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Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

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Re: Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

#361

Post by squigz »

glaucon wrote: post #291
rsolva wrote: post #275

Banning personalised ads would solve a lot of the underlying incentives that drives the attention grabbing economy today. Increasing the age a few years for when young people are allow to make accounts on social media is not going to make a large difference in the big picture of things, and do not address the core problem that is the collection and abuse of massive amounts of personal data. Upping the age limit a few…

> Banning personalised ads I'm in favour of anything that tries to address the appaling effects of social media, but as long as there is advertising that will, surely, be some sort of personalisation. In the past you bought a magazine about, say, gardening, and all the ads were about gardening. The advertisers were betting that most people reading a gardening magazine were interested in gardening products, the ads we…

> to some degree

This is the key part, isn't it? There's a large degree of difference between "these garden magazine readers might enjoy these gardening ads" and "based on our profile of you collected over 15 years and including every single bit of private data we can acquire about you, we think you might like..."

Personally I think any advertising targeted at children should be banned, but I guess that's probably too extreme.

Re: Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

#362

Post by imtringued »

tzs wrote: post #321
ang_cire wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think that the digital ID provider is keeping logs of which sites requested to verify which users? Even government websites are not exactly known for their high security.

The digital ID provider is only involved in issuing the ID to you. When you use that ID to verify age to a site the only communication is between your phone and the site. The ID provider has no idea when you use the ID, how often you use the ID, or where you use the ID. Briefly, when the ID provider issues the ID it gets cryptographically bound to your phone. When you use the ID to prove something to a site (age, cit…

This doesn't work because you can't prove the origin of a single bit of data without the associated identity and the origin of the data can only be verified by matching the biometric image on the ID against your real face with a camera.

Otherwise a single person could donate their ID card and let everyone else authenticate with it.

Now you might counter and say it would be enough to give each card a sequential number independent of the person's identity, but then you run into another problem. Each service might accept each card only once, but there are many services out there, so having a few thousand donations could be enough to cover exactly the niche sites that you don't want kids to see.

There is no way to implement this without a complete authoritarian lockdown of everything. There will always be people slipping past the cracks. This means all this will ever amount to is harm reduction, but nobody is selling it on that platform. Nobody is saying that they are okay with imperfect compromises.

Re: Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

#363

Post by soulofmischief »

lukasm wrote: post #201
trey-jones wrote: post #53

As a parent who gave my oldest child a (very used) smartphone just before she turned 14, I would be in favor of making smartphones illegal under age 15 (or some other number, higher or lower I don't care). I'm pretty sure they're worse than cigarettes for the future of humanity.

I fully agree. There should be a complete ban on social media and similar addictive platforms for those under 16, and a nighttime ban (10 p.m.–7 a.m.) for users aged 16 to 18. We basically give cigarettes to children.

It is absurd to suggest that children should not be allowed to socialize online. Have we completely forgotten the internet we grew up on? I would be dead if I hadn't been able to make friends online.

Re: Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

#364

Post by watwut »

DocTomoe wrote: post #338
zurfer wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, I didn't produce evidence in my comment. Smoking and lung cancer are more clear cut than social media problems in general. The effects of social media are more complex and nuanced than smoking. There are a lot of studies that show that social media has a negative effect on mental well being. When someones dies of loneliness or birth rates collapse and young people have less sex than ever, social media i…

It's not entirely honest that we argue about 'times the teenager has sex decreasing' and 'collapsing birth rates' being a problem when most parents and society itself heavily discourage their teenagers having sex and/or creating offspring. Also, I'm not arguing in favour of Social Media here. I just have seen enough moral panics in my years to have become allergic to them. For instance, I'm still waiting for evidence…

The teenage sex complaint is coming from socially conservative people, the ones that also simultaneously create as punishing conditions for young single moms and blame them for host of social issues. They are not complaining that teenagers are not being pregnant enough.

They are complaining that young males are not having easy one night stands. They also dont like that girls are empowered to say no. In their minds, the dynamic is all wrong when a young man is not complete pressuring jerk and she can say no.

They dont care about underclass of 16 years old with a life destroyed and a baby.

Re: Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

#365

Post by ceejayoz »

GaryBluto wrote: post #341
ceejayoz wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, too, was a really great parent before having children. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teen-goes-viral-for-tweeting-fr... > Dorothy, who runs an Ariana Grande fan account, was suffering through a typical teenage nightmare: Her mom took away her phone. But the resourceful teen didn't let that stop her from communicating with her followers. First, she started using Twitter on her Nintendo DS, a handheld video game devi…

I doubt this is true. I doubt that the Nintendo (3)DS web browser would be sufficient to post on Twitter, even in 2019.

There was a whole mobile.twitter.com simplified interface for devices like that. Removed in 2020.

Plus this: https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Support/Nintendo-3DS-2DS/Usag...

> As of 25 October 2022, it is no longer possible to use Nintendo 3DS Image Share or Wii U Image Share to post images on Facebook and Twitter.

Re: Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

#366

Post by ghtbircshotbe »

DocTomoe wrote: post #339
levistrauss wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you a double blind sutdy on smartphones? It seems to me that the group that would get smartphone would understand they’re the smartphone group, and the one without would know they don’t have one.

Neither the test group nor the control group does have to know they are part of an experiment.

That's not how double blind studies work.

Re: Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

#367

Post by tomhow »

isaacremuant wrote: post #324
Aeolun wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s just easier to do some things if they’re prohibited by law. If you don’t want children to smoke, not selling them ciggarettes is a great first step.

[flagged]

You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Re: Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

#368

Post by WhyOhWhyQ »

soulofmischief wrote: post #363
lukasm wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree. There should be a complete ban on social media and similar addictive platforms for those under 16, and a nighttime ban (10 p.m.–7 a.m.) for users aged 16 to 18. We basically give cigarettes to children.

It is absurd to suggest that children should not be allowed to socialize online. Have we completely forgotten the internet we grew up on? I would be dead if I hadn't been able to make friends online.

The internet we grew up on does not exist.

Re: Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

#369

Post by ipaddr »

WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #368
soulofmischief wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absurd to suggest that children should not be allowed to socialize online. Have we completely forgotten the internet we grew up on? I would be dead if I hadn't been able to make friends online.

The internet we grew up on does not exist.

Kids socialize in video games now.

Re: Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

#370

Post by ipaddr »

mikkupikku wrote: post #90
SunshineTheCat wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crazy to think how less government would need to act like a mom if there were one or two parents out there who were familiar with the word "no."

Let's do away with the laws requiring shops to check ID before selling cigarettes. After all, a parent can simply tell their child not to smoke cigarettes and that's clearly good enough, right? All in the name of less government, which is clearly the most important priority here.

That system has massive holes. Using convenience store employees many recent immigrants to be the gatekeeper to cigarettes for your kids seems foolish. Who trusts that last line of defense? If a kid fails at once location another location will succeed and there are no punishment for attempting to purchase underage.
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