I teach children. You have no idea how much social media has affected their attention, memory, critical reasoning and social skills: the social repercussions will be felt for decades.
And this isn't mentioning exposing easily malleable minds to propaganda paid for by states that see the UK as an enemy, all before their critical reasoning skills, and awareness of their emotions, and how their emotions can be used against them, have had the chance to develop.
I expect this to massively electorally backfire on the government. But in the long run, it will be more than worth it. The only alternative would be to blanket ban phones in schools, although they'll still be plugged into social media the minute they leave.
> You have no idea how much social media has affected their attention, memory, critical reasoning and social skills: the social repercussions will be felt for decades.
I don't see different results among my peers (I'm 39) let alone older people.
Seeing my family, it's mostly the 50+ that are consistently distracted by phones, not the Gen Zs.
Tbh I've never understood why a strict non-negotiable ban on phones in schools hasn't been in place. This is an easy win with no negative consequences for adults.
It already exists in the schools near where I live in the UK, but only came into place in some of them in the last year. I was surprised that they had been so slow about it.
I'm really torn on this. On the one hand I agree with you 100%, whilst on the other I have little faith that our government will implement in a non-damaging way. However, I'd almost be willing to trade some amount of civil-liberty in order to protect us from the rot of social media. If I could ban everyone from "harmful social media" I would, I just understand that's impossible to define and implement without massive unintended externalities.
I'm not naive to how much of a slippery slope that is, and I don't think the government is pursuing this in good faith. Nonetheless, here we are.
The other potential good outcomes are that (1) make a dent (however minuscule) into current and future revenue of parasitic american companies (2) a next generation of young people growing up not addicted to social media.
The latter has the same effect of trying to proselytise to a grown, intelligent adult. The response is, quite rightly, yuck.
My kid's school bans phones for that very reason. I find the age limit annoying and very easy to circumvent, which renders it pointless. This is a problem, because I agree with the benefits of kids attention not being eroded at scale.
Do you agree that parents should be the one protecting their children from this 'propaganda' and internet slop?
Whilst I agree that social media can be overwhelmingly negative especially for young people, dont you recon that the risk to privacy and free-nature / increased surveillance of the internet is a greater problem?
I think they should be "one of" not "the one." You know, it takes a village. And in any event, as others have said, parents have completely refused to participate in the question anyways, so in the real world your statement is not worth the paper it's written on.
Not OP but parental controls have existed for over a decade in these platforms with little to no uptake.
Now that the UK has had 3 major riots in the past 24 months exacerbated by foreign social media bots, it is all the more critical to prevent children from falling into the trap.
The time for the carrot is over. It's time for the stick.
On a separate note, I find it funny that plenty of so called internet freedom supporters are using HN given that it's terms and conditions give YC full ownership of comments in perpetuity.
I know many people dislike this movement but really, I think it's a good idea. Yes, it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago, but that's gone already anyway. Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me.
I see both children and adults being manipulated by corporations with "algorithms". Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
> Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access
Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
The internet I grew up on was all about freedom and resisting the police state. Now the top voted comment (at least at time of me responding) is an open-arms welcoming of the internet police state and voicing support for removal of the free internet?
How did people become so naive to believe that this will benefit them? That the regulations are only going to impact kids who use the “bad sites” and not start reaching for your group chat rooms and your social news sites, too?
Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit, YouTube, and other sites, too? It's right there in the article. Think about how this has to be enforced: The only way to guarantee under-16s are banned from these sites is to force everyone to produce ID. You think it's a good idea to force us all to produce ID to watch YouTube videos or read a post on Reddit? This is what you want?
I'm stunned when people can't reason about a tradeoff between two principles because they assigned infinite weight to one of them.
Police state=bad. Industrial scale drug addiction in kids=also bad. Some compromise must be made.
The slippery slope arguments do nothing. People are trying to solve this problem; trying to scare them with other problems they may have later--which they can solve separately!--is just irrelevant noise.
Over time it's become harder and harder to deny how bad some aspects of the internet are for people, especially for young people. Whether it's right or wrong it's not shocking that people are more willing than ever to entertain the idea of internet restrictions.
OG internet was not swarming with multibillion dollar predators ready to exploit every single psychological trick to manipulate you for profit. If you can solve this, i welcome the OG internet to be free and open place to share ideas. Let me know your suggestions.
It doesn't surprise me at all. At least in the US, both major political parties fully embrace censorship and a police state. Sure the disagree on the details, but they agree pretty universally on the direction.
Because it’s a lesser evil, at least in the UK, which has a reasonably well functioning government and society.
As much as it pains me, I’d rather have that than the brain rot being forced on young kids. And you can argue all you want about “parental control”, but there are too many parents who don’t care, plus peer pressure is a real thing.
I also think that at that age all the social media sites are a net negative.
> Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
I suspect it's because people of our generation (I'm assuming) grew up with similar experiences to ours and had kids, and want to protect them. To be fair it's worse now than when we were growing up; I can't imagine how awful it must be to grow up in the age of social media.
>Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
There is certainly an angle where people are fed up with the current state of things.
But generally speaking, the overall HN has been trending towards anti-free-internet and embracing the police state for a long time. I am pretty sure people can run an LLM on HN comments over the years.
Why do you think we lost free internet right now? In my opinion we lost it when all corporations switched to mass surveilance. Now we just stop pretending that social media corporations are not responsible for anything.
There are very likely people who's work is to shill... Also here... If not influencing editors of entire sites even. But they are only needed until it becomes full though crime to even think outside of newspeak ;)
> Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit
Reddit is a cesspool and an example of how we're in a post-peak internet like the OP says. If you actually browse Reddit the way the vast majority of people do now (i.e. not Old Reddit that masks the decline), it's crazy engagement-farming patterns everywhere, and not much of a community any more when many comments are hidden by default.
Most people today just like to fire off one-sentence comments; if you seek substantial discussion, you'll often now stand out as a weirdo on the spectrum, and may even draw downvotes and "lol wall of text bro" comments.
Yes, I follow close-knit little subs off the main page. There has been a flow of users away to WhatsApp groups, of all things -- it's that bad.
it takes very little effort from those who control the media to turn terminally online cattle for/against anything, because they are almost completely uncritical of their side of the establishment. pander to them 95% of the time, and you can use the remaining 5% to push whatever agenda you like.
among the least controversial things I can give as an example without getting silently downvoted and flagged, would you have ever imagined that particular demographic demanding draconian copyright laws? yet, here we are, copyright is good now.
Let's look at an actual case study of a police state.
I think we can agree that a state-controlled paramilitary force executing a political opponent in broad daylight, on camera, is pretty far along the "police state" spectrum, right? This kind of thing is entirely incompatible with freedom, and should be a wake up call for the civil society to weed out anything that led to that, root and branch.
Enter the execution of Alex Pretti. Days after it happened, it transformed into yet another partisan issue, a topic for discussion, something that can possibly be justified. Effectively, it was normalised on the social and classic media. Media that, in the US, are pretty "free" [].
Negative freedoms are insufficient to stop a police state. What stops the police state is political engagement and regulation, and that requires a more nuanced understanding than just "either free of regulation or embracing the police state".
: …for moneyed interests to control and influence. For all their problems, I'd argue that BBC is substantially freer than say Fox News.
I feel like you only picked the parts from my comment you cited and then decided to ignore the rest. I specifically explained WHY I am in favor of those aspects you question.
Yes, it is what I want. Would it be, in an ideal world? No. But we don't live in that world, we live in reality. You only focus on the positive aspects of the internet and frame it that way. Try this one instead:
Do you not realize that you are being brainwashed by billionaires? Companies abuse your mind, track your behavior, collect your data, all to exploit you. They want to you to become addicted, to waste your entire life consuming their content, to become antisocial and alone.
This is our current reality. So, yes, if the cost is that the goverment knows who I am while browsing to remove all of that from our lives again, it would be what I want.
As an engineer, I tend to view solutions in terms of tradeoffs and not absolutes. 20 years ago the free and open internet was great. Now I think we’ve gone too far. And more to the point, I think freedom is protected by regulation, not by handing decisions over to whatever billionaire won a cage match.
This is the gen-x part of my xennial talking, but I can’t help but feel like something has been lost when nothing is transgressive anymore. Some people look back and say how can a gen x’er who fought against censorship be so pro censorship now.
A lot of people say this is dumb because teenagers will figure out a way to bypass it. Good! That’s what teenagers are supposed to do. I think there’s a sort of weird like - there’s something distopian about Elon Musk putting his stamp of approval on using edgy racial slurs on social media. If you’re young and want to make edgy jokes. It’s supposed to be transgressive! It’s _not_ supposed to get Elon Musk’s stamp of approval.
