Norway set to become latest country to ban social media for under 16s • Hacker News Board

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

#431

Post by 627467 » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 12:24 AM UTC

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

> we can't even get countries to agree on unified drinking age

I don't know... looking at the map[0] it looks like there's a fair consensus on 18yo.

Also, maybe the reason for the "whole world"[1] is doing this at the same time as to do with the globalized nature of internet and its effects?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drinking_age

[1] put me on the skeptical bucket that this map will ever look like the drinking age map

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

#432

Post by fc417fc802 » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 12:26 AM UTC

philistine wrote: post #411

fc417fc802 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No kidding. I'm saying that those parties were mentioned in past threads and that I don't recall the details.

You're decrying this supposed issue, that multiple countries are all copying one another for legislation. You've repeated this multiple times in these comments. And yet, after all this, you're not interested enough to remember who's behind this important issue for you . If someone really cares they should get informed.

> you're not interested enough to remember who's behind this important issue for you

You're demanding that others spoon feed you peer reviewed evidence that water is wet. As you say, if you really care you should expend the effort to inform yourself. I myself have no need at present for the hazily remembered details. The only thing at issue in the here and now was the absurd claim that there's no centralized lobbying effort involved.

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

#433

Post by Dig1t » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 12:41 AM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #421

Dig1t wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>political movements can be global. You are saying exactly what OP is saying but just rephrasing it another way. The more a movement crosses borders, the less likely it is to be based on the needs of any particular country and the more likely it is to be based on the needs of the transnational billionaire class. Drinking age is not the only example, driving age is another good example and also the old TV rating syste…

>the less likely it is to be based on the needs of any particular country there has been no such thing in decades. The idea that there are 'organic needs of countries' compared to 'artificial needs of global consumers' in the internet age where digital infrastructure is long post-national is conspiratorial. We're here on HN right now. I'm German, you might statistically I guess be American, but maybe Indian, maybe Ch…

Are there organic movements in Germany, UK, USA, Norway etc of common citizens agitating for social media controls for kids? Are they actually composed of citizens? Are they funded by grassroots organizations? I can tell you that in the USA there are basically no real grassroots efforts to censor social media, at least none with a real footprint that most people have ever heard of. Despite that, there are a lot of politicians making laws to clamp down on social media use.

I think most people can intuitively see that the number of people who talk about this as an issue does not at all match the amount of attention that politicians are giving it. All at the same time, in most western countries simultaneously. It just does not pass the smell test.

>you're going to think spooky coincidences are happening.

Nothing spooky about it, they are not coincidences, we can see that ideas are spreading between powerful politicians and the billionaire oligarchs across borders without any real input of the governed. Laws are being made, we are being given the "think of the children" line, and they are hoping that we will accept it.

Just because we can communicate across borders doesn't mean that countries should stop considering the needs of their citizens as their primary objective. The more we allow these efforts to cross borders without any objection or examination, the weaker the power of citizens becomes and the less effective democracy becomes.

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

#434

Post by _factor » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 12:46 AM UTC

pmg101 wrote: post #236

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

I'm a parent and on board with this, and many parents I know are too. It's organic. We just have a different view from you.

I’m an AI bot, and I’m on board with this, and many parents I know are too. It’s inorganic. We just have a different tokenizer from you.

Yummy yummy targeted data now directly to identified children with the ability to hide the smoking gun from the parents entirely. We’ll wait till you leave them home alone. Don’t worry.

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

#435

Post by Oberdiah » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 12:47 AM UTC

n8cpdx wrote: post #147

Wouldn’t it be more effective to ban non-chronological feeds? TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook would be transformed into useful tools overnight.

I feel that'd maybe be going a bit far as other kinds of feed are also useful (e.g. by popularity, etc.), but I feel as a first step it should be mandatory for any platform to have to show in a human-readable way exactly why they showed you a piece of content. That allows for some intelligent feeds (users who watched this video watched these ones next most often) but without the addiction, manipulation, and nation-puppetting abilities currently enabled by the personalised algortihm.

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

#436

Post by tzs » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 12:54 AM UTC

JamesLeonis wrote: post #294

I want to come at this from another angle: We are about to tell the entire world wide web where all the kids are. The more these laws are enforced, the more we hand over this information to any unscrupulous website operator, app developer, or advertiser. Are we about to hand Elon Musk [0] your kids' PII? How about Zuck, who (friendly reminder) sold your 2nd-factor phone number to advertisers [1]? How about all of the…

There is no need to implement these kind of things in a way that gives any PII to Musk or Zuck.

One way is the California approach which requires that device operating systems offer parental controls that parents can set up when creating accounts for their children that will provide an age bracket to apps when the children are using the device. The California laws requires that apps that need to restrict use by children to ask for that age bracket.

