> they are... the beneficiaries of a more brain-dead, more bored, more asleep student body

> 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.

To clarify, do you think that phones or the removal of phones leads to these outcomes? Do you think that teachers like or dislike phones? Or is the point that there are many biases both ways?

> they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be

Some do. Are teachers the only ones?

> if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are [detrimental] or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test.... Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study.

I am not sure how you would set this up in a way that does not fall victim to a dozen confounding variables. There have been comparisons of standardized tests before and after phone bans, of course, but those also fall victim to similar statistical issues.

> This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told.

The interesting tidbit in the case of social media and smart phones is that they are at least partially pushed by the parents (I've seen plenty of examples of parents demand that their children have smartphones at school).

> Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.

> And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.

I think there is a difference though. There is the "off my lawn" crowd of "children today are so bad because..." sure, but I think they are not the ones demanding social media bans. The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.

> So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.

> prohibition breeds desire

Sure, but we (as societies) have always had to deal with this. Wherever you are in the world there are things that simply aren't allowed under a certain age, whether that's 15, 16, 18, 21 or whatever.

My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.

Me: "Umm. You'll find out. When you get to it."

> the rules destroyed by demanding parents bullying administrators and school boards

True, but that's why you don't do it alone. You need to talk with other parents and encourage them to talk to others until the majority of parents understand the risks and let the administration, school board, and teachers know that they have your support.

> All that local level stuff doesn’t work

I can't speak to anyone else, but it seems to be working well enough in our town. The overwhelming majority of kids don't have cell phones until high school. That doesn't mean your kids won't beg you for a smartphone, it just means you can say "no" without socially isolating them.

> As soon as a couple of kids have a smartphone

The point is to engage in collective action early enough that you can prevent these situations in the first place. Once a critical mass of kids have smartphones and their socialization and coordination moves to online spaces it becomes intensely isolating to be the only kid in a friend group without a smartphone.

It amazes me after seeing the corruption of the current government that people want to give it more power over our lives.

Technically true but I've found it to be less addictive than other text forums (like the R-site and Lemmy), let alone the algo-powered video-based abominations that normies are all hooked on.

I'm thinking that it comes down to one thing in particular: the absence of response notifications. There's only so much addiction you can get out of a page of text without so much as a bell icon.

This is true, it's also not devoid of addictiveness :)

But you know what I mean, right? The ones using intricate algorithms and tracking to keep you "engaged" and manipulate what you read and see

All the statistics I’ve seen show that 25-30% of teenagers smoke weed.

It’s but the governments job to make you out not to be the bad guy to your kids.

Again, parent your kids. You clearly suck at it if you need the government to do it for you and you ruin society making it into an authoritian hellhole just because you have no backbone. Go live in an authoritian country where they ban everything instead of ruining what once where free countries.

Otherwise, don't have children if you lack the most basic of parenting skills.

Edit: you'd ask for bans on sex because you can't educate your children either, with the same line of reasoning. Religious like authoritianism.

You can argue this, but if you hand over this authority to government, it will not be up to you.

Fundamentally this is an upvote driven social media platform no different from Reddit, which everyone agrees is social media.

If you live in Denmark, get ready to tie your State ID to your HN profile to login and hope that you don't say anything that would make the wrong official (or your employer) upset with you.

As we know from history, well-intentioned government laws have zero unintended consequences, always work perfectly every time, and are very easy to remove once they've been created...

And if they do it with their own money, it's their phone.

Children prior to 18 are not subhuman. If you're old enough to buy your own phone, you're old enough to decide whether and how to use it.

And because of the laws, it has stopped children from smoking, drinking and abusing drugs. The entire war on drugs has been such a success.

That's the hacker spirit!

You make a persuasive case, but nicotine is genuinely addictive. Something to do with releasing stored glucose and substituting for food, and causing irritability on what I take to be a physiological level on withdrawal. Otherwise I'd agree.

The idea that it's "hard" therefore we need government to save us is exactly why the program itself will never work. The problem is much deeper than law or government can fix.

> Would you want to be the one kid in school who’s not online?

I mean, who cares what the kid wants? It's your job as a parent to be a parent. Sometimes that means telling your kid no, even if that means they're not your best friend for a day or two.

> Would you want that for your kids?

