Many of these "social" media websites increasingly just fling AI-generated disturbing videos at people. I am sure we could build a web that is actually pleasant to use for kids, but we are not building it.
youtube for example: https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2006013682472669589
Video games from the 90s were actually pleasant as a kid, and I'm happy to see my kids enjoying them today rather than the slot machines that the industry makes for kids these days…
(Unfortunately I'm well aware that it won't last long, because social pressure is impossible to fight at individual scale)
If we did build it and it became popular, it would quickly be taken over by the same forces that are destroying the current internet. To get good social media sites (and a better internet as well), you would first have to change the economics of the entire system driving these forces. But as is said "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism".
The question is how this is implemented, in particular age verification.
It's usual to say that MPs are old people that don't understand current technologies, but in law preparation committees they appear to be well aware; in particular, they mentioned a "double-anonymity" system where the site requesting your age wouldn't know your name, and the entity serving age requests wouldn't know which site it is for. They are also aware that people walk-around age verification checks with e.g. fake ID cards, possibly AI generated.
I'm not sure if it is actually doable reliabily, and I'm not sure either that the MPs that will have to vote the law will know the topic as well as the MPs participating in these committees.
I would personally consider other options like a one-button admin config for computers/smartphones/tablets that restricts access according to age (6-14, 15-18) and requiring online service providers to announce their "rating" in HTTP headers. Hackers will certainly object that young hackers could bypass this, but like copy-protection, the mission can be considered complete when the vast majority of people are prevented from doing what they should not do.
Alternatively one could consider the creation of a top-level domain with a "code of content" (which could include things like "chat control") enforced by controlling entity. Then again, an OS-level account config button could restrict all Internet accesses to this domain.
Perhaps an national agency could simply grant a "child safe" label to operating systems that comply to this.
This type of solutions would I think also be useful in schools (e.g. school-provided devices), although they are also talking about severely limiting screen-time at school.
Devil's advocate: what is the difference between "social media" and a website very much like this one? When can I look forward to having to give a DNA test to read HN?
My own website has a bulletin board that offers a personalized list of messages after you login: whatever threads you have not yet read. And so do many other websites of this style. So this cannot be a differentiating aspect.
Not intentionally - but in the past I did have advertisements to finance it , which I had to stop since that is enough under a lot of jurisprudence to qualify as running a for-profit, which usually means less leniency from judges.
So it is advertisements where we should draw the line -- websites with advertisements should require age checks?
Why did you cherry pick advertisments from my reply and run with that?
It clearly isn't just a singular data point that is a True or False that would include a site in the ban.
Perhaps it should be, "If I had a 12 year old daughter, do I want her to have easy access to pornography, self harm material and the ability to receive private messages from a 45 year old registered sex offender?"
I get your point - "Where is the line in the sand?" and it's a valid point but no need to argue in bad faith.
These 80yo lawmakers have kids and grandkids and advisers. They know how social media works.
They hate social media because it gives people the power to talk in public about them with near impunity. They want to go back to the old days when if you wrote a letter to the newspaper about potential corruption or wrongdoing among the "more equal animals" you'd get pulled over for a light out whenever you went through that town for the next 20yr.
For the record, that is exactly my point . I do not want yet another sword of Damocles for websites, even less if it depends on the mood of a clueless judge.
From a definition standpoint, hn is a social media site. From a legislation standpoint, it's not nearly popular (infamous?) enough to legislate (the mentioned sites have had enough negative coverage to manufacturer consent for this invasion of privacy: cyber bullying, destructive challenges, etc.)
When it is, and when your local government becomes sufficiently captured by the user surveillance industrial complex, you will need real world verification here.
Reddit is a cesspool of bots reposting the best performing images and rage bait of the last 5 years ad nauseam, that and porn makes up the bulk of the traffic. So yes, again, there is nothing in common between reddit and hn
Eh, HN is "basically the same" on several key aspects and demographic axis. It's just reached a very different equilibrium as to what goes on here due to the aspects and demographics that are different.
I used it to follow some functional programming discussions that had chosen it as it's main bulletin board, as did many other software projects. (I am not a fan of Reddit, which is why it is of paramount importance to me to be able to continue to browse it without an account.)
But fine: if you think Reddit deserves the cut, please let me know why you think this site does not deserve it. Or why Discord (also used by a lot of software projects, to my annoyance ) does not deserve it. In a way that a "80 year old judge which hates computers" can understand.
We should have kept to mailing lists, as I said many times.
Does HN spread Fake News? Facebook and Youtube do.
Do you feel bad after using HN? Insta and Facebook it happens.
Does HN collect data to specify marketing? Every other Social Media do.
