alt Hacker NewsWell, yes but the other problem is this is putting authoritarians in charge of more stuff. I had a comment comparing this to allowing people to eat too much food and that is literally where the logical outcome of this sort of thinking goes - it happens in practice, that isn't some sort of theoretical risk. The more the government decides what people can and can't want to do the worse the potential gets when they make mistakes. And this is further normalising the government making decisions about speech where they have every incentive and tendency to shut down people who tell inconvenient and important truths.
The risks are not worth the rewards of half-heatedly trying to stop kids communicating with other kids. They're still going to bully each other and what have you. They're still going to develop unrealistic expectations. They're probably even still going to use social media in practice.
Replies
These are government regulations regarding kids. Nothing new here, we’ve been regulating what you can market to kids for decades. I’m not buying a slippery slope argument.
As a parent myself, it definitely helps when you can collectively avoid having your kids on these platforms. I can’t express how much easier it is to restrict it and not seem like a kook when authorities are also on board.
Authoritarians use social networks to undermine democratic principles so not exposing kids to that takes power away from them. Or did I misunderstand something?
The government has laws saying people under 16 can't drive cars, do you think that's part of the slippery slope that has led to all of those happening-in-practice bad things?
We wouldn’t have this problem if the tech companies can “self regulate” (lol). But us engineers just can’t help ourselves but find even more effective and efficient ways to harvest eyeballs and stoke hate.
And yes, I mean engineers. Just a few “inventions” off the top of my head that got us here:
- infinite scroll - Facebook’s shadow profiles - recommendation algorithms
Don’t pretend it’s not engineers that came up with these.
It’s Australia, it’s a nanny state and always has been, and much as the locals complain, they also love it, and keep voting for it.
The rest of the Anglo world is much less obsessed with government control than the US is; UK is absolutely fine with cameras everywhere, for example, and has almost no protection against parliament. Law enforcement is much more seen as by the people and for the people in these countries.
We regulate kids in all sorts of ways, this isn’t different. Kids don’t need social media to communicate.
Why not compare it to smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol? You need to be an adult to decide legally you can do that and that makes sense. Its the same thing here.
The attempt is to remove the market do exploiting the attention of children for profit. This doesn’t have to be perfect to be worth it.
What’s more, the idea that this puts children at the mercy of authoritarians is laughable. The US tech industry has shown us beyond doubt that they are perfectly ok with genuine authoritarians in charge, provided the dollars keep rolling. Fuck them, and good on ya Australia.
and the other other problem is that this does nothing to disincentivize toxic advertisement and predatory behaviors they will just follow where the target are.
You know we kids did perfectly fine before there was social media? The point is, arguably we did a lot better.
> I had a comment comparing this to allowing people to eat too much food
We do that for drugs already. Of course, the correct way to do it is not to try to ban a substance or control supply but simply to ban advertising for addictive stuff. I don't think that works for social media, though, due to the viral nature of it.
Come on dude, you are on HN. You probably know that social media is no longer about free speech. It’s a targeted advertising machine that is extremely effective on kids and teenagers. It preys on them so, so efficiently. It’s a technical work of art. A young mind is extremely susceptible to the algorithms on those platforms. Much more than adults are, and adults are already really susceptible. This is what this ban is trying to shield kids from. Not from them talking to each other.
The Social media platforms of today are very clearly harmful to our youth. Just like alcohol and cigarettes are to a developing brain. Why can we ban those and not this?
Now tell us what you think about drivers licenses
The question here is, is social media addictive and is it harmful. If we have enough evidentiary proof, then yes, it should be banned just like we do for alcohol or cigarettes. We also ban porn for kids. And we don't need any ID proofs in implementing the ban. So we have a precedent. It's not perfect, but society knows it's bad, government, family, schools come together and implement the ban. No need for IDs etc and give more control to government.
Some of us don’t mind government regulation as much as your parents told you not to like it. I just say this because it’s usually those types of parents that instill this kind of stuff and their children not to trust the government but some of us actually do. We are pretty happy with the way things are. It’s not naïve either. It’s seriously a problem when people talk like the government is meant to be not trusted.
I don't put much stock in slippery-slope style arguments. If you're going to make an argument like that, you need to support it with other instances where the same group/government has actually fallen down that slippery slope, to great detriment, in a similar enough situation for it to be likely to happen here.
Without that, it just comes off as hand-wavy anti-government fear-mongering. It's telling that you used the term "authoritarians", as if any law that's passed that can restrict what someone can do is necessarily authoritarian... which, well, as I said, it's telling.
I'm more concerned with the fact that these sorts of laws don't just affect kids: they require adults to supply government-issued identification in order to use these services, which I think is crap.
Authoritarians were already in charge of social media. At least these new “authoritarians” are elected and have some duty to people and society rather than just a few rich shareholders.
Still, even the most libertarian among us generally won't oppose restricting youth access to tobacco, or restricting recreational access to hard drugs.
This is not about stopping kids from communicating. The list of negative consequences of being on social media is long and real.
A government regulating something is also not authoritarian.
"Government bad" is not an argument by the way, and also not a given. It's just libertarian confusion.
The "stuff" is already in the hands of authoritarians. When huge swathes of the world's "social estate" lies in the hands of a very small number of individuals with overwhelming incentives to tweak the "stuff" for their own benefit (exerting their authority over the estate if you will), then you're already in that territory. At least with elected authoritarians you have some theoretical influence. Good luck getting a Facebook/X policy changed.
>And this is further normalising the government making decisions about speech where they have every incentive and tendency to shut down people who tell inconvenient and important truths.
You really should think about how idiotic this libertarian talking point is
It would be valid if you had a populace that was educated (implying that when people heard the inconvenient truths, they would be able to parse fact from fiction and not be ideologically driven), combined with a tyrannical government that would be in power and afraid of the general populace knowing that information and starting a revolt.
This situation is pretty much impossible. How can an educated populace elect that government in the first place? If the population was dumb and elected a fascist government (i.e USA), they would just ignore anyone speaking inconvenient truths (i.e how MAGA is blind to all the stuff that is going on).
Secondly, information dissemination is pretty much impossible to stop these days with everyone being on the internet all the time.
The only people who complain about government silencing them these days are racists who wanna push some racist or "anti-woke" narrative, or the brainrotted people like anti-vaxxers. Because in their mind, they live in this false reality where they believe that everyone is brainwashed by the evil government and they are the actually "woke" ones.
That is an argument and worth monitoring, but IMO it's not a strong enough argument to stop this.
This sort of ban is the same as existing laws banning the sale and consumption of alcohol or driving until kids are of age they will (on average) have sufficient maturity to handle the responsibility. Something we accept.
Kids are not banned from digital communication. My daughter can still send text messages and make phone calls.
Kids are not banned from the consuming content on those platforms. They simply can't have an account to create their own content as it was too often abused. For example, my 12yo daughter was asked by a friend to message bomb and abuse a 12yo her friend had a crush on. That's mild compared to some of the stories I've heard from platforms like Facebook, and between about 10 - 16 many kids are just nasty.
I believe that the line in the sand over which platforms this applies to is the ones that leverage account history to supercharge the already addictive behaviours caused by UI designs optimised to manipulate your attention and direct your purchasing power towards whoever is paying them. Something kids are particularly vulnerable to. The algorithm doesn't care if it is pushing you towards radical content as long as you are watching it for as many hours in a day as possible.