9 ms·

Malaysia enforces ban on social media accounts for children younger than 16

132 points by 01-_- 5mo ago

infinite_spin 5mo ago
Out of curiosity, how difficult (from reasonably expensive to impossibly expensive) would it be to build a second internet for children, completely disconnected from what we'd call the adult internet? If we're going toward this highly curated model, which I'm not against, I'm wondering if this would be a reasonable solution to preventing the exploitation of minors on the internet.
- energy123 5mo ago
  It might be a good business (like youtube for kids) but would it actually be good for kids? They should go outside with their friends, and people in the tech industry should stay away from them. Allegedly good intentions ("help you stay in touch with your friends") will eventually turn into what it always turns into.
  - ulrikrasmussen 5mo ago
    Nothing is universally good for kids in too big quantities, but I think this approach would be less bad than any other approach to the moral panic around social media. I would never let my kids access YouTube Kids, and I probably also wouldn't let them loose unsupervised on a kids-only internet either, but I would much prefer it to the alternative whack-a-mole approach of trying to make the actual internet a kids friendly place, which will eventually destroy online anonymity and turn a few of the biggest tech companies into de facto gatekeepers for everyone and handing them a regulatory moat the size of the Atlantic.
  - infinite_spin 5mo ago
    I'm not against what you're saying, but I also don't mean "like youtube for kids", I mean something we would legislate and build to completely replace the current internet. I think it's a fools errand to try to keep building walled gardens and hoping to keep the vermin out. What I'm proposing is a literal second internet. No ads, no adult content, no third party tracking, and with training wheels. We need children to understand what internet scams are, we need them to understand how to use a search engine, and we need them to develop behavioral norms with respect to social media.. we can't do that by just yelling at them to go outside. So I earnestly want to know how much this would cost.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 5mo ago
  I shudder at the mere thought of opening this can of worms, but… have you looked into web3?
  - ShinyLeftPad 5mo ago
    Web3 is neckbeard territory, under 16s rarely get that kind of hair.
- a-french-anon 5mo ago
  Prepare for Lords of the Flies: Digital Edition , I'd say.
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo ago
  are you really under the impression that preventing exploitation of minors is the goal of these online-identification-masquerading-as-age-verification laws?
  - infinite_spin 5mo ago
    no, I realize that's just a way to track people under the guise of protecting children, but I also have a strong desire to see children protected from bad actors. I don't know if this is feasible, but sandboxing doesn't appear to be working very well, so we might as well look into a clean-room approach
- anal_reactor 5mo ago
  > I'm wondering if this would be a reasonable solution to preventing the exploitation of minors on the internet The bulk of exploitation comes from 1. Big tech. I imagine that 90% of "internet for kids" would be Cocomelon AI-generated slop 2. Other kids bullying each other Not to mention the simple fact that if you shelter kids from any adult content then they'll turn 18 while still having child-like mindset, which means that "exploitation of kids" will turn into "explanation of young adults".
- SuddsMcDuff 5mo ago
  At first I thought this sounded implausible, but then I remembered we already have a second internet, largely isolated from the main internet - the darkweb.
- pjc50 5mo ago
  This is what AOL/Compuserve were in the very old dialup days. Curated spaces.
- ben_w 5mo ago
  Actually "completely disconnected"? That would be impossibly expensive. Easier but still hard would be e.g. a child-mode[0] for consumer[1] operating systems that can only connect to a DNS resolver which itself only resolves certified-by-age-rating content. This would "only" be "extremely expensive": people complain about the cost of getting a film an age rating, and they're only 1-3 hours long and don't get near-continuous updates. My guess, and it is a guess, is that content for children shouldn't be "the internet", but a small and specifically curated collection for each age range[2], essentially the back catalogue of all the things we've already made for kids, from Saturday morning cartoons to Scholastic books. Of course, this is still flawed, hence my parents' generation fretting over D&D, Harry Potter, and anything about sex education (and twice over if it was gay). [0] or a multitude, corresponding to film content rating systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_picture_content_rating_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_picture_content_rating_... [1] Despite having learned to read with the Commodore 64 user manual, I'd say that if you can get into a command-line OS today with all our easier distractions, then you shouldn't even get asked how old you are. [2] Even single shows split content in this way, e.g. Sesame Street has different muppets be representative of different developmental stages of kids.
kinmick 5mo ago
Great news, hope many more countries follow suit. Like banning the sale of nicotine products to under-16s, it won't be a perfect solution as a few will continue to work around the restriction, but it's a huge step in the right direction.
