- Let's limit children's use of social media and screens.
- Great! Let's do it.
- We need to identify who is 18+, so here's your digital ID for everything. And, from now on, if you ever criticize the government you will lose your bank account and your job.
- WTF!
- That "WTF" just cost you 100 social credits.
UK, EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and next USA. It's amazing how coordinated it is. They are using dog-whistles like CSAM, immigration, crime, and now children's wellbeing.
It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state. Check out what teachers have to say about the attention span of the current generation pupils. But no, your access to whatever it is you're addicted to is more important.
Anyway, the government can already take away your bank account. No need for them to introduce such a complex scheme.
> It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state.
Agree. A simple solution would be to regulate social media by forcing a maximum time per user per day or banning it altogether. But that's clearly not the agenda. (same with all the other dog-whistles).
> Anyway, the government can already take away your bank account. No need for them to introduce such a complex scheme.
But currently they can't match anonymous social media profiles to IDs or bank accounts. This is why they want a mandatory "Digital ID" for social media.
The fact that this discussion seems to revolving around a single axis of limiting social media time and mandatory identification is such a farce.
When I was growing up, I had very limited access to real life social spaces that I actually enjoyed participating in. Online communities were my respite, the light in the darkness that honestly kept me alive until I managed to make it to college. If there was an overbearing nanny state preventing me from knowing that there was a better life waiting for me after grade school, I'm not sure I would've bothered to stick around until then.
That said, most of modern social media isn't the same as the online communities I and many others grew up on. It's a free for all with very thin walls between social spaces, almost no human oversight, and run by the most despicable and immoral people on God's green earth. So I am inclined to agree with the people who say that kind of social media is a bad influence and should be curtailed.
But even today, that isn't everything that's on the internet these days. Discord especially has quietly become the socialization hub of most of the younger folks I know of, and a large part of that is because it allows the creation of private, invite-only groups moderated by actual people. As far as I'm concerned, the Internet needs more Discords and fewer Twitters and Instagrams. There shouldn't be an arbitrary limit on socialization, but socializing should be...social, not some weird performance art done in front of the entire internet.
> When I was growing up, I had very limited access to real life social spaces that I actually enjoyed participating in. Online communities were my respite, the light in the darkness that honestly kept me alive until I managed to make it to college. If there was an overbearing nanny state preventing me from knowing that there was a better life waiting for me after grade school, I'm not sure I would've bothered to stick around until then.
This is indeed a problem. Especially when growing up in a small town you can get stuck in a monoculture where people all have the same interests (I think in the US that's often sports and religion I think, in my case it was a bit different). I have zero interests in any of those and I don't do pretend. So I never fit in well either.
I also started looking for online places and started embracing being different. It wasn't easy but it did shape who I am. I'm still very much in alt cultures now.
These days I live in big cities where it's much easier to find groups to fit me than to try and fit in to whatever monoculture exists.
>It's a free for all with very thin walls between social spaces, almost no human oversight, and run by the most despicable and immoral people on God's green earth. So I am inclined to agree with the people who say that kind of social media is a bad influence and should be curtailed.
It was the same in the past. The difference is that the house odds were different. You didn't have algorithms cramming the worst of the worst down your feed, forums, IRC, message boards and the like weren't built with the goal of maximizing engagement. Heck, even vote based communities which inevitably turn into low common denominator groupthink producing cesspits are mild compared to modern stuff.
Frankly, the law should be "you can sue social media if you can link their service to a problem with you'r child's mental health"
then let the courts decide. they'll clean up their act pretty quick when lawsuits come pouring in, and it removes the central govt's role in USER ID's and other 1984 schemes.
> Frankly, the law should be "you can sue social media if you can link their service to a problem with you'r child's mental health"
So you want to make it legally viable for religious parents to sue social spaces that allow for their children to question the religion of their parents? That's totally something that I could picture happening under such a regime. And that's ultimately indicative of a larger conundrum we face as a society.
The fact that as a society we seem to favor giving parents the ability to make their children in their own image, over giving their children the leeway to figure out who they truly are outside of their parent's guidance. And that's a truly difficult line to tack. Sometimes the parents are 100% right and the children would self-destruct under their own supervision. Other times, the children are being abused and tortured for not following the whims of their selfish parents.
I was lucky, all things considered. My parents were well meaning, just extremely overbearing and micro-managing. Some of the outright abuse that some of my acquaintances describe undergoing would make y'all sick if repeated here. I don't know if there's any solution, but I'm not sure giving helicopter parents more leverage against social spaces is the right play.
> So you want to make it legally viable for religious parents to sue social spaces that allow for their children to question the religion of their parents?
Why not. In a court of law, and facts, such lawsuits would only serve to highlight that religion is not a real thing. That would be a good thing for the world.
Great example of what "hapless enabler" looks like.
We all agree there's a problem. But simply letting the .gov do whatever it finds convenient will likely not solve the problem any better than any other option, and will likely make a whole bunch of other things way worse.
But that's fine because it's for the children, right?
Facebook knew for years its social media was hurting the mental health of teenagers, and not only they doubled down on it because it makes money, they will also face zero consequences.
>It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state.
It's not though. That's just the popular meme among easily influenced and excitable social groups (like parents). It's not reflective of reality. The idea that mobile devices are somehow damaging to mental state is not supported by scientific studies. Nor is the idea that online discussion forums and markets are.
What is dangerous is mis-using medical terms like "addiction" in apparently an intended medical context. When you start throwing around words like addiction governments get really excited about their ability to use force and start hurting and imprisoning people. Even murdering them. Multi-media screens are not addictive. There is no evidence supporting such assertions in reputable scientific journals.
> the term of problematic use characterizes individuals who experience addiction-like symptoms as a result of their social media use. Problematic social media use reflects a non–substance related disorder by which detrimental effects occur as a result of preoccupation and compulsion to excessively engage in social media platforms despite negative consequences.
This study is taking "problematic social media use" as it's implicit given and then from this arbitrary base it is then saying this small subset of problematic people experience depression because of the fiat declaration of "problematic".
But then it goes on,
>While there exists no official diagnostic term or measurement, Andreassen et al [17] developed the Facebook Addiction Scale, which measures features of substance use disorder such as salience, tolerance, preoccupation, impaired role performance, loss of control, and withdrawal, to systematically score problematic Facebook use.
This is not real science. This is anti-facebook political manipulation via science sounding words. I'm plenty anti-facebook myself but I am very pro-science so it's sad to see this successfully masquerading as real science.
By link you mean correlate, which doesn't mean anything.
Social studies are useless anyway. Academic social studies are so biased that anything they say on the matter should be discarded. They will always produce "evidence" on demand for whatever the left want to do.
Social media should be left alone. Parents who want to can block it on their children's devices. There's nothing more that needs to be done.
I don’t think this is obvious - I have kids and this is a constant battle. If you take the devices away they are along and isolated and it’s so much worse.
Some schools have these rules, but unless they are practically enforced, kids get around it.
I worry these laws will result in the worse of both worlds.
We need really well moderated forums for kids, along with practical bans for everything else.
I'm 52 and I'm alone and isolated, so age has very little to do with any of it. There is no reason to pass laws to solve what technology caused and technology will undo or we will go extinct and it won't even matter anyways.
When I was a teenager (that was a while ago) the addiction and social dangers where different, my mother (she raised us almost by herself alone) never “forbid” me to anything, just explained us what was what and what could be the consequences. Do not expect the government do the parenting, be a good strong and loving parent and trust your kids.
I've read that after elementary school parents have an incredibly small impact on their children's development, peers and their environment (which includes virtual one), has virtually all of the impact on your children's development.
Parents can still confiscate their children's belongings even if the child bought them. Imagine a child buys large speakers and puts them on blast with windows open in the middle of the night. Doesn't matter if the child bought them on their own, the parent should still be able to confiscate them.
Cellphone service providers will most likely be unwilling to start a contract with a child, so the child can't get a SIM on their own. Also if the parent wants to make sure that the SIM card they get can't be used with another phone than the one they provided, they can get an eSIM.
The child is also not going to have access to their home wifi unless their parents provide the password. That network is also totally in their control. They can setup a firewall.
School networks should also have firewalls, if they even provide wifi to the students which arguably they shouldn't.
The only remaining way to get internet access is through open networks on restaurants, etc.
If the child is old enough to be hanging around outside like that though, they're likely old enough for social media, I think.
Is "no contract" to be taken super-literally? Do they not ask to sign a terms-and-conditions document at least? or ask for ID at least to ensure you're a resident of the jurisdiction? I always thought "no contract" was just a term of the trade to mean "no post-payment contract". I'm skeptical they're willing to have anonymous users.
> Do they not ask to sign a terms-and-conditions document at least?
Not when I got one (… two … no, three…). No idea what current rules are, may have changed, but back when I lived in the UK you'd find stacks of SIMs on supermarket shelves for £0.99 each, no questions asked. Topping them up was also no questions asked.
It's possible there was a tickbox somewhere for "you agree to the T&Cs", that's the kind of thing that I'd not even remember, but no actual signature was needed.
Germany (where I live now) needs a proof of ID to register a SIM, so did Kenya when I visited, but the UK hadn't done anything like that by the time I left the country.
My parents gave me really shitty smartphones that were barely powerful enough to do important things but was an awful experience for Instagram/games/etc until I bought a better one with my own money (similar specs to Pinephone Pro)
No luck necessary. Not like you need permission from your child to deny them things.
You can get a dumb phone since having a phone (not necessarily smart) is a good idea. There's also parental controls on at least Android smartphones that let you control the apps and sites they get access to.
How so? Parents and schools can collectively decide to take away the smartphones of preschoolers if keeping them safe and focused was the main priority. Like how else is a preschooler gonna get a smartphone without adult money and support? Last time I checked preschoolers can't open a checking account and a credit card.
This bs of government forcing everyone in the country to have to doxx themselves just so preschoolers can't access social media(which they will anyway since rebellious children are very resourceful on cheating the system made by tech illiterate adults), is like if prehistoric humanity were to stop using fire just because the village idiot burned his house down.
If only there were some kind of collective larger than a family or a school that could decide to take away social media from impressionable children...
Yes, and how would the government ban social media apps from preschoolers without forcing everyone to doxx themselves to prove age?
Your sarcastic jab doesn't add any new questions or answers to this very important issue, since everyone can agree social media is bad for kids, but also we don't want to lose internet anonymity just because schools and parents can't raise kids without giving them a smartphone in hand since birth.
They've already done it, mate. You can go read about the Australian law. They are putting the burden of proof on the tech companies: "You have heaps of data on your users, you know who are young teens because you target them for marketing. Ban underage kids or we fine you."
Let's suppose the cause really is as simple as "parents can't be bothered to parent". By default, this will continue to be the case. And realistically we're not going to fix it by telling bad parents to please start being good parents. So what do you actually want to do? I'm not saying it's this or nothing, but if you don't have an alternative policy that might actually help, I don't take much comfort in the idea that the kids who are damaged will have _parents_ who totally deserved it.
There are some alternative policies, for example, banning smartphones in schools. This doesn't completely solve the problem, of course, but at least it limits social media use while the children are under direct supervision of the government.
A more extreme policy would be to treat smartphones themselves the same way we treat alcohol and cigarettes, enforcing an age minimum at the point of purchase. Of course the giant tech corporations would fly into rage over this suggestion and lobby heavily against it.
If it were bloody obvious the government wouldn't need to be involved, parents would find a way to get their children off social media. And there are much gentler solutions than a ban that should be explored first (like letting households volunteer themselves to be IP-banned by social networks, for example).
> parents would find a way to get their children off social media.
They wouldn't have a clue. Hell, I personally had this addiction for a long time and it just takes too long to see what a horrible experience it is in the long term. You can argue you should be able to do whatever you want at any age, I'm not the person to say anything about that.
But I totally agree that, as other comments point out, they use it as a justification for all sort of surveillance, I don't really think it is necessary to go that hard because whoever want to get access, they will. It's the internet after all.
the largest companies in the world have their core profit motive tied to getting you to engage in social media.
asking households to voluntarily leave is like asking people not to get fat -- ain't gonna work, esp. when mega corporations want you to consume consume consume.
it needs to be a law, and it needs to be enforced.
Are you suggesting we ban people from eating excessive amounts of food? Because you've drawn a parallel and I quite like how we treat food - people can just eat too much if they want to and people tell them not to get fat when they complain that it has negative consequences.
It's why we see so many infants getting caught for DUIs. Seriously? You seem to be implying that there's no justification/efficacy for any law/ban prohibiting children from engaging in adult activities. That's... something.
It's much easier to say to a child "you can't have a social media account, it's the law because experts have determined it's not healthy at your age" than "your mother and I think that social media is bad for you".
A true observation, but not sufficient to criminalize and infringe on basically everybody else.
There are all sorts of things that would be easier for parents to prohibit if the government made it illegal: Popular toys, M&M's, pork, anything that questions the bible...
> And, from now on, if you ever criticize the government you will lose your bank account and your job.
We could have a real conversation about tradeoffs (and maybe this one isn't worth it!) but not if you just assume/pretend the worst-case scenario is real. I'm Australian and I'll happily bet that N years from now I'll still be able to criticize the government without being debanked or sacked.
If we do ever fall to authoritarianism, I doubt this will have been a crucial step; it's already easy for the government to deanonymize most posters if it wants to, and an evil future government that wanted to go further could probably just... do it, regardless of precedent.
> but not if you just assume/pretend the worst-case scenario is real
Just want to point out that Canada weaponised war time powers to debank truckers protesting during COVID. The rubicon has already been crossed. While I didn't support their cause, the writing is on the wall about what governments want to be able to do to people it finds inconvenient.
Police in the UK continue to arrest people for online posts that are reported as threatening, harassing, or grossly offensive.
Cases are commonly brought under communications and public order laws, including offenses tied to harassment, malicious communications, and hate incidents.
There's a lot I don't like about the UK (enough that I left the country), but these things are not "criticising the government".
Closest the UK got, in recent years, to people getting punished specifically for criticising the government was that Mock the Week got cancelled. But not, say, Have I Got News For You, which has spent its entire existence doing nothing but.
Governments never give up power. They will only take more. So considerations on what power should be given over should be done carefully instead of having knee jerk reactions based on "think of the children".
It's my impression that the shift from 'basically normal government' to 'authoritarian nightmare', when it happens, tends to happen quite abruptly rather than via the ratchet effect/frog-boiling.
And there seem to be plenty of examples of democracies that have remained basically normal despite decades' worth of policies that libertarian-leaning observers would decry as the thin end of the wedge. I'm open to being convinced that the risk of a policy like this clearly outweighs its benefits, but I think I need a specific causal pathway and/or historical precedent rather than general arguments.
The US is kind of an obvious example of this ratchet effect. The powers that have been given to the executive over the course of decades and consistent moving to the right for decades has led us to where we are now. Similar cases in Russia and China where more power is handed over to a centralized leadership role over time.
I'm not a libertarian or follow the thin end of the wedge belief system. It's a simple observation that governments operate under the idea of growth of power. That is not to say an absence of government or reduction of government is good or better. But to recognize our role in maintain the social contract with the government. Abdicating that role entirely does not improve your life.
The only benefit of this legislation is that VPN's will get a bump in revenue, the web becomes more unusable and critical information gets stored at third parties who become high value targets for hacking. Not to mention these data brokers can easily turn around and begin to monetize this data. I'm not a privacy nut by any measure, but this seems like the most obvious major hit to personal data privacy. Instead of addressing the problem that is being claimed to be resolved, it's just lining another corporations pockets who will sell your data. We've seen this story play out many many times already. but you think this time will be different? I don't think so.
The harm from unaccountable governments who treat their constitutions like suggestions is far greater still, though. It's not about the guns, it's about the list. If you're an American who's not outraged by Emanuel's statement -- on guns or on social media for that matter -- it's because you feel privilege that you may not actually possess.
On that subject, it's certainly a strange time to argue for government's role as the holder of a monopoly on the tools of violence, isn't it? The human consequences of this misguided philosophy ran well into eight figures in the 20th century alone.
In any case... say what you will about the US, we won't shoot you at the border for trying to leave.
> On that subject, it's certainly a strange time to argue for government's role as the holder of a monopoly on the tools of violence, isn't it? The human consequences of this misguided philosophy ran well into eight figures in the 20th century alone.
Sounds like you think the argument people are making is that it ought to have the monopoly?
I think the argument is that whoever doesn't have that monopoly, can't call themselves a government… at least not for very long. Reason being, not having a monopoly necessarily requires someone else is doing violence and cannot be stopped by the so-called government, which means the so-called government is weak and at risk of being taken over, perhaps by the people doing the violence, perhaps by a outside "peacekeeping" force.
