Florida's DeSantis signs law restricting social media for people under 16
reuters.com
reuters.com
It is an unconstitutional law; it is following the path of similar unconstitutional laws¹²³. Where is the experiment?
¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchan...
²https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reno_v._American_Civil_Liberti... (sections about minor access to indecent material struck down)
³https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/ohio/oh...
- social media being optimized for addiction
- social media potentially compromising minors’ physical safety
- social media use having documented adverse mental health outcomes for minors
- the fact that social media use requires an ongoing contractual relationship between the company and the minor
I could see these factors tipping the balance on the “compelling government interest” question, though I see less of an argument for “narrow tailoring”.
I think the experiment is more about the judiciary and about tribal politics. There's ample case law against something like this, so to me this seems unconstitutional, and I doubt it will stand. But DeSantis will win some more heart and minds of the folks who secretly do want big government protecting them from the boogieman.
Regardless of anyone's views about social media, the fact that the government wants 'papers please' for you to access a website should really scare everyone.
Those supporters aren't very secret about it. In fact, they are quite open about it.
We've been doing that for R and X movies forever.
I think it’s excellent the government is taking a stand to protect kids when it’s obvious most parents are unable to. Kids have no business in the discourse.
Perhaps... but my guess is that repeatability wouldn't depend on the children but on the wants and needs of the governing politicians.
That is, the data would, in my view, likely be worthless for its purported goal, but can give some insight into some political shenanigans.
Monumentally naïve. Zero understanding of the way things work in reality.
I disagree to an extent. Oregons drug decriminalization failed because of a few reasons that are plain to see:
- The people who wrote the measure did not prescribe how it should be done, just what it should achieve.
- The measure demanded changes be immediate, which didn't jive with a very slow running, heavy bureaucracy like Oregons government. More importantly, time was not given for the social services pipelines to fill with cash and plans.
- The law did not also ban public drug use, it depended on the legislature doing this - which they never did. This was the big tipping point. You don't forget the smell of meth or fent, especially outside your grocery store or kids school.
This was a master class in when head in the clouds thinking meets legislative elites who are outright insulted when the people flex their voice.
I do think we'll revisit this again in the future, but hopefully next time we at least ban public drug use.
Imagine that Biden campaigned in 2000 extensively off a hoax that Trump called nazis fine people. This was well supported by professional media.
"Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will have no other" -- Benjamin Franklin
Really ?
I mean the entire point of the nanny state argument is to not act as a nanny toward ADULT citizen. Minor should still be protected, especially under 16
Then he said that they were going to get all the other kids in the school off the social media site, and asked again what the student would want to be paid to be off the site. The answer was that students would actually pay to be in that situation.
For some kids at least, this is a coordination problem, where they'd all rather not be on social media, but assuming others are, they want to be there. I could be getting the details/dollar values wrong, and I don't know that this bill is the right way to address the issue.
But it's pretty clear that social media is something that many teens wish they could avoid, but currently feel they can't. That doesn't mean we need to Do Something™, but it does mean that we're not currently in the optimal situation.
Edit: found the experiment. Haidt wrote about it, but it was done by University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-...
My solution was to not care if I was missing out. Counterintuitively, it's not until you do that that you're free to find the life you want for yourself. Good luck explaining that to a 16 year old though, they're not there yet, they're not building the life they want, they're finding their tribe, and you have to be connected to do that.
Disconnecting as an adult is much easier/worthwhile because you now have other means of signalling.
I already didn’t want a Facebook account just to see a businesses specials, now I’ll need to present ID too?
Certainly interested to see how all this plays out.
It also has conditions for which sites are affected by this law. The site has to have doomscroll and already be popular with kids. Google Maps isn't what they're targeting.
Honestly, mixed feelings. I'm in no rush to show Zuck my passport but the flagrant grooming comments on every kid's TikTok account is enough to show there's a significant problem, even if this isn't the right answer.
I agree, but I think your problem isn't Zuck, it's with passports.
Government issued licences aren't fit for purpose any more. They were when all you did with your paper drivers licence is show it to the police, but now they've become a form of ID you show man+dog who gets to scrape a whole pile of into from it that can be used to track you. For example, they can follow your passport number or drivers licence to connect a series of what should look like unrelated transactions.
As an example, now when a car rental company wants to know you have a valid licence they demand a copy of it. If you have an accident they use the copy to prove they verified you are licenced to drive, if you do something illegal they can hand over your ID so the police can chase you down. FIDO / WebAuthn / PassKey shows how those things can be achieved without leaking all the information on the licence. It can hand over a one time token saying you have a valid licence and signed by something that chains back to a public key held by the government. The token reveals nothing more than that to the car hire firm, but should they hand it over to the police they can decrypt it to identify you.
These tokens are useless if stolen. They can't link you to other transactions and don't identify you in any way, and yet are far more secure than a bunch of unsigned pixels. In other words unlike a copy of a passport, mostly harmless.
The bill summary on the Florida senate webpage says:
> Such commercial entities must verify, using either an anonymous or standard age verification method, that the age of a person attempting to access the material harmful to minors satisfies the bill’s age requirements.
It sounds to me like “anonymous age verification method” could just mean that the website asks how old you are? What constitutes verification here? That sentence makes it sound like they can choose to use whatever feeble method they want.
