Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban

That is an argument and worth monitoring, but IMO it's not a strong enough argument to stop this.

This sort of ban is the same as existing laws banning the sale and consumption of alcohol or driving until kids are of age they will (on average) have sufficient maturity to handle the responsibility. Something we accept.

Kids are not banned from digital communication. My daughter can still send text messages and make phone calls.

Kids are not banned from the consuming content on those platforms. They simply can't have an account to create their own content as it was too often abused. For example, my 12yo daughter was asked by a friend to message bomb and abuse a 12yo her friend had a crush on. That's mild compared to some of the stories I've heard from platforms like Facebook, and between about 10 - 16 many kids are just nasty.

I believe that the line in the sand over which platforms this applies to is the ones that leverage account history to supercharge the already addictive behaviours caused by UI designs optimised to manipulate your attention and direct your purchasing power towards whoever is paying them. Something kids are particularly vulnerable to. The algorithm doesn't care if it is pushing you towards radical content as long as you are watching it for as many hours in a day as possible.

These are government regulations regarding kids. Nothing new here, we’ve been regulating what you can market to kids for decades. I’m not buying a slippery slope argument.

As a parent myself, it definitely helps when you can collectively avoid having your kids on these platforms. I can’t express how much easier it is to restrict it and not seem like a kook when authorities are also on board.

Authoritarians use social networks to undermine democratic principles so not exposing kids to that takes power away from them. Or did I misunderstand something?

We wouldn’t have this problem if the tech companies can “self regulate” (lol). But us engineers just can’t help ourselves but find even more effective and efficient ways to harvest eyeballs and stoke hate.

And yes, I mean engineers. Just a few “inventions” off the top of my head that got us here:

- infinite scroll - Facebook’s shadow profiles - recommendation algorithms

Don’t pretend it’s not engineers that came up with these.

The government has laws saying people under 16 can't drive cars, do you think that's part of the slippery slope that has led to all of those happening-in-practice bad things?

Why not compare it to smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol? You need to be an adult to decide legally you can do that and that makes sense. Its the same thing here.

The question here is, is social media addictive and is it harmful. If we have enough evidentiary proof, then yes, it should be banned just like we do for alcohol or cigarettes. We also ban porn for kids. And we don't need any ID proofs in implementing the ban. So we have a precedent. It's not perfect, but society knows it's bad, government, family, schools come together and implement the ban. No need for IDs etc and give more control to government.

and the other other problem is that this does nothing to disincentivize toxic advertisement and predatory behaviors they will just follow where the target are.

Absolutely this. We have limits in place for usage of a bunch of this sort of stuff, from not at all to up to an hour, and we'd be constantly tested and pushed on these limits. Constantly. "But my friends are..." is the usual start to it.

Government says you can't chat with just anyone in Roblox, and suddenly it's accepted that this is just what it is. Not only that, but limits and rules on how much and when you can watch YouTube and the like are also suddenly more acceptable.

So far what my kids are saying is that this is broadly true across their peer groups. The exceptions are just that, exceptions. The peer pressure to be in on it all is lessened. And in turn, that means less push-back on boundaries set by us, because it's less of a big deal.

(And I face less of a dilemma of how much to allow to balance out the harm of not being part of the zeitgeist vs. the harm of short form, mega-corporation curated content).

That's exactly what its part of it.

So many people are looking at this from a technical stand point and how water tight or perfect its going to be.

But there is a large psychological part of this that helps parents and I know that part of it is what a number of parents I've spoken to like about it.

Its not just about the current generation, but the next wave of kids who have grown up under these laws, the psychology of it will have changed.

Yes, there is a normative aspect to it.

This also works with other things such as alcohol and (old school) smoking (neither of which has watertight control, but the control is still very effective).

The real problem is social media. Their machine learning algorithms are optimised to boost toxic content, as they result in more engagement (time spent). This is a fundamental trait of humans. Even babies look at angry faces longer than happy faces.More time spent means more advertising revenue.

It means the current generation gets exposed to a lot of toxic content all in the name of driving advertising revenue. In the olden days you could get everything, but it wasn't forced down your throat, or rather your reels.

