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The case for banning children from social media

newyorker.com

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Re: The case for banning children from social media

#61

Post by XorNot »

tastysandwich wrote: post #46

I just don't see any alternatives to banning social media, perhaps even up to the age of 18. The dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs and social media is just as addictive. It's not clear how you could effectively regulate this stuff - especially in our highly polarised political climate. The right will immediately target "wokeness", and the left will immediately target "hate speech". And the kids will be…

As noted by another poster[1]: how are you going to enforce it?

The idea of banning people from seeking things they want to do to themselves is incredibly stupid with the "War on Drugs" and it's equally stupid here with all the same consequences: a sudden explosion of either unregulated social media alternatives (back in the day Napster had a chat function even), or suspiciously immature "18 year olds" on Facebook and Tiktok.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35447990

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#63

Post by PragmaticPulp »

ehnto wrote: post #42
C50VGicCxmHC wrote: post #3

> These bills will likely face considerable constitutional challenges. Previous attempts to block minors from accessing Web sites via broad legislation, including the Child Online Protection Act, from 1998, have been struck down on First Amendment grounds. You might get farther instead of banning children from social media, ban all ads to children on social media. Every single ad impression shown to a child is a $1,0…

From my experience it took very active moderation to even poorly enforce COPA style rules and that was with a small user base, not the mega-userbases of today's social media. Kids just sign up anyway and then the moderators wait for them to slip up and still are just making an educated guess. The only way to make it more effective I feel is ID verification but then you are looking at collecting IDs from kids and that…

> Kids just sign up anyway and then the moderators wait for them to slip up and still are just making an educated guess.

I’m baffled by all of these HN posts from people who seemingly forgot what being a kid is like. Kids are experts at circumventing the rules.

All of these suggestions about fining companies any time a kid manages to use the website are DOA. Kids will use the internet and steal their parents accounts, IDs, and credit cards. The harder you lock it down, the more terrible the internet is going to become for anyone trying to use it.

Meanwhile, every social website will just pick up and relocate to a country with sane laws overnight.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#64

Post by atahanacar »

andy_ppp wrote: post #51
atahanacar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't want your children to become addicted to something, be a good parent and monitor them. It is not the government's or the society's responsibility to babysit your kids. I don't want my freedoms taken away from me (in this case, freedom to anonymously use social media) just because some people don't have the capability or the motivation to parent their kids properly. Also, this "what about the children" th…

But society stops minors from doing all sorts of harmful behaviors, like drinking, drugs, gambling, guns etc. I think we should consider limiting the algorithms applied to teenagers at least to being much simpler and maybe not allow personal information to be used. I don't think this is some loss of freedom we need to worry about.

>But society stops minors from doing all sorts of harmful behaviors, like drinking, drugs, gambling, guns etc.

None of which affect my freedoms.

>not allow personal information to be used

I 100% agree with this. If a kid can't consent for anything else, how can they consent for their data being collected and processed?

>I don't think this is some loss of freedom we need to worry about.

You may not worry, but I do. Online anonymity is important for people ruled by shady governments, and there is no guaranteeing your government won't become a shady one in your lifetime. There are multiple examples of this worldwide, both in the past and present.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#65

Post by turtleyacht »

Firewall!

    Firewall! Firewall all the things
    Make of a DMZ off thy router
    Content inspect every common packet
    Install on ev'ry device that sniffing
    Snicker--alas for lack of space, a new
    Line beneath: pf -f /etc/pf.conf

    Firewall! A backdoor of no trivial make
    Of maister's werk, a tiny hole
    Strapped alongside, whistling rockets,
    Detonating lines, monitored ropes

    Whence thy enterprising sleuth
    Perchance stumble or sneak
    On day zero of the time
    When secrets revealed
    And figured the locks
    And found the world
    Beyond

    Then a new sys admin is made
    With belt of tools; persistence too:
    A shoulder burdened with weight
    Of knowledge, yet
    Too a realization: imprison'd knowledge
    A deliberate moat, a shadowed keep
    To while the youngest times
    In learning's depths

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#66

Post by PragmaticPulp »

XorNot wrote: post #61
tastysandwich wrote: post #46

I just don't see any alternatives to banning social media, perhaps even up to the age of 18. The dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs and social media is just as addictive. It's not clear how you could effectively regulate this stuff - especially in our highly polarised political climate. The right will immediately target "wokeness", and the left will immediately target "hate speech". And the kids will be…

As noted by another poster[1]: how are you going to enforce it? The idea of banning people from seeking things they want to do to themselves is incredibly stupid with the "War on Drugs" and it's equally stupid here with all the same consequences: a sudden explosion of either unregulated social media alternatives (back in the day Napster had a chat function even), or suspiciously immature "18 year olds" on Facebook an…

> As noted by another poster[1]: how are you going to enforce it?

The number of comments here that haven’t realized that any regulations would require huge privacy intrusions for everyone is weird to see.

It’s like people are imaging some magical set of rules that would only apply to kids but wouldn’t impact themselves negatively.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#67

Post by kevinmchugh »

tastysandwich wrote: post #46

I just don't see any alternatives to banning social media, perhaps even up to the age of 18. The dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs and social media is just as addictive. It's not clear how you could effectively regulate this stuff - especially in our highly polarised political climate. The right will immediately target "wokeness", and the left will immediately target "hate speech". And the kids will be…

Social media is unlike drugs in that if you abstain while your peers use you're in some ways worse off. I wonder if there's a narrower ban to be had, either on image usage or especially on filters

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#69

Post by mixmastamyk »

This is the start of a good article on the subject, but doesn't mention the surveillance capitalism aspect.

> everything from gender identity...

Odd—they always lead with this even though it might affect less than a few percent of the population. There might be other ways to help these folks.

> might have to verify their age using official government identification

Now we're getting somewhere, that's a big problem for everyone.

Maybe if they made such sites charge money, which realistically means credit cards, it could largely solve this. Would probably reduce some of the dark patterns and mostly prevent kids from accessing them. That's how it worked with porn, didn't it?

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#70

Post by bastawhiz »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #27
C50VGicCxmHC wrote: post #3

> These bills will likely face considerable constitutional challenges. Previous attempts to block minors from accessing Web sites via broad legislation, including the Child Online Protection Act, from 1998, have been struck down on First Amendment grounds. You might get farther instead of banning children from social media, ban all ads to children on social media. Every single ad impression shown to a child is a $1,0…

Hrm. I'm not a big fan of this proposal, but I think that implementation would be technically interesting. Say we create a "this is a child" header, which would be sent with all HTTP requests and would mandate that the user not be tracked or advertised to. Great solution, except that everybody would immediately switch the header on because everybody hates ads. In effect, everybody wants to be a child. So now online s…

> Let's say that there's a Government Identity office that, when you turn 18, grants you an Adult Citizen ID# security key that lets you verify your identity digitally.

There's really no reason a non-SSN identification number couldn't be used for this. If SSNs weren't sensitive, you could just have a government endpoint that takes an SSN tells you whether the holder is over 18 (or "no, or the SSN is not valid).

The only challenge is knowing whether the number belongs the the person sitting in front of the computer. There's no way to stop a kid from using their parent's number. Which is sort of the whole problem with SSNs in the first place: their value largely comes from the fact that they're secret-ish. In effect, they're passwords.

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