Why do we have to ban networked communication for teens instead of regulating it?

Nearly everything about it that’s bad for teens also sucks for the rest of us.

hilbert42 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Right, it sucks for all. What truly pisses me off is that early on very smart people in Big Tech realized that to make a financial killing they'd have to get in quickly and lock in populations before governments et al realized the negative implications and introduced policy/regulations.

As with addiction or clicking a ratchet forward, they knew that reversing direction would then be nigh on impossible. Society seems to have little or no defense against such threats and I'd bet London to a brick that it'll be repeated with AI.

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jksmith 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How many degrees of separation is this from adult regulation? Want to provide age information to a site so you can look at porn without any guarantee that information won't be used for additional profit? That's a real thing in the US.

Government assumes zero expected trust reciprocation because they don't have to provide trust reciprocation and can do what they want, and government is comprised of co-opted humans.

Err on the side of sovereign freedom. Arguing about banning this or regulating that is all second principle stuff, and nanny states all strike me as the tail-end of civilization.

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nostrebored 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I value my kid not being exposed to porn as a child well above your right to privacy while watching it.

The ubiquity of the internet and children’s access to it is something we haven’t reckoned with yet. The differences between pre social media and mobile vs now is immense. The people seeking to capitalize on getting children addicted to something are numerous and well motivated by LTV.

Their incentives and the wellbeing of children are directly at odds. We already regulate things that are addictive for children.

People might give their kids a drink extralegally. Nobody is saying “hey kid, why don’t we watch porn together so you can develop healthier habits.” Nobody is creating a “starter Instagram” with their teenage daughter.

These forms of media are NOT SAFE FOR KIDS. They have observably negative population wide outcomes and are as reasonably banned as lead in pipes.

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raw_anon_1111 3 days ago | parent [-]

Then be a parent and turn on parental controls.

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nostrebored 3 days ago | parent [-]

Oh, I don’t let my children have electronic devices at all.

But schools do. Their friends all have Internet enabled devices in their pockets. The library he goes to has poorly secured devices. The school library does too.

This is what I mean by the ubiquity of the internet. It is functionally impossible to control access to the internet as a parent and allow your children to develop independence.

I do what I can, and have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars at this point to opt in to like minded environments. My oldest at ten is observably different than children at his age and doing great.

His friends that come from poorer families, like the ones that I grew up in, might as well have Roblox as a third parent and suffer from ridiculous behavioral problems. The school curriculum in SFUSD is years behind my curriculum was in Georgia when it was a bottom quintile outcome program.

It does not take much looking to see something is thoroughly wrong. I think a lot of it has to do with the mass experiment of Internet access we’ve run on children.

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raw_anon_1111 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Fair.

Funny enough I lived in the Atlanta metro area from 1996 to 2022. I had a house built in Decatur in 2003.

I started dating my now wife in 2011. She lived in Alpharetta. As soon as I met my now step sons who were 9 and 14, my first thought was in going to have to sell my house and move. There is no way in hell they are going to survive Decatur public schools.

We moved to Johns Creek at first and then had a house built in Forsyth County. Yeah this Forsyth County

https://youtu.be/WErjPmFulQ0?si=qfgRouGzQvm_nI1h

The attitudes in the burbs of Forsyth changed since then as people came from other places and it grew. But we very much stuck out. My son loved it there and still lives in that area and rents a house nearby where you use to live.

	▲	devmor 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Strangely enough I live in the same general area - right in the middle of Gwinnett. What an odd coincidence that the three of us happened to come across eachother in an HN thread before knowing this.

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hilbert42 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

"It does not take much looking to see something is thoroughly wrong."

Agreed, but observation suggests that it takes much more effort to do something about it—effort that the majority cannot muster or are unwilling to commit to.

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hilbert42 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Want to provide age information to a site so you can look at porn without any guarantee that information won't be used for additional profit?"

That's the Orwellian payoff: people self-censoring and frightened to act for rear of retribution or their reputation. It's the authoritarian's ideal approach to control.

