The world is much more globalized now. Countries are watching each other, political movements can be global. That wasn't the case when drinking laws were enacted.

Also, the object - social networks - is global. Yes, all kinds of societies have had alcohol, but alcoholic beverages don't suddenly become 20% more potent or harmful everywhere at once. With centralized platforms, that can happen.

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npunt 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Totally. Today’s social media is not the same as last years etc. Read Meta’s quarterly reports and they brag about Reels increasing time spent on site by 30% in a year. That’s not even considering the other ill effects like giving kids a firehose of all the worlds problems when they’re not yet equipped to handle that information, which causes them to internalize those things, making them feel like things are fucked, that they’re responsible, etc. It’s psychologically devastating. And so many other things! Let kids be kids.

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SoftTalker 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes I think this is it. News headlines and Tweets and other social media posts mean that trends are much more global than they used to be. "Controlling kids' access to social media" is just trending right now, and that means it's getting attention all over the globe at the same time.

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redeeman 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

are you for real suggesting that this is just countries that just so happen to look at eachother than then all go "wow, gotta get that age verification going" ?

its blindly obvious that this is an agenda that SOMEONE is pushing EVERYWHERE, one can then speculate who that might be, or for what purpose

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Dig1t 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>political movements can be global.

You are saying exactly what OP is saying but just rephrasing it another way.

The more a movement crosses borders, the less likely it is to be based on the needs of any particular country and the more likely it is to be based on the needs of the transnational billionaire class.

Drinking age is not the only example, driving age is another good example and also the old TV rating system. What was considered taboo in America was often at the same time considered to be fine in places like Europe, or vice versa. But we never had a coordinated international push for censorship when it came to TV/movies like we are seeing with social media.

I can remember how much people used to deride mass surveillance and censorship in places like Russia and China and now here we are very quickly catching up to them in every way.

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Barrin92 2 hours ago | parent [-]

>the less likely it is to be based on the needs of any particular country

there has been no such thing in decades. The idea that there are 'organic needs of countries' compared to 'artificial needs of global consumers' in the internet age where digital infrastructure is long post-national is conspiratorial.

We're here on HN right now. I'm German, you might statistically I guess be American, but maybe Indian, maybe Chinese, we likely both consume media made in South Korea or Japan so the fact that legislation emerges kind of in tandem isn't "coordinated censorship", it's reflecting a reality of how information flows. Politics, economics, and media consumption is now horizontally intertwined, we don't live in vertical silo countries any more.

If you made a digital worldmap and connected each person you'd get something that doesn't look at all like the one on your physical globe and if you don't realize that the distances there are a bit different you're going to think spooky coincidences are happening.

	▲	Dig1t 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Are there organic movements in Germany, UK, USA, Norway etc of common citizens agitating for social media controls for kids? Are they actually composed of citizens? Are they funded by grassroots organizations? I can tell you that in the USA there are basically no real grassroots efforts to censor social media, at least none with a real footprint that most people have ever heard of. Despite that, there are a lot of politicians making laws to clamp down on social media use. I think most people can intuitively see that the number of people who talk about this as an issue does not at all match the amount of attention that politicians are giving it. All at the same time, in most western countries simultaneously. It just does not pass the smell test. >you're going to think spooky coincidences are happening. Nothing spooky about it, they are not coincidences, we can see that ideas are spreading between powerful politicians and the billionaire oligarchs across borders without any real input of the governed. Laws are being made, we are being given the "think of the children" line, and they are hoping that we will accept it. Just because we can communicate across borders doesn't mean that countries should stop considering the needs of their citizens as their primary objective. The more we allow these efforts to cross borders without any objection or examination, the weaker the power of citizens becomes and the less effective democracy becomes.

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pessimizer 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The world is much more globalized now. Countries are watching each other, political movements can be global.

This is simply not true. The US puts pressure on countries to harmonize their regulations and laws to ours, unless it is to the US's advantage that other countries have different laws than ours. The world didn't suddenly get draconian drug laws through "political movements," it got them through diplomatic and funding pressures. The US often used those laws as excuses for military and intelligence interventions, or to build political organizations in those countries in the guise of antidrug organizations.

All countries do things like this, but the US is rich and dangerous enough to do it hardest. The US has decided that it wants everybody tracked at all times, especially online, and when it explains the advantages of this to the elites of other countries, they also like the idea.

Smaller European countries have also made it a cottage industry to fanatically push US agendas in places like NATO and the EU, because it gives their little homelands outsized influence (and bags of cash) to operate on behalf of the bully. For some reason, everybody in Europe has to care what e.g. Estonia thinks about something, although Estonia is just saying what the US wants Europe to be doing, and the US is financing Estonian candidates for European positions (and maybe even having Trump lobby against them to give them even more credibility.)

This attack on any sort of privacy online is not coming from the churches. There is no lobby group that it pushing it that doesn't get the majority of its funds from any number of governments, which is just government lobbying itself. The way democracy is supposed to work is that the people support something, and they then vote for candidates that will give it to them - but there is no visible constituency lobbying for this other than casual liberal cynics who aren't organized in any way.

As a comparison, in 2015 there was like 65-70% popular support for single-payer health care in the US. There were dozens of organized groups supporting it. It even crossed 50% among Republicans for at least a year. Not a hint of anything happened.

edit: Also Europe, like Japan, is one of those places that had a really emotionally tough time outlawing pedophilia and child pornography. They certainly don't care this much about the sexual aspect of child safety, at least. What Europe has never been behind on is the censorship of political speech. That is what can excite people.

	▲	8note 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		the US has no laws about social media for u16. australia does, and countries are following suit. the west is led by the people that lead now countries also have single payer or other socialized healthcare, and have not followed the US into its junky private profits on extraordinary public money setup this is not at all convincing. america used to have soft power influence, but its being left behind