- reddalo 5mo ago
  I like this. I'm just worried that it's going to make it way harder to create new independent small websites, if the webmasters have to check their users' age.
  - lmz 5mo ago
    Well no-one said they have to implement it themselves. I'm sure Google and Apple are willing to send a hardware-signed attestation that the device owner is 18+ if required bu the state.
  - domh 5mo ago
    I think this is by design. I think small independent new websites will cease to exist. I'm generally supportive of bans like this, but I don't want it to come at the expense of the privacy of adult users. I fear this is the way we're going in the west.
  - prawn 5mo ago
    "The rules ... apply to platforms with at least 8 million users..."
    - reddalo 5mo ago
      ...for now.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- H4cks0r1337 5mo ago
  [dead]
golph 5mo ago
I’m on the fence regarding bans like this. But from first hand, I grew up on social media and I can’t say it was really positive for me or the people around me that also grew up on/with social media. I’m wondering how this would change mental health in young people. Can anyone point me to specific studies on this?
- hhjj 5mo ago
  The real subject is what it implies: identification of every Malaysian posting on social media to enforce this ban. Control of speech through think of the children rhetoric.
- Forgeties79 5mo ago
  I’ve given this a lot of thought as well and I’m also generally a little unsure, especially because the Internet was so positive for me in most other ways (it’s hard to overstate what battle.net communities did for my psychology and confidence as somebody who felt kind of alone) but I think what ultimately distinguishes the current harm of social media is that what we had back then was not nearly as sophisticated. Yes I’m sure they were getting some data from us, yes there was exploitation and problems, But the current infrastructure of the “attention economy” is absolutely insane and beyond destructive. From a social perspective, it wasn’t really until Instagram blew up in popularity and we had to start learning not to take people’s feeds as representative of how great their lives were that this stuff started to creep up. IMO Facebook was a little more text driven and myspace was mostly just middle school drama that would’ve taken place IRL anyway.
  - prawn 5mo ago
    I think that comment about sophistication is absolutely key. Not even just data harvesting, but actively working against the interests of a user to keep them actively engaged.
    - Forgeties79 5mo ago
      Yeah it’s just such an overall hostile experience where you have to have your guard up. Which crazy to me is how many people on HN still say that having an ad blocker is selfish/“people just wanting stuff for free.” An ad blocker is basic security at this point.
arjie 5mo ago
Ah, it requires at least 8 million users[0] in Malaysia and they have a list. I was wondering how Hacker News etc. were going to comply. 0: https://soyacincau.com/2025/12/15/mcmc-social-media-instant-messaging-platforms-deemed-licensed-2026/ https://soyacincau.com/2025/12/15/mcmc-social-media-instant-...
- sheept 5mo ago
  The list is pretty small, so I wonder if this just drives users to other, smaller platforms. That said, the list of platforms includes all the biggest offenders of engagement optimization, so it feels more like a ban of addictive social media than all social media in general. But it's also interesting they ban messaging apps, which I assume parents use to keep contact with their kids.
noobermin 5mo ago
This is likely because the government fears of protests. Just like the bans in the west were mostly about anti Israel/ pro Palestinian rhetoric, this is a response to the anti Government protests last year in Indonesia and elsewhere. They're afraid of it happening there.
lilOnion 5mo ago
So we're all going to accept mass survaliance for everybody who is >=16 in order to "protect" those who are under 16. Yet parents wont get any notices if their child bypasses the id check.
- ben_w 5mo ago
  Social media is inherently mass surveillance, or at least that's the narrative the big companies themselves sell to those who want ad slots in order to justify the prices they charge.
  - zarzavat 5mo ago
    HN is social media...
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - totalconfusion 5mo ago
      We built this city
    - gaiagraphia 5mo ago
      I think the term 'social media' has outlived its purpose. It's too vague to be used in discussion. 'Social' seems a bit redundant, as isn't most media inherently social? It's quite a nice, flattering term for these companies. They get to advertise their platforms as being 'social' (bringing people closer together, having firneds), and 'media' (wow look at all these fun, cool pics and videos!), when in reality, it's kinda the opposite. I think we need to start naming things based on who actually owns these companies, the essence of their operations, and where they generate the most of their revenues from. Ad Platforms? Surveillance Boards?
gherkinnn 5mo ago
I am against these age bans because I know the mechanisms behind it will be used against everybody. I am, however, all for banning personalised feeds, data collection, targeted ads, what amounts slot machines, and generally the poison these platforms spew. What this will look like in practice I don't know. I am neither a lawyer, politician, nor do I work on these systems.
- shevy-java 5mo ago