I don’t want to send anyone to jail for bypassing these laws or saying the wrong thing. It’s a hard needle to thread, but we need a code of conduct so people can make a choice to break it. So people can create alternate websites to the big social media companies. We need institutions without so much power so they can be jailbroken. And government is just plainly not the only powerful institution I fear.
Because we've been conditioned to believe that every good thing harbors a dark and sinister secret, that every attempt at improving our situation contains a fatal flaw.
It's a narrative trope, not real life. Come back to reality. It's what Omelas was trying to convey.
Why shocked? When the internet got popular and the normies started flooding in the culture of the internet changed.
I’m more shocked in how authoritarian so-called “liberals” have gotten in the last 3 decades. I have to specify I’m a “classical” liberal now in order to not appear as if I desire a police state.
> The internet I grew up on was all about freedom and resisting the police state.
I grew up on that internet too (the freedom part). Do you really believe it is the same internet now?
Gone are the days when one could run their own mail server now because Apple or Google or Microsoft can suddenly deem it as "untrustworthy" or "suspicious" (based on some algorithm) and all your email will end up in spam. IRC and newsgroups have been hijacked by centralised Messengers and Social Media firms run by BigTech. They can ban you on these platforms for no reasons, without much recourse, holding your digital life hostage. Last year, I learnt that the much vaunted "free speech" no longer exists online - I have to fight and waste time with everyone - from the moderators to the platform "community managers" - to publish any factual pro-palestine or anti-Israli-right posts because these are being heavily censored on all western platforms (and unfortunately all English language communities are western platforms). Election manipulations by foreign platforms are also another danger every sovereign nations now faces.
> How did people become so naive to believe that this will benefit them?
So I wouldn't say that people are being "naive". We don't want to live in an "echo chamber" controlled by western or Chinese BigTech corporates and their ideas of techno-fascism. Not to mention that we really cannot ignore any more the societal and political impact of some of these platforms - Facebook / Whatsapp are responsible for causing many social unrest around the world and even genocide (How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho... ).
The negative psychological impact of social media addiction is so obvious even in adults. So imagine how much worse it is on kids / teens - it truly would be irresponsible to not regulate it.
> That the regulations are only going to impact kids who use the “bad sites” and not start reaching for your group chat rooms and your social news sites, too?
Oh, very true! That is something to be very wary of. And the answer to that is to also fight for stronger privacy regulations and prevent government overreach. Not trust the government or the corporates to behave.
Here, you will have to understand and accept that unlike in America, where mistrust of government is inherent in the political structure (the US Presidential system favoured a weak central government because the makers were distrustful of a powerful Federal government) is very much in contrast to other parts of the world. Europeans expect and have more trust in their governments to regulate some aspects of their society, while the rest of the world prefers a "strong" Central government (and thus it is expected that the government will regulate many aspects of society). That is something fundamentally different vis American politics vs the rest of the world, that perhaps befuddles Americans.
In a democracy though, I don't see anything wrong in "trusting" your government more than local or foreign corporates (or even a foreign country - for all the talk about how America stood for "free speech", my experience with American / western owned platforms censoring my political ideas and beliefs has made me increasingly cynical if they ever truly believe in democratic values; so yeah - I guess you could also say that all this is also perhaps a backlash to current western politics).
> You think it's a good idea to force us all to produce ID to watch YouTube videos or read a post on Reddit? This is what you want?
No, I want more. I want us to not be able to use these sites at all.
The modern internet has become a cesspool. There’s some good stuff here and there but it’s not worth the overly negative downsides. Reddit is mostly bots. YouTube is becoming clickbait slop. Social Media platforms are ruining society.
We need an alternative to the internet. Not long ago, we did not have all these things and it was one of the best times to be alive.
I disagree. I don’t have a huge problem with the UK government monitoring my online presence; I’m reasonably sure my ISP is siphoning all that information to them anyway. That may be problematic for some, but I’m ok with it.
My problem is that this info doesn’t go to the government; it goes to persona and Yoti. We are literally giving government issued IDs to tracking platforms to tell Meta, Google, ByteDance, Reddit who we are.
This isn’t about keeping children safe - if it was the law would be to mandate parental controls on devices. I’d stand behind that law.,
I have no idea how successful the US war on drugs has been and I don't need to, because I am not from the US and the US is not everything there is in the world. Just because one attempt to fight something bad failed, that doesn't mean every attempt ever at fighting anything bad is doomed to fail.
I'm not saying the war on drugs has been successful by any means.
But legalization has also been a really disappointing flop. After marijuana was legalized in my state, it has been really disturbing to see usage skyrocket among middle and high schoolers. A lot of people apparently derive their standards of morality from the legal system.
>Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me.
The issue is once the mechanism is in place, the government will surely use that mechanism when it's convenient. You need look no further than the Online Safety Act of 2023, which was sold as a way to protect children but didn't even go a whole week before the government was censoring videos for political reasons.
The end of internet anonymity is a one-way door. Once we're through there will be no going back.
Keeping children off social media, or to a very limited children only social media seems obviously a good thing.
My issue is the UK “free” speech standards seem to be something like free speech as long as its reasonable, doesn’t offend or excite too many people, cast aspersions on those in power etc, in other words not very free at all. And any form of internet registration could be used to tie more people to their posts.
Of course restricting posting some benefit exists as we seen in the US with robust free speech and twitter being overrun with third world posters attempting to influence domestic politics.
Isn’t it already impossible to be anonymous on the internet without flawless opsec? I’m surprised there isn’t a TV Tropes article about it but whenever a character in a show needs to be perfectly anonymous they visit an Internet cafe with a baseball cap and glasses - which while it’s a trope I think it also plays on our cultural understanding that significant diligence is required to maintain anonymity.
Edit: though I suppose the counterargument is that we shouldn’t make it any easier for surveillance states, especially technologically inept ones, to perform dragnet surveillance.
There’s a middle ground between going to cybercafes with sunglasses, and submitting a 4K scan of you gov ID before watching a YouTube video where someone says a bad word.
Yes, I sound like someone who cares about our well-being as humans, and I am happy about that.
Do you know how you sound yourself? A conspiracist. If indeed everyone is out to get us and wants to control our brains, then that's f'd up. But you have just as little knowledge about whether that is true as I do.
> Yes, it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago,
social media is not, and never was the "free internet" we all get nostalgic about. maybe the first couple of years was something tangential, but that died very quickly. since then it's been a nightmare-ish hellscape of surveillance, manipulation and hate.
> Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me.
anyone claiming something like that is happening here is just spreading paranoiac FUD via a cheap and lazy straw man. if UK law starts requiring me to provide ID just to read rust crate documentation or connect to the internet then that is an issue. i would be very unhappy about it. but that is not happening here.
let's not be drama queens about it.
> Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
i've asserted for a very long bloody time that major social media platforms, not the internet in general, should require government ID verification of some sort to have an account. would likely make it far easier for the police to prosecute a lot of the nasty shit that only happens on those platforms.
having said that, these platforms are designed to prioritise engagement and angry, toxic and hate-filled people click more. so it's the platform's fault but as ever they're not cleaning up their mess.
if folks on HN wanna blame someone or get angry then get angry at the platforms for letting it get to where we are today. it's their own fucking faults.
I'm generally in agreement on social media bans for children, but the proposed solution is age verification on all platforms which has a huge amount of problems.
Why can't we just ban the use of smartphones without parental locks for under 16-year-olds instead? That's not perfect but would already be a huge improvement and adults wouldn't be affected by it.
That is pretty much my point. I just wanted to point that out because, next to being controlled by the government, it's the most common argument against stuff like this I see.
This is not about the good of the people. And the sooner you realize that this type of regulation will be used to manipulate you as much as what you fear is happening already the better.
The government is an entity that acts to protect itself. It has and always will fear an open and informed public.
majority of parents are in favour of such a ban, otherwise they wouldn't do it
if social media companies hadn't made social media a total cesspit of disinformation, child grooming and algorithmic manipulation then the outcome might have been different
Right. A lot of "Internet Freedom" is just dishonest Anarchism. A thought terminating cliche that halts otherwise brilliant people from actually considering the tradeoffs of policies like this.
The whole appeal of Anarchy is that The State always has the potential to become Evil. So, at a (very quick) first pass - eliminating The State kinda seems like it heads off some bad futures.
While some of the HN commentariat may be anarchists, you and I at least are not.
