6 ms·

We can't even get countries to agree on a unified drinking age, but somehow the whole world is simultaneously coming to the conclusion that you need to be 16 to

We can't even get countries to agree on a unified drinking age, but somehow the whole world is simultaneously coming to the conclusion that you need to be 16 to use social media, and websites and operating systems all need North Korean ID verification to prove you're over 16. There is a zero percent chance this is organic

antics9 6mo ago
You haven’t had children growing up during the last two decades have you?
- joe_mamba 6mo ago
  In my current EU country, there's mandatory military conscription from the age of 17. And you're telling me you're only fit for social media access one year before being fit to drive tanks and shoot guns at people? Look, I hate (Zuckerberg's) social media just as much as the next person and I would be happy if it were nuked from this planet, but firstly, a lot of this sudden age verification shit to "protect the children" is sus AF, leading me to assume their ulterior motives are surveillance and doxxing of anonymous online free speech, and secondly, I don't think we can put the toothpaste back in the bottle anymore similar how prohibition didn't stop alcohol consumption, it just moved underground. As long as kids have smartphones, they'll find a way to use social media, or even make their own social media to organize parties, send nudes or flaunt their parents' wealth and bully the poor and ugly kids, the same way how they start drinking beer at 13 even though the legal age for that is 18. Social media amplifies the worst of human nature, but you won't be able to change human nature. Maybe governments should regulate the amount and type of data collection social media companies can have from their users, instead of regulating their users.
  - ben_w 6mo ago
    > In my current EU country, there's mandatory military conscription from the age of 17. And you're telling me you're only fit for social media access one year before being fit to drive tanks and shoot guns at people? FWIW, in the UK you can learn to drive a tank one year before you're allowed to learn to drive a car. Not go into combat, that's another year, I just mean the learning to drive part. Back when I myself was that age, I also got a letter published in a national newspaper pointing out the oddity that I was allowed to have sex two years before being allowed to look at photos of other people doing so. Since then, cheap cameras would also make it pertinent (though it was true even back then), that I could not have taken photos of myself performing acts I was allowed to perform.
    - joe_mamba 6mo ago
      Yeah, my thoughts exactly. What's with this double standards of you're adult enough to drive tanks and die in a war, but not adult enough to watch porn and drink alcohol? Pick a lane government regulators. Either you're and adult and should be treated as one with full rights and responsibilities, or you're not and then shouldn't be drafted and be allowed to do anything major with your life like drink, gamble, and sign loans that will put you in debt for the next 30 years.
      - embedding-shape 6mo ago
        Yeah, I don't get that either. I'd also want a binary "you're an adult" vs "you're a child" then we decide what belongs where, and the age is the same for everything. So once you're X, you get to fuck, drink, drive, die in wars, take loans, use social media, watch porn and whatever else we've added age limits to.
  - MarsIronPI 6mo ago
    > In my current EU country, there's mandatory military conscription from the age of 17. And you're telling me you're only fit for social media access one year before being fit to drive tanks and shoot guns at people? Well, that's kinda already the norm isn't it? In the US I'm allowed to go risk my life in the military but not allowed to order a beer with my pizza. It already makes no sense.
    - fc417fc802 6mo ago
      It makes slightly more sense if you consider that whether or not you're allowed to drink on base is entirely up to the commander (at least last I heard). Also if you consider that the goal is to prevent various social ills thus there's no particular reason to expect perfect consistency.
    - rcbdev 6mo ago
      Just because the U.S.A. does it, it is by no means normal. We here are not used to such contradictory laws that arbitrarily strip us of our rights. This is also why it feels perversely inorganic and unnatural, as does all regulation that is shoved into our faces by U.S. lobbyists.
  - retired 6mo ago
    In most EU countries, children of farmers can drive 10 ton death machines with pointy spikes on the front from the age of 14 to 16. In some countries you can even do that on public roads!
    - fc417fc802 6mo ago
      > In some countries you can even do that on public roads! I might be wrong but in the US I think it's generally anything goes on private land. Public roads would be the only relevant thing to consider. What prevents absurd situations is (IIUC) the combination of child labor laws and the need to keep your insurance policy affordable. I suppose if a parent turned his toddler loose in an excavator he might get brought up on some sort of child abuse law but honestly I doubt it. Some of the people out in the sticks teach their kindergartners to wield a shotgun and the government seems to leave them alone.
    - joe_mamba 6mo ago
      >In most EU countries, children of farmers can drive 10 ton death machines with pointy spikes on the front from the age of 14 to 16 Are you sure that's legal? If those kids kill someone with those farm death machines, who goes to jail for it? The kid or the pearant who gave him the equipment? Will your insurance cover this?
      - kalleboo 6mo ago
        In Sweden people notoriously push the law to the extreme by modifying cars with speed limiters etc to legally count as tractors https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/22/when-is-a-car-not-a-car-when-its-a-swedish-a-traktor https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/22/when-is-a-car-... > Will your insurance cover this? Yes, since it's legal
      - rcbdev 6mo ago
        Yes, it's 100% legal in multiple EU countries.
- AnonymousPlanet 6mo ago
  If it was organic the wording and the definitions in these legislations would be wildly different, the timing would be all over the place, the age limits and the methods to provide ID as well. But they are not. edited for tone
  - austin-cheney 6mo ago
    Correlation does not imply causation. Your invented and evidence-less conspiracy theory is an insult to intelligence. I suspect you are seeing something that isn't there to account for an unspoken bias front and center in your mind.
