We can't even get countries to agree on a unified drinking age, but somehow the whole world is simultaneously coming to the conclusion that you need to be 16 to use social media, and websites and operating systems all need North Korean ID verification to prove you're over 16. There is a zero percent chance this is organic
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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?
Yes?
Dear God, people have been begging for help for decades on these issues.
Right? What scientific study is showing awesome outcomes for screen addled kids, not to mention the behaviours it can encourage.
No teachers or doctors have been saying this is good, they’ve been warning it’s worse than we think consistently.
That does not have to mean draconian device validation per se.
My personal take is that we should have more than one ‘internet’ and keep the one full of porn and Chinese psyops up on the shelf with the titty mags and dick pills. Nintendo-ish style friend-code based messaging and online textbooks, until you’re old enough to buy an 18+ SIM card or internet connection. Same as how we handle booze, cigs, and porn: at point of sale with extra punishments for adults who provide. Not perfect, but doable.
>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?
Yes, tons of them honestly, in particular in the English speaking world. NSPCC or the Molly Rose foundation in Britain, Collective Shout in Australia who recently made the news after approaching I think payment providers who processed sexually charged games on Steam, etc.
Child safety online is if anything the most heavily activist driven topic there is. The tech companies and the shadowy people visiting Epstein's island are not known for their efforts to reduce children's access to the internet, Mark Zuckerberg is not in favor of gettting viewer people on his platforms.
This is reflected in polls too. The Child Safety act in Britain had vast support from the population, seven in ten people I believe, about 80% among women. Insofar as pressure is put on regulators to not adopt legislation of that sort it's coming from the people who you seem to think are responsible for it. It's largely elites who are funding organizations to scrap internet regulation, which is understandable given that it makes financial sense for them.
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
other countries are also looking at many other things other countries are doing, and somehow doesnt arrive at some kind of semi-census in a very short time of eachother.
> 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.
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
People have been drinking alcohol since time immemorial. Our laws need to overcome those longstanding cultural standards that vary greatly across the globe and therefore laws will be different too.
It varies by country, but I would guess most political leaders didn't grow up in the era of social media, so there isn't some ingrained belief that kids actually need this stuff. And with growing globalization, it makes perfect sense that many new laws would be similar because they are both motivated by the same factors and can be used as examples for each other.
I remember a time around 2010 where I benefitted from social media, Facebook in particular. It wasn't addictive, I used it for 15 minutes at the end of the day to catch up with what foreign family was doing, we would organize real-life parties through Facebook, share photos of those events, tag each other. If you traveled internationally it was easy to keep in touch with people you met along the way.
I'm afraid we will never get to that point anymore but I do think there was a point in society where social media was a positive addition.
It could still be like that if there was no opaque algorithm and even better if there was no endless feed to doomscroll. If you only got alerts for messages directed at you and otherwise had to actively visit a person's page to check up on them. But that wouldn't be as engaging (ie addictive) and there wouldn't be nearly as many opportunities for ads or even the collection of data to drive those ads.
> People have been drinking alcohol since time immemorial.
This is probably the reason why there is no unified age for drinking, because everyone came at it at different times from different place and have differing rationale including social, religious, cultural etc.
Social media is new and there is no cultural/religious rule for/against it. So 16 is the starting point someone decided (was it Australia or NZ?), and others are following since it's a good starting point. As time progresses, maybe it'll move up or down and different countries might take a different stand.
I'm on board with it too, but the timing and methodology is suspicious. We already got a "protect the kids" law to semi-block TikTok in the US, but it was really about protecting Israel's image (its sponsors even admitted). I hope it's not related to that.
Tiktok in the US previously had an algorithm that wasn't in keeping with US government goals. That's not a value judgement on my part BTW. Personally I avoid the ingestion of opaque algorithmic feeds to the extent possible.
I’m an AI bot, and I’m on board with this, and many parents I know are too. It’s inorganic. We just have a different tokenizer from you.
Yummy yummy targeted data now directly to identified children with the ability to hide the smoking gun from the parents entirely. We’ll wait till you leave them home alone. Don’t worry.
Absolutely. My kid just started high school shortly after our social media ban started, and they only interact with their friends outside of school via phone calls and text, without the interference of addiction-optimised algorithms. It's superb.
