Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

https://yle.fi/a/74-20207494

by Teever • 6 months ago

745 550 6 months ago

"FISTA has taken advantage of the law change, brought in last August, which allows schools to restrict or completely ban the use of mobile phones during school hours."

I find it interesting that a law change was needed to allow schools to do this.

amelius• 6 months ago

Yeah if in the 80s they had to change a law to prevent children from taking their TV to school, everybody would be scratching their heads.

sham1• 6 months ago

Students do have rights - and indeed also property rights - here. Of course, when in class the students could be asked to bring their phones to the front and be given them back afterwards, but without the law, the use of phones couldn't be restricted during breaks etc. Thus the new law which can make the restrictions even more severe during school hours.

mytailorisrich3• 6 months ago

Of course people have rights... the point is that schools seem not allowed to set their own rules.

The school my children went to in the UK has had a no phone policy for many years: phones must be off and kept in the pupils' bags. No need for a law change...

I think this is about approach to regulation and flexibility. In general being too restrictive about what is allowed makes things inflexible and poor at adapting.

SoftTalker• 6 months ago

Students don't have many rights when it comes to what you can bring to or do at school. We were prohibited from wearing certain styles of clothes, hats, couldn't even chew gum in class. Pretty much anything that could be called disruptive, damaging, or dangerous was banned. I'm not sure how phones ever were considered acceptable in the first place. Even in the pre-smartphone days, SMS was a huge distraction.

alkonaut6• 6 months ago

Not sure if the law is required to just make the rule banning phones or if the law is what’s needed to enforce it (e.g take kids’ phones and not return them until end of day). The latter would make some sense at least.

helsinkiandrew• 6 months ago

The headline is missing an important “looks to”. Politicians and public opinion seem to be in favour.

Finland looks to end "uncontrolled human experiment" with Australia-style ban on social media

mjevans• 6 months ago

I'm fine with this, as long as they DO NOT require any form of ID or 'age' verification.

Instead this should be attacked from the profit side, by banning any form of advertising which might target children. If there's no profit to be made in servicing said demographic and a law requesting at least end user 'agreement' that they are an adult, this should be sufficient.

throwup238• 6 months ago

Who decides whether an ad is targeting children or not?

I’m not playing devil’s advocate, I’m curious what the SOTA is for ad moderation. I’m sure it’s relatively easy to tell a kid’s toy ad from adult ones like alcohol, but how do you differentiate toy ads targeting parents vs toy ads targeting kids?

joe_mamba3• 6 months ago

Who decides whether an ad is targeting children or not?

Much simpler than that, you just ban all targeted ads full stop end of story. The ad-funded internet existed in the 90s before ad targeting was a thing.

You went on a car forum, you'd get ads about car parts. You went on a PC forum, you'd get ads about PC parts. Pretty simple stuff that didn't need to know your age, gender, political affiliation, ovulation status, etc so it's not like the web will go bust without ad targeting.

Targeted ads are exploitative and manipulative, and a crime against humanity, or at least on society.

behringer• 6 months ago

We should ban all ads.

ajsnigrutin• 6 months ago

Since platforms know the users age, any ad shown to them should be considered as such.

So basically, no ads on underage accounts at all should be the norm.

mytailorisrich3• 6 months ago

Without age verification this is obviously an unenforceable ban... I think Finland already has schemes for age verification.

k__• 6 months ago

Yeah.

Zero knowledge proof and you're good to go.

alkonaut6• 6 months ago

Any kind of zero knowledge verification should be ok.

But with minors it often goes a long way to just make the law. It’s a good instruction to parents who should be able to control this. Laws on bike helmets for minors are followed nearly 100% not because they are enforced by authorities but because the law gives parents guidance.

Mindwipe3• 6 months ago

There is no such thing in practice.

Anything with zero knowledge is never going to be considered robust enough by a government. Zero knowledge protocols really have no functional revocation mechanism.

peyton3• 6 months ago

Bike helmets are for safety but reading the article the ban is more for some kind of societal change. I don’t know if it’s really comparable.

dyauspitr5• 6 months ago

I disagree, we should have age verification but maybe it can be done in a mostly anonymous way like a central arbiter of identity from the government or something.

salawat• 6 months ago

That's exactly the opposite of anonymous. You cannot have anonymity & age verification that actually guarantees anything. It's a contradiction. Either the chain exists, or it doesn't.

Aurornis9• 6 months ago

like a central arbiter of identity from the government or something

This comes up in every ID thread on Hacker News, usually with suggestion that we do it via zero-knowledge cryptographic primitives

However, all of those proposals miss the point. These ID verification laws aren't simply designed to confirm that someone has access to an >= 18yo ID. They are identity verification to try to confirm that the person presenting the ID is the same person who is using the site.

This concept is obvious with in-person ID checks: You can't go to the liquor store and show them any random ID, they have to check that it's your ID.

For some reason when we talk about internet ID verification that part is forgotten and we get these proposals to use cryptographic primitives to anonymously check something without linking the person to the ID. It doesn't work, and doesn't satisfy the way these laws are usually written.

I'm also surprised that people of this website even think it might work in the first place. Did everyone forget what it's like to be a kid trying to out-maneuver rules to access something? How long do you think it would take before the first enterprising kid figures out that if they can get access to their mom or older brother's ID, they can charge their friends $5 to use it for this totally anonymous one-time cryptographic ID check for their social media accounts?

kuerbel• 6 months ago

Instead of banning social media for teenagers, regulate it in ways that actively reduce addictive design.

For example: after 15 minutes of short-form content, show an unskippable timer every third video, displaying today’s, this week’s, and total watch time. The same principle should apply to endless scrolling, make usage visible and interruptible.

Base it on actual screen time. This would protect teenagers and benefit adults.

yoz-y• 6 months ago

There is still a financial incentive to loop in teenagers that would stay on a platform and spend money there later.

Telemakhos• 6 months ago

If there's no profit to be made in servicing said demographic and a law requesting at least end user 'agreement' that they are an adult, this should be sufficient.

Is it still advertising if an "influencer" takes money on the down low to sip a Pepsi not too obviously in the middle of a video?

Is it still advertising if an attractive and young person provides news that happens to be colored in a way that supports the narratives of a particular political faction?

Is it still advertising if you can't prove that a foreign power encouraged a popular yoga enthusiast or makeup artist to post some whispered ideas that weaken citizens' faith in your institutions? Does that foreign power ever care about profit?

Advertising and propaganda love to explore the grey spaces around definitions, so your bans will end up being a whack-a-mole game. Cutting off kids with an ID check is much easier. Implementing age verification the Apple way would even protect privacy by simply registering whether Apple can attest that the user is over or under the age limit, without handing the ID over to third parties.

prussia• 6 months ago

There's no profit for the platform. As of now, both the "influencer" and platform are aligned in that they want children to consume more slop. If the platform doesn't have any incentive anymore, maybe most of those "influencers" will fall away, if the algorithm starts deprioritising content geared toward children. As you say, policing the "influencers" is difficult, but at least it is quite easy and simple to target the platform. Better than nothing.

quotemstr5• 6 months ago

You can tell these proposals are made in bad faith because we can do age verification in an anonymous way using zero-knowledge proofs but regulators demand linkable IDs instead.

It's not about protecting the kids. It's about managing the public's information diet. The latter is not a legitimate function of any state.

ozgung• 6 months ago

The goal is to ban anonymous internet for everyone. You won't be able to post anything without verifying your id. All these similar efforts in different countries seem coordinated and synchronous, suddenly after 35 years since the advent of the web.

sensanaty2• 6 months ago

In the Netherlands we already have zero-knowledge ID verification through DigID, I'd be amazed if the Nordics didn't have the same system available to its citizens.

throwawayk7h• 6 months ago

Why not device-side headers? Kids' devices should always include a header saying "I'm a kid, don't show me adult content.

digiown7• 6 months ago

I secretly wish it would use a verification scheme that's so invasive/annoying, that even adults would stop using it anyway.

bluescrn4• 6 months ago

IMHO the main point of these schemes is to make it hard for adults to use social media somewhat-anonyously. So the government can more easily identify those posting 'prohibited speech'.

If there was a legitimate drive to protect kids from the worst of the Internet, there'd have been more of a crackdown on porn, gore, etc long before social media became such a big problem. And smartphones would have never been allowed in schools.

bamboozled• 6 months ago

What major revolutions or important political shifts have occurred from people anonymously shitposting on Reddit or Facebook ?

digiown7• 6 months ago

You already basically can't use most mainstream platforms anonymously. Try registering a Facebook without a phone number (you need to give a passport to get one in most of Europe).

athrowaway3z• 6 months ago

I'm very critical of all the schemes proposed but this is just a fundamental misconception on your part.

If there was a legitimate drive to protect kids from the worst of the Internet

As with any disease, the impact heavily depends on virality.

The worst the internet has to offer to children, is not the gore or porn for the few that look for it (usually individually). The worst it does to children is the attention algorithm that captures practically everybody.

riffraff4• 6 months ago

90% of the people that spout racism, conspiracy theories, threaten people, etc.. on social networks use their real name and login with their phone number, there's no need to ask the social networks to get ID cards, if you are the government.

hn_throwaway_994• 6 months ago

If there was a legitimate drive to protect kids from the worst of the Internet, there'd have been more of a crackdown on porn, gore, etc long before social media became such a big problem. And smartphones would have never been allowed in schools.

