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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

#451

Post by Wilder7977 »

pembrook wrote: post #239
zhug3 wrote: post #28

The phrase "uncontrolled human experiment" is doing interesting rhetorical work here. It frames the status quo as the experiment and regulation as the control—when historically it's been the reverse.

The fact that you're the only one calling this out is quite frankly alarming. It's one of the most authoritarian statements I've ever heard from a western government. And just because its the trendy moral panic of the day, everybody is cheering it on. Anything where we allow people free will is by definition an "uncontrolled human experiment" and the basis of any free society. Should we also end the "uncontrolled hum…

You mention free will, but it would be an interesting conversation to discuss how much free will there is when people fight, without knowing it, against psychological manipulation, addition creation, all crafted with plenty of money and research. Especially when this people are young ones. Can the behavior still be called free will when you get hooked to mechanisms specifically designed to exploit humans in this way?

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

#452

Post by nandomrumber »

beAbU wrote: post #41
Tade0 wrote: post #16

I'm eternally grateful that the social media network that I was part of throughout my teenage years abruptly disappeared from the internet, never to come back again. Some say it was a technical failure during migration when the company was trying to pivot to file hosting, but it's impossible to verify. Perhaps these bans are a blessing in disguise and future generations will be happy to not have their most awkward st…

Are you referring to MySpace? My highschool band had tracks and videos of live performances in the school hall on there that is forever lost and I'm still bitter about it.

How is that MySpace’s fault?

Who uploaded the videos then deleted the originals.

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

#453

Post by Nursie »

m132 wrote: post #178

Open Internet dying in front of our very eyes. Let's not forget that social media are just one of the many scapegoats tried over the past decade in hopes of pushing this idea forwards. And while there's no denying that today's social media have gotten destructive, they're still only a scapegoat; no attempt is being made here to bring them back to their original, non-malicious shape. Is the social media hate really so…

Social media is not the open internet, pretty much by definition. With a few notable, niche exceptions it’s big centralised services entirely in the control of single companies.

They’ve long been explicitly targeting human psychology for profit, it’s hardly surprising there’s a backlash. But that doesn’t mean the open internet is dead. In fact the open internet could benefit from the slaying of these centralised monsters.

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

#454

Post by mike_hearn »

hackyhacky wrote: post #150
XorNot wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News has plenty of its own echo chamber, no different to any other social environment.

> Hacker News has plenty of its own echo chamber, no different to any other social environment. Sure, but fwiw the HN echo chamber is organic. People choose to interact with people who have similar opinions, as they have since forever. In contrast, the echo chamber on HN, Tiktok, FB, etc is architected specifically to drive engagement. You are shown more of the content that you react to, so that you won't leave.

It's not at all organic. There's lots of flag killing and shadow banning on HN to suppress opinions, mostly anything that hints of right wing stuff. It mostly works, too.

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

#455

Post by NalNezumi »

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…

No reddit is not fine.

It's simple really. Do you have a recommendation algorithm that is tuned to individual preferences to increase engagement? You're a social media that falls under the ban.

You're a messaging app that is between individuals (or group messages) with no recommendation algorithm but just for communication? You're an communication (or at worst Social network) app, you're good to go.

If I would add, I'd add a clause that says "if you can make a non-algorithms version of your product and keep it separated, you can maybe circumvent the ban"

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

#456

Post by mike_hearn »

Abekkus wrote: post #327
mike_hearn wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So buy an Android: https://families.google/intl/my/familylink/

family link is not enough, try disabling gemini and news access with it, and you cannot block shorts

You will always be able to come up with some unique combination of features you want from software that it doesn't have yet. Note that none of these social media bans would block Gemini, and most of them don't consider YouTube to be social media. You are still far ahead with Family Link, and Android is flexible enough that if there's actually real demand for these things you can implement solutions and sell them to other parents.

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

#457

Post by mike_hearn »

baq wrote: post #254
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…

Parental controls don’t work, they’re too coarse grained and too easy to get past. Source: am a parent.

They do work. You may not feel they work perfectly, but government mandated ID verification on social media will work far worse and be far more coarse grained. You don't even have any control with government regulation, so being "coarse grained" isn't even worth discussing because with one-size-fits-all laws imposed by the providers there is no grain.

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

#458

Post by Mindwipe »

tzs wrote: post #191
Mindwipe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing in practice. Anything with zero knowledge is never going to be considered robust enough by a government. Zero knowledge protocols really have no functional revocation mechanism.

The EU has been working on a zero knowledge system as part of the EU Digital Identity Wallet project for a few years now. It is currently undergoing large scale field tests in several countries with expected release late this year. All member states are required to provide at least one free secure interoperable implementation to their citizens, and regulated industries such as banks and telecoms, are required to acce…

The EU Digital Identity Wallet isn't zero knowledge. I mean it's just not. It relies on Google Play Integrity Attestation on Android and the iOS equivalent on Apple devices because those give it a revocation mechanism, and those aren't zero knowledge.

https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-doc-technic...

It says that it wants to be zero knowledge, but it has no zero knowledge implementation and no plan of how it even possibly could be zero knowledge, and it never will precisely because that is incompatible with the revocation requirements set down by the EU.

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

#459

Post by Mindwipe »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #167
mrob wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>valid proof would never become invalid proof Somebody can give their proof of age to another person.

And? Presentation of someone else's valid credentials is not fixable by any privacy-preserving mechanism. You can set an expiration date in order to rotate them, and they can be fast-rotating. In any case, it's a moot point: the correct amount of required identification is zero.

> Presentation of someone else's valid credentials is not fixable by any privacy-preserving mechanism.

And that is precisely why governments will never implement a privacy-preserving mechanism, which is exactly my point.

Compromised tokens would be trivially google-able within a day otherwise.

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

#460

Post by pembrook »

Wilder7977 wrote: post #451
pembrook wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you're the only one calling this out is quite frankly alarming. It's one of the most authoritarian statements I've ever heard from a western government. And just because its the trendy moral panic of the day, everybody is cheering it on. Anything where we allow people free will is by definition an "uncontrolled human experiment" and the basis of any free society. Should we also end the "uncontrolled hum…

You mention free will, but it would be an interesting conversation to discuss how much free will there is when people fight, without knowing it, against psychological manipulation, addition creation, all crafted with plenty of money and research. Especially when this people are young ones. Can the behavior still be called free will when you get hooked to mechanisms specifically designed to exploit humans in this way?

Your rebuttal is based on the assumption that social media is uniquely manipulative, addictive and designed by a secret evil cabal of geniuses with top hats.

This is a media narrative and a popular meme, but it is not reality when looking at the actual studies:

[1] Effects of reducing social media use are small and inconsistent: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266656032...

[2] Belief in "Social media addiction" is wholly explained by media framing and not an actual addiction: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-27053-2

[3] No causal link between time spent on social media and mental health harm: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-t...

The idea that social media is uniquely bad is simply the same moral panic that comes up every time we encounter something new. The truth is every person, company and government engages in "psychological manipulation" when trying to get what they want, including the children themselves.

Since other children engage in psychological manipulation with each other at school, should we ban schools to protect kids from it? Since the government engages in psychological manipulation with its policies and agendas (all backed by billions of dollars), should we ban government policy-making for children?

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