Please note that the Conseil d'État, the highest French court for administrative matters, has issued a very skeptical opinion on this bill, saying that only the EU can impose new obligations onto digital platforms.
> The amended and adopted text now states that "access to an online social network service provided by an online platform is prohibited for minors under the age of 15." This is a more ambiguous formulation, as it does not explicitly impose any requirements on social networks. However, as a consequence, "platforms will have to implement age verification measures to ensure the effectiveness of this measure," the government promised in the explanatory statement of the amendment. For major platforms like Instagram or Snapchat, sanctions would fall under the jurisdiction of the European Commission.
> This has raised eyebrows among several law experts specializing in European digital law, whom Le Monde interviewed. "The bill is legally fragile," warned Brunessen Bertrand, law professor at the University of Rennes-I. In her view, it is based on a "broad and highly questionable interpretation" of European rules.
The décret establishing the list of social networks forbidden to the <15 yo will be appealed before the Conseil d'État, which will most likely send a question to the CJEU and have the ability to cancel the décret, so I would argue that their opinion is extremely relevant. Same thing for the eventual sanctions taken by the Arcom.
European law takes precedence over national law, so the effectiveness of the bill appears to be limited. The same thing happened with the French age verification bill for adult websites.
Which European law supersedes this law? My unfamiliar guess is that if there is no specific contradiction then French law stands, otherwise how can any country pass any laws in the EU?
> "By imposing a ban on access to social media on online platforms, the wording of the proposed law could be seen as raising difficulties with regard to the Digital Services Act."
I don't know how it works in France, but in common law systems opinions of other courts are always at least capable of being persuasive (not binding) precedent, so they are not irrelevant. Other courts can be, and often are, influenced by persuasive precedent when appropriate.
Just the other day the FT put out an article that the current generation of graduates are so serially online that they freeze or go silent when faced with basic small talk questions.
I have encountered this for myself.
A few months ago New York banned phones at lunch and was discussed on HN [1]
We live in times where parents and schools no longer have the authority to enforce behaviour and social media is peer pressure from the entire world.
These bans are obviously heavy handed but hopefully they are a reversion back to an equilibrium that gives our young a chance to properly develop...
It is one thing to ban something on paper, another to actually ban it in practice. In France, mobile phones for students in college (junior high school) have been banned but surveys of schools suggested only 9% of the schools actually banned the phones, citing practical and financial constraints. [0]
I feel all of this has been going on for the last 50 years. TV and video games were a substitute for a normal environment for kids to develop in the at the end of the last century.
> We live in times where parents and schools no longer have the authority to enforce behavior
Yes but the problem is much deeper.
I often observer various "families" with their kids on holidays. The French and the Brits are really a nightmare, strangely the same countries who are now banning social media. But my guess is this is more of chicken than an egg problem.
You will often have an hysterical woman, totally deranged and often alone, screaming constantly on the kids for no reasons. You wish you could call child protective services on them and this is only when they are "relaxing" on holiday.
We know those kids are gonna get into weird internet things and drugs anyway to escape this world. France can write any law they want it is not gonna solve the problem and send them back to any "equilibrium".
Blaming TV, video games and now social media 20 years late is just a way to avoid talking about the real problem.
> I feel all of this has been going on for the last 50 years. TV and video games were a substitute for a normal environment for kids to develop in the at the end of the last century.
Not really, I was born in the 80s and video games did help me know a lot of people I still hang out with.
I don't like the idea of centralised digital ID for the obvious surveillance/privacy arguments and think that side of the conversation needs to be focused on. BUT, I also think that the Social Media experiment has shown that social media in general really, really sucks. It sucks for adults but it's objectively damaging to kids.
So like, I am all for restricting kids from it, and honestly I'd happily see it regulated out of existence entirely.
I’d like good social media regulated into existence. Let people take their data, move to a different service, set up redirects, have some meaningful ways to customize or reject algorithms, etc. I don’t think it’s likely to happen but one can hope.
That would be nice. Maybe take it back to a time when it was about forming and maintaining interpersonal connections rather than 'following' influencers and peddling ragebait.
Social media is objectively damaging to the interests of the ruling class, who have been objectively damaging to western civilization during the past decades in which they had near-complete control over the flow of information. It'd be batshit crazy to go back to the times when information flow was centralized in the hands of a few corporations, just because a some neurotics can't handle the increased flow of information from decentralized media.
Isn’t the information flow being controlled by the few major social media players another form of centralisation where their algorithms decide which decentralised voices are heard?
> Social media is objectively damaging to the interests of the ruling class,
Maybe double check who owns and controls most social media platforms, and then think a bit if you'd categorize them more in the ruling class or working class.
I've noticed that there's a decent amount of people who had benefitted having access to computer and internet really early on that seemed to be pro on banning teen access to social media, is there a reason why? the social media of today don't seem all that much different from the internet forums of back in the day
if algorithmic amplification is the reason then I'm not sure why social media as a whole has to be banned over it.
> the social media of today don't seem all that much different from the internet forums of back in the day
I’m not trying to be a jerk, but did you actually participate in “Internet forums back in the day?” I couldn’t think of anything more different than contemporary social media. Internet forums in late 90’s and early 00’s were something special. Hell, I had more “internet friends” from online forums attend my wedding than I did friends from high school or college… and for some it was the first time meeting in person.
4chan is old enough to drink. Something Awful is from the 20th century. Don't pretend that transgressive internet content is some novel challenge that today's youth must face for the first time.
You are mistaken if you think it is about transgression. Old forums had no algo feeds to manipulate the content you saw and steer you. This is the issue, not so much the content itself.
The people who benefited from having access to a computer and the internet early on had no access to social media. Also, nobody is banning under 15s from having access to a computer and the internet.
This site is social media. Should under 15s be prevented discussing developers in the tech industry?
No? On what grounds? HN uses opaque feed ranking algorithms. It's run by a for-profit US tech company. It uses dark patterns (e.g. shadowbans and unwired "flag" links) that prompt users to engage under false pretenses.
It even has advertisements. The horror!
