Give parents control over parenting.
Youtube should have voluntarily removed shorts and the front page or made them available as a parental control to appease the regulator. When I wrote to the minister they used YouTube's addictive algorithms as justification for including them as social media which I do agree with.
We had curated kids logins with age restrictions, subscriptions, and ad free under premium and also youtube music with individual playlists they used for instrument practice etc. We had to shift music platform. I know we can replicate a lot of this with special apps and browser extensions but this was a single cross platform solution that was working for responsible parents. To be fair it is partly YouTube's fault for prioritizing Shorts and watch time over quality.
The problem isn't lack of control, it's the lazy attitude from parents who're shocked that they have to actually do their own job of raising their progeny.
They'd rather abdicate that responsibility to the government, who in turn love the idea because it means more control.
However the world of woods, wide open spaces, kids with power tools, kids walking for hours with friends and dogs circuiting the beach, caves, forrests and fields very much still exists in many places across the globe.
Kids working for themselves down in the shed making things they can sell for money at a swap meet or market happens here all the time and is a controlled risk - they wear PPE, have knowledge of readily apparent risks and aren't being stalked and crept up on by a netwok of bot assisted groomers.
Your argument seems to be a false choice between "either kids play in the woods or they play online in toxic social media hellscapes". Yes it is tragic that some components of a great childhood are impossible now for so many children. But this doesn't imply we must now let them play with guns and matches and razorblades.
I have a friend who works with lots of young people whom she routinely tries to get to come to organized events but they often can't make it because they're attending the funerals of friends who've committed suicide. It's almost unbelievable how bad it is. This genie absolutely must be put back in the bottle by any means possible, and society is trying to figure out how.
[Edit: removed reference to whataboutism]
Social media "feels" like it should be uniquely bad for children but the evidence is low-quality and contradictory. For example, high social media use is associated with anxiety and depression, but which direction does that relationship run? Meanwhile there are documented benefits especially for youth who are members of marginalized groups (e.g. LGBTQ). Don't get me wrong, I think there are a lot of problems with the big social media companies. I just think they affect adults too and that we should address them directly.
But setting that aside, the practical implications of age gate laws are terrible. The options are basically to have an LLM guess your age based on your face, or uploading sensitive identity documents to multiple sites and hope they are stored and processed securely and not reused for other purposes.
But OK let's assume social media is always bad for kids and also that someone invents a perfect age gate... kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe. How is that not worse?
Those aren't the only options. See the comments on almost any of the many other discussions of age verification on HN for details of ways to do it that do not involve giving any sensitive information to sites (other than what you explicitly trying to give to them, like your age being above their threshold) and do not involve guessing your age via LLM or any other means.
If you need to use your ID to log into a website (even if the website doesn't get any of your information) then society is only a step away from the government monitoring everything you do online. And at that point it's up to them to decide whether they want to do it or not, because you're already used to the process. If they decide to violate your privacy there's nothing you can do about it other than vaguely point at privacy laws before promptly getting ignored.
It involves your government issuing you a signed digital copy of your ID documents which gets cryptographically bound to the security hardware in your smart phone (support for other hardware security devices is planned for later).
To verify your age to a site your phone and the site use a protocol based on zero-knowledge proofs to demonstrate to the site that your phone has a bound ID document signed by your government that says your age is above the site's threshold, without disclosing anything else from your ID document to the site.
This demonstration requires the use of a key that was generated in the security hardware when the ID was bound, which shows that the site is talking to your phone and that the security hardware is unlocked, which is sufficient evidence that you have authorized this verification to satisfy the law.
Note that your government is not involved beyond the initial installation of the bound ID document on the phone. They get no information on what sites you later age verify for or when you do any age verifications.
Every generation seems to pick their moral panic and then engages in "unintentional concern trolling" over it. The people mean well, but low quality evidence shouldn't be good enough to condemn things.