It's OK for the government to have the best guns, and in fact (as you suggest) that state of affairs is pretty much unavoidable for any government worthy of the name.
It's not OK for the government to have all the guns.
Given that, it's necessary to consider who should have legal access to guns and who should not.
What we call the "No-fly list" is an abhorrently-wrong way to do that.
Maybe because everyone knows violent uprising should be a last resort and things aren't bad enough to condemn millions to stravation and death yet.
Unless you are saying you personally would join a US uprising, asking why armed people haven't yet started one yet themselves isn't a compelling arguement to disarm them. If people were shooting back I think you and most others would be condemning them.
I'm saying Trump isn't even afraid of an uprising.
That's not a condemnation of the people failing to replicate the Jan 6 thing while switching red flags for blue ones.
I'm saying the freedom to have guns didn't do the thing that people say it does.
I would go further: I also don't think private arms would work if y'all did start firing them, because who wins a civil war is more likely to depend who the military supports than private firearms, and if the military aren't the deciding factor for whatever reason (internal split within the military?) then it's down to whoever outside the country is supplying weapons/logistics to which side (so, probably China?)
We aren't talking about a civil war though, we are talking about a civil uprising. Trump didn't take the government by force or strongarm politicians into compliance, they mostly went along with all this bullshit too. People already had the view that federal politicians as a whole were corrupt and self-serving and have been failing to effectively govern and legislate in the country's favor for decades. I also doubt any or enough of them would be willing to take up arms themselves and become a factional leader. Nobody is going to rally behind Kamala or some geriatric or the democratic party even if they were willing to try.
And in an insurgency type situation private arms/small arms are extremely effective, if costly with lives. The US failing to subdue multiple countries long term despite having a tiny fraction the amount of small arms, veterans, or people directly involved in US logistics operations, is all the proof we need. Nobody wants that, it would be horrendous and bloody, but tanks and planes don't run off mere hopes and dreams and the US citizenry is more heavily armed by multiple factors than any other country or people in history.
The other thing that private arms buys you is international support. If you show that you can make the most of limited offensive capabilities, you attract allies whose interests are aligned to your own, as seen from the American Revolution to modern-day Ukraine.
If you disarm and roll over meekly, nobody is going to want to help you.
And if you know anything about Rahm Emanuel's background, you'd think he'd be the one waving this particular banner, but... (shrug)
> In any case... say what you will about the US, we won't shoot you at the border for trying to leave.
How does this alleged virtue square away with everything else that's going on?
There ara bunch of murdered Venezuelan fishermen right now that never came even remotely close to the border, let alone transiting it in either direction.
"Say what you will about zombies eating your brains, at least they won't eat your eyes."
I don't have the solution. But it seems like a problem which needs to be addressed and regulation isn't a crazy place to look. As a parent, it feels like I'm constantly battling with Meta, Tiktok and Google over my childrens' development and we have very different goals.
Lack of something like SSO and centrally-managed permissions for families is a huge pain in the ass.
Minecraft is notably insane due to this. I don’t know how normies get their kids playing online with it (ours is locked down to just-with-friends, and we gatekeep the friend list), I thought it was hard as a techie. Cross-platform play (outside of X-Box, I suppose) requires creating and carefully-massaging permissions on two overlapping but unrelated systems, both the account on the console itself and a Microsoft account (and their UI for managing this is, in modern Microsoft fashion, entirely nutty). Then, if anything goes wrong, the error messages are careful never to tell you which account’s settings blocked an action, so you get to guess. Fun!
(Getting “classic” Java Minecraft working, just with a local server, was even harder)
Your options are to go all-in on one or two ecosystems; to take on just a fuckload of work getting it all set up nicely and maintaining that with a half-dozen accounts per kid or whatever; or to give up.
Then schools send chromebooks home with less-restrictive settings than I’d use if I were managing it and no way for me to tighten those, and a kid stays up all night playing shovelware free Web games before we realize we need to account for those devices before bed time. Thanks for the extra work, assholes.
sso for the family :mindblown:. Tie this in with a real ID validation tool, and then integrating systems only know "is/is not allowed" and the parents can mind all the kid's stuff.
iPhones have excellent parental controls (by the abysmal standards of consumer software more broadly). You can just not allow insta and such, or set time limits on them per-day (30 minutes, say). I assume Android has something similar. You can set the Web to allowlist-only. Kids can send requests to bypass limits, sends the request right to your own Apple devices, easy to yay or nay it. It’s damn good.
If those work, sure, although kids tend to be pretty clever about getting around parental controls and are sometimes quite a bit more technically sophisticated than their parents.
It ain’t the ‘90s and this ain’t Windows 95 with bypassable-by-accident OS account logins and half-assed website blocking made by the lowest bidder. Getting past app installation restrictions and time limits on iOS would be… challenging.
It sucks as a parent because you get this from both ends: “parent better! (Putting in tons of work that our parents didn’t have to)” and also “lol what are you doing restricting kids on computers is impossible, give up you idiot”.
(And on some platforms it is, for practical purposes, impossible—looking at you, Linux, not just because it’s a powerful open platform but because its permissions and capabilities system is decades behind the state-of-the-art and tools for sensibly managing any of that on a scale smaller than “fleet of servers” and in the context of user-session applications are nonexistent)
> It sucks as a parent because you get this from both ends: “parent better! (Putting in tons of work that our parents didn’t have to)” and also “lol what are you doing restricting kids on computers is impossible, give up you idiot”.
I didn't claim that it's impossible, merely that it's difficult sometimes, as you also implied ("putting in tons of work"). The advantage of physically consfiscating phones is that it's a low tech, brute force method available even to the least technically sophisticated parents.
To that extent can't kids just pop in a live USB and get a totally ephemeral and open os?
I'd push the implementation to the router and force root certs on devices and have all clients run through your proxy or drop the packets. That way even live usbs will not get network access. Have some separate, hugely locked down network for kids' friends.
Maybe put a separate honeypot network up with some iot devices on it with wifi and a weak password, and let the kids have some freedom once they figure out how to deauth and grab the bash upon reconnections.
Idk. I'm some years away from this problem myself,but someone recommended this in another thread recently.
> To that extent can't kids just pop in a live USB and get a totally ephemeral and open os?
That's a lot more difficult if you leave secureboot enabled on the computer. Plus, most devices, especially newer ones, allow you to pin your own certificates and sometimes even disable the OEM certs.
That, in addition with locking the BIOS with a password (and if the device does not have known OEM override passwords like on bios-pw.org), should be more than enough to keep a kid out.
I'm not sure if you're asking as a parent or an observer of parents. But it's not such a clear option given how entrenched we've made devices into children's lives.
My son's cross country team communicates via GroupMe and it's very difficult for him to stay up-to-date with the web version from a laptop. My daughter's friend group communicates via snapchat.
This doesn't mean parents have to allow everything. My daughter doesn't have Snapchat, for example. But there are definite tradeoffs like her being left out of many conversations and slowly getting excluded from friend groups as a result.
It's too much unnecessary complexity added to parenting and the motivation being profit by mega corps is why I suggest regulation is a valid place to start looking.
> I'm not sure if you're asking as a parent or an observer of parents. But it's not such a clear option given how entrenched we've made devices into children's lives.
It doesn't have to be a 24 hour a day ban. A kid could be limited to an hour a day or phone use or something like that.
> It's too much unnecessary complexity added to parenting and the motivation being profit by mega corps is why I suggest regulation is a valid place to start looking.
The inevitable result would seem to be that all adults, parents or not, would be forced to present their identification online to use the internet. I think that's too much personal freedom to sacrifice, regardless of how noble the goal.
Limits help, for sure. But it's like setting limits for addictive products like "one cigarette a day". It's better than a pack a day but the impact addictive products have on kids don't stop once their limit is up.
> I think that's too much personal freedom to sacrifice
That's why I started by saying I don't have the solution. Regulation and fines for companies that target kids feels plausible. While not exactly the same, we curbed teen cigarette use by imposing marketing restrictions and issuing fines to tobacco companies (and drastically reduced adult smoking too for that matter).
That may sound nice offhand but blanket bans like that on things that have widespread appeal have never been helpful because eventually you gotta start arresting people, and likely a lot of people, in which case the solution ends up far more harmful than the problem.
That would have severe economical impact, so nobody dares to go there which is why all these salami tactic solutions are being thrown around. Personally, I think your suggestion has merit, since we can observe that not only children's mental health is severely impacted. Another advantage I see with this is that clear lines allow for clear enforcement that would then get a lot less expensive. I mean, the overabundance of malicious ads should also go into this pot. Another idea would be to put social media companies under strict rules and compel them to install human moderators to enforce them, think dang or tomhow.
Edit: it works on HN (rule wise and moderation wise), so it could work on other platforms, too. Of course that would be expensive for the companies, but frankly, the companies are causing the current upset, so why not place the cost with the ones causing it instead of impacting everyone and even socialising the fallout like lawsuits.
That has nothing to do with online identification. Do you believe that those operating a vehicle that can easily kill people shouldn't require registration to prevent this from happening again?
Also, that a was few dozen truckers who were actively blocking major highways, and the banking ban lasted less than a week for most people. Several orders of magnitude more people get arbitrarily unbanked for less. I had a credit card and bank account permanently banned while traveling and they refused to give me an explanation.
If your making the slippery slope argument sure I can agree there is a risk.
However its saying digital validation for federal benefits - I mean given the amount of fraud in the US social security system of recent years it seems like having some kind of protection is important to not waste our tax payers benefit. And if you cross the border you are immediately in a digital system in the US.
That said this isn't saying digital identity for websites similar to what AUS is proposing.
An an Australian, the social media ban legislation specifically requires than non-ID methods be available (it specifically says that also included digital ID).
We like to pretend that this is something new. Before free porn on the internet, what did people do?
- They bought porn from stores (no anonymity)
- They rented porn from hotel rooms
- They paid for it on pay per view channels (how many kids growing up in the 90s remember watching the fuzzy scrambled Spice channel and trying to make out a boob somewhere in the garbled picture?)
- They went to movie theaters for porn! I've never actually seen this but have read about it.
NONE of those actions are anonymous. They're even documented and associated with real identities.
If you're telling me that somehow adding some kind of verifiable age gates to things like porn (and social media) will lead to authoritarianism, we don't have to theorize. We ran this experiment already. And nobody had issues with it, realistically.
We're still running this experiment. If you try to watch an R rated movie in a theater, they will likely ask you for ID if you're clearly under 17. They used to do that to me growing up.
The current state of "Kids can access all this without any protection at any time" is abnormal. It's NOT normal.
We can all have a reasonable conversation here without always bringing in the authoritarianism boogeyman.
A store that asks for ID before letting someone buy a porn mag will have an employee check with their own eyes and then return the ID. By the time the person is out the door, any record of who they were is basically gone. The record is just in the fading short-term memory of the employee. If they turned right around that instant and went back into the building, they're basically as anonymous as they were the first time. If they interrogated everyone affiliated with the store, including the owner, nobody would know the home address of the person even though it was on the ID. The anonymity is even larger if you let a few days pass. Nobody will ever remember you for having bought that magazine or for having ever entered that store for that matter. They'll likely be different employees.
With online services, the identity would be tied to your account forever. A government would have the ability to review every passing comment you've made in your entire lifetime and know exactly who you are, who your family is, where you live, where you work, what your bank accounts are, etc.
As others have pointed, this is unfortunately already true, due to big data and analytics companies hoovering up everything.
So again, what changes in any fundamental way?
This is a tech forum. There are already standards that can be used to verify age without requiring a lot of extra info. (Already used by drivers licenses at TSA checkpoints, those are all standards).
There are ways to solve this without essentially saying “there is no alternative so let’s give nefarious companies access to our kids brains all the time”
Just because it's bad, doesn't mean it's fine if it gets way worse. There's a difference between individual platforms potentially selling data with aggregators maybe finding ways to fallibly join them together, and the government mandating using a standardized identifier between all of them such that platforms can't even choose to be privacy-respecting.
You can use pseudonyms on practically all social media. That's under threat.
> There are ways to solve this without essentially saying “there is no alternative so let’s give nefarious companies access to our kids brains all the time”
It's ultimately the parents' responsibility, and the parents willingly gave their children access. It's very easy to setup parental controls. It's very easy to get your child a dumb phone. It's very easy to confiscate technology that their child isn't using responsibly. Adults should know that peer pressure isn't reason enough to give their children more freedoms than they're able to responsibly handle.
If people want to tackle this on a societal level, we should be looking into what's causing parents to be so lax in their parenting.
Right, the practical privacy outcomes are dramatically different when the digital panopticon is up and running.
The expectation of privacy from random unaffiliated humans seeing me pass on the sidewalk is very different from being stalked by a drone swarm that follows me and whatever vehicle I'm in.
I would suggest that anyone who says modern social media isn't damaging to people in general, but particularly young people, either (a) has never used it; or (b) is being deliberately disingenuous.
From that point I would view social media essentially like alcohol.
As an adult you can choose to (ab)use it if you wish, but it's arguably the government's responsibility to protect children at large from social dangers like this.
It's absolutely a thing that people are asked to prove their age to buy alcohol, or even to enter a licensed venue that serves alcohol. I don't think I've ever heard anyone except underage teenagers complain about the invasion of privacy to hand over your ID for beer/etc.
Does the implementation around safe proof of age need work? Probably. Does that mean the whole thing is a not-so-subtle attempt to fire you for swearing?
I don't fucking think so mate.
People are already fired for saying stupid shit on social media, they're already debanked for being out-and-proud White Supremacists.
Given the current political situation in the USA and how it got there, if you have any illusions of a continuing democracy, you should be champing at the bit for anything which reduces social media use.
> It's absolutely a thing that people are asked to prove their age to buy alcohol, or even to enter a licensed venue that serves alcohol. I don't think I've ever heard anyone except underage teenagers complain about the invasion of privacy to hand over your ID for beer/etc.
If they reported verifying my ID to the government every time I bought a drink I would complain about invasion of privacy.
It's not really "amazing" at all, when you consider that the working class in those countries has finally woken up to the fact that their biggest present day issues, like housing unaffordability and low purchasing power, have been caused by the intentional fiscal policies of their governments over the last 30+ years, instead of the usual boogeymen (Xi Jinping, Putin, Covid, immigrants, etc).
And now after 20+ years of constantly vote hopping between left and right, hoping "this time it will be better than last time" but in practice it always ended up worse, the people are trying to hold them accountable for it, so the elite are switching tactics now that the ye olde reliable tactic of gaslighting the people doesn't work anymore.
If the carrot doesn't work anymore, time to move over to using the stick to keep the peasants in line.
When you put all the points on a graph and they form a line, what more "evidence" do you need?
Your request for evidence reminds me when the 3 telco operators in my country raised their prices simultaneously on the same day, and the nation's anti cartel watchdog said they found no evidence of price fixing lol
Just because the system is corrupt, incompetent or ineffective at finding evidence, doesn't mean there isn't collusion going on.
I lucked out in when I was born, I developed before social media existed and my college was a later addition to Facebook. I think it just doesn’t affect me in the same way… like someone who has never won a dollar gambling looks at a gambling addict. I’ve got tremendous empathy for the people that are addicted to it and I can’t imagine how corrosive it would have been to my teen years, so much as I revile the politics behind Rahm who believes nothing and will stick his finger in the wind every few minutes and go where it takes him, I’m glad this is the way the winds are blowing. Social Media should be regulated like alcohol and cigarettes and drugs. All addictive, all tuned to hit dopamine centers, all bad for our health in different ways.
I think playing a ton of games as a kid has helped me.
I walk through a casino and see all the flashing lights and sounds and like the casino screen is half as busy as an RTS. It's just not the same level of engagement; it's not overwhelming, it's just slow.
I feel the same way. In a sense, our parents had it easier in terms of the damage external world could do emotionally, because there was typically a simple way to prevent most of it. Now, it is not nearly as simple. Not to search very far, our kid has a media diet that some consider strict ( 30 minutes a day of pre-selected items if kid meets some criteria, which I still consider too high ). But then some kids already have cellphones, ipads ( some completely unlocked too ! ). I only recently gave my kid lappy with gcompris installed ( locked down lappy; no net access ). Point I am trying to make in my rambly way is that each parent is hodge podge of various choices. And it does not work in aggregate.
I get that it is all about balance, but it is hard to disagree with Rahm here. Top down ban is the only real way to go.
> Point I am trying to make in my rambly way is that each parent is hodge podge of various choices. And it does not work in aggregate.
On top of that, you have some of the biggest, most moneyed companies in the country spending billions of dollars to get kids and adults hooked. Even for parents with good intentions, it's not a fair fight.
Maybe I'm going off the deep end, but I sometimes think people that work at Facebook should be considered social pariahs. The amount of damage that company has done to our country and society is truly incalculable. It's really hard for me to forgive anyone who had any part in it.