Yet nobody serious says HN is harmful to the fledging minor technologist.
I've yet to see a logical rule allowing minors to access HN but prohibiting their scrolling Instagram. Every demarcation scheme I've seen is some variant of "big company bad", which is a ridiculous standard for a law intended to prevent the harms that the "structure* of a medium (as opposed to the identity of its owners) produces.
In a nation of laws, an act is allowed or prohibited based on the nature of the act itself. Actors don't get special privileges based on who they are.
If so then I would say the term "social media" has more or less lost all meaning.
To me HN is more like an old-school forum - it has a focus and it has a mod team to keep the rails on the discussion and keep the topics vaguely on topic.
My point is that it's hard to define social media in a way that excludes HN but includes the services that the activist sort thinks are disrespecting the gods of the city and corrupting the youth. Laws must be rooted in conduct, not identy.
Start with classic conditioning that’s implemented in every large social media platform and go from there.
Or go in reverse, look at research into correlation between mental health issues and social media use and extrapolate contributing factors, from those extract the features
Should give a starting point for nailing down the definition.
I'm not convinced it's that hard. I've pointed out a few ways that it differs significantly.
There are others major differences like the lack of infinite doomscrolling, or the personalised feed to optimise engagement.
To the wider point that maybe we should be preventing kids from accessing classes of things rather than particular services - yeah probably, but it's much easier to manage a blocklist starting with the worst offenders, and that might be a good enough start down the path of harm reduction.
There are various studies about social media having a negative impact on teenager's mental health.
I don't think internet forums are comparable to what social media are today, in the scale (it was a marginal activity 15 years ago) and the impact it has on your own life.
> the social media of today don't seem all that much different from the internet forums of back in the day
The message boards I participated when I was a young teenager were mostly focused on a specific topic (a specific videogame or series of videogame, or a specific genre), with some off-topics board on the side. They were contained communities; village-like if you will. If you don't like one you could hop on another website that had another set of members, customs, and rules.
(yes, you can sort-of see that small village feel with some Discord group or subreddit; but back then the media were controlled by an admin, not a centralized for-profit group)
Contrast this with today's infinite feed were everyone could potentially reach anyone, all curated by The Algorithm(tm) with a vague notion of "friend" or "subscriber".
I consider it more like an opium crisis of the time
Where the whole population is addicted and governors risk their political career to ban the addiction, and then get their territory invaded by the corporations they kicked out who have returned with a foreign military and mercenary army, to push the addiction back on the populace
All of the big "social media" companies support this type of legislation. No one is risking their political career doing exactly what tech companies want lol
Advertising, a push to incredibly short video content, dumb memes, AI slop, conspiracy theories, scams, algorithms that push more of all these bad things to generate ‘engagement’ and advertising revenue and punish real thoughtful ideas. The truth hasn’t even put its shoes in before misinformation is racing around the world on these platforms.
It’s hard to think of something genuinely positive about platforms like instagram YouTube and twitter nowadays.
Trying to share genuine joy in an activity is still possible but the platforms heavily push frequent users to think of themselves as ‘content creators’ and produce trivial yet popular video clips with all the negatives that brings.
>I've noticed that there's a decent amount of people who had benefitted having access to computer and internet really early on that seemed to be pro on banning teen access to social media
Most of the people on this platform are left-leaning, and social media has allowed right-wing ideas to spread among the youth, ideas which they'd never have been exposed to if their information was filtered through left-leaning teachers and media as it was in previous decades. They want to ban social media in an attempt to bring future youth back leftwards.
Same here; I'm all for a "ban" but it doesn't have to be all social media, just force them to use a simple rules-based algorithm for minors.
But meh, it's a broader issue anyway. Just look at the puritanical obsession some people have with pornography too.
Young people these days are getting infantilised way too much imho and that's just not healthy. There needs to be a safe environment to transition into adulthood with gradual exposure to all kinds of things, rather than turning 18 and suddenly being a different category of person entirely.
There are supposedly studies linking social media to various negative consequences. For example, according to the Mayo Clinic, social media can:
- Distract from homework, exercise and family activities.
- Disrupt sleep.
- Lead to information that is biased or not correct.
... Ah, just like that public health menace, the public library.
I don't believe "social media" is actually injurious to youths. The studies saying it does, ISTM, are all confounded, of poor quality, and ride off publication bias. And yeah, it's remarkable that a lot of people on this very thread ago grew up on the Internet and gained lifelong technical skills want to pull the ladder up after them on the grounds of unproven and implausible harms.
In reality, the drive for social media age limits is the latest in a long line of moral panics. In the 80s, it was D&D corrupting innocent souls. Now, it's feed ranking? I don't believe any of it.
Looking for reason at the root of a moral panic usually leads only to despair. These things just have to be endured.
Gambling doesn’t cause physical harm either, but it’s also banned for children. It’s similar to social media in that both are made to be as addictive as possible and they exploit human psychology.
I think it’s telling that many people here who work in tech don’t want social media for their kids, but there are no comic book readers who want to ban comics for their kids.
Nepal tried to ban social media to keep the youth from organizing, and the youth rose up and burned the government buildings and politicans' homes down. I'd like to see you try.
What a weird idea to isolate teens from a platform instead of regulating it. It’s like if children were forbidden to drink a soda at a bar because they also sell alcohol. Enforcing platform’s safety and educating users (young and old) would be much better to help everyone be healthy in a connected world.
> It’s like if children were forbidden to drink a soda at a bar because they also sell alcohol
The comparison is wrong.
It would be more "It is like if children were forbidden to be in a smoker room, just because they are not the one consuming".
Yes they should be forbidden, because they do not need to smoke themselves to feel the negative effects.
Even without "porn", "murdering/violence" or other controversial content that can be found on social medias, just the negative effects of doomscrolling on the brain are harmful enough.
Their is plenty of studies that describe the effect it has on attention span, memory and cognitive capacity of kids.
My comparison is about the alarmism and you are doing the same by equivaliting chatting with friends online to smoking which can give cancer.
