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Norway set to become latest country to ban social media for under 16s

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Re: Norway set to become latest country to ban social media for under 16s

#191
post #94

Good, social media is cancer on society and will only get worse with LLMs, Deepfakes etc. All the astroturfing in favour of social media couldn't possibly change my mind on how harmful social media has been on society.

It's funny to me that we still call it "social media", when it bears no similarities to its original form. Back when your feed was sourced from your real-life friends and colleagues, and the only "algorithms" that existed were to show your latest friend's post at the top. It's a bummer, because I think a platform that follows Facebook's original intent has just as much value in today's world, if not more.

Well we still call them phones, which is a more extreme case of semantic drift.

Re: Norway set to become latest country to ban social media for under 16s

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does HN count, or is the actual problem the algorithmic feeds?

[flagged]

I mostly agree with you, I think what you're implying is correct on average, but I'm probably not the only one to whom HN is more addictive than Instagram, Tiktok and all the other classic social media apps.

They get boring much more quickly and also make me feel guilty about spending time on something so shallow, so it's very self limiting.

Re: Norway set to become latest country to ban social media for under 16s

#193
I feel like education, not abstinence, is the way forward.

Prohibition doesn’t work. Educating consumers and holding companies accountable works. It historically takes time though for that pressure to accumulate to the point of having political will.

We also need teen social media education - like we have about alcohol and drugs. Where we’re frank about the real research. Don’t moralize. Talk about the realities of the situation.

Re: Norway set to become latest country to ban social media for under 16s

#194
post #103

Doing this without the parents on board does not work. Kids can lie about their birthdate by a few years. Facial age estimation has error bars of like 5 years and many teens don't have any ID. Younger kids use a parent's phone. Many are not supervised by parents or have parents who are complicit/encouraging in getting them more access. Oh you could be famous! But it is clear that more persistent identifiers online wi…

Parents are massively on board. And they are probably moving to a system where you need to link your device with a government issued cryptographic ID (i.e. passport) using zero knowledge proofs. With a system that ensures an identity can only be installed on one device at a time. This means a parent would have to give up all social media accounts and chat apps on their own phone, in order to give their identity to th…

The parents could also check their kids phones and ground them if they find them using social networks.

The parents don't actually need their adult, childless neighbors to show their IDs to protect their kids, but it seems we're going down that exact path.

Re: Norway set to become latest country to ban social media for under 16s

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, the basic idea of social media isn't necessarily bad, it's the fact that it is ad supported, which incentivizes completely controlling the attention of users, which is the issue.

The problem is, the borders upon which you want a child operating in social media are pretty fuzzy. Do you want them working with classmates? sure. Other peers in same school grade? of course; older peers? ...sure; older peers in other districts...maybe? Then there's all the spoofing and the "age gate" software that inevitably needs to be done to do this.

The things is, it’s not the people that bother me. If it was IRC or MySpace I’d be mostly fine, even if they were engaging with questionable people or content, I think partially because the fidelity and partially because those experiences were still largely pulled by the child. It’s the non-stop algorithmic content.

This is sort of - it’s not really the “social media” that’s the problem it’s billion dollar companies getting to push content direct.

Re: Norway set to become latest country to ban social media for under 16s

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man where I'm from they'd probably just laugh and put them to bed. jkjk To be honest I did some brief searching and couldn't find anything! The parent will be liable if someone at your home drinks and drives home drunk, but I couldn't find anything specific about children consuming alcohol alone. It is only illegal to sell alcohol to minor, underage alcohol consumption is explicitly legal if supplied and supervise…

okay, so we now have: parent/homeowner responsible if someone drives home drunk, parent responsible if child gets drunk via abuse/neglect laws, and parent responsible for other crimes and damages caused by a child via dozens of individual laws. is that enough examples to satisfy your initial request? (which was a request for examples of the extremely broad statement: "We used to hold parents liable.")

So I asked for examples because there is a large difference between "We used to hold parents liable" meaning "we used to, socially, hold parents accountable for raising well adjusted humans" (which I would mostly disagree with) vs. "we used to persecute parents for normative laws" (which I mostly agree with).

I know your point is talking about point 2, but I believe OPs comment was about point 1. But I also still don't know what the "used to" means in the original, do we not anymore?

Re: Norway set to become latest country to ban social media for under 16s

#197

I feel like education, not abstinence, is the way forward. Prohibition doesn’t work. Educating consumers and holding companies accountable works. It historically takes time though for that pressure to accumulate to the point of having political will. We also need teen social media education - like we have about alcohol and drugs. Where we’re frank about the real research. Don’t moralize. Talk about the realities of t…

You know what else has prohibition? Alcohol and drugs for minors.

Re: Norway set to become latest country to ban social media for under 16s

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does HN count, or is the actual problem the algorithmic feeds?

I would categorize HN as a news aggregator with a comment section, not social media.

Your opinion is irrelevant. You've now handed that authority over to random career bureaucrats within the state to decide.

Re: Norway set to become latest country to ban social media for under 16s

#199

This sudden coordinated worldwide effort to ban social media for kids (hint: it's not because of the kids) needs to stop, it's dangerous and people need to stop being so naive and stop supporting this.

Speak for yourself. I want it banned for kids.

Do you think this is about kids? It's about online identity and government surveillance and control.

Even if you think it is about kids, then take responsibility into your own hands, be a parent and prevent your kids from using it. Or you just want to tell other parents to raise their kids the way you want? Then tell them that, don't hide behind fascist police and justice system to force online ID for adults.

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