I think one difference from how we grew up (remember bbs’es?) is that it was something in your desktop, not an omnipresent force in your pocket

> In the EU you don’t need to upload your ID anywhere, the service can use the government’s portal for ID verification. In the case of age verification they can get a yes/no response

The issue is that now the government knows what you are doing online, and that should never be allowed to happen.

I grew up when the Internet was truly free, before Facebook even existed. People shared source code, videos, MP3s, games, regardless of "copyright" or "intellectual property." To some extent, it is still possible to do all of this, but these freedoms are being eroded every day by making the Internet less anonymous. The endgame is obviously to force people to pay for things whose "marginal cost" is zero in the language of economists. "Protecting the children" is just a convenient excuse.

> This is opaque to the service

The "service" is irrelevant. I think most people would trust Porno Hub to be discreet about their visits. That's in their business interest. But now they have to tell your government about all the times you're visiting Porno Hub.

And nobody should trust their government.

Also, keep in mind that western governments share with each other. There will come a time when Australians will try to enter USA but they'll get flagged at the border because the AUS government shared that this particular individual visited Porno Hub and a few other age-restricted websites 7,000 times in the last 30 days. Red Flag!

That's a very good technical solution, but socially it can be foiled by an official-looking alert saying "failed to scan card, please do X instead".

And that's assuming the technical solution is deployed everywhere. I'm in the EU with one of those IDs, and I still had to upload photos of my passport and scan my face to open a bank account. The identification process even had its own app that I had to install.

Discord might not be officially included, but they still complied.

«Big Tech» is a bad term to use IMHO, but if you do, why wouldn't it cover Discord(/Tencent) or even Telegram ?

Like anything it's a matter of magnitudes. My best guess is that any negative side effects are going to be of a trivial magnitude, cancelling out a small amount of the upside on net. At the very least it's an experiment worth running, and if successful, worth extending to further regulations for adults too, especially around mechanics (not the content itself) such as the algorithmic feed.

What I’m seeing in Australia is most parents know it’s bad, and want their kids off social media. But it’s a Herculean task when the social media companies have such a grip on their kids and when all the other kids have it.

It’s the same story with banning phones in schools. Everyone knows it’s the right thing to do but individual parents or teachers don’t have the power to do it alone.

> I'm not sure why a person would want to let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common,

A great percentage of serious crimes (from rape to fraud) are committed by family and friends of the victims. Should we not leave our children with our family alone?

The best move is to teach your children how to not be victimized. It is part of "being responsible for yourself". My parents taught me how to be safe in a bad neighborhood because sometimes you have to go there. They taught me how to pick good friends who wouldn't do bad things to me. They taught me how to spot the precursors to bad things. They let me hang out unsupervised. Because they taught me how to be responsible for myself. Why not teach your kids how to navigate the internet safely.

> let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common, if it's at all possible to avoid it.

You're talking about cutting kids from all online services, including multiplayer games and community wikis.

It also means your kid has no experience of online interactions with strangers, basically no SNS literacy, which also sounds like a disaster waiting to happen to me.

The issue is, that many people think social media like TikTok and FB and so on are good and that they are letting their children "participate in modern life" or something like that. They are utterly uninformed about these things, or so media brainwashed themselves, that they will fight you to the teeth standing up for things like FB.

I had that happening. I explained to someone, that FB is a criminal company, that's spying on everyone and everything they do, and just had that 5 billion sum to pay for mishandling personal data. But do you think that that person would come to their senses? Nope, ofc not. They argued on and on about how it is a force of good and whatnot.

> They can message people they actually know IRL, somewhere without a feed full of crap from people they don't know.

Just how do you think they get introduced to TikTok? What do you think gets posted in the school class WhatsApp group chat?

My kids' WhatsApp group chats are mostly a torrent of sharing idiotic TikToks, YouTube Shorts, and celebrity Instagrams.

Which my kids can't watch… until they're savvy enough to bypass my restrictions. Until then, they'll watch it in school, on their friends' phones - little consolation there.

And when that pauses, they just have stupid sticker wars, and the kind of impolite banter (often misogynist/homophobic in nature, definitely not age appropriate) that may well have been par for the course when I was their age, but that I would never have committed to in writing, in essentially a public space. Not to mention the almost bullying.