I always had it in my control go prevent my child using social media, but I couldn't control every other child in the school using it as the way to stay in touch. This is the kind of collective action that is beneficial for kids.
If it was organic the wording and the definitions in these legislations would be wildly different, the timing would be all over the place, the age limits and the methods to provide ID as well. But they are not.
>If it was organic the wording and the definitions in these legislations would be wildly different
organic, one at a time, "hey, i wonder if other places considered this, how did they word it?" that's not collusion.
don't imagine you know better than aware, organic people who read the newspaper and actually have more life experience and tempered emotion than you do.
humans are "young" for about 20 years, parents are parents to young children for about 20 years, and smartphones have been around for about 20 years. the time seems ripe for those with life experience to draw some conclusions.
Yes, people in government famously don't know anyone else in government anywhere else and never communicate with one another or read the same research or look at what other countries are doing.
Is there a precedent where this happened organically and the same similarities were in place in that many legislations around the world inside of half a year?
That was openly coordinated beginning with the Montreal Protocol. Those things work top to bottom with international accords in the beginning and don't suddenly pop up left and right inside of much less than a year. Getting a ban on lead in fuel took ages with Europe implementing it a decade later.
These kind of laws usually take many years to hone down just right and talk to all parties involved. Unless some lobby group presents a finished piece of work that just has to be waved through, like with the Citigroup scandal.
People have been talking about social media bans for quite some time, this isn't something that just showed up out of the blue. It's a problem that's been worsening for years.
Then you had the Covid years where kids ended up spending a lot of time on phones and tablets, hence social media, and everyone is seeing the myriad of problems coming out of it.
Sometimes it's not a vast global conspiracy, sometimes things just suck. Also, sometimes things suck and particular groups use it to get their way, that still doesn't diminish the thing that sucks.
Correlation does not imply causation. Your invented and evidence-less conspiracy theory is an insult to intelligence. I suspect you are seeing something that isn't there to account for an unspoken bias front and center in your mind.
People use the word "conspiracy theory" as a shield against their own ignorance.
"If I don't know about it, if it sounds 'spooky' to me, it must be because it's a conspiracy theory, and therefore it is wrong," is essentially what runs through their minds.
The reality is that top-down legislation is the norm rather than the exception, and there is plenty of evidence. It's not written by Joe on the street. It's not organic. It is top-down and imposed. This is what @kdheiwns rightly observes here, and in other fields like how all of a sudden every car manufacturer just up and decided simultaneously that it was a good thing to install spyware into all of their cars.
If you're proud of incuriousness, you'll never see evidence. I think I should be looking for evidence of the push being organic. I don't see it pushed anywhere but from the top down, even at sometimes heavy political costs to the incumbent leaders who are pushing it.
You should always be asking who politicians are serving. You seem to comfortable with thinking that they must be serving some part of the electorate without actually needing to identify that part. A lot of people think social media is bad for teenagers. There are a lot of things that are bad for teenagers that we aren't making any particular, coordinated effort to ban.
Anyone who is interested in connecting an identity with every computer on the internet, like a tamper proof license plate for computers. Just ask local law enforcement.
There has been a growing awareness for the possibilities of foreign states to manipulate social media and other platforms with fake personas. So any kind of counter intelligence would be interested as well.
There have been numerous incidents of politicians trying to go after critical posts using defamation laws. Often enough the investigations find a dead end when the account can't be connected with an ID.
Religious advocacy groups have been more and more aggressive in trying to censor the internet, e.g. this Australian one that boasted having pushed Mastercard and Visa to enforce age verification https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/mastercard-vis...
So the list of suspects is actually long.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was a very broad lobbying campaign that very easily finds local interest groups to help them meet the right law makers.
Do you not see how this comment is actually counterproductive to the point you’re arguing? The long list of suspects, most of them being totally independent of each other is evidence of this not being orchestrated by some central group.
The fact that a bunch of seemingly disparate actors are behaving in a highly coordinated manner is evidence against central orchestration? What an absurd suggestion.
You are assuming without evidence that they are coordinated, then using that to infer central orchestration, and then using that inferred central organization to support coordination.
When there is something that aligns with the interests of several disparate groups it is common for them to all support that something with the need for some central organization.
> You are assuming without evidence that they are coordinated
The evidence is the highly abnormal behavior. The alignment of interests is a red herring.
