As a Norwegian teen parent: Seeing all the issues cropping up which is /enabled/ (not saying caused) by social media, you don't need to look for ulterior motives. I believe these bans are honest attempts to fix real problems.
Examples I know about include 12-year-olds selling nudes, teen experimentation with alcohol being replaced with cocaine because cocaine is so easily available (the issue is the scale and how widespread cocaine is getting; not that it never happened before), several cases in Norway of 13-year-olds being recruited by the mafia to throw bombs at houses through the internet, violence etc. is up the roof, kids have 4 hours of sleep since they doomscroll all through the night, results in school are trending downwards, university reports that students are increasingly unable to concentrate...
Are there other solutions than bans to social media? Sure. Could this in theory have been fixed by better parenting? Sure.
But parents don't live in a vacuum. Parents and children alike rely on the culture around them.
Social media is a HUGE shift to society, and neither culture nor parenting practices has sufficiently adopted to handle it yet. Slowing the shift down a bit until norms and culture catches up doesn't seem like a bad idea.
Our teens are living through a changing time: peak unregulated social media, that I personally belive is approaching heroin level addiction and damage; covid lockdowns testing the very limits of Piagetian theory; AI in school and outsourcing understanding; very uncertain job market to enter into; possibly the collapse of AMOC; reaching Peloponnesian war level of unstable democracy; the true collapse of idealism, the birth of the mechanical man and the first total spiritual crisis
Our institutions absolutely can not react with the accelerated change, so I think the only thing a parent can do is act as individuals, teach their children, and position their families in the best way they can to weather the storm.
As a parent, too, this is a parental responsibility, schools can (and do) ban smartphones as well.
For under 16 there are tools built in Android and iOS to control and limit usage that parents can use. And at home parents can obviously also take the device(s) away.
The question isn't whether there are harms - the questions is whether the approach - a ban based on age, and therefore some sort of ID, has a hidden agenda.
After all many of those harms you listed don't suddenly stop at 16.
Many campaigners see this approach as letting the tech companies off the hook - by removing children from the platforms is removes a key leverage point to get the tech companies to cleanup their act generally.
Obviously it's quite possible the not-so-hidden agenda is simply a political one of 'being seen to do something'.
I see that youtube is on the blanket banned list - which is a bit surprising given they are probably one of the more responsible platforms and it also contains lots of educational stuff.
There is also the possibility that this is not a well thought-out announcement (which they say will take effect by spring so things can change) by a PM with perhaps only a few weeks left in the job...
One very odd thing about the ban is that discord is ignored ( both a cesspool and almost every adolescent male who plays online games is on it ), yet youtube is banned.
Youtube has to be one of the most policed platforms out there, and also has a lot of really good educational content.
Such choices can both be incompetance and a desire to force everyone ( as banning via ID means everyone has to ID to watch ) to ID to watch youtube......
Good point. Future historians looking back will likely consider 2015/2016 to be the point when we entered the social-media-epoch. Both Brexit and Trump where mainly social-media-driven phenomenon.
"Barack Obama’s successful campaign for the presidency has been widely attributed to the use of social networking sites, mobile devices, and interactive websites to engage previously hard-to-reach populations in political activity. Campaign communication strategies may be applicable for youth health promotion efforts, particularly for the highly stigmatized issue of mental health. In this article, we examine elements of the 2008 Obama presidential campaign’s use of social media technologies and content designed to foster effective political participation among youth."
Yes, it's about the explicitly stated goal of getting kids to stop being harmed by the products of some of the largest advertising agencies on the planet that have resisted more subtle regulation for decades.
Yes, no doubt there is an obvious first-order reason for this. It's the second order effects that I think folks are rightly worried about, but it's easy to steel man.
I'm not sure that will bring a lot of relief to the concerned side as it implies you are being fingerprinted by all the websites that are subject to this verification rule.
So that's considered acceptable? Seriously? I mean the government can't seriously argue that Facebook or Twitter aren't going to be deceptive about this?
were you under some sort of impression that ad-tech surveillance platforms (“social media”) weren’t already fingerprinting the majority of their users?
like, the facebook pixel used to track you across the entire internet (or damn near close enough to it). and that was 10-ish years ago.
