1. this bill is trash, it couldn’t be enforced, it’s pandering.
2. Social media as it has existed for the last 5-10 years is harmful for teenagers.
Instagram is making teens depressed and suicidal. TikTok videos have people celebrating mental illness like Tourette’s and has brainwashed impressionable kids into believing they too have tics or multiple personalities or Tourette’s.
Something needs to be done. Not every corporate evolution is good or must be accepted as permanent. That’s corporate propaganda. Instagram needs a “taking the cocaine out of the recipe” moment if it’s going to survive as a reputable product.
Oh please, social media may make teens depressed and suicidal, but so too has life in general for decades or longer. If anything, teens can more easily access social support from certain peers within the framework of social media when they do get into a bad spot. Teenage life has never been easy, but it has also never been easier than it is today.
Your notion of social media causing some sort of enormously unique and enormous damage needs to be heavily qualified by real evidence compared to previous trends. I say all this, by the way, as someone who has enormous criticism for the intrusive, manipulative and heavy handed totalities of social media companies. However, it's one thing to hate them where they deserve hate and another to attribute very old problems of teenage life to them as if they were unique emergences today.
It's popular on HN to hate on social networks (despite many people here very much being dependent on them for their large salaries) but some of this hate should be taken with a grain of salt and lots of qualification.
edit: social media makes teens suicidal and depressed, but not inordinately more than many other things would in their lives in general. Being saturated by these networks is not obligatory in life. Even teens have plenty of agency and opportunities to learn about the dangers of not moderating involvement in certain things. Enough with the youth social trauma porn.
I’ll just say, you are acknowledging that social media does make teens suicidal but you are comparing it to the “many other things” in their lives that make them suicidal.
Like what? Pressure to achieve? Being popular? Hormones?
Social media is a product like cigarettes it can and probably should be regulated. You can’t mandate everybody to have friends but you can regulate Facebook and TikTok.
Yes, I'm saying that social media can make teens act and feel all sorts of things, and that in doing this, it's sometimes harmful in certain very specific contexts that can't simply be made to disappear through ham-fisted regulations, just like many other things throughout modern history that have been pegged to hysterias about "the children". It can be both dangerous in some contexts, beneficial in others and again, something that doesn't deserve exceptional mania about its dangers.
I'd love to see how you propose regulating it for teenagers and young people. I do hope it's at least something less foolish than the previous hysterical media/public fits about also "controlling" teens access to...... certain books, certain magazines, comics, TV, porno, "dangerous school games" and of course, video gaming!!! (which barely a couple decades ago supposedly made them prone to murder at an unusual rate). Remember all of these other media-inspired catastrophes for teen development? Do school library bans on books like "Catcher in the Rye" also ring a bell?
I repeat, qualification of claims: In other words, really show that some new tech or media terror actually does do inordinate, demonstrably above-normal harm to a large percentage of the bags of volatile hormones that teenagers have always been, with all sorts of mental issues that they largely end up handling reasonably well. They can grow further without being treated as if they were absurdly fragile and in need of protection from the wider world that they will anyhow have to face just a few years later, whatever its tendencies.
It gets tiresome to see some new supposed danger get trotted out after every couple of teenage generations as something that supposedly needs heavy intervention, mitigation and usually ridiculous regulations. Give teenagers just a bit more credit for mental toughness.
So unlike every other industry, social media is impervious to regulation?
Maybe the situation doesn’t call for prohibition but harm reduction? Why should parents and society as a whole just have to accept whatever some middle management product director at facebook thinks is right? We truly are not as enslaved to the current state of social media as you make it seem.
State attorney general notices his kid's social media app is giving algorithmic instead of chronological results, subpoenas social networks for number of under-18s in Minnesota, files charges, court sets up enormous fine.
> (b) The social media platform is liable to an individual account holder who received user-generated content through a social media algorithm while the individual account holder was under the age of 18 and was using the individual account holder’s own account, if the social media platform knew or had reason to know that the individual account holder was under the age of 18 and located in Minnesota. [...]
Sounds like they're not requiring unreasonable knowledge of faked ages.
If they only upload videos taken with the selfie cam which look like a minor and seem to have a pre puberty voice and their locations are sometimes in Minnesota would that be enough to warrant: "had reason to know that the individual account holder was under 18 years"?