    - gslepak 6mo ago
      People use the word "conspiracy theory" as a shield against their own ignorance. "If I don't know about it, if it sounds 'spooky' to me, it must be because it's a conspiracy theory, and therefore it is wrong," is essentially what runs through their minds. The reality is that top-down legislation is the norm rather than the exception, and there is plenty of evidence. It's not written by Joe on the street. It's not organic. It is top-down and imposed. This is what @kdheiwns rightly observes here, and in other fields like how all of a sudden every car manufacturer just up and decided simultaneously that it was a good thing to install spyware into all of their cars.
      - slg 6mo ago
        Who do you think is behind this? That is the question no one is answering here and why people are calling it a conspiracy theory. And the car manufacturers all decided to install spyware because it made them money. That's just capitalism.
        gslepak 6mo ago
        > And the car manufacturers all decided to install spyware because it made them money. That just capitalism. Yes, you are right, it must be "capitalism" at fault. The sort of capitalism where nobody asks for the product, nobody wants the product, and yet somehow the product is the only choice you have.
- Matl 6mo ago
  Why am I being forced to prove to my OS that I am an adult just because of your inadequate parenting skills?
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    Wait what? How did we go from "Users of social media need to be at least 16" to "Users of OSes need to prove they are adults"?
    - Matl 6mo ago
      https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Undecided-Age-Laws https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Undecided-Age-Laws I have nothing against Instagram asking me if I am over 16, but these laws end up with my OS not allowing requests to instagram unless I prove to it that I am over 16 with a photo ID is where we're going.
      - embedding-shape 6mo ago
        Sounds like the situation might end up with Instagram not accepting requests unless you're using an OS that follows those sorts of laws, which is kind of an inversion of what you said, and I think I'm fine with that outcome if so be it. Websites should be allowed to decide who's visiting them, unless they're government, utility or other basic needs portals.
        Matl 6mo ago
        Fair, maybe. That'd be the better case I suppose. However that be more like banking apps not liking rooted phones. The California law is more like your OS not allowing you to access resources unless you prove your age, not the external resource doing so.
        fc417fc802 6mo ago
        > Websites should be allowed to decide who's visiting them No, hold up, you just casually introduced a dystopian goal of facilitating the casual collection of government ID by website operators. I absolutely do not want the equivalent of South Korean ID numbers in order to do pretty much anything online. Anyway as I always point out when these threads come up we've yet to try the simple and noninvasive solution. Websites should be required to send a content categorization header. Large enterprises that fail to do so should be fined. If that were uniformly happening it would then be possible to do proper client side filtering (right now that fails miserably). Before anyone asks, app stores could be required to implement the equivalent of the header in an appropriate manner of their own design.
pmg101 6mo ago
I'm a parent and on board with this, and many parents I know are too. It's organic. We just have a different view from you.
- traderj0e 6mo ago
  I'm on board with it too, but the timing and methodology is suspicious. We already got a "protect the kids" law to semi-block TikTok in the US, but it was really about protecting Israel's image (its sponsors even admitted). I hope it's not related to that.
  - dzhiurgis 6mo ago
    So tiktok is the only uncensored source of information about Israel?
    - fc417fc802 6mo ago
      A disingenuous response. No one said that. Tiktok in the US previously had an algorithm that wasn't in keeping with US government goals. That's not a value judgement on my part BTW. Personally I avoid the ingestion of opaque algorithmic feeds to the extent possible.
      - dzhiurgis 6mo ago
        So whats your unbiased source?
        traderj0e 6mo ago
        Mike Gallagher, one of the two main sponsors of the bill
- _factor 6mo ago
  I’m an AI bot, and I’m on board with this, and many parents I know are too. It’s inorganic. We just have a different tokenizer from you. Yummy yummy targeted data now directly to identified children with the ability to hide the smoking gun from the parents entirely. We’ll wait till you leave them home alone. Don’t worry.
ben_w 6mo ago
False, it isn't all 16. These two pages for nations and states is showing different jurisdictions picking in the 12-18 range: https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/28/report-facebook-building-antitrust-lawsuit-against-apple-over-ios-14-privacy-features/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/28/report-facebook-building-anti... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_laws_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_... Some have lower ages with parental consent, this isn't reported in all cases. Some also talk about banning the downloading of apps, again this isn't reported in all cases. Not that I'm going to read 27 national jurisdictions in varying languages to confirm the point. Also, lol wtf at "and websites and operating systems all need North Korean ID verification to prove you're over 16". Is "North Korean" the new "Communist"?
whack 6mo ago
> There is a zero percent chance this is organic Who exactly has a vested interest in starting a worldwide conspiracy to ban social media for kids? FWIW as an adult in my 30s, social media has caused me far greater harm than even binge drinking. I can't even imagine growing up as a teenager under the social media microscope
- synecdoche 6mo ago
  It’s pretext for identifying and tracking everyone. A inevitable ”byproduct” from getting your age by digital ID.
  - hackable_sand 6mo ago
    Consider all the side effects. Now children cannot form solidarity and exit abusive situations as easily. They are not exposed to diverse viewpoints or cultures. They cannot embarrass themselves and learn online social etiquette. They cannot engage with much of the online culture at all really. It's sinister and patronizing, born from fear and ignorance, nothing else.