Watching youtube wasn't banned. They just got banned from having an account and participating in the social features of youtube.
As for how effective the ban was on getting kids off social media in general, I think it's a long process that doesn't entirely sit on this change. Banning phones in schools has been a much faster more radical improvement.
It's going to take a lot more work to defeat the tech giants but I'm glad we are trying.
That is not an accurate description of the idea expressed in the post I replied to, you might want to start a separate thread to discuss potential second order effects.
The proper way to implement it is to issue digital IDs and use ZK proofs to verify the age. That way the service doesn't know anything other that the fact that you have an official digital ID and that you are at least a certain age. The ID issuer does not need to be involved in anything other than issuing the ID, making it perfect when it comes to privacy, while still fulfilling the goal of having an age limit.
If this is built on open standards, so that anyone can use it for free, it would be a big positive step forward for everyone.
Zero knowledge proofs are unusable for age verification because they're impossible to revoke. One person can share their ID and everyone else can use it.
The currency of the world is data. This the beginning of public restriction to data (currency). It always starts slowly. Start with kids, softly softly. Fast forward a couple of years and we absolutely know this will morph into total control of who has access to what, when and how. It will be used to curb whatever the ruling elite decide they don’t like and we probably won’t even know, as by then they will have full
spectrum dominance of all media & comms.
Look at how they flipped the switch on Mythos last week - do peope really believe these lunatic governments we’re all currently suffering from won’t go further after they start this? Some of you seem to think they still “ask” nicely... nope, they just do whatever they want now.
Probably? Social media has a ton of negative influence on young people. One of which is reducing time spent on in-person socializing which leads to decrease in number of romantic relationships and children born.
This is something government deeply cares about because the business that bought it needs there to be more workers so that the labor remains dirt cheap.
Have they said you’ll need to provide ID? My guess would be they do it through other mechanisms like age estimation. I know X is already doing this for posts labelled mature. If they do estimation through account age most people are probably already basically verified on lots of the main social media services.
The UK government has no problem being openly authoritarian when it wants to, without hiding it behind other policies. Whether or not you think it's bad policy (I think it's mixed), I think this is genuinely about what it claims to be.
The truth is the vast majority of British citizens (70%+) support this. Actually, support for the Online Safety Act went up in the year after it was implemented. People you talk to online are not representative of public opinion as a whole. British society is very pro-"protecting children", which is what this is advertised as.
A lot of old people think a social media ban will bring back the good old days of their childhood where kids went outside. A lot of parents don't want to tell their kids "no" to social media because of "peer pressure", instead of just telling their kids to find better friends.
Only a small proportion of the population recognises this is about control. No major political party will speak out against this as they know being against it is a vote loser.
This specifically doesn't ID anybody. It's not using the upcoming digital ID, it's just going to use the existing age authentication - eg, you just need to show your company is doing some sort of "serious" age verification (not just enter your DOB here) rather than actually checking identity.
It's bad, shallow populism, but it's not some nefarious surveillance plan, as much as the yanks are going to paint it that way.
Here's a random movie recommendation that has nothing at all to do with the above comment or the original link posted: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094
It's also about an extremely unpopular government restricting teenagers to only information provided by government controlled/supporting sources, so when they turn 16 and can vote they're more likely to vote for the incumbent regime.
Its wildly popular to the tune of 70% support amongst the general population?
The HN bubble needs to realize that it's not that people don't care, it's that they really want this and also when it didn't work started complaining they wanted even more.
Examples I know about include 12-year-olds selling nudes, teen experimentation with alcohol being replaced with cocaine because cocaine is so easily available (the issue is the scale and how widespread cocaine is getting; not that it never happened before), several cases in Norway of 13-year-olds being recruited by the mafia to throw bombs at houses through the internet, violence etc. is up the roof, kids have 4 hours of sleep since they doomscroll all through the night, results in school are trending downwards, university reports that students are increasingly unable to concentrate...
Are there other solutions than bans to social media? Sure. Could this in theory have been fixed by better parenting? Sure.
But parents don't live in a vacuum. Parents and children alike rely on the culture around them.
Social media is a HUGE shift to society, and neither culture nor parenting practices has sufficiently adopted to handle it yet. Slowing the shift down a bit until norms and culture catches up doesn't seem like a bad idea.