Maybe I'm just getting old and cynical but, while I think current social media is bad for children, I'm very suspicious of the current international agreement that it's time to take action, especially with all the ID verification coming from multiple avenues
Two things can be true, and I am in the same boat. Should the next generation have their brains fried by ad-tech corporations and their algorithms? Absolutely not. Should the overdue off-ramp from this trend be the on-ramp to mass-surveillance and government overreach? Also a firm no.
I really wish this take was more prominent. I really don't buy that mass-surveillance should be required for age verification. There are plenty of very smart people who have created much more complicated things than a digital age verification that doesn't track every time you use it.
This also isn't helpful, but I think the sudden push of urgency isn't helping. The internet has existed without any kind of age verification or safety measures for about 30 years. We could have used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy trade offs, but instead we've waited till now to decide that everything has to be rushed through with minimal consideration.
> We could have used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy trade offs [of age verification]…
There is always a conversation, but it is often not the popular one and gets drown out by whatever everyone is excited about at the moment. You can find it if you seek it out.
Lawrence Lessig’s book “Code” (1999), for example, talks about how a completely unrelated internet is an anomaly, and that regulation will certainly be necessary, and advocates that it be done in a thoughtful manner.
>used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy trade offs,
On HN itself, no way. Too many people here make far too much money on ads to want that. It seems the other part that want freedom also want so much freedom it gives huge corporations the freedom to crush them.
>things than a digital age verification that doesn't track every time you use it.
The big companies that pay the politicians don't want that, therefore we won't get that.
Exactly. There's a clear alternative in my mind, one I'm sure is objectionable in its own way but I think is the least evil of the three: require providers to label their content and make them liable for it. This allows parents to do the censoring, which is functionally impossible now because no parent can fight the slippery power of multibillion dollar software investments designed to prevent them from having control over what their kids see.
we should be removing the harmful aspects of modern social, which are harmful for everyone not just minors, by making them unprofitable or even outright illegal.
Instead we are saying "only adults should use this" which, while technically regulating the industry, places the restriction on users.
We're treating it like tobacco or alcohol (2 industries who have similarly spent millions upon millions of dollars in lobbying efforts) but we should be treating it like asbestos.
OK, so what would be in the text of this law making it enforceable and not easily game-able by the social media companies and without severe unintended consequences?
Governments always want censorship and speech control. That never changes. The only difference is that now the general populace has accumulated enough disgruntlement to social media to be used against themselves.
No the difference is that when governments are still constrained by the rule of law it’s cheap PR to fight the government on data access claims but once they are authoritarian fascist industrialists fall over themselves to feed everything into Palantir
given that it's happening simultaneously with the war on E2EE and general purpose computing, their goals are as transparent as it gets. the West is at this point only a decade behind China.
I’m deeply worried by how uncritical these responses are. Meta is removing end-to-end encryption specifically because these lawsuits are trying to claim end-to-end encryption is a tool for child abuse.
The “think of the children” angle is the perfect angle to pressure companies to make communications readable by the government. And here tech audiences are welcoming it and applauding because they couldn’t read past the headline and they think anything that hurts Zuck is good.
How anyone can see this happening and not draw the connections to Discord and other services also pushing ID checks is beyond me. Believing that this will only apply to services that don’t effect you is short sighted.
Really? You still think you're the one looking at it all wrong? It's exactly what you think it is. Stop giving blatant malice the benefit of the doubt, especially the doubt they've directly instilled.
This doesn’t paint the entire picture. Suicide rates peaked in 1990 and then declined to its lowest point in 2007 from there the rates started rising again.
Like all metrics, they fluctuate over time. But they've remained pretty for decades stable at around 10 per 100k per year. The recent rise doesn't really coincide with social media adoption. By 2008, >80% of teens were using social media. If social media adoption was driving the increase in suicides, we would have started to see a rise in suicides around the early 2000s, reaching it's peak around 2008. But that adoption of social media by teens was coupled with a decrease in suicides. The more recent rise in teen suicides occurred during a period of largely flat teen social media adoption (because nearly 100% of them were already on social media by the end of the 2000s).
This idea of teen suicide painting a clear picture about the impact of social media just isn't borne out by the data. And lastly, people ought to remember that teens have the lowest rate of suicide among any age cohort.
The general public is being told they are faced with a crisis. This has been a problem for at least a decade, yet suddenly it's at the forefront and conveniently ties into ID verification for everyone to use general purpose computing.
I'm sorry but if you don't think there's a conspiracy I have a bridge to sell you. It was already unveiled that Meta has lobbied billions towards promoting this legislative change
You're arguing there's a conspiracy, but even if there is, what is the best action for governments to take given the devastating impact social media has been demonstrated to have on young people especially?
I don’t know what the solution is, but introducing mass surveillance of ALL users on their own devices hurts the general population - do you think it will solve the problem?
> The general public is being told they are faced with a crisis.
> This has been a problem for at least a decade.
I get you're point, but anyone that doesn't is asking "Which is it?"
I think everyone can see there is problems. Is there a crisis? I don't think so. Same problems we've always had, but on a computer.
People that know tech, know these laws cross a MAJOR line. Not a little slippery slope thing, this is off a cliff. But I don't think most people, that are already used to having to sign in with an online account on every device they use, even their TV, see it as that big a step. They don't even realize how predatory it is that they are required to sign in. What they need to see is that the sign in requirement was a choice by the vendor. These are LAWS, demanding no one ever be given the choice to not reveal personal information about themselves to use ANY computer. That's the point that needs to be driven home.
Its been decades of work to even get social media to court.
No one wants to talk about this or look at the issues when it’s not sexy.
$@&$$ - I’ve been at conferences and had safety teams cry on my shoulder about how THEY don’t get engineering resources if they ask for it.
Tech platforms suppress so much research and hold so much data hostage, that an entire research coalition based on independence from tech.
Zuck and tech as a whole pivoted to drop safety investments the moment this government came to power.
And this is for user in frikking America !
The shit that is going down in the rest of the world is a curse. The sheer amount of NCII that exists, with zero recourse for people whose lives are destroyed is insane.
