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This author is seriously suggesting that governments ban children's use of social media, and that can't really be done without completely destroying internet an

This author is seriously suggesting that governments ban children's use of social media, and that can't really be done without completely destroying internet anonymity. Any policy that actually achieved this, without being trivial to circumvent, would basically need to replicate the great firewall of China. Doing this in a half-assed way is even worse than not doing anything at all. If you just require ID checks for all users to do age verification, you create a privacy nightmare for the adults. Meanwhile, children will circumvent the restrictions with VPNs, so you need to ban VPNs too. Foreign companies, who have no incentive to play by the rules, will surely capitalize on this, so you also need a comprehensive website blocking system. As they say, there's nothing more dangerous than a teenager with very little money and a lot of time on their hands, so a simple DNS-based block definitely won't suffice, you probably need Chinese-style deep packet inspection and such. The only middle ground I see here is enforcing this through the App Stores, perhaps with an extra ban on sideloading without a developer certificate, guarded byID checks. Losing the ability to sideload would be a shame, but this is the "worst solution, except for all the others" kind of situation. Sure, this is trivial to circumvent by using the web, but the extra friction required due to web apps being worse than native might be a good enough deterrent.

hollerith 3y ago
>that can't really be done without completely destroying internet anonymity I am skeptical of this push to elevate internet anonymity to a new fundamental principle for organizing society.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
  I would not feel safe painting a target on my back if I was required to attach my legal name to my comments, especially the ones advocating for queer rights.
  - hackerlight 3y ago
    Have a government agency do the age verification, then it tells FB your age but no other information. Maybe the agency gives you a unique token that it also gives to FB, and you can use it to make a unique account.
    - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
      That would be great if voters and politicians already cared for privacy, and if it was auditable. Anyway good thing I'm not on Facebook. If I can hang out in a community of about 100 without anyone calling it "media", and we just keep out kids by not bringing any in, I'll live I guess
- mptest 3y ago
  >elevate internet anonymity to a new fundamental principle for organizing society You mean privacy? Internet anonymity is a downstream byproduct of our right to privacy, not some new concept devised in the internet age. We've had the fourth amendment for quite some time.
  - hollerith 3y ago
    There's no right to privacy in the 4th Amendment. But more importantly, there are huge differences between internet anonymity and the older comceptualization of a right to privacy, which has mostly to do with shielding conversations between people who know each other's identities (real names and addresses) from prying government eyes. Shielding such conversations from prying government eyes is not incompatible with preventing teenagers from using social media.
    - willvarfar 3y ago
      It's interesting that, historically, privacy didn't need protecting because it was trivially available and people won't have thought much about the possibility that in the future it would not longer be technically available. Privacy didn't need protecting in history before bugging. If a founding father wanted to talk to someone privately they just went stood apart from everybody else. 50 years ago, standing apart no longer provided privacy because of long range microphones etc, but those were targeted attacks on diplomats etc. Nowadays, you can probably do a nice undergrad project to recreate conversations from lip reading streetview video clips. Privacy was defacto available hundreds of years ago, but is technically impossible now. (Imagine the kinds of body checks that will be introduced before you enter a US SCIF post the chess cheating scandal!)
      - hollerith 3y ago
        The recent emphasis on internet anonymity is mostly not a response to better tech for eavesdropping.
    - bigstrat2003 3y ago
      > There's no right to privacy in the 4th Amendment. The Constitution is not an enumeration of rights that the people have. It even says so itself, in the ninth amendment. So there doesn't need to be text which says you have a right to privacy: you have that right even without it being listed.
willcipriano 3y ago
> completely destroying internet anonymity. Stores that sell age restricted products already can also sell "adult passes". Each adult pass costs less than $5, and contains a single use scratch off code that you can use to prove you are of age. When you want to sign up for social media or porn, you need a code. Mutiple companies can implement and sell them.
- KingMachiavelli 3y ago
  There would be a huge black market of selling to the underage immediately defeating the purpose.
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    Checking ID to prevent the sale of tobacco to children may not prevent them from ever smoking but is considered better than nothing. This product would be sold in exactly the same manner at the same locations. Prevents kids from stumbling onto it by accident at very least.
  - oblio 3y ago
    That would limit the total addressable market from 100% to, say, 1-5%. Statistically, legally, socially, that's not "defeating the purpose", that's "job done", instead. Most people here should be engineers or at least analytical. No solution is 100%.
  - triceratops 3y ago
    Most minors don't smoke or drink, even though straw purchases of booze and cigs are a thing. Social media is even more amenable to this type of gatekeeping because if most of your social circle isn't on it, you have no reason to be there either.
Glyptodon 3y ago
I don't think you have to destroy internet anonymity. Just fine parents like $25 or $50 bucks every time anyone can link their kid to social media use. Give people rewards for reporting it or something. Even as little as driving kids towards platforms that incentivize anonymous interaction over real name and face stuff is probably enough move the needle. That said, I think social media use has a very overlapping relationship with allowing kids unsupervised and/or frequent and lengthy use of tablets and phones from early ages, which I suspect is also destructive.