We are ourselves now on a sort of social media platform which shows it’s possible to be responsible and use it wisely with a better design and more rules. Framing the decision in France like a fight against a nocive substance is lazy and avoid talking about nuanced regulation and digital literacy which are more effective approaches. There are studies showing that regulating adolescent social media use is better than a ban for example.
> There are studies showing that regulating adolescent social media use is better than a ban for example.
Not in disagreement. I believe that the ban is not even strictly applicable.
It will just lead to the redirection to a new platform that avoid the restrictions or any jurisdiction, which is worst.
The complete lack of will to tackle the problem by the main Mega networks (Meta, X, Tiktok, Snapchat, Telegram and even Youtube) is currently the main issues here.
For instance, enforcing a "report" to the consummer weekly with the effective time spend on scrolling to promote awareness and help to prevent addiction would already be a first good move. None of them implemented that effectively.
Very off-topic, but war on drugs failed in NA, but is successful in East Asia. It really depends on government and how they handle it. I’m not American, but my understanding of war on drugs was also that it wasn’t just about drugs, might be wrong.
Being discriminated against by the government sucks, and so does getting locked out of the main way the world communicates in the 21st century. I don't blame a 14 year old for not handling a violation of their rights in a mature manner.
> It’s like if children were forbidden to drink a soda at a bar because they also sell alcohol.
Errr... there are quite a few places where children aren't allowed to enter a bar, or can only go to them with parents if the establishment also serves food.
> Enforcing platform’s safety and educating users (young and old) would be much better to help everyone
It's not 100% clear to me this is true, it may be that the way social media operates is just bad for developing brains. Maybe all brains....
It would be nice to have good evidence one way or another though.
There are many things that can be changed to make the platforms more suitable to younger users. Just banning it instead of searching for a good balance won’t help the next generation to understand the world and take a part in it.
There are so many ways the platforms can be changed but France decided they've tried nothing and they're all out of ideas.
Not exactly. They don't have the final say, so if they disagree with something, they can (and will) be overruled. But they don't "stamp" things and aren't otherwise made to approve what they don't like.
And of course they will demand that everyone is required to do a KYC. At sone point vpn access will require that as well. And finally the internet as we know it will be a thing of the past.
Yeah, I for one am getting pissed already about having legitimate parts of the internet cut off unless I'm willing to submit to ID verification.
For example, discussions about recent killings by ICE in the US. This example is one where I really don't want to tie my real life ID to my online presence for fear of retribution if I ever feel confident to travel to there again.
I'm not using any social media besides reddit (if it can even be considered a social media) and I have absolutely 0 problem going through life. What are you talking about ?
Funny thing is, too, that you can do age verification with zero knowledge proofs. No ID needed -- in principle.
Yet in practice, yeah, it'll be the death of anonymity. To allow ZKPs to take off would be letting a good panic go to waste, right? /s
While I believe the genesis of this age limit push is a good old fashioned moral panic, it's also obvious that the usual enemies of free speech are salivating at using this panic as a pretext to ban anonymity on the internet.
I can't read the article because cloud flare won't let me, but how is this ban a violation of privacy? From my knowledge of social media it would likely increase the privacy of those not using these platforms.
Because under the guise of protecting children you now require the ID of everyone. And the service list will expand. Can't wait to have to swipe my ID to even start Chrome.
Switzerland created a digital ID platform (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45407657), that has been open sourced, and that would allow people to prove for example their age without revealing any other personal details. It's maybe not the perfect solution, but I find this highly preferable to sharing my ID with some social media platform.
I was happy enough to use Vimeo for several years, then made an account to be able to watch videos all of a sudden, and just recently when I logged in they've asked me to also verify (?) my identity with an ID. Yeah, not doing that.
Why just teens though? Getting manipulated by algorithms crafted to maximize screentime and ad revenue is bad for anyone.
These platforms rely on ads to survive. Which means it should be easy to regulate them. You can prevent them from selling ads at which point they will be forced to comply. If they don't, someone else will get the ad revenue. Europe is already hostile towards american tech giants anyways.
The possibilities are endless. Pass a law that forces all social media with more than x users to not implement constant scrolling, make their ranking algorithm open source, allow people to use their own algorithms, employ robust moderation etc.
Instead we have a blanket ban that requires id checks but leaves the manipulation machine intact so it can prey on adults. Mental health is not the real issue here. They want to be able to track people and destroy anonimity online. Children are a convenient excuse.
I share your vision about what ideal regulation looks like.
I don't share your cynicism pertaining to motives. Well, I am cynical about it, but in a non-conspiratorial way.
Politicians are feckless trend followers, cowardly in their disposition, preferring to follow the path of least resistance, and they lack any substantial vision or imagination themselves.
That explains why nothing bold is happening. And that lack of boldness is not unique to social media regulation.
That puts me squarely in the "this isn't perfect, but it's a good step" camp.
Yeah and all internet surveillance is to catch terrorists and pedophiles. Of course almost every action can be justified by some positives, but let's not pretend it is what it is. Getting an ID behind every username has a lot more benefits than protecting a shrinking population that does not vote.
This is ridiculous. I went to university at the age of 14 and was absolutely capable of managing my way through social media at that time - but it became much worse in my early 20s when interest in politics peaked. Maybe interest in politics should be outlawed instead, it’s much more harmful.
If you went to university at 14, which is what... 4+ years earlier then anyone else usually manages? then you really shouldn't extrapolate your own experience on the population at large.
You'd have skipped multiple years in education, hence you'd be massively more intelligent then the general population that this regulation aims to help, (albeit against their own wishes).
>Maybe interest in politics should be outlawed instead, it’s much more harmful.
It's not "politics" that's harmful, it's politicians continuously acting against the interests of the younger generation. Trying to suppress the youth's ability to discuss and organize against that is tyrannical.
This kind of legislation is frankly just bad. Any TV station in america could have broadcasted the worst things in the world to thousands of people affecting their lives together. You know how we handled that? Legislation on the broadcasters. We didn't stop kids from watching TV.
