From Australia to Europe, countries move to curb children's social media access

ETH_start

The most important question here is not whether social media access should be banned to children. The question is whether everyone's rights should be stripped in an effort to enforce such a ban. I find this whole globally coordinated endeavor to be outrageous in its illiberality, and manipulative in its appeal to protecting children to justify these encroachments on people's rights.

RVuRnvbM2e

Where's the regulation of addictive dark patterns that hook kids and adults alike? Most jurisdictions regulate gambling to reduce societal harm. Social media is little different; it just has an advertising middle man.

roenxi

In Australia, back in 2021, we had a senior politician run out of politics because a relatively small-time YouTuber just wouldn't shut up about his connections to organised crime. And friendlyjordies house was eventually firebombed by the organised criminals too, so that was interesting. Now obviously one bad apple doesn't spoil the whole bunch [0] but it always struck me as the sort of thing that would ruffle feathers in parliament. I'm not surprised to see our regulations described as among the world's toughest and I doubt it is going to stop here, there is a very motivated faction who want to be able to shut troublemakers up. [0] Barilaro was only the deputy premier of New South Wales at the time, not anything important. Ow my sarcasm gland is strained now.

ajsnigrutin

They move towards having every adult "show their id" when doing stuff online. This could have easily been solved by parental controls and banning advertising towards children (or ban advertising all together for underage accounts, everywhere... by a new phone, set that it's a phone for an underage person, add a guardian who can unlock stuff if needed, and no ads anywhere are allowed). But nope, instead we get face scans and digital IDs.

groan

I would expect more outrage but it seems people are burned out/don’t care?

noja

_Social media company execs_ also want to curb their children's social media access.

CrzyLngPwd

A ban is a good idea, but not by eroding the privacy of every adult, for all of the reasons stated elsewhere. I think most people agree that social media is toxic, not just for children, but adults too. What I don't understand is why parents don't take responsibility for reducing the contact with such harmful products. Even growing up in the 70's, most children didn't smoke or drink alcohol, not because they didn't have access to it, but because of the wrath of their parents.

poszlem

All of that in a very organic, and not at all coordinated way.

somelamer567

Techno-libertarianism was always a con. I'm convinced it was an information operation organised by enemies of the West to "prep the battlefield" to enable revisionist state aggression against the West in the cognitive domain. We mustn't forget that the Russians claimed that the internet was created by the CIA to attack Russia and steal its resources -- after a Russian clairvoyant told Vladimir Putin she read Madeleine Albright's mind and said that the US is plotting to weaken Russia and "steal its resources". We also must not forget that Russia is corrupt from top to bottom, and that Russian intelligence and organised crime have effectively merged into a lawless juggernaut that threatens the entire civilised world. Today, Russian information-warfare specialists and gangsters have turned the Western information space into a free-fire zone. And there is literally NOTHING we can do about it, because weak minds and fifth-columnists on our side demand we unilaterally disarm and NOT enforce mandatory strong ID for activity on the internet. It's time to see this aggression for what it is.

pcrh

Would someone be able to comment on this: Why is it not possible to require websites that wish to market to children to be certified as "child safe". Such sites would be audited by an independent entity that would grant them some form of encrypted key. These could be in age bands, e.g. <6yr, <12 yrs, <16 yrs, etc. also also possibly geographically. We do this for many other things, from toys to public venues. Parents could then set their child's device to only allow access to sites with the appropriate certification. This way the children are as safe as their parents allow them to be, without sharing their child's identity, and the rest of the population also doesn't have to share their identity with dubious authentication service or the government. There's probably something wrong with this idea, if so I'd be glad to hear it!

rowanseymour

I'm back in the UK for a bit and one of the first things I notice besides the infuriating and pointless "Accept Cookies" popups on every webpage is that I can't view half the news about Palestine on Twitter/X without handing over a government ID to prove I'm an adult. No thanks. Please let's find a way to protect children without giving up the right to anonymity on the internet.

WithinReason

Why not bind it to the phone itself? The phone (or a phone app) would verify you're an adult, and beyond that the website would know nothing but that 1 bit of information.