> Zuck and tech as a whole pivoted to drop safety investments the moment this government came to power.
I think the question to ask here is, if both Meta and the current administration don't care about child safety, why is the age verification stuff going so smoothly? Is helping them do this really the right move?
This fine from New Mexico is about 0.6% of Meta's annual profit.
If all 50 states sue at the same rate, that'll be a 30% dent, and I'm sure states can sue for more than 0.6% too. That would be historic action against malfeasance and would send a strong FAFO single to all corporates.
Make the fine scale, and fit the severity of the issue. This should be $375 Billion not $375 Million. These are our future generations they're destroying.
Regulate and fine social media and adtech companies until its no longer economically feasible to generate the massive profits and stock valuations that is prompting this garbage.
Just have to read the quarterly conference calls between Zuck and Wall Street. Both groups are in total denial. And will be till we never hear from Zuck ever again.
Just break them all up via antitrust enforcement. It's increasingly becoming clear that society will degenerate into cyberpunk technofeudalism otherwise.
If Meta did advertise the "safety of its platforms for young users" then they should be held accountable for that. It seems clear from the whistleblowers that Meta had internal data that they knew they were not safe for young users, but Zuck gotta get those ads($$$) in front of young kids.
"We went a little over the line to figure out where the line is, so, we can now guarantee you, dear shareholder, that we're extracting the absolute maximum possible value! Isn't that splendid!"
Meta can do more and should do more. I think that's the short of it. The company made 59 Billion last year. It's completely reasonable to expect that they expend effort and budget on reducing their harm to children.
I doubt that Zuckerberg really uses either Facebook or Instagram all that much. Maybe as a curated PR channel sure, but he's not doom scrolling Instagram at bedtime.
If you know what the platform is capable of, if you seen how the sausage is made, you're probably not using it.
People are also a little naive in not seeing that these platforms aren't just bad for children, they are bad for adults as well. I'm not oppose to not "selling" them to children, but we also need to label correctly for adults and have rules like those for alcohol, tobakko and gambling, so no or limited advertising. Scrub the public spaces of Facebook logos.
I'm not sure if it's naiveté, it's probably more that we are all complacent. If all Facebook/Instagram users (and perhaps, even if only those with children), stopped using, that would be an actual stick, wouldn't it.. But we don't (I'm not excluding myself).
Deeper than that, it might be food for thought if someone can't stop doom scrolling. It does not matter the platform, if people are "addicted" to "bad news" it might be the person at the corner of the street ("the end is nigh! repent!"), the pharmacy next block or something else.
I personally stopped using Facebook because it was annoying me with useless doom and aggressive comments of people on stupid topics. If it would have showed me only cat pictures (like Instagrams does) or reasonable stuff (news, etc.) I would have continued using it.
Discussions from proper experts about absolute toxicity of social networks in their implementation are at least... 15 years old at this point? At least that, and I am not talking about rare article here and there but onslaught of articles in popular media from all sides. But parents... mostly didn't give a fuck.
Lets admit it, in same vein trump is a symptom of current US society, the approach and effects of social networks we allow them to be is a result of how lazy and thus addicted people got. On top of many of the parents doing exactly the same, then don't expect miracles.
One thing that I don't understand - even here, some folks call that sociopathic amoral piece of shit 'zuck' and treat his empire like some sort of semi-charity. When I attacked facebook company in the past, there was always a lot of defense (look at this open sourced stuff, look at that... which I presume came from either direct employees or clueless stock holders). People are people, deeply flawed and often weak without willingness to admit it to themselves.
Most Facebook users are basically teenagers, so it's no wonder it took them this long to add any real restrictions...or maybe they just wanted us to think they cared.
The same company intentionally driving minors towards this content (despite claiming to care about them) is also lobbying in secrecy for requiring all of us to scan our ID and face in order to use our phones and computers.
They don't care about child safety as long as it doesn't become so bad as to impact their revenue negatively. But they see that governments all over the world push for some kinds of age restrictions, and they know they are a prime target and it is hard for them to push back against that.
The reason they are (not so secretly) lobbying for requiring us to ID ourselves at the device level is that they don't want to be the gatekeepers. They want to make creating an account as effortless as possible and having to prove your age is a barrier that make turn off some people, including adults, and they may instead turn to services that don't require age verification. By moving the age verification in the OS, not only the responsibility shifts to the OS or hardware vendor, but it also removes the disadvantage they have against services that don't require age verification.
If you read between the lines, you will see that they have the same stance: "put age verification at the OS level, so that people don't discriminate against us". They know they are not in a position to argue against "child safety" laws, so instead, they lobby for making it worse for everyone instead of just themselves.
Meta is like one giant cancer that grew a few small tumors of benign[1] nature, like some of their efforts in open source and open research (React, Llama, etc.).
Cancer is a great metaphor because its a perversion of natural, healthy processes. So called social media is nearly that, but actually grotesquely unhealthy.
People are dramatically unwell when they are not social, but that unregulated process is also negative up to and including being lethal.
Exactly. It started out as something good: see what friends and family are up to. But now: scroll infinite algorithmically placed or sponsored rage bait trying to trigger you into behaving the way that advances certain corporate or foreign interests at the expense of whatever was left of our already tattered social fabric and our collective mental or literal health.
Actually it didn't start out as something good. Facebook emerged from a failed DARPA project called lifelog. It was always meant to be a tool to enable government surveillance.
Do you require everything you read to spell out everything for you point blank? Are you unable to connect dots?
The DARPA lifelog project ended the day Facebook was announced by a college dropout no one had ever heard of before. Facebook just happened to have the exact same goals / features as the lifelog project. Must just be a giant coincidence huh?
Oh yes, because intelligence agencies are known for broadcasting their moves to everyone.
I can guarantee you believe in a lot of things that you have no actual evidence of happening - just some perceived authority figure you trust for whatever reason, telling you it happened.
Also -
WHYY.org has received support through NewsMatch partner funds, which often includes contributions from large technology firms like Facebook (Meta) to support local journalism. These funds are generally used to match donations, helping stations like WHYY increase their financial sustainability and support public media.