At face value this law seems like political points being scored by passing a widely popular law that changes very little in practice (bumping the minimum age from 13 to 14).
so...everyone - that Facebook or whatever considers to be in Florida - has to provide ID to post, then?
I think the point is that the internet and particularly social media is now the de-facto town square. States are basically requiring identification to speak or criticize government in the town square. If you take a step back and look at it that way, it's grossly anti-American.
Imagine back in the day, if you had any type of meeting/gathering to discuss anything that might be related to politics, and the police were there to collect everyone's Id. AA meetings, computer meetups, hobby gathering, HOA meetings, etc. This is essentially that, except on a computer. Just think of the children!
Hopefully this will make that problem less prevalent.
I know the devil is in the details though, so kinda curious what the actual provisions are.
The alternative is a free internet, where we don't need accounts to do things, because we're not building or storing advertising profiles on users. Hmmmm... imagine that.
Why would anybody rent to a minor otherwise, regardless of the contract breaking issues. They are unlikely to have much credit history. To say nothing of the maturity / responsibility and income (+ wealth / cash savings) problems.
Sure, so long as you pay for the service you're using. 10c per HN post, 50c per facebook photo.
Apparently some people haven't heard about Stacker News (okay it's more like $0.0001 per post, but anyways...)
I feel it's more likely that the long game is ultimately about de-anonymizing the Internet.
This particular objective is a solid plausible explanation of so many initiatives over the last few years. Perhaps not full public de-anonymization, but at the very least to make it easier for things like CALEA to exist in these spaces as well. The public is constantly shown techniques in whodunnit TV shows where the good guys can instantly look up an IP address or other identifying log entry and associate it with a name/address/etc.
IMHO, the plan is to make Business As Usual untenable and make it cheaper and financially safer for tech companies to give in and identify everybody as a survival mechanism. When its safer to record a passport/realid/etc as a legal defense then at some point it'll be done.
After that happens then it's easy to plug in something like CALEA. The public is already being primed to accept it with the benefits being constantly shown on the likes of CSI/NCIS/etc/etc/etc shows.
Of course, from a profit perspective, it certainly wouldn't hurt that all this valuable user data that is being being compiled is finally cross checked and validated.
Or maybe I'm completely wrong and there's no ulterior motive and there's nothing more to it than politicians trying to be seen to be doing the right thing. Hah! I'm way too cynical for that.
Please convince me I'm crazy or provide anecdotes that suggest this to be a terrible idea.
I grew up with internet access in the early 90s and have been behind a keyboard ever since.
edit: Downvotes are not for disagreement, please provide constructive discussion to a reasonable question.
No.
Marginalized groups __need__ their anonymity to be safe.
Should a teenager in Utah be doxxed by a message board where they're working through their gender identity?
What about a kid in Georgia that's working through whether or not they believe the religion they were raised in?
How about a wife who is beginning the research process and asking questions about whether what she's experiencing at home is spousal abuse or not?
Anonymity protects those of us most in danger.
Our local newspaper used to allow people to comment on stories with a Facebook account. People who were using real names and had publicly posted enough information that you'd be able to quickly locate where they lived frequently went on extreme rants.
The newspaper eventually just got rid of Facebook-powered comments, but I see the same behavior (terrible comments under real names, easily linked to employers/homes/schools) on the neighborhood's Nextdoor discussions.
Maybe this is true, but we also have to think about the perfectly reasonable things we nevertheless wouldn’t want pinned on us. Political opinions, of which many of mine are half-baked and I am writing to test with other smart people, but I don’t want to necessarily be associated with them forever. I don’t want to worry that simply saying tech workers should unionize will impact my employability in the future.
Better for who?
Any system secure enough that a person could never face consequences for posting something unpopular would also be incapable of accomplishing the goal of censoring things online that are considered "bad".
You say that even our current pseudo-anonymous communication enables "extremism" but any system that would prevent it could be used to stop a whistleblower, or a protestor, or an atheist, or anyone else with an unpopular opinion. I don't see that as making the internet better, and I question how much it would even stop the things most people today would agree to want abolished.
I don't believe so.
> For this to be a constructive discussion, can we assume companies have a proper and secure way to validate identities and store your data?
What?! No, we absolutely can't assume that. In fact, good default is to assume that data stored will be eventually compromised with high probability. Assuming otherwise is like believing in some magical backdoors in cryptography that only "good" guys can access and other such nonsense.
> I sometimes wonder if the internet as we know it and social medias pervasive influence would be much different if people were less anonymous.
Social media as we know it today mostly stems from FB which has a real name policy. Don't think FB is much better than others (by any measure that interests me at least).
It's extremely difficult for parents to stop their children, especially early teens from using social media. This law should make it easier and it would put the work on Meta, Snap, Tiktok, Pinterest, Twitter to help parents.
I'm personally glad that I grew up without social media but I worry about the kids growing up now. The amount of random junk young kids are exposed to on social media is worrying.
Your argument seems like exactly what my parents would have said about me spending so much time on TV, computers and electronics instead of studying, playing outside, sports etc.
Almost exactly like your last paragraph.. “I’m personally glad that I grew up without infinite channels on TV, computers and its games, cell phones and your SMSes. I’m worried about your generation. You guys are exposed to a lot of junk and things that waste your attention.” - Dad.
Yet, here we are….
May be kids of now will just need to be educated about the real impact and not be treated as if they are in glass houses?
TV, print, radio, music and to a lesser extent games are all subject to some level of industry or statutory content regulation.
