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I know many people dislike this movement but really, I think it's a good idea. Yes, it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago, but that's gone alrea

• tsunamifury 4mo ago
  This is not about the good of the people. And the sooner you realize that this type of regulation will be used to manipulate you as much as what you fear is happening already the better. The government is an entity that acts to protect itself. It has and always will fear an open and informed public.
  • vitriol83 4mo ago
    majority of parents are in favour of such a ban, otherwise they wouldn't do it if social media companies hadn't made social media a total cesspit of disinformation, child grooming and algorithmic manipulation then the outcome might have been different
• jMyles 4mo ago
  > Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step. Adopting the drug prohibition model is fine, if what we want is to lavishly enrich the social media cartels, and visit upon the rest of the world needless crime, misery, addiction, and death.
  • cenamus 4mo ago
    Obviously OP is not
• stavros 4mo ago
  A better measure would be to mandate that social media platforms can only show you content from people you follow, and in chronological order.
  • witx 4mo ago
    I like this idea, to me the algorithm the most offending part. But how do you control what a kid can or cannot follow? They can still follow Andrew Tate and his temu versions
    • stavros 4mo ago
      At some point you have to allow people to see what they want to see. You don't have to make it so that what they want to see is pushed on them, though, and this is what modern social media does. It pushes stuff just because it's engaging.
  • nly 4mo ago
    That basically kills the business model and would wipe hundreds of billions of $ in capital away Not that I disagree
    • stavros 4mo ago
      Good!
• raincole 4mo ago
  > as drugs Because war on drugs has been such a successful policy...?
  • paytonjjones 4mo ago
    I'm not saying the war on drugs has been successful by any means. But legalization has also been a really disappointing flop. After marijuana was legalized in my state, it has been really disturbing to see usage skyrocket among middle and high schoolers. A lot of people apparently derive their standards of morality from the legal system.
    • nailer 4mo ago
      Nor arguing and I do appreciate your perspective but that’s so odd: vodka is legal and middle and high schoolers shouldn’t be getting into that either.
      • cassianoleal 4mo ago
        Yeah if they legalised cannabis use for teenagers that's a failure of how it was regulated - not of the act of legalising it.
    • estebank 4mo ago
      Has actual use increased or is it now just more visible to you?
      • deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
  • duped 4mo ago
    As a means of reducing incidence of drug use, prohibition does in fact work.
  • atollk 4mo ago
    I have no idea how successful the US war on drugs has been and I don't need to, because I am not from the US and the US is not everything there is in the world. Just because one attempt to fight something bad failed, that doesn't mean every attempt ever at fighting anything bad is doomed to fail.
• maccard 4mo ago
  I disagree. I don’t have a huge problem with the UK government monitoring my online presence; I’m reasonably sure my ISP is siphoning all that information to them anyway. That may be problematic for some, but I’m ok with it. My problem is that this info doesn’t go to the government; it goes to persona and Yoti. We are literally giving government issued IDs to tracking platforms to tell Meta, Google, ByteDance, Reddit who we are. This isn’t about keeping children safe - if it was the law would be to mandate parental controls on devices. I’d stand behind that law.,
• datsci_est_2015 4mo ago
  Isn’t it already impossible to be anonymous on the internet without flawless opsec? I’m surprised there isn’t a TV Tropes article about it but whenever a character in a show needs to be perfectly anonymous they visit an Internet cafe with a baseball cap and glasses - which while it’s a trope I think it also plays on our cultural understanding that significant diligence is required to maintain anonymity. Edit: though I suppose the counterargument is that we shouldn’t make it any easier for surveillance states, especially technologically inept ones, to perform dragnet surveillance.
  • butchkass 4mo ago
    There’s a middle ground between going to cybercafes with sunglasses, and submitting a 4K scan of you gov ID before watching a YouTube video where someone says a bad word.
• lotsofpulp 4mo ago
  >Yes, it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago, but that's gone already anyway. The "free" internet is there, just the same as before. The proportion of people using it in the way they used to might have changed.
• Aurornis 4mo ago
  > but really, I think it's a good idea. > Yes, it removes the "free" internet > Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state? The internet I grew up on was all about freedom and resisting the police state. Now the top voted comment (at least at time of me responding) is an open-arms welcoming of the internet police state and voicing support for removal of the free internet? How did people become so naive to believe that this will benefit them? That the regulations are only going to impact kids who use the “bad sites” and not start reaching for your group chat rooms and your social news sites, too? Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit, YouTube, and other sites, too? It's right there in the article. Think about how this has to be enforced: The only way to guarantee under-16s are banned from these sites is to force everyone to produce ID. You think it's a good idea to force us all to produce ID to watch YouTube videos or read a post on Reddit? This is what you want?
  • zepolen 4mo ago
    The posters account is 89 days old, it's a shill.
  • kelseyfrog 4mo ago
    Because we've been conditioned to believe that every good thing harbors a dark and sinister secret, that every attempt at improving our situation contains a fatal flaw. It's a narrative trope, not real life. Come back to reality. It's what Omelas was trying to convey.
  • SkyeCA 4mo ago
    Over time it's become harder and harder to deny how bad some aspects of the internet are for people, especially for young people. Whether it's right or wrong it's not shocking that people are more willing than ever to entertain the idea of internet restrictions.