  Well, one example is the "are you a bot check". If you don't give out your age and let the provider verify that, you are banned from using the internet. Thse are new "freedoms" we are going to enjoy in a little while.
- phyzix5761 5mo ago
  I'm against all those things as well but placing a ban on them is the same mechanism as banning anything. People should have the freedom to do things we disagree with. I haven't used social media (other than HN if it counts as one) for almost 20 years. I think they're toxic and a waste of time. But that doesn't mean other people shouldn't be allowed to use them. If people want to watch brainrot all day its they're life and I have no say in that. This is so my own personal freedom is preserved.
  - BigJono 5mo ago
    You can't have freedom if a few people have a microphone that reaches hundreds of millions of people have zero responsibilities for how they use that microphone. If you actually haven't used social media recently then I get why you'd be confused, because back in the day Facebook had a chronological timeline of people you specifically added in. The way a modern social media recommender algorithms work is completely different. If you, for example, say "I want to hear everything that Bob has to say" by "subscribing" to Bob or whatever, you "might" see when Bob says something, or instead you "might" see Mary's post from the other side of the world that has some strangely aggressive opinions about someone the billionaire platform owner happens to hate. Social media companies have decided by buddying up to the US administration that they get to decide what everyone around you sees or hears. If a couple of billionaires decide that they don't like phyzix5761 you might just get lynched by an angry mob. That's not gonna do much for your freedom, in-fact it's kind of the opposite.
shevy-java 5mo ago
> The rules require social media platforms to implement age-verification systems and block users under 16 from creating accounts. The to me interesting part is how these all allege to restrict under-age people, but EVERYONE will be forced to give out their year. Aka the world wide web is turned into a giant age-sniffing network. I don't buy for a second that this is due to the alleged "we must protect children". What is also weird is ... if you are 15 years old, you get restricted here; at age 16, you don't, and at age 18 you are often taken from mandatory draft (in some countries) to be used for training in the military. In modern warfare with drones, this means cannon fodder, while the superrich are exempt from everything (look at the orange man and ask him when he served). Something is fundamentally broken here.
jdw64 5mo ago
[dead]
karmasimida 5mo ago
Honestly? Yes Social media is more harmful than alcohol, and it could solicit so much negative reactions at formation age. This needs to be global.
nullbio 5mo ago
This concerted global effort is more about building the surveillance infrastructure for the web that will be required given AI's takeoff, and less-so about the well being of children.
- somenameforme 5mo ago
  I'm about as cynical and open to conspiracy as anybody, but I strongly disagree on this one. Social media is a cancer on society as a whole, let alone children who are still trying to figure out who they are. It serves absolutely no positive purpose that couldn't be done at least as well through private chat groups and the like. I will absolutely be barring my children from social media. I fully expect them to use it or similar sorts of stuff behind my back, but that's okay. It will then be hidden and scarce, which limits the overall negative consequences it can have. Being in a country where this is enforced at a national level is extremely appealing to me.
  - logicchains 5mo ago
    >Social media is a cancer on society as a whole, let alone children who are still trying to figure out who they are. It serves absolutely no positive purpose that couldn't be done at least as well through private chat groups and the like. Social media provides decentralized information transmission, so people (kids are people) are able to obtain information without it first being filtered through a small cabal of self-interested media corporations and governments. If there was no social media, the Iran war would probably have overwhelming popular support like the Iraq one and there'd already be US boots on the ground.
    - matips 5mo ago
      The way how corporations like Meta implemented modern social medias filter information as well. It does it in a different way than TV, but personalized information bubbles are important arguments again using "social" medias.
    - ShinTakuya 5mo ago
      Except all major social media sites are also corporations with their own interests. I'd rather the business model of traditional media that rides on journalistic reputation to a recommendation feed where the only job of it is to keep you on the site, especially when said feed can easily be manipulated. No media organisation is perfect but your description of social media as some nirvana of decentralised truth is very questionable.
try-working 5mo ago
At this point, if we all get banned from Instagram and Facebook we lose nothing. I find Twitter very useful still for software stuff.
- AndrewThrowaway 5mo ago
  And I personally get a lot of news from Facebook and Insta, never used Twitter. So who is to choose what social media is good and what should be banned.
- rimliu 5mo ago
  omg, Twitter is as useless as Instagram is.
nsoonhui 5mo ago