How would we effectively regulate social media? Being the regulator could be a very powerful political tool and used to capture or maintain political power.
Regulating is already being done by the “private” companies that own them, heck it’s the plot of a bond movie (sub in newspapers for social media) with a real life Larry, Elon or Mark as the villain.
As a society we choose what to allow or not allow together, collectively, through politics (ideally) and when things damage our collective health we regulate or ban them. All regulations probably seem impossible before they happen. Australia regulated guns, China regulated social media, plenty of countries regulate alcohol, drugs, gambling. It’s all possible, just have to weigh the positives and negatives and find a balance, but the status quo is broken.
Deciding what we want as a society is fine. Vehemently disagreeing over what and how things should be regulated is fine too. In general, trying to do anything in good faith is more or less fine.
What is not fine is proposing to make regulations that purport to do things that are near-universally supported, but in reality further agendas that are widely opposed, agendas that work against the interests of the American people and would never pass otherwise.
That is very clearly what is happening here, and we know that because it happens all the time, using the same tried-and-true formula. In particular, anything claiming to "protect the children" is almost certainly an obfuscated attempt to erode civil rights protections like free speech or privacy, and should be treated with extreme prejudice.
*edit* Also, anything Rahm Emmanuel says, believe the exact opposite.
I agree with the sentiment, but the rights of Americans are being eroded at a comical rate with no positives like protecting children (be that an allusion to protecting them or actually doing it)
Look at the TikTok “ban” for example. Congress passed a law to ban it because they didn’t have control over what the population was seeing, specifically around the genocide in Gaza. Now US ownership has passed to Larry Ellison, a republican connected pro-Zionist that will make sure the objectionable content that shows Palestinian's suffering does not bubble up in the algorithm. Never mind that you see 10 year old girls practicing TikTok dances when they are standing in line, waiting for the bus, etc. That problem persists, and no one in leadership cares because now the right people are getting rich and censoring the actual content the rulers cared about.
I’m with you on Rahm, but I’m not going to let him trying to hook his wagon to a policy that I support ruin my support of it.
This is the exact policing we don't want government to do regardless of the age. In my opinion it's the responsibility of the parents to decide how to raise their children and teach them how to live and adapt in the age of social media and maintain a balance.
In the same sense one could argue that social media like Facebook or WhatsApp should be banned among older population because that's one of the major ways mis/fake information being spread among elderly people and now with AI videos they actually believe those fake stories to be 100% true as well. I think that's more risk to modern day democracy and well being of the society in general.
> This is the exact policing we don't want government to do regardless of the age. In my opinion it's the responsibility of the parents to decide how to raise their children and teach them how to live and adapt in the age of social media and maintain a balance.
It's complicated. I can decide how to raise my child when he's inside the house. But if when he goes into the world he's sorrounded by people addicted to their phones, what do you think it's going to happen?
The same way parents of previous generations dealt with it. Whether it was phones, tv's, drugs, etc. Helicopter parenting is not the solution and not an effective method to produce well adjusted adults. You have to equip children with the tools to respond to different scenarios. Not prevent from ever knowing other things exist.
A) Forbidding your children something does not equate to helicopter parenting. You're attacking someone else's position.
B) Forbidding your children something DOES WORK as long as that thing is not easily accessible. That's why we make certain things illegal to sell to children, so that their rate of usage is lower than otherwise.
Cigarettes (nicotine products) are easy to identify. What is social media? Why would I want to acquire and provide an ID just to comment on HN? In the case of social media, there is not a well enough defined product to ban.
Big tech has had decades to self-police, and I don’t believe for a second they didn’t know that at some point they would be forced to if they didn’t do so.
This is just the adults in the room drawing the line.
Stores don't require you to present an ID to enter them. They don't record that ID, add it to a pile of other data they've collected about you, and sell that information. In short, the privacy concerns are vastly different.
Furthermore, nicotine products are much more easily defined than social media, as another commenter points out.
That's the whole point then right? It's whole another policing and maintenance burden created to be funded by tax payers money without actually achieving anything useful at all.
Social media is not the same product as social networks. It had value when you were in control of what content you wanted to see (your friends' posts).
Now social media, controlled by algorithms, is just like a permanent informercial. You have direct ads and first level indirect adds (sponsored content), but it goes deeper than that, when they manage set up a "viral trend" you have a lot of people acting as speaker person for brands without even realizing.
Attention shapes who you will become in the future, because it focus on what matters to you. When you outsource that to others, they can mold you into what is more profitable to them. Specially kids, who are at the prime time for being influenced.
But it's not clear to me that the echo bubbles are not still there. I think the more important aspect is control. Who is making the decision is more important than echo bubbles are bad.
This is a good point. I completely relate to the statement that "social media is a plague on society." But you have a good point -- it's not so much the digitization of a social network as the algorithms that are hyper-optimized to steal attention and sell advertising. Maybe it's not the age that should be regulated, but the algorithm. Whether algorithm regulation should be age dependent is another question. Personally I don't think it should be age dependent. Or... Dear Social Media Companies, F your attention hijacking, skinnerbox advertising and engagement crack regardless of how old your victim is.
So let me this straight. I will need an ID to go on internet but not to vote. He even talked about how requiring ID makes thar certain people are trapped in vicious cycle.
This is the exact policing we don't want government to do - but it is to protect children. So I guess we will go with it.
He was also directly involved in the chicago police department's attempted coverup of the murder of laquan mcdonald. He is completely despicable, the idea that anyone is covering his policy ideas is fucking vile. He should be begging for prison.
These policies are so shortsighted. What about youth who are disabled? Socializing online can a huge benefit for them and allow them to connect with other people who they might never meet. What about LGBT youth who live in oppressive environments? Having a community that accepts them boosts their own self worth and reduces the risks of harm. What about any marginalized youth? They may be in a situation where they are one of the only people like them in the are and the internet allows them to find other people like them and give them peace about their own identity.
This push for age verification is just a thinly veiled attempt to unmask everyone on the internet to open them up to harm and prevent connections from being made.
They have a panel who are reviewing it’s effects across all aspects of teen life including sleep patterns, school grades ect and then nationally test results ect
“The regulator would need to assess whether platforms were taking reasonable steps. If they were not, it could take that platform to court to seek fines.
There would be an independent evaluation of the ban conducted by an academic advisory group examining the short-term, medium-term and longer-term impacts of the ban.
“It will look at the benefits over time, but also the unintended consequences,” Inman Grant said.
A 14-year-old boy looking at social media on his mobile phone. Tech giants Meta and TikTok said on October 28 they will obey Australia's under-16 social media ban but warned the landmark laws could prove difficult to enforce. Australia will from December 10 force social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to remove users under the age of 16. (Photo by David GRAY / AFP) (Photo by DAVID GRAY/AFP via Getty Images)
How is Australia’s social media ban affecting you and your family?
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“Everything from are they sleeping? Are they interacting or are they actually getting out on the sports fields? Are they reading books? Are they taking less medication like antidepressants? Are their Naplan scores improving over time?” Inman Grant said.”
Almost no laws are enacted with this in mind. The people doing it are neither scientists nor engineers and never suffer any consequences for failure of what most people will see as well meaning lawmaking. The idea that a law should be subject to quality control is not merely absent but also anathema.
On the question of whether to legislate the ban, I'm a no. On the question of whether parents should implement it, I'm a yes. My niece and her husband have a one year old that is allowed zero screen time. They are willing and able to forego the high tech baby sitting, and are talking about continuing until at least the pre-teens. I think that if they could go even further, say live for the next decade with the Amish, it would be even better.
If a kid was raised with his family in a dome where no technology later than 1900 were permitted (perhaps with an emergency medicine exception) and the kid wasn't released into the world until 13, I think on average they'd be mentally healthier and have a happier life.
That is extremely short-sighted to assume that because a few anecdotes on “how to parent” will fix the problem. I recommend you go out in public and observe the reality in various states and in various demographics and you’ll quickly see that the parents are just as addicted as the kids. They won’t know how to parent this away without legislation.
Just go into the classroom and witness children and their six-seveeen.
This is 100% like smoking except worse, because entire population of children are being deprived of their attention span. They just learn how to peddle useless products onto their peers without brain development to understand the consequence.
I feel the same way about a smoking. I'm opposed to both smoking and a ban on smoking. It's not because I don't think an effective ban would be healthful, but because I believe that the concentrated power needed for it is a greater danger. It's the same argument that I believe supports the first amendment: people saying evil shitty false things is a lesser evil than the power needed to stop them from saying them.
And suppose no one banned smoking, and smoking was still allowed on airplanes and most restaurants had smoking sections would we be better off? I’m sure all the people who died of throat cancer would tell you otherwise.
Your niece and her husband are one in a thousand parents. Very few have the fortitude to do it. Not a good outlook for the future if we depend on the virtue of parents.
I concur with this. I’d even be okay with government-sponsored PSAs about social media use as long as it’s based on sound research. But a ban is a hard no due to the First Amendment.
I don't see advertisements often, but I had to fly for work recently and of course saw advertisements in the airport. One of the ads was for "Teen Instagram" with "automatic protections." Kind of depressing. It's a bit like someone selling teen cigarettes, they're a bit more mild and you can graduate to "adult cigarettes" when you're ready. I'm not sure government banning is solution, but there's clearly no good done by the existence of social media. It's a strange problem, and ultimately the issue is that people just cannot regulate their behavior in this area.
> there's clearly no good done by the existence of social media.
If this were true, I’m sure that you wouldn’t have any trouble advocating that we ban it. Many of us remember social media before the algorithmic feed took over, and it was a good way to stay connected to friends and family. Some us also were lucky enough to experience a protracted period of socializing on the internet in the pre-social media days: MUDs, web forums, chat rooms, etc. I enjoyed all of those, in my teen and college years, and like you I count myself fortunate that I was not exposed to social media during a formative time of my life. I think that’s why I hesitate to say that we should outright ban it: I know that the internet _can_ coexist (and even augment) a healthy social life. That said, I don’t use social media at all anymore (unless you count HN), so I’ve definitely voted with my eyeballs.
- What we did on the Internet in the early 90s was not broadcast to our (real world) peers. If some big drama blew up online, we could escape it with the flip of a switch.
- Similarly, we could escape real world drama by shifting to our online relationships.
- Normal people were not online yet, so you didn't have all the normal real world structures of authority and popularity/hostility. Or, you had substitutes instead, because this is human nature, but they were not so universal and entrenched. It was an Internet of niches, and we could all find or create our own.
- There was no pervasive profitability goal in keeping our eyeballs on a particular platform, so today's dark pattern manipulation just didn't exist.
- It was separate. Not only did the Internet not bleed into real life (and v-v), but it wasn't always-available like today with smartphone ubiquity.
The Internet, back then, was a safe third space.
Today it's often a toxic hellscape, with some exceptional corners.
Very well put. The internet used to be an island of sanity from the real world. Now, most of it, is far worse than the real world. Pockets of excellence exist, but you're always just one impulse control failure away from stumbling into outrageous or addicting content.
When you start to think about that statement, and why it was written there, why a company chooses to pay $ to tell you this, you know that inherently something went REALLY wrong in the past.
And because it's a company, they're doing the bare minimum to fix it, as to minimize the impact on their bottom line.
It reminds me of the ads against a certain prop in CA, the one that would make app workers (?) employees.
Advertisements taken out by Lyft, Uber, etc, all to sway people.
When companies want you to do something it's not in your best interest. It's in theirs.
> there's clearly no good done by the existence of social media
Citation needed.
Look, I am greatly opposed to how US social media giants handle and monetize data, and I don’t like them having the level of control that they do. Antitrust is a great lever to use here, because concentration is the source of many problems. But banning what is in effect public social communications is a giant step over the First Amendment.
People can and do use social media to their benefit, whether it’s for political organizing, whistleblowing, mutual aid, OSINT, or gathering on the ground media and first hand accounts from active events (such as conflicts, protests, or police actions) that may never show up in the news. The professional media cannot be everywhere, and sometimes they will not cover certain events. That’s what social media is good for, despite its flaws.
Yes. My parents happily drench themselves in a neverending barrage of unhinged political commentary on YouTube and watch clips on Facebook without knowing they are AI generated. It is really horrifying.
I used to laugh about the idea of kid's voting rights. As I get older, I'm not so sure it's a bad idea. They're the ones who have to grow up in the world we're shaping. Maybe they should have a voice in how it's shaped.
And if anyone wants an idea of why, here's a clip from one of the best shows of all time, The West Wing
I Have Also Written Via Snail’s Courier To Make America Healthy Again That We USA Enact A Similar Ban But Also That We Should Start With The Adults Since The Children Seem More Mature Capable And Really Just Generally Cooler In On And Even Under The Internet
Ban social media and go a step further and ban mobile devices for children while we're at it. The generation of iPad babies is completely broken. I kept my kids away from that stuff religiously, but now these brain addled goblins are their peers.
It is unlikely that ID requirements for the internet would pass constitutional muster in the US. SCOTUS looks poorly on anything resembling a speech licensing regime.
Almost impossible to do, but I agree and have been saying that for decades.
Until recently I agreed with the age of 16, now I am starting to think they should be banned until they get an High School Diploma or equivalent, if no "diploma", then at the age of 21, they are allowed. Same as Drinking Age in the US.
The diploma requirement might decrease the dropout rate the the US.
This will never ever happen in the US because free speech is obviously more important than children's mental health. Allowing 14 YOs onto the Internet is but a mere side effect of the Constitution.
Culturally, this is the pivotal question of our generation. Both options are admittedly terrible, and as appealing as the parental rights argument may be... it hasn't been going well.
Remember this guy was chased out of chicago for trying to cover up the murder of Laquan McDonald by the CPD. Then, previously was famous for being Clinton's fixer in the Gennifer Flowers case. The fact that this man has any political career at all is an incredible indictment of our system.
When I was a youth I could get anything I wanted on the internet, even/especially things I wasn’t supposed to have.
I have no faith whatsoever that this ban would be effective, and further, evoking the perennial kiddy porn panic makes me extra suspicious of what the ‘real’ goal might be. You don’t tend to wring your hands and wail “won’t somebody please think of the children” unless you know you can’t make your case without the emotional appeal.
The effects are there for everyone to see. GenZ is depressed and can't hold a thought for more than a few seconds. No, it's not because of the housing or job market, it's the phones. Check e.g. Jonathan Haidt: https://jonathanhaidt.com/social-media/
And free speech: you don't need a mobile phone or tiktok to exercise that right.
Does the Democratic party actually have a platform capable of beating the incumbent Trump Republicans? Or is it just this kind of stuff? Ban kids from YouTube?
It's interesting, because quite a lot of the pornography ID laws are passed by Republicans and popular among Republicans. I don't mean this as a "both sides" sort of argument, but rather that modern tech seems to be unpopular among all constituents, even if different groups have their preferred villain.
I feel like those laws are different because they specifically target pornography, which is seen as an evangelical moral sin. They would prefer to ban it completely, but that most likely runs afoul of the Constitution. So their next best bet is just to try to limit it to over-18s.
Obviously the end result is the same, but I think the motivation is different.
> They would prefer to ban it completely, but that most likely runs afoul of the Constitution. So their next best bet is just to try to limit it to over-18s.
They dont care about constitution. And they are in position to reinterpret it however they want to, regardless of its text and meaning.
If that was actually true then states would have banned or blocked already. This is not a new issue and it has been challenged unsuccessfully many times.
Maybe. Most of the debate that I hear feels similar to social media commentary -- teen boys getting their brains fried by constant access to stimulus. I don't hear anything about onanism or sinning.
Mind you, I'm not saying they're right or wrong, but just that most of the arguments I hear are saying "we think this is an identifiable and secular harm."
depends on how or who you poll. I dont think it is popular. It's just that there's a lot of stigma when you try to argue against "saving the children" type policy - which is why this gets used to pass laws that otherwise would be difficult to pass if the true intentions were revealed.
The pitch of the centrist/“3rd way” wing that’s still, incredibly, ascendant even after the massive party shift on the other side that was teed up in the late ‘00s and realized in 2016, is basically “we’re just like Reagan but we like the gays and abortion a little more, and like guns a lot less”.
It’s a shit message, but they’re apparently permanently damaged by the 1980 landslide re-election loss to Reagan and incapable of moving on. IDK if liberal democracy will survive here long enough for us to see if another wing of the party can ever get those folks to let them try something else.
[edit] not for nothing, Obama lightly hinted at a move away from that in his campaigning (if not his governing) and it seemed to work pretty damn well. Why they didn’t double down on that is anyone’s guess, but I’d suppose it rhymes with “bobbying”.