- jojobas 3y ago
  That would be immediately framed as an assault on poor families. You can't force people to not hurt themselves.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bowsamic 3y ago
  But then they will contest the claim, it will then have to be investigated, and that will cause huge amounts of pointless busywork that will amount to no clear evidence. Not worth it for such a small fine
mixmastamyk 3y ago
It doesn’t have to be a technical ban. Just make it the law and let companies, schools, parents, and kids take their punishment when found to happen. This should be enough for the risk averse to take open devices away from children and bolster parents. It’s not important to stop every possible access, simply that adults have the authority to say no and be supported by society instead of undermined.
- Aurornis 3y ago
  > It doesn’t have to be a technical ban. Just make it the law and let companies, schools, parents, and kids take their punishment when found to happen You’re describing a ban.
  - jackbravo 3y ago
    It doesn’t have to be a technological ban. It can be a social ban
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - mixmastamyk 3y ago
    , without the ID requirements.
- agentgumshoe 3y ago
  Now, define 'social media' clearly and we're all good.
  - ars 3y ago
    Social media has the following elements (which would be prohibited): Recommendation based on previous views. Recommendation based on what is currently being viewed is permitted. Recommendation based on current view that is customized to user is not permitted. Ratings up/down. Sorting based on rating or based on users' interest. Chronological sorting is permitted. Suggesting content is forbidden. Specifically subscribed content is permitted to be suggested - but only chronologically, or in response to a search. No public comments. Private comments permitted. Comments in room/forum/group permitted. User must specifically subscribe/join to see the comments. Comments sorting/notification rules same as above. "Reactions" to messages show up as additional/new replies, and are not attached to the original message. Discussion: The idea is to reduce addictive methods, and to modify discussion/views to reflect ordinary human behavior: No one rates your sentence spoken in a group, no one goes back and promotes certain things you said, words are said in a group chronologically.
naasking 3y ago
Achieving 90% of not is simpler than you think: ban smartphones from schools during school bours. If the parents want the kid to have a phone, then the parents can get a flip phone.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  Would this be a federal ban, a state-level ban managed by education boards, or something else? And how is it enforced exactly? Are parents held responsible, or are state education funds impacted somehow based on smartphone use? Would we need a federal mandate to require flip phone / feature phone support? The last time I tried to find a feature phone it wasn't easy, many depend on 2G/3G networks which are losing support and carriers have absolutely no incentive to carry feature phones when smartphones are all that sell.
  - bart_spoon 3y ago
    State bans are already occurring. Indiana just banned phones from schools a week or two ago.
    - _heimdall 3y ago
      Well I can't really complain about that at least. States have a lot more leeway and are explicitly given the power to manage their public schools. A quick look at Indiana's law and the news articles are interesting. The law requires schools to implements rules that ban phone use during class, but the actual rules and implementations are left for schools to decide. The articles I found make that sound like the law is toothless and passes the hard work off to school systems, but in my opinion that's a great law as it let's every school do what works best for them without prescribing a single solution for everyone.
- bigstrat2003 3y ago
  I think we should go even further: ban all phones during school hours. There is absolutely no reason that kids need to have a phone in school. If the parent needs to reach them, then call the school office who can get your kid on the line. There is no emergency so dire that a few minutes' delay in talking to your child will make a meaningful difference.
Aurornis 3y ago
> that can't really be done without completely destroying internet anonymity. This is why I can’t take any calls for banning social media for kids on HN seriously: The moment anyone introduced any legislation to limit social media access by age, this creates a de facto requirement to verify ID. The people in this thread would be up in arms as soon as the government tried to force companies to collect their ID to use social media.
- oblio 3y ago
  Oooor, hear me out, that part could be a government run ID validation service (as in SaaS). Crazy, right?
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  With the rise of IA, identity verification on the internet is going to be inevitable on the internet anyway, to make sure people are actually humans. But it doesn't need to break anonymity, cryptography can be used to allow for a zero-knowledge humanity or age proof. Fighting against regulations in the name of anonymity is the best way to actually harm anonymity. We can have both (while we currently have neither in practice …)
- triceratops 3y ago
  > government tried to force companies to collect their ID to use social media. I'm strongly opposed to ID collection of any kind. But I think age bans are a good idea. Why not sell age verification codes at physical stores? One code per account per website. It's good for 2 years and costs no more than $5. You can pay cash at the store and the sales clerk may only check your ID, as though they were selling you tobacco or alcohol. They cannot record anything. There will still be straw purchases, just like booze and cigs. But it makes it easier to police the ban on minors joining social media without seriously compromising anonymity for adults. Few kids in my high school smoked or drank. Most couldn't access those things. And social media has network effects. If most kids can't join it, the rest probably won't bother.
imgabe 3y ago