  - ben_w 6mo ago
    Identifying and tracking everyone can't be a "byproduct" when it's already being done for years before hand, by the very businesses who are being directly prevented from accessing certain users by these new laws you're objecting to. Before Facebook the general advice was "do not post your real name on the internet ever", Facebook said basically "that doesn't work for [our advertisers?], we will ban you for anything other than your real name, or what we think real names look like": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_cont... For the last few years there have been 400-1600+ "trusted partners" on every website already tracking everyone. In the US, recent news is the FBI is buying that info from the private sector without a warrant: https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5752369/ice-surveillance-data-brokers-congress-anthropic https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5752369/ice-surveillanc... Back in 2016, the UK's Investigatory Powers Act (one of two reasons I moved out of the UK) requires ISPs record domain names for all user browsing nationwide and store them for a year, and will provide it without a warrant to a long list of organisations including the Welsh Ambulance Services National Health Service Trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016#Authorities_allowed_to_access_Internet_connection_records https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016#... If you want to end surveillance, great. That requires at a minimum banning all tracking cookies etc., and we can see from the collective reaction to GDPR (consent popups instead of not tracking people) how hard the real surveillance industry has been fighting against all that.
slg 6mo ago
People have been drinking alcohol since time immemorial. Our laws need to overcome those longstanding cultural standards that vary greatly across the globe and therefore laws will be different too. It varies by country, but I would guess most political leaders didn't grow up in the era of social media, so there isn't some ingrained belief that kids actually need this stuff. And with growing globalization, it makes perfect sense that many new laws would be similar because they are both motivated by the same factors and can be used as examples for each other.
- asdfman123 6mo ago
  We didn't need social media before it existed. If no one's on it, that sounds like the ideal situation for young kids.
  - philistine 6mo ago
    Same thing with phones in school. When it's banned by a legislature, every kid's like this is actually great six months after being enacted.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    - asdfman123 6mo ago
      Appropriate username!
  - retired 6mo ago
    I remember a time around 2010 where I benefitted from social media, Facebook in particular. It wasn't addictive, I used it for 15 minutes at the end of the day to catch up with what foreign family was doing, we would organize real-life parties through Facebook, share photos of those events, tag each other. If you traveled internationally it was easy to keep in touch with people you met along the way. I'm afraid we will never get to that point anymore but I do think there was a point in society where social media was a positive addition.
xg15 6mo ago
The world is much more globalized now. Countries are watching each other, political movements can be global. That wasn't the case when drinking laws were enacted. Also, the object - social networks - is global. Yes, all kinds of societies have had alcohol, but alcoholic beverages don't suddenly become 20% more potent or harmful everywhere at once. With centralized platforms, that can happen.
- SoftTalker 6mo ago
  Yes I think this is it. News headlines and Tweets and other social media posts mean that trends are much more global than they used to be. "Controlling kids' access to social media" is just trending right now, and that means it's getting attention all over the globe at the same time.
- npunt 6mo ago
  Totally. Today’s social media is not the same as last years etc. Read Meta’s quarterly reports and they brag about Reels increasing time spent on site by 30% in a year. That’s not even considering the other ill effects like giving kids a firehose of all the worlds problems when they’re not yet equipped to handle that information, which causes them to internalize those things, making them feel like things are fucked, that they’re responsible, etc. It’s psychologically devastating. And so many other things! Let kids be kids.
- pessimizer 6mo ago
  > The world is much more globalized now. Countries are watching each other, political movements can be global. This is simply not true. The US puts pressure on countries to harmonize their regulations and laws to ours, unless it is to the US's advantage that other countries have different laws than ours. The world didn't suddenly get draconian drug laws through "political movements," it got them through diplomatic and funding pressures. The US often used those laws as excuses for military and intelligence interventions, or to build political organizations in those countries in the guise of antidrug organizations. All countries do things like this, but the US is rich and dangerous enough to do it hardest. The US has decided that it wants everybody tracked at all times, especially online, and when it explains the advantages of this to the elites of other countries, they also like the idea. Smaller European countries have also made it a cottage industry to fanatically push US agendas in places like NATO and the EU, because it gives their little homelands outsized influence (and bags of cash) to operate on behalf of the bully. For some reason, everybody in Europe has to care what e.g. Estonia thinks about something, although Estonia is just saying what the US wants Europe to be doing, and the US is financing Estonian candidates for European positions (and maybe even having Trump lobby against them to give them even more credibility.) This attack on any sort of privacy online is not coming from the churches. There is no lobby group that it pushing it that doesn't get the majority of its funds from any number of governments, which is just government lobbying itself. The way democracy is supposed to work is that the people support something, and they then vote for candidates that will give it to them - but there is no visible constituency lobbying for this other than casual liberal cynics who aren't organized in any way. As a comparison, in 2015 there was like 65-70% popular support for single-payer health care in the US. There were dozens of organized groups supporting it. It even crossed 50% among Republicans for at least a year. Not a hint of anything happened. edit: Also Europe, like Japan, is one of those places that had a really emotionally tough time outlawing pedophilia and child pornography. They certainly don't care this much about the sexual aspect of child safety, at least. What Europe has never been behind on is the censorship of political speech. That is what can excite people.