The mere suggestion by my kid (on my advice) that a separate space was created to discuss actually important stuff, like forgotten homework assignments, test dates, etc, was met with incredulity and laughter by peers (the almost bullying).

Kids teach their peers how to act. Peers have way more influence than their parents. We need a majority of kids to understand TikTok/etc are bad for them.

"Everyone must prove their age online now" creates a trail of identity that kills anonymous speech dead. Anonymous speech is very important to maintaining freedoms... such as freedom of speech and freedom of association.

Yes, this is one of those game theory traps like the prisoners dilemma, because it requires coordinated action across a large group of people. Unfortunately the lowest common denominator parenting is not able to handle the problem, because the parents don't understand the situation, are addicted to platforms themselves, and just generally don't have the necessary skills.

Government regulation is a ham fisted approach that risks unintended consequences / secondary effects, but it is generally good at breaking the game theory traps because it changes the playing field for everyone. That is fundamentally why we have government at all - to solve coordination problems.

>not a fan of the government approach of "everyone must prove their age online now", which I believe is how the AU law is done

This is not how the law is implemented. The vast majority of verification is being done by 'age inference', ie analysis of the content the user consumes or posts to infer likely age. Only accounts suspected to be children by the inference process are being required to verify or have the account disabled. In practice, the inference process means very few accounts are required to provide any proof of age. Personally, I haven't been asked to verify by even a single website.

The age inference process is described on this page under 'What is Age Assurance?' https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/your-privacy-rights/social-m...

If you think we can't depend on parents for the kids education, school should handle it.

There wasn’t much but the mostly fabricated WMD narrative was questioned a lot. Now the current administration makes an endless stream of fantasies and lies which go almost entirely unchallenged.

I'm guessing they mean Gaza, and that the author is pro-Israel. Which really undermines their point.

The average adult has a carefully curated understanding of the world based on a completely false narrative but nobody clutches their pearls about that

It was very illuminating though obvious when recently Twitter started showing account country of origin and all of the MAGA political accounts pretending to be American get revealed as run out of Nigeria and Russia.

The scale of the operations is immense now.

The platform operators have a responsibility to remove garbage from their site. I don’t see how it’s better if adults are the recipients of these alleged harms. And I definitely don’t see how the platform operators are going to clean up their act if — rather than being penalized — they can pretend that the problem has vanished into thin air because a specific category of vulnerable users is now de jure disappeared.

>I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially when this content is packaged up to them and commodified.

The law could instead prohibit scams and violence?

>These platforms make more money than the ATO (Australian Tax Office) brings in a year.

Irrelevant.

>but the idea that there isn't a legitimate goal here (keeping children safe)

Almost every other avenue, including doing nothing, has more merit than that which has been implemented.

>If you look back at vox pops from when drink-driving laws were introduced, or when seatbelts became mandatory, or when ID requirements were tightened, the arguments for and against were eerily similar.

Theres some basic negative freedom implications from those, but they dont intend to ban a class of person from accessing a mundane element of human society.

> I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially when this content is packaged up to them and commodified.

I hope we can agree that allowing every social media site to devolve into the above is the bigger problem. There can be some places that are adults-only; just like reality though, the world is better when open-by-default, with some places gated to adults-only.

Shifting focus to "Why are we letting some of the most profitable companies the world has ever seen get away with being a cesspit?" lets us keep kids safe by default, doesn't attack E2EE, and doesn't default to the internet becoming a surveillance state.

If we start by getting Facebook and Twitter (et al.) to clean up their acts, we can all work, yell, and vote together, instead of some yelling about their kids being shown unexpected pornography, and others yelling about the internet becoming a surveillance state.

Because both can be real concerns - but a starter solution can get the vast majority of voters on-board, and garner real progress, instead of giving Facebook more data and control, or governments a turn-key dictatorship.

> These platforms make more money than the ATO (Australian Tax Office) brings in a year.

From their users in Australia? Clearly not.

> I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc.

You mean like the outside world?

What happens when these hot house flowers of yours reach whatever magic age and get dumped into all of that, still with no clue, but with more responsibilities and more to lose?