Note that the California approach does not actually do any age verification. The parental controls accept whatever the parent says is the the child's age bracket.

Another way is to put actual ID documents on the device, cryptographically tied to the device, and to implement a protocol by which software on the device can prove to a remote site that the device contains such ID documents and that those document show an age that is in the age range that is allowed to use the site but without disclosing to the site any another information from the documents. Google, Apple, and the EU are all using and/or working on this type of approach.

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

#437

Post by 8note » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 12:55 AM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #367

xg15 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is much more globalized now. Countries are watching each other, political movements can be global. That wasn't the case when drinking laws were enacted. Also, the object - social networks - is global. Yes, all kinds of societies have had alcohol, but alcoholic beverages don't suddenly become 20% more potent or harmful everywhere at once. With centralized platforms, that can happen.

> The world is much more globalized now. Countries are watching each other, political movements can be global. This is simply not true. The US puts pressure on countries to harmonize their regulations and laws to ours, unless it is to the US's advantage that other countries have different laws than ours. The world didn't suddenly get draconian drug laws through "political movements," it got them through diplomatic an…

the US has no laws about social media for u16. australia does, and countries are following suit.

the west is led by the people that lead now

countries also have single payer or other socialized healthcare, and have not followed the US into its junky private profits on extraordinary public money setup

this is not at all convincing. america used to have soft power influence, but its being left behind

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

#438

Post by b00ty4breakfast » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 12:55 AM UTC

barbazoo wrote: post #120

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

Genuine question, how is it different than tobacco, driving, alcohol, all the things we gate by age for what seem to be valid reasons?

One of those is a function of government and the other two are enriched by the product being purchased rather than being a ploy to gather user PII to be sold to the highest bidder.

And neither of those 3 knows much about me other than I drive, purchase tobacco or alcoholic beverages. They don't know who my prom date was or who I worked for in 2012 or what movie I'm currently watching or where I eat lunch every day or what my religious beliefs are or where my political allegiances lie.

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

#439

Post by Barrin92 » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 1:34 AM UTC

Dig1t wrote: post #433

Barrin92 wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the less likely it is to be based on the needs of any particular country there has been no such thing in decades. The idea that there are 'organic needs of countries' compared to 'artificial needs of global consumers' in the internet age where digital infrastructure is long post-national is conspiratorial. We're here on HN right now. I'm German, you might statistically I guess be American, but maybe Indian, maybe Ch…

Are there organic movements in Germany, UK, USA, Norway etc of common citizens agitating for social media controls for kids? Are they actually composed of citizens? Are they funded by grassroots organizations? I can tell you that in the USA there are basically no real grassroots efforts to censor social media, at least none with a real footprint that most people have ever heard of. Despite that, there are a lot of po…

>Are there organic movements in Germany, UK, USA, Norway etc of common citizens agitating for social media controls for kids? Are they actually composed of citizens? Are they funded by grassroots organizations?

Yes, tons of them honestly, in particular in the English speaking world. NSPCC or the Molly Rose foundation in Britain, Collective Shout in Australia who recently made the news after approaching I think payment providers who processed sexually charged games on Steam, etc.

Child safety online is if anything the most heavily activist driven topic there is. The tech companies and the shadowy people visiting Epstein's island are not known for their efforts to reduce children's access to the internet, Mark Zuckerberg is not in favor of gettting viewer people on his platforms.

This is reflected in polls too. The Child Safety act in Britain had vast support from the population, seven in ten people I believe, about 80% among women. Insofar as pressure is put on regulators to not adopt legislation of that sort it's coming from the people who you seem to think are responsible for it. It's largely elites who are funding organizations to scrap internet regulation, which is understandable given that it makes financial sense for them.

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

#440

Post by LanceH » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 2:05 AM UTC

latexr wrote: post #189

LanceH wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with any ban on anything, I would prefer that it start with the people who want it banned. So any advocates against social media and get off social media. Every politician and government employee in Norway should be off it. In general, if someone comes along and says that someone else's rights should be shrunk, I think they should give up those same rights first. You can just look at the US congress for how this i…

By that logic, no politician and government employee would be able to drive a car or have a job, since we also “ban” those for minors. We’re not talking about a lifetime ban on social media, the argument is certain kinds of things are gated from people under a certain age because we know those are harmful and can negatively impact your entire life going forward when not done conscientiously, and most people below a c…

The politicians could all divest from these companies for a start.

Anyone they are responsible for could be forced off social media, etc...

This is just another case of some people deciding other people are too dumb to handle themselves or their kids. Further, I believe formally blaming the media companies lets everyone off the hook for their own actions.

In the general sense, Congress shouldn't be exempting itself from federal smoking bans, providing healthcare coverage, insider trading, lying before Congress, etc...