There are two avenues to deal with a hazard. You can try to manipulate the environment to eliminate the hazard, or you can try to strengthen people to make them immune to the hazard. I think we should prefer the latter over the former whenever possible. For one thing, it's more robust. The environment is messy and control is often illusory at best. Control limits freedoms and introduces centralized points of failure that can be manipulated by bad actors. Making people strong and free creates more opportunity and innovation, even though it scares the people who long to be in charge of the centralized control. What does it mean to strengthen people to make them immune to the harms caused by social media? I don't know exactly, but I bet we could find out.
- oblio 3y ago
  The brain has some flaws that are very hard to overcome. Addictions are some of them. There's a reason almost every country in the world regulates and restricts gambling.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    Aside: The people who like prediction markets get quite annoyed at that.
    - throwaway2037 3y ago
      "prediction markets" -- what a loaded term. Do you consider financial futures markets to also be "prediction markets"? As I understand from financial research, it has been shown time and time again that financial futures do not predict future performance. In my mind, "prediction markets" are nothing more than legalised gambling on an (election) outcome. To be fair, most retail (non-institutional) traders of highly leveraged financial products (futures & options) are the same: They are gambling on an outcome, not investing or hedging risk. Finally, I am not saying it should be outlawed, but there should be some very strong warnings before trading the product -- as there are for futures & options.
  - logicchains 3y ago
bufio 3y ago
Just shut down Meta and something like 75% of the problem goes away. One neat trick, etc.
- block_dagger 3y ago
  That works until the next ten competitors take up the space. It's a wider cultural problem.
mtillman 3y ago
Is anything with a share button social? What are the lines?
littlestymaar 3y ago
You're going way too far in your reasoning, acting as if the state had to directly enforce it itself. But it doesn't have to: social networks are run by companies that makes profit doing so and that can be strong-armed into doing the control by themselves or be fined if they fail to comply (and we're talking about company whose entire business is about profiling their users to maximize their ads revenues, so they have zero difficulty recognizing teenagers, and more importantly content that is targeted at teenagers). And even more importantly you're missing the point of why people go to social networks in the first place: because everybody they know is there! If it becomes cumbersome to access, most people won't go, and then there's no more appeal. It's not as if it was porn or stuff like that, that has a purpose on its own that makes people willing to circumvent the restrictions no matter what. Social networks are “networks” and if you break the network effect, you've broken the system. American people don't go on VK not because it's less good than Facebook, but because there's no point in doing so.
bart_spoon 3y ago
We spend enormous amounts of time and energy trying to pick up the pieces of the destruction being left in the wake by social media giants as they get absurdly rich. How about we instead simply make the giants liable for what gets posted on their platforms? Let the “move fast and break things” crowd that is so certain of their own genius spend their billions on figuring it out instead of on how to get you to click on another ad. They will figure out a solution very quickly or they will simply cease to exist, and either way the problem will be solved.
- Buttons840 3y ago
  The largest social media platforms should be required to federate and open their data through powerful APIs. Once they control a significant part of society's communications they own society something in return. Let society access our communications how we choose.
- nyokodo 3y ago
  > How about we instead simply make the giants liable for what gets posted on their platforms? Because social media is a tool for global social influence and global intelligence that the powers that be do not want to give up. Because those same powers are often invested in social media companies or don’t want to get on their list of enemies. Because it might look bad politically if it proved unpopular. Because they are all social media addicts. Take your pick.
- anthonypasq 3y ago
  the fact they are exceedingly rich seems to indicate they are providing things people like.
  - bart_spoon 3y ago
    Fentanyl, human trafficking, and identity theft can all be quite lucrative as well. Externalities matter. A high revenue stream does not equate to high benefit to society.
skybrian 3y ago
Social media != the Internet. It would make it harder to sign up for an account with the large social media services covered by the law. They would need to check ids, or outsource to someone who does. It would be like creating a bank account. You could do plenty of other things. Anything you don't need an account for isn't covered. Depending on how the law is implemented, perhaps many forums wouldn't be covered? I think it would result in kids going to websites that their parents haven't heard of yet and don't check ids.
- randomdata 3y ago
  > Social media != the Internet. Technically true, but social interaction is the great draw of the internet. Even Zawinski's Law noticed that every program expands to include social features or is replaced by those that do.
gitaarik 3y ago
Of course people think of solving this problem again by constraining the consumer, instead of the producer. What we should do is make rules for social media platforms to disallow them to develop algorithms that make people addicted. You might think how do you define that, but the companies have already made a whole science out of it so it's not that abstract anymore. It would sure be an elaborate task and will surely result in a cat and mouse game, but at least the issue would be taken seriously and people will understand better that engaging with these platforms that try to push the edges is playing with fire.
- nwiswell 3y ago