If so that implies social network will have to scan every video for the age range of participants.
I certainly lied about my age to get my Hotmail account (which dates me fairly well).
I'm sure there are plenty enough kids who accurately represented their age between 13-18 to make this quite enforceable. I probably said I was 13 when I was 12, or something close enough.
Do a PSA campaign telling parents to make sure their kids' social media apps correctly represent their age to keep them safe. Would work well enough.
Well, you might have been a precocious 2-year old Microsoft fan in 2012. So, depending on your timezone, you should be in bed young man! And what do you think you were doing on HN at the young age of 1?
The easiest way to not show non-chronological results to kids lying about their age isn't KYC, it's showing chronological results to everyone.
(or, well, not showing results to anyone)
I'm much less concerned about the issue of identifying kids (if they can't identify kids, all the better, adults get to benefit too) than that they're probably accidentally banning whole categories of useful things like rolling your own search engine.
Yeah wow I would love this. It would finally make social media useful again.
I actually enjoyed seeing what my friends were up to on Facebook until they moved to this algorithmic timeline and it started showing only what they think I'd want to see.
Unfortunately it invariably thinks I want more of the same and that's exactly not what I want.
But I've closed all my accounts and don't think I'll ever go back anyway.
People will always go around rules. The point of rules is to send a clear signal that something is bad or socially unacceptable. In this case it's signaling to the parents that it's desirable that they enforce this rule.
It may or may not be pandering. The cultural and corporate elites have been increasingly exercising control over speech on the internet the past few years, and now we have a Ministry of Truth in the government.
More top down control is the natural progression of what we're already seeing.
Parents have a lot to answer for. The fact most kids dont have a relationship with their parents or guardians where they can talk to them about anything is highlighted with metadata like you have highlighted.
The sophistication of manipulation and control is highly granular in todays world, even a keyboard typing pattern can give away emotion which some can exploit.
> The fact most kids dont have a relationship with their parents or guardians where they can talk to them about anything is highlighted with metadata like you have highlighted.
You have a source for that? The statistics you're referring certainly don't say anything at all to back your claim.
Have a look online, but here is one plucked from a search engine (
https://www.highlights.com/about-us/press-room/national-surv... ) again meta data, but there is also a Thomas Pynchon quote to think about, "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.".
Oh yeah. It's Facebook that causes kids to become depressed or attempt suicide.
Nevermind the student loan debt crisis, the floundering economy or the authoritarianism sneaking in.
Definitely social media.
Spoken like the disconnected politicians creating these laws. Hilariously off the mark.
Social media is as dangerous for kids as video games. There's an argument to be made for advertising but I sense that is far beyond the perception of the people blaming social media for the state of the democratic society they've participated in for the past few decades...
High school teens don’t have a student loan debt crisis. The economy has been going gangbusters from 2008 to 2022. “Authoritarianism” predominately affecting teens, the most politically disconnected group aside from young children? None of your reasons make more sense than the social media theory (btw, the experience of “authoritarianism” is likely from social media/internet news as other than for some marginalized groups like undocumented immigrants, nothing bad has been happening directly to the majority of teens or their friend groups.)
> Although often treated by psychiatrists, Tourette is not a mental or psychiatric illness. Rather, it is a movement disorder that often occurs along with other psychiatric conditions such as obsessive compulsive disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, etc.
Most technical adults I know are in some stage of trying to revert their internet usage back to the offerings this bill would allow through. The less than 1 million users careveout is HUGE— allowing for the power of small forums, federated socials, etc. seems like a great bill unless you’re trying to exploit young people.
It seems you're implying everyone who disagrees with you is trying to exploit young people. It's the same rhetoric as the politicians who drafted the bill. We need to have open minds in civil society, some humility to anticipate desenting opinions, and careful fingers to type out comments with.
I have some concerns about this bill and tactic. For example, even if it worked as intended, would we see an uptick of problems in 18 year olds' use of algorithmic social media as they're suddenly away from home/out from under their parents' supervision and given access to a bunch of exploiting content? It's similar to how the first two years of driving are more dangerous regardless of when those 2 years take place.