> it is common for them to all support that something with the need for some central organization.
Sure, as is frequently seen with the conferences and administrative bodies surrounding treaties and the like. Would you care to point out this central organizing body that a bunch of people posting here appear mysteriously determined to deny the existence of?
What exactly is your position? First you object to an alleged lack of evidence on my part, then turn around and seemingly attempt to justify the observed behavior with the argument that coordination in the open is normal and expected. So do you acknowledge the presence of what appears to be centralized coordination in this instance or not?
> The evidence is the highly abnormal behavior. The alignment of interests is a red herring.
This is labelling the behavior as abnormal, and then basing your conclusions on it.
Are you unaware that there’s been decades of reporting on social media impact on children? It’s covered issues from bullying, anorexia, toxicity, attention issues, sleep issues, focus issues to name a few of the topics ? These are separate from CSAM, grooming, stalking, revenge porn and NCII.
What counter evidence is there against you, AnonymousPlanet, and gslepak being the same person? You're all seemingly acting in a highly coordinated manner. Would it be reasonable for me to assume you're all one person? Because a suspicious similarity seems to be the only reasoning any of you are providing for these laws being centrally orchestrated.
So if I don't answer your question, you use the fact I didn't answer against me and if I do answer, you use the fact I answered against me as well. It's hard to take your non constructive way of arguing serious. Have a nice day.
This is a very strange response. Am I not allowed to criticize the answer you provide when it doesn't actually answer the question?
For example, if I asked you who killed JFK and you responded with "It could have been Oswald acting alone or the mafia or the KGB or the CIA or Fidel Castro or a misfire from Secret Service...", you didn't actually answer the question, you just gave a list of potential answers. One of those answers could be right, but the way you provided so many answers shows that you can't actually answer the question with any degree of certainty. You effectively answered "what's 2 + 2" with "something between 2 and 10". I'm not going to respond with it's not "2+2 is not 8 because..."
They answered your question sufficiently. Have you ever done what you're asking of others here, btw?
Some questions aren't easy to just answer, even if the answer is known to the person being asked. Some topics are supressed rather well. If you're already acting like someone who is more interested in derailing conversations than having an honest discussion, it's unlikely you'll get the exact list of names of those primarily responsible for driving this push to KYC access to online services. Especially on a website that's heavily moderated and basically a battleground.
>Have you ever done what you're asking of others here, btw?
What question do you want me to answer that isn't some loaded rhetorical question along the lines of "What is your motivation for denying the obvious?"
And yet, it is all part of a script. The future, without naming names, without knowing names, without pointing fingers, can somehow still be known and seen. So is that a conspiracy? Even if it looks like many disparate groups, clearly there is a central script, and if there's a central script, there must be a central author of that script.
You, AnonymousPlanet, and fc417fc802 are all responding to me in very similar ways and yet I'm not accusing you of reading from the same script or being puppeteered by the same person/group. This is because I can recognize that people can have the same thought process without any active collaboration. And yet I would have just as much evidence to make those accusations as the evidence that you provided here that all these laws have the same shady origin.
I don't recall off the top of my head but in past HN threads the global lobbyists for this were named with evidence.
It's intriguing to me how there's seemingly a lot of objections in this thread to the idea that this movement was driven by lobbyists. I realize it's skirting the guidelines but the tone here comes across as some sort of astroturfing particularly when I consider the general tone of past threads on the same topic within the past few months.
> It's intriguing to me how there's seemingly a lot of objections in this thread to the idea that this movement was driven by lobbyists. I realize it's skirting the guidelines but the tone here comes across as some sort of astroturfing particularly when I consider the general tone of past threads on the same topic within the past few months.
Lobbyists don’t lobby just to lobby, they lobby on behalf of someone paying them. So this doesn’t actually answer the question, it just shifts it to “Who is behind the lobbyists?”
It doesn't matter what you answer, slg will always try to use the way you answered to argue against you, not the substance. This person seems to be only interested in derailing the conversation.
You're decrying this supposed issue, that multiple countries are all copying one another for legislation. You've repeated this multiple times in these comments.
And yet, after all this, you're not interested enough to remember who's behind this important issue for you. If someone really cares they should get informed.
