Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spain to ban social media access for under-16s, PM Sanchez says

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 113 posts

Re: Spain to ban social media access for under-16s, PM Sanchez says

#21

Post by andy81 »

energy123 wrote: post #16
rimbo789 wrote: post #2

Great. About 10 years too late but better than nothing. Hope it becomes the global norm. Once that’s done we should ban the over the 65+.

I want to see regulation of the algorithm. Something like forcing a chronological feed, or somehow nerfing the recommendation engine. Figure out a way to make it boring, bypass the whole censorship debate.

There are more options -

Banning advertising targeted at the user rather than the context

Enforcing Do Not Track

Enforcing GDPR (especially sites that use cookie banners)

Re: Spain to ban social media access for under-16s, PM Sanchez says

#22

Post by circuit10 »

lnsru wrote: post #11
circuit10 wrote: post #4

I worry that these measures (if they actually work, which is unlikely) will isolate people who struggle with real-life interactions. I remember reading somewhere that autistic people tend to find community in online spaces, and it seems like a lot of people gain their tech skills that way, including me. So indiscriminately banning young people from these spaces will prevent them from finding community and people like…

What real life interactions? With scammers, bots or troll farms? Facebook from first years is long gone. I am pretty sure that autistic people as easy target should be kept away from internet for their own good. There is nothing good to find there.

Personally I joined Discord servers for open source projects and this is how I got my start using GitHub, learning how code review worked and the process for communicating with other devs etc. I feel like I may not be in a software development career if these laws had existed when I was growing up

Autism is a wide-ranging spectrum, I find the idea that I should be “kept away from the Internet” because I have (high-functioning) autism quite patronising. Maybe this is true for some people, but my point is that these social media ban ideas are too indiscriminate

I would agree that addictive platforms are harmful for children, and I haven’t looked into this law so maybe it does make a distinction, but any online communication (e.g. GitHub) is sometimes considered “social media”. A lot of people seem to exclude the platforms they like from what they count as “social media”, as they see social media as the evil thing they look down upon

Re: Spain to ban social media access for under-16s, PM Sanchez says

#23

Post by aacid »

budududuroiu wrote: post #3

So... de-facto mass deanonymisation of all Spanish social media users? I see a lot of supporters of these policies either not acknowledge that you can't identify under-16yo without identifying over-16yos.

You need ID to buy cigarettes and alcohol, prescription drugs or to get sim card... you will need it to register for social network account... do not seem as big of a deal to me. Even less when considering all the positives.

Re: Spain to ban social media access for under-16s, PM Sanchez says

#25

Post by u_sama »

arrrg wrote: post #18
budududuroiu wrote: post #3

So... de-facto mass deanonymisation of all Spanish social media users? I see a lot of supporters of these policies either not acknowledge that you can't identify under-16yo without identifying over-16yos.

Age verification is possible without revealing personally identifiable information (beyond old enough yes/no, which is not in any way personally identifiable info) and from my perspective should be a strict requirement with any such laws. In fact, if these laws make the requisite infrastructure (ID cards that offer that functionality) a hard requirement then creating an anonymous web that nevertheless has age checks…

Given the track record of both the country and other EU attempts (despite the existence of a zero trust verification framework) I am quite sure this will be used to de-anonymize users online, see UK.

Re: Spain to ban social media access for under-16s, PM Sanchez says

#26

Post by lossyalgo »

budududuroiu wrote: post #3

So... de-facto mass deanonymisation of all Spanish social media users? I see a lot of supporters of these policies either not acknowledge that you can't identify under-16yo without identifying over-16yos.

Yeah this isn't the solution we need. We need to ban addictive dark patterns on ALL platforms for ALL ages.

Re: Spain to ban social media access for under-16s, PM Sanchez says

#27

Post by nehalem »

budududuroiu wrote: post #3

So... de-facto mass deanonymisation of all Spanish social media users? I see a lot of supporters of these policies either not acknowledge that you can't identify under-16yo without identifying over-16yos.

This is a straw-man argument. A public service that can answer whether a one-time key provided by the user to the service fulfills a certain requirement would suffice.

Re: Spain to ban social media access for under-16s, PM Sanchez says

#28

Post by littlecranky67 »

Good, heavily in favor. Social media has just become media, the social aspect is mostly gone. Especially since all of them just try to shove down 30sec shorts/reels/tiktoks down your throat. I have not a single real-life friend or family member (except those, that are under 16 and use tiktok) that ever recorded a short.

Re: Spain to ban social media access for under-16s, PM Sanchez says

#30

Post by arrrg »

u_sama wrote: post #25
arrrg wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Age verification is possible without revealing personally identifiable information (beyond old enough yes/no, which is not in any way personally identifiable info) and from my perspective should be a strict requirement with any such laws. In fact, if these laws make the requisite infrastructure (ID cards that offer that functionality) a hard requirement then creating an anonymous web that nevertheless has age checks…

Given the track record of both the country and other EU attempts (despite the existence of a zero trust verification framework) I am quite sure this will be used to de-anonymize users online, see UK.

There it rears its ugly head again, the preemptive cynicism that prevents anything good from ever getting done.

It’s simple really: zero trust age verification should be a strict requirement of any such law and anything else illegal for age verification.

That to me is what has to happen and it’s important to me. That’s my perspective on this – not that‘s never going to happen anyway, so no point in trying to.

Post reply on HN