I'm not a fan of the law, but your argument is pretty weak. The dose makes the poison and all that. It seems rationale to believe that humans can construct an entertainment mechanism so addictive as to warrant safeguards. The debate is mostly around whether this is that point and whether the trade-offs are worth it.
...yes? Humans love their poisons even if it's not in their best interest to love them. It's all about giving people a fighting chance to make conscious decisions about how they want to live their life. If we crush a fledgling brain with social media before it's learned to fend for itself then we're removing true freedom of choice.
To me, it seems pretty analogous to alcohol, etc. You don't prohibit alcohol. You define an age in which you're willing to declare people mature enough to tolerate letting them make their own decisions.
TV the broadcast station was held responsible for the content they distributed and if they failed too much they would loose their access to the radio spectrum and unambiguous stop to exist.
The rules online is different. Not only are they not responsible for the content they distribute, but when they do break the law anyway the only punishment that they get is a small fine.
Around 30% of facebook advertisements are scams. That would not had worked with TV stations of old.
Actually, we don't stop kids from buying cigarettes, we punish stores that sell cigarettes to kids and are caught! That's my entire point! You just made my argument for me!
And the store does not use facial recognition and/or checking id to know if the potential buyer is a kid ?
The only (huge) difference for me is the scale of the verification and how data are stored.
Despite the headline, does this law actually punish the children if they are caught with social media accounts? Or is the burden on the social media providers?
I have to assume this is a joke because that's absolutely ludicrous to claim and (if true) would mean the valuation of every social media company is so inflated as to constitute fraud.
How do you compare a system where the communication channel goes only one way in a single country to a system where everyone potentially contributes to the content and is distributed over the world?
How does one country legislate the content of a company based in another country?
Do you think that censorship is a better solution?
Oh how's moderating and legislating social media behemots going so far?
Exactly..
They will use any trick or loophole available to keep the reach and to exploit attention spans.
Kids brains aren't correct really made for social media whatsoever. Ban is justified and the bar should be even higher than 15 years old, but it's a start.
I have a young baby and no way it touches anything smartphone related for many many years, same goes with TV to a certain extent (these things are like smartphones nowadays with all the apps and programme fighting for your attention and to enrage you). I am doing my part, I for sure expect the government does their thing as well.
Exploitators should stay in check and at bay with any means necessary
> Oh how's moderating and legislating social media behemots going so far?
This feels like you intended to make it a gotcha question, but the answer is: America isn't really trying to do that at all. So we should just give up?
"Damn, handling biowaste is hard and dangerous, what we'll do is just prevent people from leaving their house."
I'm not in America nor would I rely on their legislators doing anything about it, especially with current admin.
France, Australia and the likes (who are in process of implementing banning social media for kids) is the only way behemots will understand. Otherwise you're risking loopholes beig exploited, bureaucracy being slow while behemots move fast, etc.
Ban is pretty much self explanatory and leaves little room for interpretation, at least not in a way where 100s of pages of moderation guidelines and potential ambiguity such docs create
Some related information, I see a lot of talk about how people feel social media or phones affect young people, but little data or input from researchers who are not politicians or selling books.
From Nature[1]:
> Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health
From the Atlantic[2] with citations in the article:
> The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn’t Help Teens,
> It may only make things worse.
> I am a developmental psychologist, and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.
> Many other researchers have found the same. In fact, a recent study and a review of research on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”
Even Meta's OWN research indicated social media is actively harmful to teens.
That means, the people with the most to lose couldn't even escape this conclusion.
Sure, you may be able to find 1 or 2 counterexamples, big tabacco also had a lot of "doctors" who found smoking not that bad.
Please note that the Conseil d'État, the highest French court for administrative matters, has issued a very skeptical opinion on this bill, saying that only the EU can impose new obligations onto digital platforms.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/01/27/french-l...
> The amended and adopted text now states that "access to an online social network service provided by an online platform is prohibited for minors under the age of 15." This is a more ambiguous formulation, as it does not explicitly impose any requirements on social networks. However, as a consequence, "platforms will have to implement age verification measures to ensure the effectiveness of this measure," the government promised in the explanatory statement of the amendment. For major platforms like Instagram or Snapchat, sanctions would fall under the jurisdiction of the European Commission.
> This has raised eyebrows among several law experts specializing in European digital law, whom Le Monde interviewed. "The bill is legally fragile," warned Brunessen Bertrand, law professor at the University of Rennes-I. In her view, it is based on a "broad and highly questionable interpretation" of European rules.
Except the Conseil d'État is not a supreme court, so their opinion on the subject is irrelevant.
The décret establishing the list of social networks forbidden to the <15 yo will be appealed before the Conseil d'État, which will most likely send a question to the CJEU and have the ability to cancel the décret, so I would argue that their opinion is extremely relevant. Same thing for the eventual sanctions taken by the Arcom.
European law takes precedence over national law, so the effectiveness of the bill appears to be limited. The same thing happened with the French age verification bill for adult websites.
>European law takes precedence over national law
Which European law supersedes this law? My unfamiliar guess is that if there is no specific contradiction then French law stands, otherwise how can any country pass any laws in the EU?
The Conseil d'Etat seems to think that there is a contradiction between the original draft and the DSA: https://www.conseil-etat.fr/avis-consultatifs/derniers-avis-... (starting at number 12)
> "By imposing a ban on access to social media on online platforms, the wording of the proposed law could be seen as raising difficulties with regard to the Digital Services Act."
I don't know how it works in France, but in common law systems opinions of other courts are always at least capable of being persuasive (not binding) precedent, so they are not irrelevant. Other courts can be, and often are, influenced by persuasive precedent when appropriate.
Frexit?
Just the other day the FT put out an article that the current generation of graduates are so serially online that they freeze or go silent when faced with basic small talk questions.
I have encountered this for myself.
A few months ago New York banned phones at lunch and was discussed on HN [1]
We live in times where parents and schools no longer have the authority to enforce behaviour and social media is peer pressure from the entire world.