Strong worded comment but yes, it's exhausting seeing people here of all places arguint against their own rights and the freedom of the internet :/ I guess the fight is already lost. Remember when people literally went to the streets while fighting SOPA, PIPA and ACTA?
From someone that’s been here a decade longer than you: actually insubstantial comments don’t belong here and comments that show how people’s thinking evolve are welcome contributions.
> Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
Adopting the drug prohibition model is fine, if what we want is to lavishly enrich the social media cartels, and visit upon the rest of the world needless crime, misery, addiction, and death.
Do you not see that the largest companies on the internet are also surveilling everyone and that the massive troves of data they're collecting about their registered users and even non-registered users is directly and indirectly accessible to governments around the world?
How is it “obviously about the kids”? Is it because they mentioned them? I would argue it will impact the kids but this isn’t being done for their benefit, it’s being done to regulate what we have access to as a whole. Slippery slope coming up!
The way this has been pushed through after countless attempts over the past decade, and push back from advising experts, does not feel like it originates from genuine concern for children. It feels like a state trying to wrestle for digital control amidst rising civil unrest.
Interesting that Canada is trying to do the same thing. Seems suspiciously similar.
The idea that this is about surveillance is also interesting.
I think it's important we ask: could we invoke this ban without surveillance?
- identity scan is one solution
But surely there are other solutions? Can't you just make laws that get kids in trouble if they get caught on social media? Kids get in trouble for missing school.. there are other incentives than identify checks, surely?
Kids find ways around everything. Even adults find the 'digital wellbeing' tools on Android and iOS useless. Just look at the multitude of apps available for digital self regulation these days (ScreenZen, Freedom, BlockSite, etc). No single solution works for everybody at the moment.
Regulation by itself is also insufficient. But maybe combining regulation with parental controls plus other measures will be effective. A 'defense in depth' or swiss cheese strategy, with multiple layers of protection.
I do hope we figure out what layers are needed soon, though. It feels like we're running out of time.
Simpler still, a “minor” bit on the phone, set by parents once. All services must respect the bit in http headers, and app stores should refuse to install certain apps. No need for id check
I imagine that many parent don’t want micromanage their kids apps, this takes care of the problem.
I’m in favor of this, but it doesn’t solve the full problem. If all your friends use social media as the fabric of their social interactions, you’ll be ostracized if you opt out as an individual.
IOW its a coordination problem. You need most of the other parents in your social group to also implement those controls.
>Interesting that Canada is trying to do the same thing. Seems suspiciously similar.
Australia already did. Commonwealth countries share a lot in common, and of course a lot of problems are common across many countries.
But let's be real -- these countries are announcing it in lockstep because the US is a corrupt plutocracy, and the lords of the nation like Mark Zuckerberg will run to Trump and he'll have a little tantrum (tantrums that always, it should be mentioned, just hurt Americans more. Everything is in the service of the billionaire class) about this.
It's tougher for that grifter to do so if so many countries do it simultaneously.
>The idea that this is about surveillance is also interesting.
What idea is that? That firms from foreign nations will gather IDs, of absolutely zero value for the country, to ensure age compliance? How does this silly conspiracy work?
Kids motivated will just get around it. But I think it's pretty clear at this point, given the idiocracies rising worldwide and how everything is getting stupider/worse, that social media has not been a net good.
Somehow all the countries are suddenly proposing the same thing. You'd think at least one of these countries might try something different if they actually cared about the kids, like banning algorithmic feeds. Not suspicious at all.
But so has trust in government (for very good reasons). And those same unscrupulous governments are heavily influenced by the very same tech companies people are suspicious of.
And yet you're still labeled a conspiracy theorist if you suggest that their might be ulterior motives for identity verification in the nation that arrested 12,000 people for what they posted online in 2023.
I'm actually very supportive of getting rid of screens + social media for kids. I don't the reasons I'm supportive of that bear any resemblance to the motives of the UK's political class.
I'm probably going down a conspiracy theory, but it's notable when all the Five Eyes countries seem to start talking about the same problem and pushing through legislation. The US would probably do the same if not for the constitution.
Not sure how closely you follow US news, but a majority of Americans feel that the current US administration is not all that concerned with the constitution, so that not really a blocker.
Not beyond the realms of possibility that Meta etc has decided it wants government/photo ID and has convinced governments to implement it
Big tech will act inconvenienced but they will in reality benefit
Just like any attempt by a UK Gov to fix housing: they just make it worse, because that was the real aim (yes I include the latest renter's rights legislation)
I still think we're solving social media from wrong angle. We should fix the addiction nature, so we can still use social media for informative purposes. (like hobby forums) Before the big platforms took over, there was lots rich information sources about tech and programming I wouldnt be there if those forums did not exist. Right now its just bunch negativity dopamine hits.
It's still weird how those social media bans are essentially "anything with chat/messages requires age check".
If social media is affecting learning, then ban using phones at schools, it's been very effective all around world with no privacy risks.
What do you think this will lead to? Will mesh networks explode in popularity or maybe the adults will just log their kids in - and UK will then make that illegal... But how to surveil the parents then.
Personally I fear this will just become whackamole against communication innovation. it feels to me like an addition in a broader attempt to control communications in general.
I happened to talk to a teenage relative about this possibility the other day and she said that she'd be fine with a ban. It seems that it's not as big a deal if everyone's in the same boat. Parents genuinely have a hard time navigating this because drawing a line for their own children has the effect of socially excluding them.
It's not ideal in many senses (what age checks are we talking about here) but its worth thinking about some of the positive effects this might have on the young people growing up in the mess we've made of new media.
When you try to ban people from doing something they find ways to do it illegally. Humans have a need to socialize and kids are not going to stop using the internet for that just because of some law.
Aided by their parents, I'm sure, they will find seedier ways to do this. Ways that are not regulated at all, even by sensible laws that prevent direct exploitation. The parents obviously don't care that their kids use social media, otherwise they would take steps to stop it.
These laws are not going to bring back the days where we all were riding our bikes outside and reading physical books. That's not the way of life for these kids. But it's, very likely, going to put children in a more dangerous situation as they try to find some kind of solution to their social needs online.
Counterpoint - this is a coordination problem, there are studies suggesting that most kids would rather not participate in the whole social media thing but an individual can’t opt out.
It’s very possible that a policy like this could give everyone a new Schelling point to coordinate around, and thus change the default behavior.
We will see! I certainly agree this policy won’t prevent the kids that really want to use an app.
> When you try to ban people from doing something they find ways to do it illegally. Humans have a need to socialize and kids are not going to stop using the internet for that just because of some law.
They’ll do what my son has done his whole teenage life, having been banned from social media by me before he even asked for it, and go out and see their mates in real life !
The evidence of social media causing depression and anxiety in youth is mixed and almost all of the affirmative findings are correlational, so I expect to see a variety of takes in this comment thread.
Personally, the strongest positive evidence I've seen comes from the natural experiments tracking when high speed internet & phones were introduced geographically. Rates of teen depression do seem to topple in very close sync with this, as discussed here: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
I agree that children under 16 should be limited in their exposure to social media but... I am deeply worried this will be used to either limit everyone else's access (particularly in "times of crisis") or may lead to a national identity requirement for accessing the internet. It's a little alarming the tech-minded public has not pushed back on this more.
Ultimately, if a kid is super digitally connected and using social media all day, can't his/her final grades be enough evidence?
I'd like to hear some arguments how we must ban certain technology in school; meanwhile it's plain to see to anybody with a brain cell that there is an entire corrupt stack from state government down to the individual classroom that *students must not be given failing grades*.
Here's a thought experiment: provide an opinion to both of these assertions. The rule of the experiment is you cannot give an opinion to one without answering the other.
When considering how to think about these restrictions, I turn to my 15 year old self back in the 90s and ask him "would you want the government to block you from using IRC, forums, guestbooks, and social web sites?"
His response would have been "go to hell", and he would have figured out a way to get around it anyways. Unless they're actually planning to track one government ID per person in a database, a truly horrifying idea that this project is slippery sloping towards (because if the current design is easily defeatable, then why do it at all?)
Having access to the entire internet, warts and all, as a kid did not ruin my life, it was an escape from the people I did not fit in with in the place I grew up, it taught me about humanity and ultimately led to a successful career for me.
Dave Bohnett, the founder of Geocities, stuck his neck out to protect the LGBT section of the site so that young adults could find a place to have community despite often growing up in places where it was dangerous to be gay, like it was for him when he grew up in a very conservative suburb of Chicago.
