As a British teen I concerned my parents a lot with my computer usage, with all they had heard about the dangers of over use. But for me that was an outlet in a pretty miserable childhood and turned into my career, I was programming and learning how stuff worked. I don't envy the kids that found an outlet doing something productive only to have a nanny state eventually rip it away from them.
You messing with a computer and teens doom-scrolling social media are two entirely different things.
Yes, some teens are creative with uploading videos, most are not. But teens can still be creative with a smart phone, just don’t post that stuff on social media.
But they don't - either through lack of knowledge or just can't be bothered to enforce it because they don't want to upset their kid. If parents were doing this already, the government wouldn't have to step in.
There were pedophiles, porn, extreme gore, cults, scams and a primitive notion of brainrot. Music and games (not that I played games, but honestly my mum thought that this is why I liked computers and what I was doing) were generally thought to turn kids into killers.
Computer users even in the best conditions (and not children) were looked at negatively- as if they were no life losers. The techbro thing, and the normalisation of computer use is a very modern notion.
FWIW I had the same exact situation as the parent, and heard it all from my mum. The computer was considered undesirable at best and actively harmful at worst.
Their point is: for some individuals it can be beneficial.
My point is: on a societal level, the numbers are pretty clear that teens consume too much media (and social media is even more addictive) and their skills and attention span deteriorate.
I think you understood my point and you understand the reasons for the act. But I'm just protesting on behalf of the kids that will pretty much have their lives ruined or made worse for this decision, for what it's worth.
They said same about video games but it turns out I didn't just want to play them, I also invested crazy amounts of time learning how to make them. Best time to spend crazy hours pursuing something you care about before the busy schedule of an adult saps all that away. It got me ahead. Not everyone just wants quick fixes.
The difference, I think (as an "over-user" of computers all throughout childhood) is that there were no basis for "they said same about video games", but there is a lot of basis for "social media is a net bad" now.
Do I believe the UK is doing this for the right reason or the right way? Absolutely not. But I also don't agree with the comparison of now and when I was a kid/teen.
I was playing brain dead Game Boy games when I was a kid and adults around me were saying games need to be outlawed because they're making my generation stupid. Now I'm a game developer and pretty happy with it.
Every generation has grumpy old people complaining about the youth. I see the dumb TikTok videos that grumpy old people complain about today, and they're about 2 steps above the absolute slop Gen X adults used to watch in the early 2000s: reality TV. Now grumpy old people watch political streamers saying we need to ban (new thing) because it's making kids stupid.
I'm sure parents back in the day thought the same about video games. You're lumping a lot of kids together there, maybe some of them will become journalists... Maybe social media is the only media that will even be relevant in 20 years when their career gets serious.
games could cause a lot of 'lost' time, but you had a say in games; there's a lot more consuming and almost no producing in social media use. And games did not cause you anxiety and FOMO, nor did they programatically lure you into spending your time and money on them.
And we're finally going back to a time where if a kid is even a little bit different from those around them, they're robbed of finding any type of community that doesn't ostracize them.
you dont think the amount of bullying and pressure to fit in on social media by teens isnt a huge problem? this isnt internet forums and online communities of the 90s, it’s in-your-face constant advertising and pressure by peers every second of every day
Is HN in complete denial about what is happening to the younger generations right now? My whole family are teachers, and they are all sounding the alarm. A majority of kids are basically unable to read books now. Not just children - young adults studying English literature at college...
Parents are up against some of the wealthiest companies on earth, and the fear of socially excluding their kids by limiting their usage. Systemic change is never going to come from parents on this one.
The problem seems to be that many students going to college can't seem to read any substantial texts anymore, while somehow getting themselves into college. It's pretty worrying imo. There's a bunch of articles about this as well: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
It's their attention span. My SIL is an English professor and she stopped assigning long texts. The kids won't read it, will get an AI to summarize, and then give her poor reviews at the end for making them read.
HN is in denial about a lot of stuff. The tech bubble exists somewhere else to most people's reality.
A lot of my youngest's peers are pretty illiterate still at 13. They have trouble with more than a few minutes of concentration. They track reading age and the average is declining every year as they arrive at secondary school which is causing a big panic in UK education. I think some of this data is driving the legislation changes as well.
I'd have preferred the government to have targeted the social media and attention companies personally. Extremely high taxation would be a good start much as we do for cigarettes and alcohol. If the business is no longer viable at that point they can quite frankly fuck off.
The verification controls are possibly a bigger problem which has serious consequences for society going forwards. Things aren't too bad now but in the future, the information and data that is available makes the nazis and the stasi look like amateurs.
Drawing a false equivalence between the internet and literal chemical poisons that aren't safe at any dose, cause severe physical addictions that take away choice to stop at best, and disable and kill millions of people every year at worst, like alcohol or cigarettes, is a little too on the nose.
At some point, you have to ask how much of the rhetoric is driven by hysteria and moral panic and how much of it is driven by what the actual evidence shows.
From the Guardian[1]:
> Social media time does not increase teenagers’ mental health problems – study
> Research finds no evidence heavier social media use or more gaming increases symptoms of anxiety or depression
> Screen time spent gaming or on social media does not cause mental health problems in teenagers, according to a large-scale study.
> With ministers in the UK considering whether to follow Australia’s example by banning social media use for under-16s, the findings challenge concerns that long periods spent gaming or scrolling TikTok or Instagram are driving an increase in teenagers’ depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions.
> Researchers at the University of Manchester followed 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years, tracking their self-reported social media habits, gaming frequency and emotional difficulties to find out whether technology use genuinely predicted later mental health difficulties.
From Nature[2]:
> Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health
From the Atlantic[3] with citations in the article:
> The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn’t Help Teens, It may only make things worse.
> I am a developmental psychologist[4], and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find[5] compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.
> Many other researchers have found the same[6]. In fact, a recent[6] study and a review of research[7] on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report[8] concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”
Way to cherry pick citations. Have you considered writing a meta analysis for a journal and fail to disclose your interests and funding? That'd really top it off.
I can do the same if I want the other way. But it's not worth my time.
You're going to drop a bombshell like "social media is as bad as alcohol and cigarettes, we need to ban it" and not provide any evidence?