  > You might think how do you define that, but the companies have already made a whole science out of it so it's not that abstract anymore Hardly. Addictiveness does not exist in binary. There are many people who obsessively check their email or refresh news websites. There is no doubt that social media companies choose the algorithms that maximize engagement and so most probably they also maximize addiction, but _any_ algorithm will cause addiction to some extent. What's the limit? How do we even measure this? Something that is maybe a little more interesting is banning the practice of recommending "negative content" because it produces more engagement than "positive content". How this is defined is also somewhat squishy, but we can at least try to define it -- content that is likely to provoke negative emotions, like anger, fear, aggression, etc. I think there's a much clearer through-line to argue that recommending negative content on social media produces a substantial negative externality, and that moves this into the category of things like environmental regulations.
  - Ghexor 3y ago
    I agree with you that a pos/neg divide is clearer and more straight forward to construct. Reading your comment also evoked in me imaginations of political repression. Anger and fear are really important emotions signifying "this situation is not meeting my needs". Social Media can abuse these for profit probably precicely because they play this important role. In this light, a ban on recommending negative content seems really dangerous. Any content that expresses dissatisfaction with the political status quo is likely to contain some 'negative' (I suggest the term 'challenging') emotions. So while 'addictiveness' is, like you say, really difficuly to measure - I prefer we try.
ojosilva 3y ago
No, no, no, that's nonsense. Kids are given a phone and access to social media by their parents (who are also users most likely). I don't see parents saying oh please block this out of my kid's hands with deep packet inspection or ID checks. These people can just install Family Link or whatever and set limits, and be parents. But they just won't do it. Some don't even know it exists. Kids are clocking 5h+ of mobile use / day, with poor sleep patterns and digital hygiene. No limits. That's the real issue.
drak0n1c 3y ago
A similar form of middle ground without touching the app/web level may be to enable device parental controls by default on new Phone and Tablet purchases and rationing its removal with some kind of privacy-preserving ID hashing protocol that's also rate-limited per ID. 90% of the problem is mobile device ease related, it doesn't need to extend to PCs. Still a ton of burdensome consequences. But really, the best policy would be constant social and educational emphasis on device parental control feature awareness - similar to drunk driving campaigns. Get parents and guardians in the habit of taking 15 min to set up basic parental controls BEFORE handing devices to kids. Rather than the all-too-common mess of reacting to a problem by taking the kids phone or making them manually show everything after the damage is already done. Maybe also compel device manufacturers to incorporate a first-time-setup flow that has a specific soft ask of "Will this device be given to or borrowed by a child?" that then handholds the owner through setting up controls.
audunw 3y ago
It’s ridiculous to suggest that you destroy all of internet anonymity by requiring ID for mass-scale ad-funded social media It’s the commercial side of the equation that’s the problem. It’s what gives these social media companies perverse incentives when it comes to engagement. So any social media site that can’t effectively tap into the US ad market at a significant scale will not have as much of a problem. I don’t think the pre-Facebook forums was as much of a problem even though they might have had some ads here and there. So VPNs and all that just isn’t a concern. You don’t need a great firewall. You just need to regulate commercial business, which is not at all a crazy proposition. The other side of this is that the US really, really should implement an effective federal ID system with two factor authentication. This is becoming commonplace almost everywhere else in the world, and not having it creates very serious security and privacy risks.
bigfudge 3y ago
Facebook already knows how old its users are with a great degree of accuracy. The block does not have to be perfect to be effective at a societal level. Some curious kids may circumvent it. But it would prevent the massive network effect whereby all teen social life is online on platforms that monetize them. Some very large fines for social media companies found providing services to minors would make it impossible to advertise to teens there, and would make a huge difference.
- lurker616 3y ago
  Even if Facebook implements these controls, what guarantee do we have that another social app won't come along without these controls? Do we regulate TikTok, Youtube, Snapchat, GroupMe or whatever the latest flavor of the month is as well? There are probably thousands of startups that would jump at the chance to monetize teenagers even if FB were to step aside.
  - altpaddle 3y ago
    There really aren't that many platforms that 'everyone' uses. So yes you regulate them. Just like we regulate the thousands of bars in the country from allowing minors in
matrix87 3y ago
> and that can't really be done without completely destroying internet anonymity. doesn't have to in the general case maybe just have it at the OS level, have parents set up the phone, prompt on setup whether it's intended for use by a minor or not, use that flag to enable/disable access to social media that's not really the same as banning social media for all minors and imo makes too much sense, more likely that congress will push something that fucks over anonymity more
boxed 3y ago
> This author is seriously suggesting that governments ban children's use of social media Where did it do that?
marmaduke 3y ago
> there's nothing more dangerous than a teenager with very little money and a lot of time on their hands, so a simple DNS-based block definitely won't suffice, you probably need Chinese-style deep packet inspection and such Or just give them some money and something to do? Why fight fire with fire, just makes bigger fire
tootie 3y ago
I have to say, I still just don't believe him. I think Nature's criticism is accurate. He's cherry-picking data that shows the rise in depression started in 1999 and only somewhat accelerated around 2010-11. And I think there is another obvious culprit and it's the rise of authoritarianism and particularly right-wing media. Something that has been a major trend since about 1999.