No it didn’t. That was just like the first free sample from the drug dealer. Give a “good” free service to rope them in, always with the next steps in mind.
I disagree. I feel like earlier social networks hadn't yet huffed the "lean startup" gas and weren't obsessed with engagement and thus were not yet trying to hook their users into an engagement cycle like where we are today.
I feel like the Myspace/Friendster and early Facebook were nowhere near as harmful (albeit for addiction, those sites were still vulnerable to grooming) as where we are today.
OG Facebook was perfectly fine. In your analogy it’d be more like someone replacing your Diet Coke with actual cocaine. Like, yeah Diet Coke isn’t great for you, but it’s not cocaine.
Being on "social media" is a fundamentally unsocial activity: you do it alone, it makes you lonely, and it separates you from others. Some people manage to bootstrap a social layer on top of the base medium, but most are being driven apart for profit.
I think you can tell approximately how old someone is by when they believe Eternal September started on the internet. Nobody believes it was when they started enjoying the internet. It was always when some other generation or service arrived after them.
The internet was not a calm and well behaved place before Facebook arrived. The original “Eternal September” was in the early 90s. Usenet, forums, Reddit, comment sections, and every other social part of the internet have been full of bad behavior long before Facebook came along.
So many words and you missed the most important one: "netiquette"
That's the whole point: the word exists precisely as a testament to something that used to exist but now doesn't.
Anybody old enough to remember the word when it was common use should realize that it would have been impossible for the term to be coined in 2026.
If you missed that part of the Internet (maybe you were too young or maybe you were focused on other things, like the vast majority of people in the 90s), that's totally fine, but plenty of us did experience it and remember it pretty clearly.
> Usenet, forums, Reddit, comment sections, and every other social part of the internet have been full of bad behavior long before Facebook came along.
You can tell approximately how old someone is by whether they have reached the "everything sucks" part of life yet or not.
Hence... "of the web." IRC is and always was a cesspool but at least they had heard of netiquette, and it was something you could choose to partake in - or not, for the lulz. Nobody said anything about being "calm and well behaved" in particular.
Eternal September started before I was on the internet, but there have been several similar shifts since then.
It gets continually worse. Agentic AI is another Eternal September. For example, we now have dimwits sending dozens of unsolicited and unreviewed slop PRs to open source projects. Every search result is an affiliate marketing listicle obviously written by a robot.
As a Millennial, I'm sad to say that it wasn't even older generations' fault, but our own (+Gen X). The tipping point was letting in normies who traded in photos and money instead of text and art.
Elitism and selectivity were actually features of the early Internet. High barriers to entry (tech savvy, literacy) ensured that there was a high signal to noise ratio, and thus you had, let's say, upper quartile participants concentrated in one (forum of) fora.
LLMs are now heralding the Eternal September of even software engineering, and now I am wondering where to hang up my Techpriest robes in search of more elite pastures.
I wonder if this is how the clergy felt once the vulgar were allowed to study scripture not in the original spiritual programming languages of Hebrew or Latin, but English.
Elitism and selectivity were actually features of the early Internet. High barriers to entry (tech savvy, literacy) ensured that there was a high signal to noise ratio, and thus you had, let's say, upper quartile participants concentrated in one (forum of) fora.
I disagree. I'm of the Neopets/Pokemon forums generation. Elitism and selectivity were not what made that era a good balance between the caustic free-for-all we have now and the rich kid's playground from before. It was the technical and practical restrictions on what you could put in and get out of a web experience.
You couldn't upload thousands of thirst traps every month, because storage was limited. You couldn't summon another head of the dropshipping or affiliate marketing hydras with a few clicks, because the infrastructure didn't exist. You couldn't inundate users with dark patterns designed to extract every ounce of attention, data, and cash possible, because the rich web wasn't that rich yet.
You had to deal in text and reasonably-sized images on a CRT with a limited-bandwidth pipe feeding it all. Because of this, many of the techniques developed to transform so many other forms of media and so many other institutions into Capitalist hellscapes and high school, respectively, didn't work online. Until they did.
> I wonder if this is how the clergy felt once the vulgar were...
You meant the "vulgus". "Vulgar" has the same root, but a very different meaning.
This random thought is kinda disconnected from actual human history. "Not allowed to study Scripture" was not a thing: Illiteracy was. There were people that knew how to read and people who didn't, that's it.
I'm trying hard (and failing) to visualize your mental image.
"Dear Father: it looks like the Bible has been translated to English by my dear brothers up at the monastery. I'm sure you understand why I can no longer be a priest"
Remember that you're living in the actual earth timeline, not the 40k one.
I mean, one can always get an older machine and code everything as holy binary chant not only impress the youngsters, but also impose level of distance from the 'limited by llms'.
FWIW, I like the analogy despite seeing a benefit to knowing the original languages to studying scripture.
Ha, I think the great crimes and wrongs title goes to Angular. I became a front-end guy specifically to avoid all the OOP verbosity. I'm just trying to call some APIs and render some data on a web page. I don't need layers of abstraction to do that.
Anyways, is there a "just use vue" effort like there is with postgres :)
Actually. Meta is spending millions to push the age verification requirement off to the app store providers, such as Google and Apple. It's an attempt to shield Meta from liability, transfer it to the app providers.
Having clear laws about what's allowed and what isn't is a lot cheaper than getting repeatedly sued for hundreds of millions for not doing things there was never a clear legal requirement to do.
im not aware of any law that went through parliament that directly impacts installing apps. OSA has already hit and didn't impact app stores. Can you link me the relevant legislation or hansard debates?
>to push the age verification requirement off to the app store providers,
and makes more sense, Apple and Google have your credit card , or if you are a parent that bought soem phone for you child then at first boot up as a parent should be your job to setup a child account.
> at first boot up as a parent should be your job to setup a child account.
Something I would be 100% OK with is some regulation that at first boot, you have to present information about what parental controls are available on the device and ask if you'd like them enabled.
I haven't set up a phone in a hot minute, I only do it once every few years, is this something they already do?
I'd imagine there's a lot of cases where a parent buys a new phone and hands down the old one to their kid without enabling safety features. I don't know if there's a good way to help with that - maybe something like, whenever you go to set a new password, prompt "hey is this for a kid?" and go through the safety features again?