There are a lot of strong feelings around social media, and I'm no fan, but I'm not going to walk head first into a moral panic, or participate in witch hunt, without knowing the facts.
In the end, ad hominem arguments don't affect the validity of evidence. I was hoping to have an interesting discussion, but I see that if you aren't politically correct on this topic, evidence will be outright dismissed and the messenger shot for delivering it.
Society has a responsibility and an interest in parenting your kids as well. That's why it mandates some level of education and offer parts of it for free. It's why it has stores/bars check ID for buying alcohol or cigarettes. It's why banks don't give loans or credit cards to kids. It's why kids that commit a crime are not treated like adults.
So I never really understood that argument that society shouldn't also be worried and want to put some measures in place to protect kids from social media harm.
I don't disagree. Society should reinforce what is good for it. But it should have reinforced parenting rather than introduce draconian controls on everything. Because they always end up creating more problems. On top of that, while the current government may not be an authoritarian dictatorship, that is not guaranteed going forwards so any mechanisms the state build must be compatible with that in the future. This is not.
That clearly is required here, but the scale of the existing and potential harm is such that relying on parenting only is the equivalent of using paper instead of plastic straws when the worlds biggest companies and militaries are burning down the environment.
I’ve got three kids, albeit two somewhat older. It’s not a panopticon prison. There’s trust. The social media thing just isn’t a big thing for them. They all use WhatsApp and that’s about it. I mean one has instagram and that’s marketing for part time job while she’s studying.
Edit: just asked her and she’s on book 7 this year. That’s a whole lot better for you than doom scrolling.
I don’t think that at all. I just make sure they get to experience the rest of the world first. Literature, art, music, games, conversation, meeting people in real life, jumping on a plane and going places and seeing things.
There’s a lot to do in the world. Social media isn’t very attractive if you go and do those things. I’d you don’t then it becomes a portal to a narrow view of the world and then there is trouble.
Concerns of a nanny state side, this experiment is going to miss the mark. Social media bans is a collective action problem. Being the only teenager amongst your peers without social media is a very different situation to you _and also all of your friends_ not having social media.
The problem is a framed as a question of protection (who doesn't want to be protected?) with the intended effect of over-reach (spying).
The coordinated track that governments around the world are on (sponsored by corporations), is that governments and corps will be able to monitor and track individuals online - people will be deanonymised (via OS logins, no side loading, 'protect the children'). The ostensibly kind desires are just sugar.
Even if you accept that fact that people are online too much (by choice), teens are drinking/smoking less. When you push one thing another pops out. Forcing 'good' conformity on others, is actually psychological meddling. In my view meddling with another's desires (even if it's for their own good, in your opinion) is a form of psychological abuse. Inner re-engineering of others should not be normalised or accepted because it is done by government.
Are the social media companies not meddling with our desires through all the psychological tricks they use? I think their overreach should be feared as much as, if not more than, state overreach.
Having corporations in the role of 'bad cop', allows the illusion that the government is 'good cop', and that they can manage reality for the greater good.
However, the only entity that can manage reality, is the individual for themselves. Working with a constrained subset of reality, means you do not actually have the full picture.
Perversely, not having the full picture, means that people pretend that someone else has got this for us (government). Seeking an external authority, rather than working through reality personally, prevents the individual from building up the correct understanding: only you can manage yourself correctly. Having information hidden from you supports the idea that individuals are not capable of managing themselves, and encourages 'looking outside for help' aka nannying to manage one's difficulties. It puts people into a state of neoteny - prolonged adolescence - which benefits those who use psychopathic/narcissistic tricks. It's a choreographed, incremental ballet, that is intended to get 'the people' to a destination (technocratic governance) that no one would choose.
Corporations are not in the role of bad cop, they exist to exploit us for profit and have many nasty tactics they can use to do that. To put the blame at the feet of individuals for that exploitation underestimated how much power they have.
The state can, at least in theory, be structured to serve rather than exploit us.
On top of that, the idea that individuals have the time, energy, or inclination to completely manage their own "reality" rather than relying on external authorities is daft imo. At some point we need to trust and rely on eachother and there are various entities beyond nation states that are set up specifically for that too.
> Corporations are not in the role of bad cop, they exist to exploit us for profit and have many nasty tactics they can use to do that.
.. and governments are the same.
I believe we already live in a form of fascism where business and governments are aspects of the same entity.
> The state can, at least in theory, be structured to serve rather than exploit us.
I disagree. It can soak up believers energy though, forcing people against others who they have no personal issues with.
> On top of that, the idea that individuals have the time, energy, or inclination to completely manage their own "reality" rather than relying on external authorities is daft imo.
It might be daft in your opinion, but assuming the answers you want will be provided externally could be a working definition of insanity, imo.
No, not the WHO, pharmaceutical companies or Bill Gates. These folk only have humanity's interests at heart, nothing to do with money and power. At all. You should absolutely trust your children to these folks.
Banning it is tackling the problem at the wrong end. Social media, and Big Tech in general, should be heavily regulated, and certain behavior strongly fined, including criminal prosecution and prison sentences for repeat offenders.
But we all know this is not happening because governments profit greatly and have much to gain from their symbiotic relationships with tech companies. So it's easier to hassle tax payers, or in this case children to gain political points.
People understand that this has nothing to do with the wellbeing of any teenager, right? This is only about establishing a mechanism to prevent individuals from doing things online. Why do people fall for the "protect the children"-lines again and again?
That governments globally start to take serious actions against an entertainment form means that multiple academic and intellectual sources warned about a dangerous fall of public literacy, intelligence and thinking. We don't need to possess classical knowledge like any university student had in the 60's but the stupidness of the last decade is unacceptable. I think the situation crossed the line in the 10's but it took a full 10 years for governments to get in the middle, probably also waiting for the controls of parenting, which failed miserably.
Those with fond memories of a childhood spent playing games and typing code from magazines and having low fidelity conversations with faraway likeminded folks need to know how lucky they were, because these days that stuff may still be there but for kids it won’t win pales vs addictive social media..
I ask again: What is "social media"? This appears focued on apps. Ok. What about web interfaces? Is youtube? Will kids be allowed to use signal?
We all talk about some great thing but we never define that thing. If we are going to move forwards with laws we need specifics. Is this place, HN, considered social media?