hollerith 3y ago

>that can't really be done without completely destroying internet anonymity I am skeptical of this push to elevate internet anonymity to a new fundamental principle for organizing society.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
I would not feel safe painting a target on my back if I was required to attach my legal name to my comments, especially the ones advocating for queer rights.
- hackerlight 3y ago
  Have a government agency do the age verification, then it tells FB your age but no other information. Maybe the agency gives you a unique token that it also gives to FB, and you can use it to make a unique account.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
    That would be great if voters and politicians already cared for privacy, and if it was auditable. Anyway good thing I'm not on Facebook. If I can hang out in a community of about 100 without anyone calling it "media", and we just keep out kids by not bringing any in, I'll live I guess
mptest 3y ago
>elevate internet anonymity to a new fundamental principle for organizing society You mean privacy? Internet anonymity is a downstream byproduct of our right to privacy, not some new concept devised in the internet age. We've had the fourth amendment for quite some time.
- hollerith 3y ago
  There's no right to privacy in the 4th Amendment. But more importantly, there are huge differences between internet anonymity and the older comceptualization of a right to privacy, which has mostly to do with shielding conversations between people who know each other's identities (real names and addresses) from prying government eyes. Shielding such conversations from prying government eyes is not incompatible with preventing teenagers from using social media.
  - willvarfar 3y ago
    It's interesting that, historically, privacy didn't need protecting because it was trivially available and people won't have thought much about the possibility that in the future it would not longer be technically available. Privacy didn't need protecting in history before bugging. If a founding father wanted to talk to someone privately they just went stood apart from everybody else. 50 years ago, standing apart no longer provided privacy because of long range microphones etc, but those were targeted attacks on diplomats etc. Nowadays, you can probably do a nice undergrad project to recreate conversations from lip reading streetview video clips. Privacy was defacto available hundreds of years ago, but is technically impossible now. (Imagine the kinds of body checks that will be introduced before you enter a US SCIF post the chess cheating scandal!)
    - hollerith 3y ago
      The recent emphasis on internet anonymity is mostly not a response to better tech for eavesdropping.
  - bigstrat2003 3y ago
    > There's no right to privacy in the 4th Amendment. The Constitution is not an enumeration of rights that the people have. It even says so itself, in the ninth amendment. So there doesn't need to be text which says you have a right to privacy: you have that right even without it being listed.

willcipriano 3y ago

> completely destroying internet anonymity. Stores that sell age restricted products already can also sell "adult passes". Each adult pass costs less than $5, and contains a single use scratch off code that you can use to prove you are of age. When you want to sign up for social media or porn, you need a code. Mutiple companies can implement and sell them.

KingMachiavelli 3y ago
There would be a huge black market of selling to the underage immediately defeating the purpose.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  Checking ID to prevent the sale of tobacco to children may not prevent them from ever smoking but is considered better than nothing. This product would be sold in exactly the same manner at the same locations. Prevents kids from stumbling onto it by accident at very least.
- oblio 3y ago
  That would limit the total addressable market from 100% to, say, 1-5%. Statistically, legally, socially, that's not "defeating the purpose", that's "job done", instead. Most people here should be engineers or at least analytical. No solution is 100%.
- triceratops 3y ago
  Most minors don't smoke or drink, even though straw purchases of booze and cigs are a thing. Social media is even more amenable to this type of gatekeeping because if most of your social circle isn't on it, you have no reason to be there either.

Glyptodon 3y ago

I don't think you have to destroy internet anonymity. Just fine parents like $25 or $50 bucks every time anyone can link their kid to social media use. Give people rewards for reporting it or something. Even as little as driving kids towards platforms that incentivize anonymous interaction over real name and face stuff is probably enough move the needle. That said, I think social media use has a very overlapping relationship with allowing kids unsupervised and/or frequent and lengthy use of tablets and phones from early ages, which I suspect is also destructive.

jojobas 3y ago
That would be immediately framed as an assault on poor families. You can't force people to not hurt themselves.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bowsamic 3y ago
But then they will contest the claim, it will then have to be investigated, and that will cause huge amounts of pointless busywork that will amount to no clear evidence. Not worth it for such a small fine

mixmastamyk 3y ago

It doesn’t have to be a technical ban. Just make it the law and let companies, schools, parents, and kids take their punishment when found to happen. This should be enough for the risk averse to take open devices away from children and bolster parents. It’s not important to stop every possible access, simply that adults have the authority to say no and be supported by society instead of undermined.