I haven't noticed a whole lot of governments, or even very many parents, worrying about doing much to actually prepare anybody for adulthood. It's always about protection, never about helping them become competent, independent human beings. Probably because protection is set-and-forget, or at least they think it is... whereas preparation requires actually spending time, and paying attention, and thinking, and communicating. Maybe even having to answer hard questions about your own ideas.

... and since when are kids supposed to be protected from politics? We used to call that "civics class".

>If you look back at vox pops from when drink-driving laws were introduced, or when seatbelts became mandatory, or when ID requirements were tightened, the arguments for and against were eerily similar.

If you think the arguments are eerily similar, I feel like you haven't really been listening to the arguments against these types of age-verification-for-websites laws.

I mean, there's some similarities, of course. But I think there are some very stark differences.

yeah social media is proving itself to be a bad actor like big alcohol, big tobacco. No incentive to do the right thing or improve anything. ripping audiences away from them is the only way they'll understand.

> I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation

Why not? Why won't you give political agency to young adults? I'm saying this as a kid who grew up in Romania, just after Ceausescu had been executed, so throughout the '90s, I do very well remember all the political news and commentary coming my way (I was a teen), but I can't say that it bothered, not at all, it made me more connected to the adult world and hence more prepared to tackle real life just a little bit later on.

I won't comment on the other stuff, because that would make me bring back memories of watching TV1000 (a Swedish TV satellite channel) late at night on Saturdays, also in the early '90s, I won't say for what but suffice is to say that I turned out ok.

I think this might be true at the parent level, but less and less true as you climb up the government ladder.

The shitty part is that when the parents really do believe something is "for the kids", it becomes that much easier to push through laws that have awful side effects (intentional ones or not). Which is why "for the kids" is so common, of course.

It's very unfortunate. As a parent, I feel like it requires regulation at the national level because I can't win against Meta (FB, Insta), Google (Youtube), Snapchat and TikTok.

Banning the printing press in Europe would have stopped the 30 years war.

Somehow I don't think anyone here would approve of the long term consequences.

The end result of this will be that everyone needs to give their real name and address to view social media.

Anything you say or watch that the current government doesn't like will result in police coming for a chat.

It's not that the people don't genuinely believe what they're saying. It's that they've deluded themselves into thinking their ideological right is "for the kids".

There's always been Reefer Madness sorts of people. Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll, Video Games, DnD, Rap Music, Homosexuality, and on and on. Today it's half woke mind virus and half DEI (for lack of a better term). Most of the people that spout this stuff genuinely believe they're fighting for the kids.

Its not good faith because its already broken by vpn. And its forcing kids with no credit cards to download free and malware ridden ones. How would you measure any level of success from this initiative? Doing something isnt a solution if it has tons of bad sideeffects

That is just a thought-stopping reference. Why does this literal nobody who nobody has to listen to have the total backing of both major political parties? That is the real question and it obviously goes back to narrative control and the move from democracy to an authoritarian managerial state.

My favourite micro pressure-group in Australia is the Pedestrian Council of Australia.

Whenever there's talk about car safety measures, e-scooters or anything else, the press goes to the official-sounding "Pedestrian Council of Australia" for comment. And obligingly, Harold Scruby who is the CEO, Chairman and entire membership of said council will hold forth.

He's been spectacularly successful at getting himself listened to, as if he represented something.

Collective shout are just as illegitimate.

>going after algorithmic feeds

This is such an older person take. Users really like Algorithmic feeds and see the removal of such a feature to be platform destroying. Cronological feeds are still easy to game and abuse.

>predatory platforms like Roblox

What makes roblox a predatory platform and what would you change to make it not a predatory platform? To me Roblox is a predatory platform because of the age group of people not because of the platform design.

> kids pretending to be adults so they sneak through these filters

The real question is: how hard does it make it for them to pretend to be adults? We just need it to be hard enough that most kids won't do it.

> platforms winding back their (meagre) child safety efforts since "children are banned anyway"

If the law forces the platforms to properly ban children, I don't see how they can do that. If you're thinking that the platforms will just say "it's illegal for children to join, so we don't have to do anything because they shouldn't come in the first place", then I don't think the law is made like this.

> everyone being forced to prove their age via e.g. uploading ID (which will inevitably get leaked)

Some countries have been working on privacy-preserving age verification. I find it's a lot better than uploading an ID.

