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A couple months ago, I saw people everywhere online (including HN) saying they love the idea of social media bans for kids. They love the idea of keeping people

A couple months ago, I saw people everywhere online (including HN) saying they love the idea of social media bans for kids. They love the idea of keeping people under 18 safe from the dangers of porn and mature games and other unclean things as well. Now governments around the world are acting in unison to happily give those people what they want, and people are suddenly confused and pissed that these laws mean you need to submit proof that you're over 18. And instead of being an annoying checkbox that says "I'm 18. Leave me alone", it's needing to submit a selfie and ID photo to be verified, saved, and permanently bound to your every single action online. People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted. They'll have to live with the consequences for the rest of their lives. We all will.

deleted 1y ago
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RankingMember 1y ago
I think the concern about how this will be implemented (e.g. selfie and ID submission) is well-founded. I also think that letting tech companies make billions by feeding our youth mental junk food is a problem. I'm not sure where the middle path is, but I think it'll need some real thought to figure out.
- Bukhmanizer 1y ago
  If you didn’t realize that making teens verify their age online meant that everyone had to verify their age and identity online, that’s just a dangerous level of stupidity. The issue is everyone wants some quick and easy solution when the truth is we’re going to need to get much more intentional as a society about this. Take phone bans. Everyone wants to ban phones from schools/classrooms, but the truth is in a lot of places phones are already banned from school. But we’ve spent the last 3 decades taking away any power from teachers to enforce their rules so kids just do it anyway.
  - Tadpole9181 1y ago
    There are zero knowledge proof systems that nobody would have a problem with because nobody ever knows who is accessing the content, only that they are allowed or not. Ironic to call people aware of this stupid.
    - dmix 1y ago
      There's always smart ways to do things. The government will choose the cheapest and hire the most generic IT consulting firm to do it which won't get close. Or if they don't do it themselves, they'll just fine big companies unless they follow an overbearing and forever expanding checklist of requirements where the companies lawyers will be forced to choose the most extreme options or risk exposure. Meanwhile kids will use VPNs, browser extensions, ID spoofing, piracy, etc will become the norm to bypass it and law abiding adults (including good parents and people without kids) will be burdened with the results.
      - Tadpole9181 1y ago
        The parent called people stupid. That was uncalled for and I'm educating them. I don't support these policies myself.
    - heavyset_go 1y ago
      Zero knowledge proofs don't matter, these verification systems already exist and they require you to show live video of your face to confirm you're the actual living person that matches your credentials. You could have a completely anonymous tech solution to this, but it doesn't matter, because platforms and governments want video proof of life and identity, and they want to keep the data.
      - Tadpole9181 1y ago
        Don't ignore the context of this discussion. Someone just said anyone who believes in privacy and content restrictions is stupid. Except those two concepts are compatible.
- jjani 1y ago
  > I'm not sure where the middle path is, but I think it'll need some real thought to figure out. Bans on recommendation systems. Doesn't need much thought to figure out. Instant 90% harm reduction.
  - AlecSchueler 1y ago
    But they do have genuine discovery utility, the issue is more of having them tuned for engagement above all else.
    - jjani 1y ago
      Heroin also has genuine medical utility.
JKCalhoun 1y ago
> People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted. They'll have to live with the consequences for the rest of their lives. We all will. I guess I'm fine with not visiting any of these age-restricted sites. They're not the thing I would miss if the whole internet shut down. (In fact, there's precious little I would miss — maybe just archive.org?)
- stavros 1y ago
  He said, on an online forum.
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    Sure, ha ha. But I was talking about things I would miss.
- kristopolous 1y ago
  If "save the children" creates enough friction to bring the demise of social media then I'll go lay a flower on Anita Bryant's grave and tell her I'm sorry.
- XorNot 1y ago
  It's going to be every website. There will be no place they will stop. You think a forum like this one where it's conceivably possible someone in a bad category could interact with someone under the age of 16, however unlikely, won't be regulated? "But sir! The largest websites on the internet implement Government ID Age Check. Just federate with one of those, why are you complaining so much? Don't you want to protect the children or stop anti-Semitism or something?"
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    You might be exaggerating the dangers a bit I think, but I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm kind of a hard sell though because I think sometimes that life before there was an internet was preferable. To be sure, like anyone, I can think of plenty of positives that the internet has brought. But as a net positive? I'm increasingly having my doubts.
jjangkke 1y ago
