It has reached the level of moral panic, so it’s the current topic everywhere.
Even on Hacker News, threads about children and social media or short form video will draw a lot of comments supporting harsh age restrictions, including an alarming number of extremist comments in favor banning under-18s from using the internet or phones.
It’s not until the discussion turns to implantation details that the sentiment swings firm negative. The average comment in favor of age restrictions hasn’t thought through what it would mean, they only assume that some mechanism will exist that only impacts children and/or sites they don’t care about.
As soon as the implantation details come out and everyone realizes that you can’t restrict children without first verifying everyone’s age or that “social media” includes Discord and other services they use, the outrage starts.
We’re now entering the phases where everyone realizes that these calls to action have consequences for everyone because there is no easy solution that automatically only impacts children.
> threads about children and social media or short form video will draw a lot of comments supporting harsh age restrictions
I think there should be age restrictions. I prefer to do it in a privacy-preserving way. But I’m also not happy about conditioning the former on the existence of the latter.
Outside of better parental controls and restricting accounts based on self declared age, there isn't a way to perform age verification anonymously or privately.
> isn't a way to perform age verification anonymously or privately
Totally, no. Better than having users upload IDs with no use restrictions on the social-media companies? Yes. The harms justify, in my opinion and the opinion of lots of Americans (and importantly, those able and willing to call their electeds), a little bit of privacy encroachment for using a totally-voluntary product.
One component is to stop building tools that exploit impressionable minds.
They exploit all minds. But adults can make that choice responsibly. Kids cannot. We age gate alcohol and cigarettes. Social media is no different.
Thank you for saying this. I've been similarly baffled.
The call to ban children from social media seemed like it was coming loudest from tech people - like HN users.
How did they think this was going to work?
There is no shortage of reactionary "tech people". They likely didn't think a bit about how this would work. Just ban kids from social media to protect the kids! And then their line of thought stops there. At the same time you've got people on HN asking for better parental controls. And when state governments push for exactly that, parental controls that still preserve individual privacy, everyone loses their fucking minds. Your operating system reporting an age range that you define so apps and websites can filter content appropriately is not a privacy violation. It's literally what people have been asking for. But this community wants to protect children from the internet and "dangers of social media" and also refuses to build any mechanism that distinguishes children from adults that don't violate privacy.
> the discussion turns to implantation details
Do not try and derail this thread with facts about vaccines!