For example, in America, you're very unlikely to have a kids TV channel suddenly switch to videos of people being killed in industrial accidents. new media, not so much.
Watershed, age constraints and company ending fines existed (and in some cases still do) for violating those rules.
Large new media companies, such as facebook, youtube and tiktok can literally serve porn to kids and not have any legal ramifications. If a cable broadcaster knowingly broadcast frontal nudity before watershed, it would be fined. (yes, cable TV has less restrictions) but thats the point, regulation has not kept up with the pace of change. that has been a deliberate decision.
My kids are >5 < 12. They aren't allowed on insta/tiktok. They can have youtube, but its only when supervised. even then its 1/3 chance that they land on something toxic as shit.
The world has changed, and the guard rails that we had as kids have been removed. There is an argument about freedom of expression, I get that. But we need to think about whether its right to allow large corporations to profit from showing horrific content to minors. (adults, I don't give a shit, do what you want) The problem is, I'm not sure of the best mechanism, with the least bad outcome.
Having struggled with various forms of screen addiction myself, I find it sort of odd that a lot of people are so laissez faire about giving children the most addictive device ever created.[3] Whether or not this law is a good idea, I think it's incumbent on parents to monitor and limit screen time and access to social media. Which is difficult! When my wife and I are tired, setting my daughter down in front of an ipad is the easiest way to get a break.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23522...
[2] https://jeanmtwenge.substack.com/p/yes-its-the-phones-and-so...
[3] Sure, it's not technically "the device," itself, but rather what it makes possible.
As an adult, I don't have cable, I use an antenna. Yes, I have streaming some streaming services.
As adults and/or parents we can make decisions that help our kids (and they might help us too)
I also use Adblock.
The TV argument is the same as devices too; We had one family TV growing up; I still refuse to have a TV in my bedroom.
In conclusion, seems like we've hit the generation where our parents used TV to parent and so now we don't know how to parents -- or, for many people, be.
TV --> has quality control, professionally done, goes through a team of editors/creators before making it onto the screen
Early internet --> Mostly harmless content, can find dark stuff if kids look for it but it's pretty hard to find. More dangerous than TV but not too bad.
SMS --> just chatting with people you know. Not afraid.
TikTok, IG Reels, Youtube Shorts, Snapchat, Twitter: Good luck to you. Your kid is going to see a ton of deep fakes, edited images of unrealistic body proportions that the influencer won't disclose, heaps of radical and extremist views, undisclosed sponsorships masquerading as advice, targeted ads that anyone can buy, etc.
The magnitude is much higher now - hence I think laws need to come in to make it easier for parents to get back some control.
Go ahead and try to teach your kid who is going to spend hours each day seeing hundreds of videos each day - probably tens of thousands in a year. What are you going to do? Watch 100 Instagram Reels per day with your kid and explain each and every single one? As an adult, even I'm easily influenced by this stuff.
The problem with this argument is that TV had ads and while they are manipulative, they are absolutely no match for the shit that Meta, YouTube, etc pull. Kids (and quite obviously lots of adults) simply do not have the ability to deal with that.
until it’s possible to have strong and reliable filters, the only way to protect tender minds is through controlled exposure.
Education about the real impact will not happen if there is profit to be made in forsaking education.
This is the kind of shit that’s everywhere on YT now, and your kids will stumble upon (father of one here). The “faces of death” stuff we had access to once in a blue moon is not even close.
That said, one thing my teenagers clued me in to is that these efforts to require parental involvement by law have some underlying motivations that are not being said out loud. One of them is to out kids to their parents early and cut off online support for teens going through gender identity issues, especially gay and trans kids, perhaps under the assumption that gender identity is a choice and that online activities are somehow causal.
Considering the suicide rates among teens with gender issues, and the growing number of physiological indicators, I’m not sure cutting off all online support for them is a good idea. One of my kids does have gender identity issues and has considered suicide, and as a parent that breaks my heart and scares me more than anything. It was surprising to find out about the gender issues, and it started coming out around 14, so it’s easy to jump to conclusions that social media is a bad influence. But in retrospect, the signs had been there for a long time and we failed to see and acknowledge them. Our kid said that online support is what kept her from attempting suicide even earlier.
I’ve known and worked with folks facing mental health issues over the decades and usually these kind of issues come from within. The idea that instagram is a cure-all for teen self-harm is not supported.
Anecdata—we knew a teen recently with very supportive parents and a smartphone and it didn’t stop a suicide attempt. Direct intervention did.
My state's version of this law is to force ID-verification for porn sites. For that stated purpose, it isn't even remotely effective. But what about convincing a child to admit to their parents (or Mormon Bishop) that they watch pornography? That's where it gets truly concerning.
Send them to a private school, or even better, homeschool, control what kind of people they make friends with, keep them busy with church and Sunday school and bible study, burn the books and defund the public libraries, control what music they listen to and what shows and films they watch and the games they play… and, of course, control their means of communication.
Heaven forbid your child ever be exposed to anything that might make them question the reality of this little garden of Eden you’ve imprisoned them in.
The current form of interactive online platforms may be flawed but banning teens from using them is not the solution and any effective method of enforcing such a law is likely to run afoul of the 1st Amendment. Besides obviously the Tinker v. Des Moines precedent about how teens have the right to engage in non-disruptive speech at school which is probably sufficient to overturn this if the Supreme Court recognizes the precedent.