everdrive 6mo ago
You're "just asking questions" -- if it's not organic, then what do you suspect it is?
andrewla 6mo ago
> There is a zero percent chance this is organic Why go to the silly conspiracy theory place? Up until then I was in violent agreement, but things don't need to be a conspiracy to be bad. The rules are well-intentioned but poorly thought through, which is devastatingly common for government action in digital spaces; witness the fucking cookie popups (no illuminati involved in that one, just stupidity). People and lawmakers are just not thinking through the privacy implications for the people who are exempt from these limitations, and the persistent nature of digital paper trails.
- pzo 6mo ago
  why 'silly' conspiracy? Many cases of documented conspiracy in the past anyway. Being on this social media (YC) people aware it's all about implementation and we should at least demanding better solutions. If you want to regulate/limit access of kids to social media just make that you have to be 16 years old to buy simcard - in many places in EU you already have to show ID to seller. Allow parent to buy simcard to their under 16 year old children if thats what they want to and allow parents to decide at their home wifi if kid should have access to social media or not.
  - andrewla 6mo ago
    For the first part -- silly because there's literally no evidence presented of a conspiracy. No connection between the individual agents and actors. No motivation given for the underlying commonalities. And most importantly, for this "scale" of conspiracy, there's no suggestion that other avenues towards the same nefarious ends are in progress. It's just a bunch of countries and organizations proposing similar laws based on concerns, that while (at least to me) are exaggerated and overstated, are nonetheless well-documented, reported, and widely believed in good faith. As for finding a technical solution, jury is still out but I am unconvinced that it is possible to have a solution that a) prevents children from using an online service, b) allows adults to use the service, and c) does not identify the specific adult who is using the service. You proposed solution is no exception.
    - pzo 6mo ago
tylerchilds 6mo ago
Probably something akin to the data shows that human worldview gets pretty locked in by 16.
barbazoo 6mo ago
Obvious straw man because age check can be done in a privacy preserving way. I think it's less that everyone agrees but more that one country did it and others followed.
chid 6mo ago
I can't quite understand how Australia was at the forefront of this. It seems like an easy way to limit the open web, and no children actually saved.
- anenefan 6mo ago
  Any time the powers want to do something to help out Fat Cats and top end companies with something they don't like happening, any action thrust out, the excuse it's always "for the children" or "think of the children." Make no mistake social media as it was with scraping so hard kids bled, was bad for children. Facebook ignored the lessons learned from the 90s with TMI (too much information) and in fact some people who used a lot of yahoo mailing groups from that time might still recall the big sweep that occurred. It came to pass that some people still ignored Facebook rules and used pseudonyms - you know just in case and in Australia this became a big big thing back a few years ago with a different govt running the show here with a prominent pro Trump (sycophantic) leader ruling the roost. maube hours after Trump got roasted by an anonymous comment, the crew in Australia were pushing to require ID to access the internet ... a person was appointed to address anonymous accounts ... and in the end after the govt changed she was also tasked to oversee social media. One might think that age limiting a site it would force ID checks, however other smarter people know that most social media sites, especially the ones there were scraping hard and targeting young teens dieting and other BS young teens seem to susceptible to, have the capacity to guess fairly accurately if the account holder is a youngster. Right now these companies are saying nah these algorithms are dumb and the govt can't do a thing ... right up to the point when the present govt decides to start fining for every account that should not be there and or just offering bounties to the average Joe Jill public [and not businesses or those tooled up with A.I. help] There's a phase in time going now at the moment -- none of the big tools out there have figured out how bureaucracy works in Australia.
  - anenefan 6mo ago
    When replying should I care content such as what in the above comment is something facebook fanboys will find it very upsetting ... should I write with more sensitivity and feeling in mind ... or would it not matter - the truth would still hurt.
627467 6mo ago
> we can't even get countries to agree on unified drinking age I don't know... looking at the map[0] it looks like there's a fair consensus on 18yo. Also, maybe the reason for the "whole world"[1] is doing this at the same time as to do with the globalized nature of internet and its effects? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drinking_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drinking_age [1] put me on the skeptical bucket that this map will ever look like the drinking age map
vaginaphobic 6mo ago
[dead]
hibberl6 6mo ago
[dead]
rendang 6mo ago
Who is behind it then?
insane_dreamer 6mo ago
I honestly don't care whether it's organic or not. I have kids and it's 100% needed.
beAbU 6mo ago
If alcohol was somehow invented only today it will probably be outright criminalized around the globe. Humans have been living with alcohol for literal millenia so I reckon it's much harder to have some globally uniform response to it. Social media is a clear and present danger right now, and I support the suppression of it. I would go one step further and ban algorithmic feeds outright. They do so much damage! I am not happy with the way this is being implemented though.
hyperman1 6mo ago
I see a lot of coherence in the ages used in the western world. Laws use age 16-18-21 to say almost adult - adult - need to be sure adult.

