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Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

yle.fi

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

#461

Post by xkbarkar »

Eh. This is pointless.

There will always be at least one country that has not rules and everyone will vpn there.

Danish minister was about to solve that nut airing ideas of banning vpn ( was of course dropped, most politicians have zero technical skills, not even rudimentary ones).

Of course this is all to protect the children.

I am unscientifically convinced that the average 12 year old is more technically apt that the entire adult governmental body of north europe.

If the will is there, they will circumevent it and the only outcome was another pointless level of buerocracy that is impossible to enforce.

target the algorithm instead. Its a more difficult area and harder to design that law and it would require understanding technology, the end result would be targeting the platforms, not the users. Possibly with hundreds of millions in fines and less predatory platform behaviour.

This low quality , protect the children yelp regulation set will have no long term effect whatsoever.

It is far to easy to circumvent.

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

#462

Post by jen20 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #412
spaqin wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exchanging messages with your contacts isn't really that hard that you really need to prepare for it.

Zealous parents are using this as an opportunity to take phones, computers and means of digital communication away. Hell, by law, you can't even use Discord without verifying your age lol Imagine if they banned video games and texting 20 years ago because parents were convinced their kids were addicted to Halo and T9Word. They could always roll hoops in the street and send letters to each other with a little planning…

In the UK that was naturally the case 20-25 years ago - text messages were priced per message, and bundles were small.

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

#464

Post by gorgoiler »

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…

Tech folks went crazy for Google+’s circles back in 2011 but the demand from normal users just wasn’t there for that level of control. FB brushed it off with friends, “close friends”, and public. That was enough — even “friends of friends” was dropped or buried after a while.

Fast forward to 2025 and circles is absolutely the winning paradigm, except it’s called “group chat” where it is the vector for cat pictures, hollandaise bragging, and vacation snaps.

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

#465

Post by AnthonyMouse »

miroljub wrote: post #446
miki123211 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two problems in computer science, accepting payments and naming things. Reddit's principal problem is that the first person to take r/foo is often a BDFL for foo for life, and no other subreddit about foo will ever be quite as recognizable. If we instead had subreddits with a numeric ID and a non-unique display name, that problem would be solved. Payments would also solve the spam problem, but many users wh…

Don't you understand that paying even one cent to Redeit (or any other social media) would completely deanonymise it? So yeah, I'd rather live with spam than with whatever public online identities give any government.

> Don't you understand that paying even one cent to Redeit (or any other social media) would completely deanonymise it?

For a site of that size I wonder if it wouldn't work to just have them sell gift cards in physical retailers and then you could buy one for cash.

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

#466

Post by gorgoiler »

Periodically, Amazon gets it in the neck for tax avoidance. While the news cycle plays out, all the other FAANGS Homer-Simpson their way backwards into a hedge to let Bezos take the flack for something for which they are just as guilty.

It’s the same with screen time.

Apple and Google are surely delighted that the heat is on Meta and TikTok. As long as the pariah is being labelled as “social media” then their reputation goes untouched. They could be doing just as much, if not more, to protect adolescent brains from going rotten.

I’d like to see them held to account not so much for doing harm — pretty high framerate OLEDs are harder to treat as boogeymen than evil feed algorithms — but for not doing very much to help, either.

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

#467

Post by afandian »

alexjplant wrote: post #210
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…

Reddit has been a cesspit of recycled pablum, populist image macros and low effort reply comments for more than a decade. Enthusiast subreddits are astroturfed to hell and back by people with a Shopify storefront and a dream trying to growth hack their way to a hockey stick. The low barrier to entry to each community means that this vapid culture eventually diffuses itself across subreddits that might otherwise be go…

I’ve just set up a forum for up and coming bagpipe makers (not the loud Scottish kind).

It’s been a real breath of fresh air seeing a community coalesce without the feeling of predators on the horizon (eg a hosting provider with misaligned incentives or astroturfers).

I don’t do social media (beyond HN) much at all these days but I’m enjoying seeing it slowly take off.

Using hosted Discourse. I’m glad there’s still a market for it.

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

#468

Post by tgv »

eimrine wrote: post #187
tgv wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an alternative: prohibit smart phones for youth. They can possess simple phones.

prohibit all proprietary software

That won't help. They'll open-source it, and the addiction stays.

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

#469

Post by cube00 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #405
AlienRobot wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The craziest thing about Reddit for me is how most communities forbid "self-promotion." To me that sounds like a thing only admins would want because it keeps users on the site/app, but this is enforced by moderators for some reason and a lot of drama has occurred over banning creators over these silly rules. It's a place that originally was a link-sharing platform, where you literally can't share a link to your own…

I'm not a good marketer, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but the only thing I've found that works is replying to relevant comments in popular threads with neutral looking promotional material (e.g. github links). A well placed reply in a hot thread will easily drive 10x the value of a blog post.

Sadly a few have started doing this on HN now.

(Short low effort comment agreeing with parent comment) I wrote more about this here...

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

#470

Post by attendant3446 »

gman83 wrote: post #137
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…

I wouldn't be surprised if Meta turned WhatsApp into a TikTok clone just to get around the restrictions. They know that banning WhatsApp for teenagers in Europe is almost impossible. I look at my kids, all their sports clubs and other extracurricular activities are organized through WhatsApp. I already had to block Youtube on their devices. I was alright with them watching a couple of long-form youtube videos every d…

I'm a bit glad that it's no longer Facebook groups. But WhatsApp is also disappointing. I have to keep an account on my 'throwaway' phone for junk apps just to communicate with those groups and clubs. And usually WhatsApp is the only way with them.
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