(As this is a law regulating both online speech and the safety of children, in the UK, bypassing will likely come with draconian penalties.)
The term "social media" is meaningless at this point. People call all kinds of online services social media. In practise it typically refers to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. And I have a really hard time seeing what is "social" about YouTube, because of the huge asymmetry between creators and watchers. Even when you have reaction videos between different content creators, there is nothing social going on.
Im just a Canadian observer. But the current UK government doesnt maintain a consent to govern. They certainly arent a legitimate government.
They have mass arrests of political opponents for speech. Exceeding authoritarian regimes 1000:1. Putin is jealous how many illegitimate arrests they are getting away with.
Now they intend to extend restricting speech of their political opponents even further.
The UK is turning in the very definition of a nanny and police state under the usual guise of think of the children.
And don't get me wrong I'm just all for banning social media entirely.
Everyone likes to say the UK is a police state. It’s a bit of a meme. I mean we are literally going through legal reform at the moment to make it less of one while people with a masked presidential police force scream at us for being a police state.
Keep in mind that the UK government is currently locking people up for FB posts. Not exactly a police state but close enough that its a distinction without a difference. Oh, and they are debating if to get rid of jury trials so they can just lock up people for FB posts without a trial. If it quacks like a duck...
Firstly the incumbent legislation is actually being rolled back at the moment by Mahmood. The FB posts are all inciting violence against others which should not be protected speech. As for the jury trials, have you ever been in a jury? I'd rather not thanks myself. My peers are mostly fucking idiots. And they're changing that as well.
Are all the news items about people being arrested for exercising speech not true?
I‘ve heard from multiple people already that there is a massive prosecution going in the UK against people that say „hateful“ things on the internet. Whereby „hateful“ is vaguely defined but usually in relation to religious feelings.
- actual incitement to violence, like the hotel arson
And if you look at the actual convictions, first offense for most things is usually a suspended sentence. I'd be interested to see if you can find a case on bailii (no, not social media, actual court transcripts only) which matches:
- first offense custodial sentence
- one off post, not a pattern of harassment
- between strangers
- does not include even implied threats of violence
(Last one I can think of was the Robin Hood Airport one, which hinged on whether a joke threat to blow up an airport should have been taken seriously.)
Honestly that is happening, and I think it's an overstep. I have never heard anyone talk about this in real life (that could be a London bubble though). I will say - I am nearly 40, and I've spent the last 25 years online reading about the Orwellian hell my life is (or is about to become). It has never felt like it comes from a place of lived experience. For example we infamously have a lot of cameras in the UK. 90% of them are on closed circuits in shops and it doesn't affect anything.
Right now the biggest issue in the UK is the same as most places - lack of money. It's killing our services, poisoning our politics. Everything else feels abstract in comparison.
>the effects of social media on kids is too strong, and too negative to deny at this point.
Bold claim that really needs some evidence. Is there research which shows that kids who grow up with social media are less likely to succeed as adults because of social media exposure?
For some reason, conversations on HN and in tech circles are behind the curve when it comes to social media bans.
Most countries are looking at social media bans, and there is a deep groundswell of public opinion against tech today.
Yes, in the 90s, tech was the good guy, but today people are frightened and upset with tech companies.
This would be less of a problem, if governments globally were not tending towards authoritarianism.
Governments are more than happy to appear responsive to voter needs, while also finally getting some form of control over (primarily American) tech firms.
As it stands though - safety is a bad word, enshittification is an actual word, and profit seems to be the final word.
The Techlash is real, but it doesn’t seem to feature in calculations and discussions on HN.
The problem with that is that it just creates a blind spot, and a miscalculation in the energies underlying such drives.
The OSINT report from r/linux got more traction, even if it was riddled with issues, giving birth to the belief that this is all driven by Meta.
A reading of the same data sits comfortably with Meta simply taking advantage of the macro trends to push onerous burdens onto its competitors.
I am sorry for the meta comment, but the blind spot in logic is annoying to me since it results in a mis-estimation of the energies at play here. That in turn means the responses or ideas people have are not calibrated and scaled correctly.
People are going to respond to incentives and instigate for their needs to be met.
My guess is that if tech invested significantly in customer support and safety, being more responsive to user needs, perhaps the underlying anger can be alleviated.
——
Anecdotes:
There needs to also be actual signal sharing between safety teams in tech. Same for customer support - Far too many please for help go through slack and WhatsApp.
I know of posts on reddit where people are asking for help reporting and taking down NCII found on Instagram/Threads. ideas.
What's that smell? It smells like a high-tech 1980's NFL playing field in here. Wild.
> Most countries are looking at social media bans, and there is a deep groundswell of public opinion against tech today.
Not sure what this has to do with laying the groundwork for an Internet Posting License, but sure.
I expect that if Big Tech wasn't shoving LLMs up every available nook and cranny, wasn't using a shocking amount of money, power, and land for said LLMs, and wasn't firing tons of people in order to spend more money on those LLMs, people would be far, far less angry.
> I know of posts on reddit where people are asking for help reporting and taking down NCII...
NCII? [0] Why would anyone want to take down or report that? Is this some new acronym for "kiddy porn"? Those seem to change every year or two.
Meta may be manipulating things to try to ensure they don't pay for age verification, but I think the state's true goal is more about foreign influence.
The very fact that we allow armies of state-actor paid posters to work diligently to undermine the views of our own citizens, and even more important our impressionable children, is beyond bizarre. Advertising works, manipulation works, and in an age where you can make up any story you want, create any visual appearance you want, create any history you want, this sort of manipulation is at an entire new level.
There is always more than one reason for any action, but I think a primary for this literal world wide push to add age verification, and eventually identity verification, is because states are finally waking up to the wide-scale manipulation happening on platforms today.
States take years and years to make policy change.
From the perspective of the state, they already know who you are when posting domestically. What they're gaining is an enhanced ability to ban externals from posting. To end or significantly reduce sock-puppetry.
Corps like Meta, X, etc would hate this on its own, for an enormous amount of accounts are fake accounts. Realistically, however, it would be a one time correction...
Anyhow.
Point is, when you see every democracy passing these laws, it isn't Meta.
None of this is nefarious, either. An example? Every decade or so every country in the world sends representatives to discuss ... effectively, "roads" and "road safety". One thing they do is, try to make the rules of the road as similar as possible everywhere.
