> …is not "get online" but something more like "get on social media".

Which for ordinary people is the same thing, alas.

It’s not just “social media”. Any site that’s funded by advertising fits that description.

Your bank almost certainly uses your personal information to advertise or market to you — and so seems like it would be covered by that definition.

There's quite a lot of statistics saying currently teens struggle with mental health even more than is historically normal for teenagers. [1, 2] Young people are also spending less time with friends, drinking less, and having less sex than ever before.

Obviously it's difficult to pin a 20-year trend on a single cause. But most parents have the sense their teens spend too much time on their phones; and with social media use as common as it is, almost every kid who commits suicide will have recently used social media. But it's not possible to prove causality in a way that will silence all objections.

I suspect it's particularly easy to convince politicians that social media is bad for mental health because of their lived experience. Consider the experience of being a professional politician on Twitter.

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/publications... [2] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/child-adolescent-and-yo...

The world sucks and the kids have no hope. Social media/ internet is to distract everyone from the real world problems

Yes.

The research is quite confusing. This is because the strongest version of the argument is not "your child uses social media, and that makes them depressed". The strongest version is more like "when a society mass adopts social media, this irrevocably alters the culture in ways that causes massive changes in mental health, most prominently among young girls, including those exposed to the culture who don't even use social media."

This means you get a weird effect where experimental studies of high quality - which are usually the best evidence, are expected by the strong argument to show zero effect.

Correlational studies usually show either a weak effect (stronger in young girls) or no effect (it's extremely rare to see a study showing a positive correlational effect, though).

And where you get the most juice is looking at population level introduction of social media studies like those discussed here: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...

But even then it's very tricky, as those studies can't exactly be replicated, and we don't know whether changes will actually reverse the cultural artifacts

But it's not just teenagers, it's also adults who are harmed by overexposure to algorithmically presented content. Obvs we can't restrict adults from legal content but we can legislate against algorythmic content.

The NPR bit sounds like what I'd imagine I could expect from people who are very good at pushing junk food -they've got good science behind flavoring and light addiction (like you don't get withdrawals from not eating doritoes) and the same with social media. they have very good science behind getting people to spend more and more time viewing their content not matter what. So I take that bit on NPR with a grain of salt. In my experience, NPR often presents studies based on small samples for whatever reason. Maybe to go against the grain, maybe to get people to think, who knows...

The kids are fine. The adults that are genuinely worried about the kids need to keep these specific adults out of the kids lives as much as possible.

This the same NPR that was gutted when the new administration took over and is now spouting propaganda? That NPR?

More info on AIPAC endorsements:

Guthrie (4th out of 7): $42k https://www.trackaipac.com/states/kentucky

Pallone (7th out of 10): $241k https://www.trackaipac.com/states/newjersey

I would have used the word "suspicious", but yeah.

Facebook has been documented for sponsoring these bills in the USA.

But we also have years of research about how social media and other internet phenomena are ruining kids' lives.

I don't disagree with the principle of a lot of these laws, but many implementations are too flawed to be a mistake.

Of course. They meet in Davos every year.

There's not a single point in history where everyone on the planet advised just one of those things simultaneously.

Super awesome as long as your kids never go anywhere they could access a non-locked-down device. And assuming that device parental controls work, which (at least on iOS) they don't [1].

1. https://www.macworld.com/article/2305919/apple-parental-cont...

If we expect the behavior of parents to change we must change their incentives.

Providing access to social media must be met with the same punishment as offering heroin to children. The monopoly on violence must be brought to bear on parents who neglect parental responsibilities.

Details on how to do that here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48711871

Isn't it interesting how they're doing it in every anglo country simultaneously? How does that work?

And if they do it anyway? Sure, you can vote them out but it's hard to dislodge incumbents especially over policy choices rather than obvious problems like corruption. Then even after you've ejected them, you need to push their successor into the Sisyphean task of rewriting populist legislation.

Representative democracy is not adequate to the demands of the information age, where the informational asymmetry between individual and state is unprecedented in history. It's time to explore other models like administrative democracy.

We do not need to lose our rights to privacy because people want to control what their kids do and see. (I'm not even convinced this is true - this is likely just a convenient lie told by the politicians, because I don't see parents clamoring for this.)

We're below replacement rate, so it's not like most people are even having kids, anyway. Yet we have to give up our freedom for other people to raise little Christian tots (or whatever the motivation for this is billed as)?

I grew up in a Deep South Protestant household. Having access to the unfiltered internet got me interested in STEM. Bumping into occasional shock sites and porn as a preteen did not turn me into a satanist cannibal.

Keeping "Kids Safe" is a LIE.

This is about putting collars on every US citizen.

They'll filter you into groups.

They'll control what loans and jobs you can get.

They'll use this information to blackmail you should you ever run for office or gain wealth or power.

This is a threat to democracy and personal liberty.

Child safety is a LIE.

Don't forget to enclose a check

and have your children on the phone telling them to not let companies store and leak their information before they are old enough to consent to this.

If they are asking you to leave a message, have your kids leave the message.