Where are you from, because all of these things have/are being tried for a long time in the US (and, I'd note, received significant pushback from civil liberty advocates). Heck, TFA itself talks about how this social media ban is coming after a ban on phones in schools.

xixixao• 6 months ago

Your argument hinges on the assumption that porn and gore etc. have worse impact on kids. I don’t think there’s a concensus on that. One might argue that porn and gore could have been found in print before the internet, but that social media have a more novel impact.

I personally like the theory that most kids problems are actually attributable to family issues. That kids in solid family environment/upbringing will not be “destroyed” by computer games, porn, gore (2 girls 1 cup anyone?), or social media. But that’s also just a theory.

Gigachad• 6 months ago

Gore already has been cracked down on. All the old gore sites like Live leak have shut down, Reddit has removed all the related subreddits, and governments quickly scrub the internet of videos like the New Zealand shooting.

palata• 6 months ago

IMHO the main point of these schemes is to make it hard for adults to use social media somewhat-anonyously. So the government can more easily identify those posting 'prohibited speech'.

We are talking about Finland here, right?

bitshiftfaced• 6 months ago

"Social media" doesn't just mean Facebook right? It includes sites like Hacker News, yeah?

digiown7• 6 months ago

I'd draw a line using some of these aspects:

- Algorithmic recommendation / "engagement" engineering

- Profit/business model

- Images/Videos

- Real-life identity

pipes• 6 months ago

One of my main problems with all of this is "what counts as social media". It's a stupidly broad term. Email? SMS? Forums?

riffraff4• 6 months ago

the approach australia took is a list of prohibited applications. It's not "fair" to a technically minded person, but it's a practical alternative, even if it would obviously lead to a whack-a-mole situation.

tartoran• 6 months ago

No, HN is more like a forum. It doesn’t have dark patterns and addictive engineering built in, even if it could itself be addictive. There ‘s been functionality built in to limit time spent on HN for a long time. Look at noprocrast setting for example. Even if HN could be seen as social media it’s not in the same category of destructive social media a la Facebook/Instagram/Tiktok

calpaterson• 6 months ago

Finland has a whole national ID system, all interlinked. They aren't going to be scanning faces to implement this stuff here - and anyway the government here already knows what you look like.

pembrook5• 6 months ago

Do you not see the irony of posting this on a social media site (hacker news), given you're one of the users?

I guess self-hatred is one of the motivating vectors of authoritarianism.

Would you also secretly like it if daddy government was always watching you on camera and triggered your shock collar every time you reached for a candy bar?

GreenWatermelon6• 6 months ago

Hackernews is not social media. Just no. Unless the term os literally meaningless in which case my Company's slack ks social media.

bethekidyouwant5• 6 months ago

You are describing 4chan

digiown7• 6 months ago

That's good...? I don't have to browse 4chan to interact with local groups, and I hope I won't have to browse Facebook either.

Tade04• 6 months ago

I'm eternally grateful that the social media network that I was part of throughout my teenage years abruptly disappeared from the internet, never to come back again.

Some say it was a technical failure during migration when the company was trying to pivot to file hosting, but it's impossible to verify.

Perhaps these bans are a blessing in disguise and future generations will be happy to not have their most awkward stage of life available forever, to everyone, in detail.

beAbU2• 6 months ago

Are you referring to MySpace?

My highschool band had tracks and videos of live performances in the school hall on there that is forever lost and I'm still bitter about it.

joe_mamba3• 6 months ago

How is MySpace even comparable to today's social media? AFAIK MySpace wasn't agoritmycally driven to keep you addicted like TikTok or Instagram do. MySpace was just you and your friends from school competing on whose page is the tackiest.

Tade04• 6 months ago

I am not referring to MySpace. It was a local-to-my-country social network which was outcompeted by another local-to-my-country social network, which in turn gave way to Facebook.

I was aware of the existence of MySpace at the time, but it never had mainstream adoption locally. We also had not one but two mainstream messaging apps and hardly anyone was using MSN.

Come to think of it, Facebook killed a lot of that homegrown tech.

nandomrumber2• 6 months ago

How is that MySpace’s fault?

Who uploaded the videos then deleted the originals.

bnastic• 6 months ago

technical failure during migration

Showing my age when the first thing that came to mind was ' but ma.gnolia was more of a social bookmarking...'

stubish• 6 months ago

A couple of decades ago, a politically active family I knew was grooming their child to be a future Prime Minister. While the poor kid had amazing privilege that other kids could only dream of, one strict rule was no Facebook or similar. Not even appearing on friends feeds (friends in a similar social strata, so workable). They could see that nobody would be getting elected to positions of power with such a documented past. Now days you of course hire someone to maintain a fake profile.

throwaway613746• 6 months ago

I just wish this was possible somehow without essentially making corporate mass-surveillance a requirement.

Zigurd2• 6 months ago

Horse. Barn. Gone.

JoshTriplett3• 6 months ago

Only if we give up. Keep fighting surveillance and control mechanisms.

zhug3• 6 months ago

The phrase "uncontrolled human experiment" is doing interesting rhetorical work here. It frames the status quo as the experiment and regulation as the control—when historically it's been the reverse.

barbazoo4• 6 months ago

I’d say status quo is before social media as that’s where most childhoods have happened. Targeting children with social media is definitely a new thing and still an experiment since those poor souls that had their lives surveilled by Meta are just coming of age and we’re just learning about the damages.

pembrook5• 6 months ago

The fact that you're the only one calling this out is quite frankly alarming.

It's one of the most authoritarian statements I've ever heard from a western government. And just because its the trendy moral panic of the day, everybody is cheering it on.

Anything where we allow people free will is by definition an "uncontrolled human experiment" and the basis of any free society.

Should we also end the "uncontrolled human experiment" of allowing people to have private money and make their own purchase decisions? Should we end the "uncontrolled human experiment" of allowing people to select their own romantic partners?

Wilder7977• 6 months ago

You mention free will, but it would be an interesting conversation to discuss how much free will there is when people fight, without knowing it, against psychological manipulation, addition creation, all crafted with plenty of money and research. Especially when this people are young ones. Can the behavior still be called free will when you get hooked to mechanisms specifically designed to exploit humans in this way?

stackbutterflow• 6 months ago

Maybe it's time to start auditing social network platforms and disallow certain practices.

Aeolun3• 6 months ago

Is it really so controversial to ban it entirely? We ban heroin and other hard drugs.

I think most people are better off, and have a more nuanced view of reality if the only news they get is local. Or the updates from people they know always in person.

para_parolu• 6 months ago

Compare it to marijuanna instead. Then it’s on the same level of controversy.

Aeolun3• 6 months ago

Marijuanna is the definition of a social drug. Who does that by themselves at home? I may be influenced by mostly encountering it in school environments but still.

GaryBluto• 6 months ago

Social media is not a hard drug.

direwolf2017• 6 months ago

What is the definition of a hard drug?

Zigurd2• 6 months ago

"Hard drug" is a loaded term. Nicotine is more addictive than some "hard drugs." That big VC funded vape maker couldn't stay away from child friendly marketing.

fragmede2• 6 months ago

It's worse. It's the last thing before going to sleep that the addict uses and it's the first thing they check in the morning before having a thought to themselves. It doesn't run out. Everybody's doing it. People are losing jobs and relationships over it. At least fetty you gotta leave the house to get more. Instagram Reels never make you leave the house.

jbm• 6 months ago

I remember reading the Montreal Gazette as a kid, with their lopsided takes on various issues (local and international) as a result of their "organic local" writers. The local talk radio (CJAD) was worse.

I much prefer Youtube videos and international media from multiple viewpoints to that world.

Aerbil3133• 6 months ago

You are downvoted, but you are totally right. Humans are not meant to cry daily over stuff that happens half a world away, or be exposed to a thousand new strangers every day. But thanks to internet, your mom and aunt can have an endless fuel to their various anxieties and your daughter can have eating disorders comparing herself to celebrities.

Bring a pre-internet pre-24/7 TV person to present day and they’ll spot the problem straight away. Amusing Ourselves To Death was written in reaction to the societal changes brought by the TV. What about the impact of Internet news, and Facebook, and Tiktok?

logicchains5• 6 months ago

You are downvoted, but you are totally right. Humans are not meant to cry daily over stuff that happens half a world away

You mean humans are not meant to learn about the atrocities their government is funding half a world away.

wraptile3• 6 months ago

Humans are not meant to

not meant to? by whom?

We live in houses, with artificial light, heating and air conditioning, having sex without risk of pregnancy or "god-forbid" sex with people who are not capable of being pregnant. So, what exactly are we not meant to do?

There's a certain natural human nature but it's expressed through abtract virtue like justice, knowledge, safety, connection - this is the only acceptable and reasonable expression of what humans are "meant to" do.

