alt Hacker NewsFinland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media
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I get the instinct to ban it, but I’m not convinced the evidence supports treating “social media” as a single public-health toxin.
1) The best large-scale work I’ve seen finds the average association between overall screen/social-media use and teen well-being is tiny. That doesn’t mean “no one is harmed”; it means the “it’s wrecking a generation” story doesn’t fit the data very well.
2) “Social media” lumps together very different things: - messaging friends, hobby groups, learning communities, identity-affirming support - infinite-scroll algorithmic feeds + targeted ads + push notifications + autoplay People in this thread are mostly describing the second category (“attention media”). If that’s the problem, regulate that layer.
3) Blanket bans are easy to route around and may push kids to smaller/shadier apps with weaker controls. If you want a lever that actually changes incentives, go after business model & design: - no targeted ads to minors - default chronological/subscription feeds for minors - disable autoplay/infinite scroll for minors by default - limits on notifications (especially at night) - transparency + researcher access to study effects - device/school-hour phone restrictions (where enforcement is actually feasible)
If you want to “end the experiment,” change the rules of the lab (platform incentives + design), not prohibit the existence of teens talking online.
I'm eternally grateful that the social media network that I was part of throughout my teenage years abruptly disappeared from the internet, never to come back again.
Some say it was a technical failure during migration when the company was trying to pivot to file hosting, but it's impossible to verify.
Perhaps these bans are a blessing in disguise and future generations will be happy to not have their most awkward stage of life available forever, to everyone, in detail.
I'm fine with this, as long as they DO NOT require any form of ID or 'age' verification.
Instead this should be attacked from the profit side, by banning any form of advertising which might target children. If there's no profit to be made in servicing said demographic and a law requesting at least end user 'agreement' that they are an adult, this should be sufficient.
I cannot overstate how sympathetic I am to this in theory but the only way this is enforceable is through ID laws that endanger privacy online for everyone.
Rather than really address what is ass about social media, we just "ban" it for folks who we can ban it for. This seems off.
Kid's have unlimited time. They'll find something else, likely pretending to be adults and thus even more at risk.
Meanwhile everyone else gets an internet license and the government every website tracks you ...
This is a classic case of nice idea and the results will be all wrong / not even address the problem.
Noble goal but it ends up being a defacto internet license. All ages need to show id to use sites and services.
I secretly wish it would use a verification scheme that's so invasive/annoying, that even adults would stop using it anyway.
The phrase "uncontrolled human experiment" is doing interesting rhetorical work here. It frames the status quo as the experiment and regulation as the control—when historically it's been the reverse.
The headline is missing an important “looks to”. Politicians and public opinion seem to be in favour.
> Finland looks to end "uncontrolled human experiment" with Australia-style ban on social media
Does this actually solve the problem? Or is the problem something deeper in the human psyche that keeps us addicted to pleasure and avoiding pain regardless of the moral or psychological repercussions? I have a feeling if you remove one vice people will just replace it for another if the underlying cause is not treated.
I'm working on an article targeted at a Taiwan audience titled "你不是人類，你是IG代理," "You aren't a human, you're an Instagram agent." I want to reframe how everyone with their phones out at the rave isn't there for themselves, they've been directed to attend by IG so as to acquire training data for IG visual models. IG can't just order humans around like we do for LLMs but it's easy enough to program our sloppy brains: just chemically induce FOMO, show the right ads at the right time, easy, off go your little data acquisition agents to physically film the required data.
We should ban dynamic feeds that aren't based on explicit user action. E.g., Youtube should only be able to show search results based on search term, not search context. The recommendations should only be videos from channels you have subscribed to.
The dangers of algorithmic content are so obvious, and the only way to stop companies from doing this stuff is to legislate against it
Open Internet dying in front of our very eyes.
Let's not forget that social media are just one of the many scapegoats tried over the past decade in hopes of pushing this idea forwards. And while there's no denying that today's social media have gotten destructive, they're still only a scapegoat; no attempt is being made here to bring them back to their original, non-malicious shape.
