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Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

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Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#341

Post by lazarus01 »

andix wrote: post #98

Modern social media is nothing like social media in early days (myspace, early Facebook and even early Instagram). Back then it was a platform to communicate with friends, and maybe even find new friends to meet up with. Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them. The content must either be addictive/engaging or paid advertisements. Quality of the content doesn't matt…

> Quality of the content doesn't matter at all

Exactly.

Engagement is prioritized over quality on most mediums. I find user generated content on social media absolutely abhorrent.

Thank goodness for hacker news. I can read something, share my views and in some cases, my views may be based on some weak intuition and I learn from polite correctness.

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#342

Post by snigsnog »

whyenot wrote: post #183
SilverElfin wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All it takes is five more downvotes than upvotes and a comment will lose visibility. That is true here too. And Twitter is the least transparent, with people regularly reporting that posts critical of musk or trump have reduced reach compared to their other posts.

Yes, but HN still has a strong culture of considering both sides, excellent moderation, and some measures to help nudge people in the right direction. For example, right now I can only upvote your comment. I am not given an option to downvote it. That's a good thing!

It's because you're new. Powerusers can downvote and even flag comments. A couple flags and the comment is (by default) invisible. Enough flagged comments and your comments are flagged by default. There's a reason this place is called orange reddit

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#343

Post by digiown »

bethekidyouwant wrote: post #302
digiown wrote: post #11

I secretly wish it would use a verification scheme that's so invasive/annoying, that even adults would stop using it anyway.

You are describing 4chan

That's good...? I don't have to browse 4chan to interact with local groups, and I hope I won't have to browse Facebook either.

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#344

Post by heavyset_go »

collingreen wrote: post #324
heavyset_go wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you're doing nothing about that besides going "let's keep the town square terrible" and ensuring kids are 100% unprepared for the way the modern world communicates in the 21st century lol

Which part is "keep the town square terrible"?

The part where social media goes completely unchanged except for banning some kids from communicating with their friends

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#345

Post by roughly »

john01dav wrote: post #340
mike_hearn wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN lets users opt to automatically lock themselves out after a while (noprocrast). Fortnite and WoW do not. Sounds like one knows they have users with problems, no? I think the term addiction is way overused in this stuff. If a company makes a product you enjoy using that doesn't mean you can just describe it as addictive and get out of jail free. If there's some chemical in it that messes with your brain, fine, othe…

> I think the disturbing reality is these countries are wanting to control social media to control the population politically The current alternative is that unaccountable private interests control this, so some regulation in this regard seems reasonable to me. However, swapping private control for public control is only barely better. The best solution that I can think of is ending algorithmic feeds, and having subs…

I think moving algorithmic feeds out of section 230 would do the trick. Once you’re curating the feed, you’re no longer a neutral platform.

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#346

Post by kjkjadksj »

zppln wrote: post #279
Tade0 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not referring to MySpace. It was a local-to-my-country social network which was outcompeted by another local-to-my-country social network, which in turn gave way to Facebook. I was aware of the existence of MySpace at the time, but it never had mainstream adoption locally. We also had not one but two mainstream messaging apps and hardly anyone was using MSN. Come to think of it, Facebook killed a lot of that hom…

Early Facebook was inferior to local social networks in many ways. The real killer feature was convincing people to de-anonymize themselves on the internet.

Early facebook you weren’t really de anonymized like we consider today. For the simple fact that literally everyone you were friends with on that site were people you knew in real life. Yes you were “on the internet” but in this hyperlocal silo of real life connections entirely removed from the greater whole.

That is until they opened the site to boomers and then advertisers chasing their money.

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#347

Post by weberer »

hiprob wrote: post #59

Are they going to conduct an uncontrolled human experiment by requiring age checks to use the Internet (read: surveillance capitalism and Orwellian lack of privacy)?

I think Surveillance Globalism would be a more apt description. Which is a hundred times scarier since its coming from the government, multiple governments around the world simultaneously, and its about control rather than making money off you.

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#348

Post by heavyset_go »

andix wrote: post #98

Modern social media is nothing like social media in early days (myspace, early Facebook and even early Instagram). Back then it was a platform to communicate with friends, and maybe even find new friends to meet up with. Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them. The content must either be addictive/engaging or paid advertisements. Quality of the content doesn't matt…

> Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them.

Heard the same thing about video games, TV shows, D&D, texting and even youth novels.

There are a lot of big feelings about social media, but little data.

If the goal is to make social media "less addictive", the article in the OP does nothing to stop that. The article claims that social media affects youth mental health, but does the data actually back that up?

From the Guardian[1]:

> Social media time does not increase teenagers’ mental health problems – study

> Research finds no evidence heavier social media use or more gaming increases symptoms of anxiety or depression

> Screen time spent gaming or on social media does not cause mental health problems in teenagers, according to a large-scale study.

> With ministers in the UK considering whether to follow Australia’s example by banning social media use for under-16s, the findings challenge concerns that long periods spent gaming or scrolling TikTok or Instagram are driving an increase in teenagers’ depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions.

> Researchers at the University of Manchester followed 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years, tracking their self-reported social media habits, gaming frequency and emotional difficulties to find out whether technology use genuinely predicted later mental health difficulties.

From Nature[2]:

> Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health

From the Atlantic[3] with citations in the article:

> The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn’t Help Teens, It may only make things worse.

> I am a developmental psychologist[], and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find[4] compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.

> Many other researchers have found the same[5]. In fact, a recent[6] study and a review of research[6] on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report[7] concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/candi...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-t...

[4] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31929951/

[5] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7#:~:text=G...

[6] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32734903/

[7] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/27396/Highlights_...

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#349

Post by tzs »

Aurornis wrote: post #303
tzs wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You tie it cryptographically to their phone with keys in the phone's hardware security module. This doesn't stop sharing of ID but it makes it much more inconvenient.

And I access the website from my computer how? Why would you invite a technology that by definition makes websites accessible only via phones? These social media age verification laws are inevitably going to hit sites you use, too.

> And I access the website from my computer how?

By cross device authentication, such as by scanning a QR code displayed on the computer from your phone. Nearly all these laws or proposed laws only require verification on account creation and maybe an occasional re-verification. They don't require it on every login.

> Why would you invite a technology that by definition makes websites accessible only via phones?

In most or all of the countries proposing age verification phone use is extremely high. In Finland it is nearly 100% for people over 15 and not retired. It is around 96% for retired people.

Social media use is heavily skewed toward people under retirement age, which is were mobile use is highest. Even Facebook which many dismiss as the old folk's social media has about 92% of their users under 65. 98.5% of their users use it from mobile devices (82% use it exclusively from mobile).

This all suggests it will only be a very small fraction of people that use social media from desktops and do not have a mobile phone they could use for the initial verification or re-verification.

I haven't seen any country proposing to make mobile the only way to do age verification. They all are including methods that work without a phone, although a phone can give much better privacy and security assurances. (I don't know if any country has considered this but another good option would be to allow accounts that have existed longer than some threshold to skip verification. That would probably cover most of those elderly users without a smartphone).

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#350

Post by pests »

int_19h wrote: post #326
Arainach wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The legal landscape has also changed. 20 years ago I helped run a web forum, but with today's legal landscape - DMCA in the US, various different laws in the EU and other countries - I would never do so. The amount of liability on the host for user-created content is far too high.

DMCA was already a thing 20 years ago?

he ran a forum 20 years ago, but today, with things like DMCA.....
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