[uniq7]

The problem is when government's solutions go through identifying everyone and collaterally tracking their actions.

In the same way parents can be blamed for not keeping their children safe around guns/alcohol/drugs, they should also be blamed for not keeping the children out of digital dangers, and keep mandatory age verifications out of here.

[ares623]

Problem is that social media doesn’t have negative connotations like guns/alcohol/drugs do. That makes it hard or impossible for individual parents to restrict it. They are perceived as crazy or paranoid or controlling. Plus if their child does opt out of social media, they become a social outcast from their peers who are still on it, which is a worse outcome for the child.

It almost sounds like multiple parents from a large number of households need to collectively act in unison to address the problem effectively. Hmm collective action, that sounds familiar. I wonder if there’s a way to enforce such a collective action?

To be clear, I do agree that putting the ban on the software/platform side is the wrong approach. The ban should be on the physical hardware, similar to how guns/alcohol/tobacco which are all physical objects. But I don’t have the luxury to let perfect be the enemy of close enough.

[rightbyte]

> Plus if their child does opt out of social media, they become a social outcast from their peers who are still on it, which is a worse outcome for the child.

I don't think that is the case any more since social media isn't social like it used to be?

[sagacity]

This is like saying parents are at fault when a gun salesman sells a weapon to their 12 year old.

[ares623]

Not even “sell” but “give for free, constantly, every day, delivered directly to their house, disguised as a toy”

[uniq7]

More like saying parents are at fault when a gun salesman enters their home every day, talks for hours with their children, and sells them weapons.

Have these parents tried to not let the salesman in?

[rightbyte]

The salesman is at their friends place. And is a prerequisite for soccer team meetups. Etc. You need most parents to cooperate to bar him... but yeah I guess being prudent at home helps.

[uniq7]

I totally understand that "the salesman" is everywhere and that a single person can't fight against that, but he is everywhere because most parents are not blocking him in the first place, and that's exactly my point. Those are the parents that need to be blamed.

In my first message I was not targeting those parents who try to block this but can't; I was targeting those parents that use Youtube to distract their kids since they are babies, those who give unrestricted access with no control at all, those who don't care. We all know people like that.

This is just an hypothesis, but if parents were fined every time their kid accessed social media, I'm sure most kids wouldn't be on it.

[program_whiz]

This is a surprising take. So you know that this gun salesman is targeting the youth, and that parents can only resolve it by massive collective action, but they are to blame, and the gun salesman should be allowed to continue on his merry way?

Do you think a crack dealer should be allowed to hang around on the playground and every kid has to talk to him too (and its up to parents to make sure the kids know not to buy his stuff)?

[Dylan16807]

> and the gun salesman should be allowed to continue on his merry way?

I see nothing in their comments to suggest that.

They argued against the government tracking people, that's it.

[sagacity]

Your argument is conflating smart phones with social media apps and you seem to be assuming that kids wouldn't have access to their phone in other locations where they are unsupervised, subject to peer pressure, etc.

The "just say no" argument, basically.

[uniq7]

Devices and networks can be configured with parental controls, and the blockage doesn't need to be 100% effective. The kid accessing Facebook from a friend's phone 15 mins a day is tolerable, while giving them access to drugs or a gun 15 mins a day is not.

There is also the education part that for some reason we are ignoring. Kids are going to be able to access drugs in locations where they are unsupervised, they are going to be subject to peer pressure, etc. The job of the parents is to prepare them for that, as they should prepare them for the negative effects of social media.

[akramachamarei]

Very shocking that you're being downvoted on HackerNews of all places, where I'd expect people to be tech-literate and aware of the harms of internet age verification law etc.

[mikkupikku]

I downvoted it because he invoked the analogy of alcohol and tobacco while simultaneously arguing that it should be totally on the parents. That's not how it's done for alcohol and tobacco! If that were true then any shop could sell booze and cigs to kids, and if that were the case then how could parents possibly hope to stop it?

The premise that parenting is wholly on the parents and society at large doesn't need to play any role in raising kids is a manifestation of the kind of libertarianism that appeals to techies on the spectrum who want to find the simplest possible ruleset for everything, but it just doesn't work that way in reality.

[uniq7]

Age verification for alcohol/tobacco doesn't require full identification nor keeps any records that can be later used for tracking people for other perverse purposes.

I didn't say that "parenting is wholly on the parents", that's a straw man argument. I said that parents who don't keep their children away from digital dangers should be blamed.

Parents have a huge radius of action, they can:

- Avoid using Youtube for entertaining their babies/toddlers.

- Avoid buying tablets to their children.

- If they buy them a phone, use parental control and restrict app usage.

- Monitor what their kids do on internet.

- And the most important: educate their children to identify dangers.

Do you think a parent who does none of this shouldn't be blamed?

I want parents to embrace responsibility and act as parents. Delegating this kind of education to government is dangerous and has many negative collateral effects we will pay sooner or later.

[f30e3dfed1c9]

"Age verification for alcohol/tobacco doesn't require full identification"

In my state, buying cigarettes requires presenting your driver's license, which is scanned at every purchase. Not sure about alcohol.

[program_whiz]

Yes, to uniq7 and others -- you keep saying "identity verification will be used for nefarious purposes". Lets take the alcohol and tobacco case, was it used for nefarious purposes? Did adults suddenly lose rights and/or have something bad happen to them?

The government can and does already track whatever they want about you. Businesses already track you unless you are extremely thorough about erasing your footprint. Adding a zero-knowledge proof through a trusted system that you are 18+ doesn't seem like the mountain people are claiming. You already have to provide ID and credit card to get ISP access, the byte patterns are traced back to your household. They already have a unique fingerprint on your browser and computer. The real harm is just the obvious encroachment that we can all see and have known about since early 2000s. They don't need a "backdoor", it feels like alarmism over a possible problem, when there is a very real harm to children and teens (suicide rates, depression, bullying, mental health, etc).

to go back to smoking / alcohol / guns, one could argue it is an infringement, but ultimately it does seem to have been the right choice for society at large, and the increased "invasion of privacy" has been pretty minor. If anything, the opt-in stuff like credit cards, cell phones, GPS, car apps, streaming services have all been far larger invasions of privacy that people willingly embrace.

[uniq7]

Age verification for alcohol/tobacco doesn't require full identification nor keeps any records that can be later used for tracking people for other perverse purposes.

Also, the fact that gov and companies are already tracking people doesn't mean we should consent to more ways of tracking.