Just spitballing, that last one may not be a good idea, not really sure.
Even if they did, having a credit card is not proof of age.
> if you are a parent that bought soem phone for you child then at first boot up as a parent should be your job to setup a child account
Setting up a "child account" shouldn't involve setting some age field. Setting up a "child account" should involve restricting permissions.
Why leave it to the OS or a company to decide what is "age appropriate"? Leave it to the parent to decide what the child should or should not have access to. Extra bonus: that same "child account" can then also be used for other restricted purposes. Want a guest account which limits activity? Want an incognito account? Want a sandbox account? None of these should require setting some age.
This shit already happened years ago with consoles, i setup a choild account and the games were restrcited and other features also.
I am not paid by a trilion dollar company to decide if it should be a birthday input, or a dropdown where you select your political and religious conviction about what your child should see. Sony figured it out, if Apple pays me I will spend more time to write for them a UX flow so average people could sert the accpunts up and the rest could ask their priest, cousins or other person that can follow instructions to setup the account for them.
The giants shoudl have solved this decades ago and not wait for the fanatic religious to push for this as laws and get the goverments involved, now you will get 25 different laws about this.
Most sites are not going to implement this themselves.
I think they're in prime position to become a key broker of identity in the same way that a lot of people already log in with their meta or google account to unrelated websites.
They become very entrenched and get a ton of data that way.
As more and more people essentially lock themselves in with these identitybrokers tho I imagine it has a very stifling effect on speech tho. Imagine getting banned from those.
I mean, their telemetry crap is on a lot of apps too. I remember someone DMing me something very niche on Discord, and by chance I opened up Facebook, it gave me ads for that very, very niche thing I have never even looked up on Google, or Facebook, it was like IMMEDIATE. I opened up Facebook by chance, and voila.
The other one was the time I was speaking to my brother in law, who had just paved his driveway, he said "I could have used airport grade tar, but thought it was too much" and we were in front of his Nest security cam is the only thing I can think of, but the very next morning, I'm scrolling through Facebook, and sure enough, someone local is advertising airport grade tar. Why? I didn't google this, I only heard it from them.
There's some serious shenanigans going on with ad companies, and we just seem to handwave it around.
Coincidentally, I remember both experiences very very vividly, because this was the last time I used either platform in any meaningful capacity.
> The other one was the time I was speaking to my brother in law, who had just paved his driveway, he said "I could have used airport grade tar, but thought it was too much" and we were in front of his Nest security cam is the only thing I can think of, but the very next morning, I'm scrolling through Facebook, and sure enough, someone local is advertising airport grade tar. Why? I didn't google this, I only heard it from them.
Option A: The Nest camera not only listened to the conversation and picked out "Airport Grade Tar" and decided it needed to show adverts about it to people, but the camera also identified you to the point it could isolate your FB account in order to serve you those adverts.
(I'm making some assumptions but...)
Option B: Your brother had done various searches for airport grade tar from his home (in order to know how expensive it was). You, whilst visiting his home, were on his Wifi and therefore shared the same external IP address, your phone did enough activity whilst at his house (FB app checked in to their servers in the background, or used Messenger, etc) to get the "thinking of buying airport grade tar" associated with his external IP address associated with your FB account that was temporarily on that IP.
I had a friend who was convinced that some device in his house was listening in on his conversations with his wife as he kept on getting adverts for things they'd been talking about buying the day before but he hadn't searched for. (But she was searching for it from their home wifi, which is why it appeared in his adverts afterwards.)
Option C: no cameras or crude wifi tracing needed; they know who you talk to / associate with based on location data and the full profile of both sides, and can estimate things like 'will have mentioned X' -> can dispatch that via heuristic like 'show ads for X thing that was also mentioned by someone adjacent on that social graph'.
That is, BiL was marked as 'spreader for airport grade tar' based on recent activity, marked as having been in contact with spreadee, and then spreadee was marked as having received the spreading. P(conversion) high, so the ad is shown.
It's just contact tracing, it works well and is really easy even without literally watching what goes on in interactions.
Isn't this conversation, not publishing scientific hypotheses, theories and findings?
If so, it is customarily permissible to use rhetoric and sarcasm to more strongly emphasize a point. Or, to leave the conclusion as an exercise for the reader.
By intentionally hiding their position (and simultaneously acting as though it is completely obvious) the OP shuts down any useful conversation that might follow. Do they think Meta will sell the user's data? Do they think different people are in charge of different policies at Meta leading to actions that appear to be in conflict with each other? Do they think they will use this information to train AI models? Do they think they will use this information to serve Ads?
There are many interesting ways that the conversation could have been carried forward but there is no way to continue the conservation as the OP doesn't make it clear what they think.
The only thing I can say is: No I cannot figure it out, please tell me what you're trying to say here.
What’s the point in providing a rebuttal to these points (e.g. that Meta doesn’t actually sell data to anyone) if the OP can simply say “that’s not what I meant”?
They are taking a position that cannot be argued against or even discussed because they don’t make that position clear.
> providing a rebuttal to these points (e.g. that Meta doesn’t actually sell data to anyone)
So one of your suggestions of what the OP could mean was something you explicitly don’t think is true and would argue against? That sounds like a bad faith straw man set up.
Perhaps it’s just as well that the OP didn’t provide one specific reason to be nitpicked ad nauseam by an army of “well ackshually” missing the forest for the trees.
You could, as the HN guidelines suggest, argue in good faith and steel man. The distinction between “selling your data” and “profiting from your data” isn’t important for a high level discussion.
Can you truly not see through Meta’s intentions? There are entire published books, investigations, and whistleblowers to reference. Zuckerberg called people “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their data and has time and again proven to be a hypocrite who doesn’t care about anyone but himself.
I think they meant that Meta is offloading the cost (fines) of farming minor's data onto the operating systems. With an up-front cost of 2 billion dollars in lobbying, they can avoid paying 300m+ fees regularly.
Or, OP is not hiding their position and shutting down conversation — they are not imposing their position and are opening it up to discussion.