This makes me angry because fundamentally this is an attack on average person's intelligence and capabilities. We are not beasts that need to be hearded by some illuminated masters who deem what is and what isn't human nature.

drdaeman• 6 months ago

How do they even define “social media”? Do they just ban kids from participating in society using electronic communications? Or maintain a stoplist “here’s what we consider to be social media”? Or what?

I mean, sure, prime examples of what is colloquially called “social media” is crapware. I do get the intent.

But I wonder what sort of unintended, unplanned, odd and potentially even socially harmful consequences it would possibly have.

riffraff4• 6 months ago

Australia enacted this through a stoplist, but also appears to require self-assessment by the services themselves.

https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/soci...

hiprob3• 6 months ago

Are they going to conduct an uncontrolled human experiment by requiring age checks to use the Internet (read: surveillance capitalism and Orwellian lack of privacy)?

robbbbbbbbbbbb2• 6 months ago

No, they’ll probably just follow Australia’s lead[1] of: default allow; algorithmic age estimation; account suspend; ID to unblock. Chill.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyp9d3ddqyo.amp

sunaookami2• 6 months ago

So yes, you will need to show your ID which will connect to your account and obviously be used to surveil everything you post online. People on HN of all places need to stop being so naive.

hiprob3• 6 months ago

If it's as flaky as YouTube's age estimation, it's just ID by default.

weberer• 6 months ago

I think Surveillance Globalism would be a more apt description. Which is a hundred times scarier since its coming from the government, multiple governments around the world simultaneously, and its about control rather than making money off you.

Noaidi2• 6 months ago

Can we be it for adults now? Seriously, can we?

I mean, if it affects a children’s what makes we think it doesn’t affect adults? Alcohol affects children, and it affects adults. If social media affects children, it also affects adults.

The big live social media was it was meant to connect people but in truth, it was designed to control people.

logicchains5• 6 months ago

The big live social media was it was meant to connect people but in truth, it was designed to control people.

This is absurd. People have access to far more information today via decentralised media than they did when information was filtered through a small elite cabal of media company CEOs. Restricting access to information is a means of controlling people, and that's exactly what the governments pushing to ban social media want to do.

nephihaha3• 6 months ago

Search engines restrict information. You get a very limited selection of information off them nowadays.

pxoe• 6 months ago

Why is it that some people are so hell bent on limiting how people communicate? Ironically, this is also seeking to control people.

NickC252• 6 months ago

If it was a pure communication platform, we wouldn't be in this situation.

Social media as it exists in mainstream life is an advertising platform which happens to have a few methods humans can use to communicate with each other. But that's a bug, not a feature.

seydor• 6 months ago

Are adults any better? Not sure the ban is a productive way to go about it.

OsamaJaber2• 6 months ago

The real question is enforcement They tried this, and kids just moved to platforms nobody knew existed

jimbob45• 6 months ago

Eventually group SMS would still function well for this, no? Shared email lists barring that. This seems like a race to the bottom.

OsamaJaber2• 6 months ago

Exactly You can ban platforms but you can't ban communication

Arainach6• 6 months ago

Neither group SMS nor shared email lists have the algorithmic dopamine tweaking that are the root of most of the harm.

logicchains5• 6 months ago

There's still a double digit percentage of parents that oppose the ban. The only way to make a ban work without parental support is requiring a video camera to be running constantly doing facial verification while the app is running, completely unfeasible.

Arainach6• 6 months ago

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Our current laws and enforcement don't prevent 100% of murders or rapes, but that doesn't mean we should remove the laws prohibiting them.

bilsbie• 6 months ago

Noble goal but it ends up being a defacto internet license. All ages need to show id to use sites and services.

echelon• 6 months ago

110%.

No website of any kind should require IDV unless banking. It is a tool that will be used for censorship, removal of access to information, destruction of freedom of speech, erosion of privacy, and attacks on political opponents.

We need anonymity, ephemerality, and public square free speech.

Governments should instead regulate what these companies can do. How they advertise. Engagement algorithms. Stop internal efforts to target kids. Etc.

Disallow advertising to kids. Turn off ads on children's accounts if the user is predicted or self reports as a kid. Turn off the algorithm for kids.

idle_zealot• 6 months ago

This is the obvious solution, but implementing it would be a herculean effort. Not because it's technically difficult, of course.

Consider the incentives of all involved powerful groups.

You have social media giants who want to addict and advertise to users. The hate your solution, obviously. With the ID checks they lose out on their younger users, but they also get cover for even more aggressive behavior as nobody can credibly yell "think of the children!" at them.

Then you have government officials who are nervous about their lack of effective control over modern media. Your solution offers them nothing and loses them points with those powerful business leaders. It opens them up to attack from the right for being "too hard on business and stifling innovation." The ID checks, on the other hand, give them a mechanism and lever to crack down on any sentiment in the public that runs counter to their or their friends' interests. It even polls pretty well with an increasingly large number of paranoid and distrusting voters.

There's no contest at all between the routes before us. Only a huge political upheaval could divert the world from this path. The indicator to look for in a representative is a willingness to champion policy that hurts entrenched political and economic power while providing straightforward utility to average citizens.

philipallstar2• 6 months ago

Parents should instead regulate what their kids can do.

LordShredda• 6 months ago

Social media's entire income model is finding out who you are to advertise more accurately. Facebook knows your age down to the day, and if they ask for ID this is them taking even more data.

tgv2• 6 months ago

There is an alternative: prohibit smart phones for youth. They can possess simple phones.

philipallstar2• 6 months ago

Parents can just do this. It's far more expensive to not do it.

eimrine5• 6 months ago

prohibit all proprietary software

zarzavat• 6 months ago

Define a smartphone.

lm284692• 6 months ago

Good, less people will waste their lives talking to bots and other low value activities

viktorcode• 6 months ago

I expect more kids will switch to playing more games on their phones with their friends. Whoever thinks the kids will instead put down their phones and starting go out more often has lost touch with reality.

pibaker2• 6 months ago

logs into his seven year old five digit karma hackernews account tells people to stop talking online

lossyalgo• 6 months ago

Agreed. I think we need to ban addictive dark patterns on ALL platforms for ALL ages.

clusmore• 6 months ago

I am an Australian Instagram user in my 30s. When setting up my profile a few years ago I set the birthday to some fake date near my real age. At no point, including when the ban went live, was I ever asked to prove my age through any means. Nobody I know has either (noting that everyone I've asked is an adult).

wraptile3• 6 months ago

It's not even a noble goal because it's entirely populist rather than evidence and logic based. It's giving: "Yay we solved bad parenting by pretending that bad stuff is not allowed on the internet, but only for those who are under 15". It's sad that anyone believes that this would have any real positive outcomes for our society.

verdverm2• 6 months ago

How long before the kids use Ai to build their own?

rhines3• 6 months ago

What matters is content, not communication. They could build a platform to chat with each other, but they could just use WhatsApp or text or email for that. But they can't build a platform with an infinite stream of targeted content (until AI generates content I guess).

verdverm2• 6 months ago

I hear parents of young children are already sitting their children down in front of AI generated children's content on YouTube

andix3• 6 months ago

Modern social media is nothing like social media in early days (myspace, early Facebook and even early Instagram). Back then it was a platform to communicate with friends, and maybe even find new friends to meet up with.

Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them. The content must either be addictive/engaging or paid advertisements. Quality of the content doesn't matter at all. Connecting people to do stuff outside of the virtual world would actually hurt their business model. People turn off their devices and go outside, instead of watching ads.

So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine. Probably even Reddit - which does have an algorithm to show specific content - is not as bad.

john01dav2• 6 months ago

Reddit is plenty addictive in my experience, and I've heard the same from other people ranging from high school teachers to tradespeople.

tedmiston4• 6 months ago

i think most users need more screen blocking control than they get out of the box on iOS. tools like one sec [1] have been invaluable for me.

[1] https://one-sec.app/

whatever1• 6 months ago

Hackernews is also addictive. Fortnine is addictive. World of Warcraft is addictive. NFL is addictive.

Addiction does not strike to me as a unique trait of the social media.

The echo chamber bubble on the other hand, seems quite unique.

cheeseface• 6 months ago

Agree on how the platform’s have changed.

However, I don’t think Reddit is an exception. Popular is often filled with content that is driven by the feelings of fear and hate. Not something I’d like to continually expose kids or teens to.

api2• 6 months ago

Smaller subs can still be decent but I agree about popular and larger subs. They’re just brain rot and engagement bait now.

Aurornis9• 6 months ago

I agree completely about Reddit. It's a clickbait factory with a misinformation density that makes my Facebook feed look downright informative.

I was an early Reddit user. It felt like there was a distinct shift when the site went from programming and news topics to being meme-heavy. Then again recently when they started recommending niche subreddits into everyone's feeds so that even the small subreddits couldn't count on being islands of quality.

Now it's just a doomerism factory. The young Redditors I've known feel like they've had their hope about the future hollowed out and crushed. They open the site and consuming a stream of content telling them that everything is awful and will continue to be awful, and anyone who disagrees is shouted down and downvoted. It's a real crabs-in-a-bucket website now.

whyenot3• 6 months ago

What I find particularly bad about Reddit is the platform is specifically designed to amplify group think and silence competing opinions. All it takes is five more downvotes than upvotes and a comment will lose visibility. It can turn subreddits into little bubbles where like-minded people upvote each other and almost never have to see dissenting opinions. That may not be a big deal on a gardening subreddit, but it can be a big problem or even dangerous elsewhere.

oliwarner3• 6 months ago

I use old.reddit.com but I feel like I have complete control over what I see. It's new posts, I check them and then I leave.