When I mentioned that any attempt at identifying users to access or write content is a trojan horse for a wide surveillance yet HN users downvoted and flagged such comments and were zealously supportive of "prottecct kidz" In the late 90s and early 2000s we as teenagers had access to unfiltered internet and unregulated. The harm to us were largely moral fanaticism, this was when they also tried to ban video games because of violent content and now we have complete censorship and control over what games can sell or not on steam. Much of the panic on social media amplified by protestants and religious ppl are greatly exaggerated. Porn isnt the danger its the addictive tendencies of the individual that must be educated upon.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  Yep. This feels a lot like a repeat of the moral panic from the early eras, only this time the policies are unfortunately within the overton window instead of outside, and have shown to be popular outside of tech circles. We beat the moral panic last time and kept our freedoms. This time I'm not so certain that we will prevail, there seems to be a coordinated/unified effort on this wide spread surveillance and my hunch tells me the rise of authoritarianism around the world is the drive - much easier to oppress a population in a surveillance state. The "for the children" argument is as old as time.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > In the late 90s and early 2000s we as teenagers had access to unfiltered internet and unregulated. The harm to us were largely moral fanaticism, this was when they also tried to ban video games because of violent content and now we have complete censorship and control over what games can sell or not on steam. I get your point but I don't agree. I mean, politicians back then were actually right in assuming that danger looms on the Internet. They just were completely wrong about what was the danger. Everyone and their dog thought that the danger was porn, violent video games (Columbine and Erfurt certainly didn't help there), gore videos (anyone 'member RottenCom), shocker sites (RIP Goatse), more porn, oh and did I say they were afraid of boobs? Or even of cars "shaking" when you picked up a sex worker in GTA and parked in a bush? What they all missed though was the propaganda, the nutjobs, the ability of all the village idiots of the entire world that were left to solitude by society to now organize, the drive of monetization. That's how we got 4chan which began decent (Project Chanology!) but eventually led to GamerGate, 8chan and a bunch of far-right terrorists; social media itself fueled lynch mobs, enabled enemy states to distribute propaganda at a scale never before seen in the history of humanity and may or may not have played a pivotal role in many a regime change (early Twitter, that was a time...); and now we got EA and a whole bunch of free to play mobile games shoving microtransactions down our children's throats. Tetris of all things just keeps shoving gambling ads in your face after each level. The kids we're not gonna lose to far-right propaganda, we're gonna lose to fucking casinos. We should have brought down the hammer hard on all of that crap instead of wasting our energy on trying to prevent teenagers from having a good old fashioned wank.
j1elo 1y ago
> it's needing to submit a selfie and ID photo to be verified, saved, and permanently bound to your every single action online. And leaked every 6 months, now including your ID photos and real name instead of an internet pseudonym, and lots of other sweet details that make extortion schemes a child's play
- jay_kyburz 1y ago
  It would be cool if the post office could issue you an ID card, but for a pseudonym of your own choosing, so that when the data leaks, you can just trash it and get a new one. You could just show the dude at the post office your real id and he can check the age, but not actually write it down or link the two identities digitally. Even cooler would be if you create a different identity for each service so when they do leak, you know who leaked it. My first id would be for John Facebook Doe.
  - A1kmm 1y ago
    > but not actually write it down or link the two identities digitally What is to stop you just selling the ID card with zero consequences? Unless it has a photo on it of course, in which case that itself is an identifier you can't easily rotate. Better is to use zero-knowledge cryptography to prove that you have a real ID's private key in your possession. Leaking the private key would be the same as giving away your real identity. Now you could make a proxy service that generates the proofs for money without it being traced back to you - but maybe a countermeasure to limit but not eradicate abuse would be for the protocol to include a proof you haven't used the same real identity to prove your age on that service in at least x days (that does mean you could be tracked for x days until you prove your age under another pseudonym).
    - jay_kyburz 1y ago
      There are zero consequences when you get a friend to buy you alcohol or cigarettes, I think this will be much the same.
squigz 1y ago
Why would you assume these 2 groups of people are the same...?
carabiner 1y ago
I love this.
upboundspiral 1y ago
I would like to note that I am probably grossly unqualified to talk about such topics, but one idea that I've had rolling around is that inevitably, if you ask people "should kids be able to watch/read/be exposed to [insert adult thing here]" they will inevitably say no of course not. I feel like this is pretty reasonable. For advocates of privacy to succeed I believe that they will need to not just oppose censorship on a global scale, but provide solutions. One thing that technology has not changed is the unit of human relations. From foster care to single or two parents, the idea of a family is still there in society. In my opinion, this group is greatly underserved, and I do not believe it is enough to say "its the parents responsibility" to curate content. That is a full time job. Now, I will be the first to say that children do not at all need to have a smarphone/ipad/etc until they are in their teens, restricting all technology use can be hard. There needs to be tools that allow parents to choose what their children are allowed to be exposed to. Some parents will choose complete freedom, some will choose some "censorship." But I believe the power should rest in the hands of the parents, and I am strongly opposed to the government dictating this choice. I believe one thing the government can be good at is enforcing standards and providing reference implementations that would allow such curation to be possible. Imagine if you walk into an Apple store and say you are buying a phone for your child, and they tell you: would you like a side of censorship with that? Or if companies like youtube that are a platform with children would need to provide a means for them to be curated, for channels and features to be blocked, etc. I am not sure if what I am proposing is the right way forward but I would love to see governments tackle this problem of giving power back to the parents, instead of seeing governments attempt to enforce their worldviews onto others. I am also interested in how there would a handoff, from a "child-friendly" internet to a fully uncensored one within families. I believe that outright rejecting censorship of what children can access will do nothing to assuage the fears of people that do not want their children accessing random websites, and that a solution that keeps the power in the hands of the people and not the government is needed.