Aurornis 3y ago
> It doesn’t have to be a technical ban. Just make it the law and let companies, schools, parents, and kids take their punishment when found to happen You’re describing a ban.
- jackbravo 3y ago
  It doesn’t have to be a technological ban. It can be a social ban
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  , without the ID requirements.
agentgumshoe 3y ago
Now, define 'social media' clearly and we're all good.
- ars 3y ago
  Social media has the following elements (which would be prohibited): Recommendation based on previous views. Recommendation based on what is currently being viewed is permitted. Recommendation based on current view that is customized to user is not permitted. Ratings up/down. Sorting based on rating or based on users' interest. Chronological sorting is permitted. Suggesting content is forbidden. Specifically subscribed content is permitted to be suggested - but only chronologically, or in response to a search. No public comments. Private comments permitted. Comments in room/forum/group permitted. User must specifically subscribe/join to see the comments. Comments sorting/notification rules same as above. "Reactions" to messages show up as additional/new replies, and are not attached to the original message. Discussion: The idea is to reduce addictive methods, and to modify discussion/views to reflect ordinary human behavior: No one rates your sentence spoken in a group, no one goes back and promotes certain things you said, words are said in a group chronologically.

naasking 3y ago

Achieving 90% of not is simpler than you think: ban smartphones from schools during school bours. If the parents want the kid to have a phone, then the parents can get a flip phone.

_heimdall 3y ago
Would this be a federal ban, a state-level ban managed by education boards, or something else? And how is it enforced exactly? Are parents held responsible, or are state education funds impacted somehow based on smartphone use? Would we need a federal mandate to require flip phone / feature phone support? The last time I tried to find a feature phone it wasn't easy, many depend on 2G/3G networks which are losing support and carriers have absolutely no incentive to carry feature phones when smartphones are all that sell.
- bart_spoon 3y ago
  State bans are already occurring. Indiana just banned phones from schools a week or two ago.
  - _heimdall 3y ago
    Well I can't really complain about that at least. States have a lot more leeway and are explicitly given the power to manage their public schools. A quick look at Indiana's law and the news articles are interesting. The law requires schools to implements rules that ban phone use during class, but the actual rules and implementations are left for schools to decide. The articles I found make that sound like the law is toothless and passes the hard work off to school systems, but in my opinion that's a great law as it let's every school do what works best for them without prescribing a single solution for everyone.
bigstrat2003 3y ago
I think we should go even further: ban all phones during school hours. There is absolutely no reason that kids need to have a phone in school. If the parent needs to reach them, then call the school office who can get your kid on the line. There is no emergency so dire that a few minutes' delay in talking to your child will make a meaningful difference.

Aurornis 3y ago

> that can't really be done without completely destroying internet anonymity. This is why I can’t take any calls for banning social media for kids on HN seriously: The moment anyone introduced any legislation to limit social media access by age, this creates a de facto requirement to verify ID. The people in this thread would be up in arms as soon as the government tried to force companies to collect their ID to use social media.

oblio 3y ago
Oooor, hear me out, that part could be a government run ID validation service (as in SaaS). Crazy, right?
littlestymaar 3y ago
With the rise of IA, identity verification on the internet is going to be inevitable on the internet anyway, to make sure people are actually humans. But it doesn't need to break anonymity, cryptography can be used to allow for a zero-knowledge humanity or age proof. Fighting against regulations in the name of anonymity is the best way to actually harm anonymity. We can have both (while we currently have neither in practice …)
triceratops 3y ago
> government tried to force companies to collect their ID to use social media. I'm strongly opposed to ID collection of any kind. But I think age bans are a good idea. Why not sell age verification codes at physical stores? One code per account per website. It's good for 2 years and costs no more than $5. You can pay cash at the store and the sales clerk may only check your ID, as though they were selling you tobacco or alcohol. They cannot record anything. There will still be straw purchases, just like booze and cigs. But it makes it easier to police the ban on minors joining social media without seriously compromising anonymity for adults. Few kids in my high school smoked or drank. Most couldn't access those things. And social media has network effects. If most kids can't join it, the rest probably won't bother.

imgabe 3y ago

There are two avenues to deal with a hazard. You can try to manipulate the environment to eliminate the hazard, or you can try to strengthen people to make them immune to the hazard. I think we should prefer the latter over the former whenever possible. For one thing, it's more robust. The environment is messy and control is often illusory at best. Control limits freedoms and introduces centralized points of failure that can be manipulated by bad actors. Making people strong and free creates more opportunity and innovation, even though it scares the people who long to be in charge of the centralized control. What does it mean to strengthen people to make them immune to the harms caused by social media? I don't know exactly, but I bet we could find out.