That's what I've lost on Facebook. It forces me to see things its algorithm thinks I like, but more often than not, it's things that make me want to argue. I don't have that on Reddit. Long may it last.

UltraSane3• 6 months ago

I've been on reddit long enough to get sick of the constant reposts. They really should have a filter for that.

tedmiston4• 6 months ago

reddit having tons of niche subreddits and the ability to sort them by best all time is one of my favorite ways to filter for higher-quality content. (i don't use the main feed much.)

XorNot3• 6 months ago

I'd argue it's closer to the ability to search it with Google to get alright non-clickfarm responses to questions, or product reviews.

_DeadFred_• 6 months ago

I remember when they saw what a certain game app was doing and were disgusted by it. Wild to me that those same people l̶a̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶ almost instantly chose to not only adopt the behavior but make it core functionality. It's way worse when you see the evil and STILL chose it.

api2• 6 months ago

It’s not really social media at all and we should stop calling it that. I call them chum feeds or scrollers. There’s no social component. It’s just addictive short form infinite scroll brain rot.

Social media deserving of the name is almost dead. It’s not that profitable and the sites are expensive to run.

tedmiston4• 6 months ago

likes and comments aren't social?

susam• 6 months ago

Modern social media is nothing like social media in early days

Indeed. I no longer call them social media. They have all become attention media platforms. I recently expressed my thoughts about this on my blog at <https://susam.net/attention-media-is-not-social-media.html>.

These days I typically resolve the domain names of these attention media platforms to 127.0.0.1 in my /etc/hosts file, so that I do not inadvertently end up visiting them by following a link somewhere else. I think there are very few true social media platforms remaining today, among which I visit only HN and Mastodon.

hamdingers• 6 months ago

I no longer call them social media.

Social media is the correct name for what they are now, they're channels that push curated content out to their users.

The thing they used to be is social networking.

gman83• 6 months ago

I wouldn't be surprised if Meta turned WhatsApp into a TikTok clone just to get around the restrictions. They know that banning WhatsApp for teenagers in Europe is almost impossible. I look at my kids, all their sports clubs and other extracurricular activities are organized through WhatsApp. I already had to block Youtube on their devices. I was alright with them watching a couple of long-form youtube videos every day, but now if I unblock Youtube all they do is watch Shorts, with no way to disable it.

grekowalski• 6 months ago

Check out the NewPipe app. It works only on Android — it’s YouTube for minimalists. No Shorts, no feed, no ads.

Imustaskforhelp3• 6 months ago

extracurricular activities are organized through WhatsApp. I already had to block Youtube on their devices. I was alright with them watching a couple of long-form youtube videos every day, but now if I unblock Youtube all they do is watch Shorts, with no way to disable it.

If you want to block Shorts. I recommend you to try out revanced which gives you youtube without any ads and a lot of other customizations.

To be honest, I find it funny that paid youtube customers might shift to revanced which is technically piracy jsut to remove shorts.

I was this close to rooting the phones but she had just bought a new phone.

But if pricing wasn't the concern for me (which right now it is but I don't think for many HN users it might be), here's what I suggest.

Go buy a phone which can be easily rooted and also use an somewhat secure os (just short of graphene)

Patch revanced (I have even made a nix flake or some nix file [i don't use nix that much but I was curious and ended up using LLMs to generate the file] whose purpose was to take android file and patch it when I was in nix, but I don't have it with me right nwo as I may haev lost it)

Have in the options the short block option.

Newpipe is great as well but it doesn't really allow having comment support.

Also given that HN is a very techie and well hacking with software community. If anyone's interested to take an challenge within Java/Kotlin (Unfortunately, they scare me) then I have got an idea for you guys:

"But the option of turning shorts back on can still be toggled. I wish if anybody whose an expert in java/kotlin can take a look at how revanced works and maybe how to have a revanced patch which can block shorts by default (additionally with ads preferably too with the download option patch as well & the sponsorblock) while atleast in the revanced specific settings option blocking just the option/toggle switch to turn shorts back on."

Also I am a teenager. I would consider the fact that I am on this website partially because of a loop of youtubers that I started following [ Fireship the goat before he turned VC -> Primagen the legend -> Theo t3 (I do feel like he's not the best guy following but he covered so much about YC that I ended up opening news.ycombinator.com and reading it and not watching him read it and ended up making account)

oh yeah before Fireship, I used to follow Code with harry when I was around ~13 yo. I learnt python from him many years ago before it was introduced to us in school so much so that I ended up picking the finance subject out of curiosity and I enjoyed both finance and tech.

One of the funniest stories from this whole is when Code with harry loved one of my comments on youtube loooong time ago and I was around 14 or osmething and then my mum saw it and she didn't know what loving a comment in YT mean and she got suspicious about it and questioned me and then I had to describe hearting a comment to her xD.

Oh yeah. I started learning about python itself around this time because one of my cousins whom I deeply respect who works in aerospace but back when in his university started mentioning how he worked on a ~2-3k loc and he mentioned python and I was like hmm what's python.

I don't know if a parent is interested to hear this but I feel like teenagers really replicate those they admire. A lot of my traits first started just being around that cousin & he actually taught me about assets/liabilities when I was in 5th grade and taught me chess which both became very obsessive points for me later down the life (My joy when I finally ended up beating him at chess fair and square)

I don't think that I do that well academically per se though, it really just depends on my mood so :/ yeah but I really ended up butchering some prestigious college's paper real hard and still tensed about it but honestly as a teen, I don't even know why I am typing this but my point is that your kid would have a personality and just nudge him in the right manners & let him think for himself to think that he reached at a particular conclusion. I do feel like that's generally how I approached and I was the youngest of my whole entire family tree so that made me more mature but I do feel like it came at a trade off of wishing to grow up fast asap when I was a child and now wishing to go back too seeing say not being able to cope up with massive study efforts or competition but that's another matter I guess.

Though parenting is definitely really really hard, kudos to every parent out there.

Did go a little tangent so sorry about that.

stevage3• 6 months ago

If WhatsApp got banned, all those groups would simply switch to Telegram or Signal or similar. It would be very easy.

Salgat• 6 months ago

The second a ban is announced everyone would just migrate to the next thing. That's the nice part of social media and communication apps, they're easy to migrate off of.

pests4• 6 months ago

You're in luck! They recently rolled out updated parental controls letting you block it.

https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/updates-youtube-supervi...

"YouTube has introduced enhanced parental controls allowing parents to manage or block YouTube Shorts for teen accounts. Parents can set daily time limits for Shorts ranging from zero to two hours, configure custom bedtimes, and set "take a break" reminders" (AI summary)

attendant34464• 6 months ago

I'm a bit glad that it's no longer Facebook groups. But WhatsApp is also disappointing. I have to keep an account on my 'throwaway' phone for junk apps just to communicate with those groups and clubs. And usually WhatsApp is the only way with them.

Aurornis9• 6 months ago

Probably even Reddit - which does have an algorithm to show specific content - is not as bad.

I'm surprised Reddit gets a pass or borderline pass in social media discussions.

In my experience working with kids, Reddit was the worst of the social media platforms for mental health. By far. The kids who were into Reddit were always spouting off information they got from Reddit and had soul-crushing amounts of cynicism about the world. On top of that, they had a chip on their shoulder about it all, believing that Reddit was a superior source of truth about the world.

The whole experience caught me off guard because going into this I mostly heard about the stereotypical social media dangers that get talked about, like boys following Andrew Tate and such. Instead the biggest problem was Redditors on a fast path to doomerism.

andix3• 6 months ago

thanks for that insight

Ylpertnodi• 6 months ago

....the stereotypical social media dangers that get talked about, like boys following Andrew Tate and such

I wonder where tate got his ideas and influences from. And why he's free in the US.

qwerpy• 6 months ago

Agree, I consider Reddit worse than Tiktok because of the downvote. Even a mild lean in one direction immediately results in extreme viewpoints bubbling up to the top and all other opinions silenced. Few people I know spend much time there, but the one that does sticks out like a sore thumb, always finding every opportunity to get upset about whatever the outrage of the day is.

It's a shame that HN's "don't talk about HN is turning into Reddit" guideline is there. It's preemptively used to shut people down when there are real issues with threads randomly devolving into uninteresting politically charged therapy sessions.

jnordt• 6 months ago

Tictoc, Instagram, Youtube shorts and in parts Linkedin are Digital Drugs. Similisr to smoking cigarettes or vaping.

Whats fascinating about thid is that we have managed to create a new class of drugs - that does not require physical substances to be added to our bodies...and works via visual stimulous only.

LightBug1• 6 months ago

I'm delighted and honoured to announce that you are completely correct.

BrenBarn• 6 months ago

So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine.

