All the pro-freedom arguments ring hollow and insincere to the wider world.
From an outside perspective, the tech industry/community has repeatedly demonstrated that it's actually very pro-surveillance and child exploitation. From that same outside perspective, another argument of 'hey, we have to combat all attempts at protecting children to avoid surveillance' just sounds like self-serving lies.
You can argue that the tech world is not a monolith, but it looks like one from a wider societal perspective, and often the conflicting calls are coming from the same exact sources. Every AI company, for example, bleats about the potential harms of AI while chasing after them headfirst.
If you want to argue against this kind of legislation, you need to repair a lot of lost trust first.
> If you want to argue against this kind of legislation, you need to repair a lot of lost trust first.
Not trusting tech companies, or companies in general, is simply the correct attitude, so that's not happening.
I don't feel your typical person feels the tech industry is somehow "pro child exploitation" though. I'm not even sure how one could be in that camp, in practical terms.
The average person is aware that the tech industry has been enabling online grooming, AI-generated CSAM, and a host of other things that aren't great for children. Any attempt to regulate these things, or even simply criticise them, is met by a horde of disingenuous arguments about the importance of free software.
I don't think this legislation is perfect, but I think it's a response to the bad actors pretending for decades now that they were concerned about freedom while acting against it.
This is the result of people no longer having any trust in people who claim to care for freedom while harming others; you can't keep drawing from a poisoned well.
If governments want to set up online age gates, they should be responsible for providing an electronic ID system and enable privacy preserving age verification (zero knowledge proofs)
The people do want this crap. If you have kids of a certain age, you know kids that have had near misses with grooming on Roblox, or have seen the comments from men on child Tiktok accounts. It's a stupid amount of exposure that we just didn't have to deal with as kids.
People just don't understand the problems implementing AVS.
I'd be much much happier submitting details or a face scan to a .gov.uk service than all these rando verification services.
Tell me you don't have teenagers without telling me you don't have teenagers. I'd love kids to do what they're told. That would absolutely solve this but as we all know, they don't.
They could, yes. You can buy 5GB of service for £2.50 at many convenience stores. Paid cash.
This is such a weird angle. Like saying shops shouldn't age check for alcohol because the parents would know.
They are also friends with other children who have their own parents, devices and network access. Your child doesn't live in a bubble you have control over.
These are all the same fantasy arguments that completely ignore the pervasiveness of the internet and the tenacity of determined children. 15 years of waiting to see if social networks can fix this themselves has only shown us how much they want to exploit us all. They earned this.
Just parent and educate your children mate, it's simply your personal failure. Have you tried talking to them, you would be surprised, they are not dumb.
Besides this legislation won't solve the problem, it will simply postpone it, while at the same time it will require everyone to do identity verification to access anything. But it's disappointing to see these kind of comments here, as you are clearly individual with limited technical abilities.
Come next election, it will be surprised Pikachu face from many.
I want it. As someone who’s trying to keep their kids off screens and social media it’s easier to win the battle when it’s illegal. If I have to provide ID I’ll probably stop using it to and that’s good. Shit is garbage. Hopefully this becomes a global thing and we might get classic internet back, when it was actually good, before social media…
Zero knowledge proofs don't accomplish the ID checking that the governments want.
The reason all of these improvised ID check systems require you to do things like submit a video of you moving your face around (which has its own problems) is because they want to get closer to proving that the ID you submit is actually the ID of the person holding the phone, not just some ID (or zero knowledge proof) you copied from the internet.
Classic. So tell me how I can just not deal with the credit bureaus? Or tax filing companies? Or any site that sells my data to adtech, without totally secluding myself from the modern web? Where’s the supposed competition?
What you’re saying is functionally equivalent to “just deal with it,” since ultimately people will choose to have their privacy violated over the lifelong Sisyphean task of trying to avoid all of that. That doesn’t mean people don’t care about privacy, it’s just the current equilibrium in our broken system.
> I think we have been stuck in this way of life so long we can't imagine an alternative.
> the credit bureaus? >> Do NOT buy on credit. Close your CCs. Use Debit cards, Wise/Revolut or BC wallet. > Or tax filing companies? >> Do self assessment? Go and see actual CPA personally?
I really wish we could just pass "common sense" laws. Like, you just can't use addiction to make money, full stop. You can't use any kind of trickery in marketing, in particular anything trying to circumvent people's rational brain and preying on the weak animal brain underneath. Marketing and advertising would be gone overnight - good riddance -because anyone can write an honest advert.
The problem with us is we get stuck in local optima and we just can't get out. We're like ants in a death spiral. It takes some enormous external shock to get us out, like a world war. Even a financial crisis or global pandemic isn't enough any more, unfortunately. Individuals just can't accept less and no leaders appear to be able or willing to explain to the concepts of global optimisation or long term plans etc. So we get stuck with shit on top of more shit.
You know, various historians have studied this. No society has ever avoided this collapse scenario. It's like the Great Filter. But in 2026 because of the internet we only have a handful of global-scale societies instead of a hundred thousand regional societies like we used to. The first one to collapse might just catch the whole world in its debris cloud.
Canadian federal govt just pushed thru a slew of similar legislation - absolutely unprecedented assault on privacy, tools for tracking everyone all the time, minimally constrained, giving broad leeway to a three-person unelected body to implement the actual details.
"This week, politicians in the UK pushed forward with plans to eviscerate privacy and free speech on the internet by announcing a ban on social media for users under 16 that is set to take effect in Spring 2027."
Is "social media" the internet
Does "social media", i.e., "Big Tech", preserve privacy or eviscerate it. "Internet privacy" is been in direct conflict with their "business model". They engage in sweeping data collection and mass surveillance of internet users to support invasive "personalised" ad services
It seems like most people engaging in "free speech" on "social media" are not anonymous, not really interested in "privacy"
In many cases, they "share" their every thought
40 ways to share information over the internet without age verification
There is nothing good on the internet for kids. If we ban kids from the internet this will all go away. Make a smartphone every bit as regulated as alcohol or cigarettes or sexual intercourse. If a parent is found providing their kids alcohol, cigarettes, sex, or internet, we have to hold them accountable and rehabilitate the kids from their traumatic experience. These parents deserve serious prison terms, and those victimized kids will need to be institutionalized as they are now traumatized for life (plus their parents are deservedly now serving decades in prison for child abuse).
Why are we pushing our kids onto the internet? There is nothing there for them. Any politicians pushing for kids internet access are probably doing it for nefarious reasons in my opinion. The internet is not really all that safe for adults either, why are we pushing kids onto it?
I was afforded limited exposure to alcohol and sex starting around age 13, and I've got a vastly healthier relationship with the two than the rest of my society.