Under COPPA, the "parental consent" requirement for under-13s to sign up for online accounts turned into a de-facto ban because no parent or web site wants to deal with mailed permission forms. The informal "don't ask don't tell" policy works pretty well though because it functions as an IQ test to keep the kids who are too dumb to figure out that you're supposed to lie about your age (as I did to be able to use Geocities when I was 10) off of the internet. A "parental consent" requirement is effectively a ban which is what it was in the original law that DeSantis vetoed. But it sounds like this was a major priority for the Speaker of the state House so it was going to happen in some form possibly over the governor's veto in a worse form if he completely opposed it.
Most the bad stuff I saw on the internet ~99/2000 was from IRC.
I had the unfortunate idea to nick myself TheGiver after the novel at 14.
Back in the days when I had an Acorn Atom and friends would bring their Spectrum, Oric—1, TRS-80, Commodore 64 etc.
Both.
I'm trying to decide whether it's "extremely easy" or "extremely difficult" for parents to stop their children from having a cell phone. One the one hand, all you have to do is not spend money and not buy a phone, easy. And yet, almost every kid has a cell phone, so evidently it is hard for parents to say no.
This law will put social media in the same situation. It will be "extremely easy" for parents to simply not give permission, but, like cell phones, I think most kids will end up having social media accounts anyway.
I don't think half the people commenting in this thread have even one single clue about any of this, from real world experience. You can do everything right on your end, but they sit with their friends on their devices when not around your house.
It all fell apart when she realized that she'd have to yank the XBox, the PS*, the Switch, etc.
Her kid, and all of the other entitled ones with endless access to everything on the internet, are utterly intolerable when they come over -- until they go outside with my kids for a few hours and come back in with their heads reset!
At least the other side doesn't hide the fact that they're in favor of regulations.
Should 7-11 be required to stop children from buying pornography magazines?
I give screen time more as a reward for hard work and getting chores done.
I use the screen time feature on Apple devices to limit my kids screen time and the type of apps they can access.
This is feel-good legislation and is not realistically enforceable. People can argue about it all they want, it won't change anything because it's not enforceable.
>It requires them to use a third-party verification system to screen out those who are underage.
We'll see how well that works.
Now do alcohol, cigarettes, adult bars
What are you talking about? Parents can use on-device controls, you can lock a phone down in many ways. There will be whiz kids who can get around these, but those few whiz kids can also easily get around any controls via legislation with VPNs.
This is a law mandating ID verification for all children and adults.
If you require controls for everyone below a certain age, you de facto require controls for everyone of every age who does not prove they are over the minimum age. In other words, even if you can legally discriminate against children, my rights to speak anonymously as an adult are being taken away because if I don't show my ID, I will be treated as a child who has fewer rights.
We can disagree on the merits, but please don't imply that everyone who disagrees with you is ipso facto an idiot.
My son is old enough the law would give us a choice and I'd let him keep Discord I think as well. If there is something positive here though it would be forcing the companies to make it easier for parents to control what their kids do, it should just be up to them.
There's a consistent factoid going around that brains aren't done developing until the age of 25. It's frequently used as an argument to restrict young people.
Looking at performance by age in fields like math and music, declining brain plasticity seems more like a reason to implement the carousel from Logan's Run
Perhaps we should also cut off people over 65, since they've proven to be more vulnerable to scams and financial exploitation over social media?
(there's real arguments to be had about the negative effects of social media, but a serious discussion would include those on adults and old people as well, and this ban, like the TikTok one, is definitely more a part of culture war than a well-intentioned effort to improve the effect of telecoms on people's lives)
In all seriousness, this is a great move that should be emulated. I'm a tech-optimist but the effect social media has on teenagers specifically and public discourse in general is absolutely toxic.
I used Orkut too. It was a place to talk to your real-life friends, join local communities and organize events. You didn’t develop a personal following or post selfies looking for approval.
Social media, as we have it today, allows individuals to broadcast their twisted mind to millions, and not via text - only cute pictures, memes, and 30-second clips. These are worlds apart.
At 16 there are at least 2 years where parents have the ability to actually interfere and help bring any negative effects under control.
We don't need Daddy Government to make decisions that can and should be made by parents.
If there's widespread agreement that social media is dangerous and yet widespread difficulty coordinating a response among parents, isn't that exactly what the government is for?
Like it's the literal job of a parent to tell their kids no. Over and over and over again. So instead of parents teaching healthy habits easy with something a child will not be a le to avoid as an adult, we'll just unleash them on them right when failure is high impact because some parents are lazy and we're not willing to have public service campaigns anymore.
Or really want this is is one more step to a de-anon'd internet, where everyone's speech can be controlled.
The only effective response I'm aware of is a collective one. This is not that. This is fascism.
We did that. My kids (twins) pooled their allowance money for a few months and had a friend at school buy them an old iPhone that they shared in a locker at school. They went wild on social media once they were set loose, to the detriment of everyone involved.
There was a government report in the last couple years that concluded (paraphrasing) “the ideal amount of social media for teens is greater than zero and less than ‘all day’—but it’s not clear where it becomes harmful.”
TL;DR-nature, uh, finds a way…
Do you think keeping them away from it initially drove them to this faster?