And as somebody who was 12 when COPPA went into effect, there are unintended consequences of banning minors from platforms:
1.) They lie, so either that's going to be commonly known/accepted OR a giant millstone around the neck of any existing company. This makes it a lot harder to pick out accounts that belong to minors, which makes it harder to both research and protect kids.
2.) Related to that, if you're breaking the rules by being in a space, you are way less likely to speak up. If you're a 15 year old who lies and says you're 18 to be on whatever social media platform, then if somebody harasses you, you're less likely to report it because it would get your account banned.
That's not even mentioning what something like this would do for the edge case of kids who genuinely are artists or content creators.
> 1.) They lie, so either that's going to be commonly known/accepted OR a giant millstone around the neck of any existing company.
You hint at an under-mentioned point here: we want laws that encourage companies to be aware of their users and to protect them, and an unintended consequence of laws that say, "you can continue operating as normal as long as you don't know any of your users are kids" is that companies hear, "don't make any moderation or safety features that might open you up to that kind of accusation."
Of course demanding that companies know all of their users perfectly is an obvious privacy violation with obviously even worse consequences. But even though it's better than hooking up ID verification to social networks, "pretend teenagers don't use the Internet" isn't harmless policy, it's not just that there are popups people click through.
----
I personally feel like this kind of "don't knowingly target" stuff is often counterproductive to keeping kids safe online. It means that when they hang out, almost every space they enter is going to be specifically designed for adults, and will systematically ignore the fact that they exist or might have unique needs -- because ignoring that kids exist and removing safeguards is now the safest thing for the website to do.
On a really small scale, think back to when Youtube got targeted for programming "aimed at kids". One short-term result I saw from that was animators/streamers trying to deliberately make their streams less child-appropriate so they wouldn't be swept up. It's anecdotal and I'd like to see more research on it, but I vaguely wonder if the result of these crackdowns isn't often to make social sites more dangerous for kids.
> But even though it's better than hooking up ID verification to social networks, "pretend teenagers don't use the Internet" isn't harmless policy, it's not just that there are popups people click through.
Related to that, we can't just pretend teenagers have no ability or agency. Honestly, it's a toss up who would 'win' a cat and mouse game between the MN legislature and a group of teens with programming capability. Adolescents are in a developmental stage where they're establishing themselves as individuals away from their parents/adult authorities; it's natural that they're going to seek out spaces that either their parents don't know about or don't want them going to. Our job as adults is to make sure that process is safe for them while still allowing them the autonomy to learn to make good decisions.
> I vaguely wonder if the result of these crackdowns isn't often to make social sites more dangerous for kids.
I wonder this too. I was a very digital kid back in the day before there were regulations against it, and there were opportunity costs to kicking out the under-13s that would be very magnified for 13-to-18s.
It prevents kids from having their own social structures and spaces. For example, 7-10 year old me ran a curatorial site for the Geocities' kids neighborhood and late elementary school me also had an IRC channel. It seems bonkers, but there were advantages: Since I/some of the other kids could run things ourselves (with some adult help from trusted adults), it kept creepy adults from integrating themselves into the group by providing resources. (Think the stereotypical college kid buying high schoolers booze; if kids can't sign up or learn how things work, then they have to play in adult playgrounds instead of making their own.) It meant I could kick people and that the conversation was age-appropriate (because that was where I talked about kid stuff and how dare you be off-topic in my channel [kids make great dictators]).
Related, having an admin/building group of kids is really helpful as a buffer, especially in the teen years. Lots of teens aren't going to tell their parents much, but they will tell other teens, so having some teens around who know how stuff works and gives advice is helpful.
You can't legislate for teens without remembering that they have agency and will act independently.
The thing is that there's no benefit to algorithmic social media, so erring on the side of caution is responsible. And we see a clear and extremely reasonable threat. The ideal benefit is that teens won't form a social media addiction.
Algorithmic social media uses the exact same principles as gambling addictions. Teens are much more subject to these exploitations and we don't let them sit in casinos all day and loot boxes have seen some regulation as well.
Social media may be even worse because the gamble is far less tangible, it's cost in the surface is only time and the reward is purely an emotional one.