I think the internet, however, is a much greater threat to growing minds.
Yeah, I've thought about this some. I as a website owner do not want to babysit your kids. Parents probably do not want me babysitting their kids either. I should be able to put meta data in my website that says "for adults only" and that should be it.
I'm not against kids having some sort of child friendly network access. The trouble is that there is no tech that is child friendly any more, its all vibe coded crap that keeps no one safe at all anymore with hidden traps inside the cesspool of crazies posting all sorts of wierd crap conspiracy shit.
Heck a super beneficial appearing thing like wikipedia is literally an encyclopedia yet the GOP for instance can't stand it if someone talks about any sexuality at all or some other bogyman subject of the hour.
Just ban kids at the internet's points of entry. Phones, Modems. Age gate amateur radio too, no kids interested in amateur radio anymore anyways, no packet switched communications at all until 18 or whatever.
Can you please edit out swipes from your HN comments, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Your comment would be fine without the first and last sentences.
I dunno, there's a definite tendency to say extreme and trivially falsifiable things on HN as if they were fact. I think those should be called out because they really derail rational discussion and encourage "us vs them" narratives.
He is clearly exaggerating for effect so much that it doesn't make sense any more, and IMO that is what leads to unproductive debate. It should be called out as such.
If you feel that someone else is posting incorrect information, it's sufficient to post correct information. Getting aggressive about it is unnecessary and damages the commons.
Banning kids from alcohol, cigarettes, and sex sure did work. I can't think of a single kid I went to school with that did any of these things (and certainly not me). All those laws and rules were absolutely effective in preventing us as kids from doing them. /s
Yeah but we can sanction the parents. If your friends at school were having sex with strangers for money and their parents were doing the pimping, society would like to have a word.
Why is letting your kids sext with adult strangers any different? Is it because the only "pimping" you are doing is giving in to your brat nagging for an iphone?
It isn't any different, parents can already be sanctioned if they let those kids do those things.
The thing is, the vast vast majority of kids are not doing those things and are savy enough not to. It's the same as the alchohol and drugs for teens. Yes there are some that go to far and even get hooked on hard stuff, but most don't.
Don't get me wrong, I think social media is bad for both kids and adults alike, but predation is not its biggest problem. I'd say the biggest problem is the attention black hole it creates along with a misaligned sense of self. But that's a harder story to sell then 'super scary bad thing is happening so we need to do super extreme thing to prevent it'.
No, I'm pretty sure declining birthrates are caused by the smartphones, either that or the AI lied to me again but I'm still pretty sure its the smartphones.
"Recent economic research links the rise of smartphones to the persistent decline in birth rates. A National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study estimates that early smartphone adoption accounts for 33% to 52% of the drop in the U.S. general fertility rate, particularly among teenagers and young adults under 30"
-- this quote is from AI and could be a complete fabrication
Yeah, this isn't the HN I remember, but the one I am, unfortunately, stuck in.
Slow but steady reddification of HN audience (judging by the comments) is its biggest existential threat imo. And the worst part is that, unlike with the actual reddit, this isn't due to the platform owners/admins at all (as I can only think of good things to say about @dang and the HN itself).
About 2 million adults in the UK don't have government-issued photo ID. Certainly many 16-17 year olds will have trouble verifying their age. They're blocking huge sectors of the UK population from being able to use the internet normally.
The world was fine before youtube, it's not the end of the world. It's full of fake education who won't take responsibility by claiming they're "just entertainment".
Realistically, the kids will find their way around the ban.
Doesn't matter, if this goes through as is you will have to submit photo-id and/or facial scans linking you to a google account in order to watch any youtube other than the kids section.
The EFF believes the ends (freedom) justify the means (access to everything good and bad for everyone). Governments are pragmatic, not fundamentalist.
This article addresses the technological flaws in age verification, then says “but even if there were, broad restrictions on social media will inevitably limit access to lawful speech, and valuable online communities, and arts and culture.”
If the EFF care about freedom above all else (a reasonable position) muddying the waters with half-baked
age verification isn’t perfect arguments is just sloppy.
Why does the freedom matter above all else? That’s what voters need to be convinced of.
> Why does the freedom matter above all else? That’s what voters need to be convinced of.
Because without freedom, you cannot really have anything else. You are a slave. Is that really what you want to be? Or how we want children to be raised?
I'm frustrated with how the various internet freedom orgs have handled this over the years.
The writing was on the wall for years - it's not the 90s anymore and some compromise on anonymity and verification is coming. Frankly for good reason - I think the social utility of Big Social is massively negative, and even more so for kids.
That was the shot of orgs like EFF to help shape the debate in a good direction. Zero knowledge proofs, anonymity preserving age checks, good govt regulation on this etc.
Instead they all dug their heels in, refused to give an inch or even engage in the debate. If you wanted anything other that a Toresque utopia then you clearly want Big Brother to keep tabs on everything, and you're probably a moron who thinks you have "nothing to hide".
So they vacated the space while Mumsnet users came to the only logical conclusion: let's ban social media for kids, with whatever method comes to their mind. Scanning their ID, face scans, fingerprints connected to a government DB ran by the cheapest contractor - who knows how this will materialise. And I kind of can't blame them. The adults of internet privacy vacated the room because they said everyone else in the room is too stupid. So they left and left the stupid people in charge.
The same applies to the social media services themselves.
Evidence of harm has been building up over the last decade, so there's been ample opportunity for them to develop effective systems to reduce or mitigate the problems. Instead, they've chosen to do the opposite.
And, if anything, that process has only accelerated over the past 2-3 years - firing moderation teams, amping up the algorithmic feeds, refusing to engage with regulators.
Did they really think their behaviour would have no consequences?
The technical incoherence doesn’t matter. What matters is being able to say “you can’t use Snapchat” and then they say “my friend xxx uses it” you can say “xxx’s parent are delinquent”
This isn’t about blocking as much as setting societal expectations.
Totally agree. Setting the tone is so important. It’s so bad it’s “illegal” is a lot more convincing than saying to your kid, “well the research shows…”
Totally. The next step is a national campaign explaining how apple screen time and android family works. In the Uk we had a lot of shock adverts for drinking driving. The same thing with online harms would go a long way.
If its primary legislation (Acts of Parliament) like Online Safety Act, the courts cannot strike it down. If its secondary legislation by ministers and other agencies, it could be contested in courts.
"Under-16 social media ban" sounds narrow.
In practice it means building an age-checking layer for the whole web, then hoping it only gets used for children.
Wouldn’t this be an amazing outcome of the legislation and prove politicians understand exactly how and why the internet was built?