As a Malaysian and a parent, and as someone who detests censorship and who is wholely aware of the slippery slope nature of censorship, I actually agree with the ban. This is because in Malaysia we already have seen enough examples of bad, vague laws have been used to shut up/down the ethnic minorities and dissenters, adding this ban will not change too much of the landscape. Banning younger children to have a social media account is good. If we can ban kids from driving because their brains aren't fully developed yet, why not just ban social media account for the same reason? It's actually sickening to see that everyone-- especially children-- glues to phone in public space: playground, restaurants and whatnot. Of course you can say that adults should follow the same ban but adults are more resistant to the opium of social media ( refer to the driving car example above). So I think the double standard is excusable. The detriment effects of social media towards the young, girls especially, are well documented ( see the Jonathan Hahdt book "the anxious generation"). So I think the ban is valid.
haritha-j 5mo ago
There is nothing social about social media as it exists today. The social component was meant to be socialising with friends and like-minded individuals. As it exists it is at best parasocial media. Realistically its simply a funnel for content from creators, and the ads that leech onto said content.
- ShinyLeftPad 5mo ago
  > The social component was meant to be socialising with friends and like-minded individuals. That still exists. I know people who mostly use just that part and don't like to doomscroll. I also personally connected to new people through socials and these friendships are pretty strong.
- Gigachad 5mo ago
  Social media today is just designed to induce a zombie state where you sit for hours scrolling short form video and adverts. If it was destroyed entirely society would be better off.
SilverElfin 5mo ago
Remember, Malaysia is an officially Islamic country, with Islamic laws. This type of law and verification of age / identity will be used to suppress speech and civil liberties. Not to mention the government’s fear of protests that have also rocked their Islamic neighbor, Indonesia. Keeping children off the internet requires everyone - including adults - be verified and identified online. This is a bad solution to mental health problems. Parents need to control and care for their kids, not take away everyone’s rights because they’re bad parents.
- gmhafiz 5mo ago
  > Remember, Malaysia is an officially Islamic country, with Islamic laws. Malaysia is a secular country with secular laws. Islam is its official religion, and has a Syariah court that only applies to Muslim with limited jurisdiction. Big difference than what you are trying to paint. As they cannot "suppress speech and civil liberties" if the law reach is limited.
clydethefrog 5mo ago
There was another research in Austria into phone-free living among 46,000 young people shows that three weeks without a smartphone leads to better sleep and less depression. The participants reported increased psychological well-being and a decrease in problematic internet use, even after they started using the phones again. Many young people found new activities such as reading or playing outside to fill the time. https://science.orf.at/stories/3235664 https://science.orf.at/stories/3235664
commanderj 5mo ago
Why is this removed from the front page. 2 hours after posting, 117 up votes and more than 10 healthy comment threads?
egorfine 5mo ago
I've got four children ranging from 11 to 33. All of them digital native, all of them had no restrictions whatsoever on gadgets and online at all. All grew up to become good and successful people. I will do everything in my power to keep my youngest connected to all the social networks he wants and I will not take those legal requirements into consideration.
gaiagraphia 5mo ago
It's a privilege for these tech companies to operate in these nations, not a right. If they can't demonstrate positive value, then countries are absolutely right to cut out a cancer. I'm hugely in favour of more regulation with more revenue/users. If my income tax scales, so should the penalties associated their wealth extraction models. Ideally these big tech firms should be eliminating all the negative externalities associated with their use, either through funding systems, or a direct tax on revenue. The privacy side is worrying, but does Meta, Google, etc products are the antithesis of privacy anyway. Anything which burns their model and ideologies to the ground is a welcome change. As long as these draconian regulations only impact the hugest companies who don't demonstrate positive value, I think it's ok. If they start coming for smaller sites, message boards, etc, then it's a problem.
subarctic 5mo ago
Like I've said before i don't necessarily think it's bad that they're raising the minimum age for these sites, but since when does that mean they have to check ids? There's been a minimum age of 13 for decades and that never meant you had to upload your id
- CamouflagedKiwi 5mo ago
  That's because the sites put that there to claim they had a rule or whatever. If this new limit is being enforced on them with the intention that it is actually effective, there clearly has to be some way of checking it or kids will just click through - I remember that being parodied in the South Park movie, which must be 25-30 years old now.
jason1cho 5mo ago
Creating accounts should be allowed, but using an account could require age check. People should be able to create an account at birth. Then when they grow up, they are ready to use the account. This way proves that the account owner is at least as old as the account.