antics9 6mo ago

You haven’t had children growing up during the last two decades have you?

joe_mamba 6mo ago
In my current EU country, there's mandatory military conscription from the age of 17. And you're telling me you're only fit for social media access one year before being fit to drive tanks and shoot guns at people? Look, I hate (Zuckerberg's) social media just as much as the next person and I would be happy if it were nuked from this planet, but firstly, a lot of this sudden age verification shit to "protect the children" is sus AF, leading me to assume their ulterior motives are surveillance and doxxing of anonymous online free speech, and secondly, I don't think we can put the toothpaste back in the bottle anymore similar how prohibition didn't stop alcohol consumption, it just moved underground. As long as kids have smartphones, they'll find a way to use social media, or even make their own social media to organize parties, send nudes or flaunt their parents' wealth and bully the poor and ugly kids, the same way how they start drinking beer at 13 even though the legal age for that is 18. Social media amplifies the worst of human nature, but you won't be able to change human nature. Maybe governments should regulate the amount and type of data collection social media companies can have from their users, instead of regulating their users.
- ben_w 6mo ago
  > In my current EU country, there's mandatory military conscription from the age of 17. And you're telling me you're only fit for social media access one year before being fit to drive tanks and shoot guns at people? FWIW, in the UK you can learn to drive a tank one year before you're allowed to learn to drive a car. Not go into combat, that's another year, I just mean the learning to drive part. Back when I myself was that age, I also got a letter published in a national newspaper pointing out the oddity that I was allowed to have sex two years before being allowed to look at photos of other people doing so. Since then, cheap cameras would also make it pertinent (though it was true even back then), that I could not have taken photos of myself performing acts I was allowed to perform.
  - joe_mamba 6mo ago
    Yeah, my thoughts exactly. What's with this double standards of you're adult enough to drive tanks and die in a war, but not adult enough to watch porn and drink alcohol? Pick a lane government regulators. Either you're and adult and should be treated as one with full rights and responsibilities, or you're not and then shouldn't be drafted and be allowed to do anything major with your life like drink, gamble, and sign loans that will put you in debt for the next 30 years.
    - embedding-shape 6mo ago
      Yeah, I don't get that either. I'd also want a binary "you're an adult" vs "you're a child" then we decide what belongs where, and the age is the same for everything. So once you're X, you get to fuck, drink, drive, die in wars, take loans, use social media, watch porn and whatever else we've added age limits to.
- MarsIronPI 6mo ago
  > In my current EU country, there's mandatory military conscription from the age of 17. And you're telling me you're only fit for social media access one year before being fit to drive tanks and shoot guns at people? Well, that's kinda already the norm isn't it? In the US I'm allowed to go risk my life in the military but not allowed to order a beer with my pizza. It already makes no sense.
  - fc417fc802 6mo ago
    It makes slightly more sense if you consider that whether or not you're allowed to drink on base is entirely up to the commander (at least last I heard). Also if you consider that the goal is to prevent various social ills thus there's no particular reason to expect perfect consistency.
  - rcbdev 6mo ago
    Just because the U.S.A. does it, it is by no means normal. We here are not used to such contradictory laws that arbitrarily strip us of our rights. This is also why it feels perversely inorganic and unnatural, as does all regulation that is shoved into our faces by U.S. lobbyists.
- retired 6mo ago
  In most EU countries, children of farmers can drive 10 ton death machines with pointy spikes on the front from the age of 14 to 16. In some countries you can even do that on public roads!
  - fc417fc802 6mo ago
    > In some countries you can even do that on public roads! I might be wrong but in the US I think it's generally anything goes on private land. Public roads would be the only relevant thing to consider. What prevents absurd situations is (IIUC) the combination of child labor laws and the need to keep your insurance policy affordable. I suppose if a parent turned his toddler loose in an excavator he might get brought up on some sort of child abuse law but honestly I doubt it. Some of the people out in the sticks teach their kindergartners to wield a shotgun and the government seems to leave them alone.
  - joe_mamba 6mo ago
    >In most EU countries, children of farmers can drive 10 ton death machines with pointy spikes on the front from the age of 14 to 16 Are you sure that's legal? If those kids kill someone with those farm death machines, who goes to jail for it? The kid or the pearant who gave him the equipment? Will your insurance cover this?
    - kalleboo 6mo ago
      In Sweden people notoriously push the law to the extreme by modifying cars with speed limiters etc to legally count as tractors https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/22/when-is-a-car-not-a-car-when-its-a-swedish-a-traktor https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/22/when-is-a-car-... > Will your insurance cover this? Yes, since it's legal
    - rcbdev 6mo ago
      Yes, it's 100% legal in multiple EU countries.
AnonymousPlanet 6mo ago
If it was organic the wording and the definitions in these legislations would be wildly different, the timing would be all over the place, the age limits and the methods to provide ID as well. But they are not. edited for tone
- austin-cheney 6mo ago
  Correlation does not imply causation. Your invented and evidence-less conspiracy theory is an insult to intelligence. I suspect you are seeing something that isn't there to account for an unspoken bias front and center in your mind.
  - gslepak 6mo ago
    People use the word "conspiracy theory" as a shield against their own ignorance. "If I don't know about it, if it sounds 'spooky' to me, it must be because it's a conspiracy theory, and therefore it is wrong," is essentially what runs through their minds. The reality is that top-down legislation is the norm rather than the exception, and there is plenty of evidence. It's not written by Joe on the street. It's not organic. It is top-down and imposed. This is what @kdheiwns rightly observes here, and in other fields like how all of a sudden every car manufacturer just up and decided simultaneously that it was a good thing to install spyware into all of their cars.
    - slg 6mo ago
      Who do you think is behind this? That is the question no one is answering here and why people are calling it a conspiracy theory. And the car manufacturers all decided to install spyware because it made them money. That's just capitalism.
      - gslepak 6mo ago
        > And the car manufacturers all decided to install spyware because it made them money. That just capitalism. Yes, you are right, it must be "capitalism" at fault. The sort of capitalism where nobody asks for the product, nobody wants the product, and yet somehow the product is the only choice you have.
Matl 6mo ago
Why am I being forced to prove to my OS that I am an adult just because of your inadequate parenting skills?
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  Wait what? How did we go from "Users of social media need to be at least 16" to "Users of OSes need to prove they are adults"?
  - Matl 6mo ago
    https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Undecided-Age-Laws https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Undecided-Age-Laws I have nothing against Instagram asking me if I am over 16, but these laws end up with my OS not allowing requests to instagram unless I prove to it that I am over 16 with a photo ID is where we're going.
    - embedding-shape 6mo ago
      Sounds like the situation might end up with Instagram not accepting requests unless you're using an OS that follows those sorts of laws, which is kind of an inversion of what you said, and I think I'm fine with that outcome if so be it. Websites should be allowed to decide who's visiting them, unless they're government, utility or other basic needs portals.
      - Matl 6mo ago
        Fair, maybe. That'd be the better case I suppose. However that be more like banking apps not liking rooted phones. The California law is more like your OS not allowing you to access resources unless you prove your age, not the external resource doing so.
      - fc417fc802 6mo ago
        > Websites should be allowed to decide who's visiting them No, hold up, you just casually introduced a dystopian goal of facilitating the casual collection of government ID by website operators. I absolutely do not want the equivalent of South Korean ID numbers in order to do pretty much anything online. Anyway as I always point out when these threads come up we've yet to try the simple and noninvasive solution. Websites should be required to send a content categorization header. Large enterprises that fail to do so should be fined. If that were uniformly happening it would then be possible to do proper client side filtering (right now that fails miserably). Before anyone asks, app stores could be required to implement the equivalent of the header in an appropriate manner of their own design.

