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Comment by tremon | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of other goods and services are used by children, even targeted at them, without them needing to enter a contract.

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I think the OP was saying that having minors agree to a social media sites terms and conditions is them entering a contract. So if you're against minors entering contracts, its logically consistent to also be against holding minors to a websites terms.

> I think the OP was saying that having minors agree to a social media sites terms and conditions is them entering a contract. So if you're against minors entering contracts, its logically consistent to also be against holding minors to a websites terms.

In which case we should ban children from using game consoles, computers, cell phones, ISPs, TVs, or anything that else that comes with a ToS/AUP/T&C

Since when can children agree to legal contracts? don't you have to be 18 to get a cellphone plan or sign a contract with an ISP?

Yet children have cell phones and use the internet right? Nothing (as far as I know) will stop a child from walking into a walmart and buying a pre-paid phone or a TV or a computer but all of those things will force you agree to their terms.

How enforceable all of that is legally would be up to the courts, but that's true for social media sites too. If a 15 year old signs up for a social media site they're forced to agree to terms that might not hold up in a courtroom. None of that protects the child from having their data harvested, sold, and used against them for the rest of their lives.

If we agree to ban kids from using social media on the basis of them not being able to legally enter into a contract, we'll have to ban kids from a whole lot more that social media since so many things in our lives require one. Even things explicitly made for children.

> but if we enforce the law, then companies will have to stop taking advantage of children!

That sounds pretty good. Maybe companies targeting their products and services at children shouldn't attempt to enter illegal contracts with them?

I'd be better to outlaw the data collection and exploitation than to tell kids they can't use cell phones or computers or social media and televisions. No need to limit that to just kids either.

Children aren't allowed to play slot machines either and that's what TikTok (and Youtube Shorts, etc) sure feels like to me.

It might feel that way but what's the real difference between TikTok and watching TV? Society has always restricted children's access to specific content but now we're restricting children's access to specific mediums regardless of the content itself.

Why is TikTok or YouTube shorts not a valid way to consume media?

It's a bit like arguing graphic novels are acceptable to children but short comics are not.

The difference is massive.

Your weird neighbour who has a feet fetish would never get to be a TV star, but he can amass 50k followers on TikTok, and request feet pics via private messages to them. Including underage children.

Now multiply that by ten thousand.

TV, by nature of being a group effort and holding a sliver of a monopoly for your attention, had a natural content filter (based on societal standards, for bad and good).

I don't watch foot fetishists but I watch a lot of content made by people who would never get on TV on subjects too niche to ever get on TV.

Also, if you want learn how to do anything, you can find someone online that will show you how to do it.

> Your weird neighbour who has a feet fetish would never get to be a TV star

Look up Nickelodeon and Dan Schneider my man.

Haha, I was sure someone would make a comment like this. The point is that that his fetish would not be the show’s content :)

Well… there are some examples of them filming some very inappropriate stuff with the child actors [0]. There are other examples but I’m not on here to talk about this anymore, I just happened to learn about this subject recently and it was topical. I think it’s disgusting anyone takes advantage of others, TikTok stars or otherwise.

0 - https://youtu.be/nc-ZT4Ty05o

I mean, that’s also kind of the point. Something like that on TV that generates worldwide commotion, gets people fired etc, is actually very mild when put near the stuff children can find online.

It’s also more of an abuse on the actors, and might pass unnoticed by young viewers, while a lot of the content on tiktok and YouTube is actively harmful, trying to indoctrinate weird ideas or stimulate inappropriate behaviour. With an audience of other kids and creeps cheering on and competing for likes in the comments. I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how much more dangerous social media is.

The point is his fetish is in the show's content!

Although, still, a few exceptions aside doesn't invalidate your point. TV being a single group effort is much better than thousands of individual voices, what could possibly go wrong with that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo

The greater risk isn't weird fetishists but the social media companies themselves who push products designed to be addictive, manipulative, and exploitive in ways that TV can't be (although it's increasingly trying to catch up)

Replace that with books and written content on the internet, which has been a thing for almost 30 years by this point (like a lot of fanfiction on the internet).

> what's the real difference between TikTok and watching TV?

One is a heavily regulated medium where people spend millions of dollars and work together in teams of hundreds. It's content is overseen by numerous regulatory agencies before it airs. Tons of powerful people stand to lose a lot of money if anyone screws up and sneaks porn onto the news - even a nip slip on live TV can become a major scandal that's remembered years later.

The other relies on a team of inconsistent, overworked moderators to delete a deluge of inappropriate content in a vaguely timely manner.

Are we willing to lock all humans into an antiquated medium for the sake of this control?

I ask this as someone who now watches only a tiny amount of television now. I watch a lot of content online and even create my own content. The only reason we need overworked moderators is because anyone can be a creator now. I don't think you can put that genie back in the bottle and I don't think it's necessarily better if you did.

> even a nip slip on live TV can become a major scandal that's remembered years later.

And only a few decades before that you couldn't show two adults sleeping in the same bed.

That's not the problem with TikTok. All the extreme stuff is filtered out. The problem is with content that moderation is fine with being of seemingly low value. Unfortunately, because of how the app and its algorithm works, there is no good way for an outside researcher to observe and report the full nature of the content of the platform.

Graphic novels and short comics are a finite medium, they have a beginning and an end. There's not a very practical way to doom scroll away your entire weekend with comic books. You will eventually run out of comic books or run out of places to put them.

I desperately wanted to gamble with slot machines when I was a minor. When I reached 21, I had lost all interest in them.

Would you mind expanding that? I always assumed that renting, lending or buying anything constitutes a contract technically.

If you want to be really pedantic, everytime a minor makes a purchase in a convenience store, that's technically a fulfillment of a contract. We still consider this a normal interaction and we don't consider the purchase null and void because one of the parties was underage.

I was thinking more about sports clubs, or things like the scouts or church groups. Sure, the payment side requires parental supervision but none of them operate under dracionan "accept our legalese or we won't let you play"-style rules. There's a lot of difference between "we have an implicit contract that's based around common values" and "we deny you access unless you agree to be exploited".

I felt that the blanket statement "it should probably be illegal to attempt to enter a contract with a minor anyway" was implying that therefore young people should have no agency. That's probably not what the GP meant, but I thought it needed stating explicitly that we do expect children/teenagers/adolescents to gradually take more control over their own life, and that we do expect society to allow for that.

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