132 points by 01-_- 5mo ago

Out of curiosity, how difficult (from reasonably expensive to impossibly expensive) would it be to build a second internet for children, completely disconnected from what we'd call the adult internet? If we're going toward this highly curated model, which I'm not against, I'm wondering if this would be a reasonable solution to preventing the exploitation of minors on the internet.

energy123 5mo ago
It might be a good business (like youtube for kids) but would it actually be good for kids? They should go outside with their friends, and people in the tech industry should stay away from them. Allegedly good intentions ("help you stay in touch with your friends") will eventually turn into what it always turns into.
- ulrikrasmussen 5mo ago
  Nothing is universally good for kids in too big quantities, but I think this approach would be less bad than any other approach to the moral panic around social media. I would never let my kids access YouTube Kids, and I probably also wouldn't let them loose unsupervised on a kids-only internet either, but I would much prefer it to the alternative whack-a-mole approach of trying to make the actual internet a kids friendly place, which will eventually destroy online anonymity and turn a few of the biggest tech companies into de facto gatekeepers for everyone and handing them a regulatory moat the size of the Atlantic.
- infinite_spin 5mo ago
  I'm not against what you're saying, but I also don't mean "like youtube for kids", I mean something we would legislate and build to completely replace the current internet. I think it's a fools errand to try to keep building walled gardens and hoping to keep the vermin out. What I'm proposing is a literal second internet. No ads, no adult content, no third party tracking, and with training wheels. We need children to understand what internet scams are, we need them to understand how to use a search engine, and we need them to develop behavioral norms with respect to social media.. we can't do that by just yelling at them to go outside. So I earnestly want to know how much this would cost.
rTX5CMRXIfFG 5mo ago
I shudder at the mere thought of opening this can of worms, but… have you looked into web3?
- ShinyLeftPad 5mo ago
  Web3 is neckbeard territory, under 16s rarely get that kind of hair.
a-french-anon 5mo ago
Prepare for Lords of the Flies: Digital Edition , I'd say.
b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo ago
are you really under the impression that preventing exploitation of minors is the goal of these online-identification-masquerading-as-age-verification laws?
- infinite_spin 5mo ago
  no, I realize that's just a way to track people under the guise of protecting children, but I also have a strong desire to see children protected from bad actors. I don't know if this is feasible, but sandboxing doesn't appear to be working very well, so we might as well look into a clean-room approach
anal_reactor 5mo ago
> I'm wondering if this would be a reasonable solution to preventing the exploitation of minors on the internet The bulk of exploitation comes from 1. Big tech. I imagine that 90% of "internet for kids" would be Cocomelon AI-generated slop 2. Other kids bullying each other Not to mention the simple fact that if you shelter kids from any adult content then they'll turn 18 while still having child-like mindset, which means that "exploitation of kids" will turn into "explanation of young adults".
SuddsMcDuff 5mo ago
At first I thought this sounded implausible, but then I remembered we already have a second internet, largely isolated from the main internet - the darkweb.
pjc50 5mo ago
This is what AOL/Compuserve were in the very old dialup days. Curated spaces.
ben_w 5mo ago
Actually "completely disconnected"? That would be impossibly expensive. Easier but still hard would be e.g. a child-mode[0] for consumer[1] operating systems that can only connect to a DNS resolver which itself only resolves certified-by-age-rating content. This would "only" be "extremely expensive": people complain about the cost of getting a film an age rating, and they're only 1-3 hours long and don't get near-continuous updates. My guess, and it is a guess, is that content for children shouldn't be "the internet", but a small and specifically curated collection for each age range[2], essentially the back catalogue of all the things we've already made for kids, from Saturday morning cartoons to Scholastic books. Of course, this is still flawed, hence my parents' generation fretting over D&D, Harry Potter, and anything about sex education (and twice over if it was gay). [0] or a multitude, corresponding to film content rating systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_picture_content_rating_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_picture_content_rating_... [1] Despite having learned to read with the Commodore 64 user manual, I'd say that if you can get into a command-line OS today with all our easier distractions, then you shouldn't even get asked how old you are. [2] Even single shows split content in this way, e.g. Sesame Street has different muppets be representative of different developmental stages of kids.

kinmick 5mo ago

Great news, hope many more countries follow suit. Like banning the sale of nicotine products to under-16s, it won't be a perfect solution as a few will continue to work around the restriction, but it's a huge step in the right direction.