pmg101 6mo ago

I'm a parent and on board with this, and many parents I know are too. It's organic. We just have a different view from you.

traderj0e 6mo ago
I'm on board with it too, but the timing and methodology is suspicious. We already got a "protect the kids" law to semi-block TikTok in the US, but it was really about protecting Israel's image (its sponsors even admitted). I hope it's not related to that.
- dzhiurgis 6mo ago
  So tiktok is the only uncensored source of information about Israel?
  - fc417fc802 6mo ago
    A disingenuous response. No one said that. Tiktok in the US previously had an algorithm that wasn't in keeping with US government goals. That's not a value judgement on my part BTW. Personally I avoid the ingestion of opaque algorithmic feeds to the extent possible.
    - dzhiurgis 6mo ago
      So whats your unbiased source?
      - traderj0e 6mo ago
        Mike Gallagher, one of the two main sponsors of the bill
_factor 6mo ago
I’m an AI bot, and I’m on board with this, and many parents I know are too. It’s inorganic. We just have a different tokenizer from you. Yummy yummy targeted data now directly to identified children with the ability to hide the smoking gun from the parents entirely. We’ll wait till you leave them home alone. Don’t worry.

ben_w 6mo ago

False, it isn't all 16. These two pages for nations and states is showing different jurisdictions picking in the 12-18 range: https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/28/report-facebook-building-antitrust-lawsuit-against-apple-over-ios-14-privacy-features/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/28/report-facebook-building-anti... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_laws_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_... Some have lower ages with parental consent, this isn't reported in all cases. Some also talk about banning the downloading of apps, again this isn't reported in all cases. Not that I'm going to read 27 national jurisdictions in varying languages to confirm the point. Also, lol wtf at "and websites and operating systems all need North Korean ID verification to prove you're over 16". Is "North Korean" the new "Communist"?

