UK set to announce social media ban for under-16s(manchestereveningnews.co.uk) |
UK set to announce social media ban for under-16s(manchestereveningnews.co.uk) |
I'm sick of this government, they won't be getting my vote in the next GE.
I still believe that the government should ban unsolicited algorithmic content (so search engines are exempted), but this is a second best option.
Then perhaps comes the mark which is about restricting and controlling what you're allowed to buy and sell.
(answer: https://ash.org.uk/resources/view/use-of-e-cigarettes-among-... )
Edit: as your own source conclude
- 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
It's very obviously not about the children.
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.
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?
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
It's a narrative trope, not real life. Come back to reality. It's what Omelas was trying to convey.
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).
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.
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.,
Because war on drugs has been such a successful policy...?
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.
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.
Do you know how you sound? Stop falling for these tactics, no one is caring for the children while making these laws.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But how do you control what a kid can or cannot follow? They can still follow Andrew Tate and his temu versions
Not that I disagree
I’m not sure free internet was ever good for us. I didn’t need to see all those beheading videos.
The government is an entity that acts to protect itself. It has and always will fear an open and informed public.
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
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.
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.
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?
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)
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.
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.
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 !
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.
- 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.
(NB it'll start off at a lower figure)
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.
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...
Parents will just scan the kids in.
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.
And completely against it actually meaning strong identification of over 16s.
Quebec has it, too. IMO it should be banned for under-18s instead of under-16s.
The only problem is how to enforce it.
I imagine that many parent don’t want micromanage their kids apps, this takes care of the problem.
IOW its a coordination problem. You need most of the other parents in your social group to also implement those controls.
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.
The government shouldn't be parenting other parents kids
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.
I was also surprised it hadn’t been the case. Apparently there were some policies against phone use during class but the enforcement was so toothless and sporadic that teachers and kids alike were ignoring the rule.
Now the rules are firm, universally applied, and have actual consequences. That last part seems to be the key. You can try to say phones are banned but until there are actual consequences it’s not really going to make a difference.
"Parental controls aren't for parents" - https://beasthacker.com/til/parental-controls-arent-for-pare... - 456 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46464652
"Apple’s Parental Controls Are Broken" - https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-parental-controls-are-br... - 43 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36921602
"Apple parental controls have more holes than Swiss cheese" - https://xcancel.com/MichaelErmer_/status/2012515535326527740 - 3 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46672071
And as a bonus
"Tell HN: Attackers using Google parental controls to prevent account recovery" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056472
The schools in my district did it. Several kids ran huge campaigns with flyers and news media involvement trying to protest it, but after that died down the response has been very positive.
It’s not going to satisfy the people who think that all children everywhere must be banned from social media at all times whether their parents agree or disagree. It does have a very positive impact at schools.
There is also a cost socially, which is hard to navigate as a parent. If everybody is talking about minecraft every break and playing it together in the evenings, then it's hard for them if they haven't even seen the game.
I see an opportunity for much more reasonable legislation since this is a thing that the gov already controls.
Presumably you wouldn't call laws against murder a failure because there are murders.
The more regulations are added, the harder it is for anyone other than the multibillion dollar corporations to set up the infrastructure needed to comply.
That small forum you visit and the chat space you hang out in have to geo block your entire region because their operator can’t take on the legal risk of accidentally violating one of the laws. You are, however, free to move the group to Facebook and continue your group chat on Discord after submitting to the ID verification process of both sites, however. Those are the sanctioned safe spaces that have teams of lawyers and developers ensuring compliance with the laws.
This is the future many here are inviting. They don’t see it that way because they’re imagining laws that say “Kids can’t use Facebook” but the actual laws are going to be written to say “Social sites that host user generated content must ensure that all users are over the age of…”
As an example, look at what Anthropic's response to the US making them pull Fable. They commended the action and said they believe there need to be permanent regulations around safety of released models with approval committees and mandatory testing.
They aren't recommending it purely because of safety, they want to add expenses to their competitors without so much money to burn.
You wrote this in jest, right, right?
Much safe system. Very good.
Most apps and sites are terrible in terms of the parental controls they provide - they tend to be all or nothing. E.g. I'd like to have a group for our family on WhatsApp but I don't want my children to be able to join random WhatsApp groups and there isn't any way to have the former and not the latter.
It’s very recent but WhatsApp are giving you exactly what you want!
One campaign I’ve liked is one in the UK to try and get the parents of whole year groups in school to agree to not buy phones until their children are a certain age. This removes a lot of the peer pressure of ‘my friends all have one’.
> It feels like we're running out of time.
I mean, does it? It feels like we’re running guns blazing into something that will be trivially bypassable (hello free VPN to some random European country - remember Hola?).
So the teenagers bypass it and use other sites while us adults are handing our IDs over just to use basic websites?
