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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

Anyone voting for this is clearly not fit to hold their position. Aside from the stupidity of thinking this is enforceable, it's hamfisted and misguided.

When they propose such open-ended legislation there should be an ability for an outside party to make every single one of them fill out a survey of "Would this be allowed/disallowed under the new law?" with a bunch of examples. If the people who voted for it don't have consistency in their answers within some percentage (something like 95% must answer identically) then the bill is rejected since they clearly have no idea what they are talking about.

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Why would it be difficult to enforce?

>In addition to other damages, the PRA authorizes statutory damages of $1k per violation, capped at $100k per account holder per calendar year.

There are 1.3 million under 18 in MN, some percentage of those have social media accounts, let's just guess 500k, so a maximum statutory fine for non-compliance of $50 billion per year per social network. All sorts of ways to adjust that down but still a substantial motivation to turn on the "chronological only in Minnesota" feature. Or are you assuming a state court can't fine a social network?

It makes me wish Republicans were a little more sane so I could justify voting for some of them in Minnesota.

> Or are you assuming a state court can't fine a social network?

Social network: ok, we are blocking users from that jurisdiction from being able to access our product to comply with recently instated state legislation, please don't use a VPN to do so wink wink.

Plenty of people (yes, even those who aren't the most technologically advanced average users) have been using VPNs for a similar purpose to access Netflix shows available in other regions since a long time ago, so I can easily imagine people doing the same to access TikTok.

See the existing "you gotta be 13 or older to create an account" registration requirement on many platforms, which exists to comply with the law. Sure, it is enforceable in a sense that the government can go after any company that explicitly allows kids under 13 to register and flaunts this law. But it is utterly unenforceable in practice, because what is the government gonna do about kids lying about their age when creating an account? Nothing, aside from legally mandating identity verification and linking it to every account you create. But that's not the route I would ever want the world to take, not even mentioning that there will be ways around that too anyway (and the potential side effects of such id-linking mandate would be much more disastrous than the original problem).

You're imagining that a social network would be willing to geofence off an entire state in order to not comply with a fairly straightforward to implement regulation. Doesn't sound like something which would be honoring the fiduciary duty to investors required by leadership, leaving all that money on the table, or something that wouldn't be worth the calculus of cutting off an entire state to avoid losing a portion of revenue for part of the population.

> You're imagining that a social network would be willing to geofence off an entire state in order to not comply with a fairly straightforward to implement regulation.

I mean, the company can comply, and users can go around those restrictions by lying to the company. Whether the company decides to geofence or comply, it doesn't affect how enforceable this specific law would be at all. Users can go around it with equal ease in either case (as long as real identity verification for online accounts doesn't enter the equation).

because it's general enough that it can be challenged.

I have an amazon profile. The reviews are user generated. They certainly rank popularity into categories.

In fact, I also have a wikipedia user profile as well and there's talk pages and here's the trending topics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Top_25_Report

Same goes with youtube, twitch, imdb, discogs, substack, medium, and oh yes, video games. Lots of UGC video games.

Social media can be bad, toxic, unhealthy, lead to suicide and depression among youth, ok. That's certainly terrible but you get a bunch of snazzy lawyers for billion dollar companies that work for the bottom line in the room, this thing won't stand.

Instead what might work better is to extend liability law to such forums of persuasion. It the parents of a dead kid have grounds to sue Facebook and Facebook knows it, they'll pull back quick. It's a page from the Ralph Nader playbook

On what grounds could it be challenged?

It'd have to be demonstrated. There's always places to hide in generalities.

Every word can be quibbled over as not actually applying and thus sitting outside the definition.

It's a prohibition against a generally described feature which makes it fundamentally contestable.

And say you nab them. Then they just have to do an otherwise meaningless permutation to the feature and claim they're compliant and you're back in court.

Ianal btw

Hrrrm, you're not wrong. I don't think the law is intended to target wikipedia or imdb as such. Some of the others might actually be intentional though.

You're expecting our politicians to actually understand the laws they vote on? That's just insane. What's next? Banning bills that are thousands of pages long and include countless things that are entirely unrelated to the actual topic of the bill? Come on.

I know, I know, it's a crazy concept. I just get so frustrated seeing people pass bills on subjects that they have zero knowledge or can't even explain how it would be enforced. It would also be a nice resource to the layman, "Here are a list of examples/scenarios that would/would not run afoul of this law".

I mean Ron Wyden of Oregon stands out by a country mile when it comes to actually trying to grok and pass common sense tech laws.

Ain’t enough Ron Wyden’s out there sadly.

>> When they propose such open-ended legislation there should be an ability for an outside party to make every single one of them fill out a survey of "Would this be allowed/disallowed under the new law?"

You claim the lawmakers are too stupid to understand how tech works, but you're completely failing to understand how the law works. It's rarely (if ever) black and white. It's the job of the courts to interpret and decide what is allowed/disallowed under the law.

The fact that it's not black and white is the problem.

Above all law should be predictable a priori

Yet here I am deliberately avoiding the features that Minnesota wants to ban. There is nothing hamfisted and misguided about this, the point is simply to ban the social media equivalent of casinos where the entire point of certain features is to stop you leaving by distracting you from the rest of your life.

Do you think HN would be banned for minors according to this law?

I think it would, and I don't think HNs algorithm for ranking is abusive or toxic at all.

This is a valid point -- HN's algorithm is one of the few that is good at discouraging flamewars without being explicitly chronological.

Eh, I think credit for that goes to dang and the community. Flamewars definitely start up now and then but moderation stamps many out.

I think minors joining social media or forums should require parent permission. There’s too many weirdos out there, and too much self harm from sharing too much information.

This is already allowed for under-13s, but almost no site/service actually allows for that. I imagine this would have similar results with it being a functional ban and the kids just all signing up as '18 year olds'.

Minors would end up seeing the same “sort by new” version of the site that everyone who sorts by new instead of hot/rising/popular/etc will see.

This is true of basically all laws. You just noticed in this case because it's an area where you're familiar.

Yes it’s hard to imagine who would enforce this and how.

But the reason it’s being discussed is that social media like instagram and TikTok is toxic to teenagers. Something does need to be done, society is not enslaved to the aims of mid grade social media product managers.

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