reddalo 5mo ago
I like this. I'm just worried that it's going to make it way harder to create new independent small websites, if the webmasters have to check their users' age.
- lmz 5mo ago
  Well no-one said they have to implement it themselves. I'm sure Google and Apple are willing to send a hardware-signed attestation that the device owner is 18+ if required bu the state.
- domh 5mo ago
  I think this is by design. I think small independent new websites will cease to exist. I'm generally supportive of bans like this, but I don't want it to come at the expense of the privacy of adult users. I fear this is the way we're going in the west.
- prawn 5mo ago
  "The rules ... apply to platforms with at least 8 million users..."
  - reddalo 5mo ago
    ...for now.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
H4cks0r1337 5mo ago
[dead]

golph 5mo ago

I’m on the fence regarding bans like this. But from first hand, I grew up on social media and I can’t say it was really positive for me or the people around me that also grew up on/with social media. I’m wondering how this would change mental health in young people. Can anyone point me to specific studies on this?

hhjj 5mo ago
The real subject is what it implies: identification of every Malaysian posting on social media to enforce this ban. Control of speech through think of the children rhetoric.
Forgeties79 5mo ago
I’ve given this a lot of thought as well and I’m also generally a little unsure, especially because the Internet was so positive for me in most other ways (it’s hard to overstate what battle.net communities did for my psychology and confidence as somebody who felt kind of alone) but I think what ultimately distinguishes the current harm of social media is that what we had back then was not nearly as sophisticated. Yes I’m sure they were getting some data from us, yes there was exploitation and problems, But the current infrastructure of the “attention economy” is absolutely insane and beyond destructive. From a social perspective, it wasn’t really until Instagram blew up in popularity and we had to start learning not to take people’s feeds as representative of how great their lives were that this stuff started to creep up. IMO Facebook was a little more text driven and myspace was mostly just middle school drama that would’ve taken place IRL anyway.
- prawn 5mo ago
  I think that comment about sophistication is absolutely key. Not even just data harvesting, but actively working against the interests of a user to keep them actively engaged.
  - Forgeties79 5mo ago
    Yeah it’s just such an overall hostile experience where you have to have your guard up. Which crazy to me is how many people on HN still say that having an ad blocker is selfish/“people just wanting stuff for free.” An ad blocker is basic security at this point.

arjie 5mo ago

Ah, it requires at least 8 million users[0] in Malaysia and they have a list. I was wondering how Hacker News etc. were going to comply. 0: https://soyacincau.com/2025/12/15/mcmc-social-media-instant-messaging-platforms-deemed-licensed-2026/ https://soyacincau.com/2025/12/15/mcmc-social-media-instant-...

sheept 5mo ago
The list is pretty small, so I wonder if this just drives users to other, smaller platforms. That said, the list of platforms includes all the biggest offenders of engagement optimization, so it feels more like a ban of addictive social media than all social media in general. But it's also interesting they ban messaging apps, which I assume parents use to keep contact with their kids.

noobermin 5mo ago

This is likely because the government fears of protests. Just like the bans in the west were mostly about anti Israel/ pro Palestinian rhetoric, this is a response to the anti Government protests last year in Indonesia and elsewhere. They're afraid of it happening there.

lilOnion 5mo ago

So we're all going to accept mass survaliance for everybody who is >=16 in order to "protect" those who are under 16. Yet parents wont get any notices if their child bypasses the id check.

ben_w 5mo ago
Social media is inherently mass surveillance, or at least that's the narrative the big companies themselves sell to those who want ad slots in order to justify the prices they charge.
- zarzavat 5mo ago
  HN is social media...
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - totalconfusion 5mo ago
    We built this city
  - gaiagraphia 5mo ago
    I think the term 'social media' has outlived its purpose. It's too vague to be used in discussion. 'Social' seems a bit redundant, as isn't most media inherently social? It's quite a nice, flattering term for these companies. They get to advertise their platforms as being 'social' (bringing people closer together, having firneds), and 'media' (wow look at all these fun, cool pics and videos!), when in reality, it's kinda the opposite. I think we need to start naming things based on who actually owns these companies, the essence of their operations, and where they generate the most of their revenues from. Ad Platforms? Surveillance Boards?

gherkinnn 5mo ago

I am against these age bans because I know the mechanisms behind it will be used against everybody. I am, however, all for banning personalised feeds, data collection, targeted ads, what amounts slot machines, and generally the poison these platforms spew. What this will look like in practice I don't know. I am neither a lawyer, politician, nor do I work on these systems.