I don't think anyone has said more negative stuff about Facebook then I have, and I literally made a platform eager to try to destroy it, but this is not the way to do it. We should be thinking very, very carefully about when we let the government become our parents in scenarios like this when the unintended consequences seem quite likely be enormous and when there's no mechanism for retracting the law once it's implemented and we find out that, surprise surprise, it didn't magically cure depression in young adults.
Social media sites today are nothing like the forums and guestbooks of the 90s. Social media now is highly effective at developing addiction like symptoms as well as driving people to decisive topics and conspiracy theories. It has a measurable effect on teenagers wellbeing and academic performance too.
My bigger concern is the how rather than the why on this topic.
I asked my Ouija board some questions and determined that:
- Select 3rd parties friends of government officials will be taxpayer funded to verify government ID's and live facial recognition.
- Said data will be "accidentally leaked" and somehow a myriad of 3rd parties and criminals end up with this data.
- People will be encouraged to purchase some form of identity protection monitoring service.
- People will conclude or theorize that all of this could have been avoided.
I have some ideas that could solve this without impacting anyone currently using the internet but there are no financial incentives for government officials to participate thus such ideas are dead in the water.
Can you provide some evidence that it didn’t work in Australia? Given the ban hasn’t been in place that long I’d like to see your sources about it not working.
Limited success might be a better term. But if a supposedly blanket ban only stopped 30% of under-16s accounts from accessing social media, that does seem pretty failure-esque.
Tbh, I think that this is still putting the blame on users and not in the actual tool designed to be as addictive as possible. It's like blaming people who get addicted to cigarettes.
To this I say: Hey kids, go grow your own groups using free/libre open source decentralised, distributed post-blockchain holochain-powered https://moss.social
Nice, let's hope they will be using their creativity and smarts to understand deeply how tech works and bypass these or create their own spaces. We have high hopes for you young people.
A lot of reporting seems to state that it's only for "high risk social media". Is that the case? Are they really picking and choosing which social media they will ban for under 16s?
If there was any smart way of doing it, we should block it for everyone. Very little good has come of it. Also solves the age verification problem. It’s soooo difficult to not fall into the addiction trap, and I’m exhausted from keeping myself away from it.
If the operators are liable, they will find a way, it's easy for the operators to infer a users age based on usage patterns. They must be required to close these accounts.
It doesn't need to be perfect, but in spite of that perfect is possible if people ask for it. Don't tempt them. Look at what happened in Spain with Cloudflare.
I like it. We don’t need social media. It is just a convenient way for the elites to collect data and push agendas, and people can communicate in other online ways without limiting themselves to short attention span, doom scrolling and others. TBH I’d be happy that it doesn’t exist.
Quebec has it, too. IMO it should be banned for under-18s instead of under-16s.
Exactly, I stoped using all social media and I feel way better and my screen time went significantly down. It is harder to communicate with some people (have to use email or sms) but it reduced mostly meaningless small talk we can do in person.
When the OSA came into force I checked the iOS App Store and the top 10 apps in the UK at the time were all dodgy free VPNs. This legislation is utterly idiotic.
I'm sick of this government, they won't be getting my vote in the next GE.
Isn't that better? For one, they're connected to peers they have physically met. Additionally, they won't be exposed to strangers or ads that warp their world view.
I still believe that the government should ban unsolicited algorithmic content (so search engines are exempted), but this is a second best option.
Also, stop your BS about a prison system, its not whats going on globally. You are just buying into the BS that Facebook and company are sending you. Good on you for buying into their propaganda. The world existed before social media and it will keep existing.
OR we can try to move this to the positive side instead of fighting the fascists. We dont NEED social media, its a cancer on humanity. So maybe instead accept this BS and move it towards a place that we can all agree upon. I understand the UK political system is corrupt to its core, like all world goverments, but that's not the reason why to ignore and give in to
what the government is demanding.
There will still be social media. Most of the public conversation will still take place there. You just won't be able to use it anonymously (possibly not even read it).
The actual ban passed a couple months ago, after the data in your link was collected. But also, smoking bans (etc) had hugely positive effects on smoking rates. There's every reason to be positive.
Wow looking at your history, please chill. You are very clearly related to the powers at be, i guess you feel unsafe unless uncle sam tucks you in at night. I feel sorry for you at this point...
Same as whenever they talk about banning anything in society… They can’t keep drugs, weapons, phones, etc. out of prisons, which are entirely under government purview. Elect clowns, expect a circus.
If they were really concerned, they'd be doing something about the algorithmic feeds pumping right wing vitreol into everything and Elon constantly begging for race wars to start.
Our governments seem to have just two tools for big issues in society (because they're quick and cheap):
- Nudging, propaganda, posters and automated announcements
- New legislation to ban something
If something can't be fixed with either of those, nothing gets fixed. Shockingly this happens a lot!
Their mates will make some money and lobbyists appeased, then they'll get distracted about what to ban and clutch pearls over next, and the issues our children have will persist and get worse
I teach children. You have no idea how much social media has affected their attention, memory, critical reasoning and social skills: the social repercussions will be felt for decades.
And this isn't mentioning exposing easily malleable minds to propaganda paid for by states that see the UK as an enemy, all before their critical reasoning skills, and awareness of their emotions, and how their emotions can be used against them, have had the chance to develop.
I expect this to massively electorally backfire on the government. But in the long run, it will be more than worth it. The only alternative would be to blanket ban phones in schools, although they'll still be plugged into social media the minute they leave.
> You have no idea how much social media has affected their attention, memory, critical reasoning and social skills: the social repercussions will be felt for decades.
I don't see different results among my peers (I'm 39) let alone older people.
Seeing my family, it's mostly the 50+ that are consistently distracted by phones, not the Gen Zs.
Tbh I've never understood why a strict non-negotiable ban on phones in schools hasn't been in place. This is an easy win with no negative consequences for adults.
It already exists in the schools near where I live in the UK, but only came into place in some of them in the last year. I was surprised that they had been so slow about it.
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I too don't like all this "age-verification" approach, but how does banning phones in school prevent kids / teens from using social media?
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it was the case when i was younger and phones were still dumb. We've gone backwards
I'm really torn on this. On the one hand I agree with you 100%, whilst on the other I have little faith that our government will implement in a non-damaging way. However, I'd almost be willing to trade some amount of civil-liberty in order to protect us from the rot of social media. If I could ban everyone from "harmful social media" I would, I just understand that's impossible to define and implement without massive unintended externalities.
I'm not naive to how much of a slippery slope that is, and I don't think the government is pursuing this in good faith. Nonetheless, here we are.
The other potential good outcomes are that (1) make a dent (however minuscule) into current and future revenue of parasitic american companies (2) a next generation of young people growing up not addicted to social media.
The latter has the same effect of trying to proselytise to a grown, intelligent adult. The response is, quite rightly, yuck.
My kid's school bans phones for that very reason. I find the age limit annoying and very easy to circumvent, which renders it pointless. This is a problem, because I agree with the benefits of kids attention not being eroded at scale.
edit: added age
May I ask how long you've been teaching and generally how big the behavioural change and/or timespan has been?
That's just a long way to say you hate Pink Floyd
Do you agree that parents should be the one protecting their children from this 'propaganda' and internet slop?
Whilst I agree that social media can be overwhelmingly negative especially for young people, dont you recon that the risk to privacy and free-nature / increased surveillance of the internet is a greater problem?
I’m a parent, children should be banned from social media and enforcement should include serious fines for parents who don’t monitor their children.
After the first 2-3 fines, people will magically learn to use parental control and the idiocy of age verification will end.
I think they should be "one of" not "the one." You know, it takes a village. And in any event, as others have said, parents have completely refused to participate in the question anyways, so in the real world your statement is not worth the paper it's written on.
Shouldn't parents be the ones to protect their children from the dangers of heroin, rather than an over-reaching state?
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Not OP but parental controls have existed for over a decade in these platforms with little to no uptake.
Now that the UK has had 3 major riots in the past 24 months exacerbated by foreign social media bots, it is all the more critical to prevent children from falling into the trap.
The time for the carrot is over. It's time for the stick.
On a separate note, I find it funny that plenty of so called internet freedom supporters are using HN given that it's terms and conditions give YC full ownership of comments in perpetuity.
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I know many people dislike this movement but really, I think it's a good idea. Yes, it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago, but that's gone already anyway. Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me.
I see both children and adults being manipulated by corporations with "algorithms". Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
> but really, I think it's a good idea.
> Yes, it removes the "free" internet
> Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access
Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
The internet I grew up on was all about freedom and resisting the police state. Now the top voted comment (at least at time of me responding) is an open-arms welcoming of the internet police state and voicing support for removal of the free internet?