    • _heimdall 4mo ago
      I'd dig deeper on the problem though. More fundamentally, laws like this are based on the fundamental assumption that both children and their parents can't make good decisions and that the state must instead force the right decisions on them.
• nailer 4mo ago
  > it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago I’m not sure free internet was ever good for us. I didn’t need to see all those beheading videos.
  • breppp 4mo ago
    I think the bigger issue was when terror attacks started imitating FPS games
  • atollk 4mo ago
    That is pretty much my point. I just wanted to point that out because, next to being controlled by the government, it's the most common argument against stuff like this I see.
• BigJono 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  • nailer 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    • BigJono 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      • breppp 4mo ago
        Sorry to break it out to you, but the internet was already destroyed by people like you in silicon valley, not the government
        • BigJono 4mo ago
          Why do you think I'm like the people destroying the Internet? Because I said a bad word? Are you actually retarded? I'd love to return to the Internet we had in the 90s and 2000s, we're not going to get there if defeatist bitches like you cave and let the governments of the world control who is allowed to serve http responses to people that don't put their government ID in the header and route it through a 3rd party.
          • breppp 4mo ago
            No, because the people who ruined the Internet were people like you who grew up on it, and then continued on to monetize it. The government was always too slow to be an actual threat. Also chill with the anger
      • nailer 4mo ago
        Assertions of correctness and unreasonableness are useless. Positions without supporting arguments are noise.
  • 4mo ago
• dindunuf 4mo ago
  I want you to imagine the sentiment here if it was "Russia set to announce social media ban for under-16s".
  • atollk 4mo ago
    I would think to myself "I hope we do the same as well soon." If the goal is to take away mental manipulation from children, them I am all for it, no matter who does it.
• Lonestar1440 4mo ago
  Right. A lot of "Internet Freedom" is just dishonest Anarchism. A thought terminating cliche that halts otherwise brilliant people from actually considering the tradeoffs of policies like this. The whole appeal of Anarchy is that The State always has the potential to become Evil. So, at a (very quick) first pass - eliminating The State kinda seems like it heads off some bad futures. While some of the HN commentariat may be anarchists, you and I at least are not.
• dijksterhuis 4mo ago
  > Yes, it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago, social media is not, and never was the "free internet" we all get nostalgic about. maybe the first couple of years was something tangential, but that died very quickly. since then it's been a nightmare-ish hellscape of surveillance, manipulation and hate. > Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me. anyone claiming something like that is happening here is just spreading paranoiac FUD via a cheap and lazy straw man. if UK law starts requiring me to provide ID just to read rust crate documentation or connect to the internet then that is an issue. i would be very unhappy about it. but that is not happening here. let's not be drama queens about it. > Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step. i've asserted for a very long bloody time that major social media platforms, not the internet in general, should require government ID verification of some sort to have an account. would likely make it far easier for the police to prosecute a lot of the nasty shit that only happens on those platforms. having said that, these platforms are designed to prioritise engagement and angry, toxic and hate-filled people click more. so it's the platform's fault but as ever they're not cleaning up their mess. if folks on HN wanna blame someone or get angry then get angry at the platforms for letting it get to where we are today. it's their own fucking faults.
• sunaookami 4mo ago
  "Yes, it will lead to mass surveillance but who cares anyway? You can't just argue against that, that's anarchism!" Do you know how you sound? Stop falling for these tactics, no one is caring for the children while making these laws.
  • atollk 4mo ago
    Yes, I sound like someone who cares about our well-being as humans, and I am happy about that. Do you know how you sound yourself? A conspiracist. If indeed everyone is out to get us and wants to control our brains, then that's f'd up. But you have just as little knowledge about whether that is true as I do.
    • sunaookami 4mo ago
      Thanks for destroying our free society, I appreciate it.
• gadders 4mo ago
  It's a good idea, as long as this clown show of a government doesn't link it to mandatory digital IDs.
  • NopIdoN 4mo ago
    Any reason to think they won't?
• porknubbins 4mo ago
  Keeping children off social media, or to a very limited children only social media seems obviously a good thing. My issue is the UK “free” speech standards seem to be something like free speech as long as its reasonable, doesn’t offend or excite too many people, cast aspersions on those in power etc, in other words not very free at all. And any form of internet registration could be used to tie more people to their posts. Of course restricting posting some benefit exists as we seen in the US with robust free speech and twitter being overrun with third world posters attempting to influence domestic politics.
• monssooon 4mo ago
  The post was edited?!
• ginko 4mo ago
  I'm generally in agreement on social media bans for children, but the proposed solution is age verification on all platforms which has a huge amount of problems. Why can't we just ban the use of smartphones without parental locks for under 16-year-olds instead? That's not perfect but would already be a huge improvement and adults wouldn't be affected by it.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• laughing_man 4mo ago
  >Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me. The issue is once the mechanism is in place, the government will surely use that mechanism when it's convenient. You need look no further than the Online Safety Act of 2023, which was sold as a way to protect children but didn't even go a whole week before the government was censoring videos for political reasons. The end of internet anonymity is a one-way door. Once we're through there will be no going back.