An example is, in BC, Canada, a 'flashing green light' used to mean 'pedestrian crossing is active'. I kid you not. Meanwhile in Ontario, it meant 'turn left is OK'.
That's not how it works any more. BC now changed that flashing green light, and everywhere has almost completed the 15+ year long migration to an actual left arrow for 'turn left'.
Road lines were yellow in Canada most of the time, even in the middle of lanes. The logic was, you can see yellow easier than white, when there is some snow on the ground. Now, all lines tend to be white in Canada. Why? Because they're white everywhere.
The goal with road signs, is to have them as pictures, rather than words, and the same everywhere on the planet, so anyone of any language can understand them.
This is the sort of generic collaboration that happens in the background constantly. And its sensible, everyone wants tourism, everyone wants drivers to be safer, understand the rules of the road when traveling, and so on. Everyone benefits.
So from my perspective, to see all democracies passing laws, I simply see that probably there was a conference somewhere, and everyone discussed it, and thought "yeah, this is a problem".
that the Heritage Foundation (creators of Project 2025) wants these laws and has been pushing similar agendas in a number of countries makes me doubt this.
> Point is, when you see every democracy passing these laws, it isn't Meta.
Sure. And the outpouring of support for ratification of OOXML as an ISO standard wasn't motivated by Microsoft. Nor was the large influx of new "P" members who arrived just in time to vote to adopt OOXML. Absolutely.
The fact that those "P" members refused to meet their obligations to cast a vote in any later ballots (resulting in the failure of several key ballots, bringing ISO to a standstill) only strengthens the claim that their actions were genuine grassroots activity. No. Doubt.
Megacorps never use their massive gobs of money and influence to co-opt processes that require all participants to mostly operate in good faith. Nope.
> States take years and years to make policy change.
The USian post-9/11 hysteria would like to have a word with you. Authoritarians rarely miss an opportunity to manufacture (or inflame) a crisis in order to present their pre-prepared rules changes that just happen to further expand their power and influence.
> I think the state's true goal is more about foreign influence. ... From the perspective of the state, they already know who you are when posting domestically.
Not in the US, no. Not without a fair bit of legwork. Though, I don't know much about the situation on the ground in countries like Britain and Germany. Perhaps things are so now bad there that you need to attach your Posting Loicense/Papers to everything you post, IDK.
> What they're gaining is an enhanced ability to ban externals from posting.
Yeah, here it is. "Keep those fuzzy foreigners out of our discussions!".
For the sake of discussion, let's assume that banning and/or jailing "Those People" is a reasonable thing to want to do. [0] The problem with this is that once you deploy and normalize this sort of "social technology", it always, always creeps further. Today it's "dangerous foreigners" with their "subversive ideologies". Five, ten years from now, it's whoever is the equivalent of today's LGBT&etc underclass.
[0] It's absolutely not. The remedy for bad speech is more speech. The remedy for falsehood is truth. The remedy for invalid attempts to sow discontent is to show how those attempts are not grounded in fact.
> Sure. And the outpouring of support for ratification of OOXML as an ISO standard wasn't motivated by Microsoft. Nor was the large influx of new "P" members who arrived just in time to vote to adopt OOXML. Absolutely.
Yes - Meta is most definitely taking advantage of the situation, but it’s surfing the waves, not generating them.
> [0] It's absolutely not. The remedy for bad speech is more speech. The remedy for falsehood is truth. The remedy for invalid attempts to sow discontent is to show how those attempts are not grounded in fact.
I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this defense (more speech) has been defeated.
We (humanity) have developed attacks that avoid these defenses. Our defenses were primarily against government control of data. The current attacks leverage the mechanized production of speech, and achieve influence via an abundance of content.
Between attention seeking algorithms, the death of classifieds and the revenue sources for independent journalism, the creation of party+media entities, and actual foreign influence operations - theres a surfeit of content traps to catch voters up. “Flood the zone”, so to speak.
It’s very similar to the sub prime mortgage/ NINJA loan scenario: On the one hand you have professional teams / media market makers which specialize in figuring out content that works. On the other side you have the average joe who is entering the marketplace with their wits and experience.
This iteration of the market place of ideas result in unfair fights between the average person, and whichever entity decides they have the money to spend.
> ...this defense (more speech) has been defeated.
Very loud incorrect buzzer
The minute humans gathered into groups larger than one could talk in-depth to in a week -let alone a year- we've had the "too much information" problem. So, we've had that problem for hundreds or thousands of years. It's nothing new.
Censorious authoritarians want to convince people that it's new and that the best solution is (obviously) to curtail free speech and association, but that's also nothing new.
As a British teen I concerned my parents a lot with my computer usage, with all they had heard about the dangers of over use. But for me that was an outlet in a pretty miserable childhood and turned into my career, I was programming and learning how stuff worked. I don't envy the kids that found an outlet doing something productive only to have a nanny state eventually rip it away from them.
You messing with a computer and teens doom-scrolling social media are two entirely different things.
Yes, some teens are creative with uploading videos, most are not. But teens can still be creative with a smart phone, just don’t post that stuff on social media.
We don't need a nanny state to help with either of the two things. We can just have parents do their jobs if they wish to restrict social media usage.
But they don't - either through lack of knowledge or just can't be bothered to enforce it because they don't want to upset their kid. If parents were doing this already, the government wouldn't have to step in.
The only reason government are doing this is because they want to force everyone to identify themselves online.
You walked right into his point.
There were pedophiles, porn, extreme gore, cults, scams and a primitive notion of brainrot. Music and games (not that I played games, but honestly my mum thought that this is why I liked computers and what I was doing) were generally thought to turn kids into killers.
Computer users even in the best conditions (and not children) were looked at negatively- as if they were no life losers. The techbro thing, and the normalisation of computer use is a very modern notion.
FWIW I had the same exact situation as the parent, and heard it all from my mum. The computer was considered undesirable at best and actively harmful at worst.
Their point is: for some individuals it can be beneficial.
My point is: on a societal level, the numbers are pretty clear that teens consume too much media (and social media is even more addictive) and their skills and attention span deteriorate.
I think you understood my point and you understand the reasons for the act. But I'm just protesting on behalf of the kids that will pretty much have their lives ruined or made worse for this decision, for what it's worth.
