261–270 of 720 posts
This makes me think of how, as a child, every site asked “are you over 13”, and I diligently clicked “yes”. Some more clever sites asked for my birth year… forcing me to do the arduous work of taking the current year and subtracting 14. Though I suppose the real plan here is to pass the law and then have the government selectively prosecute social media companies for having users under 16.
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How would it be different than age restricting voting, driving, or alcohol and tobacco sales? It seems there's precedent for treating minors differently than adults in many ways.
There's no constitutional right to drive, smoke, or drink alcohol. As for voting, it's constitutionally mandated that 18 or older can vote, which implies there's no constitutional mandate for anyone younger.
>"In Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U.S. 629 (1968), the Supreme Court upheld a harmful to minors, or “obscene as to minors,” law, affirming the illegality of giving persons under 17 years of age access to expressions or depictions of nudity and sexual content for “monetary consideration.”
>Judge Fuld of the Nassau County District Court had convicted Sam Ginsberg, who owned a small convenience store in Long Island, New York, where he sold “adult magazines” and was accused of selling them to a 16-year-old boy on two occasions."
It's not good for kids to have unrestricted access to pornography in the same way that it's not good for them to have access to unrestricted social media.
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…
We ARE talking about social media.
Like, the least private software on the planet.
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…
I also believe that this is a Big Deal™ that we need to take seriously as a nation. I have yet to see any HN commentator offer a robust pro-social media argument that carries any weight in my opinion. The most common "they'll be isolated from their peers" argument seems pretty superficial and can easily be worked around with even a tiny amount of efforts on the parents' part.
As an added bonus, this latest legislation removes the issue of "everyone is doing it". I mean, sure, a lot still will be—but then it's illegal and you get to have an entirely separate conversation with your kid. :)
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Adults should not have to enter a credit card to, say, read HN. But kids should. And therein lies the problem...
Why not? Honestly asking here. Let's assume oposition to the law is a "progressive" position: If there is a constitutional right to absolutely 100% friction free access to information then what happens to all the barriers the government has erected to access covid, Trump, Russia and other "disinformation" progressive pushed for? (You can invert this example for a right wing if you want)
...those barriers go away. They never really existed in the first place in any real way. Like the Great Firewall, they were a polite fiction defining what people are allowed to know, but were trivially circumvented from minute zero.
This is one of the most reliable and desirable features of the internet in the first place.
That being said, I am not strictly opposed to a bill like this. But 16 is way too old. I feel like likely somewhere within the 10 to 13 range since most don't allow for under 13 anyways would be fine. But then if they all block under 13 what is the point of the bill?
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> The central authority should be someplace that already has your non-anonymous ID data, so using your ID for age verification doesn't give them any new ID information. The only new thing that them doing age verification adds is that they might keep a list of verification tokens they have issued. But the central authority, a third party, will get a heads-up every time someone - whether child or adult - logs into the…
> But the central authority, a third-party, will get a heads-up every time someone - whether child or adult - logs into the social media site. That's a privacy violation. Why would you do age verification on login? It only needs to happen once on account creation.
Oops. That slipped my mind. For sites that require log-in, my previous comment is wrong.
I had unconsciously assumed that at least one site would implement the age verification system without requiring users to make accounts to browse the site. In this comment, I will make explicitly make that assumption. For sites without log-in walls but with government-mandated age verification, the concerns in my previous comment would apply. But sites with log-in walls have their own privacy problems independent of age verification, chief being that having to log in means letting the first party site track how often I use the site. A different problem (not necessarily privacy-related, but can be) of log-in walls is that I would be forced to create accounts. If I don't wish to deal with the burden of making accounts, then I won't browse the website. If the website made a log-in wall in response to an age verification mandate from a government, then my First Amendment right to access the speech the website wished to provide will have been chilled.
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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.
I think a perfectly clear line could be drawn that would separate out phpBB from TikTok very easily. I genuinely don't understand this comment, we shouldn't do it because it's hard or the results might be imperfect?
If we want to "ban social media" we'll need a consistent set of guidelines about what counts as social media and what doesn't, and what exactly the harms are so they can be avoided.
I don't believe that's as easy as you think.
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There's actually a really simple and elegant penalty - forfeiture of the device used to access the social media. With all seized devices to then be wiped and donated to low income school districts/families. This gets more complex when using something like a school computer, but I think it's a pretty nice solution outside of that. That's going to be a tremendous deterrent, yet also not particularly draconian.
Yep thats what low income families need: more cell phones.
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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…
> destroying the anonymous nature of the internet Aren't the really problematic social networks the ones where you've lost your privacy and anonymity long ago and are being tracked and mined like crazy?