Is the social media hate really so powerful that, channeled carefully, it can overshadow free speech?
I miss the days of chatting at home with friends after school on MSN Messenger and ICQ.
Probably best to just ban it for everyone.
The real question is enforcement They tried this, and kids just moved to platforms nobody knew existed
It’s going to be interesting to see how these types of bans play out.
One alternative to bans could perhaps be if the EU created an IdP or something similar, with a fee for each authentication request, and then forced all commercial services within Europe to use it. I’m not sure if the fee should go back to the user or be paid as tax to the government, but either way, it would change the incentives around connecting traffic to you and making profit from it by harvesting data or steering recommendation engines.
Because I do think there’s nothing wrong with the government doing this, just like in the physical world.
And in some cases, we might prefer cheap authentications… like when posting comments, to avoid trolling/manipulation/bullying. Perhaps when doing “writes” on the internet, if there’s a robust way to identify that type of traffic.
Is it really so controversial to ban it entirely? We ban heroin and other hard drugs.
I think most people are better off, and have a more nuanced view of reality if the only news they get is local. Or the updates from people they know always in person.
It's all picking up steam. The thing is whatever the implementation may be, the writing is on the wall that social media's are numbered, well at least its in current form.
I.m sure there'll be downsides to this but, have to say, I'm happy the de facto position that social media's should be allowed to be the wild west is now seriously being questioned
The internet should be 18+, no internet for kids, there is literally no need for kids to have internet access and its easy too, treat the devices themselves as contraband. This way you need no age checks for social media because internet itself is 18+.
Nice try to force digital IDs onto an entire country.
Social media age restriation is just an anonymity ban in disguise. Governments should focus on regulations knowingly addictive and overly engaging mechanics instead.
Meanwhile in Australia two teens I am responsible for still have TikTok appearing in their screentime usage and for longer than the time limit I have set for them.
Welp, let’s just keep screwing over anyone who doesn’t fit society’s mold of who is acceptable. Particularly queer kids, neurodivergent kids, disabled kids, etc.
Maybe it's time to start auditing social network platforms and disallow certain practices.
"Citizens should be free to make their own choices for themselves and their children, especially benign ones about how to socialize and who to socialize with."
It's interesting how few governments believe this. Your rulers know what's best for you, and it's not freedom.
Are they going to conduct an uncontrolled human experiment by requiring age checks to use the Internet (read: surveillance capitalism and Orwellian lack of privacy)?
Never accept the bullshit false dichotomy of people pushing an agenda. There are many, many ways to solve this issue other than the nuclear option of a ban and doing nothing.
Australia, France, soon the UK... All within a few months and they have the chutzpah to suggest they came up with this notion independently.
Seems its just another country coming up with the same convenient excuse to implement KYC to access the internet.
I just wish this was possible somehow without essentially making corporate mass-surveillance a requirement.
Are adults any better? Not sure the ban is a productive way to go about it.
How do they even define “social media”? Do they just ban kids from participating in society using electronic communications? Or maintain a stoplist “here’s what we consider to be social media”? Or what?
I mean, sure, prime examples of what is colloquially called “social media” is crapware. I do get the intent.
But I wonder what sort of unintended, unplanned, odd and potentially even socially harmful consequences it would possibly have.
Ironically, Finland is where it started because of Nokia.
Tiktok was also the wake up call for US and other western countries who found out they lost a part of their youth about the Israeli war on Gaza. Youth thorough the ages always stand against perceived injustice. The oligarchy also want to control that aspect.
People in this thread are celebrating this, though it inevitably means ID-checking and mass surveillance. Australia's ban also exempted Roblox, a platform that exploits children and is a haven for child predators. Also, it's no coincidence that all these social media bans are arriving the same time youth are using social media to spread awareness of Israel's genocide of Palestine.
Social media really is downhill from here. There is already a lot of bot activity (and I don't mean moltbook) and it will only get worse.
This will become closer to truth than conspiracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
"FISTA has taken advantage of the law change, brought in last August, which allows schools to restrict or completely ban the use of mobile phones during school hours."
