251–260 of 783 posts
"I don't want my kids using social media without my permission" is a problem that already has a solution: put parental controls on your kids devices. We don't need Daddy Government to make decisions that can and should be made by parents.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Because at 18 people are responsible for their own actions This is only because we arbitrarily picked an age - we used to consider people responsible for their own actions at much younger ages, it makes sense to change the number when we get new science supporting that. If the argument is that we shouldn't use brain development as a reason to restrict young people, then why not lower the drinking age again or get r…
This right here. Seems like the USA is all about arbitrary rules, isn't it? You can join the military and drive a tank into war at 18, but god forbid we let you have a beer afterward.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a 14 year old and the content of social media seems to be what bums her out. She seems to be ingrained with the idea that she will never own a home, environmental disasters will be constant and the economy will be in shambles by the time she reaches adulthood. Maybe America just has a uniquely depressive social media environment? I have not read any kind of large scale studies examining the "tone" of social me…
> she will be able to buy a house if she wants one, the economy will always be good for people who are work smart and hard, etc. Yeah, I don't think that's true at all. Its just anecdata, but I have several friends in their 30s for which that's just not the case. They're smart and work (harder than I do, just not in tech), but the price of a down payment on a home is going up faster than they're able to save, and the…
>Critics have said the bill violates the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment protections for free speech and that parents, not the government, should make decisions about the online presence of their children of all ages. It's extremely difficult for parents to stop their children, especially early teens from using social media. This law should make it easier and it would put the work on Meta, Snap, Tiktok, Pinterest…
As a parent, I’m concerned about social media, and it has been more or less impossible to stop my teens from using it. They were jailbreaking and using VPNs and bypassing my parental controls a lot earlier than I expected. I did notice that whenever my kids didn’t have access to phones and games for several days for whatever reason, they were less grouchy and more willing to engage with us and do family or social act…
Send them to a private school, or even better, homeschool, control what kind of people they make friends with, keep them busy with church and Sunday school and bible study, burn the books and defund the public libraries, control what music they listen to and what shows and films they watch and the games they play… and, of course, control their means of communication.
Heaven forbid your child ever be exposed to anything that might make them question the reality of this little garden of Eden you’ve imprisoned them in.
The recent World Happiness Report[0] concluded: > In many but not all regions, the young are happier than the old. But in North America happiness has fallen so sharply for the young that they are now less happy than the old. By contrast, in the transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the young are much happier than the old. In Western Europe as a whole happiness is similar at all ages, while elsewhere it…
I have a 14 year old and the content of social media seems to be what bums her out. She seems to be ingrained with the idea that she will never own a home, environmental disasters will be constant and the economy will be in shambles by the time she reaches adulthood. Maybe America just has a uniquely depressive social media environment? I have not read any kind of large scale studies examining the "tone" of social me…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When people say "the brain is still developing until you're 25" it means "your brain is noticeably worse at learning after the age of 25". Noting that, should people learn self-control in the presence of social media before 25, or after 25?
I believe the part of the brian that deals with impulse control isn’t fully developed until early 20s. We don’t willingly and willfully let kids have access to alcohol and heroin. By your reasoning it seems like we should so that they can learn self control.
I believe 16-year olds can still buy wine and beer at the grocery stores in Denmark. I’ve heard it’s fairly common for 14-year olds to drink at home in the UK - though the 14-to-16 range may be delaying on average since ~2010.
I don’t believe many countries allow adults access to heroin. I believe prohibition does more harm here due to lack of quality control and testing but reasonable minds could disagree.
Age of first exposure is a fairly open question across the globe. Everyone is experimenting with whats best and whats tolerable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When people say "the brain is still developing until you're 25" it means "your brain is noticeably worse at learning after the age of 25". Noting that, should people learn self-control in the presence of social media before 25, or after 25?
Under that framework, we should learn self control as early as possible. We learn faster at age 6 than at age 16.