1984, not 1980, FWIW, and the Democratic Party old guard had been pretty badly beaten up by the 1968 and 1972 conventions. Tip O'Neill was one of the last of that group to really hold power.
1980 was the famous almost-every-state-is-red presidential election map that scared democrats shitless and convinced (enough of) them the way forward was shifting much closer to Reagan on many issues (including, notably, joining the Republican neoliberal movement). But yeah it took an election cycle or two to stabilize after that.
[edit] I mean yes 1984's map was even worse, but 1980's was reeeeeal bad. Six states won in 1980, versus one in 1984. And we have a guy who won a pretty ordinary split of states and less than a majority of votes-cast calling his win in 2024 a "landslide", lol. No, Reagan's elections are what a landslide looks like.
[edit edit] I mean I don't really want to quibble over the details, it probably was the one-two punch of those that really set the direction and we seem to agree on the basics that it was Reagan's crushing electoral success that set the tone for Democrats for up until... well, still today, largely.
Trump won during a time where incumbents lost by ~10 points. He narrowly beat a candidate that lost their only primary run by <2 point.
Trump's very vocal minority is very good at making people think there is a silent majority.
However, the democrats have been elected quite a lot this millennium and they've fully shown they're incapable of making necessary reforms so there's going to keep being populist candidates until there's new blue blood.
That would require making positive, pragmatic suggestions that could improve the lives of the average person, rather than moralizing and kowtowing to the special interest groups and wealthy donors who have captured the party. Good luck with that.
As it is we now have two parties obsessed with “regulating” the morality of citizens while bleeding them out financially.
No, it would require overcoming a shameless demagogue and enablers who have no problem blatantly lying about everything to everyone.
Democracy has been known since its invention to be extremely vulnerable to such actors. It's vulnerable to it because it's nearly impossible to counter.
Your critique is valid to some degree, but Trump won simply because he had the shamelessness to lie over and over and over again that he'd bring prices down. That's it.
No "positive, pragmatic suggestions" are electorally stronger than simple untruths stated with confidence ad infinitum.
Good luck with that. This was the message of the consultant class in 2016 and 2024 and it’s why Dems lost both of those elections. Biden, for all his flaws, actually did attempt to articulate and focus on a positive message and actively reached out to struggling workers. And he won.
No, the message was that winning was about “overcoming a shameless demagogue and enablers who have no problem blatantly lying about everything to everyone,” plus shallow pandering to diversity, rather than delivering tangible benefits to Americans. In both 2016 and 2024 the Dem message to voters was that everything was fine, no radical economic change was needed, vote against orange man and all would be well. This was a losing position against a populist. Biden called on his long record of support for labor and proposed investing in American manufacturing, which was a winner in swing states especially since the economy was hurting due to the pandemic.
I said that there's no "pragmatic, positive message" that overcomes simply lying and having an entire media and political apparatus that supports it.
Biden's primary advantage was running against a guy who was demonstrably a complete shit show as an actual incumbent. That was memory-holed by the same shameless lying (e.g. ask Republicans who they think "locked people down" during COVID).
Biden (and Harris) then had a similar disadvantage going into 2024.
It's extremely, extremely silly to act like voters were looking for pragmatic messages lol. Simply no evidence for that.
They were primarily looking to get rid of the incumbent, as was the trend across all democracies during a period of extreme inflation.
That’s a common refrain, especially among the media (ironically, as they are blaming themselves) and the professional-managerial class, who seem to have a blind spot for labor needs. Voters facing hardship have agency and vote for who they believe is aligned with their needs. In 2020 Biden’s union support was key to his victory in the rust belt states, which carried him to victory. Harris didn’t have the same background and didn’t make a serious effort to reach those people, and lost a percentage of union votes at a time when the number of union voters actually increased. So she lost. But it’s true that inflation didn’t help.
One reason that incumbents are doing so poorly is that they promise nothing, and deliver it. Nations are in decline across the West, and all that candidates are allowed to offer is more of the same neoliberal pablum. Anyone who attempts to offer something different faces a coordinated attack from the media and incumbent political class, and the only ones seemingly able to break through the resistance are dishonest right-populists. The left has to come up with a solution other than dismantling (excuse me, “fortifying”) democracy, which appears to be the EU solution.
Can you tell me which Trump policies were pro-labor, pro-union, pragmatic, positive visions of the future?
There was none.
It turns out that actually you don't need pragmatic, positive visions of the future to win. In fact, we have plenty of evidence that pragmatic policies at all are a massive electoral liability when facing someone who is, again, willing to simply lie about everything.
In Trump, you have clear evidence that people do not need pragmatic solutions to anything. Somehow you are pulling from that the conclusion that Democrats are not pragmatic enough.
What makes you believe there is public appetite for pragmatic solutions? Enough to win a national election?
Trump does not offer real solutions, except as a sound bite in passing (to be later ignored). But in the absence of pragmatic policies that voters can get behind, the winner will always be the candidate who offers to tear down the system that has failed the people. Mark my words.
The reality is that sound bites have an intrinsic advantage over real solutions. Real solutions to complex problems are by their nature complex and uncertain (else the problem would've been solved already).
"Immigrants are the problem" or "I will bring prices down on day one" have a fundamental memetic advantage that, in a lazy and unengaged populace, will win in 100% of scenarios.
The real issue here is the GOP not holding themselves accountable to something better than suicidal demagoguery. The opposing party cannot prevent this from being successful. That's why it's a known, fundamental flaw of democracy.
Again: you haven't actually provided any evidence of what the 2016/2024 strategy was, why 2020 was different, etc.
You're doing the far lazier, "ascribe all failures to the thing I do not like, and all successes to the thing I do like." Evidence should be trivial to produce but you cannot.
And yes, a major faction electing a demagogue is a real spot of trouble. It has been known as such literally since the invention of democracy.
It wouldn't be considered a known vulnerability because it's solved by "well just talk about a pragmatic, positive vision for the future!" lmao
Evidence: I was there, do your own research if you care so much. This isn’t a formal debate, and anyone who has eyes, ears, and a brain can figure it out.
You keep shouting demagogue, demagogue! As if anyone outside of the political class cares. Solve the people’s problems or there will be more (and worse) demagogues. It’s your only option.
We don't disagree that that's my (as someone on the anti-Trump side) only reasonable option.
Where we disagree is your assertion that that is the necessary and sufficient solution.
Those are entirely distinct claims.
People have won elections for a long long time without pragmatic solutions to real problems (case in point: 2024). You have basically zero evidence this is even a relevant point in elections whatsoever.
The actual necessary solution is entirely on the GOP's side. So long as they're in the throes of a cult of personality, then a sufficiently large part of the electorate will be immune to logic.
And yes: this is very bad. It is a deeply inconvenient fact, but the inconvenience of it does not render it less factual.
I don’t know what to tell you if you require research to explain that the intended function of the government is to serve the needs of the people, that this is the right thing to do, and that voters will respond positively if it looks like you will make an honest effort to do this.
It sounds like you would rather claim a lack of agency (it’s all up to the big bad Republicans) rather than even attempt to implement a pragmatic, common sense strategy. And this is why the Democratic Party finds itself rudderless.
I don't know what to tell you if you don't think there's a divergence between what gets people put into power and what role they're supposed to play with that power. Again: we are currently living a live, empirical disproof of your position, as you have already acknowledged.
> It sounds like you would rather claim a lack of agency (it’s all up to the big bad Republicans) rather than even attempt to implement a pragmatic, common sense strategy. And this is why the Democratic Party finds itself rudderless.
Huh? No. It sounds like instead of reading the words in front of you, you're just arguing against the claims you want me to be making.
Harris was a terrible candidate, we don't disagree there.
Again: We disagree in your assertion that pragmatic policies on the oppositional side are all that's required to win against a demagogue.
If that's true, please tell me why demagogues have long been known to be a real vulnerability in democracies?
Answer directly: If that's all that's necessary, then why did the Founding Fathers even bother to write extensively on this problem?
> Again: We disagree in your assertion that pragmatic policies on the oppositional side are all that's required to win against a demagogue.
I never said that this is the only thing you need. You need other things as well, including a modicum of charisma, a good network on the ground, and solid fundraising to support the efforts. And a party that won’t fight its own candidate after the primaries (oh, and you should actually hold a primary).
Demagogues are a problem in every kind of government when the quality of governance declines. You just don’t often hear about it in dictatorships because the demagogues are either killed or they flee to another country. But demagogues are a sort of release valve for public frustration that’s grounded in material reality, and if you suppress their rise long enough then you eventually get a civil war, collapse, or revolution. The only solution is to fix the problems that lead people to seek out radical change.
Anyway, it’s clear we’re talking past each other, I have no desire to continue this thread further.
Yes, the global rise of fascism is a huge problem. Gleefully handing fascists more power over communications and a means of de-anonymizing access to information and communications is exactly what you don't want to do.
That's what this sudden movement is really about: maintaining bubbles of indoctrination to maintain the rightward slide of the Overton Window, and installing a permanent means of tying Internet activity to identity for monitoring.
It's important that things like the first amendment never be compromised precisely because that erosion becomes a tool of fascism. We're inches away from neo-McCarthyism, and this is the tool to enable it.
We should think about the consequences to everyone’s lives of having thugs cosplaying as soldiers running around disappearing innocent people off the streets because they’re brown.
They're literally federal law enforcement officers, not thugs. And they're not "disappearing" people because they're brown, they're deporting them to their homeland because they no one gave them permission to be in our country.
I'm sure you're used to this alarmist dramatic language working in your circles but it won't here.
We should think about the consequences of letting in tens of million of illegals instead.
The driving, smoking, and drinking laws are enforced outside the home. Everyone has to prove their age at the DMV to get a license and at commercial establishments to buy cigarettes and alcohol.
The only way to enforce the social media law age minimum is to force everyone to show their ID just to use the internet, even from their own home. That seems more Orwellian to me.
Social media is the smoking of our age, and it will come to be seen the same way we see smoking now.
Just like the tobacco companies, social media companies have known about the ills of their platforms for a long time and actively hidden it and/or publicly downplayed it.
No: It's more like leaded gasoline. People of the future will be like, "why would you let a big corporation control the feed algorithm?" Social media is fine. It's the algorithm that seeks addiction/engagement that's the problem. Not social media in general.
"Social media" is far too ambiguous anyway. For example, under most definitions, Steam is a social media platform. Yet no one is addicted to sharing things via Steam. But you can! You absolutely can share and browse people's posts, screenshots, videos, and even chat (text and voice)!
The reason why no one complains about Steam's social media features is that they're not designed to be addicting. That's not the point of the platform (it's to sell more games).
I don't believe this is done for the benefit of children/teens. What's much more likely is that politicians don't like people having news/information sources not beholden to them.
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UK, EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and next USA. It's amazing how coordinated it is. They are using dog-whistles like CSAM, immigration, crime, and now children's wellbeing.It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state. Check out what teachers have to say about the attention span of the current generation pupils. But no, your access to whatever it is you're addicted to is more important.
Anyway, the government can already take away your bank account. No need for them to introduce such a complex scheme.
> It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state.
Agree. A simple solution would be to regulate social media by forcing a maximum time per user per day or banning it altogether. But that's clearly not the agenda. (same with all the other dog-whistles).
> Anyway, the government can already take away your bank account. No need for them to introduce such a complex scheme.
But currently they can't match anonymous social media profiles to IDs or bank accounts. This is why they want a mandatory "Digital ID" for social media.
The fact that this discussion seems to revolving around a single axis of limiting social media time and mandatory identification is such a farce.
When I was growing up, I had very limited access to real life social spaces that I actually enjoyed participating in. Online communities were my respite, the light in the darkness that honestly kept me alive until I managed to make it to college. If there was an overbearing nanny state preventing me from knowing that there was a better life waiting for me after grade school, I'm not sure I would've bothered to stick around until then.
That said, most of modern social media isn't the same as the online communities I and many others grew up on. It's a free for all with very thin walls between social spaces, almost no human oversight, and run by the most despicable and immoral people on God's green earth. So I am inclined to agree with the people who say that kind of social media is a bad influence and should be curtailed.
But even today, that isn't everything that's on the internet these days. Discord especially has quietly become the socialization hub of most of the younger folks I know of, and a large part of that is because it allows the creation of private, invite-only groups moderated by actual people. As far as I'm concerned, the Internet needs more Discords and fewer Twitters and Instagrams. There shouldn't be an arbitrary limit on socialization, but socializing should be...social, not some weird performance art done in front of the entire internet.
> When I was growing up, I had very limited access to real life social spaces that I actually enjoyed participating in. Online communities were my respite, the light in the darkness that honestly kept me alive until I managed to make it to college. If there was an overbearing nanny state preventing me from knowing that there was a better life waiting for me after grade school, I'm not sure I would've bothered to stick around until then.
This is indeed a problem. Especially when growing up in a small town you can get stuck in a monoculture where people all have the same interests (I think in the US that's often sports and religion I think, in my case it was a bit different). I have zero interests in any of those and I don't do pretend. So I never fit in well either.
I also started looking for online places and started embracing being different. It wasn't easy but it did shape who I am. I'm still very much in alt cultures now.
These days I live in big cities where it's much easier to find groups to fit me than to try and fit in to whatever monoculture exists.
>It's a free for all with very thin walls between social spaces, almost no human oversight, and run by the most despicable and immoral people on God's green earth. So I am inclined to agree with the people who say that kind of social media is a bad influence and should be curtailed.
It was the same in the past. The difference is that the house odds were different. You didn't have algorithms cramming the worst of the worst down your feed, forums, IRC, message boards and the like weren't built with the goal of maximizing engagement. Heck, even vote based communities which inevitably turn into low common denominator groupthink producing cesspits are mild compared to modern stuff.
Frankly, the law should be "you can sue social media if you can link their service to a problem with you'r child's mental health"
then let the courts decide. they'll clean up their act pretty quick when lawsuits come pouring in, and it removes the central govt's role in USER ID's and other 1984 schemes.
> Frankly, the law should be "you can sue social media if you can link their service to a problem with you'r child's mental health"
So you want to make it legally viable for religious parents to sue social spaces that allow for their children to question the religion of their parents? That's totally something that I could picture happening under such a regime. And that's ultimately indicative of a larger conundrum we face as a society.
The fact that as a society we seem to favor giving parents the ability to make their children in their own image, over giving their children the leeway to figure out who they truly are outside of their parent's guidance. And that's a truly difficult line to tack. Sometimes the parents are 100% right and the children would self-destruct under their own supervision. Other times, the children are being abused and tortured for not following the whims of their selfish parents.
I was lucky, all things considered. My parents were well meaning, just extremely overbearing and micro-managing. Some of the outright abuse that some of my acquaintances describe undergoing would make y'all sick if repeated here. I don't know if there's any solution, but I'm not sure giving helicopter parents more leverage against social spaces is the right play.
> So you want to make it legally viable for religious parents to sue social spaces that allow for their children to question the religion of their parents?
Why not. In a court of law, and facts, such lawsuits would only serve to highlight that religion is not a real thing. That would be a good thing for the world.
Great example of what "hapless enabler" looks like.
We all agree there's a problem. But simply letting the .gov do whatever it finds convenient will likely not solve the problem any better than any other option, and will likely make a whole bunch of other things way worse.
But that's fine because it's for the children, right?
> Better than any other option
Such as?
Facebook knew for years its social media was hurting the mental health of teenagers, and not only they doubled down on it because it makes money, they will also face zero consequences.
Corporate self-regulation is a myth.
>It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state.
It's not though. That's just the popular meme among easily influenced and excitable social groups (like parents). It's not reflective of reality. The idea that mobile devices are somehow damaging to mental state is not supported by scientific studies. Nor is the idea that online discussion forums and markets are.
What is dangerous is mis-using medical terms like "addiction" in apparently an intended medical context. When you start throwing around words like addiction governments get really excited about their ability to use force and start hurting and imprisoning people. Even murdering them. Multi-media screens are not addictive. There is no evidence supporting such assertions in reputable scientific journals.
What are you talking about there's an overabundance of studies that links social media consumption with degrading mental health. Especially for youth.
Here's a review (a paper that collects results of many other papers) from 2022:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9052033
> the term of problematic use characterizes individuals who experience addiction-like symptoms as a result of their social media use. Problematic social media use reflects a non–substance related disorder by which detrimental effects occur as a result of preoccupation and compulsion to excessively engage in social media platforms despite negative consequences.
This study is taking "problematic social media use" as it's implicit given and then from this arbitrary base it is then saying this small subset of problematic people experience depression because of the fiat declaration of "problematic".
But then it goes on,
>While there exists no official diagnostic term or measurement, Andreassen et al [17] developed the Facebook Addiction Scale, which measures features of substance use disorder such as salience, tolerance, preoccupation, impaired role performance, loss of control, and withdrawal, to systematically score problematic Facebook use.
