Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

If all the other kids are on social media all the time, it makes it much harder to keep your kids off it. Would you want to be the one kid in school who’s not online? Would you want that for your kids?

Bans like this make much more sense at a community level. Not an individual level.

If you live in isolation, totally! We live in a civilization so we have to coordinate and compromise to get along.

oh yeah, children famously do what their parents are told. especially when it comes to interacting with their friends. and they never are more adept at understanding technology and circumventing parental controls.

Let's do away with the laws requiring shops to check ID before selling cigarettes. After all, a parent can simply tell their child not to smoke cigarettes and that's clearly good enough, right? All in the name of less government, which is clearly the most important priority here.

For one there is no indication that parents are any more literate in regards to digital practices than their kids. More importantly the constant appeal to the responsibility of parents misses that this is a collective action problem.

The reason most parents give up to regulate their children's online activity is because the children end up isolated if an individual household prevents their kid from socializing online. All the other kids are online, therefore switching individually ends in isolation. What might be beneficial for each household is unworkable as long as there is no collective mechanism. (which is the case for virtually every problem caused by social networks)

Except it's not so easy, because there's social pressure on the kids to use them to fit in with the group.

First, if some parents let their kids use social media and some don't, all kids will eventually use it. You can't cut kids off from social spaces their peers are using and expect them to obey.

Second, this move by Denmark reflects a failure to regulate what social media companies have been doing to all their users.

e.g. What has Meta done to address their failures in Myanmar?[1] As little as was legally possible, and that was as close to nothing as makes no difference. More recently, Meta's own projections indicate 10% of their ad revenue comes from fraud[2]. The real proportion is almost certainly higher, but Meta refuses to take action.

Any attempts to tax or regulate American social media companies has invited swift and merciless response from the U.S. government. To make matters worse, U.S. law makes it impossible for American companies to respect the privacy of consumers in non-U.S. markets[3].

Put it all together, and American social media is something that children need to be protected from, but the only way to protect them is to cut them off from it entirely. This is the direct result of companies like Meta refusing to respond to concerns in any way other than lobbying the U.S. government to bully other nations into accepting their products as is.

Good on Denmark. I hope my own country follows suit.

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[1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

[2]https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

[3]https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/micro...

Social media in the early 2000s is nothing like today.

Yeh, no.

Parents are doing what they can, but it inevitably comes down to “but my friend x has it so why can’t I have it” - so all and any help from government / schools is a good thing.

This is so, so, so obviously a nasty, dangerous technology - young brains should absolutely not be exposed to it. In all honesty, neither should older ones, but that’s not what we’re considering here.

The problem is the kid feeling left out at school when they're the only one without a smartphone and can't participate in their friends' activities.

Comparing the internet we grew up with and the modern internet where a army of psychologists have been unleashed with the express intent to massively increase addiction to everything they touch is very foolish

> Regardless, this wouldn't run afoul of this. This is similar to restricting who can buy alcohol, based purely on age; the identification process is just digital. MitID - the Danish digital identification infrastructure - allows an service to request specific details about another purpose; such as their age or just a boolean value whether they are old enough. Essentially: the service can ask "is this user 18 or older?" and the ID service can respond yes or no, without providing any other PII.

> That's the theory at least; nothing about snooping private communication, but rather forcing the "bouncing" to actually check IDs.

Hopefully the theory will reflect the real world. The 'return bool' to 'isUser15+()' is probably the best we can hope for, and should prevent the obvious problems, but there can always be more shady dealings on the backend (as if there aren't enough of those already).

>considering that it considered fake SMS train tickets to be document fraud, even though the law text never explicitly mentions text messages

That has nothing to do with the medium of the ticket and is all about knowingly presenting a fake ticket. The ticket is a document proving your payment for travel. They could be lumps of dirt and it would still be document fraud to present a fake hand of dirt.

People continue to believe that the "Grundlov" works like the US constitution, and it's really nothing like that. If anything it's more of a transfer of legislation from the king to parliament. Most laws just leaves the details to be determined by parliament.

Censorship really is one of the few laws that are pretty unambiguous, that's really just "No, never again". Not that this stops politicians, but that's a separate debate.

And yet they wanted to push a proposal where the government would have free access to all digital communication, no judge required. So if it happens through a telephone conversation, you need a judge, while with a digital message, you wouldn't have, since the government would have already collected that information through Chat Control.

Would social networks accepting Danish users have to implement the other end of that, or will they also be allowed to use less privacy-oriented age verification solutions (e.g. requesting a photocopy of the user's ID)?

It seems to me like it's either a privacy disaster waiting to happen (if not required) or everyone but the biggest players throwing out a lot of bathwater with very little baby by simply not accepting Danish users (if required).

The wording on the page also makes it sound like their threat model doesn't include themselves as a potential threat actor. I absolutely wouldn't want to reveal my complete identity to just anyone requesting it, which the digital ID solution seems to have covered, but I also don't want the issuer of the age attestation to know anything about my browsing habits, which the description doesn't address.

I look forward to being able to buy your porn surfing habits on the darkweb in a few years.

this scenario can be addressed without digital ID

the social media platforms already measure more than enough signals to understand a users likely age. they could be required by law to do something about it

Some people: these online companies have too much information about us! They know everything about us!! Where's muh privacy??

Same people now: how will the poor company know that it's an underage user?? Oh noes!

Our German national ID supports just verifying that you are over age X, with no other info given.

*Only for Google Android and Apple iOS users. Everyone else who don't want to be a customer of these two, including GrapheneOS and LineageOS users, will have to upload scans of identity papers to each service, like the UK clusterfuck.

Source: I wrote Digitaliseringsstyrelsen in Denmark where this solution will be implemented next year as a pilot, and they confirm that the truly anonymous solution will not be offered on other platforms.

Digitaliseringsstyrelsen and EU is truly, utterly fucking us all over by locking us in to the trusted competing platforms offered by the current American duopoly on the smartphone market.

This is an acceptable solution only if the government doesn't know which platform you are trying to access either.

And Tylenol is a drug just the same as heroin. Do you think that HN has the same sort of impacts on people as instagram or facebook?

I'm aware. If I lost the forum on HN as a side effect, I'd probably be happier overall.

how would society even survive if under-15s couldn't access HN?

the horror!

That's probably the solution: You can run a social media, but you have to do it ad free. Charge people if you need to, but you cannot run ads. What fucks up social media is the constant need to "engagement".