- jamiek88 1y ago
  Please use paragraphs.
- mango7283 1y ago
viraptor 1y ago
Requiring photo IDs is not the only solution. Things don't have to be implemented that way. I can be both for privacy in this case and limits on social media. Australia already requires you to register for voting and other things, so the trivial solution here is: give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site, with no logging. Essentially a signed timestamp + random number. > People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted. This is BS and not productive. We can do better.
- nojs 1y ago
  > Australia already requires you to register for voting and other things, so the trivial solution here is: give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site Which “gov site”? Registering for voting does not give you an electronic log in of any kind.
  - a_bonobo 1y ago
    Not that poster but since Covid, most people have a registration on the MyGov app that handles medicare, tax etc. You could easily add a one-time token mechanism to that app
  - viraptor 1y ago
    My gov id. I'm not saying that there's currently a registration online for voting, but that since you're required to register anyway, the system exists that can be extended to generating those tokens. And realistically, most people do have mygov id already.
    - inopinatus 1y ago
      > most people do have mygov id It was renamed myid, and less than half of all Australians use it. > no logging If you think that the AIC/NIC doesn't have its tentacles in there already, then I have a bridge to sell you.
      - viraptor 1y ago
paradox460 1y ago
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety
- energy123 1y ago
  The case study of Bukele in El Salvador shows why this is naive. Low safety directly caused low liberty, because voters care about safety more than liberty, due to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Delivering safety is a necessary condition for preserving liberty. It is not a nuisance or a side quest.
opan 1y ago
The simple answer to these situations is usually that it's not the same people complaining in both instances. I see similar things in places with anonymous posting where people assume everyone was in agreement on x, then later they hear something different and try to frame it like a flip-flop or a gotcha. People are never all in agreement. To add to that, often no news is good news, or rather people won't bother posting about how they're glad minors can use social media freely, but once restrictions are in place they will quickly complain (because they prefer the old way).
- Dilettante_ 1y ago
  >it's not the same people complaining in both instances I just learned a brand-new term for this: It's called the "Goomba Fallacy"[1] [1]https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy
  - superfish 1y ago
    > The term references an Internet meme depicting the fallacy using Goombas, which was first posted to Twitter by @supersylvie_ on January 29, 2024. The history of this term goes back… one year? (from a rather unpopular meme) I’m all for introducing new vocab in english but it feels like there should already be a term for this. Maybe “population fallacy”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy ?
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
      Funny enough, searching "goomba fallacy" in wikipedia's search yields [association fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy) and it appears to be more accurate. (Also, what I assume to be semantic search hitting that article from that search is amusing and more than a little telling.) The population fallacy is when one infers information about an individual from the group, which wasn't done here as there is no specific individual in question. The population fallacy is seeing that some demographic likes to do a thing more than other demographics and thinking therefore any given subject in that demographic likes to do that thing.
_carbyau_ 1y ago
The issue I have is this is all for naught. All it does is make things more complicated. Some with kids will praise and use it as intended. Many with kids won't. Those without kids won't. All in return for the ultimate in monitoring. And then people will work around it in various ways. Use forums or chat-group apps that don't comply with the law as intended. Share videos in other ways. This whole shebang is pointless for enforcement and scary for authoritarianism - worst of both worlds.
Aurornis 1y ago
> A couple months ago, I saw people everywhere online (including HN) saying they love the idea of social media bans for kids. The common theme in these statements is that people see “social media” as something that other people consume. All of these calls for extreme regulations share the same theme: The people calling for them assume they won’t be impacted. They think only other people consuming other content on other sites will be restricted or inconvenienced, so they don’t care about the details. Consider how often people on Hacker News object when you explain that Hacker News is a social media site. Many people come up with their own definition of social media that excludes their preferred social sites and only includes sites they don’t use.
tsoukase 1y ago
Until about the age of 12 banning inappropriate media and people that carry such is the sole responsibility of the parents. Between 12 and 16 there is an interraction with the child and afterwards the teen goes by theirself. The same goes for social relations, education, every life choice. No silly age IDs and selfies, no unstable and unsafe procedures, no permanent damage.
nromiun 1y ago
Of course they are angry. People only love govt intervention when they think it won't affect them. Us vs them mentality is everywhere these days. Even when them is our own children.
stephen_g 1y ago
From here in Australia, nobody was really asking for this here. Best I can tell it came from a single but sustained pressure campaign by one of the Murdoch newspapers. Then the Government gamed some survey polling to make it look like there was support for it (asking questions that assumed an impossible perfect system that could magically block under-16s with no age verification for adults). Still, over 40% of parents said that 15s and under should be able to access Facebook and Instagram, and over 75% of parents said they should be able to access YouTube, but the Government was acting like 95% of people were for blocking them, when it was closer to 50% of parents.
- protocolture 1y ago