[dead]
You missed it again.
The “computers were considered dangerous” means that people generally thought they were dangerous, especially to children.
You would most probably have it taken away by endless stream of brain sugar like TikTok, if it existed back in your days.
They said same about video games but it turns out I didn't just want to play them, I also invested crazy amounts of time learning how to make them. Best time to spend crazy hours pursuing something you care about before the busy schedule of an adult saps all that away. It got me ahead. Not everyone just wants quick fixes.
The difference, I think (as an "over-user" of computers all throughout childhood) is that there were no basis for "they said same about video games", but there is a lot of basis for "social media is a net bad" now.
Do I believe the UK is doing this for the right reason or the right way? Absolutely not. But I also don't agree with the comparison of now and when I was a kid/teen.
I was playing brain dead Game Boy games when I was a kid and adults around me were saying games need to be outlawed because they're making my generation stupid. Now I'm a game developer and pretty happy with it.
Every generation has grumpy old people complaining about the youth. I see the dumb TikTok videos that grumpy old people complain about today, and they're about 2 steps above the absolute slop Gen X adults used to watch in the early 2000s: reality TV. Now grumpy old people watch political streamers saying we need to ban (new thing) because it's making kids stupid.
This doesn’t really take the computer away. It takes walled addictive social media apps away.
We just didn’t have those back in the day.
> I don't envy the kids that found an outlet doing something productive only to have a nanny state eventually rip it away from them.
99% of today's social media usage is the opposite of productive, too bad the laws concentrate on policing internet use though.
I'm sure parents back in the day thought the same about video games. You're lumping a lot of kids together there, maybe some of them will become journalists... Maybe social media is the only media that will even be relevant in 20 years when their career gets serious.
games could cause a lot of 'lost' time, but you had a say in games; there's a lot more consuming and almost no producing in social media use. And games did not cause you anxiety and FOMO, nor did they programatically lure you into spending your time and money on them.
And we're finally going back to a time where if a kid is even a little bit different from those around them, they're robbed of finding any type of community that doesn't ostracize them.
you dont think the amount of bullying and pressure to fit in on social media by teens isnt a huge problem? this isnt internet forums and online communities of the 90s, it’s in-your-face constant advertising and pressure by peers every second of every day
I already do this with my <16. It’s called parenting.
They can use their computer however. That’s fine. It’s the engagement based social media and constant comms via messaging that’s the issue.
I find that she doesn’t actually use it all the time and goes and does other stuff like reading and recently drawing and painting.
Is HN in complete denial about what is happening to the younger generations right now? My whole family are teachers, and they are all sounding the alarm. A majority of kids are basically unable to read books now. Not just children - young adults studying English literature at college...
Parents are up against some of the wealthiest companies on earth, and the fear of socially excluding their kids by limiting their usage. Systemic change is never going to come from parents on this one.
Not to state the obvious but, isn't literacy an entry requirement for a college course?
The problem seems to be that many students going to college can't seem to read any substantial texts anymore, while somehow getting themselves into college. It's pretty worrying imo. There's a bunch of articles about this as well: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
It's their attention span. My SIL is an English professor and she stopped assigning long texts. The kids won't read it, will get an AI to summarize, and then give her poor reviews at the end for making them read.
Nope.
https://www.live5news.com/2025/02/28/former-high-school-hono...
The problem is also discussed briefly in this recent paper: https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...HN is in denial about a lot of stuff. The tech bubble exists somewhere else to most people's reality.
A lot of my youngest's peers are pretty illiterate still at 13. They have trouble with more than a few minutes of concentration. They track reading age and the average is declining every year as they arrive at secondary school which is causing a big panic in UK education. I think some of this data is driving the legislation changes as well.
I'd have preferred the government to have targeted the social media and attention companies personally. Extremely high taxation would be a good start much as we do for cigarettes and alcohol. If the business is no longer viable at that point they can quite frankly fuck off.
The verification controls are possibly a bigger problem which has serious consequences for society going forwards. Things aren't too bad now but in the future, the information and data that is available makes the nazis and the stasi look like amateurs.
Drawing a false equivalence between the internet and literal chemical poisons that aren't safe at any dose, cause severe physical addictions that take away choice to stop at best, and disable and kill millions of people every year at worst, like alcohol or cigarettes, is a little too on the nose.
At some point, you have to ask how much of the rhetoric is driven by hysteria and moral panic and how much of it is driven by what the actual evidence shows.
From the Guardian[1]:
> Social media time does not increase teenagers’ mental health problems – study
> Research finds no evidence heavier social media use or more gaming increases symptoms of anxiety or depression
> Screen time spent gaming or on social media does not cause mental health problems in teenagers, according to a large-scale study.
> With ministers in the UK considering whether to follow Australia’s example by banning social media use for under-16s, the findings challenge concerns that long periods spent gaming or scrolling TikTok or Instagram are driving an increase in teenagers’ depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions.
> Researchers at the University of Manchester followed 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years, tracking their self-reported social media habits, gaming frequency and emotional difficulties to find out whether technology use genuinely predicted later mental health difficulties.
From Nature[2]:
> Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health
From the Atlantic[3] with citations in the article:
> The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn’t Help Teens, It may only make things worse.
> I am a developmental psychologist[4], and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find[5] compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.
> Many other researchers have found the same[6]. In fact, a recent[6] study and a review of research[7] on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report[8] concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-t...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/candi...
[4] https://adaptlab.org/
[5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31929951/
[6] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7#:~:text=G...
[7] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32734903/
[8] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/27396/Highlights_...
Way to cherry pick citations. Have you considered writing a meta analysis for a journal and fail to disclose your interests and funding? That'd really top it off.
I can do the same if I want the other way. But it's not worth my time.
You're going to drop a bombshell like "social media is as bad as alcohol and cigarettes, we need to ban it" and not provide any evidence?
There are a lot of strong feelings around social media, and I'm no fan, but I'm not going to walk head first into a moral panic, or participate in witch hunt, without knowing the facts.
In the end, ad hominem arguments don't affect the validity of evidence. I was hoping to have an interesting discussion, but I see that if you aren't politically correct on this topic, evidence will be outright dismissed and the messenger shot for delivering it.