Unequivocally, yes. Social media is cancer. I'd prefer my daughter not be pathologically depressed and my son not turn into a little hateball because of Meta's shitty algorithms. I have no idea why this is even a question, aside from the pure cowardice of Millennial parents.

None of this to comment on GP's suggestion that we don't need laws, or the idea that we shouldn't do this societally anyways.

Bans that don't make sense at an individual level do not suddenly make sense at a community level. This is terrible "we'll make it up on volume" logic.

It's also the justification used for some of the dumbest laws in history.

Think about what level of enforcement is going to be required for this (National IDs tied to online activity), and then think about the fact that Denmark is one of the main governments pushing chat control. Now start to think about how, once this tracking/enforcement scheme is created, that it might be expanded to things outside the scope of this law.

Like communism, this idea sounds good in theory, but is going to turn into an authoritarian nightmare in practice.

> For one there is no indication that parents are any more literate in regards to digital practices than their kids

This one hit me recently. My 4th grader has a friend who is on tik-toc and has a phone. Me, living in a bubble, where other parents I've met are terrified of social media and phones for their kids, was shocked when I met the mom and she wasn't aware of all the negative impact of social media. But, like with smokers, you can tell them it's bad for you but it's up to them to quit.

It's absolutely a collective action problem.

Yes, cultures around the world have done this through parents parenting their child successfully, and not through arbitrary government overreach telling you how to parent.

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.

"Because I'm your parent, and I said no."

Do you buy your kids a toy every time you go to the store? Do you feed them candy for dinner?

...and this needs to be solved with a law? Kids feeling left out over something well and truly inconsequentual?

Demanding a law because you are unable to tell your kids "no" makes you the bigger fool.

Given the track record of digitalization in Denmark, you can be rest assured this will be implemented in the worst possible way.

This is Denmark. The country who reads the EU legislation requesting the construction of a CA to avoid centralizing the system and then legally bends the rules of EU and decides it's far better to create a centralized solution. I.e., the intent is a public key cryptosystem with three bodies, the state being the CA. But no, they should hold both the CA and the Key in escrow. Oh, and then decides that the secret should be a pin such that law enforcement can break it in 10 milliseconds.

I think internet verification is at least 10 years too late. Better late than never. I just lament the fact we are going to get a bad solution to the problem.

Except the Supreme Court deemed the case to be of a principal nature, and granted relieve (i.e. no cost to either party), since it was disputed whether a fake SMS train ticket counted as document fraud.

The ombudsman will say some strong words and everything will continue as is.

I don't know where you get your information, but that was not in the chat control proposal I read.

The ID card allows age verification without disclosing the identity to the service which needs the age verified.

I don't know, this is a bad take. There is good technology to deal with that problem.

https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44457390

*everyone's

The difference is meaningful. It's mostly prisoners dilemma. If only one persons porn habit is available thats bad for them. If everyones (legal) porn habits are available, then it gets normalized.

> 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, Instagram, etc. do so.

Do they make parents liable or no? I'm somewhat curious about that as an option.

But why would you give your id?

It needs to be scaled to the EU level.

This sounds like a temporary issue.

Speaking as someone in their 20s - no, I don't think it's a "completely different time". Just 10 years ago, I first learned programming from scripting languages; SourcePawn from Team Fortress 2, and Lua from Roblox/GMod. Predators, hive minds, and self-destructing behavior from children wasn't suddenly invented or rejuvenated after 2016.

All 3 were a total hotbed of bad influences for a child: Team Fortress had trade pub servers with people doing sprays of literal CP and wearing custom lewd skins to harass users with them - and people with very questionable social skills and intentions huddled up in realtime microphone comms with children, Roblox's predator problem for the last 14+ years (at least that I can attest) is suddenly en vogue now that they're a public company and there's stock shorting to be had, GMod is still the community with the most colorful vocabulary I've ever encountered - plus grooming. And much more.

Indeed, you can (and I did) get burned by these actualities when exposed to such communities in your youth - and it can cost you real money, real time, real idealism/innocence, and real mental health. However, I think being exposed to softwares, systems and games that inspired curiosity and led me toward a path of WANTING to contribute brought me to this software development career and life path, and it would have been much more inaccessible and unknown to me in any other way. And I favorited a comment from another HN user a few days ago that goes in astute depth on why that path can only be organically introduced and self-governed [1].