How is this good?
Freedom has to be more than “you can choose any walled garden you want!” We need more spaces that aren’t mediated.
I feel like we’ve accepted this terrible definition of freedom, out of fear it could get worse, not because we love what we have.
But not to worry, I feel comfortable having contrarian views, because my one vote isn’t going to radically change the world.
It never works that way. The more regulations you add, the harder it becomes to have a small community on the internet. The big companies can spend money to comply and lobby. The small communities cannot.
We are already seeing this. There are websites blocking the UK because they can't afford to comply with all of their laws. Even websites that try to block the UK are getting threats from Ofcom for not ID-checking their users: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1rk690v/i_ru...
The end game of your accelerationism isn't a utopia where we're all back to small communities.
The end game is that small communities die out because the only companies who can navigate, comply, and lobby are those 5 companies you hated. You're cheering on the consolidation of the internet.
> More fundamentally, laws like this are based on the fundamental assumption that both children and their parents can't make good decisions and that the state must instead force the right decisions on them.
Also yeah? Sure? You may not like that that’s the conclusion. Why does everyone say this like it’s some kind of gotcha? Children are incapable biologically of making good decisions.
But yes, I cannot make these decisions of myself and want the state to step in. It’s way too big a surface area.
Edit: why is it you know these decisions should be made but you can't do it yourself? Do you not trust yourself, like an alcoholic avoiding one drink because it turns into 12, or do you not think you're capable of making the right choice at all?
But yeah, it’s not without risks.
But there’s two sort of self-identified reasons for freedom of speech.
One is to get the best ideas on the table. I’m a little suss of this one (when taken to extremes) because speech that costs nothing is just noise.
The second is to make sure everyone has an outlet to express themselves so they don’t rebel. And while I certainly don’t want to see violent rebellion, I think maybe a bit more social and political rebellion wouldn’t be the end of the world.
> Internet version of legalising heroin and installing a physical surveillance state to target the addicts
Whatever this is. We would be in agreement that would be bad. The debate is over whether this is that, rather than whether that is bad. Misunderstanding that makes all the discussion pointless.
I that once freedom of speech and freedom to communicate and freedom to decent are gone they are gone for good.
I dislike very much that politicians like Peter Kyle and Jess Philips have tried to shut down dissenting voices by comparing them to paedophiles or saying this is just about access to porn.
I'm really angry about this. I don't want to live in a "nanny state" and will probably end up voting for a party I otherwise dislike just get this crap repealed.
Labour, Tories and Greens don't seem to care about personal freedom. I do and I'm fed having politicians and journalists that don't listen to me.
Huh? I must've read thousands of comments on this site over the years to the effect that any censorship of the internet would be wrong.
I've lost count of the number of politicians and special interests I've heard on shows like Radio Four's Today Programme talk about online "safety" and funnily enough they never speak about mitigating the fall out from that.
I couldn't tell if this post was satire at first read.First it complains about not weighting tradeoffs, then it follows up with a demand that we ignore the tradeoffs as noise and just push through with the regulations.
You see the irony, right? You're stunned that people can't weigh tradeoffs, then you switch to dismissing tradeoffs as noise:
> 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.
Considering the second order and higher order consequences of regulations is the entire point.
You're just waving them all away with an assumption that they will be solved in the future.
Trying to shut down discussion about the consequences of government action as noise is scary. We've reached levels of moral panic that people like you are happy to close your eyes to any consequences and insist we let the government take control and do whatever they want right now, without considering the consequences.
It's terrifying that people think this way.
> people like you are happy to close your eyes to any consequences and insist we let the government take control and do whatever they want right now, without considering the consequences.
Nobody said anything of the sort. That's the problem with trying to debate this: you're interpolating this stance into people who don't have it at all.
False. The whole point of fundamental rights is that they aren’t compromised on based on outcomes.
“Torture is bad, but not being able to get information out of criminals is also bad. Some compromise must be made.” That’s just not how it works, is it?
This is false, we generally take away fundamental rights when there's justification for doing so. e.g. the first paragraph of https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47986 (and every other paragraph also; I'm sure there are UK equivalents). We enshrine fundamental rights in order to elevate them above baser considerations, but it's not like a paperclip-maximizer thing where we optimize 100% for protecting them over all other considerations. Nor should it be (for the obvious paperclip-maximizer failure modes).
Anyway, the debate here is not over "police state good" and I'm frankly disappointed in all the commenters who interpret anyone disagreeing with them as claiming that. I for example loathe the idea of a police state and I'm quite sure the people I'm replying to would find I agree with them on most issues related to that. But it is not black and white, despite everyone's attempts at portraying it as such. I would love to hear people's practical, viable, politically-tenable plans for doing something about industrial-scale addiction to social media which do not involve impinging on these freedoms at all.