Which isn't even a real journal article but instead a comment in a non-research paper which hasn't ever even been cited by anyone else until this paper. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C29&q=Dev... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22662404/
This is not real science. This is anti-facebook political manipulation via science sounding words. I'm plenty anti-facebook myself but I am very pro-science so it's sad to see this successfully masquerading as real science.
By link you mean correlate, which doesn't mean anything.
Social studies are useless anyway. Academic social studies are so biased that anything they say on the matter should be discarded. They will always produce "evidence" on demand for whatever the left want to do.
Social media should be left alone. Parents who want to can block it on their children's devices. There's nothing more that needs to be done.
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Why are we focusing on pupils? Attention span in general has degraded, I see it on myself and my family too and we're all between 32 and 60.
The only person that hasn't degraded is my grandma as the only internet feature she uses are video calls.
I don’t think this is obvious - I have kids and this is a constant battle. If you take the devices away they are along and isolated and it’s so much worse.
Some schools have these rules, but unless they are practically enforced, kids get around it.
I worry these laws will result in the worse of both worlds.
We need really well moderated forums for kids, along with practical bans for everything else.
I’m not sure how that happens.
I'm 52 and I'm alone and isolated, so age has very little to do with any of it. There is no reason to pass laws to solve what technology caused and technology will undo or we will go extinct and it won't even matter anyways.
When I was a teenager (that was a while ago) the addiction and social dangers where different, my mother (she raised us almost by herself alone) never “forbid” me to anything, just explained us what was what and what could be the consequences. Do not expect the government do the parenting, be a good strong and loving parent and trust your kids.
They can, but digital passports and ID makes it far easier. Notice that even though government can do it now they are still pushing for these.
“It’s for the children” is the siren song of tyranny.
Yes let's take away everyone's privacy because parents can't be bothered to parent.
I doubt that parenting can do much here.
I've read that after elementary school parents have an incredibly small impact on their children's development, peers and their environment (which includes virtual one), has virtually all of the impact on your children's development.
Do children buy devices and pay for internet service?
Pocket money is a thing, PAYG is a thing, gift cards are a thing.
Skipping lunch and saving up the dinner money to spend on an ex-demo Performa 5200 and a 56k modem is how I got online back in the late 90s.
Parents can still confiscate their children's belongings even if the child bought them. Imagine a child buys large speakers and puts them on blast with windows open in the middle of the night. Doesn't matter if the child bought them on their own, the parent should still be able to confiscate them.
Sure. But a phone is easy to hide… well, until it gets addictive and overused.
Cellphone service providers will most likely be unwilling to start a contract with a child, so the child can't get a SIM on their own. Also if the parent wants to make sure that the SIM card they get can't be used with another phone than the one they provided, they can get an eSIM.
The child is also not going to have access to their home wifi unless their parents provide the password. That network is also totally in their control. They can setup a firewall.
School networks should also have firewalls, if they even provide wifi to the students which arguably they shouldn't.
The only remaining way to get internet access is through open networks on restaurants, etc.
If the child is old enough to be hanging around outside like that though, they're likely old enough for social media, I think.
Contract, yes. I said PAYG, as in Pay As You Go, as in not a contract.
Before I left the UK, there were remarkably good options for PAYG as both a phone SIM and mobile internet dongles.
Does the USA not have PAYG options?
Is "no contract" to be taken super-literally? Do they not ask to sign a terms-and-conditions document at least? or ask for ID at least to ensure you're a resident of the jurisdiction? I always thought "no contract" was just a term of the trade to mean "no post-payment contract". I'm skeptical they're willing to have anonymous users.
> Do they not ask to sign a terms-and-conditions document at least?
Not when I got one (… two … no, three…). No idea what current rules are, may have changed, but back when I lived in the UK you'd find stacks of SIMs on supermarket shelves for £0.99 each, no questions asked. Topping them up was also no questions asked.
It's possible there was a tickbox somewhere for "you agree to the T&Cs", that's the kind of thing that I'd not even remember, but no actual signature was needed.
Germany (where I live now) needs a proof of ID to register a SIM, so did Kenya when I visited, but the UK hadn't done anything like that by the time I left the country.
What the heck is ‘dinner money’?
Your parents couldn’t be arsed to cook even a single meal for you?
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/dinner-...
Good luck denying your 12 year olds a smartphone when every single of their friends has one and they are cut off from everything.
My parents gave me really shitty smartphones that were barely powerful enough to do important things but was an awful experience for Instagram/games/etc until I bought a better one with my own money (similar specs to Pinephone Pro)
No luck necessary. Not like you need permission from your child to deny them things.
You can get a dumb phone since having a phone (not necessarily smart) is a good idea. There's also parental controls on at least Android smartphones that let you control the apps and sites they get access to.
How so? Parents and schools can collectively decide to take away the smartphones of preschoolers if keeping them safe and focused was the main priority. Like how else is a preschooler gonna get a smartphone without adult money and support? Last time I checked preschoolers can't open a checking account and a credit card.
This bs of government forcing everyone in the country to have to doxx themselves just so preschoolers can't access social media(which they will anyway since rebellious children are very resourceful on cheating the system made by tech illiterate adults), is like if prehistoric humanity were to stop using fire just because the village idiot burned his house down.
> Parents and schools can collectively decide to take away the smartphones of preschoolers if keeping them safe and focused was the main priority
Collective action? Like some sort of communist? No THANK you!
If only there were some kind of collective larger than a family or a school that could decide to take away social media from impressionable children...
Yes, and how would the government ban social media apps from preschoolers without forcing everyone to doxx themselves to prove age?
Your sarcastic jab doesn't add any new questions or answers to this very important issue, since everyone can agree social media is bad for kids, but also we don't want to lose internet anonymity just because schools and parents can't raise kids without giving them a smartphone in hand since birth.
They've already done it, mate. You can go read about the Australian law. They are putting the burden of proof on the tech companies: "You have heaps of data on your users, you know who are young teens because you target them for marketing. Ban underage kids or we fine you."
Let's suppose the cause really is as simple as "parents can't be bothered to parent". By default, this will continue to be the case. And realistically we're not going to fix it by telling bad parents to please start being good parents. So what do you actually want to do? I'm not saying it's this or nothing, but if you don't have an alternative policy that might actually help, I don't take much comfort in the idea that the kids who are damaged will have _parents_ who totally deserved it.
There are some alternative policies, for example, banning smartphones in schools. This doesn't completely solve the problem, of course, but at least it limits social media use while the children are under direct supervision of the government.
A more extreme policy would be to treat smartphones themselves the same way we treat alcohol and cigarettes, enforcing an age minimum at the point of purchase. Of course the giant tech corporations would fly into rage over this suggestion and lobby heavily against it.
If it were bloody obvious the government wouldn't need to be involved, parents would find a way to get their children off social media. And there are much gentler solutions than a ban that should be explored first (like letting households volunteer themselves to be IP-banned by social networks, for example).
> parents would find a way to get their children off social media.
They wouldn't have a clue. Hell, I personally had this addiction for a long time and it just takes too long to see what a horrible experience it is in the long term. You can argue you should be able to do whatever you want at any age, I'm not the person to say anything about that.
But I totally agree that, as other comments point out, they use it as a justification for all sort of surveillance, I don't really think it is necessary to go that hard because whoever want to get access, they will. It's the internet after all.
the largest companies in the world have their core profit motive tied to getting you to engage in social media.
asking households to voluntarily leave is like asking people not to get fat -- ain't gonna work, esp. when mega corporations want you to consume consume consume.
it needs to be a law, and it needs to be enforced.
Are you suggesting we ban people from eating excessive amounts of food? Because you've drawn a parallel and I quite like how we treat food - people can just eat too much if they want to and people tell them not to get fat when they complain that it has negative consequences.
You do realize that kids learning how to dodge IP blocks is a practice as old as the internet itself, right?
That wouldn’t solve anything.
Yes, but damaging adults is OK. It's only children that must not be damaged.
Adults are expected to think for themselves. Kids need help because they don’t have the experience yet.
If society and parents ban you from something and they do it themselves then the ban has virtually no effect.
It's why we see so many infants getting caught for DUIs. Seriously? You seem to be implying that there's no justification/efficacy for any law/ban prohibiting children from engaging in adult activities. That's... something.
That’s right and important to keep in mind.
Pretty much every doctor agrees alcohol is bad for developing brains. But science doesn't always win against society.
Is there any place without an age limit for alcohol?
In terms of private consumption, effectively so. The UK limit for consumption at home is five. I have no idea how even that can be enforced.
Boots taste good, actually! +10 social credit for you!
Why shouldn’t parents mind their own children? Why limit everyone’s speech?
Do you have kids?
It's much easier to say to a child "you can't have a social media account, it's the law because experts have determined it's not healthy at your age" than "your mother and I think that social media is bad for you".
Whether it's the rules of the parents, or the "rules" of the government, they're all the same in the eyes of a child.
source: was once a child
A true observation, but not sufficient to criminalize and infringe on basically everybody else.
There are all sorts of things that would be easier for parents to prohibit if the government made it illegal: Popular toys, M&M's, pork, anything that questions the bible...
Whether experts have determined it's not healthy is independent from whether it's against the law.
https://www.waituntil8th.org/
I tried that before they were 13. Technically false, but almost no social media company allows under 13s.
It didn’t work very well.
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Your insults weaken your argument and detract from the overall conversation. Aim higher.
The don't tread on me angle is just as overplayed as the one you're complaining about.
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> And, from now on, if you ever criticize the government you will lose your bank account and your job.
We could have a real conversation about tradeoffs (and maybe this one isn't worth it!) but not if you just assume/pretend the worst-case scenario is real. I'm Australian and I'll happily bet that N years from now I'll still be able to criticize the government without being debanked or sacked.
If we do ever fall to authoritarianism, I doubt this will have been a crucial step; it's already easy for the government to deanonymize most posters if it wants to, and an evil future government that wanted to go further could probably just... do it, regardless of precedent.
> but not if you just assume/pretend the worst-case scenario is real
Just want to point out that Canada weaponised war time powers to debank truckers protesting during COVID. The rubicon has already been crossed. While I didn't support their cause, the writing is on the wall about what governments want to be able to do to people it finds inconvenient.
Social media posts are getting people arrested in the UK. Even if mostly "fixed" in appeals, there seems to be a cross national trend.
https://redact.dev/blog/how-and-why-people-are-being-arreste...
Closest the UK got, in recent years, to people getting punished specifically for criticising the government was that Mock the Week got cancelled. But not, say, Have I Got News For You, which has spent its entire existence doing nothing but.
your government already has an online censorship department https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESafety_Commissioner which is being used to silence social media posts with bogus "informal" takedown notices
Governments never give up power. They will only take more. So considerations on what power should be given over should be done carefully instead of having knee jerk reactions based on "think of the children".
It's my impression that the shift from 'basically normal government' to 'authoritarian nightmare', when it happens, tends to happen quite abruptly rather than via the ratchet effect/frog-boiling. And there seem to be plenty of examples of democracies that have remained basically normal despite decades' worth of policies that libertarian-leaning observers would decry as the thin end of the wedge. I'm open to being convinced that the risk of a policy like this clearly outweighs its benefits, but I think I need a specific causal pathway and/or historical precedent rather than general arguments.
The US is kind of an obvious example of this ratchet effect. The powers that have been given to the executive over the course of decades and consistent moving to the right for decades has led us to where we are now. Similar cases in Russia and China where more power is handed over to a centralized leadership role over time.
I'm not a libertarian or follow the thin end of the wedge belief system. It's a simple observation that governments operate under the idea of growth of power. That is not to say an absence of government or reduction of government is good or better. But to recognize our role in maintain the social contract with the government. Abdicating that role entirely does not improve your life.
The only benefit of this legislation is that VPN's will get a bump in revenue, the web becomes more unusable and critical information gets stored at third parties who become high value targets for hacking. Not to mention these data brokers can easily turn around and begin to monetize this data. I'm not a privacy nut by any measure, but this seems like the most obvious major hit to personal data privacy. Instead of addressing the problem that is being claimed to be resolved, it's just lining another corporations pockets who will sell your data. We've seen this story play out many many times already. but you think this time will be different? I don't think so.
Also Rahm Emanuel: "Let's take Second Amendment rights away from everybody on the no-fly list." [1,2]
1: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/rahm-emanuel-hey-lets...
2: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/816qf/rahm_eman...
The harm from guns is far, far clearer, and they are far less essential or relevant to daily life, especially for young adults.
Also the US is basically the only country which sees lethality as a "right".
The harm from unaccountable governments who treat their constitutions like suggestions is far greater still, though. It's not about the guns, it's about the list. If you're an American who's not outraged by Emanuel's statement -- on guns or on social media for that matter -- it's because you feel privilege that you may not actually possess.
On that subject, it's certainly a strange time to argue for government's role as the holder of a monopoly on the tools of violence, isn't it? The human consequences of this misguided philosophy ran well into eight figures in the 20th century alone.
In any case... say what you will about the US, we won't shoot you at the border for trying to leave.
> On that subject, it's certainly a strange time to argue for government's role as the holder of a monopoly on the tools of violence, isn't it? The human consequences of this misguided philosophy ran well into eight figures in the 20th century alone.
Sounds like you think the argument people are making is that it ought to have the monopoly?
I think the argument is that whoever doesn't have that monopoly, can't call themselves a government… at least not for very long. Reason being, not having a monopoly necessarily requires someone else is doing violence and cannot be stopped by the so-called government, which means the so-called government is weak and at risk of being taken over, perhaps by the people doing the violence, perhaps by a outside "peacekeeping" force.
It's OK for the government to have the best guns, and in fact (as you suggest) that state of affairs is pretty much unavoidable for any government worthy of the name.
It's not OK for the government to have all the guns.
Given that, it's necessary to consider who should have legal access to guns and who should not.
What we call the "No-fly list" is an abhorrently-wrong way to do that.
> It's not OK for the government to have all the guns.
Why?
The argument I've heard Americans give over the years is to stop authoritarian governments, to keep the government "scared" of the people.
Yet people in the USA are now being snatched off the street and deported for what is supposed to be protected by the first amendment: speech.
Clearly literally getting shot at didn't keep Trump "scared".
Maybe because everyone knows violent uprising should be a last resort and things aren't bad enough to condemn millions to stravation and death yet.
Unless you are saying you personally would join a US uprising, asking why armed people haven't yet started one yet themselves isn't a compelling arguement to disarm them. If people were shooting back I think you and most others would be condemning them.
I'm saying Trump isn't even afraid of an uprising.
That's not a condemnation of the people failing to replicate the Jan 6 thing while switching red flags for blue ones.
I'm saying the freedom to have guns didn't do the thing that people say it does.
I would go further: I also don't think private arms would work if y'all did start firing them, because who wins a civil war is more likely to depend who the military supports than private firearms, and if the military aren't the deciding factor for whatever reason (internal split within the military?) then it's down to whoever outside the country is supplying weapons/logistics to which side (so, probably China?)
We aren't talking about a civil war though, we are talking about a civil uprising. Trump didn't take the government by force or strongarm politicians into compliance, they mostly went along with all this bullshit too. People already had the view that federal politicians as a whole were corrupt and self-serving and have been failing to effectively govern and legislate in the country's favor for decades. I also doubt any or enough of them would be willing to take up arms themselves and become a factional leader. Nobody is going to rally behind Kamala or some geriatric or the democratic party even if they were willing to try.
And in an insurgency type situation private arms/small arms are extremely effective, if costly with lives. The US failing to subdue multiple countries long term despite having a tiny fraction the amount of small arms, veterans, or people directly involved in US logistics operations, is all the proof we need. Nobody wants that, it would be horrendous and bloody, but tanks and planes don't run off mere hopes and dreams and the US citizenry is more heavily armed by multiple factors than any other country or people in history.
The other thing that private arms buys you is international support. If you show that you can make the most of limited offensive capabilities, you attract allies whose interests are aligned to your own, as seen from the American Revolution to modern-day Ukraine.
If you disarm and roll over meekly, nobody is going to want to help you.
And if you know anything about Rahm Emanuel's background, you'd think he'd be the one waving this particular banner, but... (shrug)
> In any case... say what you will about the US, we won't shoot you at the border for trying to leave.
How does this alleged virtue square away with everything else that's going on?
There ara bunch of murdered Venezuelan fishermen right now that never came even remotely close to the border, let alone transiting it in either direction.
"Say what you will about zombies eating your brains, at least they won't eat your eyes."
I don't have the solution. But it seems like a problem which needs to be addressed and regulation isn't a crazy place to look. As a parent, it feels like I'm constantly battling with Meta, Tiktok and Google over my childrens' development and we have very different goals.
