[causalscience]

I'm in the UK and I've been involved in advocating for this.

I find it utterly frustrating to read the "think of the children" mockery here on HN.

I argue that this is good.

There's many reasons why children having unfettered access to the internet and different campaigners care about different aspects, so I'm going to talk about the one I care about: addiction, destroyed ability to focus, and dopamine desensitization. In the UK (and elsewhere in the world, I imagine) there's a huge problem with people addicted to phones and children are especially vulnerable. I don't care if adults are vulnerable, they have to make their own decisions. But I care that parents that do everything right in terms of educating their children on how to be healthy with respect of phones (like me and my partner) then have to send their children to schools where they're given ipads. It's not fair to say "banning doesnt work you should just not give your children phones", but then force you to send your children to schools that give them ipads and other distractions.

It's a matter of network effects (something that HN loooves talking about). In addition to the fact that phones are engineered to be addictive, you have the fact that in many schools EVERY child is on social media, and so any family that wants to stay away has to decide between isolating their child from society, or selling themselves into the "engagement industry".

I think that banning is a valid approach. It won't be 100% effective, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that it will introduce friction (another thing that HN looooves talking about) and so will reduce the total number on children that is on social media and therefore reduce the social need for other children to be in.

So, we're adding friction to break or weaken the network effects that keep these cancer companies harming children in schools.

[munksbeer]

I admire your intentions, I genuinely mean that. I have children and worry about the horrible impact of social media too.

But your methods are flawed. I'm not even sure I can follow the logic of your post. You're talking about doing school work on iPads at school, so we must make everyone give their personal identifying information to VPNs? How does that follow?

The main problems I have with your methods:

1. You're forcing everyone in the UK to expose their personal identifying data to third party companies who *will* leak the data at some point.

2. You're forcing children to work around this and they *will* work around it and end up on websites that definitely do not have their best intentions in mind. I think your hammer approach is going to partly work, but have some extreme negative outcomes. Will you raise your hand for the harm this causes?

I'd suggest digesting what I'm saying here, really looking strongly at your aims and think if there are better alternatives.

Here is what I would like:

Whenever a UK citizen browses a social media site, I'd mandate banners that advertise the harms of social media, and also mandate that they can view the algorithm that is being used to feed them.

I plan on providing safe ways to browse the internet for my children when they're old enough. I'll give them their own VPN if needed, again with necessary precautions and education.

[yunnpp]

You're advocating for the wrong thing. Advocate to ban targeted advertising or demand that social media feeds be transparent. Don't advocate for banning VPNs from anyone who does not want to submit an ID to a company that will be breached less than a year later, or any kind of client-side measure; that's ineffective towards the goal you are trying to accomplish, and has so many other negative side effects that the whole thing is just stupid.

[6DM]

In my opinion you're undercutting your own argument. You should be working to remove tablets from the schools instead of advocating for making us register our ID's all over the internet (which has proven to be insecure on an almost monthly basis now).

[wasmainiac]

I don’t think people mocking the reasoning behind the law, just its implementation. I’m all for kicking kids off the internet and phones. I’m not British… fyi, but as kids we were not allowed to drink but we still found ways to get beer or whatever else because the regulations were not effective.

It’s better to be more to the point and straight up identity social media platforms as addictive or otherwise harmful and block them altogether or at least kill the algorithm and endless scroll.

[monsecchris]

The reason you want this is because the only way to implement it facilitates your tyranny and it still wont achieve what you pretend to desire.

[miningape]

> I think that banning is a valid approach

Are we talking about VPNs or phones in general? Because somewhere in this we jumped from VPNs to phones in general, and these things are not equivalent.

A phone ban in general for children, maybe I could agree with you on. But, a VPN ban on those grounds alone is utterly pointless: it's not like there aren't millions of other bits of internet crack children can easily find without a VPN.

Not addressing the actual concerns and instead pointing fingers at a totally different, larger issue reeks of "won't somebody think of the children". All with the convenient downstream effect of revealing which citizens own VPNs.

[boznz]

The title of the site "Hacker News" should be a dead giveaway why this law is mocked here

[causalscience]

Well, we've tried your thing of letting these companies call the shots. Now we'll try my thing for a bit :-)

What's more hacker than experimenting to get the results you want?