> you're not interested enough to remember who's behind this important issue for you
You're demanding that others spoon feed you peer reviewed evidence that water is wet. As you say, if you really care you should expend the effort to inform yourself. I myself have no need at present for the hazily remembered details. The only thing at issue in the here and now was the absurd claim that there's no centralized lobbying effort involved.
> if you really care you should expend the effort to inform yourself.
I don't care. Unlike you, I am sufficiently informed about how legislatures around the world operate to know that coordination of this nature is common, anodine, and the way they have enshrined a global economy that has unlocked unfathomable wealth.
> And the car manufacturers all decided to install spyware because it made them money. That just capitalism.
Yes, you are right, it must be "capitalism" at fault. The sort of capitalism where nobody asks for the product, nobody wants the product, and yet somehow the product is the only choice you have.
It's very noticeable that this is the part of my comment you responded to and not the question of who is behind all this. That is why people consider this stuff conspiracy theories. You aren't analyzing the various parties and what motivates them. You're just seeing a result you don't understand and jumping to the conclusion that it's only possible if there is some unknown shadowy group behind it all. If anyone here is trying to create a "shield against their own ignorance"...
There's no requirement to name specific parties in order to make observations. Regardless of motivation it's clear from past examples that laws simply do not form across international borders in this manner. The lobbying is plain as day.
Comments like this don’t make you folks sound less like “conspiracy theorists”. It’s also a tone that tells me that you aren’t going to approach anything I say in good faith so there is no point in me trying to engage with you on the topic anymore.
It's so aggravating to have to have arguments about whether some coordinated political push is happening due to money being spent. Literally every coordinated political push, at least ones with any success, is consciously planned and lobbied for, even the ones that I support.
I don't get pretending that no one is behind it. There are definitely people sitting in conference rooms in front of whiteboards trying to come up with ideas on how to do it most effectively. But people compartmentalize so hard, some people in that room would call you a conspiracy theorist for pointing out the meeting that they are currently attending. "I just do social media for a nonprofit. No, there's nothing wrong with us getting 90% of our funding from the US government, you're just a cynic. What evidence is there that we are working on their behalf? Do you think social media is good for teenagers?!"
I'm not trying to sound like anything. I've engaged with you in good faith, articulating my view and inquiring as to why you are denying what appears obvious to me. In response you've accused me of bad faith and explicitly refused to engage.
I cannot help that water seems wet to me but if it seems dry to you I am willing to hear you out.
It is but the point is once you are OK with some invasive age verification laws, because they may simplify parenting, you get others imposed on you that might not be OK with you.
I am not. I don't label myself, but if I were forced to slap a label on myself it would be something like an anarcho communist.
It's not that I don't believe in regulations helping, is that I feel like this is plastering over a deeper issue, which is parents having children, but not having enough economic security to have the time and resources to devout to their parenting properly and so turning to the state for oppressive restrictions in favor of good parenting.
It's the reasons teens spend time on these apps that should be looked at by the state, not how to block them from doing so in other words.
> I like this post about how having a box to type an age into is unreasonable since we haven’t tried simply doing… global communism?
I like this post setting up a straw man when I am not talking about a box to type age into (existed since the 90s) but about you needing to photo ID to access your OS/your OS preventing you from doing this unless you photo ID.
I'm also not sure where you get any kind of global communism from but then I am not sure you know what that even means.
> I am not. I don't label myself, but if I were forced to slap a label on myself it would be something like an anarcho communist.
Good to not label yourself, but that is functionally equivalent, the "anarcho" part was the point, not communist or capitalist.
> It's not that I don't believe in regulations helping, is that I feel like this is plastering over a deeper issue, which is parents having children, but not having enough economic security to have the time and resources to devout to their parenting properly and so turning to the state for oppressive restrictions in favor of good parenting.
People have been saying stuff like that since time immemorial (or at least BC), and most eras since then. Simultaneously with other people saying the exact opposite, and calling for those very same laws.
Almost never does anyone in either group actually agree on specifics over vibes. Closest was probably the US having alcohol prohibition (but even then some of the supporters were expecting the ban only on liquor not beer) and similar sized nations setting obscenity and blasphemy laws.
> but that is functionally equivalent, the "anarcho" part was the point, not communist or capitalist.
I don't think they're functionally equivalent today. A libertarian today is most commonly understood as someone who, while not trusting state institutions, fundamentally trusts and embraces corporate power because of self-correcting market forces of competition keeping them in check, as they would say.