  >From here in Australia, nobody was really asking for this here. Government in australia is about being seen to be busy. Give them an idea that cant be morally contested, that the media wont contest, and they go about it. Much like how we got our eSafety commissioner and internet bans. We protested them for years, but then sneaky scomo used Christchurch as wedge and got it through without protest. And as ever, our minor parties, especially liberty minded ones are more concerned with whats in kids pants than actual liberty.
- eviks 1y ago
  > From here in Australia, nobody was really asking for this here. > Still, over 40% of parents said that 15s and under should be able to access Facebook and Instagram So a whopping 60% were asking for it!!!
  - stephen_g 1y ago
    They weren't asking for it - the small sample of parents (not a random sample of voters) agreed in principle with the impossible-in-real-life blocking with no age verification for adults system, but nobody actually really cared enough to push for it except one newspaper pressure campaign... Yet, as I said the Government was making out like that this gamed survey meant it was basically unanimous support for a system that will require full identity/age verification for everybody (yet they’re still really trying hard to keep the ‘everybody’ bit quiet)
verisimi 1y ago
> People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted. They'll have to live with the consequences for the rest of their lives. We all will. This isn't the right way to characterise what happened. Governments are going this is unison, it is a coordinated campaign that has been obviously coming for a couple of years. Remember that governments wanted to act against misinformation? Well, this is it. Deanonymised internet. Aus, UK, US, etc - its on the way. What you are seeing with certain comments etc is probably a lot of genuine comments primed by stories of cases where id would have apparently prevented something-or-other, along with comments from agents and bots. This is how modern governance actually works. There is a goal (here, its deanonymised internet) then the excuse (children, porn, terrorists), then the apparent groundswell of support (supportive comments on hn, etc) then actual comments that validly complain this is dystopian but go nowhere (auto-downvoted or memory-holed by mods) which gives the appearance to most that no one really cares and this should be simply accepted. So, a difficult idea managed correctly can get past everyone with the minimum of fuss.
dyauspitr 1y ago
I still want it.
ygritte 1y ago
Implementing a feature and doing it in the worst and dumbest possible way are not the same thing.
uyzstvqs 1y ago
That opinion still stands. But I believe that we should regulate children's access to the internet, and not the internet's access to children. As the prior does not affect adults and their free, open and private internet, while the latter absolutely does. I believe that there should be a standard, open framework for parental control at the OS level, where parents can see a timeline of actions, and need to whitelist every new action (any new content or contact within any app). The regulation should be that children are only allowed to use such devices. Social media would then be limited to the parent-approved circles only. A minor's TikTok homepage would likely be limited to IRL friends plus some parent-approved creators, and that's exactly how it should be.
- qcnguy 1y ago
  Why do you need regulation for any of that? Devices with parental controls exist already. Special browsers with parental controls exist, just for kids. Do you think Jane Smith, L3 civil servant, will do a great job of taking over product management for the entire software industry despite having a BA in English Lit and having never heard of JIRA? There's no need for any regulations here and never was. It was always a power grab by governments and now the people who trusted the state are making surprised pikachu faces. "We didn't mean like this", they cry, whilst studiously ignoring all the people who predicted exactly this outcome.
  - uyzstvqs 1y ago
    Because most parents are oblivious to the danger, and are not taking action on their own. Meanwhile the unrestricted internet can be just as dangerous to a child's development as alcohol or drugs, if not more. The regulation should just specify a few standards that parental controls must meet, such as the standard that every new action in any app must first be approved by a parent, and it should regulate that minors may not use or have possession of unrestricted internet devices. The actual development of that technology, and the frameworks to integrate apps with them, should definitely be up to private companies and open-source projects.
    - qcnguy 1y ago
prmoustache 1y ago
> A couple months ago, I saw people everywhere online (including HN) saying they love the idea of social media bans for kids. The funny thing is hearing adult people shouting aloud that kids suffer from social media use and bla bla bla let the same people have been ruining their own relationship with their life partners, family and even their whole life for years by spending way too much time in front of TV, computers and by doomscrolling all day on instagram and tiktok. I don't understand how these people are all acting as if only children need to be saved. Banning stuff to children won't even work if the only example they have of adulthood are people with a hunchback staring lifelessly at a small screen on the palm of their hand all day.
- williamdclt 1y ago
  How is this funny? You make it sound like it's hypocritical or self-unaware. I'm finding the opposite: it's exactly because these people are aware of what social media does to them (and/or close friends and relationships) that they want it to be out of kids hands who'd be even more impacted by the negative aspects of it. In other words, they're not saying "it's okay when I do it but not kids", they're saying "even as an adult it's impacting me, let's not poison kids"
- matty22 1y ago
  I think you are 100% right. Let's ban social media for all ages and wipe this scourge from the planet.
meindnoch 1y ago
HackerNews: This will be a perfect use case for my federated, zero-knowledge, GPG-based, homomorphically encrypted web-of-trust (written in Rust)! Government: lol, every HTTP request must include your government ID, period :)
zik 1y ago
This has been in process for over a year. It's not a sudden thing. The press you saw was all part of a campaign to push the idea.
dennis_jeeves2 1y ago
>People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted. These are also the people who have essentially outsourced a lot of upbringing of their kids to the govt. They couldn't be bothered with the nuances of the lives their kids lead.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