> In many but not all regions, the young are happier than the old. But in North America happiness has fallen so sharply for the young that they are now less happy than the old. By contrast, in the transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the young are much happier than the old. In Western Europe as a whole happiness is similar at all ages, while elsewhere it tends to decline over the life cycle (with an occasional upturn for the old).
I think social media is a red herring. For whatever reason, young people in America are unhappy and instead if dealing with hard problems we think "let's just take social media away, that will fix it". Does Finland not have social media? Why are young people in Finland happier than they are in America?
I predict this trend will continue, we will take social media away from kids and they will still be unhappy as they look for things to do in their small apartment while mom and dad look at their cell phones.
[0]: https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2024/happiness-and-age-summ...
Maybe America just has a uniquely depressive social media environment? I have not read any kind of large scale studies examining the "tone" of social media feeds in different countries but that would be interesting.
* Also whenever she says stuff like that I respond by letting her know she will be able to buy a house if she wants one, the economy will always be good for people who are work smart and hard, etc.
Yeah, I don't think that's true at all. Its just anecdata, but I have several friends in their 30s for which that's just not the case. They're smart and work (harder than I do, just not in tech), but the price of a down payment on a home is going up faster than they're able to save, and they already live relatively frugally. We live in a major metro area, not a particularly expensive one, but the same is true for most of my cousins in the same age range spread across the country.
I feel like my age group (mid 40s) is the last one that could afford home ownership, and me only because I got lucky by working in tech. Other people I know that are better educated and work harder than me are just shut out of the housing market, without some kind of windfall.
Perhaps America is a bigger target than other countries for foreign influence operations that seek to cause division and depression using social media.
This is very troubling. Without social media teens would have to hear those things from their elders and peers in person or read about them elsewhere on the internet
It should be easy to prove, right? Run the numbers for median income at specific age, house costs, interest, inflation, etc. for your area. If it's obviously affordable, you can show it. Depending on the location, you may not like the answer though... That fear is not completely made up, you know?
I guess most of us are waiting for that inevitable bubble pop, but... you know the saying about irrational markets.
> environmental disasters will be constant
The way things are going and with our response... yeah, I worry the same. At this point just the inertia of the system will make things worse for close to a decade, even if we get much better. It's a valid worry.
If you're saying to her you're basically ignoring those possibilities, that's unlikely to help with being worried.
As I say at every opportunity: it's housing prices.
Housing prices are the #1 reason for youth "doom and gloom" about their economic future, at least in many Western countries and especially anglosphere countries.
Social media doesn't help, especially for teens (and it's apparently worse for girls), but it's not the only or even main cause.
I assume she's good at math? I'm sure she's solved way harder math problems than calculating how long it will take to save up a $200k down payment when you make $4k a month and pay 80% of that in rent and taxes.
> the economy will always be good for people who are work smart and hard,
Ummm....well, if that's been your experience, God bless you man. But you are writing a check you can't cash if you say it will be true of your daughter's generation.
Is it really even a good idea to emphasize hard work? My teachers/parents always said if I worked hard enough I would succeed, but man, this has only made me work 50, then 60, then 80 hours a week, desperately trying to turn an inherently doomed project into a success.
I've worked waaaay harder on my failures than on my success. That one time I was competing with a team of 5 russian Ph.D.'s to see whose software library would go into the product. That one time at a startup, where I found out too late that the founder always fires all his workers before their stock options vest.
Even my failed marriage!! I worked harder trying to keep things together than I ever worked on anything. With my current wife its not work at all. If you just tell your daughter that hard work will always ensure success, you are just setting her up for serial burnout after burnout.
If you are working hard, that's not a sign you are winning, its a sign you are losing.
And blaming it on social media is just shooting the messenger.
(Same could be said for the increasing economic inequality despite record GDP, though it's more survivable near term)
Having said that, I’ve found FOMO hitting me hard when looking at Facebook posts, so I’ve stopped looking, and feeling better.
Guess you haven't mentioned that Santa isn't real, either.
You might have something here. Given the other responses to your post which are largely unrelated but undeniably depressing. Now I have to go see if such a study exists...
Also the old are very rich in America. They hold stocks and do well. I’m a millennial and can’t say I’ve had that experience. I would bet old Europeans own less securities and are less wealthy possibly. This decreases the older generations happiness possibly and may artificially raise youth happiness in comparison.
It’s all interesting and there’s a lot here to look at and ponder over. I do think there’s something unique about American youths and how they use these technologies though.
I would also bet there’s less commerce masked as social media platforms Europe. Many young Americans sort of blend the use of these apps with attempts to make money. That’s my perception at least. That may introduce stressors not seen in a society which doesn’t have such a focus on being industrious or busy constantly.
That is quite a generalization. The rich old people are indeed very rich.
Also, a lot of old people are quite poor and poverty is increasing in that age bracket.
https://www.ncoa.org/article/latest-census-bureau-data-shows...
Young people still have good wages and opportunities, but it is hard not to be envious of previous (white) generations that could expect a separated house and a pension for working at a factory. It would be nice if young people could have a broader perspective on this point, but that’s a complaint as old as civilization.
I'm all for a healthy skepticism of government intervention, but my feeling is let's let Florida try this out and see what happens.
[1] https://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Bills/billsdetail.as...
You can't 100.0% block all Floridians from accessing your site, especially with GeoIP databases. This means someone who is close enough to the border of Alabama or Georgia with an IP address reportedly in another state could easily find reason to sue you.