What prevents you from saying "Yes, and Xyz!!" and another poster "Yup, and Pdq, and Foo too!"
Or, maybe OP is just being a bit lazy, but again, it seems the context is conversation, not formal scientific inquiry where everything must be falsifiable?
> is also lobbying in secrecy for requiring all of us to scan our ID and face in order to use our phones and computers.
You’re conflating different things. The OS-level age setting proposals are not the same as scanning IDs and faces.
I’m anti age check legislation, too, but the misinformation is getting so bad that it’s starting to weaken the counter-arguments.
> Their stated reason? Child safety.
> Their actual reason? You can figure that out.
We’re commenting under an article about one $375M lawsuit over child safety and many more on the way. They are obviously being pressured for child safety by over zealous prosecutors. This is why they reversed course and removed end-to-end encryption from Instagram because it was brought up as a threat to child safety.
Also your “you can figure that out” implication doesn’t even make sense. The proposal to move age verification to the OS level would give Meta less information about the user, because the OS, not Meta apps, would be responsible for gating age content. I’m not agreeing with the proposal, but it’s easy to see that it would be more privacy-preserving than having to submit your ID to Meta.
> The proposal to move age verification to the OS level would give Meta less information about the user, because the OS, not Meta apps, would be responsible for gating age content.
I find it hard to believe that meta doesn't already have a pretty good age estimate for 95%+ of their users.
What offloading the responsibility to the app stores (or OS vendors) gives Meta is exactly that, offloading responsibility. In a future lawsuit, they can say that someone else provided them with incorrect information.
Basically these age attestation/verification laws are being pushed as a "save the children!" scenario. But if you read the laws - all they really do is shift responsibility around.
Currently, websites and apps are supposed to ensure they don't have kids under 13, or if they do - that they have the parents permission. That's federal law in the US.
These laws make the operating system or app store (depends on the particular law) responsible for being the age gate.
This doesn't stop the federal law from being enforced or anything, but the idea is apps/websites don't handle it directly, that's handled by the operating system or app store.
So now - companies like Meta can throw up their hands and say "hey, the operating system told us they were of age, not our fault." It also makes some things murkier. Now if Meta gets sued, can they bring Google/Apple/Microsoft in as some kind of co-defendent?
I think that murkiness is the point. They don't need to create the most bullet-proof set of regulations that 100% absolves them of all responsibility, they just need to create enough to save some money next time they get sued.
I can think of a ton of regulations we could create to better help protect kids. We could mandate that mobile phones, upon first setup, tell the user about parental controls that are available on the device and ask if they'd like to be enabled. Establish a baseline set of parental controls that need to be implemented and available by phone manufacturers, like an approval process that you need to go through to hit store shelves.
We could create educational programs. Remember being in school and having anti-drug shit come through the school? It could be like that but about social media (and also not like that because it wouldn't just be "social media is bad," hopefully).
Again all these laws do is take what should be Meta's burden, and make it everybody else's burden.
Forget about the stated reason for the laws. The fact is that it makes sense that people using a service are age-appropriate. And there is no market mechanism (I mean tort law) because of Section 230.
Now the easiest law change - that wouldn't required anyone to change anything - would be to revoke Section 230. This would make service providers liable. Everything else is a band-aid. I doubt that this verdict will survive appeal (due to Section 230). But if it does, then again there is no need for any new regulations. The tort lawyers will solve the problem for us.
If we do have device age verification, then it still doesn't shield Meta. The lawyers will sue everyone involved, and disclosure will show if Meta had data that will have shown that user should have been blocked.
The purpose of age verification is to avoid all this. Of course the current proposals suck and won't achieve this. The market will not accept an approach that would work - which would be for anything with a screen or speaker to be permanently tied to an individual user. "OS verification" cannot succeed - it must be one-time hardware attestation. Even a factory reset wouldn't remove the user assignment.
It is most likely not them but they proxie for the US. Under another administration they would use an NGO to advance the agenda. The goal is to facescan the world.
To be fair, they're just an evil corporation making lemonade out of lemons. I'm sure they'd be happier pushing porn and nazism to hundreds of millions of underage users, but if certain governments want them to write all that bunk code to verify everyone's ID, they might as well make money off the data.
We used to believe in freedom of speech and freedom of association.
Since the dawn of the Internet era, we've had a legal principle that platforms are relatively shielded from liability for what their users do.
It's the Internet. There's sexual content and sketchy characters on it. Occasionally people will encounter them -- even if they're under 18.
Anyone who grew up in the mid-1990s or later, think back to your own Internet usage when you were under 18. You probably found something NSFW or NSFL, dealt with it, and came out basically OK after applying your common sense. Maybe it was shocking and mildly traumatizing -- but having negative experience is how we grow. Part of growing up is honing one's sense of "that link is staying blue" or "I'm not comfortable with this, it's time to GTFO". And it seems a lot safer if you encounter the sketchy side of humanity from the other side of a screen. Think about how a young person's exposure to the underbelly of humanity might have gone in pre-Internet times: Get invited to a party, find out it's in the bad part of town and there are a bunch of sketchy people there -- well, you're exposed to all kinds of physical risks. You can't leave the party as easily as you can put your phone down.
I stopped logging onto Facebook regularly around 2009; I only log in a couple times a year. I hate what Facebook has become in the past decade and a half.
But giving a site with millions of users a multi-hundred-million-dollar fine because some of those users behave badly seems...asinine.
If your kid is old enough and responsible enough to be given unsupervised Internet access, you'd better teach them how to deal with the skeevy stuff they might encounter.
That’s not really true. Pre-internet we had relatively much stricter content controls. Fairness doctrine springs to mind, plus significant regulation of the movie industry.
Letting companies sell addiction has pretty significant negative externalities. That’s why we regulate gambling and drugs. Facebook sells addiction, so it makes sense to regulate it like we do drugs and gambling.
I don't know who they have to pay it to but that's only for New Mexico, which has about two million people which works out to about $187.50 per person.
That's pretty cheap when it comes to deception.
The eyes of Texas should be upon this, which is 15X the size and should not settle for less than $1000 per person, where deceptive trade practice is much more serious than other places.