I think you went off the rails a bit there. Also hyper focused on a small part of the comment rather than the general issue which is somewhat unfair.
The point was simply things which are costly to society should be taxed. I am not comparing each thing to each other.
It doesn't need a multiple research papers to figure out social media is a complete cesspool tho.
> It’s called parenting.
Society has a responsibility and an interest in parenting your kids as well. That's why it mandates some level of education and offer parts of it for free. It's why it has stores/bars check ID for buying alcohol or cigarettes. It's why banks don't give loans or credit cards to kids. It's why kids that commit a crime are not treated like adults.
So I never really understood that argument that society shouldn't also be worried and want to put some measures in place to protect kids from social media harm.
I don't disagree. Society should reinforce what is good for it. But it should have reinforced parenting rather than introduce draconian controls on everything. Because they always end up creating more problems. On top of that, while the current government may not be an authoritarian dictatorship, that is not guaranteed going forwards so any mechanisms the state build must be compatible with that in the future. This is not.
> It’s called parenting.
That clearly is required here, but the scale of the existing and potential harm is such that relying on parenting only is the equivalent of using paper instead of plastic straws when the worlds biggest companies and militaries are burning down the environment.
> It’s called parenting.
There are multi-billionar dollar industries targeting the attention of your child. Many adults have problems resisting.
Are you using any technical measures to limit what they can see or do?
I’ve got three kids, albeit two somewhat older. It’s not a panopticon prison. There’s trust. The social media thing just isn’t a big thing for them. They all use WhatsApp and that’s about it. I mean one has instagram and that’s marketing for part time job while she’s studying.
Edit: just asked her and she’s on book 7 this year. That’s a whole lot better for you than doom scrolling.
If you think youre such a great parent that you or your kid is safe from the insidious danger of social media, I think youre being naive.
I don’t think that at all. I just make sure they get to experience the rest of the world first. Literature, art, music, games, conversation, meeting people in real life, jumping on a plane and going places and seeing things.
There’s a lot to do in the world. Social media isn’t very attractive if you go and do those things. I’d you don’t then it becomes a portal to a narrow view of the world and then there is trouble.
With that I agree. But it comes down as society as a whole to create that environment for children, not individual parenting.
Concerns of a nanny state side, this experiment is going to miss the mark. Social media bans is a collective action problem. Being the only teenager amongst your peers without social media is a very different situation to you _and also all of your friends_ not having social media.
Half of me worries about the nanny/surveillance state aspect of this.
Half of me wants us to ban it for adults too.
The problem is a framed as a question of protection (who doesn't want to be protected?) with the intended effect of over-reach (spying).
The coordinated track that governments around the world are on (sponsored by corporations), is that governments and corps will be able to monitor and track individuals online - people will be deanonymised (via OS logins, no side loading, 'protect the children'). The ostensibly kind desires are just sugar.
Even if you accept that fact that people are online too much (by choice), teens are drinking/smoking less. When you push one thing another pops out. Forcing 'good' conformity on others, is actually psychological meddling. In my view meddling with another's desires (even if it's for their own good, in your opinion) is a form of psychological abuse. Inner re-engineering of others should not be normalised or accepted because it is done by government.
Are the social media companies not meddling with our desires through all the psychological tricks they use? I think their overreach should be feared as much as, if not more than, state overreach.
Everyone is meddling all the time.
Having corporations in the role of 'bad cop', allows the illusion that the government is 'good cop', and that they can manage reality for the greater good.
However, the only entity that can manage reality, is the individual for themselves. Working with a constrained subset of reality, means you do not actually have the full picture.
Perversely, not having the full picture, means that people pretend that someone else has got this for us (government). Seeking an external authority, rather than working through reality personally, prevents the individual from building up the correct understanding: only you can manage yourself correctly. Having information hidden from you supports the idea that individuals are not capable of managing themselves, and encourages 'looking outside for help' aka nannying to manage one's difficulties. It puts people into a state of neoteny - prolonged adolescence - which benefits those who use psychopathic/narcissistic tricks. It's a choreographed, incremental ballet, that is intended to get 'the people' to a destination (technocratic governance) that no one would choose.
Corporations are not in the role of bad cop, they exist to exploit us for profit and have many nasty tactics they can use to do that. To put the blame at the feet of individuals for that exploitation underestimated how much power they have.
The state can, at least in theory, be structured to serve rather than exploit us.
On top of that, the idea that individuals have the time, energy, or inclination to completely manage their own "reality" rather than relying on external authorities is daft imo. At some point we need to trust and rely on eachother and there are various entities beyond nation states that are set up specifically for that too.
> Corporations are not in the role of bad cop, they exist to exploit us for profit and have many nasty tactics they can use to do that.
.. and governments are the same.
I believe we already live in a form of fascism where business and governments are aspects of the same entity.
> The state can, at least in theory, be structured to serve rather than exploit us.
I disagree. It can soak up believers energy though, forcing people against others who they have no personal issues with.
> On top of that, the idea that individuals have the time, energy, or inclination to completely manage their own "reality" rather than relying on external authorities is daft imo.
It might be daft in your opinion, but assuming the answers you want will be provided externally could be a working definition of insanity, imo.
The UK and US maybe. I'm not so sure about all governments around the world.
And so do you not trust health advice from the WHO? Do you do your own controlled trials instead?
No, not the WHO, pharmaceutical companies or Bill Gates. These folk only have humanity's interests at heart, nothing to do with money and power. At all. You should absolutely trust your children to these folks.
Banning it is tackling the problem at the wrong end. Social media, and Big Tech in general, should be heavily regulated, and certain behavior strongly fined, including criminal prosecution and prison sentences for repeat offenders.
But we all know this is not happening because governments profit greatly and have much to gain from their symbiotic relationships with tech companies. So it's easier to hassle tax payers, or in this case children to gain political points.
I can already hear people piss and moan about censorship then too though.
Pretty much. There is a very narrow middle way but I doubt we can take that.
People understand that this has nothing to do with the wellbeing of any teenager, right? This is only about establishing a mechanism to prevent individuals from doing things online. Why do people fall for the "protect the children"-lines again and again?