And because you're in the US, you can easily be made to show up in a costly court battle over state lines.
This is horrifying news for small/medium sized social media sites.
My quick reading of the bill leads me to think that smaller forums might actually qualify -- unless I missed a section on size of social network.
This bill says:
(I apologize for the incredibly bad formatting below, I've edited a few times to try to get things right)
> A social media site must fufill the criteria:
> ...
> 2. Ten percent or more of the daily active users who are younger than 16 years of age spend on average 2 hours per day or longer on the online forum, website, or application on the days when using the online forum, website, or application during the previous 12 months or, if the online forum, website, or application did not exist during the previous 12 months, during the previous month;
...when I was in high school, I spent a filthy amount of time on online tech forums. If Hackernews were around back then, I would've likely been on it for 2+ hours just reading random links.
> 3. Employs algorithms that analyze user data or information on users to select content for users; and
>
> 4. Has any of the following addictive features:
> a. Infinite scrolling, which means either:
> (I) Continuously loading content, or content that loads as the user scrolls down the page without the need to open a separate page; or
> (II) Seamless content, or the use of pages with no visible or apparent end or page breaks.
> b. Push notifications or alerts sent by the online forum, website, or application to inform a user about specific activities or events related to the user's account
> c. Displays personal interactive metrics that indicate the number of times other users have clicked a button to indicate their reaction to content or have shared or reposted the content.
So... any algorithm that selects "hot/active" content based on views+interaction, upvotes or emails about people who reply to your comments.
Now combine this with:
> When taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.
So what defines "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors"? This seems like something that might be applied on very arbitrary grounds and won't require much to trigger it.
https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/3/BillText/er/PDF
- it's obviously a massive violation of whatever remains of "free speech" in the US, and allowing this to happen creates a precedent for nibbling at all sorts of other things - creates precedent that children are even more subservient to their parents and random whims of whatever politicians are in charge at any point
- it creates the technical infrastructure and precedent for random US governments and whatever lunatics control them at the time to mediate permission to access websites
- it creates a massive database of PII, this time focussed on kids, which will be accessed endlessly by random companies, and will de facto have no actual access controls
- it spews government-required and validated PII around loads of random websites - hacking a site and then quietly passively copying all their calls to the database will be of great interest to fuckwits around the world
- will require trying harder to geo-locate users, creating even more PII and having even more of it being government-audited
- creates a huge hammer for politicians to beat up on unfavoured companies / blackmail them
- undermines the functioning of the US as a coherent unified state
There is an enormous wealth of research showing social media access at a young age is INCREDIBLY detrimental.
* [The Smartphone Kids Are Not All Right](https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/03/smartph...) - Hanna Rosin, The Atlantic, March 2024
* [End the Phone-Based Childhood Now](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-...) (Unpaywalled at [MSN](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/end-the-phone-base...)) - Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic, March 2024
* [Get Phones Out of Schools Now](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/ban-smartp...) - Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic, June 2023
* [The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/facebooks-...) - Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic, November 2021
* [The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Began Around 2012](https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness-epidemi...) - Jonathan Haidt, Afterbabel, February 2023
* [Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults With Worse Mental Health](https://www.afterbabel.com/p/sapien-smartphone-report) - Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch, Afterbabel, May 2023
* [Coddling Plus Devices? Unequivocal Disaster for Our Kids.](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/books/review/jonathan-hai...) - Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, New York Times, March 2024
not only that, but i fully believe that kids are WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY to impressionable and influenceable. there is a reason kids can't do a lot of things until 18 (even through the brain doesn't fully develop till 25). kids should not be influenced by social media to be doing permanent things that could harm themselves (like gender transitioning, getting a tatoo or piercing, or doing something dangerous challege) or their future careers (like breaking the law so they have a criminal record).
honestly social media is a wonderful thing, but something has to be done. i personally believe that parents need to have more power in discipling their children. i don't like the fact that laws like this have to be created, but i see that they have to exists with the more power they take away from the parents.
I went to school just at the cusp of digital bullying. A yahoo group was set up specifically to bully one kid in my class. It was shut down by yahoo, but I think because it was hosting porn, not because it was mostly designed for bullying people.
This was in the days of shared computers, and no real notifications. Now the bully is in your pocket.
I don't know what the equitable answer is. out right banning is wrong. But we do need to significantly more to allow people to escape bullying.
This is the equivalent of paper bags for beer cans - it will do nothing to fix the problem, but it will make children slightly more secretive about their internet usage, which will make some situations (grooming, bullying) even worse.
That isn't really how laws work. You don't say: "Driving under the influence is illegal, but I totally know people who drink and drive so the law is useless".
A solution doesn't need to be 100% effective for it to be hugely beneficial to society.
One can restrict consuming a resource only if one has means to police such restrictions. Unless you agree to draconian measures, like having all browsers under police control at all times, there is no real way to police web access by age.
The definition starts near the bottom of page 3.
Seems to me like this criteria would be hard to prove and easy for platforms to game:
> Ten percent or more of the daily active users who are younger than 16 years of age spend on average 2 hours per day or longer on the online forum, website, or application on the days when using the online forum, website, or application during the previous 12 months or, if the online forum, website, or application did not exist during the previous 12 months, during the previous month;
Anyone know why that criteria even exists in the first place?