oblio 3y ago
The brain has some flaws that are very hard to overcome. Addictions are some of them. There's a reason almost every country in the world regulates and restricts gambling.
- concordDance 3y ago
  Aside: The people who like prediction markets get quite annoyed at that.
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    "prediction markets" -- what a loaded term. Do you consider financial futures markets to also be "prediction markets"? As I understand from financial research, it has been shown time and time again that financial futures do not predict future performance. In my mind, "prediction markets" are nothing more than legalised gambling on an (election) outcome. To be fair, most retail (non-institutional) traders of highly leveraged financial products (futures & options) are the same: They are gambling on an outcome, not investing or hedging risk. Finally, I am not saying it should be outlawed, but there should be some very strong warnings before trading the product -- as there are for futures & options.
- logicchains 3y ago

bufio 3y ago

Just shut down Meta and something like 75% of the problem goes away. One neat trick, etc.

block_dagger 3y ago
That works until the next ten competitors take up the space. It's a wider cultural problem.

mtillman 3y ago

Is anything with a share button social? What are the lines?

littlestymaar 3y ago

You're going way too far in your reasoning, acting as if the state had to directly enforce it itself. But it doesn't have to: social networks are run by companies that makes profit doing so and that can be strong-armed into doing the control by themselves or be fined if they fail to comply (and we're talking about company whose entire business is about profiling their users to maximize their ads revenues, so they have zero difficulty recognizing teenagers, and more importantly content that is targeted at teenagers). And even more importantly you're missing the point of why people go to social networks in the first place: because everybody they know is there! If it becomes cumbersome to access, most people won't go, and then there's no more appeal. It's not as if it was porn or stuff like that, that has a purpose on its own that makes people willing to circumvent the restrictions no matter what. Social networks are “networks” and if you break the network effect, you've broken the system. American people don't go on VK not because it's less good than Facebook, but because there's no point in doing so.

bart_spoon 3y ago

We spend enormous amounts of time and energy trying to pick up the pieces of the destruction being left in the wake by social media giants as they get absurdly rich. How about we instead simply make the giants liable for what gets posted on their platforms? Let the “move fast and break things” crowd that is so certain of their own genius spend their billions on figuring it out instead of on how to get you to click on another ad. They will figure out a solution very quickly or they will simply cease to exist, and either way the problem will be solved.

Buttons840 3y ago
The largest social media platforms should be required to federate and open their data through powerful APIs. Once they control a significant part of society's communications they own society something in return. Let society access our communications how we choose.
nyokodo 3y ago
> How about we instead simply make the giants liable for what gets posted on their platforms? Because social media is a tool for global social influence and global intelligence that the powers that be do not want to give up. Because those same powers are often invested in social media companies or don’t want to get on their list of enemies. Because it might look bad politically if it proved unpopular. Because they are all social media addicts. Take your pick.
anthonypasq 3y ago
the fact they are exceedingly rich seems to indicate they are providing things people like.
- bart_spoon 3y ago
  Fentanyl, human trafficking, and identity theft can all be quite lucrative as well. Externalities matter. A high revenue stream does not equate to high benefit to society.

skybrian 3y ago

Social media != the Internet. It would make it harder to sign up for an account with the large social media services covered by the law. They would need to check ids, or outsource to someone who does. It would be like creating a bank account. You could do plenty of other things. Anything you don't need an account for isn't covered. Depending on how the law is implemented, perhaps many forums wouldn't be covered? I think it would result in kids going to websites that their parents haven't heard of yet and don't check ids.

randomdata 3y ago
> Social media != the Internet. Technically true, but social interaction is the great draw of the internet. Even Zawinski's Law noticed that every program expands to include social features or is replaced by those that do.

gitaarik 3y ago

Of course people think of solving this problem again by constraining the consumer, instead of the producer. What we should do is make rules for social media platforms to disallow them to develop algorithms that make people addicted. You might think how do you define that, but the companies have already made a whole science out of it so it's not that abstract anymore. It would sure be an elaborate task and will surely result in a cat and mouse game, but at least the issue would be taken seriously and people will understand better that engaging with these platforms that try to push the edges is playing with fire.