I would support efforts at restraining exploitative use of algorithmic content for all ages. The main issue is that age-restricting teens especially is logically difficult and can create unintended consequences. Teens are going to act on their own and since many of today's adults (particularly of the generation that tends to legislate in the US) were not raised in a digital world, there will be groups of teens that are better with technology/computers than the adults making laws and therefore the laws either need to account for that (and requires controls so draconian that companies are likely to just ban the kids or stop operating, which opens up the 'what about lying' issue).
You mention casinos. One difference between casinos/alcohol/cigarettes is that there are easy places to intervene/place responsibility: the point of service is a physical location subject to local law. Digital regulation is a lot murkier and easier to exploit. (And not just by creepy adults: a lot of us kids in the 90s/early 00s picked up on the argument that if we weren't legally able to be held accountable, then we couldn't be legally held accountable for things like piracy either).
The only way to ensure something like this could be enforced would be to require ID for signing up for/into any algorithmic service and HELL no. Not only should we not throw the baby out with the bathwater, we also shouldn't set the cradle on fire.
> the bill only applies to social media platforms with more that 1M “account holders” (defined as people who access a “social media account,” an undefined term) “operating in Minnesota.”
I'm always baffled by these nonsensical and arbitrary cutoffs. Obviously the proper approach is to define a function, either linear or logarithmic. In this case it's a reverse proportion: if you serve 500000 people in Minnesota, you are allowed to have 50% of Minnesota's youths on the platform, with 900000 people it's 10%, something like that. One could also have the age as a parameter of the relation, again to avoid the stupid cutoffs where the eighteenth birthday suddenly turns a person into an enlightened adult.
Hard zero at 1M also sounds random. I'd say the optimal function would be a reverse geometric progression tied to Minnesota's population and approaching zero teens at infinite Minnesotan accounts—or rather, one teen so there's no bogus fractional value.
The point of the threshold isn’t to tell how many Minnesotan kids can be on a service. It’s to limit the burden of filtering traffic for Minnesota to companies that should be large enough to manage it. A small social network may not have the engineering resources to devote to doing this, or it might be cost prohibitive. This threshold mitigates those complicated arguments to avoid the filtering.
Also, a new social network wouldn’t be as likely to be seen as a “threat” until it got to a certain scale.
(I’m not trying to defend the bill, just what I think the the rationale is for the thresholds used)
I’m baffled that you see a simple easy to understand rule and think we should spice it up with a logarithmic curve.
The goal is simply to say that big social media companies must comply and small niche ones are ok. It is arbitrary. It’s also probably fine. Note it’s not 1M people in Minnesota. It’s 1M users anywhere.
I see that political scientists have entered the thread. Never will the nation have sensible and stable laws if a major consideration in their making is the continued employment of politicians and political scientists, so they can keep adjusting the figures in each law every year.
The idea of a "default" internet that is not user generated, one entirely formed of corporate and institutional puke, is a very new concept and would not have made any sense only a few years ago. It is a dangerous idea.
The internet, and specifically the web, is pretty much all user generated. It's the the corporate spam and walled gardens that are new should be highly regulated because the corporations themselves have incorporated and abstracted away all liability for their actions. It's the trade off.
But applying this nonsense to human persons is wrong.
In short, Minnesota wants to prevent large social-media companies from individually targeting under-18's with prioritized user-generated content?
The title makes it sound more general, e.g. like under-18's couldn't use social-media at all. But instead, it sounds like they don't want under-18's having user-generated content individually targeted at them, or something like that.
I'd guess that the concern would be echo-chamber effects? This is, if users get targeted with content algorithmically selected just for them, then it may tend to silo users' perceptions. And that might be especially concerning for less-experienced users, who may not realize it's happening or see stuff outside of that bubble.
So how exactly would this be enforced? Would every website need to have you click a box that says "Are you over 18? Click [Yes] or [No]" and then if you click "[No]" it takes you about:blank or something?
That might work for babies, but wouldn't most people over the age of, say, 7 simply lie and click "[Yes]"?
>The bill would eliminate minors’ access to any algorithmically generated navigation aids, such as “top content” and “hot items” lists. It would also eliminate home pages that are algorithmically organized, whether personalized to individual users or not, which would be replaced by a list of items presented chronologically (presumably in reverse chronological order if allowed because chronological order prioritizes the oldest content, which is rarely what users want). Assuming minors can subscribe to other users’ content, they will have to subscribe sparingly to avoid being overwhelmed by an incoming flow of content unhelpfully organized solely by date. The minors would also have to constantly review the content to avoid missing something important (remember, popular or important content wouldn’t be highlighted, so it could be easily missed).