RankingMember 1y ago

I think the concern about how this will be implemented (e.g. selfie and ID submission) is well-founded. I also think that letting tech companies make billions by feeding our youth mental junk food is a problem. I'm not sure where the middle path is, but I think it'll need some real thought to figure out.

Bukhmanizer 1y ago
If you didn’t realize that making teens verify their age online meant that everyone had to verify their age and identity online, that’s just a dangerous level of stupidity. The issue is everyone wants some quick and easy solution when the truth is we’re going to need to get much more intentional as a society about this. Take phone bans. Everyone wants to ban phones from schools/classrooms, but the truth is in a lot of places phones are already banned from school. But we’ve spent the last 3 decades taking away any power from teachers to enforce their rules so kids just do it anyway.
- Tadpole9181 1y ago
  There are zero knowledge proof systems that nobody would have a problem with because nobody ever knows who is accessing the content, only that they are allowed or not. Ironic to call people aware of this stupid.
  - dmix 1y ago
    There's always smart ways to do things. The government will choose the cheapest and hire the most generic IT consulting firm to do it which won't get close. Or if they don't do it themselves, they'll just fine big companies unless they follow an overbearing and forever expanding checklist of requirements where the companies lawyers will be forced to choose the most extreme options or risk exposure. Meanwhile kids will use VPNs, browser extensions, ID spoofing, piracy, etc will become the norm to bypass it and law abiding adults (including good parents and people without kids) will be burdened with the results.
    - Tadpole9181 1y ago
      The parent called people stupid. That was uncalled for and I'm educating them. I don't support these policies myself.
  - heavyset_go 1y ago
    Zero knowledge proofs don't matter, these verification systems already exist and they require you to show live video of your face to confirm you're the actual living person that matches your credentials. You could have a completely anonymous tech solution to this, but it doesn't matter, because platforms and governments want video proof of life and identity, and they want to keep the data.
    - Tadpole9181 1y ago
      Don't ignore the context of this discussion. Someone just said anyone who believes in privacy and content restrictions is stupid. Except those two concepts are compatible.
jjani 1y ago
> I'm not sure where the middle path is, but I think it'll need some real thought to figure out. Bans on recommendation systems. Doesn't need much thought to figure out. Instant 90% harm reduction.
- AlecSchueler 1y ago
  But they do have genuine discovery utility, the issue is more of having them tuned for engagement above all else.
  - jjani 1y ago
    Heroin also has genuine medical utility.

JKCalhoun 1y ago

> People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted. They'll have to live with the consequences for the rest of their lives. We all will. I guess I'm fine with not visiting any of these age-restricted sites. They're not the thing I would miss if the whole internet shut down. (In fact, there's precious little I would miss — maybe just archive.org?)

stavros 1y ago
He said, on an online forum.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Sure, ha ha. But I was talking about things I would miss.
kristopolous 1y ago
If "save the children" creates enough friction to bring the demise of social media then I'll go lay a flower on Anita Bryant's grave and tell her I'm sorry.
XorNot 1y ago
It's going to be every website. There will be no place they will stop. You think a forum like this one where it's conceivably possible someone in a bad category could interact with someone under the age of 16, however unlikely, won't be regulated? "But sir! The largest websites on the internet implement Government ID Age Check. Just federate with one of those, why are you complaining so much? Don't you want to protect the children or stop anti-Semitism or something?"
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  You might be exaggerating the dangers a bit I think, but I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm kind of a hard sell though because I think sometimes that life before there was an internet was preferable. To be sure, like anyone, I can think of plenty of positives that the internet has brought. But as a net positive? I'm increasingly having my doubts.

jjangkke 1y ago

When I mentioned that any attempt at identifying users to access or write content is a trojan horse for a wide surveillance yet HN users downvoted and flagged such comments and were zealously supportive of "prottecct kidz" In the late 90s and early 2000s we as teenagers had access to unfiltered internet and unregulated. The harm to us were largely moral fanaticism, this was when they also tried to ban video games because of violent content and now we have complete censorship and control over what games can sell or not on steam. Much of the panic on social media amplified by protestants and religious ppl are greatly exaggerated. Porn isnt the danger its the addictive tendencies of the individual that must be educated upon.

