[dadoum]

Still, I don't want to gate people based on age.

Parents should at least be able to overwrite the age of their child, maybe selectively allow bypasses. My experience with a computer would have been completely different if I was blocked from half of the internet. Especially when I see which kind of content gets blocked.

[doginasuit]

As a millennial-aged person I saw a fair amount of content I would not want the young people in my life to see, but it's probably not nearly as harmful as the non-age gated content that they will still have access to. There is a lot creepy youtube and tiktok content that isn't off limits but still unhealthy and my younger relatives are fascinated by it.

[kentm]

Not that I want my kids looking at porn or violent content, but I’m far more concerned about man-o-sphere influencers than that other stuff.

[sciencejerk]

I had to Google "man-o-sphere". Is it particularly more dangerous or toxic than other identity-based activist communities? Genuinely curious to know

[grey-area]

Yes, a lot of it involves denigrating women and an entitled and very rigid attitude towards the male place in society (alphas etc).

This is incredibly toxic for young men growing up and the women they interact with.

Some of the more prominent proponents are actual pimps (the Tate brothers).

[sciencejerk]

Is manosphere related to "red pill"?

[jplusequalt]

Yes

[elcritch]

How is that different than pervasive pornography though? Many young boys now think it’s normal to ask girls for sexual acts before having ever kissed a girl.

[tsimionescu]

It is, as pornography is about sexual acts, while the manosphere is discussing the role they believe men and women should play in all aspects of life, not just sex and romance. They believe and teach that women shouldn't be managers, knowledge workers, professors, politicians, shouldn't have a right to vote (at least not differently from the man who essentially owns them) etc.

Pornography may give some people some wrong ideas about sex and romantic relationships, might even instill some level of implicit misoginy in certain straight men, but I'm pretty sure you won't get the idea that women should be allowed in Parliament from watching too much porn.

[squidbeak]

> Many young boys now think it’s normal to ask girls for sexual acts before having ever kissed a girl.

This is a common media talking point, but are there any hard figures for this 'many'? The type you're describing existed when I was young, long before the internet. My impression of boys and young men today is that they are generally just as decent, cautious, respectful and idealistic as they ever were - but that a small crude and unpleasant minority taints the reputation of the whole generation.

[scott_w]

Huge gap between producing material that depicts (presumably) consensual sexual activities between adults and telling young boys to commit rape.

[aussieguy1234]

The Manosphere is going to convince the impressionable young boys and men they are entitled to be treated in the same way as the men in the porn videos, consent be dammed. This is the main problem.

[khalic]

Seems like they could use some sex ed courses

[ACCount37]

Maybe? "Identity-based activist communities" are incredibly toxic as a rule.

Maybe there's lasting harm from engaging in them early. Or maybe it's better to get exposed to them early in your life, so that you have time to figure out why you don't want anything to do with them.

Either way, it seems pretty clear that preventing children and teens from engaging them is a nonstarter. You can't get anywhere close to consensus on "this is harmful and should be banned" because, guess what, someone's entire identity is going to be built around such communities.

[doginasuit]

I think it is safe to rule out early engagement as a positive factor.

[tsimionescu]

Early engagement maybe, but early exposure, especially to communities that you happen to not be attracted to, may be a net positive.

[doginasuit]

I would say what sets it apart is the undercurrent of anger and grievance combined with the self destructive beliefs that are prevalent in the community. It's men and boys who struggle to find acceptance and belonging, maybe even for reasons that are initially sympathetic. But instead of healthy self-reflection and feedback, they find a distorted understanding of themselves and masculinity that only reinforces their isolation.

[philipallstar]

This is just a caricature. It's like saying all women's spaces are bad because some female influencers tell their massive followings that men should pay for expensive shopping trips on the first date. This mischaracterisation through cherry picking is destructive.

[pseudalopex]

Who said all men's spaces were bad?

[latexr]

Louis Theroux did a documentary on it recently if you want to learn more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Theroux:_Inside_the_Mano...

