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Utah is first US state to limit teen social media access

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

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An important difference being the ID’s purpose being just to prove your age during for that transaction, not provide a mechanism to create a permanent record of your behavior.

Well, what is your plan? We can’t pretend that letting teen suicide jump 29%, and having 1 in 5 teens now having severe depression, is an issue that parents should be solely responsible for solving. And we shouldn’t pretend yet another social program could be as effective as slowing down the source.

If you have an intelligent problem solving governance:

1. Acknowledge the problem

2. Seek a root cause

3. Attempt to mediate this issue at it's root. My uninformed, and unasked for, opinion on this is this is due to the adjustment of living situation and social expectations of that age group pushes their developing social environment to go global rather than staying local. (People are scared of their kids in the local community hanging out and social, where they've been stuck in doors playing xbox/tiktok).

4. In doing #4 attempt to mediate this issue with the parents. Don't try to punish people in the situation, provide acceptable alternatives to help people be better.

On a surface level:

1. Demonstrate in public a way that live without social media is a workable thing for people at that age

2. Provide mental health outreach for the effected people (This costs money so it's never done)

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

#282
post #26
post #18

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

Honestly this seems like the best idea. You can’t get accused of letting a kid access outside approved hours if you don’t allow people in Utah on. What about adults? They may be lying kids. So either no access (safer) or strict age checks involving checking licenses and stuff. But that’s expensive. No Utah is easier. How do you know they’re in Utah? IP addresses. Blocks people outside Utah? Sorry, our lawyers made us…

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

#283
post #119

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Absolutely zero chance, SO was the only resource on the internet that had simple enough explanations for me when I started out programming at 11. I was making PRs to oss projects on Github and churning through Project Euler by 15. I literally owe my entire career to SO which is weird to say typing it out now.

Reading these comments about people relying on SO - a site founded in 2008 - at age 11, doesn't make me feel any younger, and I'm not even that old (inching closer and closer to my mid-30s). I got into Linux and bash/Python scripting by following tutorials on random shady sites and reading official documentation and manpages. Let's just say it wasn't as seamless as Googling an issue and having a SO thread directly an…

"I feel old" on the internet can mean 15yo to 80yo, so you have all the right to feel old at mid-30s lol

When I learned my second programming language (JavaScript), I asked most of my questions via a mailing list. It's quite weird trying to recall it... I almost forgot how mailing list work today.

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

#284

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…

I don’t consider Reddit, HN, etc. to be social media, at all. There might be media, but there is no social. Social requires a network of real people. You can’t prove that anyone on these sites is a real person, other than yourself. Maybe I, and everyone else on here, is a bot. When everyone is anonymous, there is no network. And, not only is everyone anonymous, but there are no connections. To the best of my knowledg…

Interesting argument.

Can a site without discrete named accounts, where everyone is called 'Anonymous', claim that there's no way to verify whether the content is generated by humans? It's basically the 4chan model.

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

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what is your plan? We can’t pretend that letting teen suicide jump 29%, and having 1 in 5 teens now having severe depression, is an issue that parents should be solely responsible for solving. And we shouldn’t pretend yet another social program could be as effective as slowing down the source.

I have strong support for the provisions that require certain features be built into social media sites themselves (e.g. "sites must support curfew scheduling" or "sites cannot have free reign on targeted advertisements") as it gives controls people want but currently can't easily get from most of these types of apps. At the same time I'm not really a fan of the implementation being based on providing real identity f…

This was a long read, but I'm glad you wrote it out.

I too am in full support of zero trust tokens. However, I feel like society doesn't understand and would never support this. Corporations have no punishment for collecting and abusing people's information, that it's disgusting. Even when they're caught abusing it, theres no negative repercussions for the organizations. (Experian.. which should have been completely closed.. got a minor fine to continue leaking people's info)

Another point I wanted to make for you. I want to see anonymous identity tokens as that we're continuing on this path. For example: Hetzner is now requiring biometrics + id proof of who you are to pay them money for a server. I understand they want to avoid fraud and provide services to legitimate people, but that kind of info is insane to give to some random person at some corporation.

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love it if you would state what you think the viewpoint opposite yours is and then try to defend it, then explain why that defense is wrong. > legislates away industries because you don't want to handle the parenting yourself. What are your thoughts on pharmaceutical/heroin legislation? What are your thoughts on making it illegal to advertise unhealthy food to kids? How do you feel about the idea of product p…

> I would love it if you would state what you think the viewpoint opposite yours is and then try to defend it, then explain why that defense is wrong. Sorry, I don't know what this means. > What are your thoughts on pharmaceutical/heroin legislation? What are your thoughts on making it illegal to advertise unhealthy food to kids? How do you feel about the idea of product placement in children's TV shows? How do you f…

> Sorry, I don't know what this means.