This is hard to define in laws so e.g. the EU chooses to force concrete measures from the social media pages.
Give me an example of websites on HN, which spread fake news by purpose and it was allowed by the mods even they knew the news / artice / website was spreading fake news.
Yes? Even newspapers do that. You have never had Gell-Mann when reading something here outside mainstream topics of interest? (e.g. almost anything from outside the US, or health related).
Is this really the criteria you want to use to decide whether to require age checks for a website?
> the EU chooses to force concrete measures from the social media pages.
This just sidesteps the issue of how a website ends up in the list. Today, Reddit. Tomorrow, Discord. Then Github. Eventually, HN.
My news is almost outside of the US as I am not American. (wow this should be sent to r/USDefaultism). So let's say like this: I do read a lot outside of "American mainstream media".
Most good working journalist try to verify claim and statements. This is the opposite to Fake News, Clickbait and Russian state propaganda spread in Social Media because its their business model.
I'm one of the weirdos that should be on board with this, but I'm against it. This will do harm to marginalized youth and push younger people to lie and find ways around the ban.
Plus, we saw that in Australia that the lobby behind the ban was in fact an ad agency that makes ads for gambling apps.
Here is France, the ban is probably just a way to avoid legislation against companies selling crap that isn't for kids like vape pens and sports gambling apps.
> If a child is in a Formula One car and they turn on the engine, I don’t want them to win the race, I just want them to get out of the car. I want them to learn the highway code first, and to ensure the car works, and to teach them to drive in a different car.
Yet computer education in France has been severely lacking for so long. From middle school to even universities (except the courses computer focused obviously) people aren't taught correctly. Teachers themselves are lost to computers and lectures are bad.
The goal is obviously to have tech illiterate people knowing just enough to use computers for the job but not worrying about the digital autoristarism currently being deployed.
I'd be very surprised if the overwhelming majority of F1 drivers weren't in some sort of go-kart racing league long before they held government licenses.
> The goal is obviously to have tech illiterate people knowing just enough to use computers for the job but not worrying about the digital autoristarism currently being deployed.
If anything, without social media access, kids are more likely to play/hack around.
It sounds like you don't like social media. With that in mind, why is it good to add a layer of user surveillance on the Internet? Where's the connection between "social media is bad" and "it is good to add surveillance"?
If you think social media is harmful, wouldn't it be good to regulate social media? What does regulating French (or Australian, or wherever) citizens have to do with it?
A ban on social media for children is a different way of saying ID Verification for the entire population.
They are implicitly the same thing.
You can't exclude children without first verifying _everyone_ and from there excluding people who match age < approved. This is basic logic.
If you were a cynical person you could imagine this is actually politicians wanting to bring in an ID law and using "think of the children" as the social justification for it.
If you're a conspiracy theorist you'd wonder why Apple and Google have now added the ability to upload and link your passport and other real id into their respective app wallets. How long before your phones browser is digitally signing all your social media posts with your ID...
I am convinced that the current world wide rise of (right wing ) populist movements is mainly caused by social media. By regulating like this my hope is we can reduce their spread.
I'm not convinced social media is to blame. Plenty of extremist movements have arisen throughout history without social media. Politics has been bad for a long long time before social media existed.
Consolidation of all kinds of media (social, print, TV, radio, etc.) is a big ingredient in this. Another ingredient is the enshitification of the net, along with the value of unfettered collection of user data.
The problem isn't that people are consuming (social) media, it's that everything is owned by so few people. We shouldn't be punished for this by having to submit to even more surveillance.
What's wrong with right wing populist movements? They come and go just like left wing populist movements. The pendulum swinging across both the political spectrums over election cycles is a thing of beauty.
Many of these "social" media websites increasingly just fling AI-generated disturbing videos at people. I am sure we could build a web that is actually pleasant to use for kids, but we are not building it. youtube for example: https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2006013682472669589
From my experience as a kid
"Pleasant for kids to use is the polar opposite of kids finding it a pleasure to use"
Video games from the 90s were actually pleasant as a kid, and I'm happy to see my kids enjoying them today rather than the slot machines that the industry makes for kids these days…
(Unfortunately I'm well aware that it won't last long, because social pressure is impossible to fight at individual scale)
If we did build it and it became popular, it would quickly be taken over by the same forces that are destroying the current internet. To get good social media sites (and a better internet as well), you would first have to change the economics of the entire system driving these forces. But as is said "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism".
This must kill that platform.
The question is how this is implemented, in particular age verification.
It's usual to say that MPs are old people that don't understand current technologies, but in law preparation committees they appear to be well aware; in particular, they mentioned a "double-anonymity" system where the site requesting your age wouldn't know your name, and the entity serving age requests wouldn't know which site it is for. They are also aware that people walk-around age verification checks with e.g. fake ID cards, possibly AI generated.