These bans are obviously heavy handed but hopefully they are a reversion back to an equilibrium that gives our young a chance to properly develop...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45822539
> We live in times where parents and schools no longer have the authority to enforce behaviour
...What? They certainly can, if they're banning certain behavior?
It is one thing to ban something on paper, another to actually ban it in practice. In France, mobile phones for students in college (junior high school) have been banned but surveys of schools suggested only 9% of the schools actually banned the phones, citing practical and financial constraints. [0]
0: https://www.ouest-france.fr/education/les-telephones-bientot...
I feel all of this has been going on for the last 50 years. TV and video games were a substitute for a normal environment for kids to develop in the at the end of the last century.
> We live in times where parents and schools no longer have the authority to enforce behavior
Yes but the problem is much deeper.
I often observer various "families" with their kids on holidays. The French and the Brits are really a nightmare, strangely the same countries who are now banning social media. But my guess is this is more of chicken than an egg problem.
You will often have an hysterical woman, totally deranged and often alone, screaming constantly on the kids for no reasons. You wish you could call child protective services on them and this is only when they are "relaxing" on holiday.
We know those kids are gonna get into weird internet things and drugs anyway to escape this world. France can write any law they want it is not gonna solve the problem and send them back to any "equilibrium".
Blaming TV, video games and now social media 20 years late is just a way to avoid talking about the real problem.
> I feel all of this has been going on for the last 50 years. TV and video games were a substitute for a normal environment for kids to develop in the at the end of the last century.
Not really, I was born in the 80s and video games did help me know a lot of people I still hang out with.
You clearly have no kids
I don't like the idea of centralised digital ID for the obvious surveillance/privacy arguments and think that side of the conversation needs to be focused on. BUT, I also think that the Social Media experiment has shown that social media in general really, really sucks. It sucks for adults but it's objectively damaging to kids.
So like, I am all for restricting kids from it, and honestly I'd happily see it regulated out of existence entirely.
I’d like good social media regulated into existence. Let people take their data, move to a different service, set up redirects, have some meaningful ways to customize or reject algorithms, etc. I don’t think it’s likely to happen but one can hope.
That would be nice. Maybe take it back to a time when it was about forming and maintaining interpersonal connections rather than 'following' influencers and peddling ragebait.
Social media is objectively damaging to the interests of the ruling class, who have been objectively damaging to western civilization during the past decades in which they had near-complete control over the flow of information. It'd be batshit crazy to go back to the times when information flow was centralized in the hands of a few corporations, just because a some neurotics can't handle the increased flow of information from decentralized media.
Isn’t the information flow being controlled by the few major social media players another form of centralisation where their algorithms decide which decentralised voices are heard?
> Social media is objectively damaging to the interests of the ruling class,
Maybe double check who owns and controls most social media platforms, and then think a bit if you'd categorize them more in the ruling class or working class.
Thats not argument for anything in this topic. The choice was never binary and it seems you don't understand the discussion.
That illuminati mumbo jumbo part doesn't deserve a comment.
I've noticed that there's a decent amount of people who had benefitted having access to computer and internet really early on that seemed to be pro on banning teen access to social media, is there a reason why? the social media of today don't seem all that much different from the internet forums of back in the day
if algorithmic amplification is the reason then I'm not sure why social media as a whole has to be banned over it.
Imo the difference is enormous between social media and forums.
Infinite feeds are designed to game you for attention, whereas the forums of yore were there to facilitate discussions.
I'm sure some forums would also have liked to game you if they could, but they didn't have the scale to always have something juicy to serve up.
To me it's super uncomfortable to expose my kids to a product designed by large teams with the goal of making it addictive.
The bodybuilding.com forums always had something juicy to serve up. Today’s social media really isn’t much different.
I find it uncomfortable for the government to yoink any citizen’s access to discussion platforms. I would be more comfortable with other means.
> the social media of today don't seem all that much different from the internet forums of back in the day
I’m not trying to be a jerk, but did you actually participate in “Internet forums back in the day?” I couldn’t think of anything more different than contemporary social media. Internet forums in late 90’s and early 00’s were something special. Hell, I had more “internet friends” from online forums attend my wedding than I did friends from high school or college… and for some it was the first time meeting in person.
4chan is old enough to drink. Something Awful is from the 20th century. Don't pretend that transgressive internet content is some novel challenge that today's youth must face for the first time.
4chan is a peaceful place compared to modern social media.
You are mistaken if you think it is about transgression. Old forums had no algo feeds to manipulate the content you saw and steer you. This is the issue, not so much the content itself.
The people who benefited from having access to a computer and the internet early on had no access to social media. Also, nobody is banning under 15s from having access to a computer and the internet.
This site is social media. Should under 15s be prevented discussing developers in the tech industry?
No? On what grounds? HN uses opaque feed ranking algorithms. It's run by a for-profit US tech company. It uses dark patterns (e.g. shadowbans and unwired "flag" links) that prompt users to engage under false pretenses.
It even has advertisements. The horror!
Yet nobody serious says HN is harmful to the fledging minor technologist.
I've yet to see a logical rule allowing minors to access HN but prohibiting their scrolling Instagram. Every demarcation scheme I've seen is some variant of "big company bad", which is a ridiculous standard for a law intended to prevent the harms that the "structure* of a medium (as opposed to the identity of its owners) produces.
In a nation of laws, an act is allowed or prohibited based on the nature of the act itself. Actors don't get special privileges based on who they are.
> This site is social media.
Is it?
If so then I would say the term "social media" has more or less lost all meaning.
To me HN is more like an old-school forum - it has a focus and it has a mod team to keep the rails on the discussion and keep the topics vaguely on topic.
My point is that it's hard to define social media in a way that excludes HN but includes the services that the activist sort thinks are disrespecting the gods of the city and corrupting the youth. Laws must be rooted in conduct, not identy.
Start with classic conditioning that’s implemented in every large social media platform and go from there.
Or go in reverse, look at research into correlation between mental health issues and social media use and extrapolate contributing factors, from those extract the features
Should give a starting point for nailing down the definition.
I'm not convinced it's that hard. I've pointed out a few ways that it differs significantly.