Now that would set a $30 billion example which may not be enough of a deterrent either.
But there are probably plenty of people for whom a $5000 one-time payment might not come close to being fair compensation for what's already happened, especially with Meta allowed to continue as an ongoing concern, that's got to be psychologically harmful.
To really fix it each state would have to follow "suit" while greatly upping the ante so there's at least hundreds of billions at stake.
Meta can afford it and who else is responsible for so much widespread sneaky deception at this scale for so long ?
Alternative headline: household spyware cash machine forced to pay $20 for being bad.
If you want to punish Meta then you have to punish the wonder boy who runs it. Not even share holders can fight off the guy spending 80B on the metaverse.
This particular verdict is a long time coming. How it drives meaningful change is the bigger question.
One of the challenges we need to resolve is the race to the bottom for online communities - engagement metrics will always result in a PH level that supports more acerbic behavior.
There’s multiple analyses that you can find, if not your own experience, to believe that we should be able to do better with our information commons.
Just today, I found a paper that studied a corpus of Twitter discussions and found that bad-faith interactions constituted 68.3% of all replies (Twitter data).
The engineer and analyst side of us will always question these types of analyses.
I’ve read enough papers at this point for the methods to matter more than the conclusion.
1) meta, and the other tech platforms need to open up their research and data. NDAs and business incentives prevent us from having the boring technical conversations.
2) tech needs someone else to be the bogeyman - the way we did for tobacco. The profit incentive ensures profitable predatory features pass review. Expecting firms to ignore quarterly shareholder reviews for warm fuzzies is … setting ourselves up for failure.
Regulators (with teeth) need to be propped up so that the right amount of predictable friction (liability) is introduced.
3) tech firms need an opportunity or forum to come clean. The sheer gap between the practical reality of something like content moderation vs the ignorance of users and regulators - results in surprise and outrage when people find out how the sausage is made.
4) algorithm defaults decide the median experience for participants in our shred market place of ideas. The defaults need to be set in a manner that works for humans and society (whatever that might be).
Economies are systems to align incentives to achieve subjective goals.
Meta should be disbanded for the damage it caused to mankind. Age verification tainting Linux also is heavily attributable to Meta buying legislation; systemd already quickly went that path, in order to appease their corporate-gods. Private user data to be released to random actors willy-nilly style - and the constant appeasement "no, this is not what is happening". Until it suddenly is happening precisely as people predicted it to be happening. Everyone runs a meta-agenda nowadays, Meta more than most others.
Drop in the bucket for them. Giving Zuck some jail time would be the more appropriate message - there's no doubt he knows and approves of the kind of evil activity the New Mexico law enforcement dug up.
That would be a dream, but cannot see it happening.
But totally agree with your theory- platforms should face genuine legal exposure for algorithmic harm to minors (as tobacco companies did for health harm).
Unfortunately, as we found out recently, Meta's lobbyists are a powerful force to contend with and I do not trust our governments to stand up to them.
As much as everyone hates Meta for selling people's personal data, this is absolutely ridiculous. The hysteria regarding forcing companies do parents' job doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
Requiring ID to browse the internet is doing the parents jobs of managing what their kids are doing online.
Stopping misleading advertisments and mental health issues while claiming to be protecting children is not on the parents. The parents were given the false information to believe their kids would be safe.
This also isn't helpful, but I think the sudden push of urgency isn't helping. The internet has existed without any kind of age verification or safety measures for about 30 years. We could have used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy trade offs, but instead we've waited till now to decide that everything has to be rushed through with minimal consideration.
There is always a conversation, but it is often not the popular one and gets drown out by whatever everyone is excited about at the moment. You can find it if you seek it out.
Lawrence Lessig’s book “Code” (1999), for example, talks about how a completely unrelated internet is an anomaly, and that regulation will certainly be necessary, and advocates that it be done in a thoughtful manner.
On HN itself, no way. Too many people here make far too much money on ads to want that. It seems the other part that want freedom also want so much freedom it gives huge corporations the freedom to crush them.
>things than a digital age verification that doesn't track every time you use it.
The big companies that pay the politicians don't want that, therefore we won't get that.
Second best time to plant a tree: now.
Unfortunately, social media users don't have billions of dollars to spend on lobbying and related activities around the world.
These lawsuits and regulations are against the industry, not the users.
The regulations and lawsuits are driving the pressure to ID check users and remove end-to-end encryption.
Instead we are saying "only adults should use this" which, while technically regulating the industry, places the restriction on users.
We're treating it like tobacco or alcohol (2 industries who have similarly spent millions upon millions of dollars in lobbying efforts) but we should be treating it like asbestos.
Just because I don't know how to write a law that can prevent it doesn't mean that I can't recognize an actual issue when I see it.
The “think of the children” angle is the perfect angle to pressure companies to make communications readable by the government. And here tech audiences are welcoming it and applauding because they couldn’t read past the headline and they think anything that hurts Zuck is good.
How anyone can see this happening and not draw the connections to Discord and other services also pushing ID checks is beyond me. Believing that this will only apply to services that don’t effect you is short sighted.
I unlurked and made a thread last night, but I think it might be hidden due to account age: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47511919
I have read the OSINT report from Reddit. The data it has is being interpreted as Meta orchestrating a global lobbying scheme.
However the data is equally if not more supportive of Meta simply taking advantage of global political sentiment to position itself better.
I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but the HN zeitgeist seems to be resistant to the idea that tech is the “bad guy” today.
I work in trust and safety, and have near front row seats to all the insanity playing out today.
There is no conspiracy the general public is faced with a crisis and they are desperate for a solution.
The teen suicide statistics do not lie.
Teen suicide rates in the US are lower now than they were in the 1990s.
This idea of teen suicide painting a clear picture about the impact of social media just isn't borne out by the data. And lastly, people ought to remember that teens have the lowest rate of suicide among any age cohort.
I'm sorry but if you don't think there's a conspiracy I have a bridge to sell you. It was already unveiled that Meta has lobbied billions towards promoting this legislative change
> This has been a problem for at least a decade.
I get you're point, but anyone that doesn't is asking "Which is it?"