Sorry for the snark, but could I change my age to 17 to get access to this? Sounds like a dream feature.
Quite the opposite actually -- the goal is to make it less appealing. Social media is designed to be addictive and prey on base psychological impulses.
Fixing the problem would just be removing the RT / Share button. That’s it. Then we would all use it less because it wouldn’t be that interesting at all.
That may help, but I suspect it will not be enough. Perhaps limiting people to mutual relationships (can’t follow without a follow back) and a maximum following/followers count of 256 to avoid parasocial relationships? (Only semi joking)
Having this as an option might be nice, though it's more likely to be useless at scale. Having it as the only option sounds like a nightmare: Blink and you'll miss the content you're interested in, with no easy way to get back to it. To actually stay connected and up-to-date you'd have to monitor your feed 24/7, manually filtering through piles of data you don't care about to find the rare gems. And what these busybodies in Minnesota are trying to mandate is not mere availability of a chronological feed, but exclusivity.
You can certainly cut down on the number of items to scan through by simply cutting off most of it, but then you'll miss some things you would have been interested in. Even worse, making it difficult to follow a wide variety of sources can only make the filter-bubble effect more pronounced—e.g., those so inclined will still follow Fox News but will be much less likely to see anything from alternative news sources since they would need to opt in to seeing everything those sources post.
The problem is not that the feed is algorithmically filtered. We should use algorithms to automatically gather useful information from a wide variety of sources. The problem is who controls the filters, and whose interests the default algorithms serve.
If it's legally mandated and services don't pull out of the market - yea usually it benefits us all since we can hop on the train (sometimes requiring a VPN but generally being offered as a feature for sale.
I, too, would love to switch over to such a mode on several social services.
Proverbs 22:6
"Train up a child in the way he should go, And when he is old he will not depart
from it."
the elites don't want "unapproved" ideas getting into the minds of malleable youth...shaping the minds of youth is solely the province of our benevolent elites...
A lot of parents don't want unapproved media to reach their kids. If something like this passes, it's going to be at least because of parental support.
Good luck. My uncles kid was always on dating sites etc at a young age. I did everything for them setting up restrictions, ensuring the kid had an account that only could access a few sites. They took away their tablet and phone etc.
The kid still managed to get caught hooking up with older men via Grindr.
Maybe teach the child how to think about their decisions in a responsible manner instead of trying to hide the world from them? You won’t win and the child won’t know why you’re hiding it from them. If they knew why, you wouldn’t need to hide it because they’d understand what to avoid on their own.
I was certainly on Grindr before I was 18 because I was a curious child and was never exposed to queer people. I was thankfully raised by parents that also taught me why making decisions like hooking up with old men could be bad. So I never did that.
My parents banned the internet from me as a kid -until i was 18- except in controlled manners. I flashed Linux on a school computer, used it to make a bootable VM of android that I could use to run apps on my person computer. I was particularly technically literate but there’s endless ways to avoid your parents wishes.
Funny thing is that I guarantee a lot of the parents in support of dumb shit like this lose their minds at sexual education classes in public schools. Just shows that most people don't have the IQ necessary to be competent parents.
If you lose your mind about a sexual education class, I agree that's misguided, but saying they have a low IQ because of that? Maybe a low EQ if they can't control their emotions, but it's absurd to automatically equate emotions with intelligence. We've all acted stupidly because we've been emotionally invested in an idea. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous at best, and probably indicative of a low IQ at worst ;)
Anyways, lots of people and religions have wildly different ideas on the sanctity (or lack of sanctity) of sex. Some people don't like it when a public school decides to teach their child something different. Whether that's a school teaching that heterosexual monogamy is the one true way, or homosexualism or polygamy or whatever. People have very different opinions on this and that's OK.
Don't think you got my point. I'd wager most parents that don't like sexual education courses don't see the hypocrisy in supporting this bill. They're essentially letting the state do the parenting for them.
Because then you end up with a society with extreme STEM brain. You will not raise citizens but a politically uneducated servant class in a society vulnerable to extreme fracturing as common frameworks to think about politics were not established.
