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Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

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Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#531

Post by joshyeetbox »

basil-rash wrote: post #446
JeremyNT wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this isn't the right solution. The power needs to be given to the users. A better solution is more robust device management, with control given to the device owner (read: the parent). The missing legislative piece is mandating that social media companies need to respond differently when the user agent tells them what to send. I should be able to take my daughter's phone (which I own), set an option somewhere tha…

Already exists, simply include the header Rating: RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA in HTTP responses that include adult content, and every parental controls software in existence will block it by default, including the ones built into iPhones/etc and embedded webviews. As far as I know all mainstream adult sites include this (or the equivalent meta tag) already. In general, I don’t think communicating to every site you vi…

This is not a response header. It's a meta tag that's added to a websites head element to indicate it's not kid friendly. The individual payloads returned from an adult site don't include this as a header.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#533

Post by standardUser »

We've got to stop crafting a special world for children that is disconnected from the adult world. We should be moving in the opposite direction, lowering the voting age for example, allowing toplessness in appropriate places and allowing children in non-sexual adult spaces when with a guardian (like bars). How have we not yet learned that repressing kids is counterproductive?

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#534

Post by reactordev »

standardUser wrote: post #533

We've got to stop crafting a special world for children that is disconnected from the adult world. We should be moving in the opposite direction, lowering the voting age for example, allowing toplessness in appropriate places and allowing children in non-sexual adult spaces when with a guardian (like bars). How have we not yet learned that repressing kids is counterproductive?

Religion… it makes certain people think the world is full of bad people. While there are bad people, the vast majority of people are good people. Our policy here is to protect the children from X. Whatever X is at the time. Right now it’s wokeism.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#535

Post by [deleted] »

standardUser wrote: post #533

We've got to stop crafting a special world for children that is disconnected from the adult world. We should be moving in the opposite direction, lowering the voting age for example, allowing toplessness in appropriate places and allowing children in non-sexual adult spaces when with a guardian (like bars). How have we not yet learned that repressing kids is counterproductive?

[deleted]

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#536

Post by nanolith »

The bill is pretty broad, with oddly specific carve-outs. I did not think that I would need to pay for a VPN service to avoid weird legislation in my state, but here we are.

The sad thing is that, with the exception of the occasional comment on Slashdot / HN and my LinkedIn profile, I'm barely active on social media anymore. Still, I'm not giving PII to sites that this bill considers "social media" sites, just to prove that I'm over 16. That's absurd.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#537

Post by mmvasq »

causal wrote: post #36

I might be the only one here in favor of this, and wanting to see a federal rollout. It is not reasonable to expect parents to spontaneously agree on a strategy for keeping kids off social media- and that kind of coordination is what it would take, because the kids + social media companies have more than enough time to coordinate workarounds. Have the law put the social media companies on the parents side, or these k…

16 seems too young. Why not tie it to drinking age. There are way too many people who have gotten better at online manipulation in the past few decades.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#538

Post by Smeevy »

spdustin wrote: post #378

I truly don't understand how the party of small government and parental rights of determination can justify passing this. Perhaps more relevant to HN, it seems to me that any solution here would be a dramatic loss of agency, privacy, and anonymity.

I'm in agreement with you. I'm amazed at how many people that do I do can look at this myopic, sanctimonious rage bait and immediately start figuring out how to implement it with an encrypted token exchange.

This is still awful no matter how much crypto you throw at it. The end result of solving this little puzzle of a problem is that everything is worse shortly afterwards. Congratulations to them, I guess.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#539

Post by zamadatix »

ok123456 wrote: post #198
akerl_ wrote: post #2

This makes me think of how, as a child, every site asked “are you over 13”, and I diligently clicked “yes”. Some more clever sites asked for my birth year… forcing me to do the arduous work of taking the current year and subtracting 14. Though I suppose the real plan here is to pass the law and then have the government selectively prosecute social media companies for having users under 16.

A small transaction would cover 99% of cases (e.g., pay a dollar that's immediately refunded). It would stop kids from casually creating accounts. The kids who can do this are already precocious enough to bypass any other verification steps you could come up with. Maybe if they use a profile pic that you algorithmically determine is someone underage, you could do some additional checks. The smart ones would learn not…

I wonder if it'd really cover anything remotely close to 99% of cases. Even if 100% of parents knew about it and watched their credit cards enough to notice a $1 refunded transaction it just takes something like one friend in high school with a credit card to sign up all their little brother's friends. It may even just cause more credit cards being shared around than kids it stops from getting to the site they want on.

Then there'd be even more unintended consequence. Instead of sites you don't want kids creating accounts on you'd have sites selling 5 minutes of ads to create an account for them or increasingly shady stuff. Preventing this kind of site is the same as the original issue.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#540

Post by jimt1234 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #130
1shooner wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because regulation worked so well in eliminating peer pressure for drinking, smoking, and drugs.

Regulation worked remarkably well on smoking.

Growing up in the 80s, no one I knew avoided cigarettes because of regulations. Cigarettes were easy to get your hands on as a kid, even though it was illegal to sell to children. We avoided cigarettes because we had a general understanding of the health risks, because we knew our parents would beat our asses if they caught us smoking, and because smoking makes your clothes smell like shit.
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