There are others major differences like the lack of infinite doomscrolling, or the personalised feed to optimise engagement.
To the wider point that maybe we should be preventing kids from accessing classes of things rather than particular services - yeah probably, but it's much easier to manage a blocklist starting with the worst offenders, and that might be a good enough start down the path of harm reduction.
There are various studies about social media having a negative impact on teenager's mental health.
I don't think internet forums are comparable to what social media are today, in the scale (it was a marginal activity 15 years ago) and the impact it has on your own life.
> the social media of today don't seem all that much different from the internet forums of back in the day
The message boards I participated when I was a young teenager were mostly focused on a specific topic (a specific videogame or series of videogame, or a specific genre), with some off-topics board on the side. They were contained communities; village-like if you will. If you don't like one you could hop on another website that had another set of members, customs, and rules.
(yes, you can sort-of see that small village feel with some Discord group or subreddit; but back then the media were controlled by an admin, not a centralized for-profit group)
Contrast this with today's infinite feed were everyone could potentially reach anyone, all curated by The Algorithm(tm) with a vague notion of "friend" or "subscriber".
It's like pot.
Back in the day, it was much less concentrated and less dangerous than what you can get today.
Social media is the rock amd roll of its time.
Every generation has to have a panic about the children.
I consider it more like an opium crisis of the time
Where the whole population is addicted and governors risk their political career to ban the addiction, and then get their territory invaded by the corporations they kicked out who have returned with a foreign military and mercenary army, to push the addiction back on the populace
All of the big "social media" companies support this type of legislation. No one is risking their political career doing exactly what tech companies want lol
Cyberpunk meets opium wars...
Actually sounds like a not so bad setting for a book/game/movie ngl; sure sounds like a garbage setting for a world to actually live in.
... No offense, but have you ever actually _used_ Tiktok? This take is incredibly out of touch.
Tiktok is to early forums like meth is to black tea.
Advertising, a push to incredibly short video content, dumb memes, AI slop, conspiracy theories, scams, algorithms that push more of all these bad things to generate ‘engagement’ and advertising revenue and punish real thoughtful ideas. The truth hasn’t even put its shoes in before misinformation is racing around the world on these platforms.
It’s hard to think of something genuinely positive about platforms like instagram YouTube and twitter nowadays.
Trying to share genuine joy in an activity is still possible but the platforms heavily push frequent users to think of themselves as ‘content creators’ and produce trivial yet popular video clips with all the negatives that brings.
>I've noticed that there's a decent amount of people who had benefitted having access to computer and internet really early on that seemed to be pro on banning teen access to social media
Most of the people on this platform are left-leaning, and social media has allowed right-wing ideas to spread among the youth, ideas which they'd never have been exposed to if their information was filtered through left-leaning teachers and media as it was in previous decades. They want to ban social media in an attempt to bring future youth back leftwards.
I would normally consider myself to be center right, but I cannot identify myself at all with the current right wing populists.
Same here; I'm all for a "ban" but it doesn't have to be all social media, just force them to use a simple rules-based algorithm for minors.
But meh, it's a broader issue anyway. Just look at the puritanical obsession some people have with pornography too.
Young people these days are getting infantilised way too much imho and that's just not healthy. There needs to be a safe environment to transition into adulthood with gradual exposure to all kinds of things, rather than turning 18 and suddenly being a different category of person entirely.
There are supposedly studies linking social media to various negative consequences. For example, according to the Mayo Clinic, social media can:
- Distract from homework, exercise and family activities.
- Disrupt sleep.
- Lead to information that is biased or not correct.
... Ah, just like that public health menace, the public library.
I don't believe "social media" is actually injurious to youths. The studies saying it does, ISTM, are all confounded, of poor quality, and ride off publication bias. And yeah, it's remarkable that a lot of people on this very thread ago grew up on the Internet and gained lifelong technical skills want to pull the ladder up after them on the grounds of unproven and implausible harms.
In reality, the drive for social media age limits is the latest in a long line of moral panics. In the 80s, it was D&D corrupting innocent souls. Now, it's feed ranking? I don't believe any of it.
Looking for reason at the root of a moral panic usually leads only to despair. These things just have to be endured.
Gambling doesn’t cause physical harm either, but it’s also banned for children. It’s similar to social media in that both are made to be as addictive as possible and they exploit human psychology.
I think it’s telling that many people here who work in tech don’t want social media for their kids, but there are no comic book readers who want to ban comics for their kids.
It's a good start. Ban it for all under 30s and over 60s.
That’s a little harsh. Under 25 and over 75 would be more appropriate.
That's the kind of soft-hearted laissez-faire attitude that got us where we are today
Yeah we need dictatorship with a dictator that opposes all your views. /s
We need to recognize that deliberately engineered psyops are deliberately engineered psyops
Ban it for everyone at that point. What's the point of not letting adults use social media, exactly?
Same as the point of banning online gambling or methamphetamines
So ADHD people shouldn't have access to meds?
Nepal tried to ban social media to keep the youth from organizing, and the youth rose up and burned the government buildings and politicans' homes down. I'd like to see you try.
That's an incredibly simplistic narrative of what happened in Nepal but I get that that is what the media in the US/EU have been running with
What a weird idea to isolate teens from a platform instead of regulating it. It’s like if children were forbidden to drink a soda at a bar because they also sell alcohol. Enforcing platform’s safety and educating users (young and old) would be much better to help everyone be healthy in a connected world.
> It’s like if children were forbidden to drink a soda at a bar because they also sell alcohol
The comparison is wrong.
It would be more "It is like if children were forbidden to be in a smoker room, just because they are not the one consuming".
Yes they should be forbidden, because they do not need to smoke themselves to feel the negative effects.
Even without "porn", "murdering/violence" or other controversial content that can be found on social medias, just the negative effects of doomscrolling on the brain are harmful enough.
Their is plenty of studies that describe the effect it has on attention span, memory and cognitive capacity of kids.
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=14350...
And lets face it: Over the last 10y, any attempt to regulate the platforms responsible of that failed miserably.