Kids pretending to be adults know they are doing something wrong. They are likely to practice acting like adults, don't pressure each other to join, and are harder for predators to find.

> algorithmic feeds in general

Do you only use /new of HN...?

The report title

> School behaviour improving after mobile phone ban and vaping reforms

Vaping !?

If we're discussing effect of phone bans at school, I think looking at a period where nicotine addiction was also strongly reduced makes the numbers pretty hard to interpret.

Each party is splitting into factions. I imagine the establishment of both parties think social media is a problem

Youtube really wants to send me down the alt-right pipeline. I watch a few WW2 history videos and suddenly I must identify with "Mr Mustache" as the kids say. TikTok wants to radicalize me the other way, and shows me every video of a cop abusing their power that they can find. It cuts both ways.

I think what's killing Dems is that they don't understand the medium. Mamdani did really well by making good social media posts. Him and Trump had a grand old time at the whitehouse because they have a competent grasp on social media in common. Newsom has been trolling lately and his approval ratings are only going up.

Dems being a million years old is killing the dems.

Good analogy.

The solution, however, isn't prohibition or age restrictions; it's either regulating the algorithms or holding these companies responsible for the adverse outcomes their platforms contribute to. Safe harbor laws made sense when tech wasn't filtering/promoting content, now that they are influencing the material we see, these laws must no longer apply.

This may mean adopting a modern equivalent to libel laws. Something akin to: if an algorithm pushes false information, the company behind the algorithm can be sued for harm. Disallow terms of service that force arbitration or cap liability limits.

That makes me wonder, if only teenagers could vote would they ban adults from social media?

They'll vote eventually, and preferably won't be damaged in irreparable ways by then

Handwaving “public health” doesn’t make it so.

I just can't get behind any of it, sorry. The puritanical moralizing feels so good until you cause a revolution or the species goes extinct.

I get why people from certain countries instinctively see any government involvement as bad, but I don’t think that’s a universal truth? Yes, bad government can do enormous harm, but I think good government can also raise society above what would happen if everyone were simply left to their own devices.

As others have noted, we already accept a long list of age-based rules: alcohol, driving, tobacco, gambling, movies and games, compulsory schooling, consent, marriage, tattoos, credit cards, pornography, firearms, etc.

Seen in that context, restricting social media for children isn’t some unprecedented intrusion - it’s another attempt to limit access to something that appears harmful for younger people. Will it work? I can only hope. But it seems reasonable to at least try.

I’m not claiming this opinion fits every country - it may be due to biases of where I live. Where I am (and in my opinion), social media seems like a clear and massive net negative, especially for kids. Perhaps in some places social media is a genuinely positive part of daily life, and from that perspective the same law might look like needless government overreach.

Broadly, I agree with your sentiment. As soon as some people rule over others, given enough time, things creep towards total enslavement and disenfranchisement of the others. This has been proven over and over.

The question then becomes, how do we organise society instead?

YOUR government might be a bigger threat than anything YOU might find online, but this statement is just not generally true whatsoever. Given how broad this argument is, if anything, it’s an argument for improving government, not getting rid of it. Every freedom has two sides, the more positive freedoms you get, the less negative freedoms you get, and vice versa. There is no possibility of “infinite freedom”, it’s always zero sum, and so always a balance on a per topic basis, which hyperreductive arguments like this (“state level infringements of freedom”) totally ignore.

> I'm being a bit facetious here...

Maybe just don't do that? It's never helpful in good-faith discussions and just indicates a lack of empathy and maybe a lack of understanding of the actual issue being discussed.

> So, you haven't identified any actual problems with them being on social media though.

The problems GP raised seem pretty clear to me. Could gives us some examples of what you would consider to be "actual problems" in this context?

> Just that kids are doing something new and sometimes scary...

Any sane parent wouldn't send their kids to learn to ride a bicycle on the open road and without any supervision. You'd find a park or an empty lot somewhere, let them test it out, assess their ability to deal with potential dangers and avoid harming others at the same time, and let them be on their own once they are able to give you enough confidence that they can handle themselves most of the time without your help.