I don’t think people have a problem with “social media” per-say, it’s a problem with algorithmic feeds controlled by a few giant companies with very little if any competition, showing countless optimized ads.
“ But the social media ban does not stop there. The provision also requires internet service providers to limit the time kids spend online, and has rules about who can contact them online. These extreme rules will take decisions about using technology away from families and put them in the hands of government regulators. “
I’m not sure that “there are rules on who can contact children online” is “extreme” for anyone outside of hyper libertarian circles.
The EFF needs to start engaging with actual real world, because it’s intransigence on the issues being caused by unfettered internet usage mean it is unable to prevent bad solutions being proposed.
Then we've been doomed since we banned children from buying cigarettes, or even further back, since we banned children from having sex with adults. Do you really think banning those things made society worse?
I do believe social media should be verboten for younger people, although I believe it should be enforced by good parenting rather than legislation. That said, we live in a society, and sometimes that means our libertarian ideals don’t work on the large scale. I reserve judgement for the people of the UK, their government isn’t without its serious faults, but less regulation doesn’t seem to be the panacea Reagan and Thatcher sold it to be.
but snark aside, society needs to have a big conversation (meaning political) about what is good and what is bad about what should really be understood as the 'connectivity revolution' of the last 10-20 years.
Honestly I would love to see a ban on social media in general, for all ages (or more specifically, content that's algorithmically feed and reliant on ads/engagement). Take out Tinder and gambling while you're at it.
EFF are way off base here - this isn't "free as in free speech" but "free as in giant corporations are free to fuck people up the arse".
I agree, chronological feeds of people you’ve explicitly chosen to follow are fine, but AIs looking to optimize engagement have caused untold damage to society. Future generations will study it as an example of unintended consequences in AI systems. The sooner we shutdown this disastrous technology the better.
This is a horrible straw-man of the situation which somewhat conveniently manages to sidestep any real acknowledgement of the genuine harm and its scale.
> they’ll also lose access to educational videos on YouTube, local events on Facebook, and potentially cut off from distant friends and family.
Cmon, if you’re trying to make the case for how essential social media is for children under the age of 16, please find some better examples. As if there are no other sources of educational content online than YouTube and anyone who has left Facebook knows the last two points are simply not true. This is so weak from the EFF.
> they’ll also lose access to educational videos on YouTube, local events on Facebook, and potentially cut off from distant friends and family.
How in the world did kids ever survive before social media? Miracle of god keeping them sane every second of their miserable deprived lives. Seriously, this is such a bad argument for something that is a return to a previous known good state versus being a new state. No proof provided that social media makes any of these better versus either pre social media approaches or modern alternatives.
Ah a strawmen augment. This is comparing two specific states. If you’re admitting that the two states of pre and post social media are the same by virtue of resorting to a strawmen then glad we agree.
We have parental controls on devices. The change forced by the UK government is to give control to corporations, instead of the parents.
Parents are much better at knowing their own kid's age than corporations are. Teens keep fooling the age verification (pointing the camera at a video game character, using fake ID, even drawing beards on their face with a pen). But they aren't going to fool their own mother, and they don't need to trust ID verification startup with photographs of everbody's teenage kids to do it.
This is a tricky one, but it actually gives control to the government, not corporations. The government now has rules which let them define what social media is and how big its market can be.
The government is, frankly, just better at deciding what's good for most children than their parents when it comes to matters of health. That's a controversial statement, but truthfully most parents are just not educated enough or strict enough to decide where the boundaries should be on their children's health.
That's irrelevant because social media regulation is a collective action problem. No individual parent can restrict their kids access to social media without ostracizing it, it only makes sense if all parents together get their kids off these platforms.
>it only makes sense if all parents together get their kids off these platforms
Yes, and the wishes of all parents together != the wishes of the UK government which has its own agenda at play in which to weaponize this public outrage for their own benefit(mass surveillance and mass censorship).
The UK government doesn't actually want what's best for all the children of all the parents, otherwise it wouldn't have allowed and even enabled the rape gangs and sweep the issue under the rug in a massive coverup.
>Yes, and the wishes of all parents together != the wishes of the UK government
This legislation has widespread support among British parents across the political spectrum[1]
"As YouGov has shown previously, such a policy would be widely popular with the general public. In our latest survey, looking more specifically at the views of parents, we find that 77% of those with children under the age of 18 would support a ban, compared to only 14% who are opposed.[...] Likewise, 76% of parents think the government needs to kick up their activity on this issue, although a much lower rate of 43% think they need to be doing “much more”."
I don't even have any idea what the last paragraph, other than being some generic twitter rant has to do with the topic of the thread
>This legislation has widespread support among British parents across the political spectrum[1]
Because parents like most voters, are incredibly stupid, and just want to delegate accountability of their kids to the state, not that they actually understand the repercussions of what they're supporting. Same with brexit. Voters want a scapegoat on why their kids are stupid(er), and the government is happy to offer a monkey paw.
Ah, yes. Whenever a policy that you personally dislike is widely supported, it's because all its supporters are incredibly stupid, because you are always right.
It's not just because I am right and they're wrong in this case, it's because as the saying goes, "The Best Argument Against Democracy' Is 5-Minute Conversation with Average Voter".
And British voters have proven that several times over that they're not good at making decisions which is why their country has been in decline. Again, see their Brexit choice as proof.
But sure, you go and personally attack me with no arguments as if that means anything.
I'm sorry to tell you this but you'll have to decide between "The British government is doing terrible things that does not represent the British people" or "people are extremely stupid, democracy is terrible and we must in fact make decisions for them"
You can't actually bring up the first one because you disagree with me and then the second one when you realize you also disagree with the British people. Either you like democracy or you don't, you don't get to decide that based on what route you want to take in an internet argument.
The answer, IMO, is simply banning all algorithm-driven social media, for everyone and not just kids.
This conveniently sidesteps the identity/privacy arguments, makes it much easier to enforce, and would present an even greater net benefit. There is no benefit to algorithmic social media at all, and everyone would be better off without it.
Parents are there to protect their children. The potential harm caused by eroded privacy and reduced control over our devices is not worth the perceived benefits of this policy in ensuring children’s safety.
Unpopular to say, but the government is just better at deciding what's good for most children than their parents when it comes to matters of health. Unfortunately most parents are just very uneducated or lacking in discipline, and no child should be punished in the name of freedom. That being said, age verification laws are obviously a bad way to do that. They should just ban specific categories of social media outright.
I'm all for protecting kids from facebook/insta/snap/etc, they have love hate relationships with all of those, but YT is a bridge too far, is's more a knowledge sharing platform than a social network.
If you primarily choose to watch educational videos sure, but YouTube can give you just as much brainrot as TikTok, depending on what the recommendation engine decides you might like.