Even better might be to just destroy the big platforms by breaking them up.

dragoncrab• 6 months ago

Myspace and early Facebook were already a downgrade to classic chatrooms. I met with so many interesting people on chat in the early 2000s and have met with many offline as well. Multiple times I've travelled 6+ hours to participate in chat meetups with 20-50 others from the same chatroom.

Those were different times: Over 4 years, I've never received a d*ckpic or was target of stalking, harassment, abuse or scam. People were genuinely interested in each other, chat was not about building a personal brand and anonymity didn't make commenters psychos.

I'm not sure if ignorance was bliss, or times changed so much, but as an adult, I feel online communication has became a battlefield where I need to protect my sanity every time I interact with it. Rage bait, fake news, ads, bot farms, lies in a never ending flood. I wouldn't let my children to even try to live the same, uncontrolled online life I had.

mrighele• 6 months ago

Myspace and early Facebook were already a downgrade to classic chatrooms.

They were not a downgrade, they just worked the other way. With classic chatrooms (or a random vBulletin forums, if you wish) you would meet somebody online, then you would become friends over time and then you meet them in real life. I did that too.

With early Facebook, you would meet somebody at a party, have fun together, and decide to become friends on Facebook, not much different from exchanging phone numbers, but somehow better.

random3• 6 months ago

Not many digital cameras, not enough bandwidth for multimedia either. Your “face” was a nickname.

thijson3• 6 months ago

I remember people complaining about the degradation of the Usenet experience after AOL brought more people online.

jmathai• 6 months ago

I wish the same would happen for games like Roblox. These games suffer from all the same problems social media does.

buckle8017• 6 months ago

Reddit is actually the worst of the bunch.

UltraSane3• 6 months ago

I've noticed comments on YouTube videos about politically controversial things in the US show incredibly obvious bot activity.

alexjplant• 6 months ago

Reddit has been a cesspit of recycled pablum, populist image macros and low effort reply comments for more than a decade. Enthusiast subreddits are astroturfed to hell and back by people with a Shopify storefront and a dream trying to growth hack their way to a hockey stick. The low barrier to entry to each community means that this vapid culture eventually diffuses itself across subreddits that might otherwise be good. It's a postmodern toilet that flushes into its own tank.

I don't care if I sound old and salty when I say this: I miss phpBB and Invision forums. Even those are being bought up by marketing companies to sell ads and transformed with social media features... Xenforo (which everybody uses now) allows liking posts and supports Instagram-style content feeds.

SauntSolaire• 6 months ago

Agreed. I wish they would consider charging a small fee (~$1) to create an account. That alone would cut down on all the AI spam and give subreddit moderators a fighting chance.

shevy-java6• 6 months ago

phpBB was quite nice, but you must remember that people used phpBB less and less over the years. Many phpBB style webforums are dead, and died before discourse etc... came about.

People's habits changed.

I do agree that things got worse in the last ~16 years or so.

AlienRobot• 6 months ago

The craziest thing about Reddit for me is how most communities forbid "self-promotion." To me that sounds like a thing only admins would want because it keeps users on the site/app, but this is enforced by moderators for some reason and a lot of drama has occurred over banning creators over these silly rules.

It's a place that originally was a link-sharing platform, where you literally can't share a link to your own website on any subreddit. At least not if you are honest about it. It's okay if you pretend you aren't associated to it.

Reddit has become essentially watermarked videos posted by people pretending they aren't the creator of the video, twitter screenshots with 10 likes posted by people pretending they aren't the user who tweeted the tweet, and links to news websites posted by users whose only activity on reddit seems to be posting the same link to 5 different subreddits as if it was their job, because it probably is.

whatshisface• 6 months ago

After a certain point, these threads start sounding like,

"I hate my rights. I hate the town square. There is litter in the common square. There is a child outdoors. Take away my pubic square."

GeoAtreides• 6 months ago

Xenforo (which everybody uses now) allows liking posts and supports Instagram-style content feeds.

On spacebattles you get infracted for chan-like (or instagram-like) behaviour. It's all about how strict moderation is. They do allow likes (but there's no algo)

ValentineC• 6 months ago

I miss phpBB and Invision forums.

As someone who's paid for an Invision Power Board licence before: I remember when they screwed all existing "lifetime/perpetual" licence holders with v3, and once again with v4.

insane_dreamer6• 6 months ago

I miss slashdot 20 years ago :/

MatejKafka• 6 months ago

True for the popular subreddits, but there are occasional niche communities that imo managed to keep the forum vibe (e.g., r/progmetal, r/cpp).

jwr2• 6 months ago

I don't care if I sound old and salty when I say this: I miss phpBB

I'll one-up this: I miss USENET.

I never understood how anyone could like phpBB, compared to USENET news readers, it was a chaotic mess. But USENET, that was great for discussing things.

afandian• 6 months ago

I’ve just set up a forum for up and coming bagpipe makers (not the loud Scottish kind).

It’s been a real breath of fresh air seeing a community coalesce without the feeling of predators on the horizon (eg a hosting provider with misaligned incentives or astroturfers).

I don’t do social media (beyond HN) much at all these days but I’m enjoying seeing it slowly take off.

Using hosted Discourse. I’m glad there’s still a market for it.

lawn• 6 months ago

The problem with reddit is that subreddits vary wildly in feeling and quality.

On one hand you have absolute garbage but on the other you have very niche subreddits that does feel like the internet of old.

this_steve_j• 6 months ago

Comment of the week!

johnisgood• 6 months ago

Yeah, we all had such forums set up. I personally used Vanilla Forums and phpBB. I remember I did set up Invision once and I felt great about myself. (I was a kid) :D

figassis• 6 months ago

When did this start? IMHO it started with instagram. I remember back then there were multiple retro photo apps, insta was one of them, I had several on my phone and kept playing around with them (at the time apps felt like Christmas presents, each update exploring a device feature in creative ways).

I don't quite remember, but I don't think it was a social network then, I think you posted the photos in other networks, and then they made it into a social network and something strange happened. People started posting pictures of food and just general daily life stuff and I thought this was a small group of people who were a extroverts and just wanted to show off idk, they ate beautiful food.

Then something strange happened. This behavior started getting normalized, all other insta like apps disappeared and shortly after, it became necessary to have an instagram account.

I remember at the time I thought something was off, to this day I think I have posted a total of 10 instagram images, they still have the old filters, and stayed off of it since.

But it's been interesting watching it morph into this hydra that simply cannot be put down, to the point where it's more powerful than governments.

refulgentis2• 6 months ago

Really good question...TL;DR: I'd put it around when Mark Z decided Instagram also had to be Snapchat. (copied Stories) It normalized a behavior of copying.

I had gotten completely out of these apps, then ended up in a situation where I needed to use Snapchat daily if not hourly for messaging, and needed to use TikTok to be culturally literate. (i.e. I got into something romantic with someone younger).

It was a stunning experience. Seeing _everyone_ had normalized this "copy our competitor" strat, hill-climbing on duration of engagement.

YouTube Shorts is a crappy copy of TikTok with mostly TikTok reposts and no sense of community.

Snapchat has a poor clone of TikTok that I doubt anyone knows exists.

TikTok is the ur-engagement king. Pure dopamine, just keep swiping until something catches your attention, and swipe as soon as it stops. No meaningful 1:1 communicating aspect (there's messages, but AFAICT from light quizzing of Gen Zers, it's not used for actual communication)

Instagram specifically is hard for me to speak to, because Gen Zers seem to think its roughly as cool as Facebook, but my understanding is millennials my age or younger (I'm 37) use it more regularly, whereas Gen Z uses it more as like we'd think of Facebook, a generic safe place where grandma can see your graduation photos, as opposed to spontaneous thirst traps.

insane_dreamer6• 6 months ago

it started with FB before IG, but infected IG once Zuck bought it

but things really took off when TT cracked the code for endless scrolling of "relevant" content

shevy-java6• 6 months ago

Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them.

Agreed but you have this on many websites such as youtube. Is youtube the next to get banned here? I mean you can write comments to so it is kind of a social mediua setup as well.

So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine.

I don't know. It sounds quite arbitrary to me.

Not that I have anything against chopping down the big platforms. They truly abuse many people.

direwolf2017• 6 months ago

YouTube is social media. It feels less harmful than tiktok but it's in the same category, and shorts is just a copy of tiktok. Algorithmic feed? Check. Optimized for engagement? Check.

thijson3• 6 months ago

Probably the online dating platforms are the same way. Someone actually finding their mate, and no longer needing the platform is counterproductive to their business model.

seneca• 6 months ago

I totally agreed with you, right up until the last paragraph. Reddit is among the worst communities on the internet.

pokstad• 6 months ago

100%. Go on Facebook or Instagram today and you’re more likely to see viral videos than to see anything to do with your friends. It’s just a moth to flame.

lazarus01• 6 months ago

Quality of the content doesn't matter at all

Exactly.

Engagement is prioritized over quality on most mediums. I find user generated content on social media absolutely abhorrent.

Thank goodness for hacker news. I can read something, share my views and in some cases, my views may be based on some weak intuition and I learn from polite correctness.

heavyset_go5• 6 months ago

Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them.

Heard the same thing about video games, TV shows, D&D, texting and even youth novels.

There are a lot of big feelings about social media, but little data.