I think everyone can see there is problems. Is there a crisis? I don't think so. Same problems we've always had, but on a computer.
People that know tech, know these laws cross a MAJOR line. Not a little slippery slope thing, this is off a cliff. But I don't think most people, that are already used to having to sign in with an online account on every device they use, even their TV, see it as that big a step. They don't even realize how predatory it is that they are required to sign in. What they need to see is that the sign in requirement was a choice by the vendor. These are LAWS, demanding no one ever be given the choice to not reveal personal information about themselves to use ANY computer. That's the point that needs to be driven home.
Its been decades of work to even get social media to court.
No one wants to talk about this or look at the issues when it’s not sexy.
$@&$$ - I’ve been at conferences and had safety teams cry on my shoulder about how THEY don’t get engineering resources if they ask for it.
Tech platforms suppress so much research and hold so much data hostage, that an entire research coalition based on independence from tech.
Zuck and tech as a whole pivoted to drop safety investments the moment this government came to power.
And this is for user in frikking America !
The shit that is going down in the rest of the world is a curse. The sheer amount of NCII that exists, with zero recourse for people whose lives are destroyed is insane.
I think the question to ask here is, if both Meta and the current administration don't care about child safety, why is the age verification stuff going so smoothly? Is helping them do this really the right move?
If all 50 states sue at the same rate, that'll be a 30% dent, and I'm sure states can sue for more than 0.6% too. That would be historic action against malfeasance and would send a strong FAFO single to all corporates.
Let's lobby for it.
But who gets the $375 million dollars? Anyone know the cut the law firm will get from this incredible amount of money?
If you know what the platform is capable of, if you seen how the sausage is made, you're probably not using it.
People are also a little naive in not seeing that these platforms aren't just bad for children, they are bad for adults as well. I'm not oppose to not "selling" them to children, but we also need to label correctly for adults and have rules like those for alcohol, tobakko and gambling, so no or limited advertising. Scrub the public spaces of Facebook logos.
I personally stopped using Facebook because it was annoying me with useless doom and aggressive comments of people on stupid topics. If it would have showed me only cat pictures (like Instagrams does) or reasonable stuff (news, etc.) I would have continued using it.
Lets admit it, in same vein trump is a symptom of current US society, the approach and effects of social networks we allow them to be is a result of how lazy and thus addicted people got. On top of many of the parents doing exactly the same, then don't expect miracles.
One thing that I don't understand - even here, some folks call that sociopathic amoral piece of shit 'zuck' and treat his empire like some sort of semi-charity. When I attacked facebook company in the past, there was always a lot of defense (look at this open sourced stuff, look at that... which I presume came from either direct employees or clueless stock holders). People are people, deeply flawed and often weak without willingness to admit it to themselves.
[a] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/peanu...
Their stated reason? Child safety.
Their actual reason? You can figure that out.
They don't care about child safety as long as it doesn't become so bad as to impact their revenue negatively. But they see that governments all over the world push for some kinds of age restrictions, and they know they are a prime target and it is hard for them to push back against that.
The reason they are (not so secretly) lobbying for requiring us to ID ourselves at the device level is that they don't want to be the gatekeepers. They want to make creating an account as effortless as possible and having to prove your age is a barrier that make turn off some people, including adults, and they may instead turn to services that don't require age verification. By moving the age verification in the OS, not only the responsibility shifts to the OS or hardware vendor, but it also removes the disadvantage they have against services that don't require age verification.
For a similar issue, PornHub is currently blocked in France, because they don't want to comply with the law related to age verification. Here is their argument: https://www.aylo.com/newsroom/aylo-suspends-access-to-pornhu...
If you read between the lines, you will see that they have the same stance: "put age verification at the OS level, so that people don't discriminate against us". They know they are not in a position to argue against "child safety" laws, so instead, they lobby for making it worse for everyone instead of just themselves.
[1]: I could be wrong thinking those are benign.
Cancer is a great metaphor because its a perversion of natural, healthy processes. So called social media is nearly that, but actually grotesquely unhealthy.
People are dramatically unwell when they are not social, but that unregulated process is also negative up to and including being lethal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog [2] https://whyy.org/segments/facebook-a-computing-pioneer-a-sec...
> But to be clear, there is no evidence DARPA or the U.S. intelligence services had any role in the creation of Facebook.
The DARPA lifelog project ended the day Facebook was announced by a college dropout no one had ever heard of before. Facebook just happened to have the exact same goals / features as the lifelog project. Must just be a giant coincidence huh?
Your own source says there is none.
I can guarantee you believe in a lot of things that you have no actual evidence of happening - just some perceived authority figure you trust for whatever reason, telling you it happened.
Also -
WHYY.org has received support through NewsMatch partner funds, which often includes contributions from large technology firms like Facebook (Meta) to support local journalism. These funds are generally used to match donations, helping stations like WHYY increase their financial sustainability and support public media.
What a surprise!
https://youtu.be/ZJ380SHZvYU
No it didn’t. That was just like the first free sample from the drug dealer. Give a “good” free service to rope them in, always with the next steps in mind.
I feel like the Myspace/Friendster and early Facebook were nowhere near as harmful (albeit for addiction, those sites were still vulnerable to grooming) as where we are today.
I call it _anti_social media.
The internet was not a calm and well behaved place before Facebook arrived. The original “Eternal September” was in the early 90s. Usenet, forums, Reddit, comment sections, and every other social part of the internet have been full of bad behavior long before Facebook came along.
That's the whole point: the word exists precisely as a testament to something that used to exist but now doesn't.
Anybody old enough to remember the word when it was common use should realize that it would have been impossible for the term to be coined in 2026.
If you missed that part of the Internet (maybe you were too young or maybe you were focused on other things, like the vast majority of people in the 90s), that's totally fine, but plenty of us did experience it and remember it pretty clearly.
> Usenet, forums, Reddit, comment sections, and every other social part of the internet have been full of bad behavior long before Facebook came along.
You can tell approximately how old someone is by whether they have reached the "everything sucks" part of life yet or not.
Source: I was a bad, bad, boi, on UseNet.