Social media in its current form is designed to be as addictive as possible as a method of revenue generation. That's it. The more time we spend on these apps, the more money they make. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are designed from the ground-up to take as much time and attention as possible by using the same tricks that slot machines use. This is well-known and well-documented amongst _people like us_ who work in tech. It's less well-known outside our bubble.
Plenty of adults are unable to break the curse of the endless scroll, so what chance do children have?
It is, in my opinion, as dangerous as cigarettes, and we don't allow 11-year-olds to buy those. I don't know if a ban is the way to go, but something's gotta change.
The action of algorithms orchestrating human interactions reminds me of Asimov's Mule[0] and at this point in events it is certain that the algorithm builders have very fine control over human mental patterns. If I were to choose just one target for my efforts to sanitize the internet I would focus my fire on algorithms. Legislate without mercy.
IMO this dramatically oversells the power of recommender systems, and in a way which further serves their owners' interests rather than challenging them. In fact, I think what's clear is that they are at best able to achieve a very gross level of control over human mental patterns, one which is not meaningfully different than previous forms of media that have popped up throughout history. "Engagement", keeping someone scrolling long enough that they accumulate a nontrivial probability of clicking on an ad, is the lowest common denominator of marketing. Television, radio, and print media have long understood how to keep people serially "engaged" (consider the 'if it bleeds it leads' mentality of local news, or the emergence of 'angertainment' on CNN or FOX in the 90s and onwards).
But stimulating engagement is very different from actually controlling someone or altering their behavior in a way beyond "hey look at this interesting thing!". Consider that the click-through rate for Meta ads is on the order of ~1%, and this is literally their most valuable metric. They achieve this not by actually persuading people that an ad they don't care about is actually interesting (which to me would be the real acid test of whether they have 'fine control'), but rather by (a) effectively segmenting the audience in a way TV can't and (b) keeping the audience engaged long enough that maybe they click an ad. While they're no doubt good at both of these things, I think it's telling that the best these platforms have been able to do is the same strategy that every other form of mass media has also stumbled on: throw enough sensational crap your way that you stick around long enough to maybe click an ad.
To your point more directly: I agree that being able to agitate large groups of people in the same way is a dangerous ability, but I think it's also one that's very old and very common. It is not the unique provenance of 'algorithms', it's just the nature of mass media acting as a demagogue (look at role of newspapers in the lead-up to the Spanish-American war, for an example that predates our modern era). The way we challenge this is IMO not by treating the problem as something entirely new and overwhelmingly powerful ("big tech algorithms are mind control rays"), it's by looking at the historical record and recycling the strategies which have worked before (libel and slander laws, journalistic ethics, and trust-busting). Certainly there are elements of the problem which are new and unique , but from where I'm sitting the differences seem smaller than the similarities.
They should have doubts. This position is not supported by the currently available evidence[0][1][2]. The APA’s position paper makes this explicit: “Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.”
So long as focus remains on scapegoating ‘social media’ as the main cause of suffering, we will never solve the problem. The negative aspects of social media apply to young and old equally, and as far as I can tell are largely manifestations of deeper societal issues that have festered for generations.
[0] https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advi...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8221420/
[2] https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/no-evidence-screen-time...
I think this is just saying that social media is still part of society, and so there is nothing inherently bad in using social media, which is just an extension of our offline lives. That doesn't mean it's not harmful - if the offline life is harmful, social media can amplify it.
> The negative aspects of social media apply to young and old equally
The APA paper is filled with warnings specifically about adolescent social media use:
> ...potential risks are likely to be greater in early adolescence — a period of greater biological, social, and psychological transitions...
> Parental monitoring... and developmentally appropriate limit-setting... is critical, especially in early adolescence.
> Evidence suggests that exposure to maladaptive behavior may promote similar behavior among vulnerable youth, and online social reinforcement of these behaviors may be related to increased risk for serious psychological symptoms, even after controlling for offline influences.
> Research demonstrates that adolescents’ exposure to online discrimination and hate predicts increases in anxiety and depressive symptoms, even after controlling for how much adolescents are exposed to similar experiences offline.
> Data indicate that technology use particularly within one hour of bedtime, and social media use in particular, is associated with sleep disruptions. Insufficient sleep is associated with disruptions to neurological development in adolescent brains, teens’ emotional functioning, and risk for suicide.
> Research suggests that using social media for social comparisons related to physical appearance... [is] related to poorer body image, disordered eating, and depressive symptoms, particularly among girls.
When I was growing up, there was basically just ICQ (predominantly chat, sparse text profile), then MSN (predominantly chat, sparse text profile with one or a few profile photos), then early MySpace where nobody was uploading their real identity. I think it would have been a shame to not have access to those types of networks. I met so many people through those types of networks.
The law could put a restriction only on the post-2005 type of social media which is about publishing a curated stream of life updates with one’s real identity in rich media (photos, videos). If you take that all of that out, there’s nothing to ‘like’ or compare yourself to.
I’m no lawyer and haven’t read the actual text, but if you have a platform where there are no accounts and everyone posts anonymously or under a pseudonym, like 4chan, it completely sidesteps this.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39822577
Social media is like a drug. And should be treated as such. I would kind of support this legislation.
BUT, at the same time. Why is the state government mandating this? Where are the parents? Maybe they are also dazed by the drug of social media. ItS jUsT aN aPp, mentality. Yet what they don’t realize is these companies spend billions of dollars to fine tune the algorithm to build profiles on all of their users. Focus grouped to help. Decades of psychology used against the mind of a pre-teen, elderly, or the uneducated. They stand no chance.
