> 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.