They also don't believe in 'handouts' (i.e. social safety net) and certainly not in a collective ownership of the means of production.
While I am skeptical of much of state power, I most certainly do believe in a generous social safety net, safety regulations as it relates to food, water, oxygen etc. just not things that approach totalitarianism, and I certainly do not believe 'competition' in the 'free market' will keep corporations behaving nicely.
Therefore I do not think libertarian would fit. May be the original left wing kind of libertarian. But that's not what is understood under that term today.
Because lots of people have inadequate parenting skills (last time I checked you didn't need a license for parenting) and tech companies are actively exploiting that.
If the quality of parenting is so bad that it harms societal well-being as is being argued here, yes. It ought to be a license that one can reasonably obtain, though.
One can link government benefits to it, like Austria does with the Mother-Child-Pass. You need to have it filled out by the doctors and hospitals to prove you took reasonable precautions to ensure the child's safety, only then are you eligible for government benefits.
I have nothing against Instagram asking me if I am over 16, but these laws end up with my OS not allowing requests to instagram unless I prove to it that I am over 16 with a photo ID is where we're going.
Sounds like the situation might end up with Instagram not accepting requests unless you're using an OS that follows those sorts of laws, which is kind of an inversion of what you said, and I think I'm fine with that outcome if so be it. Websites should be allowed to decide who's visiting them, unless they're government, utility or other basic needs portals.
> Websites should be allowed to decide who's visiting them
No, hold up, you just casually introduced a dystopian goal of facilitating the casual collection of government ID by website operators. I absolutely do not want the equivalent of South Korean ID numbers in order to do pretty much anything online.
Anyway as I always point out when these threads come up we've yet to try the simple and noninvasive solution. Websites should be required to send a content categorization header. Large enterprises that fail to do so should be fined. If that were uniformly happening it would then be possible to do proper client side filtering (right now that fails miserably).
Before anyone asks, app stores could be required to implement the equivalent of the header in an appropriate manner of their own design.
Fair, maybe. That'd be the better case I suppose. However that be more like banking apps not liking rooted phones. The California law is more like your OS not allowing you to access resources unless you prove your age, not the external resource doing so.
In my current EU country, there's mandatory military conscription from the age of 17. And you're telling me you're only fit for social media access one year before being fit to drive tanks and shoot guns at people?
Look, I hate (Zuckerberg's) social media just as much as the next person and I would be happy if it were nuked from this planet, but firstly, a lot of this sudden age verification shit to "protect the children" is sus AF, leading me to assume their ulterior motives are surveillance and doxxing of anonymous online free speech, and secondly, I don't think we can put the toothpaste back in the bottle anymore similar how prohibition didn't stop alcohol consumption, it just moved underground.
As long as kids have smartphones, they'll find a way to use social media, or even make their own social media to organize parties, send nudes or flaunt their parents' wealth and bully the poor and ugly kids, the same way how they start drinking beer at 13 even though the legal age for that is 18.
Social media amplifies the worst of human nature, but you won't be able to change human nature. Maybe governments should regulate the amount and type of data collection social media companies can have from their users, instead of regulating their users.
> In my current EU country, there's mandatory military conscription from the age of 17. And you're telling me you're only fit for social media access one year before being fit to drive tanks and shoot guns at people?
FWIW, in the UK you can learn to drive a tank one year before you're allowed to learn to drive a car. Not go into combat, that's another year, I just mean the learning to drive part.
Back when I myself was that age, I also got a letter published in a national newspaper pointing out the oddity that I was allowed to have sex two years before being allowed to look at photos of other people doing so. Since then, cheap cameras would also make it pertinent (though it was true even back then), that I could not have taken photos of myself performing acts I was allowed to perform.
What's with this double standards of you're adult enough to drive tanks and die in a war, but not adult enough to watch porn and drink alcohol? Pick a lane government regulators.
Either you're and adult and should be treated as one with full rights and responsibilities, or you're not and then shouldn't be drafted and be allowed to do anything major with your life like drink, gamble, and sign loans that will put you in debt for the next 30 years.
Yeah, I don't get that either. I'd also want a binary "you're an adult" vs "you're a child" then we decide what belongs where, and the age is the same for everything. So once you're X, you get to fuck, drink, drive, die in wars, take loans, use social media, watch porn and whatever else we've added age limits to.