I referred to these places earlier in my comment as "bad influences". I think the single-most powerful thing a parent can do tasked with this dilemma - especially during an upbringing in systemically hard, uncertain, and turbulent times - is teaching them how to identify, avoid, and confront bad influences. Equipped with that, and knowing how to handle yourself, is of utmost importance.

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45718773

I don't know, maybe? Maybe it's not up to the state to decide whether my kids developmental metrics allows them screen time before age 13? What kind of nanny state is that?

> Would it have made a big difference if you learned X at 13?

Yes. Kids getting access to knowledge that clicks with them earlier than later makes a huge difference.

Which is exactly why so many people are rushing in to control what kids get exposed to. You seem to have pretty strong thought on the issue yourself, if you agree on the possible negative impact, you can't also deny the possibility of positive impact.

The dose makes the poison, I think we can understand how extreme position tend to bring more negative than positive consequences, regardless of the rethoric.

[edit: rephrased the last part]

I strongly suspect the network connection is the issue, not the software. Let the kids have graphing calculators!

I think you're missing the point. 5 year old me was writing their own computer games and at no point did I need or ask my parents how to do it (though they did buy the computer; thanks mum and dad!), they didn't know.

There were a plethora of books in the library on how to program, and here you are suggesting I, and everyone like me, be banned from doing so. You'd probably also ban me from the library by assuming I couldn't read aged 5. I certainly could, especially computer manuals. The computer was an amazing thing which did exactly what I told it, and I learned quickly how precise I needed to tell it, and when I made a mistake, it repeated my mistakes over and over without noticing. I learned more about digital ethics age 5 trying to write games than the typical CEO learns going on a "Do Not Create The Torment Nexus" course.

You'd insist I not be allowed to even use software, let alone write my own. You'd be actively cutting off my future professional life, and depriving entire nations of bedroom programmers cum professional software engineers, with your ill-thought-out ban.

If your children show an aptitude or a fascination for a topic, I hope you feed that and praise them for it.

I think my proposal is easier for parents to enforce, and programming can wait. matter of fact, programming isn't a special skill to learn.

You can teach kids electronics, have them construct toys that work on batteries,etc... work on components that don't require programming. teach them algorithms, math, crypto,etc.. without using computers.

If you're teaching kids how to code, you should give them the skills that will help them learn _what_ to code first?

Do fulcrums even exist, as independent physical objects? What you say about them not being addictive tempts me to do an entire packet of fulcrums, but I don't know where I could buy any or what they'd look like.

Do you think a law which restricts "social media" will be crafted delicately enough to affect Instagram and Facebook but not HN?

Yes, plenty of users here compulsively posting and compulsively checking for responses/upvotes/etc.

this is a familiar discourse. Ads are more than a thing you "run," they're an idea. You can't destroy the idea of ads. "Ad free" isn't possible to guarantee. Does this make sense?

Kids need to create.

Your initial comment may not have been well stated.

It asserts that underage bans are usually applied to things that are unhealthy for all.

You follow that by stating that provided examples of underage bans are things that are not things with negative impacts on populations.

I'd suggest that real world examples exist of adolecsent alcohol induced brain damage, drivers 10-16 having higher rates of accidents causing death and injury, child soldiers having a negative impact on society, industrial scale under age sex in Christian Brother homes having bad outcomes, early exposure to excessive porn being cited as causing brain rot and social malfunction, etc.

As for:

> we regulated smoking out of the market through a combination of safety regulations, limitations on marketing etc.

I'd point to Australia that started down that path with good results, and continued further only to regulate tobacco out of "regular" markets into the embrace of black markets that come with worse problems than the older established markets that "had a code" (established criminals rarely went after family or indiscriminately acted such that bystanders were killed or injured).

You raise interesting questions that deserve deeper thought and consideration.

You're right, I didn't produce evidence in my comment. Smoking and lung cancer are more clear cut than social media problems in general.

The effects of social media are more complex and nuanced than smoking. There are a lot of studies that show that social media has a negative effect on mental well being. When someones dies of loneliness or birth rates collapse and young people have less sex than ever, social media is never the only cause and might not even be the main reason, but it seems to play an important role.

Also, I don't think all social media is bad. I do love these discussions on HN even or especially when we don't agree, but tiktok and similar services have a lot of bad incentives with regards to user well being.