I find it interesting that a law change was needed to allow schools to do this.
Under 15
Its a very dangerous experiment. Remember: we only get ONE childhood. No do overs.
Wrong. Ban phones. Would benefit more than just children. The internet must again become something you sit down to use.
This is of course a trend in many western countries. With some, like the UK and Australia, leading the way.
At this point I do not think it is reasonable to deny the harm that certain modes of social interactions over the internet have caused. At the same time these bans should not be considered reasonable options. They exist to cover for the decade of inaction of politicians in addressing youth dissatisfaction and dysfunction.
A reasonable approach should not assume that the root cause of this dysfunction is youth interacting with social media, but should consider what lead to this in the first place. Apparently most adults seem to be capable of dealing with this situation, if they are not why would this ban, or at least some regulation, not extend to social media for adults.
In general I believe that dysfunction in the youth has multiple causes and that overuse of social media is just on part of the puzzle and that unhealthy use of social media is often caused by other problem and used as a coping mechanism.
These bans will not be effective and they will be assaults on the free internet, as the bureaucrats establishing the laws are also seeking to control the internet for themselves and will use this as a backdoor.
The impression that one might get from this article is that the ban is essentially a done deal, but it’s not. What exists right now is political signaling by Prime Minister Petteri Orpo, plus preliminary fact-finding and position papers by ministries and agencies, but no enacted legislation. There’s still a big gap between "government floats an idea with broad public support" and "a legally enforceable, technically workable ban".
The Finnish language article about it is much thinner.
Do people under the age of sixty even use traditional social media anymore? Do we have actual stats?
I am in my late thirties so surely out of touch, but am friends with people in their mid twenties and frankly I don't know anyone who spends any significant time on anything other than TikTok. I guess you could call TikTok "social media", but it wouldn't fit my old person definition.
I think pretty much everyone below the age of 60 is aware that Facebook/Instagram/etc is just slop now. You don't even see your friend stuff. You just see slop. I use Facebook primarily for marketplace these days, but when I do scroll my feed, it's all like weird east asian AI slop. Women cutting open impossibly large fruit, fake tartar removal, fake videos of fights.
Literally nothing that compels me to stay on the site like I hear people on here talk about.
Watching people cheer this on uncritically without thinking through what this actually means in practice (the end of privacy on the internet, forever)...just because of some silly moral panic and people being too lazy to parent their kids...it's just sad.
Unfortunately, rationally thinking through 2nd and 3rd order effects is hard. As we see on social media, appeals to emotion drive the highest engagement, and "think of the children" is the ultimate emotional appeal.
But hey, with European countries moving to tie all internet activity to their national ID system to "protect the children from social media" and "ban speech we don't like" maybe we can finally get rid of those cookie popups?
Making Lambi Toilet Paper jump through bizarre hoops when targeting their toilet paper ads to people seems silly now...given we're voluntarily handing our browser history & permission to access the open web to a much more powerful entity (the government). Consumer goods companies combining your IP address and email address together for the purpose of selling you more toilet bowl cleaner...becomes a bit of a moot point, no?
Can we be it for adults now? Seriously, can we?
I mean, if it affects a children’s what makes we think it doesn’t affect adults? Alcohol affects children, and it affects adults. If social media affects children, it also affects adults.
The big live social media was it was meant to connect people but in truth, it was designed to control people.
Banning youth from communicating is just not appropriate. And forcing adults to give up privacy to discuss things is a huge risk and a path to enabling authoritarianism, like in Trump’s America.
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Modern social media is nothing like social media in early days (myspace, early Facebook and even early Instagram). Back then it was a platform to communicate with friends, and maybe even find new friends to meet up with.
Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them. The content must either be addictive/engaging or paid advertisements. Quality of the content doesn't matter at all. Connecting people to do stuff outside of the virtual world would actually hurt their business model. People turn off their devices and go outside, instead of watching ads.
So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine. Probably even Reddit - which does have an algorithm to show specific content - is not as bad.