1. this bill is trash, it couldn’t be enforced, it’s pandering.
2. Social media as it has existed for the last 5-10 years is harmful for teenagers.
Instagram is making teens depressed and suicidal. TikTok videos have people celebrating mental illness like Tourette’s and has brainwashed impressionable kids into believing they too have tics or multiple personalities or Tourette’s.
Something needs to be done. Not every corporate evolution is good or must be accepted as permanent. That’s corporate propaganda. Instagram needs a “taking the cocaine out of the recipe” moment if it’s going to survive as a reputable product.
Oh please, social media may make teens depressed and suicidal, but so too has life in general for decades or longer. If anything, teens can more easily access social support from certain peers within the framework of social media when they do get into a bad spot. Teenage life has never been easy, but it has also never been easier than it is today.
Your notion of social media causing some sort of enormously unique and enormous damage needs to be heavily qualified by real evidence compared to previous trends. I say all this, by the way, as someone who has enormous criticism for the intrusive, manipulative and heavy handed totalities of social media companies. However, it's one thing to hate them where they deserve hate and another to attribute very old problems of teenage life to them as if they were unique emergences today.
It's popular on HN to hate on social networks (despite many people here very much being dependent on them for their large salaries) but some of this hate should be taken with a grain of salt and lots of qualification.
edit: social media makes teens suicidal and depressed, but not inordinately more than many other things would in their lives in general. Being saturated by these networks is not obligatory in life. Even teens have plenty of agency and opportunities to learn about the dangers of not moderating involvement in certain things. Enough with the youth social trauma porn.
I’ll just say, you are acknowledging that social media does make teens suicidal but you are comparing it to the “many other things” in their lives that make them suicidal.
Like what? Pressure to achieve? Being popular? Hormones?
Social media is a product like cigarettes it can and probably should be regulated. You can’t mandate everybody to have friends but you can regulate Facebook and TikTok.
Yes, I'm saying that social media can make teens act and feel all sorts of things, and that in doing this, it's sometimes harmful in certain very specific contexts that can't simply be made to disappear through ham-fisted regulations, just like many other things throughout modern history that have been pegged to hysterias about "the children". It can be both dangerous in some contexts, beneficial in others and again, something that doesn't deserve exceptional mania about its dangers.
I'd love to see how you propose regulating it for teenagers and young people. I do hope it's at least something less foolish than the previous hysterical media/public fits about also "controlling" teens access to...... certain books, certain magazines, comics, TV, porno, "dangerous school games" and of course, video gaming!!! (which barely a couple decades ago supposedly made them prone to murder at an unusual rate). Remember all of these other media-inspired catastrophes for teen development? Do school library bans on books like "Catcher in the Rye" also ring a bell?
I repeat, qualification of claims: In other words, really show that some new tech or media terror actually does do inordinate, demonstrably above-normal harm to a large percentage of the bags of volatile hormones that teenagers have always been, with all sorts of mental issues that they largely end up handling reasonably well. They can grow further without being treated as if they were absurdly fragile and in need of protection from the wider world that they will anyhow have to face just a few years later, whatever its tendencies.
It gets tiresome to see some new supposed danger get trotted out after every couple of teenage generations as something that supposedly needs heavy intervention, mitigation and usually ridiculous regulations. Give teenagers just a bit more credit for mental toughness.
So unlike every other industry, social media is impervious to regulation?
Maybe the situation doesn’t call for prohibition but harm reduction? Why should parents and society as a whole just have to accept whatever some middle management product director at facebook thinks is right? We truly are not as enslaved to the current state of social media as you make it seem.
State attorney general notices his kid's social media app is giving algorithmic instead of chronological results, subpoenas social networks for number of under-18s in Minnesota, files charges, court sets up enormous fine.
> (b) The social media platform is liable to an individual account holder who received user-generated content through a social media algorithm while the individual account holder was under the age of 18 and was using the individual account holder’s own account, if the social media platform knew or had reason to know that the individual account holder was under the age of 18 and located in Minnesota. [...]
Sounds like they're not requiring unreasonable knowledge of faked ages.