[iamnothere]

No, we “hackers” will mock it and develop workarounds for it, leak ID databases to undercut support, etc. Worst case we move to sneakernets and meshes and teach kids about old school floppynets. (When I was a kid all the best stuff came by floppy, sometimes by rogue BBS.) More likely we’ll just distribute guides on using Tor and build a better ecosystem around it.

[causalscience]

I mean.. Tor isn't gonna help you if there's no computers. We already got smartphones banned from schools. Work in progress.

[Hizonner]

Listen to yourself. You are a fanatic.

What are you going to ban after that?

[iamnothere]

He’s a troll, see other comments. Downvote and move on. (I wish I had.)

[causalscience]

Why am I a fanatic exactly? Do you not see people everywhere going around like zombies on their phones? I think that someone who sees that but still wants to do nothing because of a vague principle that someone talked him into, is the fanatic.

Ignore the other idiot. If you want to have a rational conversation I'm open.

[ReluctantLaser]

It seems you want to talk about other things rather than the VPN age-gating or the online safety act this post is about. I'll engage with the content of this post.

> but then force you to send your children to schools that give them ipads and other distractions

What does the online safety act (OSA) or this VPN age check do to prevent this? Are the "ipads" at school giving the users "unfettered access to the internet"? That seems a bit irresponsible, however I would think that your ire should instead be directed towards the schools? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding?

> In addition to the fact that phones are engineered to be addictive

Is it the phones or the content? I interpret your views as someone who should be campaigning for phones and other "distractions" to be restricted in a school environment, however the OSA and this VPN age check do not appear to tackle this.

> there's a huge problem with people addicted to phones and children are especially vulnerable

I will assume this is true for the sake of conversation. Similar to my previous query, how does the OSA or this VPN age check tackle this problem? Will banning certain types of content prevent this, or perhaps shift it? Instead of social media, would it be preferable if children were playing games on their phone? If they were then "addicted" to gaming or socialising around a popular game, would the proposal be at that point to ban children from playing games on their phone? To me, it seems the problem is less the content and more that the environment is setup in certain ways that allows this. It is unclear to me how banning and gating certain content will prevent this.

> different campaigners care about different aspects, so I'm going to talk about the one I care about: addiction, destroyed ability to focus, and dopamine desensitization

What kind of things are you pushing outside of banning material and gating access? Is there a push for educating parents of the dangers of this "addiction"? Perhaps informing people about how to use parental controls to limit the access their children have? Is there a push on companies to provide robust, and easy-to-use parental controls? I feel that parents should have the tools, yet it seems that we consider the problem out of the parents control. Why is that? If parents make an informed choice and choose differently to you, should they be allowed to do so?

> I don't care if adults are vulnerable, they have to make their own decisions.

I feel that if you are caring about children accessing "addicting" material that you should also care about your fellow citizens accessing the same. How would those adults know that this material is addictive? Are they being informed by the state? What avenues are there for them to get help? It seems that the OSA and this VPN age check do not provide any assistance to people that are perhaps already addicted, or preventing people from falling into that trap. Does the care only extend to children and no further? Should we care about building sturdy adults regardless if they are currently children or not?

My general thoughts on this is that there appears to be a lot of restriction and preventing people from accessing certain content, however very little on informing people on what those perceived dangers are. The UK government is especially keen on this restriction, yet I am seeing no push towards informing people, or providing assistance for those afflicted. To me, the proposed motivation and the implementation are incongruent with each other. The perception of safety, as opposed to an improvement in real world safety.

[Hizonner]

> dopamine desensitization

So ignorant pop pseudo-neuroscience. Got it.

> It's not fair to say "banning doesnt work you should just not give your children phones", but then force you to send your children to schools that give them ipads and other distractions.

Books can also be distractions. Ask me how I know. And I notice that you're just silently shifting back and forth between "social media" (ever notice how there's no single agreed-upon definition of that in the world?) and "just anything you can do on an iPad".

> in many schools EVERY child is on social media

Yes, because the world at large uses social media for some things. And for that matter uses things other than social media, things you or your coalition want to deprive children of, for other things. What you are effectively asking is to stick everybody who's not officially an adult in a curated sandbox that will never match the richness of the rest of society. That is unfair, unreasonable, and basically a guaranteed way to fail to prepare them for actual adulthood.

[AlienRobot]

When I went to school nobody gave me an ipad. We just wrote on paper, the teacher on chalkboard. That was a long time ago, though.