[guilhas]

Here is the real manosphere no one tells you about https://youtube.com/watch?v=JshlJzZRi64

[jrm4]

"Identity based activist communities" feels like a hilariously ham-fisted attempt to connect together extremely different groups.

[totetsu]

I'm "Genuinely curious" and I'm "just asking" are so man-o-sphere "coded"

[lo_zamoyski]

The "man-o-sphere" is pornographic. Look at the porn-brained Tate brothers for an example. That is their whole ethos and their souls are rotted out by it. Both are based in dehumanization and contempt for women and draws from the well of insecurity, viciousness, and psychological disorder. Both entrench and deepen psychological disorder and immorality.

I think the basic error is that we're making a concession to obscene content and the sophists in our midst who have spent decades deploying the garbage of moral relativism and fallacious appeals to "freedom" to defend evil. The argument for age verification here is weakened if, instead, the production and distribution of pornography is outlawed.

That you cannot perfectly enforce the law doesn't mean the law has no value or function. The purpose of the law is not undermined by imperfect enforcement, and it isn't exhausted by enforceability. Law is a teacher. Anti-porn laws would still carry psychological and social weight. They are a declaration of what is not tolerated and what is not good and contributes to the stigmatization of bad things. That creates a higher hurdle in people's minds to seek out and engage in such activity and creates shame around such activities that itself dissuades.

I would also add that pornography and drugs have a history of being used in psychological warfare. Oligarchs ruining society? Allow pornography and it will absorb people's attention and cripple them emotionally and rationally to neutralize them. Or consider the recent loosening of drug laws or debate about loosing them - which I do not accept is coincidental - to give people another dulling and numbing agent and an escape. It is in the corrupt interests of an oligarchic elite to corral the herd. The police baton is painful and creates a dangerous indignation and resentment, but pornography and drugs do not.

[nerdsniper]

So, re-instate the Hays Code, essentially? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hays_Code

[pphysch]

Manosphere content is toxic and harmful but the hyperviolence and desensitisation of the former should not be downplayed. That's where the mass shooters evidently come from.

[Balinares]

A hundred thousand furries consuming unfathomable amounts of porn without shooting up anyone kind of cast doubt about that point.

[vharish]

And 99 out of hundred get tired of porn at some point. We all have watched it and moved on. If only one can shoot and move on.

[sciencejerk]

Who is talking about furries? But Tyler James Robinson and Benjamin Jeffrey Smith. I guess that's only 2/100k to your point?

[mschuster91]

> That's where the mass shooters evidently come from.

Bollocks. European teenagers watch just as much porn and play GTA at age 10 and yet we don't end up having 12 children a day die from gun violence [1].

Note, I'm not an anti-gun nut, I think German and British anti-gun laws are ridiculously strict. But the American way of dealing with guns is equally bad.

[1] https://www.sandyhookpromise.org/resources/gun-violence-fact...

[technothrasher]

> we don't end up having 12 children a day die from gun violence

Note that this definition of "children" includes ages up 24 years old. Not that the US doesn't have a gun violence problem, but pretending 24 year olds are "children" in order to gain a better sound bite doesn't help anybody.

[imtringued]

If you look at the actual statistics there are 1300 annual homicides killing children which amounts to 3.5 children + teenagers a day.

Then there are gun suicides which I would not count as gun violence, amounting to another 3.5 children + teenagers a day.

[nearlyepic]

> That's where the mass shooters evidently come from.

I mean, quite a few have come from proto-manosphere circles, too. Elliot Rodger comes to mind.

[scotty79]

Given how large it is, I don't think it's a high stat. Especially compared with other subcultures. And we don't blame feminism for every instance where a man is killed by a man hating woman.

[tsimionescu]

> And we don't blame feminism for every instance where a man is killed by a man hating woman.

The fact that this is basically unheard of, while incels shooting up schools is somewhat common, may explain why blame is often thrown at one movement and not the other.

[pphysch]

I wouldn't equate incel with manosphere. Manosphere is often hypersexual and about greed/consumption and being insecure and getting scammed, whereas inceldom is more hate-based.

[Zababa]

>That's where the mass shooters evidently come from.

Citation needed?