shevy-java 5mo ago
Well, one example is the "are you a bot check". If you don't give out your age and let the provider verify that, you are banned from using the internet. Thse are new "freedoms" we are going to enjoy in a little while.
phyzix5761 5mo ago
I'm against all those things as well but placing a ban on them is the same mechanism as banning anything. People should have the freedom to do things we disagree with. I haven't used social media (other than HN if it counts as one) for almost 20 years. I think they're toxic and a waste of time. But that doesn't mean other people shouldn't be allowed to use them. If people want to watch brainrot all day its they're life and I have no say in that. This is so my own personal freedom is preserved.
- BigJono 5mo ago
  You can't have freedom if a few people have a microphone that reaches hundreds of millions of people have zero responsibilities for how they use that microphone. If you actually haven't used social media recently then I get why you'd be confused, because back in the day Facebook had a chronological timeline of people you specifically added in. The way a modern social media recommender algorithms work is completely different. If you, for example, say "I want to hear everything that Bob has to say" by "subscribing" to Bob or whatever, you "might" see when Bob says something, or instead you "might" see Mary's post from the other side of the world that has some strangely aggressive opinions about someone the billionaire platform owner happens to hate. Social media companies have decided by buddying up to the US administration that they get to decide what everyone around you sees or hears. If a couple of billionaires decide that they don't like phyzix5761 you might just get lynched by an angry mob. That's not gonna do much for your freedom, in-fact it's kind of the opposite.

shevy-java 5mo ago

> The rules require social media platforms to implement age-verification systems and block users under 16 from creating accounts. The to me interesting part is how these all allege to restrict under-age people, but EVERYONE will be forced to give out their year. Aka the world wide web is turned into a giant age-sniffing network. I don't buy for a second that this is due to the alleged "we must protect children". What is also weird is ... if you are 15 years old, you get restricted here; at age 16, you don't, and at age 18 you are often taken from mandatory draft (in some countries) to be used for training in the military. In modern warfare with drones, this means cannon fodder, while the superrich are exempt from everything (look at the orange man and ask him when he served). Something is fundamentally broken here.

jdw64 5mo ago

[dead]

karmasimida 5mo ago

Honestly? Yes Social media is more harmful than alcohol, and it could solicit so much negative reactions at formation age. This needs to be global.

nullbio 5mo ago

This concerted global effort is more about building the surveillance infrastructure for the web that will be required given AI's takeoff, and less-so about the well being of children.

somenameforme 5mo ago
I'm about as cynical and open to conspiracy as anybody, but I strongly disagree on this one. Social media is a cancer on society as a whole, let alone children who are still trying to figure out who they are. It serves absolutely no positive purpose that couldn't be done at least as well through private chat groups and the like. I will absolutely be barring my children from social media. I fully expect them to use it or similar sorts of stuff behind my back, but that's okay. It will then be hidden and scarce, which limits the overall negative consequences it can have. Being in a country where this is enforced at a national level is extremely appealing to me.
- logicchains 5mo ago
  >Social media is a cancer on society as a whole, let alone children who are still trying to figure out who they are. It serves absolutely no positive purpose that couldn't be done at least as well through private chat groups and the like. Social media provides decentralized information transmission, so people (kids are people) are able to obtain information without it first being filtered through a small cabal of self-interested media corporations and governments. If there was no social media, the Iran war would probably have overwhelming popular support like the Iraq one and there'd already be US boots on the ground.
  - matips 5mo ago
    The way how corporations like Meta implemented modern social medias filter information as well. It does it in a different way than TV, but personalized information bubbles are important arguments again using "social" medias.
  - ShinTakuya 5mo ago
    Except all major social media sites are also corporations with their own interests. I'd rather the business model of traditional media that rides on journalistic reputation to a recommendation feed where the only job of it is to keep you on the site, especially when said feed can easily be manipulated. No media organisation is perfect but your description of social media as some nirvana of decentralised truth is very questionable.

try-working 5mo ago

At this point, if we all get banned from Instagram and Facebook we lose nothing. I find Twitter very useful still for software stuff.

