[ETH_start]

The most important question here is not whether social media access should be banned to children. The question is whether everyone's rights should be stripped in an effort to enforce such a ban. I find this whole globally coordinated endeavor to be outrageous in its illiberality, and manipulative in its appeal to protecting children to justify these encroachments on people's rights.

[big85]

Quite right. Around 2 million UK adults don't have photo ID, mostly concentrated among poorer and less educated people, and many of those have difficulty getting credit card for the same reason. The UK is violating their basic ECHR rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assocation, and the peaceful enjoyment of their property, and it's unnecessary because we already have parental controls.

[somelamer567]

Most continential Europeans, like in Spain and France, have mandatory strong ID. I have never seen "paper please" there.

This argument simply doesn't work.

[pibaker]

I have some really bad news about the freedom of offline speech in the UK.

[YinglingHeavy]

Sounds exactly like the population worth monitoring the most

[soco]

You mean the people's rights to lure and attack my children? It's not a rhetorical question, it is exactly what is currently happening (and not only with children but okay).

[somelamer567]

(This comment is addressed to peer comments, not the parent post.)

It's silly to say "Get better at parenting", when parents who have no specialist training, are literally facing off against trillion-dollar companies with thousands of industrial psychologists and data scientists hell-bent on making their products as addictive and profitable as possible.

There are huge information- and power asymmetries at play here. Just shouting: "Parent your kids" better is simplistic, stupid and wrong IMHO.

[noirscape]

It's also worth noting that some of those trillion dollar companies have had staggeringly bad responses when confronted with the fact child predators are running amok on their platform.

The CEO of Roblox is probably the single easiest example to point at; when confronted about his platforms issues when it comes to enabling child abuse, the first response he had was to claim that child predators were an untapped market and then claim to be interested in adding a dating site feature to Roblox.

That's the kind of rethoric these bad laws are a response to, and is the elephant in the room that a lot of the tech industry fails to recognize. (Including the privacy advocates, for whom every nail looks like it has a hammer shaped solution.) Age verification isn't a good solution to this problem, but it at least forces the hands of these companies to address it if they don't want to face jailtime for knowingly abetting predators - they can't pretend to have clean hands anymore if they're mandated to verify user ages.

There's almost certainly better solutions, but that's also why attestation (where the source device transmits the user's age, rather than storing a ton of PII of them elsewhere) misses the mark. Attestation doesn't fix that problem.

[inigyou]

Attestation won't solve the problem of a predator also claiming to be a child, but what if attested children could only talk to friends added by the linked parent account? There are in between solutions that don't involve total surveillance.

[soco]

I also assume the "get better at parenting" folks have zero kids themselves, and likely (because HN) work directly with those technologies targeted by the governmental measures. But answering to their point, getting better at healthcare only worked when the society stepped in, also getting better at pensions, at work-life balance or gender equality. So yes, I WILL get better at parenting, namely by supporting all other parents as well and putting the technology under our control - not the other way around.

[somelamer567]

I'd go further (as a parent of kids of school age):

It takes a village to raise a child. It's all well and good for childless techbros to say "Raise your kids" properly, and be subject to the tender mercies of the tech giants, but we stand a fighting chance if parents, schools, child development specialists etc, rally to get some common-sense controls in place.

The internet is a free fire zone today. This needs to change, and techbros just saying "Be a better parent" is a lazy, cynical cop-out.

[netsharc]

Parenting in the pre-online days was probably a lot easier: in general you know who's talking to your kids: they're probably playing in the {street,park,diner,mall} with their friends, or they're in their room listening to music or playing on {game console,PC} which are offline.

Now, kids have phones and Internet-connected devices and the whole world can reach them 24/7, and that includes a lot of creeps.

[zimpenfish]

> You mean the people's rights to lure and attack my children?

Most child abductions and abuse[0] are from within the family or by people known to the child. Internet strangers are the absolute least of your worries.

[0] At least in the UK

[big85]

Then enable parental controls on your children's devices. But don't enable it on my device, because I'm an adult.

[inigyou]

There are no working parental controls. Have you tried? Because nobody is incentivized to make them work.

The California law basically mandates devices (including Linux) to have a parental controls mode and mandates apps to obey them under penalty of law.

[big85]

This is bizarre, then, because the on-device Apple system just enables the existing parental controls by default, while the online verification systems are easily cirvumvented.

[inigyou]

How do Apple parental controls work?

[kdheiwns]

If you're letting your kids be lured and attacked, that's a parenting issue. Responsible parents aren't letting their kids slip out alone. The better solution to this would be some sort of penalty for irresponsible parenting.

[phatfish]

I know this is a personal question, but i see this type of comment here so often, and it is hilariously naive. Do you have children?