If the goal is to make social media "less addictive", the article in the OP does nothing to stop that. The article claims that social media affects youth mental health, but does the data actually back that up?

From the Guardian[1]:

Social media time does not increase teenagers’ mental health problems – study
Research finds no evidence heavier social media use or more gaming increases symptoms of anxiety or depression
Screen time spent gaming or on social media does not cause mental health problems in teenagers, according to a large-scale study.
With ministers in the UK considering whether to follow Australia’s example by banning social media use for under-16s, the findings challenge concerns that long periods spent gaming or scrolling TikTok or Instagram are driving an increase in teenagers’ depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions.
Researchers at the University of Manchester followed 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years, tracking their self-reported social media habits, gaming frequency and emotional difficulties to find out whether technology use genuinely predicted later mental health difficulties.

From Nature[2]:

Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health

From the Atlantic[3] with citations in the article:

The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn’t Help Teens, It may only make things worse.
I am a developmental psychologist[], and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find[4] compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.
Many other researchers have found the same[5]. In fact, a recent[6] study and a review of research[6] on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report[7] concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/candi...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-t...

[4] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31929951/

[5] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7#:~:text=G...

[6] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32734903/

[7] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/27396/Highlights_...

cmurf• 6 months ago

The medical and financial predators targeting elderly makes me wonder how to constrain it. The law doesn’t really help, short of having a court determine there’s some level of incapacity.

In theory the law doesn’t require victim cooperation. In practice, I’ve found local prosecutors won’t touch a case with an uncooperative victim. And most victims don’t cooperate whether out of humiliation or rejection pf the very idea they can be scammed. Because to them all scams are obvious, and only morons are scammed. They consistently lack imagination for the sophistication and manipulation component of scams, thinking it’s all about obviousness.

I’m sure it’s not only a case of “save the children”. Saving grandma’s retirement accounts is also important. The internet is a cesspool.

LoganDark• 6 months ago

Back then it was a platform to communicate with friends, and maybe even find new friends to meet up with.

Those still exist... and this ban will probably outlaw them for the people who need it the most.

tamimio• 6 months ago

The keyword here is monetization, it’s what ruined social media, among many other entertainment industries. If we somehow managed to ban monetization through social media or internet, you will notice how it will reset back to ol’ fun days.

noufalibrahim• 6 months ago

I can relate to this. Early social media were forum sites, boards, irc, mailing lists and things like that.

leptons2• 6 months ago

Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them. The content must either be addictive/engaging or paid advertisements. Quality of the content doesn't matter at all.

"AI" is really no different. These social media bans should include "AI" too, for people under a certain age. I even see adults that don't understand the limits of "AI" and that it shouldn't be trusted blindly.

vjk800• 6 months ago

The problem is not the whole of social media per se, it is the monetization mechanisms used in the social media platforms. I'd think it would be better to ban the addictive algorithms, although it would be difficult or impossible to define precisely what to ban then.

Hacker News is a sort of social media platform, but I would have no problem with my kids using it without any sort of restrictions. The same is not true for Tik Tok or even Facebook.

NalNezumi• 6 months ago

No reddit is not fine.

It's simple really. Do you have a recommendation algorithm that is tuned to individual preferences to increase engagement? You're a social media that falls under the ban.

You're a messaging app that is between individuals (or group messages) with no recommendation algorithm but just for communication? You're an communication (or at worst Social network) app, you're good to go.

If I would add, I'd add a clause that says "if you can make a non-algorithms version of your product and keep it separated, you can maybe circumvent the ban"

gorgoiler2• 6 months ago

Tech folks went crazy for Google+’s circles back in 2011 but the demand from normal users just wasn’t there for that level of control. FB brushed it off with friends, “close friends”, and public. That was enough — even “friends of friends” was dropped or buried after a while.

Fast forward to 2025 and circles is absolutely the winning paradigm, except it’s called “group chat” where it is the vector for cat pictures, hollandaise bragging, and vacation snaps.

grishka• 6 months ago

That's why I started distinguishing these two concepts when I talk about them in English. The terrible thing that insists on obnoxiously getting in your way with its stupid algorithms when you're just trying to have conversations with your friends is "social media". Early Facebook and Twitter, and current open-source initiatives like the fediverse, are "social networks".

drecked• 6 months ago

The hint is in the name.

In the early days they were social networks. The idea was to connect people. (The Facebook movie is called the Social Network…)

Now they’re social media. The idea is to push messages to you but this time the message is coming from a person you know so you’re psychologically more inclined to believe it.

direwolf2017• 6 months ago

Uber is a taxi company with no taxis, AirBNB is a hotel company with no hotels, and tiktok is a TV channel with no producers.

steve1977• 6 months ago

So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine.

One idea would be to only allow non-profits maybe.

malklera• 6 months ago

Do parents do not exist? I mean if the parents pass hours looking at their phone, the kids would want to use a phone, maybe making a law is easier than setting an example? Each parent could educate themselves and bloc "harmful" websites from their kids phones, that is what parental control is for.(single, no kids)

ottah• 6 months ago

Never accept the bullshit false dichotomy of people pushing an agenda. There are many, many ways to solve this issue other than the nuclear option of a ban and doing nothing.

rendall• 6 months ago

The impression that one might get from this article is that the ban is essentially a done deal, but it’s not. What exists right now is political signaling by Prime Minister Petteri Orpo, plus preliminary fact-finding and position papers by ministries and agencies, but no enacted legislation. There’s still a big gap between "government floats an idea with broad public support" and "a legally enforceable, technically workable ban".

The Finnish language article about it is much thinner.

https://yle.fi/a/74-20204177

spicyusername• 6 months ago

    Under 15

Heck I'd support banning under 18.

abdelhousni• 6 months ago

Tiktok was also the wake up call for US and other western countries who found out they lost a part of their youth about the Israeli war on Gaza. Youth thorough the ages always stand against perceived injustice. The oligarchy also want to control that aspect.

SilverElfin2• 6 months ago

Banning youth from communicating is just not appropriate. And forcing adults to give up privacy to discuss things is a huge risk and a path to enabling authoritarianism, like in Trump’s America.

duxup3• 6 months ago

Rather than really address what is ass about social media, we just "ban" it for folks who we can ban it for. This seems off.

Kid's have unlimited time. They'll find something else, likely pretending to be adults and thus even more at risk.

Meanwhile everyone else gets an internet license and the government every website tracks you ...

This is a classic case of nice idea and the results will be all wrong / not even address the problem.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm3• 6 months ago

By creating 'rules' for social media based on what's good and bad instead of banning it altogether you end up creating loopholes instead. Even in the case we instead first discuss what is "ass" we will probably end up having a debate instead of getting anything done for another 10 years. I'm on team, just get shit done.

duxup3• 6 months ago

What is getting done here?

Everyone but kids is still exposed, and likely still kids...

Also you now have to have a license for social media, probably the internet eventually.

constantcrying2• 6 months ago

This is of course a trend in many western countries. With some, like the UK and Australia, leading the way.

At this point I do not think it is reasonable to deny the harm that certain modes of social interactions over the internet have caused. At the same time these bans should not be considered reasonable options. They exist to cover for the decade of inaction of politicians in addressing youth dissatisfaction and dysfunction.

A reasonable approach should not assume that the root cause of this dysfunction is youth interacting with social media, but should consider what lead to this in the first place. Apparently most adults seem to be capable of dealing with this situation, if they are not why would this ban, or at least some regulation, not extend to social media for adults.

In general I believe that dysfunction in the youth has multiple causes and that overuse of social media is just on part of the puzzle and that unhealthy use of social media is often caused by other problem and used as a coping mechanism.

These bans will not be effective and they will be assaults on the free internet, as the bureaucrats establishing the laws are also seeking to control the internet for themselves and will use this as a backdoor.

quotemstr5• 6 months ago

At this point I do not think it is reasonable to deny the harm that certain modes of social interactions over the internet have caused

Yes, it is reasonable to doubt the purported harms are real, because

1) I've yet to see evidence that the medium is the problem,

2) people keep telling me that they don't need evidence because the harms are obvious, and

3) I have an strong prior, as an American, that anyone preventing people sharing ideas with each other is a villain of history.

The furor over youth social media has all the hallmarks of a moral panic, including over-reliance of weak evidence, personal attacks against skeptics, and socially disruptive remedies of dubious efficiency, the collateral damage of which people justify by pointing to harms to children they say, falsely, are obvious and ongoing.

I'm not convinced that these social media bans are solving a real problem. The more people breathlessly tell me I'm a bad person for asking for evidence of the alleged harms, the more I think it's a public mania, not a civilizational problem.

It really doesn't help that it'd be suspiciously convenient for the worst actors in power if sharing ideas on the internet required ID.

constantcrying2• 6 months ago

For the reasons outlined in my post I believe that it is hard to show specific causal claims which relate overuse of mobile devices and especially social media to specific problems. Although I think for some specific cases this could still be reasonably inferred.

Just to be clear, the evidence seems overwhelming. This is not some novel research field, but this questions has been researched for long enough to have been pretty conclusively answered.

1) I've yet to see evidence that the medium is the problem,

This is not relevant to the claim. The claim is that the specific usage pattern of young adults is harmful to their development.