thewebguyd 1y ago
Yep. This feels a lot like a repeat of the moral panic from the early eras, only this time the policies are unfortunately within the overton window instead of outside, and have shown to be popular outside of tech circles. We beat the moral panic last time and kept our freedoms. This time I'm not so certain that we will prevail, there seems to be a coordinated/unified effort on this wide spread surveillance and my hunch tells me the rise of authoritarianism around the world is the drive - much easier to oppress a population in a surveillance state. The "for the children" argument is as old as time.
mschuster91 1y ago
> In the late 90s and early 2000s we as teenagers had access to unfiltered internet and unregulated. The harm to us were largely moral fanaticism, this was when they also tried to ban video games because of violent content and now we have complete censorship and control over what games can sell or not on steam. I get your point but I don't agree. I mean, politicians back then were actually right in assuming that danger looms on the Internet. They just were completely wrong about what was the danger. Everyone and their dog thought that the danger was porn, violent video games (Columbine and Erfurt certainly didn't help there), gore videos (anyone 'member RottenCom), shocker sites (RIP Goatse), more porn, oh and did I say they were afraid of boobs? Or even of cars "shaking" when you picked up a sex worker in GTA and parked in a bush? What they all missed though was the propaganda, the nutjobs, the ability of all the village idiots of the entire world that were left to solitude by society to now organize, the drive of monetization. That's how we got 4chan which began decent (Project Chanology!) but eventually led to GamerGate, 8chan and a bunch of far-right terrorists; social media itself fueled lynch mobs, enabled enemy states to distribute propaganda at a scale never before seen in the history of humanity and may or may not have played a pivotal role in many a regime change (early Twitter, that was a time...); and now we got EA and a whole bunch of free to play mobile games shoving microtransactions down our children's throats. Tetris of all things just keeps shoving gambling ads in your face after each level. The kids we're not gonna lose to far-right propaganda, we're gonna lose to fucking casinos. We should have brought down the hammer hard on all of that crap instead of wasting our energy on trying to prevent teenagers from having a good old fashioned wank.

j1elo 1y ago

> it's needing to submit a selfie and ID photo to be verified, saved, and permanently bound to your every single action online. And leaked every 6 months, now including your ID photos and real name instead of an internet pseudonym, and lots of other sweet details that make extortion schemes a child's play

jay_kyburz 1y ago
It would be cool if the post office could issue you an ID card, but for a pseudonym of your own choosing, so that when the data leaks, you can just trash it and get a new one. You could just show the dude at the post office your real id and he can check the age, but not actually write it down or link the two identities digitally. Even cooler would be if you create a different identity for each service so when they do leak, you know who leaked it. My first id would be for John Facebook Doe.
- A1kmm 1y ago
  > but not actually write it down or link the two identities digitally What is to stop you just selling the ID card with zero consequences? Unless it has a photo on it of course, in which case that itself is an identifier you can't easily rotate. Better is to use zero-knowledge cryptography to prove that you have a real ID's private key in your possession. Leaking the private key would be the same as giving away your real identity. Now you could make a proxy service that generates the proofs for money without it being traced back to you - but maybe a countermeasure to limit but not eradicate abuse would be for the protocol to include a proof you haven't used the same real identity to prove your age on that service in at least x days (that does mean you could be tracked for x days until you prove your age under another pseudonym).
  - jay_kyburz 1y ago
    There are zero consequences when you get a friend to buy you alcohol or cigarettes, I think this will be much the same.

squigz 1y ago

Why would you assume these 2 groups of people are the same...?

carabiner 1y ago

I love this.

upboundspiral 1y ago

I would like to note that I am probably grossly unqualified to talk about such topics, but one idea that I've had rolling around is that inevitably, if you ask people "should kids be able to watch/read/be exposed to [insert adult thing here]" they will inevitably say no of course not. I feel like this is pretty reasonable. For advocates of privacy to succeed I believe that they will need to not just oppose censorship on a global scale, but provide solutions. One thing that technology has not changed is the unit of human relations. From foster care to single or two parents, the idea of a family is still there in society. In my opinion, this group is greatly underserved, and I do not believe it is enough to say "its the parents responsibility" to curate content. That is a full time job. Now, I will be the first to say that children do not at all need to have a smarphone/ipad/etc until they are in their teens, restricting all technology use can be hard. There needs to be tools that allow parents to choose what their children are allowed to be exposed to. Some parents will choose complete freedom, some will choose some "censorship." But I believe the power should rest in the hands of the parents, and I am strongly opposed to the government dictating this choice. I believe one thing the government can be good at is enforcing standards and providing reference implementations that would allow such curation to be possible. Imagine if you walk into an Apple store and say you are buying a phone for your child, and they tell you: would you like a side of censorship with that? Or if companies like youtube that are a platform with children would need to provide a means for them to be curated, for channels and features to be blocked, etc. I am not sure if what I am proposing is the right way forward but I would love to see governments tackle this problem of giving power back to the parents, instead of seeing governments attempt to enforce their worldviews onto others. I am also interested in how there would a handoff, from a "child-friendly" internet to a fully uncensored one within families. I believe that outright rejecting censorship of what children can access will do nothing to assuage the fears of people that do not want their children accessing random websites, and that a solution that keeps the power in the hands of the people and not the government is needed.