Poltical education has been part of the education for the rulers since forever and since the enlightenment it has been more and more become part of education of everybody. By not teaching politics to a class of people you make them unable to work as lawyers, judges or (suprise) politicians taking away their control and feedback into how society develops. Those positions will be taken up instead by a different class of people by the accident of whom they have been birth been found deserving to get such an education. I hope do not elaborate why that is bad.
You could argue that people could get the same education from the internet. However as long as the internet is not censored people will spread versions of political education that are not aligned along country borders and not constrained by being a reproductive, self sustaining system of thought. This leaves the political order highly vulnerable.
We teach politics so that nations do not fall apart into local fiefdoms ruled by an elite class tied to who the parents are. By proposing to axe political education you are proposing to get onto a path to pre-enlightment political structures. This is not hyperbole. Political education goes beyond "how do i vote and how does my government work", it includes all of history, large parts of art, literature and so on. Political education like that is an pre-requisite to be able to find your own individual political opinion and it is a prerequisite for contributing to shape society. If you take away that power (in particular along a public/private education line) you kneecap one side of the politics of power and possibly irreversibly trigger a run-away feedback leading to a categorical change/tipping point how society works.
I hope i could persuade you that this is an extremely bad idea.
1. Facts are in contention and can also be politicised. When it comes to humanities there are often no facts just interpretations backed by arguments which you guessed it are political. Interpretations impose higher order structures. Recognizing such structures is important to draw parallels and apply learnings from history to the current time. If you just teach (= have people memorize) facts they will not be able to learn from history.
2. You can not act upon facts. To rationally decide what action to take you need a value system. Value Innsystems are political.
3. If you do not teach a value system people tend to construct irrational, selfish, short sighted value systems or just without reflection assume value system of their environment. Some viral value systems teach helplessness, people wouldn't dare to use their own mind but instead consult book or preacher.
4. Without encouragement for unified values nations fracture. So without politics having a thumb on what goes on in schools nations can not reproduce over successive generations.
What's wrong? Your suggestion would cripple western society (actually any society) and might get people killed.
How do you solve the issue when your ideals are rejected by parents (adults) of children being taught? Is it just "too bad for them?" (whether democrat or republican?)
No, my suggestion is to view schools as politically agnostic. This is possible, and the best option for everyone everywhere.
Political beliefs can, and should be, left to adults to decide on their own.
> How do you solve the issue when your ideals are rejected by parents (adults) of children being taught?
The best one can do is teaching about the existence of the variety of values (i am against teaching ideals) walk through some of the consequences, discuss it and encourage students to reflect. If the memetic power of values of the parents are so low that knowledge of the existence of values which conflict with them causes them to not be transmitted to the next generation then i say "tough luck". If soley one set of values is being taught and all others are demonized that would be something parents can be justifiably enraged by.
I wouldn't trust the americans education system to get things right anyway but it can get things less wrong.
> (whether democrat or republican?)
I do not care much about this destinction.
> No, my suggestion is to view schools as politically agnostic.
My suggestion is to have schools teach tolerance and give people a rough enough understanding of the different value systems so they do not cause offense because of ignorance. I find this preferable. If existence of different values causes offense to the parent "too bad for them".
> Political beliefs can, and should be, left to adults to decide on their own.
For people to be able to make their own choice, they should be guaranteed the right to learn about other choices. (I am against home schooling, if you can not tell but i am not sure abolishing home schooling would be worth while use of political capital as it is used to plaster over a lot of problems in education system that would have to be fixed first).
You asked me for my opinion. I gave it. You Americans need to sort it out on your end.
Not teaching politicized stuff is dangerous as that means a sufficiently large minority screaming loud enough have a mechanism to censor any school content by making it political even if it shouldn't be.
It did offer a solution in my reply. Explain multiple sides, explain other world religions, if students have a good understanding of all compatible with society ideologies they can pick when they are old enough.
Your opinion can be unuseful for the simple reason it's off topic.
If you aren't American, you simply cannot understand our political issues and to dismiss them as if they aren't important (because they aren't important to you) is disrespectful.
good luck teaching much beyond colors and shapes without overlapping with some "Republican ideals" or "Democrat ideals". especially given the ever-widening scope of what so many Republicans claim constitutes Democratic political indoctrination in schools.
