Exactly..
They will use any trick or loophole available to keep the reach and to exploit attention spans. Kids brains aren't correct really made for social media whatsoever. Ban is justified and the bar should be even higher than 15 years old, but it's a start.
I have a young baby and no way it touches anything smartphone related for many many years, same goes with TV to a certain extent (these things are like smartphones nowadays with all the apps and programme fighting for your attention and to enrage you). I am doing my part, I for sure expect the government does their thing as well. Exploitators should stay in check and at bay with any means necessary
This feels like you intended to make it a gotcha question, but the answer is: America isn't really trying to do that at all. So we should just give up?
"Damn, handling biowaste is hard and dangerous, what we'll do is just prevent people from leaving their house."
Okay but the conversation isn't "Should we have safeguards" it's "How do we handle the poison?".
To me, it seems pretty analogous to alcohol, etc. You don't prohibit alcohol. You define an age in which you're willing to declare people mature enough to tolerate letting them make their own decisions.
How does one country legislate the content of a company based in another country?
Do you think that censorship is a better solution?
Then if the age verification is in the hands of these companies that is bad. There's nothing they'd like more than knowing exactly who you are.
if algorithmic amplification is the reason then I'm not sure why social media as a whole has to be banned over it.
Every generation has to have a panic about the children.
Where the whole population is addicted and governors risk their political career to ban the addiction, and then get their territory invaded by the corporations they kicked out who have returned with a foreign military and mercenary army, to push the addiction back on the populace
Actually sounds like a not so bad setting for a book/game/movie ngl; sure sounds like a garbage setting for a world to actually live in.
I don't think internet forums are comparable to what social media are today, in the scale (it was a marginal activity 15 years ago) and the impact it has on your own life.
Infinite feeds are designed to game you for attention, whereas the forums of yore were there to facilitate discussions.
I'm sure some forums would also have liked to game you if they could, but they didn't have the scale to always have something juicy to serve up.
To me it's super uncomfortable to expose my kids to a product designed by large teams with the goal of making it addictive.
I find it uncomfortable for the government to yoink any citizen’s access to discussion platforms. I would be more comfortable with other means.
What we're seeing now is fundamentally different that the age of forums.
No? On what grounds? HN uses opaque feed ranking algorithms. It's run by a for-profit US tech company. It uses dark patterns (e.g. shadowbans and unwired "flag" links) that prompt users to engage under false pretenses.
It even has advertisements. The horror!
Yet nobody serious says HN is harmful to the fledging minor technologist.
I've yet to see a logical rule allowing minors to access HN but prohibiting their scrolling Instagram. Every demarcation scheme I've seen is some variant of "big company bad", which is a ridiculous standard for a law intended to prevent the harms that the "structure* of a medium (as opposed to the identity of its owners) produces.
In a nation of laws, an act is allowed or prohibited based on the nature of the act itself. Actors don't get special privileges based on who they are.
Is it?
If so then I would say the term "social media" has more or less lost all meaning.
To me HN is more like an old-school forum - it has a focus and it has a mod team to keep the rails on the discussion and keep the topics vaguely on topic.
There are others major differences like the lack of infinite doomscrolling, or the personalised feed to optimise engagement.
To the wider point that maybe we should be preventing kids from accessing classes of things rather than particular services - yeah probably, but it's much easier to manage a blocklist starting with the worst offenders, and that might be a good enough start down the path of harm reduction.
It’s hard to think of something genuinely positive about platforms like instagram YouTube and twitter nowadays.
Trying to share genuine joy in an activity is still possible but the platforms heavily push frequent users to think of themselves as ‘content creators’ and produce trivial yet popular video clips with all the negatives that brings.
I’m not trying to be a jerk, but did you actually participate in “Internet forums back in the day?” I couldn’t think of anything more different than contemporary social media. Internet forums in late 90’s and early 00’s were something special. Hell, I had more “internet friends” from online forums attend my wedding than I did friends from high school or college… and for some it was the first time meeting in person.
Most of the people on this platform are left-leaning, and social media has allowed right-wing ideas to spread among the youth, ideas which they'd never have been exposed to if their information was filtered through left-leaning teachers and media as it was in previous decades. They want to ban social media in an attempt to bring future youth back leftwards.
- Distract from homework, exercise and family activities.
- Disrupt sleep.
- Lead to information that is biased or not correct.
... Ah, just like that public health menace, the public library.
I don't believe "social media" is actually injurious to youths. The studies saying it does, ISTM, are all confounded, of poor quality, and ride off publication bias. And yeah, it's remarkable that a lot of people on this very thread ago grew up on the Internet and gained lifelong technical skills want to pull the ladder up after them on the grounds of unproven and implausible harms.
In reality, the drive for social media age limits is the latest in a long line of moral panics. In the 80s, it was D&D corrupting innocent souls. Now, it's feed ranking? I don't believe any of it.
Looking for reason at the root of a moral panic usually leads only to despair. These things just have to be endured.
But meh, it's a broader issue anyway. Just look at the puritanical obsession some people have with pornography too.
Young people these days are getting infantilised way too much imho and that's just not healthy. There needs to be a safe environment to transition into adulthood with gradual exposure to all kinds of things, rather than turning 18 and suddenly being a different category of person entirely.
Back in the day, it was much less concentrated and less dangerous than what you can get today.
The message boards I participated when I was a young teenager were mostly focused on a specific topic (a specific videogame or series of videogame, or a specific genre), with some off-topics board on the side. They were contained communities; village-like if you will. If you don't like one you could hop on another website that had another set of members, customs, and rules.