Lack of something like SSO and centrally-managed permissions for families is a huge pain in the ass.
Minecraft is notably insane due to this. I don’t know how normies get their kids playing online with it (ours is locked down to just-with-friends, and we gatekeep the friend list), I thought it was hard as a techie. Cross-platform play (outside of X-Box, I suppose) requires creating and carefully-massaging permissions on two overlapping but unrelated systems, both the account on the console itself and a Microsoft account (and their UI for managing this is, in modern Microsoft fashion, entirely nutty). Then, if anything goes wrong, the error messages are careful never to tell you which account’s settings blocked an action, so you get to guess. Fun!
(Getting “classic” Java Minecraft working, just with a local server, was even harder)
Your options are to go all-in on one or two ecosystems; to take on just a fuckload of work getting it all set up nicely and maintaining that with a half-dozen accounts per kid or whatever; or to give up.
Then schools send chromebooks home with less-restrictive settings than I’d use if I were managing it and no way for me to tighten those, and a kid stays up all night playing shovelware free Web games before we realize we need to account for those devices before bed time. Thanks for the extra work, assholes.
sso for the family :mindblown:. Tie this in with a real ID validation tool, and then integrating systems only know "is/is not allowed" and the parents can mind all the kid's stuff.
Why not just take away their phone?
iPhones have excellent parental controls (by the abysmal standards of consumer software more broadly). You can just not allow insta and such, or set time limits on them per-day (30 minutes, say). I assume Android has something similar. You can set the Web to allowlist-only. Kids can send requests to bypass limits, sends the request right to your own Apple devices, easy to yay or nay it. It’s damn good.
Phones are among the easiest devices to manage.
> iPhones have excellent parental controls
If those work, sure, although kids tend to be pretty clever about getting around parental controls and are sometimes quite a bit more technically sophisticated than their parents.
It ain’t the ‘90s and this ain’t Windows 95 with bypassable-by-accident OS account logins and half-assed website blocking made by the lowest bidder. Getting past app installation restrictions and time limits on iOS would be… challenging.
It sucks as a parent because you get this from both ends: “parent better! (Putting in tons of work that our parents didn’t have to)” and also “lol what are you doing restricting kids on computers is impossible, give up you idiot”.
(And on some platforms it is, for practical purposes, impossible—looking at you, Linux, not just because it’s a powerful open platform but because its permissions and capabilities system is decades behind the state-of-the-art and tools for sensibly managing any of that on a scale smaller than “fleet of servers” and in the context of user-session applications are nonexistent)
> It sucks as a parent because you get this from both ends: “parent better! (Putting in tons of work that our parents didn’t have to)” and also “lol what are you doing restricting kids on computers is impossible, give up you idiot”.
I didn't claim that it's impossible, merely that it's difficult sometimes, as you also implied ("putting in tons of work"). The advantage of physically consfiscating phones is that it's a low tech, brute force method available even to the least technically sophisticated parents.
heh...see my comment above about bypassing screen time limits on ios by simply deleting and reinstalling the app.
To that extent can't kids just pop in a live USB and get a totally ephemeral and open os?
I'd push the implementation to the router and force root certs on devices and have all clients run through your proxy or drop the packets. That way even live usbs will not get network access. Have some separate, hugely locked down network for kids' friends.
Maybe put a separate honeypot network up with some iot devices on it with wifi and a weak password, and let the kids have some freedom once they figure out how to deauth and grab the bash upon reconnections.
Idk. I'm some years away from this problem myself,but someone recommended this in another thread recently.
https://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/SslBump
> To that extent can't kids just pop in a live USB and get a totally ephemeral and open os?
That's a lot more difficult if you leave secureboot enabled on the computer. Plus, most devices, especially newer ones, allow you to pin your own certificates and sometimes even disable the OEM certs.
That, in addition with locking the BIOS with a password (and if the device does not have known OEM override passwords like on bios-pw.org), should be more than enough to keep a kid out.
Thanks for the tips!
Found out last year that simply deleting an app and reinstalling it will reset time limits.
App deletion and installation were among the first things I disabled :-)
I'm not sure if you're asking as a parent or an observer of parents. But it's not such a clear option given how entrenched we've made devices into children's lives.
My son's cross country team communicates via GroupMe and it's very difficult for him to stay up-to-date with the web version from a laptop. My daughter's friend group communicates via snapchat.
This doesn't mean parents have to allow everything. My daughter doesn't have Snapchat, for example. But there are definite tradeoffs like her being left out of many conversations and slowly getting excluded from friend groups as a result.
It's too much unnecessary complexity added to parenting and the motivation being profit by mega corps is why I suggest regulation is a valid place to start looking.
> I'm not sure if you're asking as a parent or an observer of parents. But it's not such a clear option given how entrenched we've made devices into children's lives.
It doesn't have to be a 24 hour a day ban. A kid could be limited to an hour a day or phone use or something like that.
> It's too much unnecessary complexity added to parenting and the motivation being profit by mega corps is why I suggest regulation is a valid place to start looking.
The inevitable result would seem to be that all adults, parents or not, would be forced to present their identification online to use the internet. I think that's too much personal freedom to sacrifice, regardless of how noble the goal.
> It doesn't have to be a 24 hour a day ban.
Limits help, for sure. But it's like setting limits for addictive products like "one cigarette a day". It's better than a pack a day but the impact addictive products have on kids don't stop once their limit is up.
> I think that's too much personal freedom to sacrifice
That's why I started by saying I don't have the solution. Regulation and fines for companies that target kids feels plausible. While not exactly the same, we curbed teen cigarette use by imposing marketing restrictions and issuing fines to tobacco companies (and drastically reduced adult smoking too for that matter).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans_in_the_Un...
Can't zero knowledge proof solve this problem?
Submit a zkp that you are over 18 to the website that requires it. The proof need not be tied to the identity of the user.
I personally don't think self-regulation works. It's harmful so the next best option is the government regulating it.
Problem? That's the intended result.
Doesn't matter if they can, because that's not how any of the shot callers want it done.
That is in fact how it is being done in the US and the EU.
This is how the eu standard for digital ID works already, the above post is uninformed fearmongering.
reminder - you have been mind read. whole this privacy talk is ridiculous
This is probably controversial, but this reason I would much rather things like social media and pornography be outright banned rather than age-gated.
That may sound nice offhand but blanket bans like that on things that have widespread appeal have never been helpful because eventually you gotta start arresting people, and likely a lot of people, in which case the solution ends up far more harmful than the problem.
That would have severe economical impact, so nobody dares to go there which is why all these salami tactic solutions are being thrown around. Personally, I think your suggestion has merit, since we can observe that not only children's mental health is severely impacted. Another advantage I see with this is that clear lines allow for clear enforcement that would then get a lot less expensive. I mean, the overabundance of malicious ads should also go into this pot. Another idea would be to put social media companies under strict rules and compel them to install human moderators to enforce them, think dang or tomhow.
Edit: it works on HN (rule wise and moderation wise), so it could work on other platforms, too. Of course that would be expensive for the companies, but frankly, the companies are causing the current upset, so why not place the cost with the ones causing it instead of impacting everyone and even socialising the fallout like lawsuits.
> And, from now on, if you ever criticize the government you will lose your bank account and your job.
When has this happened in the countries you listed?
The Canada trucker COVID protests are the standard example.
They did a bit more than "criticize the government".
That has nothing to do with online identification. Do you believe that those operating a vehicle that can easily kill people shouldn't require registration to prevent this from happening again?
Also, that a was few dozen truckers who were actively blocking major highways, and the banking ban lasted less than a week for most people. Several orders of magnitude more people get arbitrarily unbanked for less. I had a credit card and bank account permanently banned while traveling and they refused to give me an explanation.
Man, just imagine the pushback if Trump did something like that now. The word "facist" would be in the headlines for months.
"Oh, but it was 'our team' so it's different."
whatever
> And, from now on, if you ever criticize the government you will lose your bank account and your job.
The USA seems to be doing the "if you ever criticize the government [there will be consequences]" part before the rest of them?
> It's amazing how coordinated it is.
It looks coordinated to you? Then why is the USA threatening tariffs etc. for the rest of us doing these things, even when they're going further?
We already ban children under 13. I think that's a good thing and the age limit should be 16 or 17.
The rest of your comment is a non sequitur.
It's a good thing that children under the age of 12 don't know how to use checkboxes!
Luckily the Australian law is written such that tech companies can't get away with a checkbox.
Why are you lumping Canada into that group? Only UK and AUS are doing the digital ID.
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202508/canada-adopts-nationa...
https://www.todayville.com/canada-moves-forward-with-digital...
https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/FINA/Brief/B... "Oct 7, 2022 — Recommendation 1: That the government drive economic growth by prioritizing and investing in the government's digital identity mandate."
If your making the slippery slope argument sure I can agree there is a risk.
However its saying digital validation for federal benefits - I mean given the amount of fraud in the US social security system of recent years it seems like having some kind of protection is important to not waste our tax payers benefit. And if you cross the border you are immediately in a digital system in the US.
That said this isn't saying digital identity for websites similar to what AUS is proposing.
Also in the meantime kids find their way to other sites / work around and they claim to be adults so now ... NO PROTECTIONS for the kids ...
Completely the opposite of what you would hope.
An an Australian, the social media ban legislation specifically requires than non-ID methods be available (it specifically says that also included digital ID).
Children’s welbeeing being a dog whistle? You should go out and talk to real parents and teachers in the real world.
We like to pretend that this is something new. Before free porn on the internet, what did people do?
- They bought porn from stores (no anonymity)
- They rented porn from hotel rooms
- They paid for it on pay per view channels (how many kids growing up in the 90s remember watching the fuzzy scrambled Spice channel and trying to make out a boob somewhere in the garbled picture?)
- They went to movie theaters for porn! I've never actually seen this but have read about it.
NONE of those actions are anonymous. They're even documented and associated with real identities.
If you're telling me that somehow adding some kind of verifiable age gates to things like porn (and social media) will lead to authoritarianism, we don't have to theorize. We ran this experiment already. And nobody had issues with it, realistically.
We're still running this experiment. If you try to watch an R rated movie in a theater, they will likely ask you for ID if you're clearly under 17. They used to do that to me growing up.
The current state of "Kids can access all this without any protection at any time" is abnormal. It's NOT normal.
We can all have a reasonable conversation here without always bringing in the authoritarianism boogeyman.
A store that asks for ID before letting someone buy a porn mag will have an employee check with their own eyes and then return the ID. By the time the person is out the door, any record of who they were is basically gone. The record is just in the fading short-term memory of the employee. If they turned right around that instant and went back into the building, they're basically as anonymous as they were the first time. If they interrogated everyone affiliated with the store, including the owner, nobody would know the home address of the person even though it was on the ID. The anonymity is even larger if you let a few days pass. Nobody will ever remember you for having bought that magazine or for having ever entered that store for that matter. They'll likely be different employees.
With online services, the identity would be tied to your account forever. A government would have the ability to review every passing comment you've made in your entire lifetime and know exactly who you are, who your family is, where you live, where you work, what your bank accounts are, etc.
As others have pointed, this is unfortunately already true, due to big data and analytics companies hoovering up everything.
So again, what changes in any fundamental way?
This is a tech forum. There are already standards that can be used to verify age without requiring a lot of extra info. (Already used by drivers licenses at TSA checkpoints, those are all standards).
There are ways to solve this without essentially saying “there is no alternative so let’s give nefarious companies access to our kids brains all the time”
Just because it's bad, doesn't mean it's fine if it gets way worse. There's a difference between individual platforms potentially selling data with aggregators maybe finding ways to fallibly join them together, and the government mandating using a standardized identifier between all of them such that platforms can't even choose to be privacy-respecting.
You can use pseudonyms on practically all social media. That's under threat.
> There are ways to solve this without essentially saying “there is no alternative so let’s give nefarious companies access to our kids brains all the time”
It's ultimately the parents' responsibility, and the parents willingly gave their children access. It's very easy to setup parental controls. It's very easy to get your child a dumb phone. It's very easy to confiscate technology that their child isn't using responsibly. Adults should know that peer pressure isn't reason enough to give their children more freedoms than they're able to responsibly handle.
If people want to tackle this on a societal level, we should be looking into what's causing parents to be so lax in their parenting.
Right, the practical privacy outcomes are dramatically different when the digital panopticon is up and running.
The expectation of privacy from random unaffiliated humans seeing me pass on the sidewalk is very different from being stalked by a drone swarm that follows me and whatever vehicle I'm in.
This is a speculative, intuitive reflex meant to derail an argument.
Sorry what do you think is happening in New Zealand?
Better to just heavily tax social media like we tax other harmful things like cigarettes. Heavily tax advertising while we're at it, too.
can you describe how this tax would work?
Collect the tax on social media companies per monthly active user.
I would suggest that anyone who says modern social media isn't damaging to people in general, but particularly young people, either (a) has never used it; or (b) is being deliberately disingenuous.
From that point I would view social media essentially like alcohol.
As an adult you can choose to (ab)use it if you wish, but it's arguably the government's responsibility to protect children at large from social dangers like this.
It's absolutely a thing that people are asked to prove their age to buy alcohol, or even to enter a licensed venue that serves alcohol. I don't think I've ever heard anyone except underage teenagers complain about the invasion of privacy to hand over your ID for beer/etc.
Does the implementation around safe proof of age need work? Probably. Does that mean the whole thing is a not-so-subtle attempt to fire you for swearing?
I don't fucking think so mate.
People are already fired for saying stupid shit on social media, they're already debanked for being out-and-proud White Supremacists.
Given the current political situation in the USA and how it got there, if you have any illusions of a continuing democracy, you should be champing at the bit for anything which reduces social media use.
> It's absolutely a thing that people are asked to prove their age to buy alcohol, or even to enter a licensed venue that serves alcohol. I don't think I've ever heard anyone except underage teenagers complain about the invasion of privacy to hand over your ID for beer/etc.
If they reported verifying my ID to the government every time I bought a drink I would complain about invasion of privacy.
Meh, the gov can do this already. The effect of social media on our kids is a bigger evil at this point.
Can we stop pretending Google and Apple don't already know exactly (probably down to the month) how old a phone user is?
Digital ID is not required...
> It's amazing how coordinated it is.
It's not really "amazing" at all, when you consider that the working class in those countries has finally woken up to the fact that their biggest present day issues, like housing unaffordability and low purchasing power, have been caused by the intentional fiscal policies of their governments over the last 30+ years, instead of the usual boogeymen (Xi Jinping, Putin, Covid, immigrants, etc).
And now after 20+ years of constantly vote hopping between left and right, hoping "this time it will be better than last time" but in practice it always ended up worse, the people are trying to hold them accountable for it, so the elite are switching tactics now that the ye olde reliable tactic of gaslighting the people doesn't work anymore.
If the carrot doesn't work anymore, time to move over to using the stick to keep the peasants in line.
There’s no evidence about this being coordinated is there?
What?
Coordinated
When you put all the points on a graph and they form a line, what more "evidence" do you need?
Your request for evidence reminds me when the 3 telco operators in my country raised their prices simultaneously on the same day, and the nation's anti cartel watchdog said they found no evidence of price fixing lol
Just because the system is corrupt, incompetent or ineffective at finding evidence, doesn't mean there isn't collusion going on.
You do not need collusion for people with similar aims and interests who look at each other for precedents to behave in the same way.
I lucked out in when I was born, I developed before social media existed and my college was a later addition to Facebook. I think it just doesn’t affect me in the same way… like someone who has never won a dollar gambling looks at a gambling addict. I’ve got tremendous empathy for the people that are addicted to it and I can’t imagine how corrosive it would have been to my teen years, so much as I revile the politics behind Rahm who believes nothing and will stick his finger in the wind every few minutes and go where it takes him, I’m glad this is the way the winds are blowing. Social Media should be regulated like alcohol and cigarettes and drugs. All addictive, all tuned to hit dopamine centers, all bad for our health in different ways.
I think playing a ton of games as a kid has helped me.
I walk through a casino and see all the flashing lights and sounds and like the casino screen is half as busy as an RTS. It's just not the same level of engagement; it's not overwhelming, it's just slow.
I feel the same way. In a sense, our parents had it easier in terms of the damage external world could do emotionally, because there was typically a simple way to prevent most of it. Now, it is not nearly as simple. Not to search very far, our kid has a media diet that some consider strict ( 30 minutes a day of pre-selected items if kid meets some criteria, which I still consider too high ). But then some kids already have cellphones, ipads ( some completely unlocked too ! ). I only recently gave my kid lappy with gcompris installed ( locked down lappy; no net access ). Point I am trying to make in my rambly way is that each parent is hodge podge of various choices. And it does not work in aggregate.