[giancarlostoro]

I was going to name drop one, but then I realized, I wouldn't want others on HN to wind up looking it up. Let's just say, you eventually see snuff films and the like. Not something any child should be exposed to, heck even as an adult, I want nothing to do with such things, but there it was, a random .mp4 someone shared, what do you do? Curiosity killed the innocence.

[vasco]

If you saw a bunch of it and presumably are fine what does it matter then? Sure it might have been uncomfortable for a few days and you may not have understood right away but so what? That's almost every week as a kid. Seeing some titties is probably the least confusing.

[anonzzzies]

Many uncles of friends (or fathers, who knows) had stacks of porn mags we knew where they were as 70s kids. When very young they were icky and after that we took them home. Who cares.

[echelon]

We need to stop this helicopter civilization bullshit.

We're building 1984 to protect from god knows what imaginary harms.

Stop putting plastic wrap around people's freedoms, liberty, and right to privacy.

[Gigachad]

The harms of smartphones and social media are about as far from imaginary as it could get. The data is screaming at us.

We will look back at handing kids phones with instagram like giving kids cigarettes and think wtf were we doing.

[AngryData]

And I find that harm to be far less than the harm caused by identifying everybody all the time and censoring topics to people based on government provided tokens.

[kelseyfrog]

Therapy and meditation is an effective remedy for this kind of suffering.

[brigandish]

A dystopian state?

[rpdillon]

You're restating the problem, but the issue is with the proposed solution. Creating a surveillance state in an attempt to improve society is myopic. We know a surveillance apparatus will be abused to oppress people (it's already happening in the US: we have stories all the way back to the NSA/Snowden, but just last week Flock cameras were being abused to stalk ex-girlfriends, the list is endless), so pushing for that particular approach creates a bigger problem (authoritarian surveillance state) than it solves (some kids watching porn and tiktok).

Edgar Friendly got it right, back in 1993:

> See, according to Cocteau's plan, I'm the enemy. Cause I like to think, I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I'm the kind if guy who wants to sit in a greasy spoon and think, "Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?" I want high cholesterol. I want to eat bacon, butter and buckets of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in a non-smoking section. I wanna run through the streets naked with green Jello all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to. Okay, pal? I've seen the future, you know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sittin' around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake singing "I'm an Oscar-Meyer Wiener".

[echelon]

Are you sure it's just kids?

In dealing with the ills of social media, you do what you do with every other negative externality - you tax it. At least the parts of it you don't like.

Designing privacy, freedom, and liberty destroying mechanisms is not the way.

Big social wants these regulations to pass so that they can get better identity tracking for ads targeting. To them it doesn't matter if the tech ushers in 1984. It makes them more money.

[Gigachad]

It's definitely not just kids. Social media is a lot like meth, we should at a bare minimum stop giving it to kids as soon as possible. And then come to realise it's bad for everyone and should be wound back.

[Paracompact]

Their argument would be, "If meth is a negative externality, we should just tax it instead of banning it in stores for kids to buy." Kids may die, but I'm sure with all that extra state revenue we'll get a nice park or museum or kickback to Tesla or something.

[AnthonyMouse]

But then what's the point of forcing IDs on everyone instead of cutting to the chase?

[bloqs]

I'm not sure I get your arguement here

Are you saying that we should let children smoke and just tax it because its better for their liberty and freedoms?

Or are you saying we should just tax social media for adults but banning it for kids is ok

[anonzzzies]

We do that here; heavy tax sigarettes (and booze): both dropped like a lead balloon. So yes, tax it for everyone. Kids cannot pay for sigarettes and most adults don't want to (most vapers I know do it because it costs far less; that should be taxed more too imho). If browsing insta/tiktok costs an euro per hour, let's see how many still do it; I'd say they go bankrupt in a few months. Apparently it was never that interesting.

[cortic]

I remember the video nasties of the 90s were 'far from imaginary dangers' for kids, before that it was rock music that the data was screaming at us about. Maybe social media does hold an actual danger this time, but we are a hysterical bunch of knee-jerk reactionary nutjobs, when it comes to new things and kids.

