It's way easier to justify banning social media entirely than banning it for under-sixteens. Paradoxically it infringes on freedom less, as it bans a type of business model for being too harmful rather than restricting people's rights to view and share information.

▲

bluescrn 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

And who gets to decide which platforms count as 'social media'?

This is a problem with Australia's attempt to ban kids from it, where there's some surprising exemptions from the restrictions.

▲

idle_zealot 2 days ago | parent [-]

> And who gets to decide which platforms count as 'social media'?

The voting public via their elected representatives, as with literally all laws.

	▲	bluescrn 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		The very people with the most to gain from silencing dissidents or suppressing certain viewpoints given the power to restrict access to selected social media platforms while encouraging the use of others. None of this recent crackdown on social media is really about 'protecting the kids', is it?

▲

YurgenJurgensen 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I would personally simply heavily tax ad revenue rather than banning social media, as while a blanket ban is ironically less of an infringement on free speech than banning it for children, it’s still something of an infringement.

There’s a bunch of benefits to an ad-tax too, beyond revenue generation: Users won’t be encouraged to use VPNs (and most VPN users probably also use ad blockers anyway). It’s difficult to evade, since an advertising business kind-of has to operate in the open; if nobody knows you’re running an ad business, your ad business has failed at the one thing it’s supposed to do. Advertisers are also purely profit-motivated, and so won’t hesitate to rat out their competitors if they’re using some loophole to gain a competitive advantage. It’s also very difficult for them to hide which country they’re targeting, since that information has to be available to their customers, so the taxmen can get it by subpoenaing customers or posing as them. And there’s not that many big ad-tech companies, so you don’t really mind if a few small-fries slip through the net.

	▲	sofixa 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		The problem with just taxing them more is that they'll make the algorithms doing all the personal and societal damage even more agressive to compensate.

▲

Aurornis 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It's way easier to justify banning social media entirely

Whenever I read these comments on Hacker News, on user-generated stories which are ranked in my algorithmic front page feed, written by other users posting comments and socializing, I wonder if the comments realizes that HN is also a social media website with millions of global users.

Or if they just get angry and yell “No that’s not what I meant” because they thought the government social media regulations would only target the sites they don’t like, not the sites they do.

▲

noduerme 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Really? There are plenty of things that are considered harmful to minors but okay for adults. Should all those be banned too?

▲

idle_zealot 2 days ago | parent [-]

The contention is that the thing in question is harmful for minors and adults, albeit perhaps to different degrees. Also, to be clear, any ban should be enforced on the offering side, not the consumption side.

	▲	noduerme 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		You can easily argue that most of the things that are banned for minors but not for adults are also harmful or at least dangerous for adults as well. Alcohol, pot, tobacco, pornography, stripping or acting in pornography, gun purchases, etc. are all debatable as far as adults, but clearly should be out of the question for developing brains. Perhaps an even better parallel to social media is that minors cannot get credit cards or take out loans without parental approval. A social media profile is a bit like taking out a mortgage on the rest of your life. There are things that can have lifelong harmful consequences that we as a society recognize adults have rights to, and which they may be capable of moderating their exposure to, but which minors are simply not prepared to fully understand the consequences of. Banning minors from social media does not ban their speech or access to speech. It bans their access to the gamified drug-like patterns of engagement surrounding the commoditication of speech for the gain of companies which know full well that the services they provide are built on hooking someone's eyeballs at the earliest age possible.