Serious question, given it kinda feels like Meta's been acting like cigarette companies back in their heyday, while X is acting like it's the plot device of a James Bond villain.
Here's Nature reviewing his book:
> Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers
> These are not just our data or my opinion. Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews converge on the same message. An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally. Moreover, findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States, has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital-technology use. Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence.
Why did one study in Spain find an association with the rollout of high speed internet, but a much larger international study specifically looking at Facebook usage did not? Seems like that one should even more directly measure what’s alleged to be occurring.
Here's his rebuttal to that article: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi....
I think you'd struggle to find someone more earnestly trying to get an unbiased understanding of the reality of this topic.
There are a lot of problems with the way these platforms treat adults too. I think an age gate is the wrong solution and in many ways it doesn't go far enough.
Some will. But I bet a lot of kids "have to be" on Instagram/TikTok/etc because everyone else is. I don't think they all gonna flock to 4chan because they got locked out of the big platforms.
Then I'd argue you haven't actually been to the darkest corners of 4chan.
Is google docs social media? It certainly has social features and I've been witness to cyber-bullying via a shared google doc.
What about Spotify? It has social features far beyond just sharing playlists
WhatsApp? Discord? MMS?
1: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GVO7sNuCNmNwqVK64PHQ...
1. a user is shown new content based on extensive profiling and a secret algorithm that the user does not control
2. a users activity can be discovered and tracked by people that intend to take advantage of the user
3. the operation of the site is optimised for addiction (or more euphemistically "attention")
I absolutely don't think that a book club or a kids own website comments or person to person chat systems should be included in the rules.
Note - I'm not saying these things should be banned, just that I think it's reasonable to restrict their use to adults.
Sorry but I don't consider WhatsApp to be in the social media category since it's just a chat app for your contacts, not an A/B algorithmically driven carousel of media to keep you hooked in and for strangers to hit you up (unless they have your phone number). However I do think Meta will try to slowly make it a social media app.
If a classmate is sending you slop memes, then it's human curated content from an acquaintance, and not algorithmically driven, unless you consider your friends bots.
That's cause for concern given that people regularly use these apps on short breaks throughout their days, and especially problematic if they're using the apps as their main source of news.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/09658211.2025.252107...
That is how it used to work on facebook But social media was still toxic to teens even back then from the pressures they'd put on eachother, expectations for posting, etc.
But the right answer is still to ban advertising. And I don't mean just to those under 16.
Banning platform owned advertising on social networks is already impossible. If you have any concept that is broader than that, rest assured trying it will create a dystopia that still has advertising.
I agree. It's purposely addictive and harmful to peoples' mental health.
The current situation is akin to having absolutely no regulations on cigarettes.
Personally, I'd take it a step further and ban targeting algorithms for all ages and pair that with strict data privacy laws that make the entire user data industry collapse.
AIM/ICQ didn't rot our brains or attention spans.
I looked into it briefly and the following two is what I found. The rest seemed to just be repeating or debunking these two claims.
1. An infographic that claims we went from 15 second attention spans to 8 seconds attention spans (as opposed to a goldfish having a 9 second attention span (how was this measured?)).
This seems BS.
2. A study that measured how long knowledge workers spent on a single screen. This dropped from 250 seconds in the early 2000s to 72 seconds in 2012 and 47 seconds more recently.
This data shows something, but I think connecting this to attention spans 1:1 doesn't seem quite right. It could just as well be that people work differently now. Eg they're more likely to pull information from another screen or document than they used to be.
If you want to be bold and imaginative, although doubt this would ever pass, any platform that focuses or allows user content, should not be allowed to show advertisements. Then the incentive to have people stay more to watch more ads would disappear.
Infinite scrolling, algorithm based (not timestamp-based), "stories" (short videos), public (non-friend) accounts make up most of the feed, ads selling views and therefore companies trying to capture attention.