I wouldn't be surprised if 20 years from now we see social media as just another hysterical reaction that generated a generation of bad law, wrecking, or diminishing a number of lives, for no good reason at all.

[hollerith]

You're assuming that history has proven the rock music and video games weren't harmful to kids, which I do not grant.

[imjonse]

It's no coincidence cigarettes were named 'torches of freedom' to get women to start paying up for the privilege of using them a hundred years ago.

[mike_hearn]

The data isn't screaming at us. That's an illusion caused by the flood of bad academic papers on the topic.

A good example is the Jonathan Haidt/Aaron Brown fiasco from a few years ago. Brown has been methodically trying to stop the stampede off yet another pseudo-scientific cliff but not enough people are listening.

https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide...

https://reason.com/video/2024/04/02/the-bad-science-behind-j...

https://reason.com/2023/05/30/not-every-study-on-teen-depres...

> In a recent article for Reason, I argued that the hundreds of studies that New York University professor Jonathan Haidt has assembled to support his claim that social media is causing the teen mental health crisis not only don't back up his claim; they undermine it.

Age verification campaigners like Haidt play a smooth game but consistently downplay how useless social science actually is for answering questions like this:

> I didn't express "concerns" about specific studies; I argued that the majority of the 301 papers cited in his document are garbage. I went through each category of studies on Haidt's list, chose the first one that studied social media and depression to get a random sampling, and then showed that they were so embarrassingly bad as to be completely useless. They were guilty of coding errors, fatal defects hidden in mid-paper jargon, inappropriate statistics, longitudinal studies that weren't longitudinal, experiments in name only, and red flags for hypothesis shopping and p-hacking (that is, misusing data analysis to yield results that can be presented as statistically significant).

It's possible that in the past few years a wealth of robust evidence has suddenly emerged but it seems doubtful.

This stuff does matter. If you misdiagnose the problem then congrats, you just let governments censor the internet - quite possibly creating a China style totalitarian system that pretends to be democratic along the way - and kids will still have the same problems. A bad outcome!

[mike_hearn]

Gonna violate a site rule briefly to comment on voting. The vote swings on this post are fascinatingly wild (at least compared to normal). There's a ton of both up and downvotes going on continuously, but no replies. On Reddit this would be considered a highly "controversial" post by their algorithm.

The interpretation is interesting. Probably, a lot of people don't like criticism of academia or have already made an emotional investment in the social media hypothesis, but aren't sure how to respond to Brown's critiques of the studies. So it just swings up and down with otherwise no engagement.

[sajithdilshan]

Why are we only focused on kids? the boomers are doing more harm to the society and democracy by spreading mis-information via social media. If we want to have an honest conversation let's talk about every age group and limit it to everyone rather than using kids as a scapegoat

[PeterStuer]

"We" are building 1984 to make sure "We" stay in power of our EU Animal Farm.

[krige]

EU? It's mostly happening elsewhere though. See: Australia. See: California. See: KIDS act. See: KOSA.

Sounds like denial or tunnel vision.

[PeterStuer]

Have you read the DSA?

[Balinares]

I have a hunch that the Epstein class is getting increasingly upset about the kids encountering ideas about what ought to be done about the Epstein class, and mostly are keen to see the next generation molded back into good little subservient laborers. It really isn't about the well-being of the kids.

[skybrian]

Websites should have an easy way to check whether the connecting device has a child lock turned on. We don’t need to identify the person using the device at all. It should be up to parents to make sure their kids use device that are locked.

[kevincox]

Or even better, just let the website return a set of flags (like age_rating=18) in a header and let the user agent decide if it wants to show it, block it, ask for approval, ...

Then the policy lives on the user agent.

[IshKebab]

This is clearly the right way to do things. Just make devices have a forced choice for their age setting on initial setup, and expose that to apps and websites.

Insane that they didn't even try this simple solution first. Yeah people will get around it, but they'll get around any solution.

[tzs]

That’s what the California law does.

[nerdsniper]

I hesitate to comment on these because hundreds of comments have already said it and I don't have anything new to add.