nwiswell 3y ago
> You might think how do you define that, but the companies have already made a whole science out of it so it's not that abstract anymore Hardly. Addictiveness does not exist in binary. There are many people who obsessively check their email or refresh news websites. There is no doubt that social media companies choose the algorithms that maximize engagement and so most probably they also maximize addiction, but _any_ algorithm will cause addiction to some extent. What's the limit? How do we even measure this? Something that is maybe a little more interesting is banning the practice of recommending "negative content" because it produces more engagement than "positive content". How this is defined is also somewhat squishy, but we can at least try to define it -- content that is likely to provoke negative emotions, like anger, fear, aggression, etc. I think there's a much clearer through-line to argue that recommending negative content on social media produces a substantial negative externality, and that moves this into the category of things like environmental regulations.
- Ghexor 3y ago
  I agree with you that a pos/neg divide is clearer and more straight forward to construct. Reading your comment also evoked in me imaginations of political repression. Anger and fear are really important emotions signifying "this situation is not meeting my needs". Social Media can abuse these for profit probably precicely because they play this important role. In this light, a ban on recommending negative content seems really dangerous. Any content that expresses dissatisfaction with the political status quo is likely to contain some 'negative' (I suggest the term 'challenging') emotions. So while 'addictiveness' is, like you say, really difficuly to measure - I prefer we try.

ojosilva 3y ago

No, no, no, that's nonsense. Kids are given a phone and access to social media by their parents (who are also users most likely). I don't see parents saying oh please block this out of my kid's hands with deep packet inspection or ID checks. These people can just install Family Link or whatever and set limits, and be parents. But they just won't do it. Some don't even know it exists. Kids are clocking 5h+ of mobile use / day, with poor sleep patterns and digital hygiene. No limits. That's the real issue.

drak0n1c 3y ago

A similar form of middle ground without touching the app/web level may be to enable device parental controls by default on new Phone and Tablet purchases and rationing its removal with some kind of privacy-preserving ID hashing protocol that's also rate-limited per ID. 90% of the problem is mobile device ease related, it doesn't need to extend to PCs. Still a ton of burdensome consequences. But really, the best policy would be constant social and educational emphasis on device parental control feature awareness - similar to drunk driving campaigns. Get parents and guardians in the habit of taking 15 min to set up basic parental controls BEFORE handing devices to kids. Rather than the all-too-common mess of reacting to a problem by taking the kids phone or making them manually show everything after the damage is already done. Maybe also compel device manufacturers to incorporate a first-time-setup flow that has a specific soft ask of "Will this device be given to or borrowed by a child?" that then handholds the owner through setting up controls.

audunw 3y ago

It’s ridiculous to suggest that you destroy all of internet anonymity by requiring ID for mass-scale ad-funded social media It’s the commercial side of the equation that’s the problem. It’s what gives these social media companies perverse incentives when it comes to engagement. So any social media site that can’t effectively tap into the US ad market at a significant scale will not have as much of a problem. I don’t think the pre-Facebook forums was as much of a problem even though they might have had some ads here and there. So VPNs and all that just isn’t a concern. You don’t need a great firewall. You just need to regulate commercial business, which is not at all a crazy proposition. The other side of this is that the US really, really should implement an effective federal ID system with two factor authentication. This is becoming commonplace almost everywhere else in the world, and not having it creates very serious security and privacy risks.

bigfudge 3y ago

Facebook already knows how old its users are with a great degree of accuracy. The block does not have to be perfect to be effective at a societal level. Some curious kids may circumvent it. But it would prevent the massive network effect whereby all teen social life is online on platforms that monetize them. Some very large fines for social media companies found providing services to minors would make it impossible to advertise to teens there, and would make a huge difference.

lurker616 3y ago
Even if Facebook implements these controls, what guarantee do we have that another social app won't come along without these controls? Do we regulate TikTok, Youtube, Snapchat, GroupMe or whatever the latest flavor of the month is as well? There are probably thousands of startups that would jump at the chance to monetize teenagers even if FB were to step aside.
- altpaddle 3y ago
  There really aren't that many platforms that 'everyone' uses. So yes you regulate them. Just like we regulate the thousands of bars in the country from allowing minors in

matrix87 3y ago

> and that can't really be done without completely destroying internet anonymity. doesn't have to in the general case maybe just have it at the OS level, have parents set up the phone, prompt on setup whether it's intended for use by a minor or not, use that flag to enable/disable access to social media that's not really the same as banning social media for all minors and imo makes too much sense, more likely that congress will push something that fucks over anonymity more

boxed 3y ago

> This author is seriously suggesting that governments ban children's use of social media Where did it do that?

marmaduke 3y ago

> there's nothing more dangerous than a teenager with very little money and a lot of time on their hands, so a simple DNS-based block definitely won't suffice, you probably need Chinese-style deep packet inspection and such Or just give them some money and something to do? Why fight fire with fire, just makes bigger fire

tootie 3y ago

I have to say, I still just don't believe him. I think Nature's criticism is accurate. He's cherry-picking data that shows the rise in depression started in 1999 and only somewhat accelerated around 2010-11. And I think there is another obvious culprit and it's the rise of authoritarianism and particularly right-wing media. Something that has been a major trend since about 1999.