I get that it is all about balance, but it is hard to disagree with Rahm here. Top down ban is the only real way to go.
> Point I am trying to make in my rambly way is that each parent is hodge podge of various choices. And it does not work in aggregate.
On top of that, you have some of the biggest, most moneyed companies in the country spending billions of dollars to get kids and adults hooked. Even for parents with good intentions, it's not a fair fight.
Maybe I'm going off the deep end, but I sometimes think people that work at Facebook should be considered social pariahs. The amount of damage that company has done to our country and society is truly incalculable. It's really hard for me to forgive anyone who had any part in it.
How would we effectively regulate social media? Being the regulator could be a very powerful political tool and used to capture or maintain political power.
Regulating is already being done by the “private” companies that own them, heck it’s the plot of a bond movie (sub in newspapers for social media) with a real life Larry, Elon or Mark as the villain.
As a society we choose what to allow or not allow together, collectively, through politics (ideally) and when things damage our collective health we regulate or ban them. All regulations probably seem impossible before they happen. Australia regulated guns, China regulated social media, plenty of countries regulate alcohol, drugs, gambling. It’s all possible, just have to weigh the positives and negatives and find a balance, but the status quo is broken.
Deciding what we want as a society is fine. Vehemently disagreeing over what and how things should be regulated is fine too. In general, trying to do anything in good faith is more or less fine.
What is not fine is proposing to make regulations that purport to do things that are near-universally supported, but in reality further agendas that are widely opposed, agendas that work against the interests of the American people and would never pass otherwise.
That is very clearly what is happening here, and we know that because it happens all the time, using the same tried-and-true formula. In particular, anything claiming to "protect the children" is almost certainly an obfuscated attempt to erode civil rights protections like free speech or privacy, and should be treated with extreme prejudice.
*edit* Also, anything Rahm Emmanuel says, believe the exact opposite.
I agree with the sentiment, but the rights of Americans are being eroded at a comical rate with no positives like protecting children (be that an allusion to protecting them or actually doing it)
Look at the TikTok “ban” for example. Congress passed a law to ban it because they didn’t have control over what the population was seeing, specifically around the genocide in Gaza. Now US ownership has passed to Larry Ellison, a republican connected pro-Zionist that will make sure the objectionable content that shows Palestinian's suffering does not bubble up in the algorithm. Never mind that you see 10 year old girls practicing TikTok dances when they are standing in line, waiting for the bus, etc. That problem persists, and no one in leadership cares because now the right people are getting rich and censoring the actual content the rulers cared about.
I’m with you on Rahm, but I’m not going to let him trying to hook his wagon to a policy that I support ruin my support of it.
This is the exact policing we don't want government to do regardless of the age. In my opinion it's the responsibility of the parents to decide how to raise their children and teach them how to live and adapt in the age of social media and maintain a balance.
In the same sense one could argue that social media like Facebook or WhatsApp should be banned among older population because that's one of the major ways mis/fake information being spread among elderly people and now with AI videos they actually believe those fake stories to be 100% true as well. I think that's more risk to modern day democracy and well being of the society in general.
> This is the exact policing we don't want government to do regardless of the age. In my opinion it's the responsibility of the parents to decide how to raise their children and teach them how to live and adapt in the age of social media and maintain a balance.
It's complicated. I can decide how to raise my child when he's inside the house. But if when he goes into the world he's sorrounded by people addicted to their phones, what do you think it's going to happen?
The same way parents of previous generations dealt with it. Whether it was phones, tv's, drugs, etc. Helicopter parenting is not the solution and not an effective method to produce well adjusted adults. You have to equip children with the tools to respond to different scenarios. Not prevent from ever knowing other things exist.
Absolute garbage.
A) Forbidding your children something does not equate to helicopter parenting. You're attacking someone else's position.
B) Forbidding your children something DOES WORK as long as that thing is not easily accessible. That's why we make certain things illegal to sell to children, so that their rate of usage is lower than otherwise.
Stores are banned from selling cigarettes to those under 18. Sure, kids can still get them, but it does present a barrier.
I don't see this as being any different, and as a parent, I'd support a ban like that.
Cigarettes (nicotine products) are easy to identify. What is social media? Why would I want to acquire and provide an ID just to comment on HN? In the case of social media, there is not a well enough defined product to ban.
Big tech has had decades to self-police, and I don’t believe for a second they didn’t know that at some point they would be forced to if they didn’t do so.
This is just the adults in the room drawing the line.
I'm really sick of this silly comparison.
Stores don't require you to present an ID to enter them. They don't record that ID, add it to a pile of other data they've collected about you, and sell that information. In short, the privacy concerns are vastly different.
Furthermore, nicotine products are much more easily defined than social media, as another commenter points out.
Perhaps it could be made illegal for companies to use your data that way, the same way your health data is protected. I could get behind that effort.
That's the whole point then right? It's whole another policing and maintenance burden created to be funded by tax payers money without actually achieving anything useful at all.
Do you have kids? I'm glad mine can't just walk into a store and buy cigarettes. It's a pretty strong deterrent.
Which was only done federally _after_ strenuous public efforts to prove they were harmful to _everyone_.
Good luck.
Social media is not the same product as social networks. It had value when you were in control of what content you wanted to see (your friends' posts).
Now social media, controlled by algorithms, is just like a permanent informercial. You have direct ads and first level indirect adds (sponsored content), but it goes deeper than that, when they manage set up a "viral trend" you have a lot of people acting as speaker person for brands without even realizing.
Attention shapes who you will become in the future, because it focus on what matters to you. When you outsource that to others, they can mold you into what is more profitable to them. Specially kids, who are at the prime time for being influenced.
Then, people would complain it was an echo chamber because you only followed people who were aligned with you...
But it's not clear to me that the echo bubbles are not still there. I think the more important aspect is control. Who is making the decision is more important than echo bubbles are bad.
This is a good point. I completely relate to the statement that "social media is a plague on society." But you have a good point -- it's not so much the digitization of a social network as the algorithms that are hyper-optimized to steal attention and sell advertising. Maybe it's not the age that should be regulated, but the algorithm. Whether algorithm regulation should be age dependent is another question. Personally I don't think it should be age dependent. Or... Dear Social Media Companies, F your attention hijacking, skinnerbox advertising and engagement crack regardless of how old your victim is.
These platforms exist for one reason: data collection, used to sell ads.
Once you realize their perverse nature where they walk the line of barely useful vs maximizing income, using the application starts to feel icky.
But sadly that knowledge only comes with age and experience.
So let me this straight. I will need an ID to go on internet but not to vote. He even talked about how requiring ID makes thar certain people are trapped in vicious cycle.
This is the exact policing we don't want government to do - but it is to protect children. So I guess we will go with it.
Yes. The stakes of getting it wrong are different. Social media ≠ voting.
I will never forgive Rahm and his sacrifice of socialized medicine on the offering pyre of the insurance companies.
Nothing he wants is to be considered a good idea by default. He typifies everything wrong with the DNC.
He was also directly involved in the chicago police department's attempted coverup of the murder of laquan mcdonald. He is completely despicable, the idea that anyone is covering his policy ideas is fucking vile. He should be begging for prison.
Don’t worry, we have Abundance now
These policies are so shortsighted. What about youth who are disabled? Socializing online can a huge benefit for them and allow them to connect with other people who they might never meet. What about LGBT youth who live in oppressive environments? Having a community that accepts them boosts their own self worth and reduces the risks of harm. What about any marginalized youth? They may be in a situation where they are one of the only people like them in the are and the internet allows them to find other people like them and give them peace about their own identity.
This push for age verification is just a thinly veiled attempt to unmask everyone on the internet to open them up to harm and prevent connections from being made.
What are the metrics this Australian law should hit? How do we know its achieving its intended result?
They have a panel who are reviewing it’s effects across all aspects of teen life including sleep patterns, school grades ect and then nationally test results ect
Can you provide more information on this? I can't seem to find any.
“The regulator would need to assess whether platforms were taking reasonable steps. If they were not, it could take that platform to court to seek fines.
There would be an independent evaluation of the ban conducted by an academic advisory group examining the short-term, medium-term and longer-term impacts of the ban.
“It will look at the benefits over time, but also the unintended consequences,” Inman Grant said.
A 14-year-old boy looking at social media on his mobile phone. Tech giants Meta and TikTok said on October 28 they will obey Australia's under-16 social media ban but warned the landmark laws could prove difficult to enforce. Australia will from December 10 force social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to remove users under the age of 16. (Photo by David GRAY / AFP) (Photo by DAVID GRAY/AFP via Getty Images) How is Australia’s social media ban affecting you and your family? Read more “Everything from are they sleeping? Are they interacting or are they actually getting out on the sports fields? Are they reading books? Are they taking less medication like antidepressants? Are their Naplan scores improving over time?” Inman Grant said.”
From The Guardian’s reporting
Almost no laws are enacted with this in mind. The people doing it are neither scientists nor engineers and never suffer any consequences for failure of what most people will see as well meaning lawmaking. The idea that a law should be subject to quality control is not merely absent but also anathema.
On the question of whether to legislate the ban, I'm a no. On the question of whether parents should implement it, I'm a yes. My niece and her husband have a one year old that is allowed zero screen time. They are willing and able to forego the high tech baby sitting, and are talking about continuing until at least the pre-teens. I think that if they could go even further, say live for the next decade with the Amish, it would be even better.
If a kid was raised with his family in a dome where no technology later than 1900 were permitted (perhaps with an emergency medicine exception) and the kid wasn't released into the world until 13, I think on average they'd be mentally healthier and have a happier life.
That is extremely short-sighted to assume that because a few anecdotes on “how to parent” will fix the problem. I recommend you go out in public and observe the reality in various states and in various demographics and you’ll quickly see that the parents are just as addicted as the kids. They won’t know how to parent this away without legislation.
Just go into the classroom and witness children and their six-seveeen.
This is 100% like smoking except worse, because entire population of children are being deprived of their attention span. They just learn how to peddle useless products onto their peers without brain development to understand the consequence.
I feel the same way about a smoking. I'm opposed to both smoking and a ban on smoking. It's not because I don't think an effective ban would be healthful, but because I believe that the concentrated power needed for it is a greater danger. It's the same argument that I believe supports the first amendment: people saying evil shitty false things is a lesser evil than the power needed to stop them from saying them.
And suppose no one banned smoking, and smoking was still allowed on airplanes and most restaurants had smoking sections would we be better off? I’m sure all the people who died of throat cancer would tell you otherwise.
Would you also prefer to repeal the first amendment? (If you are subject to it.)
That’s a non-sequitur.
Your niece and her husband are one in a thousand parents. Very few have the fortitude to do it. Not a good outlook for the future if we depend on the virtue of parents.
I concur with this. I’d even be okay with government-sponsored PSAs about social media use as long as it’s based on sound research. But a ban is a hard no due to the First Amendment.
I don't see advertisements often, but I had to fly for work recently and of course saw advertisements in the airport. One of the ads was for "Teen Instagram" with "automatic protections." Kind of depressing. It's a bit like someone selling teen cigarettes, they're a bit more mild and you can graduate to "adult cigarettes" when you're ready. I'm not sure government banning is solution, but there's clearly no good done by the existence of social media. It's a strange problem, and ultimately the issue is that people just cannot regulate their behavior in this area.
> there's clearly no good done by the existence of social media.
If this were true, I’m sure that you wouldn’t have any trouble advocating that we ban it. Many of us remember social media before the algorithmic feed took over, and it was a good way to stay connected to friends and family. Some us also were lucky enough to experience a protracted period of socializing on the internet in the pre-social media days: MUDs, web forums, chat rooms, etc. I enjoyed all of those, in my teen and college years, and like you I count myself fortunate that I was not exposed to social media during a formative time of my life. I think that’s why I hesitate to say that we should outright ban it: I know that the internet _can_ coexist (and even augment) a healthy social life. That said, I don’t use social media at all anymore (unless you count HN), so I’ve definitely voted with my eyeballs.
Some critical differences, I think, are:
- What we did on the Internet in the early 90s was not broadcast to our (real world) peers. If some big drama blew up online, we could escape it with the flip of a switch.
- Similarly, we could escape real world drama by shifting to our online relationships.
- Normal people were not online yet, so you didn't have all the normal real world structures of authority and popularity/hostility. Or, you had substitutes instead, because this is human nature, but they were not so universal and entrenched. It was an Internet of niches, and we could all find or create our own.
- There was no pervasive profitability goal in keeping our eyeballs on a particular platform, so today's dark pattern manipulation just didn't exist.
- It was separate. Not only did the Internet not bleed into real life (and v-v), but it wasn't always-available like today with smartphone ubiquity.
The Internet, back then, was a safe third space.
Today it's often a toxic hellscape, with some exceptional corners.
Very well put. The internet used to be an island of sanity from the real world. Now, most of it, is far worse than the real world. Pockets of excellence exist, but you're always just one impulse control failure away from stumbling into outrageous or addicting content.
> If this were true, I’m sure that you wouldn’t have any trouble advocating that we ban it.
I would be fine with a ban on social media as it exists. I think it has displaced a lot of things such as forms and chat rooms and a lot more.
The internet can be good, but social media makes the internet worse.
Yea I've seen those too. Made my heart sink.
When you start to think about that statement, and why it was written there, why a company chooses to pay $ to tell you this, you know that inherently something went REALLY wrong in the past.
And because it's a company, they're doing the bare minimum to fix it, as to minimize the impact on their bottom line.
It reminds me of the ads against a certain prop in CA, the one that would make app workers (?) employees.
Advertisements taken out by Lyft, Uber, etc, all to sway people.
When companies want you to do something it's not in your best interest. It's in theirs.
> there's clearly no good done by the existence of social media.
I assume you apply this to HN as well? Discord? Forums?
All of these can easily be defined as "social media"
> there's clearly no good done by the existence of social media
Citation needed.
Look, I am greatly opposed to how US social media giants handle and monetize data, and I don’t like them having the level of control that they do. Antitrust is a great lever to use here, because concentration is the source of many problems. But banning what is in effect public social communications is a giant step over the First Amendment.
People can and do use social media to their benefit, whether it’s for political organizing, whistleblowing, mutual aid, OSINT, or gathering on the ground media and first hand accounts from active events (such as conflicts, protests, or police actions) that may never show up in the news. The professional media cannot be everywhere, and sometimes they will not cover certain events. That’s what social media is good for, despite its flaws.
Your mention of cigarettes is apt.
We will come to see social media in its current form the same way we view smoking.
I see social media ( x AI fakes) doing just as much or more harm to seniors.
Yes. My parents happily drench themselves in a neverending barrage of unhinged political commentary on YouTube and watch clips on Facebook without knowing they are AI generated. It is really horrifying.
Yes but they won’t let you take it away from them because they are hooked
they also vote
I used to laugh about the idea of kid's voting rights. As I get older, I'm not so sure it's a bad idea. They're the ones who have to grow up in the world we're shaping. Maybe they should have a voice in how it's shaped.
And if anyone wants an idea of why, here's a clip from one of the best shows of all time, The West Wing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSDxg-bDw1A
Adults of all ages are being harmed.
- 1990s, blogs, months long
- 2000s, facebook, weeks long
- 2010s, twitter, days long
- 2020s, tiktok, minutes long
- 2030s, ???, seconds long
and our attention span, intelligence and socialising are compromised.
I Have Also Written Via Snail’s Courier To Make America Healthy Again That We USA Enact A Similar Ban But Also That We Should Start With The Adults Since The Children Seem More Mature Capable And Really Just Generally Cooler In On And Even Under The Internet
Ban social media and go a step further and ban mobile devices for children while we're at it. The generation of iPad babies is completely broken. I kept my kids away from that stuff religiously, but now these brain addled goblins are their peers.
It is unlikely that ID requirements for the internet would pass constitutional muster in the US. SCOTUS looks poorly on anything resembling a speech licensing regime.
Coming from Rahm Emanuel of all people, I don't get the sense that this is just a good faith effort to help kids at school
Almost impossible to do, but I agree and have been saying that for decades.
Until recently I agreed with the age of 16, now I am starting to think they should be banned until they get an High School Diploma or equivalent, if no "diploma", then at the age of 21, they are allowed. Same as Drinking Age in the US.
The diploma requirement might decrease the dropout rate the the US.
This will never ever happen in the US because free speech is obviously more important than children's mental health. Allowing 14 YOs onto the Internet is but a mere side effect of the Constitution.
Yes, I am being sarcastic.
> And he suggested lawmakers should start with targeting three of the most popular apps among U.S. teens — TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.
The linked Pew Research article also lists YouTube up there. Why not restrict its use by teens as well? It is because it also has wholesome material?
I can't believe we're still talking about him. All he's done is fail.