I'm not convinced that these social media bans are solving a real problem.

I largely agree.

perfmode• 6 months ago

I miss the days of chatting at home with friends after school on MSN Messenger and ICQ.

notthemessiah• 6 months ago

People in this thread are celebrating this, though it inevitably means ID-checking and mass surveillance. Australia's ban also exempted Roblox, a platform that exploits children and is a haven for child predators. Also, it's no coincidence that all these social media bans are arriving the same time youth are using social media to spread awareness of Israel's genocide of Palestine.

bethekidyouwant5• 6 months ago

Have you ever played Roblox?

m1322• 6 months ago

Open Internet dying in front of our very eyes.

Let's not forget that social media are just one of the many scapegoats tried over the past decade in hopes of pushing this idea forwards. And while there's no denying that today's social media have gotten destructive, they're still only a scapegoat; no attempt is being made here to bring them back to their original, non-malicious shape.

Is the social media hate really so powerful that, channeled carefully, it can overshadow free speech?

testing223212• 6 months ago

Has anyone ever argued that children should have full access to the entire internet?

Seems like a horribly bad idea.

m1322• 6 months ago

Will adults be exempt from the invasive age verification?

wiseowise3• 6 months ago

no attempt is being made here to bring them back to their original, non-malicious shape.

Social networks can revert back to original form any minute, nobody’s stopping them.

Is the social media hate really so powerful that, channeled carefully, it can overshadow free speech?

Bots giving platform to schizos and fringe radicals is a freedom of speech?

Nursie• 6 months ago

Social media is not the open internet, pretty much by definition. With a few notable, niche exceptions it’s big centralised services entirely in the control of single companies.

They’ve long been explicitly targeting human psychology for profit, it’s hardly surprising there’s a backlash. But that doesn’t mean the open internet is dead. In fact the open internet could benefit from the slaying of these centralised monsters.

GreenWatermelon6• 6 months ago

In what universe are corpo-controlled walled-gardens considered "Open Internet"?

no attempt is being made here to bring them back to their original, non-malicious shape.

Because it's impossible unless you ban for-profit social media. Naturally I'd support such a ban.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos• 6 months ago

Wrong. Ban phones. Would benefit more than just children. The internet must again become something you sit down to use.

eimrine5• 6 months ago

ban proprietary software, do not let microsoft or apple to "offer deals" to schoolchildren.

machomaster6• 6 months ago

Not phones. Smart phones.

cal_dent• 6 months ago

It's all picking up steam. The thing is whatever the implementation may be, the writing is on the wall that social media's are numbered, well at least its in current form.

I.m sure there'll be downsides to this but, have to say, I'm happy the de facto position that social media's should be allowed to be the wild west is now seriously being questioned

logicchains5• 6 months ago

the writing is on the wall that social media's are numbered, well at least its in current form

There's enough of us devs that absolutely fucking hate the idea of governments controlling how people communicate that the next stage of social media will probably be a decentralised system that's extremely difficult to shut down. Unless every government devolves into full on China-style authoritarianism with deep packet inspection, a national firewall and ubiquitous surveillance, there's no way to stop a well designed distributed social media platform. There just hasn't been enough incentive yet for people to build one.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm3• 6 months ago

Social media really is downhill from here. There is already a lot of bot activity (and I don't mean moltbook) and it will only get worse.

This will become closer to truth than conspiracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

VortexLain• 6 months ago

Social media age restriation is just an anonymity ban in disguise. Governments should focus on regulations knowingly addictive and overly engaging mechanics instead.

pembrook5• 6 months ago

Watching people cheer this on uncritically without thinking through what this actually means in practice (the end of privacy on the internet, forever)...just because of some silly moral panic and people being too lazy to parent their kids...it's just sad.

Unfortunately, rationally thinking through 2nd and 3rd order effects is hard. As we see on social media, appeals to emotion drive the highest engagement, and "think of the children" is the ultimate emotional appeal.

But hey, with European countries moving to tie all internet activity to their national ID system to "protect the children from social media" and "ban speech we don't like" maybe we can finally get rid of those cookie popups?

Making Lambi Toilet Paper jump through bizarre hoops when targeting their toilet paper ads to people seems silly now...given we're voluntarily handing our browser history & permission to access the open web to a much more powerful entity (the government). Consumer goods companies combining your IP address and email address together for the purpose of selling you more toilet bowl cleaner...becomes a bit of a moot point, no?

donatj2• 6 months ago

Do people under the age of sixty even use traditional social media anymore? Do we have actual stats?

I am in my late thirties so surely out of touch, but am friends with people in their mid twenties and frankly I don't know anyone who spends any significant time on anything other than TikTok. I guess you could call TikTok "social media", but it wouldn't fit my old person definition.

I think pretty much everyone below the age of 60 is aware that Facebook/Instagram/etc is just slop now. You don't even see your friend stuff. You just see slop. I use Facebook primarily for marketplace these days, but when I do scroll my feed, it's all like weird east asian AI slop. Women cutting open impossibly large fruit, fake tartar removal, fake videos of fights.

Literally nothing that compels me to stay on the site like I hear people on here talk about.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm3• 6 months ago

I think pretty much everyone below the age of 60 is aware that Facebook/Instagram/etc is just slop now.

Sorry, but to me you just revealed you don't speak to many women.

donatj2• 6 months ago

I'm married with children, work from home, and weeks away from my 40s. So yes. Not a big revelation.

I have more than a couple nieces and nephews in their late teens/early 20s though and if you ask them, social media is for old people.

expedition323• 6 months ago

Its a very dangerous experiment. Remember: we only get ONE childhood. No do overs.

shevy-java6• 6 months ago

Hmmmm. So I do understand some concerns here. On the other hand, I also absolutely hate all forms of censorship. I don't use any of these anti-social media myself (though, perhaps hacker news is declared social media? I also used to use reddit in the past, is that social media? Where are the boundaries of that term definition by the way?), but I still absolutely dislike state actors banning websites. I have no illusion about e. g. Zuckerberg and others here; see the recent news how Facebook tried to "hook" up young kids like a drug addict; Google via Youtube on the "swiping" of videos (that one is hard to resist ... I keep on scrolling down in the hope of finding better videos, fail, and eventually realise how I am wasting my time swiping ...). But even then ... I actually think I dislike censorship more than those anti-social websites that I am not even using anyway. This may be different for younger brains, so it is not that I am not understanding the rational behind. But still ... I can't get myself to want to like censorship either.

httpsterio• 6 months ago

I wouldn't call it censorship. We don't allow kids to drink or smoke either, is that censorship? Gate keeping media thats possibly harmful for developing brains, when the users are possibly unable to make an informed decision for themselves, isn't inherently bad.

zinodaur2• 6 months ago

We should ban dynamic feeds that aren't based on explicit user action. E.g., Youtube should only be able to show search results based on search term, not search context. The recommendations should only be videos from channels you have subscribed to.

The dangers of algorithmic content are so obvious, and the only way to stop companies from doing this stuff is to legislate against it

barbazoo4• 6 months ago

Ranking might be deterministic but it’s never free from bias.

zinodaur2• 6 months ago

i'm sure they can still scramble our brains pretty good by exploiting ranking, but if they aren't allowed to customize it per person (e.g., if the same searches have to return the same results for different people), I think it will be a lot less effective

cowboylowrez• 6 months ago

The internet should be 18+, no internet for kids, there is literally no need for kids to have internet access and its easy too, treat the devices themselves as contraband. This way you need no age checks for social media because internet itself is 18+.

nephihaha3• 6 months ago

Australia, France, soon the UK... All within a few months and they have the chutzpah to suggest they came up with this notion independently.

mna_• 6 months ago

Are they suggesting that they came up with this notion independently? I can't speak for other countries but UK politicians who are for this say they're monitoring the Australian ban closely to see if it works, so it's clear they're not claiming they came up with this notion independently.

nephihaha3• 6 months ago

What happens in every case is this political party or that party in each country takes the blame for it, and their opposition will pretend to be against it, when in fact it appears to be part of a bigger picture.

You're right that reactions are being monitored but this has clearly been discussed somewhere and appears fairly co-ordinated, much like the emergence of digital ID and AI chatbots. It seems to be a common pattern now... Smoking restrictions and car ownership seem to approached in a fairly similar manner across different countries.

blackqueeriroh2• 6 months ago

Welp, let’s just keep screwing over anyone who doesn’t fit society’s mold of who is acceptable. Particularly queer kids, neurodivergent kids, disabled kids, etc.

wiseowise3• 6 months ago

What does this have to do with social networks ban?

jimmcslim• 6 months ago

Meanwhile in Australia two teens I am responsible for still have TikTok appearing in their screentime usage and for longer than the time limit I have set for them.

blackqueeriroh2• 6 months ago

As someone who has literally been on the internet since BBSes, the idea that those days were better absolutely is contradicted by my own experience, in which I was victimized and exploited several times because of the lack of any real moderation.

irusensei• 6 months ago

Seems its just another country coming up with the same convenient excuse to implement KYC to access the internet.

lovlar• 6 months ago

It’s going to be interesting to see how these types of bans play out.