Then it can separate the two separate components easily to satisfy whatever the law is. If it can’t then it is social media. A lot of YouTube is not knowledge sharing unless you view MrBeast as a sharer of knowledge.
It's both. Everyone except libertarians wants kids to be protected because right now we're harming them incredibly quickly. Also, Facebook wants that to be implemented by ID scans.
As long as you're hysterically foaming at the mouth with enraged performative moral panic, then start with keeping kids away from Priests instead of Drag Queens.
This is the slipperiest of slopes. I'm all for restricting social consumption, but absolutely against the current suggestions for age restrictions methods. The end goal is noble, the means of achieving it are sinister
The whole idea of this is broken, since so much of our collective knowledge is locked away in YouTube/Reddit. It's making a law against children in libraries because there are adult books in it.
That's a problem. Reddit is already dead, half the subreddits are banned, half the remaining OG posts have been edited into random words in protest, 80% of content is now LLMs farming karma. Maybe we should have built human society on a more stable foundation?
This will be a controversial statement here, but for better or worse, Youtube is a modern Library of Alexandria. It archives a significant amount of human knowledge and culture in video form, and for a lot of it, there is no backup.
Big, popular channels do push their viewers to alternative platforms like Patreon because of Youtube's censorship guidelines and arbitrary demonetization, but a lot of valuable content is on smaller channels where the owners may not have the wherewithal to transfer all of their content, much less their audience.
> It’s only not trash if you use it correctly.
> Watch some videos by some racists, you get fed videos making you racist.
So don't watch some videos by some racists, and curate your feed properly. I don't see why the government needs to get involved here.
>This is the dividing line which should apply for under 18s.
The problem is the dividing line won't stay there. A lot of people want social media regulated or banned outright for adults as well. The incentives to restrict freedom of speech and control narratives are all-consuming. Definitions will be intentionally vague so that they can apply to any platform that governments want to censor.
I find the idea that someone would care about their privacy and choose to be on social media really hard to fathom. These things are personal data vacuums that infer everything there is to know about you, if you don't just give it to them.
Have you taken a look at kids nowadays? They look like fking zombies glued to their smartphones and wireless headphones. I go walk my dog, and not a single kid tries to play with it - only people of my age (40s) do.
We’re raising a generation of completely emotionally detached robots. There’s something deeply wrong and unsettling, and it’s happening in plain daylight.
All the pro-freedom arguments ring hollow and insincere to the wider world.
From an outside perspective, the tech industry/community has repeatedly demonstrated that it's actually very pro-surveillance and child exploitation. From that same outside perspective, another argument of 'hey, we have to combat all attempts at protecting children to avoid surveillance' just sounds like self-serving lies.
You can argue that the tech world is not a monolith, but it looks like one from a wider societal perspective, and often the conflicting calls are coming from the same exact sources. Every AI company, for example, bleats about the potential harms of AI while chasing after them headfirst.
If you want to argue against this kind of legislation, you need to repair a lot of lost trust first.
> If you want to argue against this kind of legislation, you need to repair a lot of lost trust first.
Not trusting tech companies, or companies in general, is simply the correct attitude, so that's not happening.
I don't feel your typical person feels the tech industry is somehow "pro child exploitation" though. I'm not even sure how one could be in that camp, in practical terms.
The average person is aware that the tech industry has been enabling online grooming, AI-generated CSAM, and a host of other things that aren't great for children. Any attempt to regulate these things, or even simply criticise them, is met by a horde of disingenuous arguments about the importance of free software.
I feel like if there's a bad actor... this kind of legislation just ignores it / the problem.
Meanwhile kids will still find ways to do what they wish online and it will be hidden... adults exposed to these same bad actors.
I don't think this legislation is perfect, but I think it's a response to the bad actors pretending for decades now that they were concerned about freedom while acting against it.
This is the result of people no longer having any trust in people who claim to care for freedom while harming others; you can't keep drawing from a poisoned well.
I think it undermines the entire reasoning not dealing with the bad actors and reasonably questions what the actual intent is.
Social media companies bad ... laws imposed by government on individuals who aren't the people doing bad things.
That's absurd.
If governments want to set up online age gates, they should be responsible for providing an electronic ID system and enable privacy preserving age verification (zero knowledge proofs)
Who is "government" Is it not the people? The people don't want this crap. It's a few zealots with their motives that are pushing this down society.
The people do want this crap. If you have kids of a certain age, you know kids that have had near misses with grooming on Roblox, or have seen the comments from men on child Tiktok accounts. It's a stupid amount of exposure that we just didn't have to deal with as kids.
People just don't understand the problems implementing AVS.
I'd be much much happier submitting details or a face scan to a .gov.uk service than all these rando verification services.
Then do your parenting and stop limiting the rights of the rest.
Tell me you don't have teenagers without telling me you don't have teenagers. I'd love kids to do what they're told. That would absolutely solve this but as we all know, they don't.
But how are your rights limited?
Who's buying your kids internet access? Are they getting it on a street corner from a stranger? lol I doubt it.
They could, yes. You can buy 5GB of service for £2.50 at many convenience stores. Paid cash.
This is such a weird angle. Like saying shops shouldn't age check for alcohol because the parents would know.
They are also friends with other children who have their own parents, devices and network access. Your child doesn't live in a bubble you have control over.
These are all the same fantasy arguments that completely ignore the pervasiveness of the internet and the tenacity of determined children. 15 years of waiting to see if social networks can fix this themselves has only shown us how much they want to exploit us all. They earned this.
Just parent and educate your children mate, it's simply your personal failure. Have you tried talking to them, you would be surprised, they are not dumb.
Besides this legislation won't solve the problem, it will simply postpone it, while at the same time it will require everyone to do identity verification to access anything. But it's disappointing to see these kind of comments here, as you are clearly individual with limited technical abilities.
Come next election, it will be surprised Pikachu face from many.
"crack dealers are trying to sell crack to my kids at street corners, can we ban that?" "No! Just do your parenting!"
> if I replace ‘internet access’ with ‘crack,’ then that sure changes the argument!
Damn dude really makes you think
Just parent your kids.
Most people want social media banned for under 16s. Some people realized they can use this as an excuse to ram through id checks
Your (the people’s) preferences are largely irrelevant here.
https://willbrownsberger.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Gile...
I want it. As someone who’s trying to keep their kids off screens and social media it’s easier to win the battle when it’s illegal. If I have to provide ID I’ll probably stop using it to and that’s good. Shit is garbage. Hopefully this becomes a global thing and we might get classic internet back, when it was actually good, before social media…
The kids will just use illegal plattforms instead, which will not even try to stay above board or protect children.