jamiek88 1y ago
Please use paragraphs.
mango7283 1y ago

viraptor 1y ago

Requiring photo IDs is not the only solution. Things don't have to be implemented that way. I can be both for privacy in this case and limits on social media. Australia already requires you to register for voting and other things, so the trivial solution here is: give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site, with no logging. Essentially a signed timestamp + random number. > People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted. This is BS and not productive. We can do better.

nojs 1y ago
> Australia already requires you to register for voting and other things, so the trivial solution here is: give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site Which “gov site”? Registering for voting does not give you an electronic log in of any kind.
- a_bonobo 1y ago
  Not that poster but since Covid, most people have a registration on the MyGov app that handles medicare, tax etc. You could easily add a one-time token mechanism to that app
- viraptor 1y ago
  My gov id. I'm not saying that there's currently a registration online for voting, but that since you're required to register anyway, the system exists that can be extended to generating those tokens. And realistically, most people do have mygov id already.
  - inopinatus 1y ago
    > most people do have mygov id It was renamed myid, and less than half of all Australians use it. > no logging If you think that the AIC/NIC doesn't have its tentacles in there already, then I have a bridge to sell you.
    - viraptor 1y ago

paradox460 1y ago

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety

energy123 1y ago
The case study of Bukele in El Salvador shows why this is naive. Low safety directly caused low liberty, because voters care about safety more than liberty, due to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Delivering safety is a necessary condition for preserving liberty. It is not a nuisance or a side quest.

opan 1y ago

The simple answer to these situations is usually that it's not the same people complaining in both instances. I see similar things in places with anonymous posting where people assume everyone was in agreement on x, then later they hear something different and try to frame it like a flip-flop or a gotcha. People are never all in agreement. To add to that, often no news is good news, or rather people won't bother posting about how they're glad minors can use social media freely, but once restrictions are in place they will quickly complain (because they prefer the old way).

Dilettante_ 1y ago
>it's not the same people complaining in both instances I just learned a brand-new term for this: It's called the "Goomba Fallacy"[1] [1]https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy
- superfish 1y ago
  > The term references an Internet meme depicting the fallacy using Goombas, which was first posted to Twitter by @supersylvie_ on January 29, 2024. The history of this term goes back… one year? (from a rather unpopular meme) I’m all for introducing new vocab in english but it feels like there should already be a term for this. Maybe “population fallacy”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy ?
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
    Funny enough, searching "goomba fallacy" in wikipedia's search yields [association fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy) and it appears to be more accurate. (Also, what I assume to be semantic search hitting that article from that search is amusing and more than a little telling.) The population fallacy is when one infers information about an individual from the group, which wasn't done here as there is no specific individual in question. The population fallacy is seeing that some demographic likes to do a thing more than other demographics and thinking therefore any given subject in that demographic likes to do that thing.

_carbyau_ 1y ago

The issue I have is this is all for naught. All it does is make things more complicated. Some with kids will praise and use it as intended. Many with kids won't. Those without kids won't. All in return for the ultimate in monitoring. And then people will work around it in various ways. Use forums or chat-group apps that don't comply with the law as intended. Share videos in other ways. This whole shebang is pointless for enforcement and scary for authoritarianism - worst of both worlds.

Aurornis 1y ago

> A couple months ago, I saw people everywhere online (including HN) saying they love the idea of social media bans for kids. The common theme in these statements is that people see “social media” as something that other people consume. All of these calls for extreme regulations share the same theme: The people calling for them assume they won’t be impacted. They think only other people consuming other content on other sites will be restricted or inconvenienced, so they don’t care about the details. Consider how often people on Hacker News object when you explain that Hacker News is a social media site. Many people come up with their own definition of social media that excludes their preferred social sites and only includes sites they don’t use.

tsoukase 1y ago

Until about the age of 12 banning inappropriate media and people that carry such is the sole responsibility of the parents. Between 12 and 16 there is an interraction with the child and afterwards the teen goes by theirself. The same goes for social relations, education, every life choice. No silly age IDs and selfies, no unstable and unsafe procedures, no permanent damage.

nromiun 1y ago

Of course they are angry. People only love govt intervention when they think it won't affect them. Us vs them mentality is everywhere these days. Even when them is our own children.

stephen_g 1y ago

From here in Australia, nobody was really asking for this here. Best I can tell it came from a single but sustained pressure campaign by one of the Murdoch newspapers. Then the Government gamed some survey polling to make it look like there was support for it (asking questions that assumed an impossible perfect system that could magically block under-16s with no age verification for adults). Still, over 40% of parents said that 15s and under should be able to access Facebook and Instagram, and over 75% of parents said they should be able to access YouTube, but the Government was acting like 95% of people were for blocking them, when it was closer to 50% of parents.