My comparison is about the alarmism and you are doing the same by equivaliting chatting with friends online to smoking which can give cancer.
We are ourselves now on a sort of social media platform which shows it’s possible to be responsible and use it wisely with a better design and more rules. Framing the decision in France like a fight against a nocive substance is lazy and avoid talking about nuanced regulation and digital literacy which are more effective approaches. There are studies showing that regulating adolescent social media use is better than a ban for example.
> There are studies showing that regulating adolescent social media use is better than a ban for example.
Not in disagreement. I believe that the ban is not even strictly applicable.
It will just lead to the redirection to a new platform that avoid the restrictions or any jurisdiction, which is worst.
The complete lack of will to tackle the problem by the main Mega networks (Meta, X, Tiktok, Snapchat, Telegram and even Youtube) is currently the main issues here.
For instance, enforcing a "report" to the consummer weekly with the effective time spend on scrolling to promote awareness and help to prevent addiction would already be a first good move. None of them implemented that effectively.
We have not learnt anything from the war on drugs, even though many people compare social media to drugs.
Very off-topic, but war on drugs failed in NA, but is successful in East Asia. It really depends on government and how they handle it. I’m not American, but my understanding of war on drugs was also that it wasn’t just about drugs, might be wrong.
It's much easier to forbid something to a subset of the population than to the population at large.
That comparison is misguided. You can stop social media abruptly and not feel any withdrawal.
https://www.reddit.com/r/perth/comments/1pmvcml/my_14yo_is_l...
I think it depends on your definition of withdrawal, but it seems that some teens did experience something analagous to it here in Australia.
I think this counts in favour of the ban, myself.
Being discriminated against by the government sucks, and so does getting locked out of the main way the world communicates in the 21st century. I don't blame a 14 year old for not handling a violation of their rights in a mature manner.
> It’s like if children were forbidden to drink a soda at a bar because they also sell alcohol.
Errr... there are quite a few places where children aren't allowed to enter a bar, or can only go to them with parents if the establishment also serves food.
> Enforcing platform’s safety and educating users (young and old) would be much better to help everyone
It's not 100% clear to me this is true, it may be that the way social media operates is just bad for developing brains. Maybe all brains....
It would be nice to have good evidence one way or another though.
There are many things that can be changed to make the platforms more suitable to younger users. Just banning it instead of searching for a good balance won’t help the next generation to understand the world and take a part in it.
There are so many ways the platforms can be changed but France decided they've tried nothing and they're all out of ideas.
Governments just want to normalize ID verification for using online platforms. Children's safety is always the go-to cry for assimilating more power.
I think this is a good thing. Social media should be treated a bit like drugs, with regards to both production and consumption.
Yes, the more government intervention the better. history has shown that government intervention always works out well.
Not yet passed, waiting for senate approval.
Senate just stamps whatever comes on their desk in France
Not exactly. They don't have the final say, so if they disagree with something, they can (and will) be overruled. But they don't "stamp" things and aren't otherwise made to approve what they don't like.
And of course they will demand that everyone is required to do a KYC. At sone point vpn access will require that as well. And finally the internet as we know it will be a thing of the past.
So I guess in 10 or so years whoever doesn't submit their ID card to every online service in existence will not be able to do much of anything online.
Yeah, I for one am getting pissed already about having legitimate parts of the internet cut off unless I'm willing to submit to ID verification.
For example, discussions about recent killings by ICE in the US. This example is one where I really don't want to tie my real life ID to my online presence for fear of retribution if I ever feel confident to travel to there again.
So many platforms required you to register and confirm your age via face and ID scans in order to see any of the direct footage from recent events.
I'm not using any social media besides reddit (if it can even be considered a social media) and I have absolutely 0 problem going through life. What are you talking about ?
You're using it right now.
Funny thing is, too, that you can do age verification with zero knowledge proofs. No ID needed -- in principle.
Yet in practice, yeah, it'll be the death of anonymity. To allow ZKPs to take off would be letting a good panic go to waste, right? /s
While I believe the genesis of this age limit push is a good old fashioned moral panic, it's also obvious that the usual enemies of free speech are salivating at using this panic as a pretext to ban anonymity on the internet.
Violation of privacy under the pretense of protecting children
I can't read the article because cloud flare won't let me, but how is this ban a violation of privacy? From my knowledge of social media it would likely increase the privacy of those not using these platforms.
I think the privacy concern is how to prove you're of age without needing to hand over a government ID.
Oh ok, like the porn ban in the UK.
Then if the age verification is in the hands of these companies that is bad. There's nothing they'd like more than knowing exactly who you are.
Because under the guise of protecting children you now require the ID of everyone. And the service list will expand. Can't wait to have to swipe my ID to even start Chrome.
Switzerland created a digital ID platform (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45407657), that has been open sourced, and that would allow people to prove for example their age without revealing any other personal details. It's maybe not the perfect solution, but I find this highly preferable to sharing my ID with some social media platform.
Good. We need more of these laws with more teeth.
if they need age verification they will ask for everyone's ID, that is why they are doing that in the first place.
I was happy enough to use Vimeo for several years, then made an account to be able to watch videos all of a sudden, and just recently when I logged in they've asked me to also verify (?) my identity with an ID. Yeah, not doing that.
They're doing this because it's bad for teen mental health, and polls keep showing 70% support and 15% opposition.
Why just teens though? Getting manipulated by algorithms crafted to maximize screentime and ad revenue is bad for anyone.
These platforms rely on ads to survive. Which means it should be easy to regulate them. You can prevent them from selling ads at which point they will be forced to comply. If they don't, someone else will get the ad revenue. Europe is already hostile towards american tech giants anyways.
The possibilities are endless. Pass a law that forces all social media with more than x users to not implement constant scrolling, make their ranking algorithm open source, allow people to use their own algorithms, employ robust moderation etc.
Instead we have a blanket ban that requires id checks but leaves the manipulation machine intact so it can prey on adults. Mental health is not the real issue here. They want to be able to track people and destroy anonimity online. Children are a convenient excuse.