You do know that you will need to provide your ID for every single website in the future?
No, no, that's not how it works. They will do remaster of old internet. LOL. People are really dumb.
That is what I have been saying: we need ZKP! I highly doubt they will implement it though.
Zero knowledge proofs don't accomplish the ID checking that the governments want.
The reason all of these improvised ID check systems require you to do things like submit a video of you moving your face around (which has its own problems) is because they want to get closer to proving that the ID you submit is actually the ID of the person holding the phone, not just some ID (or zero knowledge proof) you copied from the internet.
But the party verifying that the person matches the id doesn’t need to know what the claim is for
It's coming to European Union citizens. Any day now.
Implementation detail. Fine companies that allow minors access and they'll find a way to verify age by themselves.
For liquor for example I don't think the govt actually specifies that you shall check ID they specify that you shall not sell to minors.
> they'll find a way to verify age by themselves.
Yeah, by outsourcing it to some shady company that sells all your private info to the lowest bidder. See Discord for example.
Don't use the site then? Or sites can compete on which age verifies in the least shitty way?
I think we have been stuck in this way of life so long we can't imagine an alternative.
Classic. So tell me how I can just not deal with the credit bureaus? Or tax filing companies? Or any site that sells my data to adtech, without totally secluding myself from the modern web? Where’s the supposed competition?
What you’re saying is functionally equivalent to “just deal with it,” since ultimately people will choose to have their privacy violated over the lifelong Sisyphean task of trying to avoid all of that. That doesn’t mean people don’t care about privacy, it’s just the current equilibrium in our broken system.
> I think we have been stuck in this way of life so long we can't imagine an alternative.
I agree.
> the credit bureaus? >> Do NOT buy on credit. Close your CCs. Use Debit cards, Wise/Revolut or BC wallet. > Or tax filing companies? >> Do self assessment? Go and see actual CPA personally?
Probably an unpopular view, but why not fix the issues with social media.
Banning or regulating algorithmic feeds would be an excellent start.
This is the best thing to do IMO
I really wish we could just pass "common sense" laws. Like, you just can't use addiction to make money, full stop. You can't use any kind of trickery in marketing, in particular anything trying to circumvent people's rational brain and preying on the weak animal brain underneath. Marketing and advertising would be gone overnight - good riddance -because anyone can write an honest advert.
The problem with us is we get stuck in local optima and we just can't get out. We're like ants in a death spiral. It takes some enormous external shock to get us out, like a world war. Even a financial crisis or global pandemic isn't enough any more, unfortunately. Individuals just can't accept less and no leaders appear to be able or willing to explain to the concepts of global optimisation or long term plans etc. So we get stuck with shit on top of more shit.
Until it all collapses.
You know, various historians have studied this. No society has ever avoided this collapse scenario. It's like the Great Filter. But in 2026 because of the internet we only have a handful of global-scale societies instead of a hundred thousand regional societies like we used to. The first one to collapse might just catch the whole world in its debris cloud.
This is the start
Canadian federal govt just pushed thru a slew of similar legislation - absolutely unprecedented assault on privacy, tools for tracking everyone all the time, minimally constrained, giving broad leeway to a three-person unelected body to implement the actual details.
"This week, politicians in the UK pushed forward with plans to eviscerate privacy and free speech on the internet by announcing a ban on social media for users under 16 that is set to take effect in Spring 2027."
Is "social media" the internet
Does "social media", i.e., "Big Tech", preserve privacy or eviscerate it. "Internet privacy" is been in direct conflict with their "business model". They engage in sweeping data collection and mass surveillance of internet users to support invasive "personalised" ad services
It seems like most people engaging in "free speech" on "social media" are not anonymous, not really interested in "privacy"
In many cases, they "share" their every thought
40 ways to share information over the internet without age verification
https://decss.zoy.org
This is old and could be updated with more
C'mon ppl, nothing new. China, N. Korea, Iran, Russia ... to some extent Turkey. So what? Adapt. We've been there before.
There is nothing good on the internet for kids. If we ban kids from the internet this will all go away. Make a smartphone every bit as regulated as alcohol or cigarettes or sexual intercourse. If a parent is found providing their kids alcohol, cigarettes, sex, or internet, we have to hold them accountable and rehabilitate the kids from their traumatic experience. These parents deserve serious prison terms, and those victimized kids will need to be institutionalized as they are now traumatized for life (plus their parents are deservedly now serving decades in prison for child abuse).
Why are we pushing our kids onto the internet? There is nothing there for them. Any politicians pushing for kids internet access are probably doing it for nefarious reasons in my opinion. The internet is not really all that safe for adults either, why are we pushing kids onto it?
I don't think internet puritanism imposed by government will protect anyone.
I was afforded limited exposure to alcohol and sex starting around age 13, and I've got a vastly healthier relationship with the two than the rest of my society.
I think the internet, however, is a much greater threat to growing minds.
Yeah, I've thought about this some. I as a website owner do not want to babysit your kids. Parents probably do not want me babysitting their kids either. I should be able to put meta data in my website that says "for adults only" and that should be it.
I'm not against kids having some sort of child friendly network access. The trouble is that there is no tech that is child friendly any more, its all vibe coded crap that keeps no one safe at all anymore with hidden traps inside the cesspool of crazies posting all sorts of wierd crap conspiracy shit.
Heck a super beneficial appearing thing like wikipedia is literally an encyclopedia yet the GOP for instance can't stand it if someone talks about any sexuality at all or some other bogyman subject of the hour.
Just ban kids at the internet's points of entry. Phones, Modems. Age gate amateur radio too, no kids interested in amateur radio anymore anyways, no packet switched communications at all until 18 or whatever.
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Can you please edit out swipes from your HN comments, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Your comment would be fine without the first and last sentences.
I dunno, there's a definite tendency to say extreme and trivially falsifiable things on HN as if they were fact. I think those should be called out because they really derail rational discussion and encourage "us vs them" narratives.
He is clearly exaggerating for effect so much that it doesn't make sense any more, and IMO that is what leads to unproductive debate. It should be called out as such.
The last sentence is a genuine question.
The phrase "call out" is already an indication that HN is not being used as intended (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). You can make your substantive points without any of this.
If you feel that someone else is posting incorrect information, it's sufficient to post correct information. Getting aggressive about it is unnecessary and damages the commons.
Well, I'll have to agree to disagree on that. What is moderation if not "calling out"?
Calling out, as I understand it, is a tactic of online shaming. We try not to shame anyone, although it does still happen unintentionally.
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Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I'm not sure what you mean by id, but I'm 41.