How did people become so naive to believe that this will benefit them? That the regulations are only going to impact kids who use the “bad sites” and not start reaching for your group chat rooms and your social news sites, too?
Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit, YouTube, and other sites, too? It's right there in the article. Think about how this has to be enforced: The only way to guarantee under-16s are banned from these sites is to force everyone to produce ID. You think it's a good idea to force us all to produce ID to watch YouTube videos or read a post on Reddit? This is what you want?
I'm stunned when people can't reason about a tradeoff between two principles because they assigned infinite weight to one of them.
Police state=bad. Industrial scale drug addiction in kids=also bad. Some compromise must be made.
The slippery slope arguments do nothing. People are trying to solve this problem; trying to scare them with other problems they may have later--which they can solve separately!--is just irrelevant noise.
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Over time it's become harder and harder to deny how bad some aspects of the internet are for people, especially for young people. Whether it's right or wrong it's not shocking that people are more willing than ever to entertain the idea of internet restrictions.
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OG internet was not swarming with multibillion dollar predators ready to exploit every single psychological trick to manipulate you for profit. If you can solve this, i welcome the OG internet to be free and open place to share ideas. Let me know your suggestions.
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It doesn't surprise me at all. At least in the US, both major political parties fully embrace censorship and a police state. Sure the disagree on the details, but they agree pretty universally on the direction.
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Because it’s a lesser evil, at least in the UK, which has a reasonably well functioning government and society.
As much as it pains me, I’d rather have that than the brain rot being forced on young kids. And you can argue all you want about “parental control”, but there are too many parents who don’t care, plus peer pressure is a real thing.
I also think that at that age all the social media sites are a net negative.
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> Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
I suspect it's because people of our generation (I'm assuming) grew up with similar experiences to ours and had kids, and want to protect them. To be fair it's worse now than when we were growing up; I can't imagine how awful it must be to grow up in the age of social media.
>Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
There is certainly an angle where people are fed up with the current state of things.
But generally speaking, the overall HN has been trending towards anti-free-internet and embracing the police state for a long time. I am pretty sure people can run an LLM on HN comments over the years.
Why do you think we lost free internet right now? In my opinion we lost it when all corporations switched to mass surveilance. Now we just stop pretending that social media corporations are not responsible for anything.
There are very likely people who's work is to shill... Also here... If not influencing editors of entire sites even. But they are only needed until it becomes full though crime to even think outside of newspeak ;)
> Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit
Reddit is a cesspool and an example of how we're in a post-peak internet like the OP says. If you actually browse Reddit the way the vast majority of people do now (i.e. not Old Reddit that masks the decline), it's crazy engagement-farming patterns everywhere, and not much of a community any more when many comments are hidden by default.
Most people today just like to fire off one-sentence comments; if you seek substantial discussion, you'll often now stand out as a weirdo on the spectrum, and may even draw downvotes and "lol wall of text bro" comments.
Yes, I follow close-knit little subs off the main page. There has been a flow of users away to WhatsApp groups, of all things -- it's that bad.
it takes very little effort from those who control the media to turn terminally online cattle for/against anything, because they are almost completely uncritical of their side of the establishment. pander to them 95% of the time, and you can use the remaining 5% to push whatever agenda you like.
among the least controversial things I can give as an example without getting silently downvoted and flagged, would you have ever imagined that particular demographic demanding draconian copyright laws? yet, here we are, copyright is good now.
Let's look at an actual case study of a police state.
I think we can agree that a state-controlled paramilitary force executing a political opponent in broad daylight, on camera, is pretty far along the "police state" spectrum, right? This kind of thing is entirely incompatible with freedom, and should be a wake up call for the civil society to weed out anything that led to that, root and branch.
Enter the execution of Alex Pretti. Days after it happened, it transformed into yet another partisan issue, a topic for discussion, something that can possibly be justified. Effectively, it was normalised on the social and classic media. Media that, in the US, are pretty "free" [].
Negative freedoms are insufficient to stop a police state. What stops the police state is political engagement and regulation, and that requires a more nuanced understanding than just "either free of regulation or embracing the police state".
: …for moneyed interests to control and influence. For all their problems, I'd argue that BBC is substantially freer than say Fox News.
I feel like you only picked the parts from my comment you cited and then decided to ignore the rest. I specifically explained WHY I am in favor of those aspects you question.
Yes, it is what I want. Would it be, in an ideal world? No. But we don't live in that world, we live in reality. You only focus on the positive aspects of the internet and frame it that way. Try this one instead:
Do you not realize that you are being brainwashed by billionaires? Companies abuse your mind, track your behavior, collect your data, all to exploit you. They want to you to become addicted, to waste your entire life consuming their content, to become antisocial and alone.
This is our current reality. So, yes, if the cost is that the goverment knows who I am while browsing to remove all of that from our lives again, it would be what I want.
As an engineer, I tend to view solutions in terms of tradeoffs and not absolutes. 20 years ago the free and open internet was great. Now I think we’ve gone too far. And more to the point, I think freedom is protected by regulation, not by handing decisions over to whatever billionaire won a cage match.
This is the gen-x part of my xennial talking, but I can’t help but feel like something has been lost when nothing is transgressive anymore. Some people look back and say how can a gen x’er who fought against censorship be so pro censorship now.
A lot of people say this is dumb because teenagers will figure out a way to bypass it. Good! That’s what teenagers are supposed to do. I think there’s a sort of weird like - there’s something distopian about Elon Musk putting his stamp of approval on using edgy racial slurs on social media. If you’re young and want to make edgy jokes. It’s supposed to be transgressive! It’s _not_ supposed to get Elon Musk’s stamp of approval.
I don’t want to send anyone to jail for bypassing these laws or saying the wrong thing. It’s a hard needle to thread, but we need a code of conduct so people can make a choice to break it. So people can create alternate websites to the big social media companies. We need institutions without so much power so they can be jailbroken. And government is just plainly not the only powerful institution I fear.
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The internet as it is sucks in no uncertain terms.
While I dislike some of those regulations, I have no will to fight for the status quo.
> Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit, YouTube, and other sites, too?
Consider that I have a profound hatred for both YouTube and Reddit.
Why should I care?
Because we've been conditioned to believe that every good thing harbors a dark and sinister secret, that every attempt at improving our situation contains a fatal flaw.
It's a narrative trope, not real life. Come back to reality. It's what Omelas was trying to convey.
The posters account is 89 days old, it's a shill.
Why shocked? When the internet got popular and the normies started flooding in the culture of the internet changed.
I’m more shocked in how authoritarian so-called “liberals” have gotten in the last 3 decades. I have to specify I’m a “classical” liberal now in order to not appear as if I desire a police state.
> The internet I grew up on was all about freedom and resisting the police state.
I grew up on that internet too (the freedom part). Do you really believe it is the same internet now?
Gone are the days when one could run their own mail server now because Apple or Google or Microsoft can suddenly deem it as "untrustworthy" or "suspicious" (based on some algorithm) and all your email will end up in spam. IRC and newsgroups have been hijacked by centralised Messengers and Social Media firms run by BigTech. They can ban you on these platforms for no reasons, without much recourse, holding your digital life hostage. Last year, I learnt that the much vaunted "free speech" no longer exists online - I have to fight and waste time with everyone - from the moderators to the platform "community managers" - to publish any factual pro-palestine or anti-Israli-right posts because these are being heavily censored on all western platforms (and unfortunately all English language communities are western platforms). Election manipulations by foreign platforms are also another danger every sovereign nations now faces.
> How did people become so naive to believe that this will benefit them?
So I wouldn't say that people are being "naive". We don't want to live in an "echo chamber" controlled by western or Chinese BigTech corporates and their ideas of techno-fascism. Not to mention that we really cannot ignore any more the societal and political impact of some of these platforms - Facebook / Whatsapp are responsible for causing many social unrest around the world and even genocide (How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho... ).
The negative psychological impact of social media addiction is so obvious even in adults. So imagine how much worse it is on kids / teens - it truly would be irresponsible to not regulate it.
> That the regulations are only going to impact kids who use the “bad sites” and not start reaching for your group chat rooms and your social news sites, too?
Oh, very true! That is something to be very wary of. And the answer to that is to also fight for stronger privacy regulations and prevent government overreach. Not trust the government or the corporates to behave.
