[OKRainbowKid]

How is it strange? As far as I know, there's quite some research on negative impact of social media on teens mental health. How is restricting access to specific age groups fundamentally different from restricting access to cigarettes or alcohol?

[alexgoodhart]

Because speech and communication obviously. That’s a ridiculous comparison.

I am very much not a pro-social media person (this is a social media website, btw) but I am even less a nanny state person. EU loses plenty of support from the citizens of its constituent states when it implements these sorts of limitations, so I hope the benefits meaningfully improve quality of life.

Also, research is not a prescriptive cure, and it isn’t a neutral domain. It is valuable, but not as an unevaluated rubber stamp.

[OKRainbowKid]

It's not a ridiculous comparison in a world where Meta faces a 1.4T lawsuit over their core platform design being addictive to young people. And that lawsuit isn't brought by the EU, but by US states. So clearly there is more to it than "EU nanny state bad, US wild west good". https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/meta-meta-...

[mdp2021]

> How is restricting access to specific age groups fundamentally different from restricting access to cigarettes or alcohol?

Restricting access to the latter does not impact privacy.

[OKRainbowKid]

Doesn't that depend on the implementation? Don't get me wrong, I am also highly skeptical about governments or businesses using means like age verification to pursue an agenda of broadly restricting access to what should be free information - but I also see the current state of major social media platforms as deeply harmful to society, and I do think it would be better if young teenagers did not have access.

[mdp2021]

> Doesn't that depend on the implementation

And which implementation of age verification would not cut off from the "restricted" side (including the "adult" part, i.e. exactly the part for the kids) of the Web the Normal People? Those that say "if my privacy is suspected to be impacted I will adoperate to cease life on Earth". I am not aware of a practical system that warranties privacy while performing age verification.

And: the implementation, "doing it right", should be the chief point of debate. Not the vile "for the kids", that already denounces that the proponents are scum. (Everyone is capable of pointing to a problem: adequate good /solutions/ are all that can exist for administrations.)

> deeply harmful to society

So are knives, and both forbidding cutlery to minors and impeding adult access to cutlery are signs that some societies are finished and requiring cessation.

[Chu4eeno]

Didn't the testifying UK academics explicitly say the current research was inconclusive?

[bushwart]

You don't need to show your government ID to enter a supermarket.

[OKRainbowKid]

And you don't need it to access the internet either.

[t0mpr1c3]

Have you tried to watch a YouTube video in the UK recently?

[OKRainbowKid]

YouTube != the Internet

[mdp2021]

YT is currently a most critical piece of the WWW: the informational content and intellectual participation on YT competes with its complement. Those who want to reach a public through video content use YT. Whether you want to find past productions or the latest input from intellectuals, in video form, you go to YT. To lose YT - to use access control over it would be to lose it - would be a most immense damage.

And the perpetrators of such damage should pay.

[OKRainbowKid]

It might be to you, but I don't follow your generalization. I spend a lot of time online and personally wouldn't shed a tear if YouTube stopped existing tomorrow. Not because I feel any animosity towards the platform, but because video content is of limited use to me. It is not an essential, and irreplaceable part of the internet. Also, to go back to the original argument, nobody is talking about taking YouTube offline.