The bill doesn't propose to ban children from social media, but rather bans them from being recommended content. In practice it would likely mean that a child's account will just view most recent or top content, or would require them to search for content. As opposed to being profiled and recommended content outside of their/their guardian's control.
I see no problem with this for children. I think that it's inevitable that this is instituted in the EU for children, and I think it should be an option for all people.
You can't even buy a cigarette in Minnesota unless you are 21. You're not mature enough to make that decision. But you are mature enough to sign a contract to join the Military...
These old farts couldn't even sign in to Facebook without technical support. Do you think they understand even a glimmer of the technical ramifications of their proposed law? Usually when laws like this fail for technical reasons, they try to compensate the embarrassment by hammering harder with the penalties.
They know exactly how to do it. They can just hire people on this board, and in two years you'll barely remember when you could visit a website without an Apple/Android phone linked to your Real ID.
This would effectively ban minors from the Internet. And many walled gardens.
EDIT: There’s a case to be made for it! The Internet, especially social media, is as powerful as illicit drugs and probably impacts development. But IMHO, this should be up to parents to decide, and I think the lawmakers probably have no clue the extent of this kind of rule would be.
It's a little ironic to argue the utility of banning something by comparing it to another thing which is already entirely prohibited but completely widespread throughout all of society anyway.
I don’t agree with the idea of banning kids from the internet. But I understand and even empathize with those who are tempted by the idea. Like going to live with the Amish.
This won’t ban minors from the Internet, it will go a long way to helping avoid bad habits like catching up on social media turning into a three hour binge.
Banning teens from using corporate, for-profit, surveillance capitalism, data-mining machines fronting as "social" "networking" sites? Yeah, I'm down. Kids can move over to decentralized, federated services and take those to the next level. Where do I sign? Ban everyone. Ban the sites completely. They're corrosive and trash.
No. I teach at the high school level in a suburb of Minneapolis. Staff asked for a formal response from administration about banning phones and were were told, directly and unequivocally, that we cannot do so, and while they support teacher initiative to restrict phone use in class, if a teacher should take a phone off a student they are personally and financially responsible for the device. I’m supposed to assume thousands of dollars of personal liability each day on my 45k salary? Fat chance.
As you expect, phone use is a constant problem. Parents are very often no more willing to restrict phone use when it’s brought to their attention. It’s kind of a shit show.
> Have they already tried to ban phones in schools?
My eldest is 12 and in his school they are not allowed to use their phones during school time, and I fully support this.
Due to some genius government policy here involving "digital classrooms", every child in his year has been handed an iPad to use during lessons. Guess what? Kids end up watching junk on YouTube during lessons, then get their devices confiscated.
I wonder if the policy wonks in government have met (m)any 12 year olds...
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.
>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).
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
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.
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.
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".
>> 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.
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.
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'.
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.
A 16 year old can, in most cases, be legally independent of their parents: living on their own. They can also, in many states (and countries), legally give consent for sex.
But we shouldn't let them view user generated content?
The inconsistencies don't even end at adolescence. You can die for your country at 18, but you can't buy a drink or (since 2020) a smoke until you're 21.
As far as I know there are no social media platforms operating in Minnesota, unless someone is still using the Gopher protocol? So this is a nothing burger.
Even so, chronological ordering is the worst choice. Now you can just flood the stream with whatever crap you want and it will push all the legitimate content down off the page.
You flood the stream with "whatever crap", people get annoyed and unsubscribe/mute. You can no longer flood, the problem is fixed.
That's how the things are used to operate, and that is the correct way. After all, if someone is annoying IRL, you stop make a decision to stop talking to them, you don't expect some random third party to remove them.
1. this bill is trash, it couldn’t be enforced, it’s pandering.
2. Social media as it has existed for the last 5-10 years is harmful for teenagers.
Instagram is making teens depressed and suicidal. TikTok videos have people celebrating mental illness like Tourette’s and has brainwashed impressionable kids into believing they too have tics or multiple personalities or Tourette’s.
Something needs to be done. Not every corporate evolution is good or must be accepted as permanent. That’s corporate propaganda. Instagram needs a “taking the cocaine out of the recipe” moment if it’s going to survive as a reputable product.