I'm not sure if it is actually doable reliabily, and I'm not sure either that the MPs that will have to vote the law will know the topic as well as the MPs participating in these committees.
I would personally consider other options like a one-button admin config for computers/smartphones/tablets that restricts access according to age (6-14, 15-18) and requiring online service providers to announce their "rating" in HTTP headers. Hackers will certainly object that young hackers could bypass this, but like copy-protection, the mission can be considered complete when the vast majority of people are prevented from doing what they should not do.
Alternatively one could consider the creation of a top-level domain with a "code of content" (which could include things like "chat control") enforced by controlling entity. Then again, an OS-level account config button could restrict all Internet accesses to this domain.
Perhaps an national agency could simply grant a "child safe" label to operating systems that comply to this.
This type of solutions would I think also be useful in schools (e.g. school-provided devices), although they are also talking about severely limiting screen-time at school.
For the french speakers, see:
[1] https://videos.assemblee-nationale.fr/video.17950525_6942684...
[2] https://videos.assemblee-nationale.fr/video.17952051_6942761...
Devil's advocate: what is the difference between "social media" and a website very much like this one? When can I look forward to having to give a DNA test to read HN?
The main difference in my view is the personalized algorithm that determines what to feed you next.
HackerNews has an algorithm but it's not personalized—i.e. everyone sees the same thing.
My own website has a bulletin board that offers a personalized list of messages after you login: whatever threads you have not yet read. And so do many other websites of this style. So this cannot be a differentiating aspect.
Are you also harvesting teens data and selling it to the highest bidder or using it for target advertisements?
Not intentionally - but in the past I did have advertisements to finance it , which I had to stop since that is enough under a lot of jurisprudence to qualify as running a for-profit, which usually means less leniency from judges.
So it is advertisements where we should draw the line -- websites with advertisements should require age checks?
Why did you cherry pick advertisments from my reply and run with that?
It clearly isn't just a singular data point that is a True or False that would include a site in the ban.
Perhaps it should be, "If I had a 12 year old daughter, do I want her to have easy access to pornography, self harm material and the ability to receive private messages from a 45 year old registered sex offender?"
I get your point - "Where is the line in the sand?" and it's a valid point but no need to argue in bad faith.
>So this cannot be a differentiating aspect.
Now explain that nuance to an 80 yr old law maker who hates the damn email.
Not to say that they are technically literate, but the average age of French lawmakers (which are just the members of parliament) is 50 years old.
It's actually the same as the average age of voting-age French citizens, so they are quite representative on this regard.
These 80yo lawmakers have kids and grandkids and advisers. They know how social media works.
They hate social media because it gives people the power to talk in public about them with near impunity. They want to go back to the old days when if you wrote a letter to the newspaper about potential corruption or wrongdoing among the "more equal animals" you'd get pulled over for a light out whenever you went through that town for the next 20yr.
For the record, that is exactly my point . I do not want yet another sword of Damocles for websites, even less if it depends on the mood of a clueless judge.
They are very different.
From a definition standpoint, hn is a social media site. From a legislation standpoint, it's not nearly popular (infamous?) enough to legislate (the mentioned sites have had enough negative coverage to manufacturer consent for this invasion of privacy: cyber bullying, destructive challenges, etc.)
When it is, and when your local government becomes sufficiently captured by the user surveillance industrial complex, you will need real world verification here.
Proper moderation, and - how to say it without sounding elitist? - more mature users.
> what is the difference between "social media" and a website very much like this one?
Pretty much everything? Not the same intent, not the same usage, not the same business model, not the same users, &c.
Frel free to name something concrete. Remember that Reddit has already been targetted by this in Australia.
Reddit is a cesspool of bots reposting the best performing images and rage bait of the last 5 years ad nauseam, that and porn makes up the bulk of the traffic. So yes, again, there is nothing in common between reddit and hn
Eh, HN is "basically the same" on several key aspects and demographic axis. It's just reached a very different equilibrium as to what goes on here due to the aspects and demographics that are different.
Why do you think Reddit is any better than Instagram or X or TikTok, such that it doesn't deserve to be targeted according to the same principles?
I used it to follow some functional programming discussions that had chosen it as it's main bulletin board, as did many other software projects. (I am not a fan of Reddit, which is why it is of paramount importance to me to be able to continue to browse it without an account.)
But fine: if you think Reddit deserves the cut, please let me know why you think this site does not deserve it. Or why Discord (also used by a lot of software projects, to my annoyance ) does not deserve it. In a way that a "80 year old judge which hates computers" can understand.