A car enthusiast forum is not doing this. phpBB sites get a pass. YouTube is, though. I think YouTube is part of the brain rot, although not the comments section.
FB, Instagram, X, tiktok, YouTube, Snapchat, etc.
Interesting to me is that I pay for youtube premium so I don't see any ads. They even have the jump ahead feature where you can skip in video project promotions. It's the most ad free experience I have on the internet. The comment sections are about the lowest of the low knuckle draggers and outright dimwits.
I'm also a bit out of touch because I quit all social media. Youtube shorts is about the closest I get and that's a mind sink for sure. [Edit: and hacker news which I consider social media without the ads]
I think YouTube shorts is exactly the experience we're talking about. And the youth watch it by scrolling up, not by selecting shorts that look interesting.
I resisted shorts for a long time, but I watch them now as well. Prefer them, even.
The fact we're not seeing ads, and that the comments are atrocious content, is irrelevant--our attention spans are at stake, not our wallets.
Youtube promoting shorts is bad.
A youtube long-form video about, say, car repair, or quantum physics, or a history of eastern asian languages doesn't contribute to brain rot.
The Chinese, take it for what it's worth, knew how to control TikTok. They simply banned non educational content on the platform. You want to watch a 5 minute video explaining the basics of a math theorem, or explaining a chess opening? Sure, that's cool. Stupid 30 second clips of dances, memes, reactions, etc? Nah, that's dumb.
As we can see anywhere and everywhere, moderation teams have to use their power, even when nothing is in violation of the rules. They'll start policing more content, and pretty soon they'll be arresting people.
> "Addictive feed" shall mean a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, or a portion thereof, in which multiple pieces of media generated or shared by users of a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, either concurrently or sequentially, are recommended, selected, or prioritized for display to a user based, in whole or in part, on information associated with the user or the user's device, unless any of the following conditions are met, alone or in combination with one another:
> (a) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is based on information that is not persistently associated with the user or user's device, and does not concern the user's previous interactions with media generated or shared by other users;
> (b) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is based on user-selected privacy or accessibility settings, or technical information concerning the user's device;
> (c) the user expressly and unambiguously requested the specific media, media by the author, creator, or poster of media the user has subscribed to, or media shared by users to a page or group the user has subscribed to, provided that the media is not recommended, selected, or prioritized for display based, in whole or in part, on other information associated with the user or the user's device that is not otherwise permissible under this subdivision;
> (d) the user expressly and unambiguously requested that specific media, media by a specified author, creator, or poster of media the user has subscribed to, or media shared by users to a page or group the user has subscribed to pursuant to paragraph (c) of this subdivision, be blocked, prioritized or deprioritized for display, provided that the media is not recommended, selected, or prioritized for display based, in whole or in part, on other information associated with the user or the user's device that is not otherwise permissible under this subdivision;
> (e) the media are direct and private communications;
> (f) the media are recommended, selected, or prioritized only in response to a specific search inquiry by the user;
(> g) the media recommended, selected, or prioritized for display is exclusively next in a pre-existing sequence from the same author, creator, poster, or source; or
> (h) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is necessary to comply with the provisions of this article and any regulations promulgated pursuant to this article.
There are still other means to chat with other individuals or groups that don't involve social media.
Good thing people give a shit about teachers and pay them properly so everyone is eager to become a teacher in order to address that bias. Instead of idk, leaving it entirely as it is and just whining in a partisan fashion about how education has some sort of bias. I mean education has a lot of women who are teachers and the GOP don't appeal to a lot of women because they want to ban abortion and shit like that. So idk that'd probably explain it simply enough. In terms of priorities what if the massive funding went into teaching instead of recruiting for ICE? Shows to me what's important to people.
Tbh, I don't think minors need to be angry about misinformation about migrants (which is what I got in like 5m last time I created a fresh twitter account), they can wait until they're old enough to vote. They'll still fall for that shit all the same, so there's no need to be upset about it. Might as well ground our kids for their first 16/18 years before unleashing the Nick Fuentes community on them.