(yes, you can sort-of see that small village feel with some Discord group or subreddit; but back then the media were controlled by an admin, not a centralized for-profit group)
Contrast this with today's infinite feed were everyone could potentially reach anyone, all curated by The Algorithm(tm) with a vague notion of "friend" or "subscriber".
Tiktok is to early forums like meth is to black tea.
So like, I am all for restricting kids from it, and honestly I'd happily see it regulated out of existence entirely.
Maybe double check who owns and controls most social media platforms, and then think a bit if you'd categorize them more in the ruling class or working class.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/01/27/french-l...
> The amended and adopted text now states that "access to an online social network service provided by an online platform is prohibited for minors under the age of 15." This is a more ambiguous formulation, as it does not explicitly impose any requirements on social networks. However, as a consequence, "platforms will have to implement age verification measures to ensure the effectiveness of this measure," the government promised in the explanatory statement of the amendment. For major platforms like Instagram or Snapchat, sanctions would fall under the jurisdiction of the European Commission.
> This has raised eyebrows among several law experts specializing in European digital law, whom Le Monde interviewed. "The bill is legally fragile," warned Brunessen Bertrand, law professor at the University of Rennes-I. In her view, it is based on a "broad and highly questionable interpretation" of European rules.
For example, discussions about recent killings by ICE in the US. This example is one where I really don't want to tie my real life ID to my online presence for fear of retribution if I ever feel confident to travel to there again.
Yet in practice, yeah, it'll be the death of anonymity. To allow ZKPs to take off would be letting a good panic go to waste, right? /s
While I believe the genesis of this age limit push is a good old fashioned moral panic, it's also obvious that the usual enemies of free speech are salivating at using this panic as a pretext to ban anonymity on the internet.
I have encountered this for myself.
A few months ago New York banned phones at lunch and was discussed on HN [1]
We live in times where parents and schools no longer have the authority to enforce behaviour and social media is peer pressure from the entire world.
These bans are obviously heavy handed but hopefully they are a reversion back to an equilibrium that gives our young a chance to properly develop...
...What? They certainly can, if they're banning certain behavior?
> We live in times where parents and schools no longer have the authority to enforce behavior
Yes but the problem is much deeper.
I often observer various "families" with their kids on holidays. The French and the Brits are really a nightmare, strangely the same countries who are now banning social media.
You will often have have an hysterical woman, totally deranged and often alone, screaming constantly on the kids for no reasons. You wish you could call child protective services on them and this is only when they are "relaxing" on holiday.
We know those kids are gonna get into weird internet things and drugs anyway to escape this world. France can write any law they want it is not gonna solve the problem and send them back to any "equilibrium".
Blaming TV, video games and now social media 20 years late is just a way to avoid talking about the real problem.
You'd have skipped multiple years in education, hence you'd be massively more intelligent then the general population that this regulation aims to help, (albeit against their own wishes).
It's not "politics" that's harmful, it's politicians continuously acting against the interests of the younger generation. Trying to suppress the youth's ability to discuss and organize against that is tyrannical.
I think it depends on your definition of withdrawal, but it seems that some teens did experience something analagous to it here in Australia.
I think this counts in favour of the ban, myself.
Which part do you regulate exactly? Do you ban endless feeds to stop doomscrolling? Do you ban algorithmic feeds? Do you ban ads? Do you ban certain words or narratives? How do you stop bullying? How do you stop the race to induce rage? How do you stop vanity take over the minds of the young?
For some reason people are expected to withstand abuse and provocations online, should kids also be subjected to that? In real life when someone tries to annoy us constantly we throw them out, don't allow them around us or kicks their ass but online you are just supposed to ignore it(blocking is not analogous, works differently). Maybe that's not a good environment for kids to start with.
Errr... there are quite a few places where children aren't allowed to enter a bar, or can only go to them with parents if the establishment also serves food.
> Enforcing platform’s safety and educating users (young and old) would be much better to help everyone
It's not 100% clear to me this is true, it may be that the way social media operates is just bad for developing brains. Maybe all brains....
It would be nice to have good evidence one way or another though.
The comparison is wrong.
It would be more "It is like if children were forbidden to be in a smoker room, just because they are not the one consuming".
Yes they should be forbidden, because they do not need to smoke themselves to feel the negative effects.
Even without "porn", "murdering/violence" or other controversial content that can be found on social medias, just the negative effects of doomscrolling on the brain are harmful enough.
Their is plenty of studies that describe the effect it has on attention span, memory and cognitive capacity of kids.
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=14350...
And lets face it: Any attempt to regulate the platforms responsible of that on the last 10y failed.
dyauspitr•1h ago
ekianjo•1h ago
barrenko•1h ago
energy123•1h ago
softg•33m ago
These platforms rely on ads to survive. Which means it should be easy to regulate them. You can prevent them from selling ads at which point they will be forced to comply. If they don't, someone else will get the ad revenue. Europe is already hostile towards american tech giants anyways.
The possibilities are endless. Pass a law that forces all social media with more than x users to not implement constant scrolling, make their ranking algorithm open source, allow people to use their own algorithms, employ robust moderation etc.
Instead we have a blanket ban that requires id checks but leaves the manipulation machine intact so it can prey on adults. Mental health is not the real issue here. They want to be able to track people and destroy anonimity online. Children are a convenient excuse.
asterix_pano•26m ago
energy123•8m ago
I don't share your cynicism pertaining to motives. Well, I am cynical about it, but in a different way.
Politicians are feckless trend followers, cowardly in their disposition, preferring to follow the path of least resistance, and they lack any substantial vision or imagination themselves.
That explains why nothing bold is happening. And that lack of boldness is not unique to social media regulation.
hcfman•33m ago