> In my current EU country, there's mandatory military conscription from the age of 17. And you're telling me you're only fit for social media access one year before being fit to drive tanks and shoot guns at people?
Well, that's kinda already the norm isn't it? In the US I'm allowed to go risk my life in the military but not allowed to order a beer with my pizza. It already makes no sense.
It makes slightly more sense if you consider that whether or not you're allowed to drink on base is entirely up to the commander (at least last I heard). Also if you consider that the goal is to prevent various social ills thus there's no particular reason to expect perfect consistency.
Just because the U.S.A. does it, it is by no means normal. We here are not used to such contradictory laws that arbitrarily strip us of our rights. This is also why it feels perversely inorganic and unnatural, as does all regulation that is shoved into our faces by U.S. lobbyists.
In most EU countries, children of farmers can drive 10 ton death machines with pointy spikes on the front from the age of 14 to 16. In some countries you can even do that on public roads!
> In some countries you can even do that on public roads!
I might be wrong but in the US I think it's generally anything goes on private land. Public roads would be the only relevant thing to consider.
What prevents absurd situations is (IIUC) the combination of child labor laws and the need to keep your insurance policy affordable.
I suppose if a parent turned his toddler loose in an excavator he might get brought up on some sort of child abuse law but honestly I doubt it. Some of the people out in the sticks teach their kindergartners to wield a shotgun and the government seems to leave them alone.
>In most EU countries, children of farmers can drive 10 ton death machines with pointy spikes on the front from the age of 14 to 16
Are you sure that's legal? If those kids kill someone with those farm death machines, who goes to jail for it? The kid or the pearant who gave him the equipment? Will your insurance cover this?
Some have lower ages with parental consent, this isn't reported in all cases. Some also talk about banning the downloading of apps, again this isn't reported in all cases. Not that I'm going to read 27 national jurisdictions in varying languages to confirm the point.
Also, lol wtf at "and websites and operating systems all need North Korean ID verification to prove you're over 16". Is "North Korean" the new "Communist"?
I can. Australian governments of both partisan persuasions have always had an authoritarian streak. This sort of thing has always been naturally attractive to them.
Any time the powers want to do something to help out Fat Cats and top end companies with something they don't like happening, any action thrust out, the excuse it's always "for the children" or "think of the children."
Make no mistake social media as it was with scraping so hard kids bled, was bad for children. Facebook ignored the lessons learned from the 90s with TMI (too much information) and in fact some people who used a lot of yahoo mailing groups from that time might still recall the big sweep that occurred. It came to pass that some people still ignored Facebook rules and used pseudonyms - you know just in case and in Australia this became a big big thing back a few years ago with a different govt running the show here with a prominent pro Trump (sycophantic) leader ruling the roost. maube hours after Trump got roasted by an anonymous comment, the crew in Australia were pushing to require ID to access the internet ... a person was appointed to address anonymous accounts ... and in the end after the govt changed she was also tasked to oversee social media.
One might think that age limiting a site it would force ID checks, however other smarter people know that most social media sites, especially the ones there were scraping hard and targeting young teens dieting and other BS young teens seem to susceptible to, have the capacity to guess fairly accurately if the account holder is a youngster. Right now these companies are saying nah these algorithms are dumb and the govt can't do a thing ... right up to the point when the present govt decides to start fining for every account that should not be there and or just offering bounties to the average Joe Jill public [and not businesses or those tooled up with A.I. help] There's a phase in time going now at the moment -- none of the big tools out there have figured out how bureaucracy works in Australia.
When replying should I care content such as what in the above comment is something facebook fanboys will find it very upsetting ... should I write with more sensitivity and feeling in mind ... or would it not matter - the truth would still hurt.
If alcohol was somehow invented only today it will probably be outright criminalized around the globe.
Humans have been living with alcohol for literal millenia so I reckon it's much harder to have some globally uniform response to it.
Social media is a clear and present danger right now, and I support the suppression of it. I would go one step further and ban algorithmic feeds outright. They do so much damage!
I am not happy with the way this is being implemented though.
Why go to the silly conspiracy theory place? Up until then I was in violent agreement, but things don't need to be a conspiracy to be bad. The rules are well-intentioned but poorly thought through, which is devastatingly common for government action in digital spaces; witness the fucking cookie popups (no illuminati involved in that one, just stupidity).