We should have kept to mailing lists, as I said many times.
Does HN spread Fake News? Facebook and Youtube do. Do you feel bad after using HN? Insta and Facebook it happens. Does HN collect data to specify marketing? Every other Social Media do.
This is hard to define in laws so e.g. the EU chooses to force concrete measures from the social media pages.
> Does HN spread Fake News?
Yes?
Give me an example of websites on HN, which spread fake news by purpose and it was allowed by the mods even they knew the news / artice / website was spreading fake news.
> Does HN spread Fake News?
Yes? Even newspapers do that. You have never had Gell-Mann when reading something here outside mainstream topics of interest? (e.g. almost anything from outside the US, or health related).
Is this really the criteria you want to use to decide whether to require age checks for a website?
> the EU chooses to force concrete measures from the social media pages.
This just sidesteps the issue of how a website ends up in the list. Today, Reddit. Tomorrow, Discord. Then Github. Eventually, HN.
My news is almost outside of the US as I am not American. (wow this should be sent to r/USDefaultism). So let's say like this: I do read a lot outside of "American mainstream media".
Most good working journalist try to verify claim and statements. This is the opposite to Fake News, Clickbait and Russian state propaganda spread in Social Media because its their business model.
the services that comply with speech suppression and privacy violation orders will be deemed acceptable, and those who don't won't.
With the caveat that by "speech suppression" you mean "russian spam suppression" and by "privacy violation orders" you mean "search warrants"
An excellent post, citizen #209113017. You've been awarded 5 social credit points.
I'm one of the weirdos that should be on board with this, but I'm against it. This will do harm to marginalized youth and push younger people to lie and find ways around the ban.
Plus, we saw that in Australia that the lobby behind the ban was in fact an ad agency that makes ads for gambling apps.
Here is France, the ban is probably just a way to avoid legislation against companies selling crap that isn't for kids like vape pens and sports gambling apps.
> If a child is in a Formula One car and they turn on the engine, I don’t want them to win the race, I just want them to get out of the car. I want them to learn the highway code first, and to ensure the car works, and to teach them to drive in a different car.
Yet computer education in France has been severely lacking for so long. From middle school to even universities (except the courses computer focused obviously) people aren't taught correctly. Teachers themselves are lost to computers and lectures are bad.
The goal is obviously to have tech illiterate people knowing just enough to use computers for the job but not worrying about the digital autoristarism currently being deployed.
Its a weird analogy. Plenty of people have years of racing experience before they get their drivers license.
I'd be very surprised if the overwhelming majority of F1 drivers weren't in some sort of go-kart racing league long before they held government licenses.
> The goal is obviously to have tech illiterate people knowing just enough to use computers for the job but not worrying about the digital autoristarism currently being deployed.
If anything, without social media access, kids are more likely to play/hack around.
Good, social media should be considered a harmful substance. Even for adults it’s probably a bad thing.
It sounds like you don't like social media. With that in mind, why is it good to add a layer of user surveillance on the Internet? Where's the connection between "social media is bad" and "it is good to add surveillance"?
If you think social media is harmful, wouldn't it be good to regulate social media? What does regulating French (or Australian, or wherever) citizens have to do with it?
Good for France!
I wish my country (USA) would adapt similar laws.
A ban on social media for children is a different way of saying ID Verification for the entire population.
They are implicitly the same thing.
You can't exclude children without first verifying _everyone_ and from there excluding people who match age < approved. This is basic logic.
If you were a cynical person you could imagine this is actually politicians wanting to bring in an ID law and using "think of the children" as the social justification for it.
If you're a conspiracy theorist you'd wonder why Apple and Google have now added the ability to upload and link your passport and other real id into their respective app wallets. How long before your phones browser is digitally signing all your social media posts with your ID...
I am convinced that the current world wide rise of (right wing ) populist movements is mainly caused by social media. By regulating like this my hope is we can reduce their spread.
I'm not convinced social media is to blame. Plenty of extremist movements have arisen throughout history without social media. Politics has been bad for a long long time before social media existed.
Consolidation of all kinds of media (social, print, TV, radio, etc.) is a big ingredient in this. Another ingredient is the enshitification of the net, along with the value of unfettered collection of user data.
The problem isn't that people are consuming (social) media, it's that everything is owned by so few people. We shouldn't be punished for this by having to submit to even more surveillance.
What's wrong with right wing populist movements? They come and go just like left wing populist movements. The pendulum swinging across both the political spectrums over election cycles is a thing of beauty.
both are a threat to democracy like we see on Trump.
What a coincidence.
HN readers won't be able to find online partners if this accelerates.
The trade war continues. We’ve known these shitty platforms were polluting kids for at least a decade.