The problem with today's social media for children is that that there is no direct supervision or moderation of any kind. Like many have pointed out, social media extends to things like online games as well, and the chance that you will see content that are implicitly or explicitly unsuitable for children is extremely high. Just try joining the Discord channels of guilds of any online game to see for yourself.

Not all things new and scary come with a moderate to high risk of irreparable harm.

Its not parenting as a service. Its not even in the same world as rock in roll. Do you think its ok to have smoking, gambling and sex ads shown on tv during the afterschool 3pm-5pm timeslot? Social media is effectively that x100 because TV ads followed advertising restrictions.

On social media kids will be subjected to undisclosed advertising for all kinds of products legal and illegal. They will be directly targeted and manipulated into real world harm situations and mental manipulation into harmful mindsets.

Most of this cannot be prevented by "being a watchful parent". If your kid watches andrew tate and you see and put a restriction youtube will recommend them a tate adjacent channel or one of the 1million alts that posts clips. Same for tiktok, X and Instagram.The only control you have is to ban them from using the platform which is a roundabout way of achieving the same thing.

Sigh, I'll bite (even though I know I shouldn't, and it's pointless).

> So, you haven't identified any actual problems with them being on social media

Anonymous cyber bullying (multiple times), performative social exclusion (multiple times), anonymous death threats (twice), deepfake porn with their faces spliced in (twice).

Your straw-man example is absurd and TBH it comes across as patronising. I'm trying to avoid assumptions, but it reads like someone who hasn't needed to grapple with this issue personally as a primary carer. Apologies if that isn't the case; everyone has their own view for what parenting should be.

Somehow we've seen fit (as a society) to regulate the minimum age for sex & marriage, obtaining alcohol, acquiring a vehicle licence, etc. We (as a society) recognise that there are good & bad tradeoffs to these activities and have regulated freedoms around these (primarily via age). Somehow, our society hasn't spontaneously regressed into North Korea.

That's definitely an interesting argument I haven't seen before.

I suppose it depends on how effective these types of measures actually are, and also on how many adults refuse to identify themselves. I would assume governments are more interested in spying on adults than under-16s, so the adults are probably more relevant here.

I hope you're right, though. Maybe there'll be a renaissance of smaller platforms. Probably not, but I can hope.

> I find it hard to believe anyone would argue in good faith against this ban.

This is a problem. You will not accept an argument against the ban.

Instead you paint anyone presenting any opposition to any part of it as a stooge of predatory businesses.

> We are simply [...]

It's a simple idea, but the implementation is anything but.

> The real villains here are the social media companies [...]

They're getting out of this easy. You're giving them a free pass.

Tax them. Sue them.

Hold them liable for the content they show users.

Ban social media for children without empowering the social media companies or the government.

You've basically just confirmed what I said at the end, that democracies have no immunity to mass surveillance. 24/7 surveillance may have been an exaggeration but not by much, really. Age verification, as it exists now, inevitably means mass surveillance, in particular tying real life identities to political beliefs and porn preferences on a mass, computerised scale. If you're too young to remember the Snowden leaks I can maybe understand why you'd think mass surveillance is not an inevitable consequence of age verification, but I'm old enough to remember them, so I think it is. The existence and impact of mass surveillance seem to be invisible to you.

> It’s not Orwellian. If it were, then not allowing kids to vote or drink before they become adults would be Orwellian.

To be clear: What do you think you're refuting? I don't think children should be on modern social media. I don't think anyone should be, but especially not children. There are plenty of ways of going about this. This is why I said:

> A lot of the arguments I see in this thread are about whether modern mainstream social media are bad for young people. When the debate becomes about that, it's very easy to defend these types of Orwellian laws. It becomes "This is a problem, therefore the solution is good", without questioning the solution itself.

You then claim that the tech industry, and by extension "tech circles", don't like this because it means they make less money. I'm not sure how forcing companies whose business model is based on surveillance capitalism to do even more surveillance would hurt them, but if it does, it's still not my concern anyway. And conflating random hackers like me with "big tech" seems to have become increasingly common recently.

> So it's a poor article, so what?

I believe their point was to illustrate the disconnect between the problem and the solution. They agree with the problem, and experienced "whiplash" when the solution was described.

> For Government, kids on social media are not a big problem, that will only bite them in the decades to come.