protocolture 1y ago
>From here in Australia, nobody was really asking for this here. Government in australia is about being seen to be busy. Give them an idea that cant be morally contested, that the media wont contest, and they go about it. Much like how we got our eSafety commissioner and internet bans. We protested them for years, but then sneaky scomo used Christchurch as wedge and got it through without protest. And as ever, our minor parties, especially liberty minded ones are more concerned with whats in kids pants than actual liberty.
eviks 1y ago
> From here in Australia, nobody was really asking for this here. > Still, over 40% of parents said that 15s and under should be able to access Facebook and Instagram So a whopping 60% were asking for it!!!
- stephen_g 1y ago
  They weren't asking for it - the small sample of parents (not a random sample of voters) agreed in principle with the impossible-in-real-life blocking with no age verification for adults system, but nobody actually really cared enough to push for it except one newspaper pressure campaign... Yet, as I said the Government was making out like that this gamed survey meant it was basically unanimous support for a system that will require full identity/age verification for everybody (yet they’re still really trying hard to keep the ‘everybody’ bit quiet)

verisimi 1y ago

> People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted. They'll have to live with the consequences for the rest of their lives. We all will. This isn't the right way to characterise what happened. Governments are going this is unison, it is a coordinated campaign that has been obviously coming for a couple of years. Remember that governments wanted to act against misinformation? Well, this is it. Deanonymised internet. Aus, UK, US, etc - its on the way. What you are seeing with certain comments etc is probably a lot of genuine comments primed by stories of cases where id would have apparently prevented something-or-other, along with comments from agents and bots. This is how modern governance actually works. There is a goal (here, its deanonymised internet) then the excuse (children, porn, terrorists), then the apparent groundswell of support (supportive comments on hn, etc) then actual comments that validly complain this is dystopian but go nowhere (auto-downvoted or memory-holed by mods) which gives the appearance to most that no one really cares and this should be simply accepted. So, a difficult idea managed correctly can get past everyone with the minimum of fuss.

dyauspitr 1y ago

I still want it.

ygritte 1y ago

Implementing a feature and doing it in the worst and dumbest possible way are not the same thing.

uyzstvqs 1y ago

That opinion still stands. But I believe that we should regulate children's access to the internet, and not the internet's access to children. As the prior does not affect adults and their free, open and private internet, while the latter absolutely does. I believe that there should be a standard, open framework for parental control at the OS level, where parents can see a timeline of actions, and need to whitelist every new action (any new content or contact within any app). The regulation should be that children are only allowed to use such devices. Social media would then be limited to the parent-approved circles only. A minor's TikTok homepage would likely be limited to IRL friends plus some parent-approved creators, and that's exactly how it should be.

qcnguy 1y ago
Why do you need regulation for any of that? Devices with parental controls exist already. Special browsers with parental controls exist, just for kids. Do you think Jane Smith, L3 civil servant, will do a great job of taking over product management for the entire software industry despite having a BA in English Lit and having never heard of JIRA? There's no need for any regulations here and never was. It was always a power grab by governments and now the people who trusted the state are making surprised pikachu faces. "We didn't mean like this", they cry, whilst studiously ignoring all the people who predicted exactly this outcome.
- uyzstvqs 1y ago
  Because most parents are oblivious to the danger, and are not taking action on their own. Meanwhile the unrestricted internet can be just as dangerous to a child's development as alcohol or drugs, if not more. The regulation should just specify a few standards that parental controls must meet, such as the standard that every new action in any app must first be approved by a parent, and it should regulate that minors may not use or have possession of unrestricted internet devices. The actual development of that technology, and the frameworks to integrate apps with them, should definitely be up to private companies and open-source projects.
  - qcnguy 1y ago

prmoustache 1y ago

> A couple months ago, I saw people everywhere online (including HN) saying they love the idea of social media bans for kids. The funny thing is hearing adult people shouting aloud that kids suffer from social media use and bla bla bla let the same people have been ruining their own relationship with their life partners, family and even their whole life for years by spending way too much time in front of TV, computers and by doomscrolling all day on instagram and tiktok. I don't understand how these people are all acting as if only children need to be saved. Banning stuff to children won't even work if the only example they have of adulthood are people with a hunchback staring lifelessly at a small screen on the palm of their hand all day.

williamdclt 1y ago
How is this funny? You make it sound like it's hypocritical or self-unaware. I'm finding the opposite: it's exactly because these people are aware of what social media does to them (and/or close friends and relationships) that they want it to be out of kids hands who'd be even more impacted by the negative aspects of it. In other words, they're not saying "it's okay when I do it but not kids", they're saying "even as an adult it's impacting me, let's not poison kids"
matty22 1y ago
I think you are 100% right. Let's ban social media for all ages and wipe this scourge from the planet.

meindnoch 1y ago

HackerNews: This will be a perfect use case for my federated, zero-knowledge, GPG-based, homomorphically encrypted web-of-trust (written in Rust)! Government: lol, every HTTP request must include your government ID, period :)

zik 1y ago

This has been in process for over a year. It's not a sudden thing. The press you saw was all part of a campaign to push the idea.

dennis_jeeves2 1y ago

>People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted. These are also the people who have essentially outsourced a lot of upbringing of their kids to the govt. They couldn't be bothered with the nuances of the lives their kids lead.