Here, you will have to understand and accept that unlike in America, where mistrust of government is inherent in the political structure (the US Presidential system favoured a weak central government because the makers were distrustful of a powerful Federal government) is very much in contrast to other parts of the world. Europeans expect and have more trust in their governments to regulate some aspects of their society, while the rest of the world prefers a "strong" Central government (and thus it is expected that the government will regulate many aspects of society). That is something fundamentally different vis American politics vs the rest of the world, that perhaps befuddles Americans.
In a democracy though, I don't see anything wrong in "trusting" your government more than local or foreign corporates (or even a foreign country - for all the talk about how America stood for "free speech", my experience with American / western owned platforms censoring my political ideas and beliefs has made me increasingly cynical if they ever truly believe in democratic values; so yeah - I guess you could also say that all this is also perhaps a backlash to current western politics).
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> You think it's a good idea to force us all to produce ID to watch YouTube videos or read a post on Reddit? This is what you want?
No, I want more. I want us to not be able to use these sites at all.
The modern internet has become a cesspool. There’s some good stuff here and there but it’s not worth the overly negative downsides. Reddit is mostly bots. YouTube is becoming clickbait slop. Social Media platforms are ruining society.
We need an alternative to the internet. Not long ago, we did not have all these things and it was one of the best times to be alive.
I disagree. I don’t have a huge problem with the UK government monitoring my online presence; I’m reasonably sure my ISP is siphoning all that information to them anyway. That may be problematic for some, but I’m ok with it.
My problem is that this info doesn’t go to the government; it goes to persona and Yoti. We are literally giving government issued IDs to tracking platforms to tell Meta, Google, ByteDance, Reddit who we are.
This isn’t about keeping children safe - if it was the law would be to mandate parental controls on devices. I’d stand behind that law.,
> as drugs
Because war on drugs has been such a successful policy...?
I have no idea how successful the US war on drugs has been and I don't need to, because I am not from the US and the US is not everything there is in the world. Just because one attempt to fight something bad failed, that doesn't mean every attempt ever at fighting anything bad is doomed to fail.
As a means of reducing incidence of drug use, prohibition does in fact work.
I'm not saying the war on drugs has been successful by any means.
But legalization has also been a really disappointing flop. After marijuana was legalized in my state, it has been really disturbing to see usage skyrocket among middle and high schoolers. A lot of people apparently derive their standards of morality from the legal system.
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>Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me.
The issue is once the mechanism is in place, the government will surely use that mechanism when it's convenient. You need look no further than the Online Safety Act of 2023, which was sold as a way to protect children but didn't even go a whole week before the government was censoring videos for political reasons.
The end of internet anonymity is a one-way door. Once we're through there will be no going back.
I want you to imagine the sentiment here if it was "Russia set to announce social media ban for under-16s".
I would think to myself "I hope we do the same as well soon."
If the goal is to take away mental manipulation from children, them I am all for it, no matter who does it.
Keeping children off social media, or to a very limited children only social media seems obviously a good thing.
My issue is the UK “free” speech standards seem to be something like free speech as long as its reasonable, doesn’t offend or excite too many people, cast aspersions on those in power etc, in other words not very free at all. And any form of internet registration could be used to tie more people to their posts.
Of course restricting posting some benefit exists as we seen in the US with robust free speech and twitter being overrun with third world posters attempting to influence domestic politics.
Isn’t it already impossible to be anonymous on the internet without flawless opsec? I’m surprised there isn’t a TV Tropes article about it but whenever a character in a show needs to be perfectly anonymous they visit an Internet cafe with a baseball cap and glasses - which while it’s a trope I think it also plays on our cultural understanding that significant diligence is required to maintain anonymity.
Edit: though I suppose the counterargument is that we shouldn’t make it any easier for surveillance states, especially technologically inept ones, to perform dragnet surveillance.
There’s a middle ground between going to cybercafes with sunglasses, and submitting a 4K scan of you gov ID before watching a YouTube video where someone says a bad word.
"Yes, it will lead to mass surveillance but who cares anyway? You can't just argue against that, that's anarchism!"
Do you know how you sound? Stop falling for these tactics, no one is caring for the children while making these laws.
Yes, I sound like someone who cares about our well-being as humans, and I am happy about that.
Do you know how you sound yourself? A conspiracist. If indeed everyone is out to get us and wants to control our brains, then that's f'd up. But you have just as little knowledge about whether that is true as I do.
> Yes, it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago,
social media is not, and never was the "free internet" we all get nostalgic about. maybe the first couple of years was something tangential, but that died very quickly. since then it's been a nightmare-ish hellscape of surveillance, manipulation and hate.
> Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me.
anyone claiming something like that is happening here is just spreading paranoiac FUD via a cheap and lazy straw man. if UK law starts requiring me to provide ID just to read rust crate documentation or connect to the internet then that is an issue. i would be very unhappy about it. but that is not happening here.
let's not be drama queens about it.
> Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
i've asserted for a very long bloody time that major social media platforms, not the internet in general, should require government ID verification of some sort to have an account. would likely make it far easier for the police to prosecute a lot of the nasty shit that only happens on those platforms.
having said that, these platforms are designed to prioritise engagement and angry, toxic and hate-filled people click more. so it's the platform's fault but as ever they're not cleaning up their mess.
if folks on HN wanna blame someone or get angry then get angry at the platforms for letting it get to where we are today. it's their own fucking faults.
>Yes, it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago, but that's gone already anyway.
The "free" internet is there, just the same as before. The proportion of people using it in the way they used to might have changed.
I'm generally in agreement on social media bans for children, but the proposed solution is age verification on all platforms which has a huge amount of problems.
Why can't we just ban the use of smartphones without parental locks for under 16-year-olds instead? That's not perfect but would already be a huge improvement and adults wouldn't be affected by it.
A better measure would be to mandate that social media platforms can only show you content from people you follow, and in chronological order.
That basically kills the business model and would wipe hundreds of billions of $ in capital away
Not that I disagree
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I like this idea, to me the algorithm the most offending part.
But how do you control what a kid can or cannot follow? They can still follow Andrew Tate and his temu versions
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The post was edited?!
> it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago
I’m not sure free internet was ever good for us. I didn’t need to see all those beheading videos.
That is pretty much my point. I just wanted to point that out because, next to being controlled by the government, it's the most common argument against stuff like this I see.
I think the bigger issue was when terror attacks started imitating FPS games
This is not about the good of the people. And the sooner you realize that this type of regulation will be used to manipulate you as much as what you fear is happening already the better.
The government is an entity that acts to protect itself. It has and always will fear an open and informed public.
majority of parents are in favour of such a ban, otherwise they wouldn't do it
if social media companies hadn't made social media a total cesspit of disinformation, child grooming and algorithmic manipulation then the outcome might have been different
It's a good idea, as long as this clown show of a government doesn't link it to mandatory digital IDs.
Any reason to think they won't?
Right. A lot of "Internet Freedom" is just dishonest Anarchism. A thought terminating cliche that halts otherwise brilliant people from actually considering the tradeoffs of policies like this.
The whole appeal of Anarchy is that The State always has the potential to become Evil. So, at a (very quick) first pass - eliminating The State kinda seems like it heads off some bad futures.
While some of the HN commentariat may be anarchists, you and I at least are not.
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Strong worded comment but yes, it's exhausting seeing people here of all places arguint against their own rights and the freedom of the internet :/ I guess the fight is already lost. Remember when people literally went to the streets while fighting SOPA, PIPA and ACTA?
From someone that’s been here a decade longer than you: actually insubstantial comments don’t belong here and comments that show how people’s thinking evolve are welcome contributions.
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> Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
Adopting the drug prohibition model is fine, if what we want is to lavishly enrich the social media cartels, and visit upon the rest of the world needless crime, misery, addiction, and death.
Obviously OP is not
Arguing about whether this is good or effective for kids or not is irrelevant. This isn't about kids at all. It's about surveillance.
Regardless of the underlying motives and surveillance outcomes, it will surely affect the kids too. So it's worth discussing.
No one is saying we should not discuss it, but discussing it in the context of the kids is a red herring. It will affect everyone.
Do you not see that the largest companies on the internet are also surveilling everyone and that the massive troves of data they're collecting about their registered users and even non-registered users is directly and indirectly accessible to governments around the world?
Doesn’t that prove their point?
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100%, anti-privacy and surveillance laws have always been wrapped in child protection and public safety.
And yet the vast majority of parents are in favour of a ban.
vast majority of parents are in favor of banning plenty of things, including some that you like, need, or simply don't find objectable.
This is obviously about kids. The problem is it requires surveillance. You don't get to decide what it's not about.