I’m also concerned at where this stops. First its to protect the children. Then it progresses to full blown censorship of the internet (ie, “Great (fire) Wall of china”). The so called “small government party” is pushing this as well, which is concerning.
Is there any such thing as a small government party, or only parties that want any parts of government they disagree with to be non-existent*?
An examination of the past several years in Florida may shed light on this.
* And often more of the parts they like.
1. How can we identify if the user is based in Florida? 2. How can we determine their age? 3. How can we map the parent-child relationship here? 4. What will happen if the account was created in Argentina during traveling?
They can delegate or they can archive and choose not to use this data for anything other than the stated purpose.
Are they indirectly saying that they can't restrain themselves and that any data they collect for whatever reasons is fair game ?
I guess their problem is if someone submits identifying data willingly they will not be able to use it for other purposes without consent and they will look suspicious even when they infer the data/connections independently.
the Right should also be more worried - requiring the construction of this sort of Technological Autocracy Infrastructure should scare them, since presumably they won't always be in charge. of course the flip side is that a lot of the leaders are Christian Dominionists who aren't worried about that, since they want to end the United States as it currently exists.
anyway, cheery! hope everyone agrees that not letting kids see what Rhianna had for lunch or whatever was worth it.
Better your kids than mine. If you think that’s what is happening on social media your children are screwed.
This is a form of government control on your devices and eyeballs, nothing else. And considering it is effectively impossible to enforce, the state is soon going to start suing all the tech companies they don't like and push further restrictions/censorship.
I mean they banned drugs and that totally worked, right?
/s
This concept that "the other side" can't do anything right is going to be the end of society.
Reasonable regulation and public safety is part of that.
All roads lead to Rome. Both parties generally seek to expand the scope of the state. Although there are a few Republican senators who lean towards minarchist principles.
Expect the cultural right to demand social media verification to protect the children. The illiberal left might demand ID verification to protect the public from the scourge of dangerous misinformation and hate speech.
The rationalizations will vary for either side of the spectrum. The two goal posts have been positioned. Don't be surprised when the free-kick goes down the middle and Digital ID is presented as a panacea.
https://www.google.com/search?q=digital+ID+site%253Aweforum....
If you are realigning your politics due to trump, you are the problem. All political realignments are bad because they are a sign of a lack of conviction and a decay in a requirement for consistency.
Why? Other than maybe bitching and moaning about it, what's the actual harm?
(note that rules which require proof of age tend also to turn into rules that end anonymity, because it's more work to separate the proof systems)
Edit: I ask a question about caselaw and end up at -3? Yes, I know, don't complain about downvotes, but I don't understand these at all.
Here's a discussion of US law as it pertains to children that you might find interesting. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
"Don't complain about downvotes" I think means what it says. Don't complain about them. I have been downvoted when posting a correct solution to a persons technical problem before. It happens. Take it on the chin and move on.
The law here is saying that social media companies are private companies and in order to do business with children they need to follow certain regulations now. This is perfectly normal and legal. For instance, a tavern has certain regulations regarding minors entry to them. There are many examples.
Your comment also has a bit of a "muh free speech" vibe which some people dislike.
Originally, "Only require a middle name when they have one."
getting rid of social media without letting them hang out in person is just goin to create an epidemic of social lonliness
but i think it would be both better and easier to make it illegal for < 16 yo's to have a smart phone
the reason being that you can assume that's how they're using social media, so its a pretty good way to stop it, and this doesn't require annoying age or identity verification mechanisms for everyone else
I do wonder why the bill seeks to restrict users' freedoms, rather than making it illegal to advertise to children in general or something (as many other countries besides the US did decades ago to target children's television). I don't want to impute too much into DeSantis' motivations without evidence, but from where I'm standing it certainly seems like the difference is the model of harm. If your model is: "advertising to children is profitable, so social media will do shady things to keep them engaged to shill them crap" then banning ads makes sense, whereas if it's: "children go on social media/the internet[0], meet new people, and learn that they may be gender non-conforming in some way" then dramatically curtailing their access to the internet seems more effective.
[0] Given the dominance of social media platforms these terms seems basically interchangeable in this context, IMO.
A rational solution that would work? Can't have that, won't have that. Who said this? Stop that person from breathing. (sarcasm folks.)
The law proposed here is a stupid hammer that won't do anything but piss everyone off. Definitely what I've come to expect from my worthless state government (I live here, I'm sorry, ive tried to replace these people several times)
Certainly not everyone.
There are many people that back this.
We’re looking for actual solutions here, not to check a box and pretend we tried
The key word is “everyone” and it’s a collective action problem.
Excellent article in The Atlantic titled “End the Phone Based Childhood Now” which covers this extensively.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-...
The study cited in this excellent - but paywalled - article is here: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/2023-131/
We are so back
>id required for more stuff
It's so over
You are probably joking and know that.
Social media, especially the recent evolution with shorts, reels and tik-tok, are destroying young minds (and older too).
I'm pretty sure there are millions of people who try to limit their consumption of social media, without any luck - it's just too addictive. If one was able to make a decision - to completely ban for example tik-tok (like make it disappear forever) my feeling is that many people would decide yes. As this is obviously not possible, we all struggle with the overall negative impact.
What makes you think the state law would get struct down in federal court?