This was hard for me! I had a natural instinct to tunnel vision into the game and not hear anything anyone was saying to me. I’d also get upset at the game and get angry in my conversations.
Training this into me at a young age really helped my emotional regulation and ability to socialize around / during games and not get too sucked into them. This was especially important because I was quite ADHD and that adds a lot of emotional disregulation.
The recent World Happiness Report[0] concluded: > In many but not all regions, the young are happier than the old. But in North America happiness has fallen so sharply for the young that they are now less happy than the old. By contrast, in the transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the young are much happier than the old. In Western Europe as a whole happiness is similar at all ages, while elsewhere it…
I have a 14 year old and the content of social media seems to be what bums her out. She seems to be ingrained with the idea that she will never own a home, environmental disasters will be constant and the economy will be in shambles by the time she reaches adulthood. Maybe America just has a uniquely depressive social media environment? I have not read any kind of large scale studies examining the "tone" of social me…
This is very troubling. Without social media teens would have to hear those things from their elders and peers in person or read about them elsewhere on the internet
- it's obviously a massive violation of whatever remains of "free speech" in the US, and allowing this to happen creates a precedent for nibbling at all sorts of other things - creates precedent that children are even more subservient to their parents and random whims of whatever politicians are in charge at any point
- it creates the technical infrastructure and precedent for random US governments and whatever lunatics control them at the time to mediate permission to access websites
- it creates a massive database of PII, this time focussed on kids, which will be accessed endlessly by random companies, and will de facto have no actual access controls
- it spews government-required and validated PII around loads of random websites - hacking a site and then quietly passively copying all their calls to the database will be of great interest to fuckwits around the world
- will require trying harder to geo-locate users, creating even more PII and having even more of it being government-audited
- creates a huge hammer for politicians to beat up on unfavoured companies / blackmail them
- undermines the functioning of the US as a coherent unified state
I think this adds an incredible amount of risk to almost any US-based social media site, big or small, regardless of which state you're in. You can't 100.0% block all Floridians from accessing your site, especially with GeoIP databases. This means someone who is close enough to the border of Alabama or Georgia with an IP address reportedly in another state could easily find reason to sue you. And because you're in th…
The bill seems to be targeting certain types of social media platforms. I'm not sure everyone is at risk. What small/medium sites do you have in mind? HN doesn't seem to be a target for example.
My quick reading of the bill leads me to think that smaller forums might actually qualify -- unless I missed a section on size of social network.
This bill says:
(I apologize for the incredibly bad formatting below, I've edited a few times to try to get things right)
> A social media site must fufill the criteria:
> ...
> 2. Ten percent or more of the daily active users who are younger than 16 years of age spend on average 2 hours per day or longer on the online forum, website, or application on the days when using the online forum, website, or application during the previous 12 months or, if the online forum, website, or application did not exist during the previous 12 months, during the previous month;
...when I was in high school, I spent a filthy amount of time on online tech forums. If Hackernews were around back then, I would've likely been on it for 2+ hours just reading random links.
> 3. Employs algorithms that analyze user data or information on users to select content for users; and
>
> 4. Has any of the following addictive features:
> a. Infinite scrolling, which means either:
> (I) Continuously loading content, or content that loads as the user scrolls down the page without the need to open a separate page; or
> (II) Seamless content, or the use of pages with no visible or apparent end or page breaks.
> b. Push notifications or alerts sent by the online forum, website, or application to inform a user about specific activities or events related to the user's account
> c. Displays personal interactive metrics that indicate the number of times other users have clicked a button to indicate their reaction to content or have shared or reposted the content.
So... any algorithm that selects "hot/active" content based on views+interaction, upvotes or emails about people who reply to your comments.
Now combine this with:
> When taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.
So what defines "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors"? This seems like something that might be applied on very arbitrary grounds and won't require much to trigger it.
https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/3/BillText/er/PDF