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Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

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Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#241

Post by carabiner »

It's crazy how in 2017, YC was proposing a social network for kids as a startup idea:

> Social Network for Children: This is a super tough nut to crack. You have to be cool and offer a safe and private environment for kids to communicate with each other while enabling trusted adults to peer in/interact, etc… The company that can build something that is used and useful for all parties can build something of great value throughout a person’s entire life. - Holly Liu, Kabam/Y Combinator

https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/13-startup-ideas

There was very little notion that a social network, no matter how safe, was inherently detrimental to childhood development. Like cigarettes initially, it just seemed to be mostly positive with some niggling annoyances. I wonder what other current YC ideas will be considered horrible 7 years from now.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#242

Post by pfdietz »

etiennebausson wrote: post #119
pfdietz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, a law preventing children from receiving religious instruction would also be constitutional, in your mind?

Spirituality (and religion) are personal choice. There is no "religious education" for children, only indoctrination. It may be legal, but it is in no way moral.

This is not an answer to the question I asked.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#243

Post by notsound »

JeremyNT wrote: post #231
lukev wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the only way to do this is to require ID checks, effectively regulating and destroying the anonymous nature of the internet (and probably unconstitutional under the First Amendment, to boot.) It's the same problem with requiring age verification for porn. It's not that anyone wants kids to have easy access to this stuff, but that any of these laws will either be (a) unenforceable and useless, or (b) draconian and…

Yes, this isn't the right solution. The power needs to be given to the users. A better solution is more robust device management, with control given to the device owner (read: the parent). The missing legislative piece is mandating that social media companies need to respond differently when the user agent tells them what to send. I should be able to take my daughter's phone (which I own), set an option somewhere tha…

Another option that allows for better privacy and versatility is the website setting a MIN_USER_AGE header based on IP geolocation.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#244

Post by deadbabe »

I have no idea how this would be enforced but I agree with the spirit of the law.

We either live in a world where children are hopelessly pressured into joining social media early in life and suffering its effects, or we ban them from it all together and allow them to have something that still looks like a childhood.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#245

Post by angra_mainyu »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #139
matthewdgreen wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several governments have already effectively banned sites like Pornhub by creating regimes where people have to mail their ID to a central clearinghouse (which creates a huge chilling effect.) The article talks about “reasonable age verification measures” and so saying it’s unenforceable seems a little bit premature. Also, you can bet those measures won’t be in any way reasonable once the Florida legislature gets thr…

Does this actually work or does it just push those same people to sketchier websites?

Worked in my case when my ISP required ID for it in the UK.

I just noped out of it entirely.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#246

Post by ScoutOrgo »

ceejayoz wrote: post #130
1shooner wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because regulation worked so well in eliminating peer pressure for drinking, smoking, and drugs.

Regulation worked remarkably well on smoking.

You also had to go in store to buy cigarettes, so the application of regulation would work a little differently in the case of social media.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#247

Post by 20after4 »

brodouevencode wrote: post #182
tedajax wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Answering a problem with unenforceable garbage like this doesn't seem like a very sound strategy.

Enforceability is a foregone conclusion, and when it comes to things like this it's somewhat expected. The same can be said for pornography, drugs and alcohol and tobacco (remember Joe Camel?), and anything else that would fall under blue-laws. The goal of this is to bring attention to the fact that it's a problem and should be seen as undesirable, like pornography or Joe Camel. The cancellation of Joe didn't prevent…

Multiple studies have determined that the dare program is entirely or almost entirely ineffective.

Here's just one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448384/

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#248

Post by anonym29 »

lukev wrote: post #221
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> effectively regulating and destroying the anonymous nature of the internet. Not at all. Just the social media sites, which are objectively bad for kids. As an adult, you do what you want on the internet.

And what makes a site a social media site? Anywhere you can post interactive content? You do realize that laws like this would apply to sites like HN, Reddit, the comment section of every blog, and every phpBB forum you ever used? It's not just Instagram and Tiktok.

Trying to force independently owned and operated forums to enforce laws that might not even be applicable in the country that the owners / admins live and work in is going to be about as effective as trying to force foreign VPS/server/hosting providers to delete copyrighted content from their server using laws that don't apply in their jurisdiction.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#249

Post by jlokier »

lukev wrote: post #210
causal wrote: post #36

I might be the only one here in favor of this, and wanting to see a federal rollout. It is not reasonable to expect parents to spontaneously agree on a strategy for keeping kids off social media- and that kind of coordination is what it would take, because the kids + social media companies have more than enough time to coordinate workarounds. Have the law put the social media companies on the parents side, or these k…

But the only way to do this is to require ID checks, effectively regulating and destroying the anonymous nature of the internet (and probably unconstitutional under the First Amendment, to boot.) It's the same problem with requiring age verification for porn. It's not that anyone wants kids to have easy access to this stuff, but that any of these laws will either be (a) unenforceable and useless, or (b) draconian and…

> But the only way to do this is to require ID checks, effectively regulating and destroying the anonymous nature of the internet

That seems intuitive, but it's not actually true. I suggest looking up zero-knowledge proofs.

Using modern cryptography, it is easy to send a machine-generated proof to your social media provider that your government-provided ID says your age is ≥ 16, without revealing anything else about you to the service provider (not even your age), and without having to communicate with the government either.

The government doesn't learn which web sites you visit, and the web sites don't learn anything about you other than you are certified to be age ≥ 16. The proofs are unique to each site, so web sites can't use them to collude with each other.

That kind of "smart ID" doesn't have to be with the government, although that's often a natural starting point for ID information. There are methods which do the same based on a consensus of people and entities that know you, for example. That might be better from a human rights perspective, given how many people do not have citizenship rights.

> (and probably unconstitutional under the First Amendment, to boot.)

If it would be unconstitutional to require identity-revealing or age-revealing ID checks for social media, that's all the more reason to investigate modern technical solutions we have to those problems.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#250

Post by ramblenode »

scythe wrote: post #152
captainmuon wrote: post #89

I guess for me it depends on what the law considers "social media". Is something like the bulletin boards we used to have around the late 90s/early 2000s social media? What about chat rooms? Local social web sites for the school or your city? I think a lot of these things can even be beneficial, if I think about my own experiences as a somewhat introverted teenager. And what about things like Netflix, Youtube, Podcas…

> I guess for me it depends on what the law considers "social media". It's a bill written by the Florida House of Representatives, so there's a definition there. Mind you, it's the Florida House, which has put out some extremely bad laws in its current session -- from "Parental Rights in Education" to the Disney speech retaliation. But given that this is a less ostensibly partisan issue, there are reasons for hope. T…

Thanks for posting the details.

> f. Interactive gaming, virtual gaming, or an online service

This bill is already out of date. The new generation's social media are games like Roblox. And these are as addictive as the old social media.

Good luck with this whack-a-mole. A comprehensive bill would stop this at the source: kids owning smartphones. But addressing smarphones would upset too many parents and too much business, so it won't get done.

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