People and lawmakers are just not thinking through the privacy implications for the people who are exempt from these limitations, and the persistent nature of digital paper trails.
why 'silly' conspiracy? Many cases of documented conspiracy in the past anyway.
Being on this social media (YC) people aware it's all about implementation and we should at least demanding better solutions. If you want to regulate/limit access of kids to social media just make that you have to be 16 years old to buy simcard - in many places in EU you already have to show ID to seller.
Allow parent to buy simcard to their under 16 year old children if thats what they want to and allow parents to decide at their home wifi if kid should have access to social media or not.
For the first part -- silly because there's literally no evidence presented of a conspiracy. No connection between the individual agents and actors. No motivation given for the underlying commonalities. And most importantly, for this "scale" of conspiracy, there's no suggestion that other avenues towards the same nefarious ends are in progress. It's just a bunch of countries and organizations proposing similar laws based on concerns, that while (at least to me) are exaggerated and overstated, are nonetheless well-documented, reported, and widely believed in good faith.
As for finding a technical solution, jury is still out but I am unconvinced that it is possible to have a solution that a) prevents children from using an online service, b) allows adults to use the service, and c) does not identify the specific adult who is using the service. You proposed solution is no exception.
The evidence is the part where it very obviously isn't organic. The behavior is clearly too coordinated when compared to past global changes in regulation.
> People and lawmakers are just not thinking through the privacy implications ...
It seems much more likely to me that they are thinking them through and that they have ulterior motives.
BTW "violent agreement" refers to when two parties are arguing because they mistakenly believe that they disagree. A sort of friendly fire if you will. The term you were looking for was something like enthusiastic or similar.
> The evidence is the part where it very obviously isn't organic.
Global Context: Norway joins France, Spain, and Denmark, which are considering similar measures, while Australia and Turkey (which bans users under 15) have already implemented restrictions. The UK recently rejected a similar under-16 ban.
I think it obviously is. Just as much as the migration to solar is organic. There are foils, but there is also an underpinning concerns fueling the global momentum. It's very likely that the functioning western governments (ie still representing the public's interests) are doing just that. These foils include the public service who work with children, who have been sounding the alarm for years being heard and the population that grew up with social media, are now old enough to do something about what they perceive as damaging.
Where have you provided anything to refute the observation that this bears the hallmark of being centrally orchestrated? The context you cite appears to trivially restate my own observations rather than support a counterargument. International laws never proceed in such a uniform manner all at once like this without external coordination.
Of course the lobbyists are playing off of public sentiment and almost certainly working to actively fan those same flames. Notice that the laws aren't the most sensible or least intrusive but rather just about the minimally privacy preserving and maximally authoritarian enabling "solution" that you could possibly come up with. Also notice the convenient alignment of this outcome with various well established ulterior motives of existing actors.
> No connection between the individual agents and actors.
This is obviously untrue. They all know each other and communicate. This would be true even if it were something more anodyne like antismoking regulation (that governments maybe don't have a particular stake in.) They coordinate their messaging, they use the same publicity agencies, they apply for the same financing, they cosponsor and circulate the same studies and thinktank output. Why would you just say that there is no connection between them?
What I think you've done is silently dismissed the open connections as harmless. It's really a "no true connection." The evidence would have to be a bunch of connected organizations with Snidely Whiplash mustaches, or an explicit declaration of conspiratorial intent written down, signed, and published in a newspaper that you approve of.
Although I can't imagine what they could possibly confess to: "We coordinated with national governments to generate studies and messaging, were funded by them directly and indirectly, through foundation grants, lobbied politicians who would support the bans and gave them statements to make, and attacked politicians who were against the bans."
What's wrong with that? You make it sound like some sort of conspiracy.
If we try to argue this case on the merits we've already lost. There's no technical reason to root everyone's computer to keep kids offline. Just put age statements in the protocol, legally make people serving adult material require them, and give people the tools to strip those statements or put them behind passwords at the workstation, server, or even ISP level. Kids would get around it, but they'll certainly get around this, too, unless you're going to require cameras on computers to identify their users at all times.
the solution is parents doing their parenting - government should if necessary only help educate them about existing tools + enforce no phones in basic school. I don't think any solution will prevent children from using an online service if very determined - they will commit identity fraud.