- The age-gate should just be a setting on the device: either over 18 or under 18. Websites/apps should at most only be legally required to respect the device's assertions.

- Devices should be controllable by parents: let the parents decide whether the child should be age-restricted or not.

- Devices should have profiles so that you can let your kids use your own phone/laptop without messing up your stuff or getting into things they shouldn't.

Historically parents have been allowed to rent R-rated movies for their kids with nudity and sex and violence even if the video store isn't supposed to rent it out to the kids directly. That was always considered okay. If I think my 16-year old is mature enough to watch some porn, that should be the parents' decision.

[tzs]

That’s pretty close to the California law.

[Nevermark]

You are imagining that a solution for you will be deemed a solution for the political powers pushing for this. Or that being age-verified is the main danger of having age-verification.

That would be nice!

But if there isn't a safe market driven solution to age-verification, which provides anonymous, unsurveiled, age-attested site access, with no ability for the government to individual monitor, deny or revoke, then that is exactly what is going to get pushed on all of us.

You don't defeat an enemy by not needing the manacles they are very motivated to force on everyone..

Increasingly: We adopt zero knowledge proofs, and other decentralized open-sourced hard-security technologies, and resolve seemingly-small, but not-going-away practical issues like age & porn, or empower and "trust" every weak politician, interest group and stranger on the internet to not use our lack of awareness and defense against us.

Add AI to the mix, and the risk/damage of passivity becomes extreme.

[delis-thumbs-7e]

I do. I’m going to take a wild guess that you are an old head like me, male, and lived your youth in the wonderful internet free of commercialisation of human interaction, free to roam and find new cool things and people, a wonderful library of Alexandria to learn and spend time in.

Discuss what the experience was/is to zoomers and younger, especially girls. Did you try to play a silly online game with your friends while being constantly harassed by 3-4 adult men? How many times someone offered you money (in form of “lootboxes”) to get nude pictures of you when you were severely underage? Or was on every site you visited an algorithm pushing on your face content about how you should embrace anorexia, start gambling on what Trump says on TV, use drugs, or simply do a suicide?

Hey fellow unc’s, we really need to stop nostalgising on the computer childhood of our youth and listen to the kids (as well as a bunch of research on the topic) and face the fact that the internet of the friendly geeks and nerds of the yesterday does not exist anymore. Things have to change, if we want to have any kind of working society left whatsoever.

[finghin]

I completely agree with you, but what this shows is a momentous change in the landscape of the internet, facilitated by mass marketing, data collection, commercialisation and even financialisation of digital game assets.

This is a huge shift that cannot be rectified by simple age filters.

Being realistic about the problem requires being realistic about ill-conceived solutions with conspicuous benefits for commercial actors.

Besides an array of largely static, non-interactive websites, there is no hard line between content that is suitable for young eyes and not.

[corroclaro]

A bit further up there's a really nice comment about how those studies are just garbage.

[tancop]

you said listen to the kids, but if you actually ask kids they will tell you they want a way to block predators and bullies. they want to restrict interactions with specific people or groups on their own terms because thats where all the real harm comes from. they do not want whole sites or categories of content to be blocked.

and even if you think kids dont understand it enough to make that choice for themselves you should let parents do it. if a family thinks their kids can have unlimited access the government should let them.

thats where the california bill comes in as the only reasonable option. it gives families a choice instead of forcing restrictions on everyone and theres no privacy problem because its using self reported age data that stays on device. and i know you might ask what about kids who secretly buy a unrestricted phone with their own money. i think at that point they deserve to have it.

[delis-thumbs-7e]

Unfortunate fact is that many victims consider predators manipulating them ”friends”. That’s how grooming works. We have discussed the safety of online spaces for 20-30 years now, always hearing the whatever okatform ”doing their utmost for the protection of children bla bla bla” and nothing changes. Meta, Snapchat and various games like Roblox could wipe this issue out of existent today if they wanted to. They won’t.

The fact is that we as a society have so far put the convenience and entertainment of adults before well-being of children and others, who are in the most weakest position.