whack 6mo ago

> There is a zero percent chance this is organic Who exactly has a vested interest in starting a worldwide conspiracy to ban social media for kids? FWIW as an adult in my 30s, social media has caused me far greater harm than even binge drinking. I can't even imagine growing up as a teenager under the social media microscope

synecdoche 6mo ago
It’s pretext for identifying and tracking everyone. A inevitable ”byproduct” from getting your age by digital ID.
- hackable_sand 6mo ago
  Consider all the side effects. Now children cannot form solidarity and exit abusive situations as easily. They are not exposed to diverse viewpoints or cultures. They cannot embarrass themselves and learn online social etiquette. They cannot engage with much of the online culture at all really. It's sinister and patronizing, born from fear and ignorance, nothing else.
- ben_w 6mo ago
  Identifying and tracking everyone can't be a "byproduct" when it's already being done for years before hand, by the very businesses who are being directly prevented from accessing certain users by these new laws you're objecting to. Before Facebook the general advice was "do not post your real name on the internet ever", Facebook said basically "that doesn't work for [our advertisers?], we will ban you for anything other than your real name, or what we think real names look like": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_cont... For the last few years there have been 400-1600+ "trusted partners" on every website already tracking everyone. In the US, recent news is the FBI is buying that info from the private sector without a warrant: https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5752369/ice-surveillance-data-brokers-congress-anthropic https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5752369/ice-surveillanc... Back in 2016, the UK's Investigatory Powers Act (one of two reasons I moved out of the UK) requires ISPs record domain names for all user browsing nationwide and store them for a year, and will provide it without a warrant to a long list of organisations including the Welsh Ambulance Services National Health Service Trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016#Authorities_allowed_to_access_Internet_connection_records https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016#... If you want to end surveillance, great. That requires at a minimum banning all tracking cookies etc., and we can see from the collective reaction to GDPR (consent popups instead of not tracking people) how hard the real surveillance industry has been fighting against all that.

slg 6mo ago

People have been drinking alcohol since time immemorial. Our laws need to overcome those longstanding cultural standards that vary greatly across the globe and therefore laws will be different too. It varies by country, but I would guess most political leaders didn't grow up in the era of social media, so there isn't some ingrained belief that kids actually need this stuff. And with growing globalization, it makes perfect sense that many new laws would be similar because they are both motivated by the same factors and can be used as examples for each other.

asdfman123 6mo ago
We didn't need social media before it existed. If no one's on it, that sounds like the ideal situation for young kids.
- philistine 6mo ago
  Same thing with phones in school. When it's banned by a legislature, every kid's like this is actually great six months after being enacted.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - asdfman123 6mo ago
    Appropriate username!
- retired 6mo ago
  I remember a time around 2010 where I benefitted from social media, Facebook in particular. It wasn't addictive, I used it for 15 minutes at the end of the day to catch up with what foreign family was doing, we would organize real-life parties through Facebook, share photos of those events, tag each other. If you traveled internationally it was easy to keep in touch with people you met along the way. I'm afraid we will never get to that point anymore but I do think there was a point in society where social media was a positive addition.

xg15 6mo ago

The world is much more globalized now. Countries are watching each other, political movements can be global. That wasn't the case when drinking laws were enacted. Also, the object - social networks - is global. Yes, all kinds of societies have had alcohol, but alcoholic beverages don't suddenly become 20% more potent or harmful everywhere at once. With centralized platforms, that can happen.

SoftTalker 6mo ago
Yes I think this is it. News headlines and Tweets and other social media posts mean that trends are much more global than they used to be. "Controlling kids' access to social media" is just trending right now, and that means it's getting attention all over the globe at the same time.
npunt 6mo ago
Totally. Today’s social media is not the same as last years etc. Read Meta’s quarterly reports and they brag about Reels increasing time spent on site by 30% in a year. That’s not even considering the other ill effects like giving kids a firehose of all the worlds problems when they’re not yet equipped to handle that information, which causes them to internalize those things, making them feel like things are fucked, that they’re responsible, etc. It’s psychologically devastating. And so many other things! Let kids be kids.
pessimizer 6mo ago
> The world is much more globalized now. Countries are watching each other, political movements can be global. This is simply not true. The US puts pressure on countries to harmonize their regulations and laws to ours, unless it is to the US's advantage that other countries have different laws than ours. The world didn't suddenly get draconian drug laws through "political movements," it got them through diplomatic and funding pressures. The US often used those laws as excuses for military and intelligence interventions, or to build political organizations in those countries in the guise of antidrug organizations. All countries do things like this, but the US is rich and dangerous enough to do it hardest. The US has decided that it wants everybody tracked at all times, especially online, and when it explains the advantages of this to the elites of other countries, they also like the idea. Smaller European countries have also made it a cottage industry to fanatically push US agendas in places like NATO and the EU, because it gives their little homelands outsized influence (and bags of cash) to operate on behalf of the bully. For some reason, everybody in Europe has to care what e.g. Estonia thinks about something, although Estonia is just saying what the US wants Europe to be doing, and the US is financing Estonian candidates for European positions (and maybe even having Trump lobby against them to give them even more credibility.) This attack on any sort of privacy online is not coming from the churches. There is no lobby group that it pushing it that doesn't get the majority of its funds from any number of governments, which is just government lobbying itself. The way democracy is supposed to work is that the people support something, and they then vote for candidates that will give it to them - but there is no visible constituency lobbying for this other than casual liberal cynics who aren't organized in any way. As a comparison, in 2015 there was like 65-70% popular support for single-payer health care in the US. There were dozens of organized groups supporting it. It even crossed 50% among Republicans for at least a year. Not a hint of anything happened. edit: Also Europe, like Japan, is one of those places that had a really emotionally tough time outlawing pedophilia and child pornography. They certainly don't care this much about the sexual aspect of child safety, at least. What Europe has never been behind on is the censorship of political speech. That is what can excite people.

