[golph]

I’m on the fence regarding bans like this.

But from first hand, I grew up on social media and I can’t say it was really positive for me or the people around me that also grew up on/with social media.

I’m wondering how this would change mental health in young people. Can anyone point me to specific studies on this?

[muse900]

Personally I believe that our communities and mental health deteriorate through social media especially in a young age.

Although I am a firm believer of the above, I do not believe that Governments are doing it because they do care about our health. Quite the opposite. I believe they want to manipulate us as much as they can so they can keep in power.

Although they want that, they have seen that social media has the power on gathering people and creating protests, so I believe they want to cut it off on younger people that usually have way more anger and got much less to lose (nowadays that the light at the end of the tunnel is fading) than a middle-aged man being mind-controlled his whole life being a good abiding citizen.

Its a power tool, they are just swinging it where they want. Soonish in EU we'll have the same ban, but it won't be because EU politicians cares about children, it is so they can keep their power and not have a generation that has access to other sources than traditional media and structured schools grooming them on just obeing their masters.

[prawn]

Are political revolutions really brought about by children under 16? I think there's an argument that these policies push for identifying adults and that that might stifle speaking out, but I don't think any of it would be about stifling uprising from 15 year olds.

And when you speak of governments doing this to stay in power: which governments? All political parties in general? Just typical old-school politicians? Because there's a fairly atypical leader in the US, and there's an atypical rising force in Australia, and so on, and I think their popularity is stronger in older age brackets than aforementioned 15 year old.

[logicchains]

There was a youth revolution in Napal thanks to social media: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Nepalese_Gen_Z_protests . A revolution in the sense that the protesters violently forced the current government to resign.

[ElProlactin]

> I believe they want to manipulate us as much as they can so they can keep in power.

And the social media companies don't want to manipulate you for power and profit?

The conspiratorial angles to these bans sounds an awful lot like the disinformation you see on social media about subjects like vaccines.

[logicchains]

>the disinformation you see on social media about subjects like vaccines.

Governments produced far more disinformation about vaccines than social media, like claiming the covid vaccines reduced transmission when the studies behind them never claimed that and the actual data showed that clearly wasn't the case.

[Forgeties79]

I’ve given this a lot of thought as well and I’m also generally a little unsure, especially because the Internet was so positive for me in most other ways (it’s hard to overstate what battle.net communities did for my psychology and confidence as somebody who felt kind of alone) but I think what ultimately distinguishes the current harm of social media is that what we had back then was not nearly as sophisticated. Yes I’m sure they were getting some data from us, yes there was exploitation and problems, But the current infrastructure of the “attention economy” is absolutely insane and beyond destructive.

From a social perspective, it wasn’t really until Instagram blew up in popularity and we had to start learning not to take people’s feeds as representative of how great their lives were that this stuff started to creep up. IMO Facebook was a little more text driven and myspace was mostly just middle school drama that would’ve taken place IRL anyway.

[golph]

I get your opinion on networks like battle.net. These also did wonders for me as a person and getting me into IT in the first place, got me connected with people double my age who just taught me valuable lessons on teamwork and growing up.

With my comment I was looking more into the direction of "the social media", where everything seems fake. I luckily grew up, when everything was still based on an actual timeline and not a deeply optimized algorithm.

[Forgeties79]

Yeah I think I kind of accidentally conflated some stuff in that comment. I’m more just broadening out - social media is particularly harmful, but there are parts of the Internet outside of social media that are also not great.

[prawn]

I think that comment about sophistication is absolutely key. Not even just data harvesting, but actively working against the interests of a user to keep them actively engaged.

[Forgeties79]

Yeah it’s just such an overall hostile experience where you have to have your guard up. Which crazy to me is how many people on HN still say that having an ad blocker is selfish/“people just wanting stuff for free.” An ad blocker is basic security at this point.

[prawn]

I would absolutely agree with that about basic security, and that it's been the case for about 20 years.

[test1984]

The Anxious Generation is a recent book that extensively explains the damage caused by social media before age 16. The arguments in the book would support such a ban if it manages to get the majority of kids off social media, but it has to be a critical mass and not easily evadable

[MrBuddyCasino]

I'd be very careful about studies that show a result favourable to the current zeitgeist's moral panic:

"A recent study claimed to show that social media use was hurting kids' cognitive development.

But I had access to their data, so I was able to show that they were completely wrong."

https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/social-scientists-are-lazy

[dbdr]

One issue with this is that it's a non-peer-reviewed critique of a peer-reviewed scientific article. It's of course still possible that the critique is correct and the article is wrong. However, you'd need to deeply understand this critique, and be at least as qualified as the reviewers to be able to convince yourself of that (or have a good reason to believe the reviewers deliberately accepted a flawed paper). Am I missing something?

[MrBuddyCasino]

Its 2026 and you still believe in peer review, I don’t know what to tell you.

[dbdr]

Peer review is imperfect, for sure. What alternative method do you recommend?

[MrBuddyCasino]

Difficult topic, too much for a HN comment. Some good starting points: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/brief-notes-on-scientific-critiqu...

[owisd]

Yet like cigarettes or lead you're not prepared to be very careful about results that claim it's all a moral panic being favourable to a very rich elite.

[shevy-java]

But you refer here solely to social media.

This is separate from mandating age verification onto everyone.

Personally I don't really care as to whether social media is banned or not, though I also don't think state actors should even be able to restrict us. However had, when it comes to age sniffing, I fail to see why I should yield my personal data, in order to access information on the www. This kind of defeats the purpose of www if a state can restrict us here (any state - not surprising in a dictatorship, but odd in a democracy).

[hhjj]

The real subject is what it implies: identification of every Malaysian posting on social media to enforce this ban.

Control of speech through think of the children rhetoric.