AndrewThrowaway 5mo ago
And I personally get a lot of news from Facebook and Insta, never used Twitter. So who is to choose what social media is good and what should be banned.
rimliu 5mo ago
omg, Twitter is as useless as Instagram is.

nsoonhui 5mo ago

As a Malaysian and a parent, and as someone who detests censorship and who is wholely aware of the slippery slope nature of censorship, I actually agree with the ban. This is because in Malaysia we already have seen enough examples of bad, vague laws have been used to shut up/down the ethnic minorities and dissenters, adding this ban will not change too much of the landscape. Banning younger children to have a social media account is good. If we can ban kids from driving because their brains aren't fully developed yet, why not just ban social media account for the same reason? It's actually sickening to see that everyone-- especially children-- glues to phone in public space: playground, restaurants and whatnot. Of course you can say that adults should follow the same ban but adults are more resistant to the opium of social media ( refer to the driving car example above). So I think the double standard is excusable. The detriment effects of social media towards the young, girls especially, are well documented ( see the Jonathan Hahdt book "the anxious generation"). So I think the ban is valid.

haritha-j 5mo ago

There is nothing social about social media as it exists today. The social component was meant to be socialising with friends and like-minded individuals. As it exists it is at best parasocial media. Realistically its simply a funnel for content from creators, and the ads that leech onto said content.

ShinyLeftPad 5mo ago
> The social component was meant to be socialising with friends and like-minded individuals. That still exists. I know people who mostly use just that part and don't like to doomscroll. I also personally connected to new people through socials and these friendships are pretty strong.
Gigachad 5mo ago
Social media today is just designed to induce a zombie state where you sit for hours scrolling short form video and adverts. If it was destroyed entirely society would be better off.

SilverElfin 5mo ago

Remember, Malaysia is an officially Islamic country, with Islamic laws. This type of law and verification of age / identity will be used to suppress speech and civil liberties. Not to mention the government’s fear of protests that have also rocked their Islamic neighbor, Indonesia. Keeping children off the internet requires everyone - including adults - be verified and identified online. This is a bad solution to mental health problems. Parents need to control and care for their kids, not take away everyone’s rights because they’re bad parents.

gmhafiz 5mo ago
> Remember, Malaysia is an officially Islamic country, with Islamic laws. Malaysia is a secular country with secular laws. Islam is its official religion, and has a Syariah court that only applies to Muslim with limited jurisdiction. Big difference than what you are trying to paint. As they cannot "suppress speech and civil liberties" if the law reach is limited.

clydethefrog 5mo ago

There was another research in Austria into phone-free living among 46,000 young people shows that three weeks without a smartphone leads to better sleep and less depression. The participants reported increased psychological well-being and a decrease in problematic internet use, even after they started using the phones again. Many young people found new activities such as reading or playing outside to fill the time. https://science.orf.at/stories/3235664 https://science.orf.at/stories/3235664

commanderj 5mo ago

Why is this removed from the front page. 2 hours after posting, 117 up votes and more than 10 healthy comment threads?

egorfine 5mo ago

I've got four children ranging from 11 to 33. All of them digital native, all of them had no restrictions whatsoever on gadgets and online at all. All grew up to become good and successful people. I will do everything in my power to keep my youngest connected to all the social networks he wants and I will not take those legal requirements into consideration.

gaiagraphia 5mo ago

It's a privilege for these tech companies to operate in these nations, not a right. If they can't demonstrate positive value, then countries are absolutely right to cut out a cancer. I'm hugely in favour of more regulation with more revenue/users. If my income tax scales, so should the penalties associated their wealth extraction models. Ideally these big tech firms should be eliminating all the negative externalities associated with their use, either through funding systems, or a direct tax on revenue. The privacy side is worrying, but does Meta, Google, etc products are the antithesis of privacy anyway. Anything which burns their model and ideologies to the ground is a welcome change. As long as these draconian regulations only impact the hugest companies who don't demonstrate positive value, I think it's ok. If they start coming for smaller sites, message boards, etc, then it's a problem.

subarctic 5mo ago

Like I've said before i don't necessarily think it's bad that they're raising the minimum age for these sites, but since when does that mean they have to check ids? There's been a minimum age of 13 for decades and that never meant you had to upload your id

CamouflagedKiwi 5mo ago
That's because the sites put that there to claim they had a rule or whatever. If this new limit is being enforced on them with the intention that it is actually effective, there clearly has to be some way of checking it or kids will just click through - I remember that being parodied in the South Park movie, which must be 25-30 years old now.

jason1cho 5mo ago

Creating accounts should be allowed, but using an account could require age check. People should be able to create an account at birth. Then when they grow up, they are ready to use the account. This way proves that the account owner is at least as old as the account.