How is it “obviously about the kids”? Is it because they mentioned them? I would argue it will impact the kids but this isn’t being done for their benefit, it’s being done to regulate what we have access to as a whole. Slippery slope coming up!
It will apply to everyone once you have to prove you are over 16. Kids are just the excuse.
The way this has been pushed through after countless attempts over the past decade, and push back from advising experts, does not feel like it originates from genuine concern for children. It feels like a state trying to wrestle for digital control amidst rising civil unrest.
Almost anything can be made "about the kids" with the right framing.
and why do you get to decide what it "is about"?
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Riddle me this. If you have to verify yourself to prove you are over 16, did that just deanonymize you? Yes.
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Interesting that Canada is trying to do the same thing. Seems suspiciously similar.
The idea that this is about surveillance is also interesting.
I think it's important we ask: could we invoke this ban without surveillance?
- identity scan is one solution
But surely there are other solutions? Can't you just make laws that get kids in trouble if they get caught on social media? Kids get in trouble for missing school.. there are other incentives than identify checks, surely?
The solution is parental controls on devices.
The solution is parenting, period. Do not give your kid an Internet-connected device before they are ready for it.
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Surely we know by now that this is not enough?
Kids find ways around everything. Even adults find the 'digital wellbeing' tools on Android and iOS useless. Just look at the multitude of apps available for digital self regulation these days (ScreenZen, Freedom, BlockSite, etc). No single solution works for everybody at the moment.
Regulation by itself is also insufficient. But maybe combining regulation with parental controls plus other measures will be effective. A 'defense in depth' or swiss cheese strategy, with multiple layers of protection.
I do hope we figure out what layers are needed soon, though. It feels like we're running out of time.
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Simpler still, a “minor” bit on the phone, set by parents once. All services must respect the bit in http headers, and app stores should refuse to install certain apps. No need for id check
I imagine that many parent don’t want micromanage their kids apps, this takes care of the problem.
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I’m in favor of this, but it doesn’t solve the full problem. If all your friends use social media as the fabric of their social interactions, you’ll be ostracized if you opt out as an individual.
IOW its a coordination problem. You need most of the other parents in your social group to also implement those controls.
This
The government shouldn't be parenting other parents kids
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>Interesting that Canada is trying to do the same thing. Seems suspiciously similar.
Australia already did. Commonwealth countries share a lot in common, and of course a lot of problems are common across many countries.
But let's be real -- these countries are announcing it in lockstep because the US is a corrupt plutocracy, and the lords of the nation like Mark Zuckerberg will run to Trump and he'll have a little tantrum (tantrums that always, it should be mentioned, just hurt Americans more. Everything is in the service of the billionaire class) about this.
It's tougher for that grifter to do so if so many countries do it simultaneously.
>The idea that this is about surveillance is also interesting.
What idea is that? That firms from foreign nations will gather IDs, of absolutely zero value for the country, to ensure age compliance? How does this silly conspiracy work?
Kids motivated will just get around it. But I think it's pretty clear at this point, given the idiocracies rising worldwide and how everything is getting stupider/worse, that social media has not been a net good.
Somehow all the countries are suddenly proposing the same thing. You'd think at least one of these countries might try something different if they actually cared about the kids, like banning algorithmic feeds. Not suspicious at all.
I don’t think it’s suspicious - I think trust globally in tech companies has been deteriorating at the same pace in most western countries is all.
But so has trust in government (for very good reasons). And those same unscrupulous governments are heavily influenced by the very same tech companies people are suspicious of.
Then why not regulate some other aspect of those companies? Surely the harms extend beyond children?
This is not about tech companies, they will shrug it off. It’s about containing protest and suppressing public speech.
And yet you're still labeled a conspiracy theorist if you suggest that their might be ulterior motives for identity verification in the nation that arrested 12,000 people for what they posted online in 2023.
I'm actually very supportive of getting rid of screens + social media for kids. I don't the reasons I'm supportive of that bear any resemblance to the motives of the UK's political class.
I'm probably going down a conspiracy theory, but it's notable when all the Five Eyes countries seem to start talking about the same problem and pushing through legislation. The US would probably do the same if not for the constitution.
Not sure how closely you follow US news, but a majority of Americans feel that the current US administration is not all that concerned with the constitution, so that not really a blocker.
I think there's some sort of 'social pressure' between nations. Policies during the COVID-19 era come to mind.
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Not beyond the realms of possibility that Meta etc has decided it wants government/photo ID and has convinced governments to implement it
Big tech will act inconvenienced but they will in reality benefit
Just like any attempt by a UK Gov to fix housing: they just make it worse, because that was the real aim (yes I include the latest renter's rights legislation)
Everyone started using Claude for coding at the same time, something is suspicious!
I still think we're solving social media from wrong angle. We should fix the addiction nature, so we can still use social media for informative purposes. (like hobby forums) Before the big platforms took over, there was lots rich information sources about tech and programming I wouldnt be there if those forums did not exist. Right now its just bunch negativity dopamine hits.
It's still weird how those social media bans are essentially "anything with chat/messages requires age check".
If social media is affecting learning, then ban using phones at schools, it's been very effective all around world with no privacy risks.
What do you think this will lead to? Will mesh networks explode in popularity or maybe the adults will just log their kids in - and UK will then make that illegal... But how to surveil the parents then.
Personally I fear this will just become whackamole against communication innovation. it feels to me like an addition in a broader attempt to control communications in general.
I happened to talk to a teenage relative about this possibility the other day and she said that she'd be fine with a ban. It seems that it's not as big a deal if everyone's in the same boat. Parents genuinely have a hard time navigating this because drawing a line for their own children has the effect of socially excluding them.
It's not ideal in many senses (what age checks are we talking about here) but its worth thinking about some of the positive effects this might have on the young people growing up in the mess we've made of new media.
When you try to ban people from doing something they find ways to do it illegally. Humans have a need to socialize and kids are not going to stop using the internet for that just because of some law.
Aided by their parents, I'm sure, they will find seedier ways to do this. Ways that are not regulated at all, even by sensible laws that prevent direct exploitation. The parents obviously don't care that their kids use social media, otherwise they would take steps to stop it.
These laws are not going to bring back the days where we all were riding our bikes outside and reading physical books. That's not the way of life for these kids. But it's, very likely, going to put children in a more dangerous situation as they try to find some kind of solution to their social needs online.
Counterpoint - this is a coordination problem, there are studies suggesting that most kids would rather not participate in the whole social media thing but an individual can’t opt out.
It’s very possible that a policy like this could give everyone a new Schelling point to coordinate around, and thus change the default behavior.
We will see! I certainly agree this policy won’t prevent the kids that really want to use an app.
> When you try to ban people from doing something they find ways to do it illegally. Humans have a need to socialize and kids are not going to stop using the internet for that just because of some law.
They’ll do what my son has done his whole teenage life, having been banned from social media by me before he even asked for it, and go out and see their mates in real life !
The evidence of social media causing depression and anxiety in youth is mixed and almost all of the affirmative findings are correlational, so I expect to see a variety of takes in this comment thread.
Personally, the strongest positive evidence I've seen comes from the natural experiments tracking when high speed internet & phones were introduced geographically. Rates of teen depression do seem to topple in very close sync with this, as discussed here: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
I agree that children under 16 should be limited in their exposure to social media but... I am deeply worried this will be used to either limit everyone else's access (particularly in "times of crisis") or may lead to a national identity requirement for accessing the internet. It's a little alarming the tech-minded public has not pushed back on this more.
Yeah where are the site banners? We had more for BLM than this.
Guess gone are the days of net neutrality and privacy protests by devs.
Ultimately, if a kid is super digitally connected and using social media all day, can't his/her final grades be enough evidence?
I'd like to hear some arguments how we must ban certain technology in school; meanwhile it's plain to see to anybody with a brain cell that there is an entire corrupt stack from state government down to the individual classroom that *students must not be given failing grades*.
Here's a thought experiment: provide an opinion to both of these assertions. The rule of the experiment is you cannot give an opinion to one without answering the other.
- We should ban social media in school
- We should ban failing grades in school
Password to bypass the Magna Carta and hundreds of years of reserving power to the British people: “Its4TheKids”
I'm absolutely fine with a social media ban for under 16s.
And completely against it actually meaning strong identification of over 16s.
When considering how to think about these restrictions, I turn to my 15 year old self back in the 90s and ask him "would you want the government to block you from using IRC, forums, guestbooks, and social web sites?"
His response would have been "go to hell", and he would have figured out a way to get around it anyways. Unless they're actually planning to track one government ID per person in a database, a truly horrifying idea that this project is slippery sloping towards (because if the current design is easily defeatable, then why do it at all?)
