Keir Starmer is deeply unpopular and I have not encountered anyone who likes him (including a lifelong Labour member who has stood for them). Last time I said that about Starmer someone complained there was no link. Now people are complaining about the link. For the record, I have never voted for the Tories ever. A plague on both their houses... There isn't even a cigarette paper between Labour and Tory policies these days — oppress the poor and needy, censor, mismanage everything and enact NGO advice.

Please see elsewhere on HN. Lots of threads about the increasing crackdown on free expression online in the UK, and forcing through digital ID online (alongside the EU, Canada, Australia etc).

It's not just about intentions. To convince me that the Government can improve things through regulations, you'd need to do a few things:

1) You must convince me that optimising for some utility function you defined is the right thing to do.

2) You must convince me that the Government can effectively estimate the utility function.

3) Finally, you must convince me that the Government can predict how the utility function will change after the policies are implemented.

For 1) I'd have problems with any utility function you could come up with. If you want to maximise total utility, for instance, does it mean that I get to assault someone as long as I gain more utility than the other person loses? What about the "Utility Monster" thought experiment?

For 2) and 3), I'm pretty sure the Government has no idea of how to measure and/or predict the result. Does the scrolling addiction of a teenager cause more loss in utility than the loss of friends to a teenager with disabilities?

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/feb/06/ive-l...

Because of these basic philosophical principles, the burden of proof that some regulation is required is always on the Government side, and the standard of proof should be much higher than it is today.

I don't believe that the concept of utility is entirely useless, though. I believe that by respecting people's individual freedoms and allowing for voluntary arrangements, you'll also get more utility in the long term, whereas if you try to force your utility optimisations, you might, maybe, get utility increases in the short term, but much worse utility in the longer term.

Discord also announced that they would use algorithmic decision making to decide which accounts are old enough to not require ID. This didn't change the uproar at all.

If you think KOSA style regulations would allow social networks to avoid ID checks, I don't think you're paying attention. Just read the article we're all commenting on to see how people are willing to attack Facebook for even having internal statistical ideas about problems. If a KOSA style law was passed and Facebook could be shown to have knowledge that some percentage of minors were evading their algorithm, they would be pulled in front of Congress again.

There is no way to reasonably look at these laws and think that it would not result in ID check requirements. We don't even have these laws yet and platforms like Discord are already rolling out ID verification.

Yeah that’s a good counterpoint. I guess it hinges on whether you can define a clear boundary around what is harmful or unharmful social media.

Like to me “online shopping addiction” is probably a more realistic and analogous problem to gambling, so maybe online advertising to teens could be regulated, but the jump to child abuse is so far outside Meta’s actual business model that it feels over-reaching to go there.

I like how everyone on this thread is up in arms about Zuckerberg - until the moment where regulation is mentioned. Then it's suddenly "oh well, they could just, like, not use it, couldn't they?"

There is also peer pressure/FOMO. "Choosing not to use it" is not exactly easy if everyone else in your social group uses it - especially for teens.