Is this a US thing? Maybe it's because your Overton window is flying miles beyond the right-end of the spectrum and you lost touch to what "left" even means?
This. If western “liberal” “democracies” are concerned about children’s privacy then we should push back on surveillance capitalism, not force people to submit government id in order to express their opinion online.
they can socialize online perfectly fine. Excluded from the ban in Australia are among others, WhatsApp, Discord, Steam and Facebook Messenger. TikTok, Twitter or Instagram are not and never have been platforms in which people form social communities with their peers.
>Also shouldn't we ban MTV and rock and roll music in general?
No, because there was never any evidence that rock has harmed the youth. Jonathan Haidt, author of this piece, has conducted extensive research to show that social media does.
By peers do you mean people they know in person or demographic peers?
I'm not going to anecdata [edit: then I do] but on platforms like Facebook I only have friends that I know personally (or at least when I used to use it). Twitter was the opposite.
Oddly the most online abuse I've had is during in game chats and providing open source software but I digress...
The "rock and roll" thing is because "think of the kids" is a perennial siren call. Only sometimes is it valid. I can't speak for everyone but there seems to be a consensus that "social media" can be deeply harmful for some young people and we should not ignore it. That this one guy made a study and it happened to support his hypothesis isn't enough for this one voter to want to ban online networks of pesky teenagers calling each other names and buying stupid crap.
Would IRC count? And considering it's not entirely difficult to set up an IRCd server (you can literally run it on a spare computer or inside a VM), would the state be branding teenagers as criminals for doing so?
I may not be having kids for a while yet, but if I had teenagers today I would absolutely move somewhere where it is not legal for kids to have social media accounts. The underlying problem is that this isn't an individual problem, it's a social one! If a teenager's friends all have social media, he is going to be left out! It is going to severely hurt his life. Even if he never watches short-form video (the main component of social media I think is detrimental), his friends will! When I was in highschool sometimes my friends and I would get together and we would be bored, have no clue what to do. Instead of messing around doing random things, a couple of them would just open up Instagram reels and bam, afternoon wasted. If the half the group isn't trying to do something, you aren't going to do anything. Contrast this with before I was a teenager and before phones, I vividly remember me and my friends just exploring and doing random things. It's just a different experience and I think social media needs to be banned for everyone for it to be effective.
Like the negatives of social media aren't just isolated to just kids and while shielding them from it is generally a good thing it still seems like putting duct tape over a giant crack in the foundation.
We're 6 months away from the news report about "the new thing kids are using on the Internet" but the open propaganda and AI forgeries on Twitter and Facebook will continue to do their work on everyone else.
If kids really want to use social media, they'll find a way. Its more about making it hard/impossible for those who haven't yet grasped their agency. As ever, its about electors and in this case: parents.
Many sites don't need accounts to access, is the account the issue or the access?
Here's a couple of arguments I had to deal with whilst expressing my support for electronics ban at schools including a blanket social media ban:
1) "Since when do we consider it OK for the government to intervene between the parents and their children and telling them whats good and whats not? They know best."
2) "Whoever does not want to use electronics at school grounds are free to do so who are we to constrain them? Also, forbidding things never works let them learn."
3) "I think you are underestimating children; if they see that what they are doing with electronics affects them in any way, they will stop using them. Lets give them some credit and let them make their mistakes."
All of which are anti phone-ban/anti-regulation/pro-liberal/freemarketeering masquerading as a product of independent thought.
I have categorised my opponents, defeating them forever.
No wait hang on.
On the idea that this is needed to “protect children” it is the job of parents not the state to decide what media their children consume. If you want to make that easier for parents then regulate and mandate parental controls and make sure parents always have the choice.
In practice I haven't seen much useful political discourse by the average person, but as long as we don't selectively amplify voices through machine signals and they NATURALLY accrue followings then whatever I guess.