That governments globally start to take serious actions against an entertainment form means that multiple academic and intellectual sources warned about a dangerous fall of public literacy, intelligence and thinking. We don't need to possess classical knowledge like any university student had in the 60's but the stupidness of the last decade is unacceptable. I think the situation crossed the line in the 10's but it took a full 10 years for governments to get in the middle, probably also waiting for the controls of parenting, which failed miserably.
Those with fond memories of a childhood spent playing games and typing code from magazines and having low fidelity conversations with faraway likeminded folks need to know how lucky they were, because these days that stuff may still be there but for kids it won’t win pales vs addictive social media..
Live long enough and eventually it will suck.
At this point the UK should just raise people's children for them and drop all pretences. Sheesh.
Hello yes we would like to invade the privacy of your child in the name of children everywhere
Some seem to support this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47513098
Which is a platform being fined for not spying on children.
I ask again: What is "social media"? This appears focued on apps. Ok. What about web interfaces? Is youtube? Will kids be allowed to use signal?
We all talk about some great thing but we never define that thing. If we are going to move forwards with laws we need specifics. Is this place, HN, considered social media?
(As this is a law regulating both online speech and the safety of children, in the UK, bypassing will likely come with draconian penalties.)
The term "social media" is meaningless at this point. People call all kinds of online services social media. In practise it typically refers to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. And I have a really hard time seeing what is "social" about YouTube, because of the huge asymmetry between creators and watchers. Even when you have reaction videos between different content creators, there is nothing social going on.
Im just a Canadian observer. But the current UK government doesnt maintain a consent to govern. They certainly arent a legitimate government.
They have mass arrests of political opponents for speech. Exceeding authoritarian regimes 1000:1. Putin is jealous how many illegitimate arrests they are getting away with.
Now they intend to extend restricting speech of their political opponents even further.
I can see bored guys setting shit on fire again :D
The UK is turning in the very definition of a nanny and police state under the usual guise of think of the children. And don't get me wrong I'm just all for banning social media entirely.
I reckon in 20 years most countries will be doing this - the effects of social media on kids is too strong, and too negative to deny at this point.
Also in what way is the UK a police state? The amount of police is falling - we're strapped for cash...
Everyone likes to say the UK is a police state. It’s a bit of a meme. I mean we are literally going through legal reform at the moment to make it less of one while people with a masked presidential police force scream at us for being a police state.
Keep in mind that the UK government is currently locking people up for FB posts. Not exactly a police state but close enough that its a distinction without a difference. Oh, and they are debating if to get rid of jury trials so they can just lock up people for FB posts without a trial. If it quacks like a duck...
This is paranoid bullshit.
Firstly the incumbent legislation is actually being rolled back at the moment by Mahmood. The FB posts are all inciting violence against others which should not be protected speech. As for the jury trials, have you ever been in a jury? I'd rather not thanks myself. My peers are mostly fucking idiots. And they're changing that as well.
Are all the news items about people being arrested for exercising speech not true?
I‘ve heard from multiple people already that there is a massive prosecution going in the UK against people that say „hateful“ things on the internet. Whereby „hateful“ is vaguely defined but usually in relation to religious feelings.
All fake news? Honest question
Most of those cases turn out to be:
- ex-partner disputes involving harassment
- actual incitement to violence, like the hotel arson
And if you look at the actual convictions, first offense for most things is usually a suspended sentence. I'd be interested to see if you can find a case on bailii (no, not social media, actual court transcripts only) which matches:
- first offense custodial sentence
- one off post, not a pattern of harassment
- between strangers
- does not include even implied threats of violence
(Last one I can think of was the Robin Hood Airport one, which hinged on whether a joke threat to blow up an airport should have been taken seriously.)
Honestly that is happening, and I think it's an overstep. I have never heard anyone talk about this in real life (that could be a London bubble though). I will say - I am nearly 40, and I've spent the last 25 years online reading about the Orwellian hell my life is (or is about to become). It has never felt like it comes from a place of lived experience. For example we infamously have a lot of cameras in the UK. 90% of them are on closed circuits in shops and it doesn't affect anything.
Right now the biggest issue in the UK is the same as most places - lack of money. It's killing our services, poisoning our politics. Everything else feels abstract in comparison.
>the effects of social media on kids is too strong, and too negative to deny at this point.
Bold claim that really needs some evidence. Is there research which shows that kids who grow up with social media are less likely to succeed as adults because of social media exposure?
20 years seems long to me. I give it less than 5. Just think of what the internet was like in 2006, these things can happen fast.
I guess imprecise wording. I suppose they mean unholy crossover of Kafqueske and Owellian state.
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For some reason, conversations on HN and in tech circles are behind the curve when it comes to social media bans.
Most countries are looking at social media bans, and there is a deep groundswell of public opinion against tech today.
Yes, in the 90s, tech was the good guy, but today people are frightened and upset with tech companies.
This would be less of a problem, if governments globally were not tending towards authoritarianism.
Governments are more than happy to appear responsive to voter needs, while also finally getting some form of control over (primarily American) tech firms.
As it stands though - safety is a bad word, enshittification is an actual word, and profit seems to be the final word.
The Techlash is real, but it doesn’t seem to feature in calculations and discussions on HN.
The problem with that is that it just creates a blind spot, and a miscalculation in the energies underlying such drives.
The OSINT report from r/linux got more traction, even if it was riddled with issues, giving birth to the belief that this is all driven by Meta.
A reading of the same data sits comfortably with Meta simply taking advantage of the macro trends to push onerous burdens onto its competitors.
I am sorry for the meta comment, but the blind spot in logic is annoying to me since it results in a mis-estimation of the energies at play here. That in turn means the responses or ideas people have are not calibrated and scaled correctly.
People are going to respond to incentives and instigate for their needs to be met.
My guess is that if tech invested significantly in customer support and safety, being more responsive to user needs, perhaps the underlying anger can be alleviated.
——
Anecdotes:
There needs to also be actual signal sharing between safety teams in tech. Same for customer support - Far too many please for help go through slack and WhatsApp.
I know of posts on reddit where people are asking for help reporting and taking down NCII found on Instagram/Threads. ideas.
What's that smell? It smells like a high-tech 1980's NFL playing field in here. Wild.
> Most countries are looking at social media bans, and there is a deep groundswell of public opinion against tech today.
Not sure what this has to do with laying the groundwork for an Internet Posting License, but sure.