Having access to the entire internet, warts and all, as a kid did not ruin my life, it was an escape from the people I did not fit in with in the place I grew up, it taught me about humanity and ultimately led to a successful career for me.
Dave Bohnett, the founder of Geocities, stuck his neck out to protect the LGBT section of the site so that young adults could find a place to have community despite often growing up in places where it was dangerous to be gay, like it was for him when he grew up in a very conservative suburb of Chicago.
I don't think anyone has said more negative stuff about Facebook then I have, and I literally made a platform eager to try to destroy it, but this is not the way to do it. We should be thinking very, very carefully about when we let the government become our parents in scenarios like this when the unintended consequences seem quite likely be enormous and when there's no mechanism for retracting the law once it's implemented and we find out that, surprise surprise, it didn't magically cure depression in young adults.
Social media sites today are nothing like the forums and guestbooks of the 90s. Social media now is highly effective at developing addiction like symptoms as well as driving people to decisive topics and conspiracy theories. It has a measurable effect on teenagers wellbeing and academic performance too.
My bigger concern is the how rather than the why on this topic.
I asked my Ouija board some questions and determined that:
- Select 3rd parties friends of government officials will be taxpayer funded to verify government ID's and live facial recognition.
- Said data will be "accidentally leaked" and somehow a myriad of 3rd parties and criminals end up with this data.
- People will be encouraged to purchase some form of identity protection monitoring service.
- People will conclude or theorize that all of this could have been avoided.
I have some ideas that could solve this without impacting anyone currently using the internet but there are no financial incentives for government officials to participate thus such ideas are dead in the water.
- It will somehow cost at least £1bn because everything costs £1bn these days
(NB it'll start off at a lower figure)
A lot of talk about the "why," absolutely nothing about the "how." The "how" is where the problem is.
Dead on. If we could wave our magic wands and ban "harmful social media" without negative externalities we'd probably do it, but we can't.
Sometimes I think legislators think laws are these magic documents which just directly mutate reality.
Didn't work in Australia, won't work in the UK.
Parents will just scan the kids in.
Can you provide some evidence that it didn’t work in Australia? Given the ban hasn’t been in place that long I’d like to see your sources about it not working.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/mar/31/meta-...
Limited success might be a better term. But if a supposedly blanket ban only stopped 30% of under-16s accounts from accessing social media, that does seem pretty failure-esque.
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NTA but it's literally in the article.
Tbh, I think that this is still putting the blame on users and not in the actual tool designed to be as addictive as possible. It's like blaming people who get addicted to cigarettes.
In other words, governments around the world finally found the cheat code to demolish online anonymity.
To this I say: Hey kids, go grow your own groups using free/libre open source decentralised, distributed post-blockchain holochain-powered https://moss.social
Nice, let's hope they will be using their creativity and smarts to understand deeply how tech works and bypass these or create their own spaces. We have high hopes for you young people.
So "login with Facebook" won't be an option anymore for kids.
A lot of reporting seems to state that it's only for "high risk social media". Is that the case? Are they really picking and choosing which social media they will ban for under 16s?
Just ban social media.
I think every country should adopt this actually. The sort of reasoning I see on social media shouldn't be exposed to children.
Alternative title: ID verification to be required for all UK citizens to use social media
Well I needed a good reason to quit social media. This can be it.
He posted, on a social media website.
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And as usual, no pro-privacy or pro-freedom groups were asked to give a comment for the article. I guess nobody objects on those grounds!
I went back to the UK a few weeks ago for an old friend's wedding, and the ID verification process shocked me.
Bluesky seems to be exempt, I wonder why.
Great! Can we ban it for adults too?
And this will apply to everyone once you have to prove you are over 16.
Not sure if true (as it was on X) but I read that Bluesky would be exempt?
If there was any smart way of doing it, we should block it for everyone. Very little good has come of it. Also solves the age verification problem. It’s soooo difficult to not fall into the addiction trap, and I’m exhausted from keeping myself away from it.
It’s pretty amazing how all major nations are using various reasons to force global ID and verification all at once isn’t it?
Doesn't even seem like various reasons.
Good
Abstractly perhaps, but I'm not aware of any practical enforcement mechanism I'd classify as "good".
If the operators are liable, they will find a way, it's easy for the operators to infer a users age based on usage patterns. They must be required to close these accounts.
It doesn't need to be perfect, but in spite of that perfect is possible if people ask for it. Don't tempt them. Look at what happened in Spain with Cloudflare.
Are you saying that with the awareness that this will be used to remove privacy from social media?
I like it. We don’t need social media. It is just a convenient way for the elites to collect data and push agendas, and people can communicate in other online ways without limiting themselves to short attention span, doom scrolling and others. TBH I’d be happy that it doesn’t exist.
Quebec has it, too. IMO it should be banned for under-18s instead of under-16s.
The only problem is how to enforce it.
Exactly, I stoped using all social media and I feel way better and my screen time went significantly down. It is harder to communicate with some people (have to use email or sms) but it reduced mostly meaningless small talk we can do in person.
"Think of the children" used to shoehorn in the police state. Shudder to think where this will be in 100 years.
100? More like 10.
Hear, hear!!!
the party of lord mandelson do not care about kids
have a short cartoon about the U.K. banning everything
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUep-4v_M9k
When the OSA came into force I checked the iOS App Store and the top 10 apps in the UK at the time were all dodgy free VPNs. This legislation is utterly idiotic.
I'm sick of this government, they won't be getting my vote in the next GE.
Fantastic idea. Now ban phones for under 16s as well.
Is it just me or did I missed a notice that Bluesky is not on the list of UK's banned social media?
I agree that there are issues, but won't kids find other places to congregate? Maybe in educational sites?
Isn't that better? For one, they're connected to peers they have physically met. Additionally, they won't be exposed to strangers or ads that warp their world view.
I still believe that the government should ban unsolicited algorithmic content (so search engines are exempted), but this is a second best option.
Perhaps using anonymous registration-free platforms like Session
Yes. Hopefully outside, in the park playing with a ball or running around.
Another headline about the Digital ID prison system they're building to identify and restrict all access to the Internet for people of all ages.
Then perhaps comes the mark which is about restricting and controlling what you're allowed to buy and sell.
Also, stop your BS about a prison system, its not whats going on globally. You are just buying into the BS that Facebook and company are sending you. Good on you for buying into their propaganda. The world existed before social media and it will keep existing.
OR we can try to move this to the positive side instead of fighting the fascists. We dont NEED social media, its a cancer on humanity. So maybe instead accept this BS and move it towards a place that we can all agree upon. I understand the UK political system is corrupt to its core, like all world goverments, but that's not the reason why to ignore and give in to what the government is demanding.
There will still be social media. Most of the public conversation will still take place there. You just won't be able to use it anonymously (possibly not even read it).
it's illegal for kids to vape too right? how's that working out?
(answer: https://ash.org.uk/resources/view/use-of-e-cigarettes-among-... )
The actual ban passed a couple months ago, after the data in your link was collected. But also, smoking bans (etc) had hugely positive effects on smoking rates. There's every reason to be positive.
Better than if it weren't illegal I'm sure. Also I think it is that it is illegal to sell kids vapes. It's not illegal for the kids to vape.
Wow looking at your history, please chill. You are very clearly related to the powers at be, i guess you feel unsafe unless uncle sam tucks you in at night. I feel sorry for you at this point...
So just do nothing, right?
Same as whenever they talk about banning anything in society… They can’t keep drugs, weapons, phones, etc. out of prisons, which are entirely under government purview. Elect clowns, expect a circus.
and what does that have to do with anything apart from diluting the point we have against the corrupt assholes.
Vaping prevalence among youth in UK has plateaued since 2022. So its slowly working.
Edit: as your own source conclude
Cry me a river. At least someone is trying
Maybe, in the future, the UK will thing twice before electing a socialist government.
It's supported by both major parties. Quite strongly by the Conservatives in fact
If they were really concerned, they'd be doing something about the algorithmic feeds pumping right wing vitreol into everything and Elon constantly begging for race wars to start.
It's very obviously not about the children.
Our governments seem to have just two tools for big issues in society (because they're quick and cheap):
- Nudging, propaganda, posters and automated announcements
- New legislation to ban something
If something can't be fixed with either of those, nothing gets fixed. Shockingly this happens a lot!
Their mates will make some money and lobbyists appeased, then they'll get distracted about what to ban and clutch pearls over next, and the issues our children have will persist and get worse
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