Did you read the law? It actually imposes very (in my humble opinion) good rules on the content providers, specifically social media. We know why social media is addictive - the personalized feeds are highly optimized to extend usage time, with no amount of time being "good enough." Social media sites would be banned from using this type of feed, limiting it to feeds of content you've subscribed to or requested only. Instead of seeing mainly influencers and viral videos, people might even start seeing their friends' own content.

> Requiring my kids' devices to advertise their age ... to protect them is not doing me or my kids any favors.

Idk about you, but it'd be doing me favors because my kids will not be physically able to use the most addictive platforms that exist today in their current form. It would be a major disruption to the behavioral manipulation that Meta, TikTok, and X do.

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kej 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Right, I'm saying that if the goal is to keep kids off of addictive social feeds, it would be better to have social media have to say "this site implements addictive feeds" and then I can configure my kids' devices to disallow that. The decision should be happening in my house on the devices I control, not in a Meta data center. The current law just gives Meta a way to start building a shadow profile early.

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xp84 2 days ago | parent [-]

> then I can configure my kids' devices to disallow that

C'mon. We all know parents are far more likely to tap "OK" for "Allow personalized social feeds?" than they are to knowingly falsify their kids' age. The kids will be begging them to and saying "It's just to personalize it, Dad! There's nothing scary or bad on Tiktok - all my friends are using the personalized feed and mine is BORING!"

> The decision should be happening in my house on the devices I control, not in a Meta data center. The current law just gives Meta a way to start building a shadow profile early.

The decision would still be in your hand. If you want them to be using all the max addictive crap, just fake their age on the device that you bought them.

> The current law just gives Meta a way to start building a shadow profile early.

Whether or not they can start building a profile to start using at 18 is unrelated to this, and depends on data protection laws. There's no use tying the two together.

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kej 2 days ago | parent [-]

> We all know parents are far more likely to tap "OK" for "Allow personalized social feeds?" than they are to knowingly falsify their kids' age.

I know lots of parents and lots of kids, and I don't think this is accurate. In my experience the breakdown is parents who care what their kids are doing online, and parents who assume it will all turn out fine because they had AOL or even Facebook as teenagers and didn't get into too much trouble. The first group is already keeping an eye on their kids and might even have decent parental controls set up, and the second group doesn't care what happens as long as charges don't show up on the credit card.

These bills punish the first group of parents and OS/device makers for the transgressions of social media companies. The uninvolved parents won't even be in the room when the age question comes up.

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xp84 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How is it a punishment to that first group? If you like the status quo, there's no impact to you if you just set the DOB to 1/1/1999.

Or are you waiting for some science-fiction proposal that will be completely perfect, which you know will never happen.

> The uninvolved parents won't even be in the room when the age question comes up.

We agree that idiot parents (and therefore their kids) can't be helped. So let's just not even consider them in deciding what to do.

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kikoreis 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah.

And there is also the group of parents that at the moment have decided no device is safe enough to be given to a child or adolescent.

They are a good litmus test of the bill; would they be happy to provide devices if there was age verification built in?

I am in this group and I wouldn't.

	▲	xp84 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> if there was age verification built in? well, actual verification isn't even on the table in Illinois so that's quite a hypothetical. But anyway, since you'll always retain the right to not give a device (which, btw I cheer and support that decision with or without the age declaration law existing) why does your lack of trusting devices with kids have to do with anything? This scheme can exist and not affect you at all, and will benefit the many "moderate" parents who do give carefully-supervised devices, and don't carelessly just throw brand-new devices at the kids. If I'm that parent who did decide to start giving access because this bill came to be, I'd still be limiting "the internet" to a small allow-list of sites whose compliance, and exact manner of compliance, I was satisfied with.

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quotemstr 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Controlling my information consumption is not a legitimate function of the state. If algorithmic feeds get a lot of use, it's because people like them. Is that so hard to comprehend? That your preferences are not universal? And that you shouldn't use the government to bludgeon people into accepting the kind of information feed you, personally, would prefer for them? What gives you the right to do so?

What you calling "addictive" is just revealed preferences of the populace.

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xp84 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Great, let's legalize recreational fentanyl too, since 'whatever people seem to like' is good for society.

In this case, unless you're a child, nobody's trying to control what content you consume. And if you are a parent and want to make sure your children can continue to consume the most addictive possible social media, by all means lie about their age. The law does nothing to stop you from doing so.

By contrast, having zero mechanism for the rest of the parents to control this, as is the current case, does impose your "do whatever feels good" values on the rest of the world.

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weakened_malloc 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> By contrast, having zero mechanism for the rest of the parents to control this, as is the current case, does impose your "do whatever feels good" values on the rest of the world.

Parental controls? They take 5mins to setup.

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xp84 2 days ago | parent [-]

I use them. First of all, they're still absolute dogshit (but Apple promises good changes in next OS?). And the choice is to either allow social media in its current, extremely toxic form, or ban it entirely. There's no "Allow Instagram but only let them see the content their actual friends post." No "Allow TikTok but let me allow-list the influencers that show up in For You." The peer pressure on kids to be on those platforms is intense though, and many parents seem to be allowing it.

I think the theory behind the law is that experimenting on children to optimize (without any ceiling) for increasing watch hours, which 100% of the social media sites are doing at all times and have been for over a decade, is unethical and should be illegal.

If adults want to subject themselves to that, it's their business, but for children, we restrict all kinds of things from even being marketed towards children. Things (especially addictive ones) that are very obviously bad for humans, like cigarettes and liquor. Why? Because otherwise there's a huge incentive for the makers of those things to do so, because of how naïve kids are.

A wildcard here is how if at all to address careless, negligent parents of course. For the things so obviously harmful like drugs, it becomes criminal to give those to your kids. But perhaps social media falls into about the same category as R-rated movies, where we just say "it's bad parenting to take a 6-year-old to one, but not illegal." Another area where we have 'censored' things for children for decades - without any kind of scary police-state regime materializing and forcing biometrics and recordkeeping at the box office.

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weakened_malloc 2 days ago | parent [-]

The difference is that those other things in the past didn't really place an undue burden on everybody else. Whether a child is allowed to watch an R rated movie or go to a pub has no effect on how I conduct myself, age-gating computers or the internet does affect how I use things.

> I think the theory behind the law is that experimenting on children to optimize (without any ceiling) for increasing watch hours, which 100% of the social media sites are doing at all times and have been for over a decade, is unethical and should be illegal.

I agree, and I think this is where the focus should be. It places no burden on any regular consumer to do anything and all the burden on the platform providers.

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xp84 19 hours ago | parent [-]

How exactly would this bill, as written, affect you? Would you indicate that you're a child when you set up your device? If not, you're arguing with a strawman version of the bill, I'm guessing one that imposes verification (which isn't in there, and which I oppose too). The slippery slope argument is nonsense. Windows XP asked me to type my full name to make a user account in 2001 and that didn't become a driver's license scan even 25 years later. Some things aren't conspiracies against you, and if we don't trust politicians not to pass the bad version of the law later, we should throw them out on their ear now.

	▲	weakened_malloc 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> The slippery slope argument is nonsense If you're going to operate from that point of view there's really no point to further explaining how a bill like this would adversely affect people. One only needs to look as far as the 'temporary' measures in the patriot act to understand that slippery slope arguments are often not so silly. The Overton window moves with laws like this.

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quotemstr 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Information that enters the mind through the eyes and ears is nothing like a drug that alters consciousness at a low level. Words are just words. You don't get to control the words people choose to hear.

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