Then donate millions in campaign contributions to ensure they actually care at all what you think!

It's so tiresome. It never stops...

sometimes it's true. We ruined the brains of a whole generation of people. Should we stop doing that? If so, how?

Just a story from Germany in early 2000. I had a website and just installed a php script to have a forum on my website and just forgot about it. Today, I could do the same, but I had a 24/7 job to monitor everything someone writes there because it could bring me personally into jail. The same with the comment section of my blog. Thats the reason why this big platforms exist and are used. Because no one other than they want to take the risk. At least in Germany are not much people that want to do that.

You mean targeting with ads, sucking into feeds, making kids harm themselves and making money on this with lip service about corporate responsibility?

Sounds about right.

EDIT: about half to two thirds of the responders didn't catch "I'm not a fan of these proposed solutions." I am not saying I like these solutions. I am trying to explain why they have support among the general public. Many of these responses are the usual "shoot the messenger" response you get online when you point out what the "other side" thinks and why they think it even if you don't necessarily agree. On this issue I think there's a need, but I have yet to see a good proposal to address it.

Once again, the response in places like this pretends everyone is an upper middle class or above tech-savvy nerd.

I'm not a fan of these proposed solutions, which do invade privacy and remove freedom, but the problems are real. These solutions are being pushed because our industry is doing nothing to police itself or provide parents with the tools they need.

In many cases we are doing less than nothing, because the profit motive is to prevent parents from having this control. "Social" media, gambling-adjacent gaming, and other addictionware, which is a huge profit center for our industry, wants to addict kids early. Gotta get those cigarettes into their hands, which means preventing parents from stopping it.

Right now if you are not a tech-savvy parent your choices are: (1) deny children access to devices or severely limit that access, or (2) allow your kids to be raised by super-addictive infinite scroll brain rot feeds, brainwashed by propaganda and influencer bullshit, and placed on an on-ramp to future gambling addiction via mobile games with engineered "compulsion loops."

Now imagine you are a non-tech-savvy household with two parents who work. You can't really limit access since you can't supervise it enough, so your choice is now binary: no access, kids raised by brain rot and propaganda. Pick one. You have no control, no ability to whitelist, because not only do you not have time to deal with this but the tools often cost money and are imperfect and ineffective.

Then you catch your 11 year old son watching extreme fetish porn that he lacks the maturity to contextualize, or hear him spouting off Nazi ideology or talking about how he's an "alpha male" and women should be his slaves. Or your daughter becomes anorexic by following influencers. Or you have a child who is questioning their sexual orientation or identity and is targeted by an online bullying ring. These are the commonplace examples. There's a lot of much worse shit too, like sextortion of kids. Search for "764."

That's why this push exists. It's not a conspiracy. It's because we -- our industry -- is an amoral shitshow that engineers addiction and refuses to police itself or provide parents with good tools to do so.

I'd also like to note that for the non-tech-savvy privacy is dead and has been dead for over ten years at least. If you are not tech-savvy your devices are recording everything about you and transmitting it to two dozen ad networks and data brokers.

Only nerds have privacy today and only if they invest the time to police their tech environment. If you're not a nerd there's nothing to lose. You already lost it long ago. We -- our industry -- took it away.

Banning smart devices from schools seems the way forward.

What kids get to see at home is up to the parents.

I remember when having a phone in school got it confiscated, now I see videos of teens with their phones within class are heavily normalized.

same thing most parents did, and here we are... don't expect miracles from massively underpaid profession which should be the opposite, literally the way to prepare the future of the nation, or fuck it up

Here's my working and cheap alternative that respects privacy: Don't do it!

Seriously now, if you give in to demanding people, they will just demand more. Appeasement does not work.

I was a bit upset to see vitriolic opposition online to systemd adding a field to store, entirely locally to a Linux system, the user's age.

I think opponents to these bills frame it as current state vs complete, invasive third-party identity verification. That's a very unfortunate framing because, as you say, it would be possible to take the wind out of the identity-verification proponents' sails by implementing better on-device controls.

Alternative what? Government?

So Tor?

> This is the first step, the next is to require of this of everyone else.

This is the threat day one. They get both groups' information.

Next, they'll start to purge information they don't like because it has been corralled off from the rest of the internet.

If they get lucky to trap a politician or billionaire in their net (and they will), they'll use that information to control how they vote or fund interests.

Next, they'll start to clamp down of people in the group they don't like. They'll lose jobs, banking, get extra audits, and have friction applied to their lives and chances of success.

Over time the fundamentalist group embraces government monitoring and control. The youth are brought up on it. The oligarchy use it to remove their enemies.

Within two generations we're living in 1984.

> mafia

IMO porn and drug mafia is far more likely to be lurking in reddit and here and spreading misinformation. Russian bots help here too.

You still got CB, FRS, GMRS, LORA, several ISM bands, etc.

There's no big conspiracy here, just a limited amount of the spectrum.

> It's going to be interesting watching nation states fight over how best to do this

As others have said, there is a coordinated push to drive this legislation everywhere. There is no fight in nation states. Just capitulation.