You called something hyperbole. You said you had a hard time imagining someone in good faith wishing that the government would legislate away an industry so that they don't have to "parent."

So I asked:

  What do you think the person you are responding too's position is?
  What do you think is the best defense for that position?
  What do you think that position is wrong despite what you see as its best defense?
I think the tobacco industry is an obvious industry to make reference to. I think now days most people who don't smoke would be happy to see it regulated away and I think it would be an extremely fringe position to think the tobacco industry should be able to advertise to kids today.

> I'd be against most regulations that basically say "to protect the children, we will ban X for everyone". I'm sure there are exceptions though.

Just because we don't know the full extent of how bad Facebook is now, doesn't mean it isn't bad.

How bad do you think we thought smoking, opiates, or other problems were before we decided they were bad?

We saw the correlation with harm of tobacco, investigated more deeply, then regulated their wide spread use particularly use by children.

Facebook is modern day tobacco.

I am much less black and white about this than you might expect, because I am generally pro letting people do what they want with their bodies. After the age of 25 (when a person's prefrontal cortex is fully developed) there are few good arguments for preventing a net tax payer from doing what they want to their bodies or time. If someone can be told they are old enough to die (or kill) for their country, that's another factor that makes limiting their freedom to make bad decisions a hard argument.

> that the government might believe causes harm to children is quite unfortunate.

When you say "the government" that is entirely jaded. There is more nuance than us (the oppressed) and them (the government). Replace the government with "my fellow neighbors," and I think it harms the anti-government righteousness a bit.

The context of the original conversation was clearly not about banning Facebook, but about not being sad if they went away. Telling facebook it can't do business in utah if it serves children and Facebook deciding to not do any business in Utah as a result is not banning Facebook.

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

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't read the bills yet but according to the article it applies to children under 18. 17-year-old me would have considered this draconian bullsh*t, for the same reasons I would now. (So does dad me, incidentally. My kid's messages have always been her business, not mine.)

> 17-year-old me would have considered this draconian bullsh t, for the same reasons I would now. If anyone thinks that this bill is going to keep 17 year olds from accessing everything from Reddit to GitHub, they are going to be very disappointed. It's kind of wild to see so much of these comments insisting that anyone under the age of 18 be locked up and prevented from accessing basic internet sites and* encouragin…

> draconian content blockers

most school content blockers were pretty easily bypassed in my experience. i was in school relatively recently, my highschool had fortinet which sucked (sni blocking + blocks a bunch of protocols), but tor still got through if i used a bridge. i probably could've used a vpn but tor was easier. before highschool there wasn't anything more than dns filtering (and briefly http host blocking but not sni blocking) which was bypassed by approximately everyone (who wanted to bypass it). most people used random vpn apps, i changed dns, both worked fine.

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

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be wrong, but I think it depends on whether it actually conflicts with any federal law. States can pass laws that affect interstate commerce if there's no superceding federal law and if they don't fall afoul of the Dormant Commerce Clause, which sort of generically restricts interstate protectionism.

So, for example, I could setup a server in Oregon, which responds to requests received from other servers in Oregon[0], and then suddenly I find myself in legal trouble in Florida? Why am I subject to Florida law when I live in Oregon, and I have no representation in the Florida legislature? [0]: In this example, I connect to an Oregon ISP and respond to requests being relayed through this ISP, but I never directly c…

I think that goes to jurisdiction, which is a different issue.

The sibling comment by dragonwriter (which I missed somehow when posting) is a better-worded version of my point about interstate commerce.

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From other comments, it seems the definition is not "what you assume is a social media app" but "any service with over 5 million users that facilitates chat via posts". I am 99% certain this includes Hacker News, Steam, probably also bugs.chromium.org and bugzilla.mozilla.org, and maybe even any website that allows user comments if they happen to have over 5 million users.

> From other comments, it seems the definition is not "what you assume is a social media app" but "any service with over 5 million users that facilitates chat via posts". It's baffling to read all the HN comments encouraging draconian restrictions and forced PII collection on websites, all with the assumption that it will only apply to websites I don't like . Laws like this, if enforced, would make a lot of the sites…

I welcome it. Breaking the way the internet is used these days would be a huge win for society as a whole no matter how painful it might look at first.
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