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Comment by edoceo | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn is social, and would have made a nice even 10 - which would trigger an oversight event.

Edited my post with some more details. While LinkedIn is a social media site of sorts, it's outside what I believe the focus of the investigation to be.

LinkedIn has a lot of teens on it actually. Very talented teens some, others are teens of average talent level. But they do have teens. They are also about 3 times bigger than discord. I think you could argue either way, because there may be a larger absolute number of teens on discord? The numbers are not broken out enough to tell. But given the nature of what we're dealing with, I wouldn't discount the idea of them not wanting anyone taking a closer look at what they are doing.

I myself am always suspicious of the "Think of the children!!!" crowd.

Somehow if my teenaged kids spent as much time in LinkedIn networking business relationships as they did in Snapchat I wouldn't quite mind as much.

Regardless, I think you've missed the part where the FTC said what they were gathering information on, e.g. "how[social media] practices affect children and teens."

I think you've missed the part where the FTC said what they were gathering information on, e.g. "how[social media] practices affect children and teens."

I didn't miss that part.

That's why I said that I don't trust people who say they are "thinking of the children". If you trust their intentions, well, we can peaceably agree to disagree.

That sounds wrong. Many of my best friends live every day thinking of their children and their future. I welcome congress acting like this.

I don't trust laws justified with only a soundbite though, whatever the soundbite is.

And if your friends are the politicians in charge, then maybe that would be a good argument that I should be less skeptical about the "think of the children" claim.

But your friends are likely not the politicians in charge, and even if they were, I wouldn't take the word of an anonymous internet poster that said friends were wholly honest and forthright in this regard. I would remain skeptical of their intentions. The recipe for good democracy includes a healthy amount of skepticism. Skepticism is what motivates investigations and inquiries. Inquiries of the type the FTC studiously avoided by not triggering the 10 entity flag.

I agree that LinkedIn probably has some similar risks to the sites that have been issued response orders. But, if the goal is create legislation around those risks, I'm not sure it is necessary (at this time) to also query LinkedIn (and the many other sites with similar risks). The ones on the list can likely provide enough information for this initial inquiry.

Does LinkedIn have some children among its users? Sure.

Is LinkedIn targeting those users with its product? No.

Does LinkedIn have a business strategy surrounding those users? Probably not.

Is the way that LinkedIn interacts with these users going to be illustrative of larger industry trends? I doubt it.

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