If they only upload videos taken with the selfie cam which look like a minor and seem to have a pre puberty voice and their locations are sometimes in Minnesota would that be enough to warrant: "had reason to know that the individual account holder was under 18 years"?
If so that implies social network will have to scan every video for the age range of participants.
I certainly lied about my age to get my Hotmail account (which dates me fairly well).
I'm sure there are plenty enough kids who accurately represented their age between 13-18 to make this quite enforceable. I probably said I was 13 when I was 12, or something close enough.
Do a PSA campaign telling parents to make sure their kids' social media apps correctly represent their age to keep them safe. Would work well enough.
Well, you might have been a precocious 2-year old Microsoft fan in 2012. So, depending on your timezone, you should be in bed young man! And what do you think you were doing on HN at the young age of 1?
The easiest way to not show non-chronological results to kids lying about their age isn't KYC, it's showing chronological results to everyone.
(or, well, not showing results to anyone)
I'm much less concerned about the issue of identifying kids (if they can't identify kids, all the better, adults get to benefit too) than that they're probably accidentally banning whole categories of useful things like rolling your own search engine.
Yeah wow I would love this. It would finally make social media useful again.
I actually enjoyed seeing what my friends were up to on Facebook until they moved to this algorithmic timeline and it started showing only what they think I'd want to see.
Unfortunately it invariably thinks I want more of the same and that's exactly not what I want.
But I've closed all my accounts and don't think I'll ever go back anyway.
People will always go around rules. The point of rules is to send a clear signal that something is bad or socially unacceptable. In this case it's signaling to the parents that it's desirable that they enforce this rule.
It may or may not be pandering. The cultural and corporate elites have been increasingly exercising control over speech on the internet the past few years, and now we have a Ministry of Truth in the government.
More top down control is the natural progression of what we're already seeing.
Parents have a lot to answer for. The fact most kids dont have a relationship with their parents or guardians where they can talk to them about anything is highlighted with metadata like you have highlighted.
The sophistication of manipulation and control is highly granular in todays world, even a keyboard typing pattern can give away emotion which some can exploit.
> The fact most kids dont have a relationship with their parents or guardians where they can talk to them about anything is highlighted with metadata like you have highlighted.
You have a source for that? The statistics you're referring certainly don't say anything at all to back your claim.
Have a look online, but here is one plucked from a search engine (
https://www.highlights.com/about-us/press-room/national-surv... ) again meta data, but there is also a Thomas Pynchon quote to think about, "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.".
Oh yeah. It's Facebook that causes kids to become depressed or attempt suicide.
Nevermind the student loan debt crisis, the floundering economy or the authoritarianism sneaking in.
Definitely social media.
Spoken like the disconnected politicians creating these laws. Hilariously off the mark.
Social media is as dangerous for kids as video games. There's an argument to be made for advertising but I sense that is far beyond the perception of the people blaming social media for the state of the democratic society they've participated in for the past few decades...
High school teens don’t have a student loan debt crisis. The economy has been going gangbusters from 2008 to 2022. “Authoritarianism” predominately affecting teens, the most politically disconnected group aside from young children? None of your reasons make more sense than the social media theory (btw, the experience of “authoritarianism” is likely from social media/internet news as other than for some marginalized groups like undocumented immigrants, nothing bad has been happening directly to the majority of teens or their friend groups.)
> Although often treated by psychiatrists, Tourette is not a mental or psychiatric illness. Rather, it is a movement disorder that often occurs along with other psychiatric conditions such as obsessive compulsive disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, etc.
1. this bill is trash, it couldn’t be enforced, it’s pandering.
2. Social media as it has existed for the last 5-10 years is harmful for teenagers.
Instagram is making teens depressed and suicidal. TikTok videos have people celebrating mental illness like Tourette’s and has brainwashed impressionable kids into believing they too have tics or multiple personalities or Tourette’s.
Something needs to be done. Not every corporate evolution is good or must be accepted as permanent. That’s corporate propaganda. Instagram needs a “taking the cocaine out of the recipe” moment if it’s going to survive as a reputable product.