[josephg]

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.

[SunshineTheCat]

The idea that it's "hard" therefore we need government to save us is exactly why the program itself will never work. The problem is much deeper than law or government can fix.

[josephg]

You don’t need the government. Just some form of collective action.

I know of plenty of alternative communities & schools in which all the parents agreed to keep their kids away from phones until they were 15 or something. Great! If you try to roll something like this out to state schools, it looks like “the government”. But it’s the same idea.

I don’t understand the hatred and mistrust of government in this thread. The government protects us from lead in our food, from underage drug use, unsafe roads and lots of other stuff. Why not social media too?

[jmye]

> Would you want to be the one kid in school who’s not online?

I mean, who cares what the kid wants? It's your job as a parent to be a parent. Sometimes that means telling your kid no, even if that means they're not your best friend for a day or two.

> Would you want that for your kids?

Unequivocally, yes. Social media is cancer. I'd prefer my daughter not be pathologically depressed and my son not turn into a little hateball because of Meta's shitty algorithms. I have no idea why this is even a question, aside from the pure cowardice of Millennial parents.

None of this to comment on GP's suggestion that we don't need laws, or the idea that we shouldn't do this societally anyways.

[ipaddr]

They will move back to smaller communities away from the public or parents.

[pembrook]

Bans that don't make sense at an individual level do not suddenly make sense at a community level. This is terrible "we'll make it up on volume" logic.

It's also the justification used for some of the dumbest laws in history.

Think about what level of enforcement is going to be required for this (National IDs tied to online activity), and then think about the fact that Denmark is one of the main governments pushing chat control. Now start to think about how, once this tracking/enforcement scheme is created, that it might be expanded to things outside the scope of this law.

Like communism, this idea sounds good in theory, but is going to turn into an authoritarian nightmare in practice.

[josephg]

> Bans that don't make sense at an individual level do not suddenly make sense at a community level.

Social media itself doesn’t make sense at an individual level. If you’re the only one on a discord server, it’s not much of a party.

Personally I’m happy for some countries trying this. Let’s run the experiment and see how it goes. I too worry about the age verification system. Let’s see if the mental health of young people actually improves and by how much.

Rest assured, if the US couldn’t take collective action in the face of a global pandemic, there’s no way a law like this will come for America.