There's a limited amount of radio spectrum, so it has to be managed. Though technically not unlimited in the strictest sense, internet communications don't have a real limit on how many people can communicate with each other, except limits artificially created.

Age verification makes it easier for the bad guys to identify and groom children without adults finding out. Sting operations are that much harder if you have to convince the surveillance capitalism machine that you're an actual child, not just your target.

Note that the EU is proposing to do this [0]. The ZKP part is a bit of a WIP and there have been some questions about the quality [1].

[0] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/eu-age-verific...

[1] https://proton.me/blog/eu-age-verification-app-hacked

It can't, because the government doesn't know shit about technology. Someone who knows tech, is close to the government, and isn't corrupt, would have to propose it and explain what this zorro-proof knowy doohicky is. The government knows ID checks because you get checked at bars.

You're distorting pretty hard about what happened there (mister random numbered throwaway account) but even if you weren't, that is not the definition of fascism.

Everything that happened during the pandemic period is an embarrassment most would like to forget. The authoritarians however remember everything and see how little friction there is against them expanding their power, especially if they can wrap it up in a threat.

All governments in the world, both sides of politics.

It's for the kids, you understand - to protect the kids.

There is no more noble purpose than to protect the kids.

Only a monster would not want to protect the kids.

Parents who want to raise healthy children.

Politicians who want to track everyone all the time.

The rare few politicians who want it to be easier to raise healthy children.

Tech CEOs who don't want to be liable for harming children's development.

Tech CEOs who want to track everyone all the time.

The rare few tech CEOs who want to improve the world (by not harming children's development) and whose business model doesn't require it or who compete with one that does (e.g. operators of edutainment websites if those even still exist).

App coders who don't want to train a neural network to check IDs themselves.

Meta has spent $2B lobbying for this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410870

Anyone who wants to centralize power: so big tech, big government, big corporations, and big dummies who think this is progress

Government

These people are around you.

Watch this "regulate 3d printers because of children" hearing: https://youtu.be/sue88CXzPcQ?t=2285

Normal people that call themselves good names like "moms for actions" drag us into this totalitarian hell.

The GOP. This is part of Project 2025. They want to outlaw porn.

> Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

https://web.archive.org/web/20241103190346/https://static.pr...

Anom caught way more E2EE terrorists than any other attack, and it wasn't even an attack on encryption.

Sounds great. What have you done?

There's a big difference here, in the US anyways, neither alcohol nor nicotine have first amendment protections. Basically all content delivered over the US does.

That's a much thornier legal issue

What content shouldn't children be accessing? Is the content a 7, 11 or 16 year old shouldn't access different between age brackets? Who makes that determination? Is this access restriction at the whole site level, or per-post? Does safe-harbor apply, or is a site-operator liable for age-inappropriate content it hosts for its clients? On S3, for example, is each object tagged with an age category, or would it have to be a totally separate S3, like GovCloud?

Nah, it should be like in California. When you set up an account you should put how old thr user is, and websites should get a header that says whether it's over 18 or not. No ID checks, just good parenting.

Aims aside, did you even read the article? This will mostly end anonymity online and require heavier policing of content.

A child might see something they shouldn't walking down the street, strolling thru the park, visiting the local zoo, or visiting an ice cream parlor. Should those places be requiring identification and hiring extra security guards to wander around making sure nobody is saying it doing anything politically objectionable?

Let's not accept creeping digital tyranny with self-assuring complacency... call or write (preferably snail mail) your congresspeople!!

I hate this analogy because it isn't true. This isn't like a clerk checking your age before you buy booze this is like a clerk taking a photocopy of your ID and a list of everything you bought and then storing those records forever every time you buy alcohol.

> vendors of alcohol and nicotine products are responsible for age verification.

You don't wind up in a database for buying alcohol.

This proposal puts your name right next to the category of porn you're into, which will be a great way to coerce all those politicians into voting for the "correct" bill. Would be a shame if they found out a state senator watched porn, so maybe they'd better vote yes on the proposal.

In time, this will be used to shape what people are "allowed" to think. Porn will gradually be purged from the internet and then go away entirely as the US becomes more fundamentalist and Christian.

Then people who are neither of those things will start to be denied jobs and loans. Politicians that don't fit the mold will stop winning.

This is about turning the US to Christianity. (Read: this is really about controlling the massses and using religious fundamentalism as a tool to do so.)

Technology is the perfect tool for control. Just as we were becoming a liberal/libertarian society and letting people live their lives how they wanted, the wrong people started using technology not as an enabler of free minds, but as an inescapable straitjacket.

You've read 1984, right?

The sensors have been widely deployed. The internet will become your Big Brother. You won't be able to buy, sell, or even move between state lines without being in the good graces of the state.

Be a good citizen and comply.

USB anal probe can be integrated the same way.

Or we could have UBI and parents could parent their kids without corporations babysitting for them.

What you describe, but at the OS level, is already the law in California. We got angry about it a few months ago when it passed, do you remember?

Wrong. Try again.