In Australia the kids on social media are a problem for the government, today. A 16 year old is less than two years away from voting. Successive governments have laughed at the idea of lowering the voting age to 16 or 17. The government has very little influence on social media -- this is different to older forms of media / communication.

That's true. I'll say this though: my social life skyrocketed thanks to Facebook when I was ~18. Not sure what kind of impact it would have had earlier, I was def. more of a kid and social medias were not a thing anyway. Makes sense to me to have an age limit considering cyber bullying and teen suicides and all.

> we had magazines, TV, and the web, they all had advertising, and no population-level impact on child & teen mental health impact was observed as these were adopted

That is not true. Distorted body perception, anorexia etc. due to omnipresent photoshopped models in magazines and poster ads where a thing decades ago.

Things escalated with social media, but there were issues long before that.

The previous static ads of the past are completely different beast compared to targeted advertising and attention driven design(leading to doomscrolling etc).

It's the combination of ads, analytics, personalization, and scale.

Ads mean that you want to keep the user on your platform as long as possible. They are incentivized to make it addictive at the most fundamental level. A company selling movies doesn't care how often you watch the movies you buy, they just want to convince you to buy them. A company that makes money for each minute you spend watching a movie would put out very different products.

Analytics mean they can precisely see the effect of any given change to figure out what makes the product more addictive.

Personalization means they can tailor your experience to be addictive to you, personally, rather than just generally addictive to people.

And scale means they can afford to pay enormous amounts of money to a lot of smart people and have them work full time on the problem of making the product more addictive.

I don't know what you do about it.

My own theory is that kids are rightfully anxious and depressed as they can now easily see the state of the world and the direction it's going. This is the world they have to enter soon, and they can do almost nothing to change it, so of course they're more anxious/depressed.

Can they gamble?

[dead]

You might not have opened any social media app lately. You need 10 seconds before you're sucked into the feed. Likes are a thing of the past, they just gather your interests by your reaction time on any content they show you.

Hey you spent 500ms looking at this pretty girl dancing, how about some ass now?

I get straight up PORN ads on Facebook too. Twitter at some point showed me porn as well, even if I had specifically curated it to show JavaScript content.

You're not wrong. Even simple "page hit counters" became a target of manipulation once they were common. Human nature is tough at scale.

At least with early Facebook one was mostly interacting with one's pretty close peers. Back when I joined, you still needed a .edu email address to signup, and there was no real discovery mechanism, so you mostly only friended people who you had met IRL.

Yeah it wasn't ever sane. It was just harder to onboard and you were still interacting mostly with people you knew. Now it's worse because you'll hardly ever interact with people you know.

>How come ad supported TV existed for decades without destroying children's mental health?

Well, there's at least a few reasons this is different than the current situation.

1) It's expensive to make a TV show, it's free to do a fortnite dance or eat a tide pod and post it to several websites. The amount of low-effort, low-quality, probably-harmful content on TikTok or whatever is exponentially more than low-effort, low-quality, probably-harmful TV shows/ads.

2) The availability is on completely different scales. TVs are (basically) fixed in a specific place. Phones are, for most people, within arms reach 24/7.

3) What can be shown on TV is significantly more regulated in most parts of the world, and control mechanisms by governments are more robust (pull a broadcast license, etc.). It's harder to take a website (or TikTok, whatever) offline than it is to pull a harmful show/advert off of HGTV or whatever your favorite channel is.

4) TV is not specifically tailored to the viewer to produce the most amount of happy chemical.

Well arguably TV did destroy people's brains, just a lot slower and less efficiently.

And in fairness, dosage is the difference between a painkiller an a heroin addiction.

In Australia TV is very commonly referred to as “the idiot box”.

Australians are very aware that it destroys people’s brains.

> How come ad supported TV existed for decades without destroying children's mental health?

I would argue that it did, we just did a poor job of measuring it.

Anecdotally, during my childhood I moved from a place that had very little TV advertising to a place with a normal amount and it had a noticeable impact.

TV programming has to broadly appeal to society generally... you can't really go down a niche algorithm that progressively feeds you more specific content until you're radicalized any certain way (it can sorta, see conservative media, but there are some guardrails). Social media can with much less restriction.