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devmor 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think you might be confused here.

Providing age assurance is what banning teens from social media requires. This is already happening in the US in several states.

Regulating social media is the alternative.

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expedition32 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Mate for 1000 years priests decided what we could eat on Friday's.

You've never been more free.

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api 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Social media isn’t social anymore. People don’t use it to talk to anyone. It’s about mindlessly scrolling through chum guided by an algorithm.

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sardon 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

hey they can still use networked communication - e.g. whatsapp, signal, etc. This ban is only concerning the following services

Facebook Instagram Threads Kick Reddit Snapchat TikTok Twitch X (formerly Twitter) YouTube

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drunner 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I was all for this legislation, thinking the positives outweighed the cost, but after reading the list of affected services, I now disagree.

Why didn't they just legislate that all social media apps content must be like Facebook in 2005. No recommendations, chronological timeline only, and you only see posts from users you explicitly added. That would have benefited everyone forever, and not enabled some small subset of apps to collect your govt id or the law to be irrelevant when the next popular social network comes along.

They effectively banned only the popular cigarette brands, instead of regulating nicotine.

If services would argue this would make them all the same, then add a clause where the user can opt in to have an algorithm shove content at them like now if they are over 18.

This way everyone can use the basic service for true socializing, but the harmful stuff is actually regulated out by default.

Too much money etc for this to ever happen, but geez they could have done a lot better.

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stOneskull 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

yeah, there's always 4chan.. and rumble might get an uptick in users today, where they can view all the content youtube has banned

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ekianjo 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oh, and how do you know it will stop there? Control freaks don't stop at the first step.

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DocTomoe 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

First they came for Facebook, and I didn't protest, I was not on facebook.

Here's what's going to happen next: Whatsapp/signal/telegram groups will become wildly popular. Which gives the wannabe-fascists the excuse to ban those as well 'for the children'.

We've seen this salami tactic often enough to know the pattern.

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SiempreViernes 3 days ago | parent [-]

You are too modest! You should start your poem denouncing those pesky spam filters than hinders the honest viagra pill salesmen! Then you could regret your inaction when google downweighted zit-popping videos, and maybe you have reached the point where it becomes reasonable to regret losing Facebook the genocide facilitator.

	▲	DocTomoe 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		There is a qualitative distinction between 'I filter for myself what I don't want to see' and 'The State decides what everyone is allowed to see.' Not too sure about those zit-popping videos. But in my time, we had rotten.com - so I might be immunized to that kind of stuff. Personally, I find a honest zit-popping video no worse than yet another AI voice going on and on about some non-topic, clearly written by AI as well. I don't seek out either, but the zit-popping at least is over after 10 seconds. But that's Google curating content. State censorship is something else entirely. Once justified "for the children" or "for security", it never stops at the first target. It grows, layer by layer. We’ve watched that pattern repeat for centuries across every medium humans have ever invented. Facebook, the genocide facilitator? If we are honest, so has the printing press. Let's ban letters, they have facilitated genocide. The printing press spread enlightenment, propaganda, revolutions, and atrocities. The State tried to control that too. It failed every time. It will fail with the net, for young people and for old ones. Repression never works long-term, it always creates pressure that eventually breaks the system that produced it. Historically, societies tend to get worse before they correct themselves, because authoritarian overreach generates exactly the instability it claims to prevent. Jefferson’s warning about the recurring need to renew freedom wasn’t a call for violence - it was an observation about the cyclical nature of power, repression, and reform. Every attempt to restrict communication has eventually collapsed under its own contradictions, and the internet will be no exception.

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walt_grata 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not networked communication that's a problem, it's a company pumping algorithmicly prioritized feeds of content while being run by unscrupulous profit driven people.

	▲	devmor 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Well that’s kind of my point. If we regulated against that kind of content pipeline, we wouldn’t have an excuse for big brother to be demanding we prove our age to access websites.