Because the effects are much worse on developing brains.
I share your vision about what ideal regulation looks like.
I don't share your cynicism pertaining to motives. Well, I am cynical about it, but in a non-conspiratorial way.
Politicians are feckless trend followers, cowardly in their disposition, preferring to follow the path of least resistance, and they lack any substantial vision or imagination themselves.
That explains why nothing bold is happening. And that lack of boldness is not unique to social media regulation.
That puts me squarely in the "this isn't perfect, but it's a good step" camp.
Despot governments are also harmful for teen mental health but we don't see those being banned.
Yeah and all internet surveillance is to catch terrorists and pedophiles. Of course almost every action can be justified by some positives, but let's not pretend it is what it is. Getting an ID behind every username has a lot more benefits than protecting a shrinking population that does not vote.
This is ridiculous. I went to university at the age of 14 and was absolutely capable of managing my way through social media at that time - but it became much worse in my early 20s when interest in politics peaked. Maybe interest in politics should be outlawed instead, it’s much more harmful.
If you went to university at 14, which is what... 4+ years earlier then anyone else usually manages? then you really shouldn't extrapolate your own experience on the population at large.
You'd have skipped multiple years in education, hence you'd be massively more intelligent then the general population that this regulation aims to help, (albeit against their own wishes).
>Maybe interest in politics should be outlawed instead, it’s much more harmful.
It's not "politics" that's harmful, it's politicians continuously acting against the interests of the younger generation. Trying to suppress the youth's ability to discuss and organize against that is tyrannical.
This kind of legislation is frankly just bad. Any TV station in america could have broadcasted the worst things in the world to thousands of people affecting their lives together. You know how we handled that? Legislation on the broadcasters. We didn't stop kids from watching TV.
I'm not a fan of the law, but your argument is pretty weak. The dose makes the poison and all that. It seems rationale to believe that humans can construct an entertainment mechanism so addictive as to warrant safeguards. The debate is mostly around whether this is that point and whether the trade-offs are worth it.
> It seems rationale to believe that humans can construct an entertainment mechanism so addictive as to warrant safeguards.
Okay but the conversation isn't "Should we have safeguards" it's "How do we handle the poison?".
...yes? Humans love their poisons even if it's not in their best interest to love them. It's all about giving people a fighting chance to make conscious decisions about how they want to live their life. If we crush a fledgling brain with social media before it's learned to fend for itself then we're removing true freedom of choice.
To me, it seems pretty analogous to alcohol, etc. You don't prohibit alcohol. You define an age in which you're willing to declare people mature enough to tolerate letting them make their own decisions.
TV the broadcast station was held responsible for the content they distributed and if they failed too much they would loose their access to the radio spectrum and unambiguous stop to exist.
The rules online is different. Not only are they not responsible for the content they distribute, but when they do break the law anyway the only punishment that they get is a small fine.
Around 30% of facebook advertisements are scams. That would not had worked with TV stations of old.
Bad content reaching kids is not the issue. (Well, it is part of it…) The whole thing is bad. We don't give cigarettes to kids either.
Actually, we don't stop kids from buying cigarettes, we punish stores that sell cigarettes to kids and are caught! That's my entire point! You just made my argument for me!
And the store does not use facial recognition and/or checking id to know if the potential buyer is a kid ? The only (huge) difference for me is the scale of the verification and how data are stored.
Despite the headline, does this law actually punish the children if they are caught with social media accounts? Or is the burden on the social media providers?
Key word is "broadcast". TV programming is not personally tailored to melt your specific amygdala.
An algo-driven feed is absolutely analogous to a broadcast and saying otherwise is absurd.
I have to assume this is a joke because that's absolutely ludicrous to claim and (if true) would mean the valuation of every social media company is so inflated as to constitute fraud.
How do you compare a system where the communication channel goes only one way in a single country to a system where everyone potentially contributes to the content and is distributed over the world?
How does one country legislate the content of a company based in another country?
Do you think that censorship is a better solution?
Oh how's moderating and legislating social media behemots going so far?
Exactly..
They will use any trick or loophole available to keep the reach and to exploit attention spans. Kids brains aren't correct really made for social media whatsoever. Ban is justified and the bar should be even higher than 15 years old, but it's a start.
I have a young baby and no way it touches anything smartphone related for many many years, same goes with TV to a certain extent (these things are like smartphones nowadays with all the apps and programme fighting for your attention and to enrage you). I am doing my part, I for sure expect the government does their thing as well. Exploitators should stay in check and at bay with any means necessary
> Oh how's moderating and legislating social media behemots going so far?
This feels like you intended to make it a gotcha question, but the answer is: America isn't really trying to do that at all. So we should just give up?
"Damn, handling biowaste is hard and dangerous, what we'll do is just prevent people from leaving their house."
I'm not in America nor would I rely on their legislators doing anything about it, especially with current admin. France, Australia and the likes (who are in process of implementing banning social media for kids) is the only way behemots will understand. Otherwise you're risking loopholes beig exploited, bureaucracy being slow while behemots move fast, etc. Ban is pretty much self explanatory and leaves little room for interpretation, at least not in a way where 100s of pages of moderation guidelines and potential ambiguity such docs create
I wish we abandoned social media as a society altogether, to be honest. With the generated text and videos from AI it's only going to get worse.
Law-wise, you're currently on a social media.
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Some related information, I see a lot of talk about how people feel social media or phones affect young people, but little data or input from researchers who are not politicians or selling books.
From Nature[1]:
> Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health
From the Atlantic[2] with citations in the article:
> The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn’t Help Teens,
> It may only make things worse.
> I am a developmental psychologist, and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.
> Many other researchers have found the same. In fact, a recent study and a review of research on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/candi...
Even Meta's OWN research indicated social media is actively harmful to teens. That means, the people with the most to lose couldn't even escape this conclusion.
Sure, you may be able to find 1 or 2 counterexamples, big tabacco also had a lot of "doctors" who found smoking not that bad.
https://www.reuters.com/business/instagram-shows-more-eating...