The world will be better for it.
What does it mean for the 1st to apply to the algorithm? For example, who would have to do what in order to violate the algorithm's 1st amendment rights?
Yet my motherland, the nation with arguably the most liberal social media in the world and the least functional school system among "western regimes", is the most socially polarized, has voted in an insecure bully on a platform of hate and prejudice, and is about to plunge into imperialistic conquest, possibly against our allies for 70 years. I can't see how age-gating social media can do any more harm.
Its the least functional because its the most dedicated to erasing history and promoting pro state propaganda.
Sounds like you're complaining that these measures will make it hard for authoritarian governments to astroturf young western people so that they radicalize and hate each other more.
We're all scrolling through algorithmic feeds on walled gardens owned by some of the greatest capitalists in history. Domestic and foreign disinformation campaigns are not uncommon, and have affected election results and fomented atrocities (as in Myanmar). The US, which birthed most of these technologies, has grown more imperialistic and conservative since their adoption.
EDIT: I saw your edit. I agree that enforcing an industry-wide standard for parental controls, preferable one that can be set per-device and must be respected by all social media services, is the right way to do this. Internet ID laws are dystopian insanity.
You may argue that the approach is bad (I would agree) but it's not because of some evil mastermind plot.
https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy2...
> The U.K. Online Safety Act was (avowedly, as revealed in a recent High Court case) “not primarily aimed at protecting children” but at regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse.”
Please do share that information.
You could still argue that ID checks are done to partition content by underage/adult which for many is a reasonable thing to do absent any better solutions.
You should learn to appreciate the nuance of opinions that differ from your own if you actually want to, you know, convince anyone of anything.
They are fascists if they want to prevent everybody else's kids using social media just because they're too shitty parents to teach their own kids that sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me.
In 2050 people will say "Do you remember social media?" and someone will say "Oh yeah, those online systems where everything you said was used to build a marketing profile of you? Where every picture you posted of your girlfriend / wife / sister / daughter / aunt / grandmother or child was taken by some weirdo and turned into porn? Where our kids hung out and were radicalized by fanatics and foreign powers?"
"Oh yeah, whatever happened to them?"
And we can expect 15 year olds to hit the workforce full-time around then too I reckon. Or younger. Imagine 9 year olds stowed away in Waymo taxi trunks with socket wrenches and cyberdecks.
Drinking beer at 16, drinking liquor at 18 for example.
Profiting via dark patterns is despicable, whether it's preying on teens or the elderly. How many elderly people are fed distorted, sensational news and believe it wholesale? At least our teens have learned to be skeptics.
Instead of punishing the innocent to gatekeep a system that is one of the most important innovations in history, maybe we should focus on the root cause: the crappified, ad-based internet that glorifies "clicks" above all else.
We might have to face the fact that "free" accounts have become too expensive. If the cost of a free internet is a business model that monetizes outrage and addiction, it's not working. I don't love the idea of paid-only access or enforced identity, but applying a single standard to everyone might be better than what we have now.
I still believe in the free internet, and I know what I want to do to build it: Make excellent content. Teach good things.
I want to prove the value of an open and positive system.
I have 2 kids and I agree under 16s shouldn’t be on social media.
But everyone then has to prove they’re 16+
Is this just stealth digital ID cards?
Or am I conspiracy theorist?
Did they really need to push the evil lever to 100% just for engagement? Or could they have pushed back on shareholders just a teeny bit, in the name of long term legislative freedom?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/15/meta-ai-c...
I don't think Europe and the US share enough values to do it on a lot of fronts, so perhaps that will shield me as an American.
But it seems like a lot of that coming down the hatch for most of Europe.
Coming up with similar laws could just be convergent evolution rather than coordination.
You also can’t discount that once one country has tried it others that we’re considering similar legislation are much more likely to take the plunge if the outcomes in the first country aren’t negative
/s