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

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

apnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 453 posts

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

#371

Post by ipaddr »

josephg wrote: post #95
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."

If all the other kids are on social media all the time, it makes it much harder to keep your kids off it. Would you want to be the one kid in school who’s not online? Would you want that for your kids? Bans like this make much more sense at a community level. Not an individual level.

They will move back to smaller communities away from the public or parents.

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

#372

Post by ipaddr »

phatfish wrote: post #305
pembrook wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Denmark's government has authoritarian aims and are one of the primary groups pushing chat control in the EU. I think you are falling for the "think of the children..." fallacy here. This is a stepping stone towards further control elsewhere, especially once a framework for enforcement is in place (which nobody actually thinks about when emotionally reacting to feel-good ideas like this). How easy would it be to expa…

"Old media" was (and is) quite heavily regulated. Not everywhere turned into an East German surveillance state. The idea that governments are incapable of acting in the interests of their citizens is just a narrative designed to weaken public democratic institutions and hand power to the real authoritarians.

Old media the three networks censored so much and the rise of cable allowed a more open playing field where someone could swear or show an HBO gritty cop show that mirrored reality.

The world of variety shows died for a reason.

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

#373

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

nullify88 wrote: post #225
pembrook wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Denmark's government has authoritarian aims and are one of the primary groups pushing chat control in the EU. I think you are falling for the "think of the children..." fallacy here. This is a stepping stone towards further control elsewhere, especially once a framework for enforcement is in place (which nobody actually thinks about when emotionally reacting to feel-good ideas like this). How easy would it be to expa…

I don't think HN is a social media site. The goals of a social media site is to keep you engaged for as long as possible with the assistance of various algorithms, dark patterns while your data is sold to businesses so they can have a slice of your attention pie via ads and supported content. I dont feel as if any of that applies here. In fact HN has gotten further from a social media site by not displaying comment p…

You mean like a continuously changing front page?

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

#374

Post by gametorch »

b112 wrote: post #354
blitzar wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once the data is in bosses will see the massive benefits and ban mobile phones entirely during work hours.

Good. I recall "no personal calls" at work as a rule, in the old days. Inbound emergencies allowed, of course. Why do people think looking at their personal email, or looking at their phone is acceptable at work? It's no different than sitting, reading a magazine pre-Internet. The very idea would have been absurd.

Why do you care?

Basic human decency says your workplace environment should be chill enough to let you take breaks as you, yourself, dictate. If you're underperforming because of it, you're fired. Enforcing a rule as you claim strips the employee of what little respect they have left. To be honest, your suggestion is sickening to me.

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

#375

Post by ethbr1 »

gametorch wrote: post #374
b112 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good. I recall "no personal calls" at work as a rule, in the old days. Inbound emergencies allowed, of course. Why do people think looking at their personal email, or looking at their phone is acceptable at work? It's no different than sitting, reading a magazine pre-Internet. The very idea would have been absurd.

Why do you care? Basic human decency says your workplace environment should be chill enough to let you take breaks as you, yourself, dictate. If you're underperforming because of it, you're fired. Enforcing a rule as you claim strips the employee of what little respect they have left. To be honest, your suggestion is sickening to me.

This is part of the K-shaped economy.

Highly skilled jobs can absolutely be 'perform or be fired', because you're paying for a person's ability to do a specialized thing, and there's usually only so much specialized work to be done.

But there are also a lot of 'we need bodies at a low cost' jobs.

And those latter jobs run on work_output : labor_cost, which can always be maximized by making fewer workers do more.

(Consequently, why the real goal for people studying / graduating in the modern economy should be to find a way to get into the former jobs...)

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

#376

Post by boomlinde »

simongray wrote: post #169
boomlinde wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would social networks accepting Danish users have to implement the other end of that, or will they also be allowed to use less privacy-oriented age verification solutions (e.g. requesting a photocopy of the user's ID)? It seems to me like it's either a privacy disaster waiting to happen (if not required) or everyone but the biggest players throwing out a lot of bathwater with very little baby by simply not accepting…

> everyone but the biggest players throwing out a lot of bathwater with very little baby by simply not accepting Danish users (if required). The biggest players in social media are precisely the ones that this law is targeting. No one in charge of implementing this law is going to care whether some Mastodon server implements a special auth solution for Danish users or not, they are going to care that Facebook, TikTok…

> No one in charge of implementing this law is going to care whether some Mastodon server implements a special auth solution for Danish users or not, they are going to care that Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, etc. do so.

And if that little Mastodon server ends up hosting some content that is embarrassing or offensive to the Danish authorities, laws like this will surely not be used to retaliate...

Arbitrarily and selectively enforced laws seem like an obviously bad thing to me. If the government can nail me for anything, even if they practically don't, I'll be very wary of offending or embarrassing the government.

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

#377

Post by gametorch »

ethbr1 wrote: post #375
gametorch wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you care? Basic human decency says your workplace environment should be chill enough to let you take breaks as you, yourself, dictate. If you're underperforming because of it, you're fired. Enforcing a rule as you claim strips the employee of what little respect they have left. To be honest, your suggestion is sickening to me.

This is part of the K-shaped economy. Highly skilled jobs can absolutely be 'perform or be fired', because you're paying for a person's ability to do a specialized thing, and there's usually only so much specialized work to be done. But there are also a lot of 'we need bodies at a low cost' jobs. And those latter jobs run on work_output : labor_cost, which can always be maximized by making fewer workers do more. (Con…

Yes, and this dichotomy has been analyzed by political and economic theorists for centuries and everyone except autocrats and slave owners has agreed that the conditions surrounding the "work_output : labor_cost" jobs you describe are a huge miscarriage of justice and ought to be discarded with the past. Whether that is predicted to occur via bloody revolution or capitalist accelerationism is a matter of your particular economic and philosophical taste. But every ethical human being says we shouldn't treat people like that.

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

#378

Post by knollimar »

mikkupikku wrote: post #103
arcfour wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, kids in the 2000s actually wanted to use social media. It's a dying industry—appropriate timing for a government to make a law to save kids from the evils of it.

> You're right, kids in the 2000s actually wanted to use social media. It's a dying industry You're either operating with an anachronistic notion of what constitutes social media, or you're very out of touch with the public. Not sure which one. The "myspaces" and "facebooks" are trending down, but other forms of social media like tiktok, discord, reddit, youtube, etc are alive and well, still hooking kids young as th…

I feel like grouping discord as something hooking kids after we teliably took their third spaces is problematic.

You wouldn't have called the equivalent when you were a kid problematic or even had a word for it. It's often just how they communicate with friends.

I feel as though algorithms dedicated to grabbing as much attention as possible are a major problem (youtube, tiktok), while notification checking on public spaces is also similarly an issue.

But is it so hard to teach your kids how to internet? Id advocate for restrictions but banning seems silly.

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

#379

Post by isaacremuant »

tomhow wrote: post #367
isaacremuant wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

If you are not doing this same thing to every comment trying to remove my freedom, which then will call me some label for disagreeing with COVID policies or whatever then I can't really take any of the guidelines seriously. I was here when it was all about segregating the ones who disagreed from life, even denying healthcare while still forcing them to pay taxes.

We're way past fake politeness when the discourse is always pro war, pro xenophobia for certain acceptable targets (e.g. Russia), pro disparaging certain alleged ideologies/parties (e.g. US republican).

2020-2021 happened and there's been no apology. Till then, the biased moderation rings hollow.

Post reply on HN