[watwut]

> Responsible parents aren't letting their kids slip out alone.

Frankly, this is nonsense. European countries like Germany or Switzerland of France find it completely normal for their kids to walk to school without parents (at 6 or even 5 years old) or to play outside without parents. That is responsible parenting and good for kids themselves.

The American idea that parents must not let kids out of their sight until they are 18 is absurd. And then again, even Americans complain about it, because it is nonsense to Americans too - it is just that rhetorical device to blame the victim rather then the perpetrator.

[kdheiwns]

It is nonsense. But thinking it's okay for kids to be able to go outside and do what they want, but oh no the internet is dangerous and we need IDs is even more ridiculous, quite frankly.

If you don't want kids using social media, set up a network filter. But if you want to have mandatory ID for social media to "protect kids", but you have no trouble letting your kid go outside and get up to who knows what (they're absolutely going to be browsing the internet on their "cool friend's" computer and doing devilish things like saying naughty words on reddit), then I think anyone who really believes that needs to post their ID as proof. Because it's a very contradictory and inorganic thought process.

[watwut]

There are many laws regulating adults behavior outside. Outside is safer then online too.

[tearwear]

> but okay

Serious topic, don't do that.

Protecting children is hard. Generations of parents have been put under loads of pointless stress so that they leave lots of education to "the system" and it's clerks, most of which were only good enough at their jobs. Things developed, and mistakes of deliberately mislead parents were conventionally framed as life and life's lessons.

We are talking about thousands of kids/adolescents raped every party weekend in US and Europe ( rape is jut one extreme example ).

The role of social media in the mere exposure effect to character types and behavioral patterns is obvious--and probably well studied--but "it's just social media - raise your kids well and stop blaming others" works about as well as outlining how certain pop segments were sabotaged for decades and couldn't even exert the free will to do things better/differently--even though they noticed the premises and conclusions of certain problems--because it went against the advice of figures who were perceived as authoritative.

[el_io]

Maybe get good at parenting?

[inigyou]

This is what we call a "thought-terminating cliché"

[el_io]

Call it what you want, but spoiling children with digital devices before they can even talk properly and then trying to forcing everyone to upload their ID to random server (which will sell/leak that) is definitely a parenting issue.

[inigyou]

What causes it?

[tessellated]

Sex.

[andmarios]

I think it's the other way around. Only by raising children without access to social media —and ideally without access to online mobile-phone games, subscriptions and other pay as you go schemes—, can we make sure that the next generation of young adults will care for their freedom and privacy.

Today's rights will not matter tomorrow if the next generation is raised without any notion of privacy and ownership.

[kdheiwns]

Give your ID and full name and address to every site you access so that people care about freedom and privacy. Yeah. Genius idea. Strip away everyone's rights so they think "gee, I wish I had freedom", then never let them have freedom again.

[andmarios]

I never wrote something like this, I didn't discuss the implementation mechanism. The parent said the most important thing is not the children but some rights that in a few years are not gonna mean anything the way we go. I think it's the other way around.

I also think your idea of rights may be skewed. It is your right to not give a name and address to a website. If a website requires it, then just skip it. If you cannot skip a website, then you've already lost your freedom.

[inigyou]

They're right that it's not an important question. It's obvious to most people now that children should be kept off social media, that's why it's not a question worth discussing, it's already settled. The arguments are about how to do that without also implementing mass surveillance.

[cloudie78]

Which rights, exactly?

[phatfish]

Someone in another post was claiming there was a "right" to anonymity on the internet. That was news to me.

The "rights" of my children to not be exploited by Zuckerberg and the rest of them are far more important as far as I'm concerned.

To counter the privacy nuts, no age gates and social media bans won't lead to a North Korean style government. If anything it is the antidote as children will have a chance to grow without being radicalised by the attention stealing algorithms. The Stasi in East Germany did rather well without internet age gates.

[ETH_start]

The KYC/permissioning of the web will be abused by governments to censor dissent and cutoff dissidents from the internet.

You're free to put child-safe software on your personal computer at home. Your desire to keep your kids safe doesn't justify stripping everyone else's right to permissionlessly access the internet. Having to get the permission of a gatekeeper (who, at first, will only verify you're an adult, but tomorrow, will verify your speech is not subversive) to access the internet subordinates the populace to the state in a dramatic fashion.

[inigyou]

I think we could do well with a right to send and receive IP packets without providing ID. Services built on top of this infrastructure would be allowed to either require ID or not require it.

The only part the government needs to get involved in, is to ensure devices have a parental controls option that works. This may require including parental controls information in certain packets but provide no further restrictions once the client is known not to be using them.