Banning kids from alcohol, cigarettes, and sex sure did work. I can't think of a single kid I went to school with that did any of these things (and certainly not me). All those laws and rules were absolutely effective in preventing us as kids from doing them. /s
Yeah but we can sanction the parents. If your friends at school were having sex with strangers for money and their parents were doing the pimping, society would like to have a word.
Why is letting your kids sext with adult strangers any different? Is it because the only "pimping" you are doing is giving in to your brat nagging for an iphone?
It isn't any different, parents can already be sanctioned if they let those kids do those things.
The thing is, the vast vast majority of kids are not doing those things and are savy enough not to. It's the same as the alchohol and drugs for teens. Yes there are some that go to far and even get hooked on hard stuff, but most don't.
Don't get me wrong, I think social media is bad for both kids and adults alike, but predation is not its biggest problem. I'd say the biggest problem is the attention black hole it creates along with a misaligned sense of self. But that's a harder story to sell then 'super scary bad thing is happening so we need to do super extreme thing to prevent it'.
I wonder if creating more laws designed to punish parents correlates with declining birth rates. Sure makes me think twice about having them.
No, I'm pretty sure declining birthrates are caused by the smartphones, either that or the AI lied to me again but I'm still pretty sure its the smartphones.
"Recent economic research links the rise of smartphones to the persistent decline in birth rates. A National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study estimates that early smartphone adoption accounts for 33% to 52% of the drop in the U.S. general fertility rate, particularly among teenagers and young adults under 30"
-- this quote is from AI and could be a complete fabrication
This whole thread is dumpster fire of sovereign citizens caught in AI psychosis supporting authoritarian bullshit.
Yeah, this isn't the HN I remember, but the one I am, unfortunately, stuck in.
Slow but steady reddification of HN audience (judging by the comments) is its biggest existential threat imo. And the worst part is that, unlike with the actual reddit, this isn't due to the platform owners/admins at all (as I can only think of good things to say about @dang and the HN itself).
What kind of argument is this? "Banning murder sure did work. I can't think of a single person who did any of those things. /s".
Bans would work for >90% of kids and that's good enough.
There is a big difference between personally knowing a lot of people that do a thing, and hearing about some stranger on TV who did a thing.
Related petition to be debated in parliament: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/757233
These never ever accomplish anything
About 2 million adults in the UK don't have government-issued photo ID. Certainly many 16-17 year olds will have trouble verifying their age. They're blocking huge sectors of the UK population from being able to use the internet normally.
Use *social media normally. Social media != The Internet. They’ll be able to use 99.9999% of the internet just fine.
YouTube is part of the ban.
so nobody can watch youtube without an account? that's going to go down well...
Nobody needs to use social media though.
Really they should just torch the lot.
you don't use YouTube?
Nobody needs to. It's an addictive cancer just like TikTok.
It's not. Tiktok is pure time wasting fluff definitely, but YouTube is a mix of that and genuinely great content.
Go and watch 3blue1brown and then tell me it's addictive cancer.
The world was fine before youtube, it's not the end of the world. It's full of fake education who won't take responsibility by claiming they're "just entertainment".
Realistically, the kids will find their way around the ban.
I use YouTube, but only watch stuff I SEARCH for or from people I have subscribed to. No watch next BS.
If you have self control you can avoid the social media element of it.
YouTube demonetisation tends to act as a reasonable steward on the platform, but it does need to be strengthened.
I.e. make YouTube responsible as the publisher for any video with over 100k views. This would be totally doable.
Doesn't matter, if this goes through as is you will have to submit photo-id and/or facial scans linking you to a google account in order to watch any youtube other than the kids section.
The EFF believes the ends (freedom) justify the means (access to everything good and bad for everyone). Governments are pragmatic, not fundamentalist.
This article addresses the technological flaws in age verification, then says “but even if there were, broad restrictions on social media will inevitably limit access to lawful speech, and valuable online communities, and arts and culture.”
If the EFF care about freedom above all else (a reasonable position) muddying the waters with half-baked age verification isn’t perfect arguments is just sloppy.
Why does the freedom matter above all else? That’s what voters need to be convinced of.
> Why does the freedom matter above all else? That’s what voters need to be convinced of.
Because without freedom, you cannot really have anything else. You are a slave. Is that really what you want to be? Or how we want children to be raised?
I'm frustrated with how the various internet freedom orgs have handled this over the years.
The writing was on the wall for years - it's not the 90s anymore and some compromise on anonymity and verification is coming. Frankly for good reason - I think the social utility of Big Social is massively negative, and even more so for kids.
That was the shot of orgs like EFF to help shape the debate in a good direction. Zero knowledge proofs, anonymity preserving age checks, good govt regulation on this etc.
Instead they all dug their heels in, refused to give an inch or even engage in the debate. If you wanted anything other that a Toresque utopia then you clearly want Big Brother to keep tabs on everything, and you're probably a moron who thinks you have "nothing to hide".
So they vacated the space while Mumsnet users came to the only logical conclusion: let's ban social media for kids, with whatever method comes to their mind. Scanning their ID, face scans, fingerprints connected to a government DB ran by the cheapest contractor - who knows how this will materialise. And I kind of can't blame them. The adults of internet privacy vacated the room because they said everyone else in the room is too stupid. So they left and left the stupid people in charge.
The same applies to the social media services themselves.
Evidence of harm has been building up over the last decade, so there's been ample opportunity for them to develop effective systems to reduce or mitigate the problems. Instead, they've chosen to do the opposite.
And, if anything, that process has only accelerated over the past 2-3 years - firing moderation teams, amping up the algorithmic feeds, refusing to engage with regulators.
Did they really think their behaviour would have no consequences?
Am I right in thinking that the EFF doesn't launch any legal campaigns inside the UK (but they offer support to those who do)
Is there a UK version of the EFF that fights in the courts against this lunacy or does it not quite work the same in the UK as it does in the US.
> Is there a UK version of the EFF that fights in the courts against this lunacy or does it not quite work the same in the UK as it does in the US.
The government looks likely to introduce the ban as regulation through secondary legislation (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9824zvpz9po).
That is open to judicial review.
If primary legislation was instead passed, that's a lot harder to challenge - Parliament makes the law, so whatever Parliament said applies.
Politics is very different in the UK than in the US, especially when the governing party has such a large majority.
The banning of under-16s from social media has widespread support across the parties in Parliament.
It’s overwhelmingly supported action.
The technical incoherence doesn’t matter. What matters is being able to say “you can’t use Snapchat” and then they say “my friend xxx uses it” you can say “xxx’s parent are delinquent”
This isn’t about blocking as much as setting societal expectations.
Totally agree. Setting the tone is so important. It’s so bad it’s “illegal” is a lot more convincing than saying to your kid, “well the research shows…”
Totally. The next step is a national campaign explaining how apple screen time and android family works. In the Uk we had a lot of shock adverts for drinking driving. The same thing with online harms would go a long way.