One alternative to bans could perhaps be if the EU created an IdP or something similar, with a fee for each authentication request, and then forced all commercial services within Europe to use it. I’m not sure if the fee should go back to the user or be paid as tax to the government, but either way, it would change the incentives around connecting traffic to you and making profit from it by harvesting data or steering recommendation engines.

Because I do think there’s nothing wrong with the government doing this, just like in the physical world.

And in some cases, we might prefer cheap authentications… like when posting comments, to avoid trolling/manipulation/bullying. Perhaps when doing “writes” on the internet, if there’s a robust way to identify that type of traffic.

jasonvorhe• 6 months ago

Nice try to force digital IDs onto an entire country.

phyzix5761• 6 months ago

Does this actually solve the problem? Or is the problem something deeper in the human psyche that keeps us addicted to pleasure and avoiding pain regardless of the moral or psychological repercussions? I have a feeling if you remove one vice people will just replace it for another if the underlying cause is not treated.

jibal2• 6 months ago

Ironically, Finland is where it started because of Nokia.

danny_codes• 6 months ago

Probably best to just ban it for everyone.

komali2• 6 months ago

I'm working on an article targeted at a Taiwan audience titled "你不是人類，你是IG代理," "You aren't a human, you're an Instagram agent." I want to reframe how everyone with their phones out at the rave isn't there for themselves, they've been directed to attend by IG so as to acquire training data for IG visual models. IG can't just order humans around like we do for LLMs but it's easy enough to program our sloppy brains: just chemically induce FOMO, show the right ads at the right time, easy, off go your little data acquisition agents to physically film the required data.

Minor49er• 6 months ago

I hope you post it to HN once it's ready

president_zippy2• 6 months ago

Enforcement of that law is going to be a certifiable joke. My Chinese classmates back in undergrad in the early 2010s used to use a VPN to access their Facebook accounts when they went home for break. Like anyone else around here in their 30s, I didn't have much trouble bypassing "WebWasher" or its ilk in the 00s either. I have a better proposal to get kids off social media, hear me out:

In order to make a teenager stop doing something, all you need to do is show them videos of someone their parents' age doing it. Juxtapose a bunch of 40-somethings doing cringy little "TikTok dances" alongside people young enough to be their classmates, and they'll stop. Make another TikTok Cringe Compilation, but this time add more clips from middle-aged TikTok users.

My proposal might be insufficiently sophisticated and too actionable for the members of this community who think themselves to be righteous members of an enlightened class and who seek only to complain about current events to self-affirm their superiority. Nonetheless, I insist that anyone who will listen gives the following proposal consideration for the future of our children, whose FICA taxes shall pay for our retirements.

energy123• 6 months ago

This misunderstands the objectives of the law. Perfect enforcement is not the goal. Breaking the network effect for teens is the goal.

president_zippy2• 6 months ago

I didn't misunderstand anything. Your little "network effect", as you have so pretentiously worded it assumes teenagers are only getting on social media for their classmates, not for all the other users on a social media site. You also assume a little government-made dumpster-tier firewall written by peons making $70k like "WebWasher" is going to stop them. It didn't stop me from opening up goatse, meatspin, or 2G1C, so your argument carries no water.

All they need is one classmate similar to most of us here on this site. Someone in their high school who will show them how to use a proxy or a VPN not for cred, not for reward, but just because "fuck it, why not?"

erichocean2• 6 months ago

"Citizens should be free to make their own choices for themselves and their children, especially benign ones about how to socialize and who to socialize with."

It's interesting how few governments believe this. Your rulers know what's best for you, and it's not freedom.

barbazoo4• 6 months ago

We regularly restrict choices of vulnerable people in our society. That’s why kids can’t drive, drink, smoke, etc.

erichocean2• 6 months ago

Parents can give their kids alcohol and cigarettes, that's fully legal.

Driving involves danger to other. We restrict adults from doing things that are a danger to others, it has nothing to do with being "vulnerable."

b00ty4breakfast• 6 months ago

I cannot overstate how sympathetic I am to this in theory but the only way this is enforceable is through ID laws that endanger privacy online for everyone.

tokioyoyo• 6 months ago

On the bright side, if every big SNS required ID verification, and majority would stop using it, then they would die it. Win for a humanity, no?

Fervicus3• 6 months ago

Quite interesting how these countries are doing this one after another - Australia, France, and now Finland.

Fervicus3• 6 months ago

They intend to normalize requiring ID to use certain websites. How fast will we go from "it's fine as long as they do zero knowledge verification" to most websites on the internet requiring some government ID proof?

mnsc• 6 months ago

What would help so much would be to force the platform to act in a way to not try to retain the user at every cost.

Like YouTube. I would love to have parental settings, "no shorts", "no recommendations on video page". Kids could search and click on the creator to see more. Combine that with blocklists and curated allow lists. Boom, YouTube is not a problem. And kids getting bored of clicking around would be a feature.

Phenomenit• 6 months ago

They should just ban showing ads to people under 18. That will remove the incentive to produce and feed dopamine garbage to kids with unfinished brains.

hgomersall• 6 months ago

There's still the incentive to get them hooked. They'd need to ban any platform for under 18s that increases its revenue from greater "engagement".

xkbarkar• 6 months ago

Eh. This is pointless.

There will always be at least one country that has not rules and everyone will vpn there.

Danish minister was about to solve that nut airing ideas of banning vpn ( was of course dropped, most politicians have zero technical skills, not even rudimentary ones).

Of course this is all to protect the children.

I am unscientifically convinced that the average 12 year old is more technically apt that the entire adult governmental body of north europe.

If the will is there, they will circumevent it and the only outcome was another pointless level of buerocracy that is impossible to enforce.

target the algorithm instead. Its a more difficult area and harder to design that law and it would require understanding technology, the end result would be targeting the platforms, not the users. Possibly with hundreds of millions in fines and less predatory platform behaviour.

This low quality , protect the children yelp regulation set will have no long term effect whatsoever.

It is far to easy to circumvent.

gorgoiler2• 6 months ago

Periodically, Amazon gets it in the neck for tax avoidance. While the news cycle plays out, all the other FAANGS Homer-Simpson their way backwards into a hedge to let Bezos take the flack for something for which they are just as guilty.

It’s the same with screen time.

Apple and Google are surely delighted that the heat is on Meta and TikTok. As long as the pariah is being labelled as “social media” then their reputation goes untouched. They could be doing just as much, if not more, to protect adolescent brains from going rotten.

I’d like to see them held to account not so much for doing harm — pretty high framerate OLEDs are harder to treat as boogeymen than evil feed algorithms — but for not doing very much to help, either.

everdrive• 6 months ago

People are often focused on the harm to kids. I think there is a lot of good evidence there. However, I don't know if people recognize social media as the main driver of the rise of populism and political instability and political extremism.

alkonaut6• 6 months ago

I think trying to argue that the viral/algorithmic addictive short-video feeds are "social media" is a bit of a stretch.

If you banned any network that does algorithmic feeds, or that don't have good moderation, then I'd be fine with my teenagers using it. I think the problem is the mind-numbing video scrolling more than any other risk with social media.

And I don't think there's a danger to it per se, I think it's just too addictive and distracting.

whywhywhywhy• 6 months ago

So blatantly coordinated and paid off it’s ridiculous.

shartshooter• 6 months ago

I’d be open to a version of social media that is not banned and the version looks like this: - a straight linear feed with three tabs, 1) people close to me(default), 2) brands and influencers I choose follow and 3) everything else the algorithm wants me to see(this could be curated and not a linear feed)

My ex and I have an agreement in our separation agreement that our children can’t have social media until they’re 16. This is the version of it I’d want for them, if they choose(or feel pressured) to use it

esarbe• 6 months ago

It's about time.

Social Media providers have spent the last 20 years to make everything more toxic, more harmful. They are aware that their products are damaging, but instead of trying to reduce the harm and to come up with some self-regulation ("Oh noes! Then we make less profit from harming teenagers! Impossible! Think for the Shareholders!") they spent all their money lobbying against any form of mitigation.

Just shut them all down.

rstuart4133• 6 months ago

Maybe they are just discussing it but even that leads to buy in, and right now buy in looks a little premature. In Australia this ban is viewed as an experiment - even by the politicians that championed it. My guess is it will take at least a year to figure out it if it is workable. Surely it would be prudent for Finland too let us wear the first mover pain before doing something themselves.

Speaking personally, I'd be much happier with it if they rolled out some zero knowledge proof of age infrastructure so the platforms could verify ages without all the PPI age identification currently requires flying around. It would remove a major criticism - government monitoring of consenting adults. Even if that aspect doesn't concern you in Australia had numerous leaks of identify documents in the past few years. Both my wife and I have had to replace our drivers licences due to leaks.

wartywhoa23• 6 months ago

What makes those of you who advocate for the state control over what children can do on the Internet (which used to be parents' business, prerogative and liability - all implied to be a total failure of parenthood now) so sure that you, grown ass adults, won't be the next target of the police state nanny?

jackinthehat• 6 months ago

Good shout tbh. Add to that Reddit. Addictive for many. Whatever gets the dopamine hitting.

Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

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