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

bloomberg.com

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

#241

Post by dv_dt »

avaer wrote: post #176
geremiiah wrote: post #172

IMHO, social media itself is not the issue. The issue is rather, why are teenagers glued to their screens? The answer is because they aren't doing something else that is social and physical. So if you ban their access to TikTok or whatever, they are still stuck at home, bored and glued to their screen. Other online entertainment will capture their focus. Before you know it you'll end up trying to ban the whole intern…

I think many people on HN grew up glued to an internet that wasn't trying to intellectually molest them for capitalist and political gains.

No, at the time I was growing up, the music industry was being blamed for corrupting the youth via explicit lyrics and music videos. And there was a whole big discussion around making movie ratings more and more detailed. It turned out that the movie rating media hue and cry all came from mostly from one conservatively funded think tank.

This social media ban looks very reminiscent and I think it is all about creating a surveillance state, controlling the population to only see images and video in a centrally approved way.

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

#242

Post by logicchains »

bluegatty wrote: post #232
softwaredoug wrote: post #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 t…

Prohibition works very well - it just has externalized costs. Excessive drinking was curtailed by 70% during the alcohol prohibition era, and acute drinking was a problem (it was more concentrated). There is zero doubt how much healthier at least some people would have been. The price paid was limiting freedom for many, and some increase in crime. Allowing children to smoke and drink from age 12 would be a social dis…

>Allowing children to smoke and drink from age 12 would be a social disaster, it's not even an argument - obviously - the 'prohibition' works - and in that case, there's nary any negative externality.

The negative externality is the huge amount of young adults damaging their bodies with excessive alcohol consumption in college because they never learned to drink healthily. The US with its late legal age for alcohol has a far bigger problem with youth alcohol abuse than European countries where youth are introduced to alcohol earlier.

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

#243

Post by Matl »

antics9 wrote: post #231
kdheiwns wrote: post #229

We can't even get countries to agree on a unified drinking age, but somehow the whole world is simultaneously coming to the conclusion that you need to be 16 to use social media, and websites and operating systems all need North Korean ID verification to prove you're over 16. There is a zero percent chance this is organic

You haven’t had children growing up during the last two decades have you?

Why am I being forced to prove to my OS that I am an adult just because of your inadequate parenting skills?

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

#244

Post by kelseyfrog »

mrtksn wrote: post #216
softwaredoug wrote: post #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 t…

You can't educate around something that's predatory in nature. IMHO the solution should involve defining what's natural social media and what is predatory social media. The natural one can be a system that connects real people with each other and operates discovery algorithms that have %100 open source and run on open data. When its real people interacting you can educate around it, you can have it with anonymous acc…

You can educate people, but the effect isnt necessarily that it reduces any effect. Education allows failures to be diverted to failures of educators or failures of students. It draws attention away from the manufacturers and if we view education as having a purpose synonymous with what it does, education is VERY, effective at diverting responsibility away from manufacturers.

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

#245

Post by ben_w »

kdheiwns wrote: post #229

We can't even get countries to agree on a unified drinking age, but somehow the whole world is simultaneously coming to the conclusion that you need to be 16 to use social media, and websites and operating systems all need North Korean ID verification to prove you're over 16. There is a zero percent chance this is organic

False, it isn't all 16. These two pages for nations and states is showing different jurisdictions picking in the 12-18 range: https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/28/report-facebook-building-anti... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_...

Some have lower ages with parental consent, this isn't reported in all cases. Some also talk about banning the downloading of apps, again this isn't reported in all cases. Not that I'm going to read 27 national jurisdictions in varying languages to confirm the point.

Also, lol wtf at "and websites and operating systems all need North Korean ID verification to prove you're over 16". Is "North Korean" the new "Communist"?

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

#246

Post by sarchertech »

quickthrowman wrote: post #162
sarchertech wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on how it’s enforced. The data we have on bans on underage drinking and smoking show that they work. Some kids will still smoke and drink, but the number is reduced, drunk driving accidents go down, and eventually fewer adults abuse alcohol and smoke cigarettes. The myth about age limits making it forbidden and attracting more kids to do it is just that it’s a myth. Spend some time looking at the studies. The…

You can’t conjure up a bottle of vodka or a pack of cigarettes out of thin air in your bedroom with a cheap Wi-Fi only Android phone, but you can use that cheap Android phone to access social media.

That’s why I said it depends on the enforcement mechanism. If they require an ID or a credit card then it’s roughly analogous to getting someone to by beer for you.

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

#247

Post by traderj0e »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #113
10xDev wrote: 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.

if it's bad for society then regulate the Social Media companies rather than shifting the burden on the citizenry through ID laws and backdooring increased surveillance under the guise of "muh chillren!"

The ID laws only apply to social media though. You don't need to give your ID if you don't use those websites. Of course it's also possible that this is just a trojan for other sites asking for ID, but hopefully people see the difference enough that extending this law there wouldn't be popular.

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

#248

Post by embedding-shape »

Matl wrote: post #243
antics9 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven’t had children growing up during the last two decades have you?

Why am I being forced to prove to my OS that I am an adult just because of your inadequate parenting skills?

Wait what? How did we go from "Users of social media need to be at least 16" to "Users of OSes need to prove they are adults"?

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

#249

Post by austin-cheney »

AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #239
antics9 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven’t had children growing up during the last two decades have you?

If it was organic the wording and the definitions in these legislations would be wildly different, the timing would be all over the place, the age limits and the methods to provide ID as well. But they are not. edited for tone

Correlation does not imply causation. Your invented and evidence-less conspiracy theory is an insult to intelligence. I suspect you are seeing something that isn't there to account for an unspoken bias front and center in your mind.

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

#250

Post by Terr_ »

softwaredoug wrote: post #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 t…

We also need to talk more about the third not-mutually-exclusive option: Legal liability if/when things go wrong.

It's often buried because the people making money dislike it, so much so that they will lobby the government to impose wide bans. Especially if:

* The ban makes somebody else pay most of the costs of protecting "the children" against their design-choices or business-model.

* The ban gives them a blanket pass for almost any exploitative design against adults or other acceptable targets.

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