If its primary legislation (Acts of Parliament) like Online Safety Act, the courts cannot strike it down. If its secondary legislation by ministers and other agencies, it could be contested in courts.
"Under-16 social media ban" sounds narrow. In practice it means building an age-checking layer for the whole web, then hoping it only gets used for children.
Couple of Months latter kids will have vipe coded their decentralized sm version that's here to stay.
When will politicians understand how and why the internet was build?
Wouldn’t this be an amazing outcome of the legislation and prove politicians understand exactly how and why the internet was built?
I don’t think people have a problem with “social media” per-say, it’s a problem with algorithmic feeds controlled by a few giant companies with very little if any competition, showing countless optimized ads.
“ But the social media ban does not stop there. The provision also requires internet service providers to limit the time kids spend online, and has rules about who can contact them online. These extreme rules will take decisions about using technology away from families and put them in the hands of government regulators. “
I’m not sure that “there are rules on who can contact children online” is “extreme” for anyone outside of hyper libertarian circles.
The EFF needs to start engaging with actual real world, because it’s intransigence on the issues being caused by unfettered internet usage mean it is unable to prevent bad solutions being proposed.
Or you maybe need to start properly educating your children by limiting your own devices instead of harming the whole net sphere.
Call your ISP and set restricted DNS' and ban any instalation of software on children's devices. Problem solved.
I don’t have kids, but I live in society.
A society whose individuals needs government laws to make good "choices" is probably doomed
The only possible law is making bigco social media less addictive, and better controls for parents
But maybe this is UK just exercising some soft power, since they have no tech to speak of
Then we've been doomed since we banned children from buying cigarettes, or even further back, since we banned children from having sex with adults. Do you really think banning those things made society worse?
Not sure limiting people access to information sharing, content discovery, and virtual communities, is comparable to smoking
I do believe social media should be verboten for younger people, although I believe it should be enforced by good parenting rather than legislation. That said, we live in a society, and sometimes that means our libertarian ideals don’t work on the large scale. I reserve judgement for the people of the UK, their government isn’t without its serious faults, but less regulation doesn’t seem to be the panacea Reagan and Thatcher sold it to be.
*to billionaires
but snark aside, society needs to have a big conversation (meaning political) about what is good and what is bad about what should really be understood as the 'connectivity revolution' of the last 10-20 years.
Honestly I would love to see a ban on social media in general, for all ages (or more specifically, content that's algorithmically feed and reliant on ads/engagement). Take out Tinder and gambling while you're at it.
EFF are way off base here - this isn't "free as in free speech" but "free as in giant corporations are free to fuck people up the arse".
I agree, chronological feeds of people you’ve explicitly chosen to follow are fine, but AIs looking to optimize engagement have caused untold damage to society. Future generations will study it as an example of unintended consequences in AI systems. The sooner we shutdown this disastrous technology the better.
Just ban all social media, no need for consent, no need for age detection BS.
Big tech is deathly afraid of these experiments having a good outcome.
This is a horrible straw-man of the situation which somewhat conveniently manages to sidestep any real acknowledgement of the genuine harm and its scale.
Terrible article.
> they’ll also lose access to educational videos on YouTube, local events on Facebook, and potentially cut off from distant friends and family.
Cmon, if you’re trying to make the case for how essential social media is for children under the age of 16, please find some better examples. As if there are no other sources of educational content online than YouTube and anyone who has left Facebook knows the last two points are simply not true. This is so weak from the EFF.
> they’ll also lose access to educational videos on YouTube, local events on Facebook, and potentially cut off from distant friends and family.
How in the world did kids ever survive before social media? Miracle of god keeping them sane every second of their miserable deprived lives. Seriously, this is such a bad argument for something that is a return to a previous known good state versus being a new state. No proof provided that social media makes any of these better versus either pre social media approaches or modern alternatives.
So because humans used to survive in caves eating raw meet we should go back to that?
Ah a strawmen augment. This is comparing two specific states. If you’re admitting that the two states of pre and post social media are the same by virtue of resorting to a strawmen then glad we agree.
I am all for it. UK has a big problem with organized pedofile crime, and this may prevent it.
The EFF is very wrong on this one. Some things are bad and we should keep children away from them.
We have parental controls on devices. The change forced by the UK government is to give control to corporations, instead of the parents.
Parents are much better at knowing their own kid's age than corporations are. Teens keep fooling the age verification (pointing the camera at a video game character, using fake ID, even drawing beards on their face with a pen). But they aren't going to fool their own mother, and they don't need to trust ID verification startup with photographs of everbody's teenage kids to do it.
This is a tricky one, but it actually gives control to the government, not corporations. The government now has rules which let them define what social media is and how big its market can be.
The government is, frankly, just better at deciding what's good for most children than their parents when it comes to matters of health. That's a controversial statement, but truthfully most parents are just not educated enough or strict enough to decide where the boundaries should be on their children's health.
>We have parental controls on devices
That's irrelevant because social media regulation is a collective action problem. No individual parent can restrict their kids access to social media without ostracizing it, it only makes sense if all parents together get their kids off these platforms.
>it only makes sense if all parents together get their kids off these platforms
Yes, and the wishes of all parents together != the wishes of the UK government which has its own agenda at play in which to weaponize this public outrage for their own benefit(mass surveillance and mass censorship).
The UK government doesn't actually want what's best for all the children of all the parents, otherwise it wouldn't have allowed and even enabled the rape gangs and sweep the issue under the rug in a massive coverup.
>Yes, and the wishes of all parents together != the wishes of the UK government
This legislation has widespread support among British parents across the political spectrum[1]
"As YouGov has shown previously, such a policy would be widely popular with the general public. In our latest survey, looking more specifically at the views of parents, we find that 77% of those with children under the age of 18 would support a ban, compared to only 14% who are opposed.[...] Likewise, 76% of parents think the government needs to kick up their activity on this issue, although a much lower rate of 43% think they need to be doing “much more”."
I don't even have any idea what the last paragraph, other than being some generic twitter rant has to do with the topic of the thread
[1]https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54969-eight-in-ten-parents...
>This legislation has widespread support among British parents across the political spectrum[1]
Because parents like most voters, are incredibly stupid, and just want to delegate accountability of their kids to the state, not that they actually understand the repercussions of what they're supporting. Same with brexit. Voters want a scapegoat on why their kids are stupid(er), and the government is happy to offer a monkey paw.
Ah, yes. Whenever a policy that you personally dislike is widely supported, it's because all its supporters are incredibly stupid, because you are always right.