I expect that if Big Tech wasn't shoving LLMs up every available nook and cranny, wasn't using a shocking amount of money, power, and land for said LLMs, and wasn't firing tons of people in order to spend more money on those LLMs, people would be far, far less angry.
> I know of posts on reddit where people are asking for help reporting and taking down NCII...
NCII? [0] Why would anyone want to take down or report that? Is this some new acronym for "kiddy porn"? Those seem to change every year or two.
[0] <https://intensiveintervention.org/>
Meta may be manipulating things to try to ensure they don't pay for age verification, but I think the state's true goal is more about foreign influence.
The very fact that we allow armies of state-actor paid posters to work diligently to undermine the views of our own citizens, and even more important our impressionable children, is beyond bizarre. Advertising works, manipulation works, and in an age where you can make up any story you want, create any visual appearance you want, create any history you want, this sort of manipulation is at an entire new level.
There is always more than one reason for any action, but I think a primary for this literal world wide push to add age verification, and eventually identity verification, is because states are finally waking up to the wide-scale manipulation happening on platforms today.
States take years and years to make policy change.
From the perspective of the state, they already know who you are when posting domestically. What they're gaining is an enhanced ability to ban externals from posting. To end or significantly reduce sock-puppetry.
Corps like Meta, X, etc would hate this on its own, for an enormous amount of accounts are fake accounts. Realistically, however, it would be a one time correction...
Anyhow.
Point is, when you see every democracy passing these laws, it isn't Meta.
None of this is nefarious, either. An example? Every decade or so every country in the world sends representatives to discuss ... effectively, "roads" and "road safety". One thing they do is, try to make the rules of the road as similar as possible everywhere.
An example is, in BC, Canada, a 'flashing green light' used to mean 'pedestrian crossing is active'. I kid you not. Meanwhile in Ontario, it meant 'turn left is OK'.
That's not how it works any more. BC now changed that flashing green light, and everywhere has almost completed the 15+ year long migration to an actual left arrow for 'turn left'.
Road lines were yellow in Canada most of the time, even in the middle of lanes. The logic was, you can see yellow easier than white, when there is some snow on the ground. Now, all lines tend to be white in Canada. Why? Because they're white everywhere.
The goal with road signs, is to have them as pictures, rather than words, and the same everywhere on the planet, so anyone of any language can understand them.
This is the sort of generic collaboration that happens in the background constantly. And its sensible, everyone wants tourism, everyone wants drivers to be safer, understand the rules of the road when traveling, and so on. Everyone benefits.
So from my perspective, to see all democracies passing laws, I simply see that probably there was a conference somewhere, and everyone discussed it, and thought "yeah, this is a problem".
>None of this is nefarious, either.
that the Heritage Foundation (creators of Project 2025) wants these laws and has been pushing similar agendas in a number of countries makes me doubt this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve6N6cUK1GM
> Point is, when you see every democracy passing these laws, it isn't Meta.
Sure. And the outpouring of support for ratification of OOXML as an ISO standard wasn't motivated by Microsoft. Nor was the large influx of new "P" members who arrived just in time to vote to adopt OOXML. Absolutely.
The fact that those "P" members refused to meet their obligations to cast a vote in any later ballots (resulting in the failure of several key ballots, bringing ISO to a standstill) only strengthens the claim that their actions were genuine grassroots activity. No. Doubt.
Megacorps never use their massive gobs of money and influence to co-opt processes that require all participants to mostly operate in good faith. Nope.
> States take years and years to make policy change.
The USian post-9/11 hysteria would like to have a word with you. Authoritarians rarely miss an opportunity to manufacture (or inflame) a crisis in order to present their pre-prepared rules changes that just happen to further expand their power and influence.
> I think the state's true goal is more about foreign influence. ... From the perspective of the state, they already know who you are when posting domestically.
Not in the US, no. Not without a fair bit of legwork. Though, I don't know much about the situation on the ground in countries like Britain and Germany. Perhaps things are so now bad there that you need to attach your Posting Loicense/Papers to everything you post, IDK.
> What they're gaining is an enhanced ability to ban externals from posting.
Yeah, here it is. "Keep those fuzzy foreigners out of our discussions!".
For the sake of discussion, let's assume that banning and/or jailing "Those People" is a reasonable thing to want to do. [0] The problem with this is that once you deploy and normalize this sort of "social technology", it always, always creeps further. Today it's "dangerous foreigners" with their "subversive ideologies". Five, ten years from now, it's whoever is the equivalent of today's LGBT&etc underclass.
[0] It's absolutely not. The remedy for bad speech is more speech. The remedy for falsehood is truth. The remedy for invalid attempts to sow discontent is to show how those attempts are not grounded in fact.
> Sure. And the outpouring of support for ratification of OOXML as an ISO standard wasn't motivated by Microsoft. Nor was the large influx of new "P" members who arrived just in time to vote to adopt OOXML. Absolutely.
Yes - Meta is most definitely taking advantage of the situation, but it’s surfing the waves, not generating them.
> [0] It's absolutely not. The remedy for bad speech is more speech. The remedy for falsehood is truth. The remedy for invalid attempts to sow discontent is to show how those attempts are not grounded in fact.
I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this defense (more speech) has been defeated.
We (humanity) have developed attacks that avoid these defenses. Our defenses were primarily against government control of data. The current attacks leverage the mechanized production of speech, and achieve influence via an abundance of content.
Between attention seeking algorithms, the death of classifieds and the revenue sources for independent journalism, the creation of party+media entities, and actual foreign influence operations - theres a surfeit of content traps to catch voters up. “Flood the zone”, so to speak.
It’s very similar to the sub prime mortgage/ NINJA loan scenario: On the one hand you have professional teams / media market makers which specialize in figuring out content that works. On the other side you have the average joe who is entering the marketplace with their wits and experience.
This iteration of the market place of ideas result in unfair fights between the average person, and whichever entity decides they have the money to spend.
> ...this defense (more speech) has been defeated.
Very loud incorrect buzzer
The minute humans gathered into groups larger than one could talk in-depth to in a week -let alone a year- we've had the "too much information" problem. So, we've had that problem for hundreds or thousands of years. It's nothing new.
Censorious authoritarians want to convince people that it's new and that the best solution is (obviously) to curtail free speech and association, but that's also nothing new.
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