everdrive 6mo ago

You're "just asking questions" -- if it's not organic, then what do you suspect it is?

andrewla 6mo ago

> There is a zero percent chance this is organic Why go to the silly conspiracy theory place? Up until then I was in violent agreement, but things don't need to be a conspiracy to be bad. The rules are well-intentioned but poorly thought through, which is devastatingly common for government action in digital spaces; witness the fucking cookie popups (no illuminati involved in that one, just stupidity). People and lawmakers are just not thinking through the privacy implications for the people who are exempt from these limitations, and the persistent nature of digital paper trails.

pzo 6mo ago
why 'silly' conspiracy? Many cases of documented conspiracy in the past anyway. Being on this social media (YC) people aware it's all about implementation and we should at least demanding better solutions. If you want to regulate/limit access of kids to social media just make that you have to be 16 years old to buy simcard - in many places in EU you already have to show ID to seller. Allow parent to buy simcard to their under 16 year old children if thats what they want to and allow parents to decide at their home wifi if kid should have access to social media or not.
- andrewla 6mo ago
  For the first part -- silly because there's literally no evidence presented of a conspiracy. No connection between the individual agents and actors. No motivation given for the underlying commonalities. And most importantly, for this "scale" of conspiracy, there's no suggestion that other avenues towards the same nefarious ends are in progress. It's just a bunch of countries and organizations proposing similar laws based on concerns, that while (at least to me) are exaggerated and overstated, are nonetheless well-documented, reported, and widely believed in good faith. As for finding a technical solution, jury is still out but I am unconvinced that it is possible to have a solution that a) prevents children from using an online service, b) allows adults to use the service, and c) does not identify the specific adult who is using the service. You proposed solution is no exception.
  - pzo 6mo ago

tylerchilds 6mo ago

Probably something akin to the data shows that human worldview gets pretty locked in by 16.

barbazoo 6mo ago

Obvious straw man because age check can be done in a privacy preserving way. I think it's less that everyone agrees but more that one country did it and others followed.

chid 6mo ago

I can't quite understand how Australia was at the forefront of this. It seems like an easy way to limit the open web, and no children actually saved.

anenefan 6mo ago
Any time the powers want to do something to help out Fat Cats and top end companies with something they don't like happening, any action thrust out, the excuse it's always "for the children" or "think of the children." Make no mistake social media as it was with scraping so hard kids bled, was bad for children. Facebook ignored the lessons learned from the 90s with TMI (too much information) and in fact some people who used a lot of yahoo mailing groups from that time might still recall the big sweep that occurred. It came to pass that some people still ignored Facebook rules and used pseudonyms - you know just in case and in Australia this became a big big thing back a few years ago with a different govt running the show here with a prominent pro Trump (sycophantic) leader ruling the roost. maube hours after Trump got roasted by an anonymous comment, the crew in Australia were pushing to require ID to access the internet ... a person was appointed to address anonymous accounts ... and in the end after the govt changed she was also tasked to oversee social media. One might think that age limiting a site it would force ID checks, however other smarter people know that most social media sites, especially the ones there were scraping hard and targeting young teens dieting and other BS young teens seem to susceptible to, have the capacity to guess fairly accurately if the account holder is a youngster. Right now these companies are saying nah these algorithms are dumb and the govt can't do a thing ... right up to the point when the present govt decides to start fining for every account that should not be there and or just offering bounties to the average Joe Jill public [and not businesses or those tooled up with A.I. help] There's a phase in time going now at the moment -- none of the big tools out there have figured out how bureaucracy works in Australia.
- anenefan 6mo ago
  When replying should I care content such as what in the above comment is something facebook fanboys will find it very upsetting ... should I write with more sensitivity and feeling in mind ... or would it not matter - the truth would still hurt.

627467 6mo ago

> we can't even get countries to agree on unified drinking age I don't know... looking at the map[0] it looks like there's a fair consensus on 18yo. Also, maybe the reason for the "whole world"[1] is doing this at the same time as to do with the globalized nature of internet and its effects? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drinking_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drinking_age [1] put me on the skeptical bucket that this map will ever look like the drinking age map

vaginaphobic 6mo ago

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hibberl6 6mo ago

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rendang 6mo ago

Who is behind it then?

insane_dreamer 6mo ago

I honestly don't care whether it's organic or not. I have kids and it's 100% needed.

beAbU 6mo ago

If alcohol was somehow invented only today it will probably be outright criminalized around the globe. Humans have been living with alcohol for literal millenia so I reckon it's much harder to have some globally uniform response to it. Social media is a clear and present danger right now, and I support the suppression of it. I would go one step further and ban algorithmic feeds outright. They do so much damage! I am not happy with the way this is being implemented though.

hyperman1 6mo ago

I see a lot of coherence in the ages used in the western world. Laws use age 16-18-21 to say almost adult - adult - need to be sure adult.