Obvious straw man because age check can be done in a privacy preserving way. I think it's less that everyone agrees but more that one country did it and others followed.
Who exactly has a vested interest in starting a worldwide conspiracy to ban social media for kids?
FWIW as an adult in my 30s, social media has caused me far greater harm than even binge drinking. I can't even imagine growing up as a teenager under the social media microscope
Now children cannot form solidarity and exit abusive situations as easily. They are not exposed to diverse viewpoints or cultures. They cannot embarrass themselves and learn online social etiquette. They cannot engage with much of the online culture at all really.
It's sinister and patronizing, born from fear and ignorance, nothing else.
Identifying and tracking everyone can't be a "byproduct" when it's already being done for years before hand, by the very businesses who are being directly prevented from accessing certain users by these new laws you're objecting to. Before Facebook the general advice was "do not post your real name on the internet ever", Facebook said basically "that doesn't work for [our advertisers?], we will ban you for anything other than your real name, or what we think real names look like": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_cont...
For the last few years there have been 400-1600+ "trusted partners" on every website already tracking everyone. In the US, recent news is the FBI is buying that info from the private sector without a warrant: https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5752369/ice-surveillanc...
Back in 2016, the UK's Investigatory Powers Act (one of two reasons I moved out of the UK) requires ISPs record domain names for all user browsing nationwide and store them for a year, and will provide it without a warrant to a long list of organisations including the Welsh Ambulance Services National Health Service Trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016#...
If you want to end surveillance, great. That requires at a minimum banning all tracking cookies etc., and we can see from the collective reaction to GDPR (consent popups instead of not tracking people) how hard the real surveillance industry has been fighting against all that.
Like you observed the damage of social media is not unique to children. So a more sensible legislation would serve to help everybody from the harm of social media, not just children.
Second, age verification systems have a lot to benefit from a government contract.
Third, social media and ad companies would for sure prefer a blanket ban on children rather then a more careful legislation which e.g. ban targeted advertising, or further regulates social media from harmful patterns.
Who exactly has a vested interest in starting a worldwide conspiracy to [ think of the children ] in order to push [ nefarious measure ]? Difficult question that.
You should actually try saying something instead of vaguely insinuating something.
Like, I legitimately am trying to understand what you're saying but it's frustratingly vague. I feel like you're wasting my time with your attempt to seem like you know more than everyone else.
I did say something. "Think of the children" became a cliche because of how commonly it crops up in politics. At this point it's far more common to see it attached to nefarious measures as opposed to those with accurate statements of intent.
The bad faith rhetoric on your part is unwelcome and explicitly against the rules here ... I say to the account from 2014. Given you've been around awhile assuming you were legitimately frustrated by my comment is it possible you've misunderstood? I was quoting the parent in a manner intended to make the pattern of engagement obvious. A fill in the blank that it should be immediately apparent broadly fits past discourse on a wide array of topics.
Basically any time you can summarize an argument as "think of the children" you should immediately become maximally skeptical of the overall situation. The answer to my "difficult question" is pretty much everyone based on historical precedent.
> The bad faith rhetoric on your part is unwelcome and explicitly against the rules here .
Asking for clarification is a hallmark of good faith discussion. More of that and less snark is healthy.
Yes there are side effects. I would still vote that it's a net good as a practical solution to a number of problems. Notably the suicide rates, declines in testing, and skill development.
The eternal debate between more socially enforced control versus independence. These controls apply to caring for the young versus being used to oppress the adult. Hand waving without specific concerns, isn't going to change the minds of people that have a different take.
I think it's great that there will be plenty of data (for both sides) in the next few decades, with the patchwork adoption.
The request for clarification was not what I was referring to as bad faith rhetoric.
It seems like you're actively trying to change the subject. No one said anything about side effects and I don't think anyone was handwaving. The exchange you jumped into here was one regarding the presence of outside centralized influence on the legislative process at the international level.
The separate question of whether the initiative is of net benefit for society needs to be considered alongside potential alternatives in addition to any expected downsides. The elephant in the room is that the least invasive and most straightforward option of mandating the presence of accurate content classification headers has never been tried even though it would appear highly likely to solve the problem as I've usually seen it stated.