Roark66

There are ways to implement this without affecting anyone's privacy. For example here in Poland everyone has an ID and everyone that wants to use egov services, file taxes, or check their prescriptions online has a cryptographic identity. It would be trivial to implement a challenge that would work like this: - the site requests you to sign a challenge - you sign the challenge and provide it to third party verifier. (can be a gov site or a private company) - service verifies your signature and gives you the copy of the challenge signed by itself only so your gov ID is never revealed. - you supply the signed challenge to the original site. You prove you're an adult. Being Polish and knowing our politics let me tell you how this will go down. The current gov is the one that will swallow everything that comes from the EU (because they are led by a guy that was the deputy leader of the biggest EU parliament party). Same guys that wasted billions trying to implement the e-prescription service that was implemented by the next gov in a fraction of time and cost. In short they are horribly incompetent on tech so I expect the first version of this will be as bad as the crypto laws they proposed. But thankfully the president is not from their camp and he will not sign any BS (if it starts looking like he might there will be mass protests - just look up the scale of protests last time they tried to censor the internet) And then they will be forced to change it. There is no technical reason why you should disclose your identity to proove you have one. That is the entire point of having those crypto identities. That you can manage how much information you provide.

Cider9986

GrapheneOS has released their Android 17 update. Grapheneos has stated that they won't be adding any identity verification or scanning, ever. It's highly usable and has very similar UX to Pixels. I switched from iOS and have found the UI to be better although it's largely the same on stock Pixel. There's over 99% app compatibility and the only failing apps are additional restrictions added by a small subset (less than 10%) of banking and government apps. There are also occasional crashes in apps when GrapheneOS blocks bugged code with their exploit protections, but these can be disabled. iOS users can continue to use iMessage with OpenBubbles, but switching contacts to Signal is becoming easier with its growing popularity.

int32_64

It's troubling this is occurring in all these countries at the same time despite the politicians not running on it and knowing that in many of these countries the "opposition" feigns opposition and would be pushing the exact same policy if in power. What are people in Western democracies actually allowed to vote for?

mirabilis

I’m really not liking the prospective combination of a bunch of independently managed collections of driver’s license scans with no especial guarantee of security across the disparate spread of vendors struggling to remain compliant with layered sets of state and country based laws + the increasing ease of identity theft or of at least “grandma, please send me bail money, I’ll even call you over Facetime and prove it’s really me” types of deepfake scams that can be performed with the assistance of AI.

Aurornis

The only way to force sites to exclude children is to have them ID everyone. This is why forcing each site to restrict access is a terrible idea. It’s a backdoor to destroying everyone’s privacy. What we really need is for each of these sites to advertise its category or age targets, similar to how TV shows have a rating. Then end user devices like phones and browsers should have the option of setting parental controls to lock out those sites. Countries could mandate that parents set age controls on their kids devices if they way. No privacy violations needed. The problem is we seem to be entering an era where politicians (and many individuals, evidenced by the comments on Hacker News) want much more extreme control over other people’s and parent’s activity. They don’t care if this requires we all surrender our rights to privacy and turn over identification to megacorps to talk to each other on the internet. They’re hell bent on controlling what other people can do or see on the internet and they think these laws will surgically do that in their favor, often with the assumption that their own websites and services will be kindly exempted. Yet we’re already seeing these laws or individual companies trying to get ahead of laws extend beyond what people thought the targets were going to be (TikTok, Facebook, Instagram) and into services most people use like YouTube, Reddit, and Discord. Everyone hates when this starts happening to them. It’s really scary that so many people are welcoming these heavy laws without stopping to think that they might be a bad solution because they never imagine it applying to themself, only to other people they want to control.

ChrisArchitect

Why is this Reuters article the same one as 4 days ago but different date? Doesn't even include additional developments like Canada. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/australia-europe-co... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48539393 )

wiseowise

Can we just separate Adult internet already? Some kind of VPN access or something where you id once and do whatever I want?

italiansolider

When the clique lost the monopoly on the social medias they began to restrict them.