Culturally, this is the pivotal question of our generation. Both options are admittedly terrible, and as appealing as the parental rights argument may be... it hasn't been going well.
Can't someone cook up a scheme where households with children need age verification for everyone, and households without children do not ?
OK, tear this idea apart...
We should ban voting aged people from using them.
Remember this guy was chased out of chicago for trying to cover up the murder of Laquan McDonald by the CPD. Then, previously was famous for being Clinton's fixer in the Gennifer Flowers case. The fact that this man has any political career at all is an incredible indictment of our system.
It's not clear to me that he has any political career beyond his home town.
When I was a youth I could get anything I wanted on the internet, even/especially things I wasn’t supposed to have.
I have no faith whatsoever that this ban would be effective, and further, evoking the perennial kiddy porn panic makes me extra suspicious of what the ‘real’ goal might be. You don’t tend to wring your hands and wail “won’t somebody please think of the children” unless you know you can’t make your case without the emotional appeal.
Surely any other country should wait a while to see what the effects are. It's already being challenged in Australia on free speech grounds.
The effects are there for everyone to see. GenZ is depressed and can't hold a thought for more than a few seconds. No, it's not because of the housing or job market, it's the phones. Check e.g. Jonathan Haidt: https://jonathanhaidt.com/social-media/
And free speech: you don't need a mobile phone or tiktok to exercise that right.
I was referring to the effects of the law.
That's def and "ok, boomer" mentality. Apparently, Rahm has never heard of a "VPN."
Jokes aside, this should be the responsibility of parents, not the government. Also, this is about censorship, not protecting kids.
Does the Democratic party actually have a platform capable of beating the incumbent Trump Republicans? Or is it just this kind of stuff? Ban kids from YouTube?
It's interesting, because quite a lot of the pornography ID laws are passed by Republicans and popular among Republicans. I don't mean this as a "both sides" sort of argument, but rather that modern tech seems to be unpopular among all constituents, even if different groups have their preferred villain.
I feel like those laws are different because they specifically target pornography, which is seen as an evangelical moral sin. They would prefer to ban it completely, but that most likely runs afoul of the Constitution. So their next best bet is just to try to limit it to over-18s.
Obviously the end result is the same, but I think the motivation is different.
> They would prefer to ban it completely, but that most likely runs afoul of the Constitution. So their next best bet is just to try to limit it to over-18s.
They dont care about constitution. And they are in position to reinterpret it however they want to, regardless of its text and meaning.
If that was actually true then states would have banned or blocked already. This is not a new issue and it has been challenged unsuccessfully many times.
That was before conservatives stopped caring about pretending they care about constitution.
They dont really care about porn now tho.
>which is seen as an evangelical moral sin
Maybe. Most of the debate that I hear feels similar to social media commentary -- teen boys getting their brains fried by constant access to stimulus. I don't hear anything about onanism or sinning.
Mind you, I'm not saying they're right or wrong, but just that most of the arguments I hear are saying "we think this is an identifiable and secular harm."
The good news is Emmanuel, although a media gadfly, isn't well liked by Democratic voters so he won't make it out of a Democratic primary.
It's popular in Australia according to polling even though you'd never guess that based on sampling opinions about it from social media.
Credibly fixing both social media and cost of living would be an effective platform across the West.
> It's popular in Australia according to polling
depends on how or who you poll. I dont think it is popular. It's just that there's a lot of stigma when you try to argue against "saving the children" type policy - which is why this gets used to pass laws that otherwise would be difficult to pass if the true intentions were revealed.
> Credibly fixing
"credibly" is carrying a lot of weight here.
The polls I've seen show banning social media for under 16s has 70-74% support in Australia and the UK, with about 20% opposed.
What polls are you looking at?
> On March 12, 2025, Politico reported that Emanuel was interested in running for president in the 2028 U.S. presidential election.
They are going to find out soon enough.
The pitch of the centrist/“3rd way” wing that’s still, incredibly, ascendant even after the massive party shift on the other side that was teed up in the late ‘00s and realized in 2016, is basically “we’re just like Reagan but we like the gays and abortion a little more, and like guns a lot less”.
It’s a shit message, but they’re apparently permanently damaged by the 1980 landslide re-election loss to Reagan and incapable of moving on. IDK if liberal democracy will survive here long enough for us to see if another wing of the party can ever get those folks to let them try something else.
[edit] not for nothing, Obama lightly hinted at a move away from that in his campaigning (if not his governing) and it seemed to work pretty damn well. Why they didn’t double down on that is anyone’s guess, but I’d suppose it rhymes with “bobbying”.
1984, not 1980, FWIW, and the Democratic Party old guard had been pretty badly beaten up by the 1968 and 1972 conventions. Tip O'Neill was one of the last of that group to really hold power.
1980 was the famous almost-every-state-is-red presidential election map that scared democrats shitless and convinced (enough of) them the way forward was shifting much closer to Reagan on many issues (including, notably, joining the Republican neoliberal movement). But yeah it took an election cycle or two to stabilize after that.
[edit] I mean yes 1984's map was even worse, but 1980's was reeeeeal bad. Six states won in 1980, versus one in 1984. And we have a guy who won a pretty ordinary split of states and less than a majority of votes-cast calling his win in 2024 a "landslide", lol. No, Reagan's elections are what a landslide looks like.
[edit edit] I mean I don't really want to quibble over the details, it probably was the one-two punch of those that really set the direction and we seem to agree on the basics that it was Reagan's crushing electoral success that set the tone for Democrats for up until... well, still today, largely.
Is this not a bipartisan issue?
Unfortunately yes.
Trump won during a time where incumbents lost by ~10 points. He narrowly beat a candidate that lost their only primary run by <2 point.
Trump's very vocal minority is very good at making people think there is a silent majority.
However, the democrats have been elected quite a lot this millennium and they've fully shown they're incapable of making necessary reforms so there's going to keep being populist candidates until there's new blue blood.
That would require making positive, pragmatic suggestions that could improve the lives of the average person, rather than moralizing and kowtowing to the special interest groups and wealthy donors who have captured the party. Good luck with that.
As it is we now have two parties obsessed with “regulating” the morality of citizens while bleeding them out financially.
No, it would require overcoming a shameless demagogue and enablers who have no problem blatantly lying about everything to everyone.
Democracy has been known since its invention to be extremely vulnerable to such actors. It's vulnerable to it because it's nearly impossible to counter.
Your critique is valid to some degree, but Trump won simply because he had the shamelessness to lie over and over and over again that he'd bring prices down. That's it.
No "positive, pragmatic suggestions" are electorally stronger than simple untruths stated with confidence ad infinitum.
Good luck with that. This was the message of the consultant class in 2016 and 2024 and it’s why Dems lost both of those elections. Biden, for all his flaws, actually did attempt to articulate and focus on a positive message and actively reached out to struggling workers. And he won.
The message of the consultant class is that demagogues can win by just lying to people?
Which consultants said that?
Biden won because he came hot on the heels of Trump's complete inability to actually govern.
Which specific pragmatic, positive visions did Biden put forth that are so distinct from Harris's that they won in one case and lost in another?
No, the message was that winning was about “overcoming a shameless demagogue and enablers who have no problem blatantly lying about everything to everyone,” plus shallow pandering to diversity, rather than delivering tangible benefits to Americans. In both 2016 and 2024 the Dem message to voters was that everything was fine, no radical economic change was needed, vote against orange man and all would be well. This was a losing position against a populist. Biden called on his long record of support for labor and proposed investing in American manufacturing, which was a winner in swing states especially since the economy was hurting due to the pandemic.
I didn't say that should be the message.
I said that there's no "pragmatic, positive message" that overcomes simply lying and having an entire media and political apparatus that supports it.
Biden's primary advantage was running against a guy who was demonstrably a complete shit show as an actual incumbent. That was memory-holed by the same shameless lying (e.g. ask Republicans who they think "locked people down" during COVID).
Biden (and Harris) then had a similar disadvantage going into 2024.
It's extremely, extremely silly to act like voters were looking for pragmatic messages lol. Simply no evidence for that.
They were primarily looking to get rid of the incumbent, as was the trend across all democracies during a period of extreme inflation.
That’s a common refrain, especially among the media (ironically, as they are blaming themselves) and the professional-managerial class, who seem to have a blind spot for labor needs. Voters facing hardship have agency and vote for who they believe is aligned with their needs. In 2020 Biden’s union support was key to his victory in the rust belt states, which carried him to victory. Harris didn’t have the same background and didn’t make a serious effort to reach those people, and lost a percentage of union votes at a time when the number of union voters actually increased. So she lost. But it’s true that inflation didn’t help.
One reason that incumbents are doing so poorly is that they promise nothing, and deliver it. Nations are in decline across the West, and all that candidates are allowed to offer is more of the same neoliberal pablum. Anyone who attempts to offer something different faces a coordinated attack from the media and incumbent political class, and the only ones seemingly able to break through the resistance are dishonest right-populists. The left has to come up with a solution other than dismantling (excuse me, “fortifying”) democracy, which appears to be the EU solution.
Can you tell me which Trump policies were pro-labor, pro-union, pragmatic, positive visions of the future?
There was none.
It turns out that actually you don't need pragmatic, positive visions of the future to win. In fact, we have plenty of evidence that pragmatic policies at all are a massive electoral liability when facing someone who is, again, willing to simply lie about everything.
In Trump, you have clear evidence that people do not need pragmatic solutions to anything. Somehow you are pulling from that the conclusion that Democrats are not pragmatic enough.
What makes you believe there is public appetite for pragmatic solutions? Enough to win a national election?
Trump does not offer real solutions, except as a sound bite in passing (to be later ignored). But in the absence of pragmatic policies that voters can get behind, the winner will always be the candidate who offers to tear down the system that has failed the people. Mark my words.
The reality is that sound bites have an intrinsic advantage over real solutions. Real solutions to complex problems are by their nature complex and uncertain (else the problem would've been solved already).
"Immigrants are the problem" or "I will bring prices down on day one" have a fundamental memetic advantage that, in a lazy and unengaged populace, will win in 100% of scenarios.
The real issue here is the GOP not holding themselves accountable to something better than suicidal demagoguery. The opposing party cannot prevent this from being successful. That's why it's a known, fundamental flaw of democracy.
It sounds like you’re in a real spot of trouble then. If there are no solutions available. Maybe you can double down on the 2016/2024 strategy again.
Again: you haven't actually provided any evidence of what the 2016/2024 strategy was, why 2020 was different, etc.
You're doing the far lazier, "ascribe all failures to the thing I do not like, and all successes to the thing I do like." Evidence should be trivial to produce but you cannot.
And yes, a major faction electing a demagogue is a real spot of trouble. It has been known as such literally since the invention of democracy.
It wouldn't be considered a known vulnerability because it's solved by "well just talk about a pragmatic, positive vision for the future!" lmao
The Atlantic summarizes the situation somewhat but with perhaps too much brevity: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/10/democra...
Evidence: I was there, do your own research if you care so much. This isn’t a formal debate, and anyone who has eyes, ears, and a brain can figure it out.
You keep shouting demagogue, demagogue! As if anyone outside of the political class cares. Solve the people’s problems or there will be more (and worse) demagogues. It’s your only option.
We don't disagree that that's my (as someone on the anti-Trump side) only reasonable option.
Where we disagree is your assertion that that is the necessary and sufficient solution.
Those are entirely distinct claims.
People have won elections for a long long time without pragmatic solutions to real problems (case in point: 2024). You have basically zero evidence this is even a relevant point in elections whatsoever.
The actual necessary solution is entirely on the GOP's side. So long as they're in the throes of a cult of personality, then a sufficiently large part of the electorate will be immune to logic.
And yes: this is very bad. It is a deeply inconvenient fact, but the inconvenience of it does not render it less factual.
I don’t know what to tell you if you require research to explain that the intended function of the government is to serve the needs of the people, that this is the right thing to do, and that voters will respond positively if it looks like you will make an honest effort to do this.
It sounds like you would rather claim a lack of agency (it’s all up to the big bad Republicans) rather than even attempt to implement a pragmatic, common sense strategy. And this is why the Democratic Party finds itself rudderless.
I don't know what to tell you if you don't think there's a divergence between what gets people put into power and what role they're supposed to play with that power. Again: we are currently living a live, empirical disproof of your position, as you have already acknowledged.
> It sounds like you would rather claim a lack of agency (it’s all up to the big bad Republicans) rather than even attempt to implement a pragmatic, common sense strategy. And this is why the Democratic Party finds itself rudderless.
Huh? No. It sounds like instead of reading the words in front of you, you're just arguing against the claims you want me to be making.
Harris was a terrible candidate, we don't disagree there.
Again: We disagree in your assertion that pragmatic policies on the oppositional side are all that's required to win against a demagogue.
If that's true, please tell me why demagogues have long been known to be a real vulnerability in democracies?
Answer directly: If that's all that's necessary, then why did the Founding Fathers even bother to write extensively on this problem?
> Again: We disagree in your assertion that pragmatic policies on the oppositional side are all that's required to win against a demagogue.
I never said that this is the only thing you need. You need other things as well, including a modicum of charisma, a good network on the ground, and solid fundraising to support the efforts. And a party that won’t fight its own candidate after the primaries (oh, and you should actually hold a primary).
Demagogues are a problem in every kind of government when the quality of governance declines. You just don’t often hear about it in dictatorships because the demagogues are either killed or they flee to another country. But demagogues are a sort of release valve for public frustration that’s grounded in material reality, and if you suppress their rise long enough then you eventually get a civil war, collapse, or revolution. The only solution is to fix the problems that lead people to seek out radical change.
Anyway, it’s clear we’re talking past each other, I have no desire to continue this thread further.
banning kids from youtube seems pretty reasonable
[flagged]
Literal fascists in the streets in US right now racial profiling people left and right hiding behind a badge.
HN: OH MY GOD SOCIAL MEDIA BANS ARE GOVERNMENT OVERREACH!!
Yes, the global rise of fascism is a huge problem. Gleefully handing fascists more power over communications and a means of de-anonymizing access to information and communications is exactly what you don't want to do.
That's what this sudden movement is really about: maintaining bubbles of indoctrination to maintain the rightward slide of the Overton Window, and installing a permanent means of tying Internet activity to identity for monitoring.
It's important that things like the first amendment never be compromised precisely because that erosion becomes a tool of fascism. We're inches away from neo-McCarthyism, and this is the tool to enable it.
Correct. Deporting illegal aliens is exactly the job of the federal government.
Clever snark!
We should think about the consequences to everyone’s lives of having thugs cosplaying as soldiers running around disappearing innocent people off the streets because they’re brown.
They're literally federal law enforcement officers, not thugs. And they're not "disappearing" people because they're brown, they're deporting them to their homeland because they no one gave them permission to be in our country.
I'm sure you're used to this alarmist dramatic language working in your circles but it won't here.
We should think about the consequences of letting in tens of million of illegals instead.
Thugs is as thugs does.
They're detaining citizens:
- https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025.12.8_IC... - https://www.visaverge.com/news/congressional-probe-finds-age...
They're doing it because they're brown:
- https://www.brookings.edu/articles/racial-profiling-by-ice-w...
They're deporting them third countries:
https://www.cfr.org/article/what-are-third-country-deportati...
> We should think about the consequences of letting in tens of million of illegals instead.
What are the consequences exactly?
Makes sense.
Our kids didn't get social media until they were 16 and life continued.
We don't let kids drive until 16 and smoke or drink until 18.
This just seems down right reasonable.
What is the case for allowing them to have it before 16?
The question is how the laws are enforced.
The driving, smoking, and drinking laws are enforced outside the home. Everyone has to prove their age at the DMV to get a license and at commercial establishments to buy cigarettes and alcohol.
The only way to enforce the social media law age minimum is to force everyone to show their ID just to use the internet, even from their own home. That seems more Orwellian to me.
Social media is the smoking of our age, and it will come to be seen the same way we see smoking now.
Just like the tobacco companies, social media companies have known about the ills of their platforms for a long time and actively hidden it and/or publicly downplayed it.
No: It's more like leaded gasoline. People of the future will be like, "why would you let a big corporation control the feed algorithm?" Social media is fine. It's the algorithm that seeks addiction/engagement that's the problem. Not social media in general.
"Social media" is far too ambiguous anyway. For example, under most definitions, Steam is a social media platform. Yet no one is addicted to sharing things via Steam. But you can! You absolutely can share and browse people's posts, screenshots, videos, and even chat (text and voice)!
The reason why no one complains about Steam's social media features is that they're not designed to be addicting. That's not the point of the platform (it's to sell more games).
And that's exactly why Steam was not included in the Australian bans.
I don't believe this is done for the benefit of children/teens. What's much more likely is that politicians don't like people having news/information sources not beholden to them.