Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Utah is first US state to limit teen social media access

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 719 posts

Re: Utah is first US state to limit teen social media access

#261

Post by shagie »

okhuman wrote: post #229
hatsunearu wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(F) interactive gaming, virtual gaming, or an online service, that allows the creation and uploading of content for the purpose of interactive gaming, edutainment, or associated entertainment, So Roblox, arguably quite harmful to children, is specifically carved out. That's great.

Whats going on at Roblox? Curious, as a parent myself.

People Make Games is one of the YouTube channels that I respect in this domain...

Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers - https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ

Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper. - https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY

Re: Utah is first US state to limit teen social media access

#262

Post by mvnuweucxqokii »

yieldcrv wrote: post #125
veec_cas_tant wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully this is hyperbole. Seems a bit extreme to hope the government legislates away industries because you don't want to handle the parenting yourself.

I hope that corporations more frequently put less relevant jurisdictions in their place and remind representatives that they are in competition with other jurisdictions and this overrides their public service ideas. So I’m more of a fan of seeing that. Not the actual outcome. Would make more people choose more collaborative solutions faster.

Honestly if social media companies pulled out of Utah, I could see tens of thousands of families choosing to move to Utah for that reason alone.

Re: Utah is first US state to limit teen social media access

#263

Post by sircastor »

Buttons840 wrote: post #205

A Utah resident connects to a server in California, controlled by a company in California. This seems like interstate commerce to me, and is thus regulated by federal law, not the laws of individual states. Consider Wickard v. Filburn[0], in which the courts ruled that a farmer growing crops on his own land, to feed to his own animals, all within a single state, was participating in "interstate commerce". Given this…

Assuming they acknowledge this at all, more and more laws are being written and passed knowing full well they violate federal law and will be challenged. The intent is not regulation of society, it’s political visibility and winning “points” among your electorate. Whether the law stands scrutiny is irrelevant

Re: Utah is first US state to limit teen social media access

#265

Post by docandrew »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #69

Sure, let's blame social media for the troubles of our youth. It's not the endless wars. It's not the endless poverty. It's not the endless divisiveness. It's not the endless media fearmongering of X or Y. It's TikTok. It's Instagram. Etc.

We’ve always had endless wars, endless poverty, endless divisiveness, endless media fearmongering, etc. Those things have all been much worse in the past than they are today (maybe not the media fearmongering). But youth (and adults too) weren’t exposed to it every waking minute of their day the way they are today.

Re: Utah is first US state to limit teen social media access

#266

Post by jquery »

This bill is draconian BS. Goodbye anonymity. "For the children" is always used to pass the worst crap. This bill doesn't do anything to help children, it only increases power for power-tripping parents by making it so that their kids have no privacy, even as teenagers. Imagine being an LGBT teen in Utah right now.

If they really cared about mental health, there's so many things they could do... but instead, they did... whatever this is. This is the same state that wants to ban pornography on mobile devices "for the children", so excuse me if I don't trust their motives one whit.

Re: Utah is first US state to limit teen social media access

#267

Post by jquery »

throwayyy479087 wrote: post #83
falcolas wrote: post #62

Is it a bad time to mention that sites like stack overflow, discord, sub stack, medium, Reddit, hacker news, GitHub, YouTube, and so forth have the same traits - the same identifying markers - as what we consider traditional social media sites? How the bill defines social media: 10) (a) "Social media platform" means an online forum that a social media company 160 makes available for an account holder to: 161 (i) crea…

Yes, and a 13 year old should absolutely not use any of those services. Discord in particular has become known as “groomercord” for it’s open pedophilia.

I've never heard it called "groomercord", ever. A google search for that term doesn't find anything, either.

I dunno where you're finding all this discord pedophilia, is this a self-report?

Re: Utah is first US state to limit teen social media access

#268

Post by heavyset_go »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #32
paxys wrote: post #16

Whether this is a reasonable law or not, my big problem with it is that it puts the burden of enforcement on tech platforms rather than the kids' parents. There is no way for any company to check for something like this without also affecting every other user of the site, whether they are in Utah or not and whether they are a teen or not. What do they do exactly, start collecting government IDs from us before every v…

I would say that anonymity on social media currently has a serious, real-world price to pay. Teen girls and Instagram don’t mix - the numbers reporting depression and suicidal thoughts since it took off is heartbreaking. They made us wear masks due to a threat to our physical health. Social media is currently having extremely acute effects on the mental health of a generation. It may have reached the point that losin…

> I would say that anonymity on social media currently has a serious, real-world price to pay. Teen girls and Instagram don’t mix - the numbers reporting depression and suicidal thoughts since it took off is heartbreaking.

I wouldn't say that anonymity is the problem here, but rather that social media sites are crafted to abuse the psychology of their users for attention, engagement, ad impressions etc.

It isn't a given that social media has to make teens depressed. If the psychologists and researchers that are hired by these companies to hone in on engagement were instead were paid to make their platforms less psychologically harmful, we could see better results. Hell, platforms have the potential to improve people's lives if they were optimized for those outcomes. Civil and criminal liability could be introduced to social media operators to ensure that their products aren't causing harm, as well.

Incentives to achieve those results can come from legislation and the judicial system.

Re: Utah is first US state to limit teen social media access

#269

Post by Brybry »

judge2020 wrote: post #172
falcolas wrote: post #62

Is it a bad time to mention that sites like stack overflow, discord, sub stack, medium, Reddit, hacker news, GitHub, YouTube, and so forth have the same traits - the same identifying markers - as what we consider traditional social media sites? How the bill defines social media: 10) (a) "Social media platform" means an online forum that a social media company 160 makes available for an account holder to: 161 (i) crea…

> There’s exceptions for email, Netflix, Amazon, news, traditional media kinds of sites. The fact that there are 20 categories of services exempted shows that this is a terrible bill that is based on punishing specific actors and not regulating data privacy or child wellbeing in a meaningful way. for reference, line 165 to 224 of that link are the exceptions: "Social media platform" does not include an online service…

Texas had to do similar exclusions for their "anti-censorship" anti-moderation bill. [1][2]

[1] https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/872/billtext/html/HB00020F...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_House_Bill_20

Re: Utah is first US state to limit teen social media access

#270

Post by sircastor »

ryankshaw wrote: post #31
taylodl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call their bluff - don’t make your service available in Utah.

I live in Utah. If that's what happens, that would be awesome! "Sorry kids, no fb/tiktok/insta and there's nothing I can do about it. None of them work where we live" Would be a huge win for all parents. No social media, and we don't have to be the bad guys taking it away.

It’s a narrow win. If people can’t post to their sites, they’re going to start thinking about going to Colorado rather than Utah for their skiing. The so-called “Silicon slopes” are going to thin out as large companies question what the legislature is going to arbitrarily decide to screw with next. Tourism dollars and high tech jobs are a hefty price.

As an aside, I lived in Utah for many years and I generally thought people preferred to not have the government dictating what was allowed and not allowed.

Post reply on HN