It's not just because I am right and they're wrong in this case, it's because as the saying goes, "The Best Argument Against Democracy' Is 5-Minute Conversation with Average Voter".
And British voters have proven that several times over that they're not good at making decisions which is why their country has been in decline. Again, see their Brexit choice as proof.
But sure, you go and personally attack me with no arguments as if that means anything.
I'm sorry to tell you this but you'll have to decide between "The British government is doing terrible things that does not represent the British people" or "people are extremely stupid, democracy is terrible and we must in fact make decisions for them"
You can't actually bring up the first one because you disagree with me and then the second one when you realize you also disagree with the British people. Either you like democracy or you don't, you don't get to decide that based on what route you want to take in an internet argument.
The answer, IMO, is simply banning all algorithm-driven social media, for everyone and not just kids.
This conveniently sidesteps the identity/privacy arguments, makes it much easier to enforce, and would present an even greater net benefit. There is no benefit to algorithmic social media at all, and everyone would be better off without it.
Parents are there to protect their children. The potential harm caused by eroded privacy and reduced control over our devices is not worth the perceived benefits of this policy in ensuring children’s safety.
Unpopular to say, but the government is just better at deciding what's good for most children than their parents when it comes to matters of health. Unfortunately most parents are just very uneducated or lacking in discipline, and no child should be punished in the name of freedom. That being said, age verification laws are obviously a bad way to do that. They should just ban specific categories of social media outright.
Right. Cigarette bans for children are unconstitutional.
I'm all for protecting kids from facebook/insta/snap/etc, they have love hate relationships with all of those, but YT is a bridge too far, is's more a knowledge sharing platform than a social network.
If you primarily choose to watch educational videos sure, but YouTube can give you just as much brainrot as TikTok, depending on what the recommendation engine decides you might like.
I think the personalised content and advertising puts it into the same category. At least, I think it has the same problematic incentives.
Then it can separate the two separate components easily to satisfy whatever the law is. If it can’t then it is social media. A lot of YouTube is not knowledge sharing unless you view MrBeast as a sharer of knowledge.
Some things, like invasion of privacy, are bad enough, that we should protect all citizens from it, independent of age.
This is not about protecting kids, when will you finally understand?
It's both. Everyone except libertarians wants kids to be protected because right now we're harming them incredibly quickly. Also, Facebook wants that to be implemented by ID scans.
No it's not both. It's an excuse for mass surveillance.
So you think the children aren't being harmed? Or they are being harmed but we shouldn't make it illegal?
You are still pretending it's about children when it's not.
So just DNS block them in the UK. They don't need YouTube
Great, you do your job as a parent and keep your children away from them while leaving the rest of us free from your envisioned surveillance state.
He says clicking "accept" to tracking cookies and their 762 "partners"
I have no messages for these under Dillo, nor in most browsers with UBo or a global hosts file.
Uh, speak for yourself, guy.
Not surpised supporters of the regime don't know about tracking protection.
It's always the tech illiterates cheering on the surveillance.
Weird take. And brutally, if predictably, wrong (client ad-blockers, pihole, wireguard if you must know).
As long as you're hysterically foaming at the mouth with enraged performative moral panic, then start with keeping kids away from Priests instead of Drag Queens.
There's no defending social media, not for adults, not for kids, ever.
It's a toxic trap which will do absolutely nothing good for and to its users.
Keep the kids away from it, doesn't take an Einstein reincarnate to realize that.
Hacker News is a social media site, but not according to the UK government.
According to the UK government, YouTube is a social media site.
Hacker News is a cancerous time-waste, no different from TikTok.
You could chose not to waste time here
Haven't found a better place to waste your time?
Or maybe you need a new law enacted to help you?
This is the slipperiest of slopes. I'm all for restricting social consumption, but absolutely against the current suggestions for age restrictions methods. The end goal is noble, the means of achieving it are sinister
Sure, is HN social media?
According to Australia’s rules, no.
The whole idea of this is broken, since so much of our collective knowledge is locked away in YouTube/Reddit. It's making a law against children in libraries because there are adult books in it.
That's a problem. Reddit is already dead, half the subreddits are banned, half the remaining OG posts have been edited into random words in protest, 80% of content is now LLMs farming karma. Maybe we should have built human society on a more stable foundation?
There is some okay stuff on YouTube.
There is nothing stopping people reposting stuff on platforms without social media elements and with proper curation and publisher responsibilities.
Most big YouTubers would love this to happen I’m sure.
This will be a controversial statement here, but for better or worse, Youtube is a modern Library of Alexandria. It archives a significant amount of human knowledge and culture in video form, and for a lot of it, there is no backup.
Big, popular channels do push their viewers to alternative platforms like Patreon because of Youtube's censorship guidelines and arbitrary demonetization, but a lot of valuable content is on smaller channels where the owners may not have the wherewithal to transfer all of their content, much less their audience.
YouTube is very mixed.
Putting short form content on it was a mistake.
It’s only not trash if you use it correctly.
Watch some videos by some racists, you get fed videos making you racist.
It has all the negatives of social media.
Ideal the UK would just make platforms responsible as publishers.
This is the dividing line which should apply for under 18s.
> It’s only not trash if you use it correctly. > Watch some videos by some racists, you get fed videos making you racist.
So don't watch some videos by some racists, and curate your feed properly. I don't see why the government needs to get involved here.
>This is the dividing line which should apply for under 18s.
The problem is the dividing line won't stay there. A lot of people want social media regulated or banned outright for adults as well. The incentives to restrict freedom of speech and control narratives are all-consuming. Definitions will be intentionally vague so that they can apply to any platform that governments want to censor.
Sure. But I’m just not that fussed about online freedom of speech. World was fine before it and will be fine after it.
They are really underestimating the harm of being on these platforms causes.
These platforms are the digital equivalent of heroin if heroin always came with either nazi or bolshevik propaganda.
They are entirely focused on the axe they rightfully have to grind the whole age verification debacle they are not seeing the bigger picture.
The major social media companies are undermining the foundations of our societies for ad revenue and giggles.
Keeping teens out is a huge step in the right direction.
I find the idea that someone would care about their privacy and choose to be on social media really hard to fathom. These things are personal data vacuums that infer everything there is to know about you, if you don't just give it to them.
Lmao yeah, bolshevik propaganda. Hilarious.
Have you taken a look at kids nowadays? They look like fking zombies glued to their smartphones and wireless headphones. I go walk my dog, and not a single kid tries to play with it - only people of my age (40s) do.
We’re raising a generation of completely emotionally detached robots. There’s something deeply wrong and unsettling, and it’s happening in plain daylight.
I'm around kids every day, they're a dynamic group.
I see adults like you describe ...