We had the same fear mongering in the 80’s and early 90’s about TV. And in the 20’s and 30’s about radio programs.

Same shit, new generation.

Jonathan Haidt is someone who nobody should take seriously. Pretty much all of the data he cites is cherry-picked and the vast majority of people in trust and safety and similar will tell you that he is probably one of the least reliable authorities on this subject. He's aiming to sell fear, not to actually solve the problem.

People under 18 don't have the same rights.

The Australian ban doesn't block anyone from accessing content.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn%27s_Early_Light:_Taking_B...

That is basically what the Heritage Foundation wants to do.

We're already on the fast track to becoming an authoritarian state. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine the next step is dissolving congress and installing a new constitution. Or just throwing it out entirely and defining the law of the land on the whims of a senile man

> In an effort to curtail the organization’s outsized influence, Facebook announced Monday that it would be implementing new steps to ensure the breakup of the U.S. government before it becomes too powerful. [1]

I'm old enough to remember when The Onion didn't just report the news.

[1] https://theonion.com/facebook-announces-plan-to-break-up-u-s...

I believe they're implying that there's an unhealthy amount of regulatory capture in favor of big tech

It was a clever riff on the current situation where business tells government

Is the assumption that non "tech industry" communities (e.g: voat, parler, ovaries, gab, truth, lemmy, mastodon, 4chan, 8chan, etc) are less likely to be a problem or to negatively impact teens than the mainstream "big tech" ones (e.g: facebook, twitter, youtube, tiktok, reddit, etc)?

Because Fedgov stopped any real anti-trust regulation over a century ago and have shown they have no will nor ability to change that since.

Why not both?

It's not going to happen, at least not in the land of crony capitalism.

I agree. It’s just there has not been a pro-EU vote in any form or capacity by any EU population. So the stopped doing referendums but the EU grew only even more unpopular- and lately with VDL and KK, its as if its a cruel joke we all expect for it to end soon.

It's a very good system. $20 is the right number to get you off the couch, but not so much as to cripple you. There are exceptions if you have a valid reason for not voting. The maximum fine is ~$180 so you can't simply ignore the Elections Commission and hope it goes away.

And no ads.

I agree that would go a long long way.

When it becomes a place to share photos with your friends, like the OG Instagram, a lot of the harmful effects go away.

I truly don't understand how people can make such comparisons, and in general defend social media. Is this some sort of Stockholm syndrome?

Social media has ruined my mental health, when I fell into a deep hole of propaganda. It took me a year to recover, and I'm still not fully recovered, and I'm still trying to separate between what I truly think, and what social media "made" me think. People underestimate the power of echo chambers created by the algorithm.

I saw how friends and family got radicalized thanks to social media. Social media is currently fueling at least one war and multiple regional conflicts, where people who know nothing about the events, get "educated" by social media. Social media is fueling hatred and bigotry, further diving already fragile societies. Social media disinformation campaigns were behind Brexit. And social media is used as a tool by government to spread misinformation or influence social opinions. All these in addition to everyone being an influencer and showing their phone into the faces of people in public places, while selling crap from AliExpress for 500% markup, as if you drink electrolytes, put a nose tape, and clean your face every day -- your life will become ten folds better.

I can't name one good thing that came out of social media. None. And even if there are things, and I'm sure someone will name them out, they are minor comparing to the negative sides, or could be achieved in a more sustainable way.

No, it’s not. It’s a link aggregator and a discussion platform, it is not centered around social aspects like user profiles and followers.

No, it's not.

You can't follow people or have followers. There's no notification system when someone "likes" your comment. It doesn't lend itself towards pulling you back with the latest comment or post. There is the front page algorithm, but you can always just go to /latest or /active. It's about the content, not the users.

Critically, there's no ads or monetization (which is where all that garbage comes in).

HN is an anti-social media. It is not inclusive. If you are not a tech geek or cannot articulate well you are not welcome here, and will be ignored.

You cannot follow or be followed. There is no attention drawn to your username or profile. Everything about HN is designed for you to just read a comment and move on, not caring much about the human behind it.

The whole world seems to be hooked on TikTok, reels and shorts for entertainment.

Reversing that would take some doing.

???? We're on social media right now.