It gets continually worse. Agentic AI is another Eternal September. For example, we now have dimwits sending dozens of unsolicited and unreviewed slop PRs to open source projects. Every search result is an affiliate marketing listicle obviously written by a robot.
LLMs are now heralding the Eternal September of even software engineering, and now I am wondering where to hang up my Techpriest robes in search of more elite pastures.
I wonder if this is how the clergy felt once the vulgar were allowed to study scripture not in the original spiritual programming languages of Hebrew or Latin, but English.
I disagree. I'm of the Neopets/Pokemon forums generation. Elitism and selectivity were not what made that era a good balance between the caustic free-for-all we have now and the rich kid's playground from before. It was the technical and practical restrictions on what you could put in and get out of a web experience.
You couldn't upload thousands of thirst traps every month, because storage was limited. You couldn't summon another head of the dropshipping or affiliate marketing hydras with a few clicks, because the infrastructure didn't exist. You couldn't inundate users with dark patterns designed to extract every ounce of attention, data, and cash possible, because the rich web wasn't that rich yet.
You had to deal in text and reasonably-sized images on a CRT with a limited-bandwidth pipe feeding it all. Because of this, many of the techniques developed to transform so many other forms of media and so many other institutions into Capitalist hellscapes and high school, respectively, didn't work online. Until they did.
You meant the "vulgus". "Vulgar" has the same root, but a very different meaning.
This random thought is kinda disconnected from actual human history. "Not allowed to study Scripture" was not a thing: Illiteracy was. There were people that knew how to read and people who didn't, that's it.
I'm trying hard (and failing) to visualize your mental image.
"Dear Father: it looks like the Bible has been translated to English by my dear brothers up at the monastery. I'm sure you understand why I can no longer be a priest"
Remember that you're living in the actual earth timeline, not the 40k one.
-emacs user
FWIW, I like the analogy despite seeing a benefit to knowing the original languages to studying scripture.
Capital and tech improvement will beat anyone chasing that.
Anyways, is there a "just use vue" effort like there is with postgres :)
In the UK, you cannot use App Store and iPhone (your own phone) without verifying your identity:
https://x.com/WindsorDebs/status/2036727466597712008
and makes more sense, Apple and Google have your credit card , or if you are a parent that bought soem phone for you child then at first boot up as a parent should be your job to setup a child account.
Something I would be 100% OK with is some regulation that at first boot, you have to present information about what parental controls are available on the device and ask if you'd like them enabled.
I haven't set up a phone in a hot minute, I only do it once every few years, is this something they already do?
I'd imagine there's a lot of cases where a parent buys a new phone and hands down the old one to their kid without enabling safety features. I don't know if there's a good way to help with that - maybe something like, whenever you go to set a new password, prompt "hey is this for a kid?" and go through the safety features again?
Just spitballing, that last one may not be a good idea, not really sure.
They don't have mine.
Even if they did, having a credit card is not proof of age.
> if you are a parent that bought soem phone for you child then at first boot up as a parent should be your job to setup a child account
Setting up a "child account" shouldn't involve setting some age field. Setting up a "child account" should involve restricting permissions.
Why leave it to the OS or a company to decide what is "age appropriate"? Leave it to the parent to decide what the child should or should not have access to. Extra bonus: that same "child account" can then also be used for other restricted purposes. Want a guest account which limits activity? Want an incognito account? Want a sandbox account? None of these should require setting some age.
I am not paid by a trilion dollar company to decide if it should be a birthday input, or a dropdown where you select your political and religious conviction about what your child should see. Sony figured it out, if Apple pays me I will spend more time to write for them a UX flow so average people could sert the accpunts up and the rest could ask their priest, cousins or other person that can follow instructions to setup the account for them.
The giants shoudl have solved this decades ago and not wait for the fanatic religious to push for this as laws and get the goverments involved, now you will get 25 different laws about this.
Why else would they want to sneakily add facial recognition to smart glasses?! /s https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ray-ban-smart-glasses-f...
As more and more people essentially lock themselves in with these identitybrokers tho I imagine it has a very stifling effect on speech tho. Imagine getting banned from those.
The other one was the time I was speaking to my brother in law, who had just paved his driveway, he said "I could have used airport grade tar, but thought it was too much" and we were in front of his Nest security cam is the only thing I can think of, but the very next morning, I'm scrolling through Facebook, and sure enough, someone local is advertising airport grade tar. Why? I didn't google this, I only heard it from them.
There's some serious shenanigans going on with ad companies, and we just seem to handwave it around.
Coincidentally, I remember both experiences very very vividly, because this was the last time I used either platform in any meaningful capacity.
Option A: The Nest camera not only listened to the conversation and picked out "Airport Grade Tar" and decided it needed to show adverts about it to people, but the camera also identified you to the point it could isolate your FB account in order to serve you those adverts.
(I'm making some assumptions but...)
Option B: Your brother had done various searches for airport grade tar from his home (in order to know how expensive it was). You, whilst visiting his home, were on his Wifi and therefore shared the same external IP address, your phone did enough activity whilst at his house (FB app checked in to their servers in the background, or used Messenger, etc) to get the "thinking of buying airport grade tar" associated with his external IP address associated with your FB account that was temporarily on that IP.
I had a friend who was convinced that some device in his house was listening in on his conversations with his wife as he kept on getting adverts for things they'd been talking about buying the day before but he hadn't searched for. (But she was searching for it from their home wifi, which is why it appeared in his adverts afterwards.)
That is, BiL was marked as 'spreader for airport grade tar' based on recent activity, marked as having been in contact with spreadee, and then spreadee was marked as having received the spreading. P(conversion) high, so the ad is shown.
It's just contact tracing, it works well and is really easy even without literally watching what goes on in interactions.
This is unfalsifiable. Just say what you think it is explicitly.
If so, it is customarily permissible to use rhetoric and sarcasm to more strongly emphasize a point. Or, to leave the conclusion as an exercise for the reader.
There are many interesting ways that the conversation could have been carried forward but there is no way to continue the conservation as the OP doesn't make it clear what they think.
The only thing I can say is: No I cannot figure it out, please tell me what you're trying to say here.
On the contrary, looks like you can:
> (…) sell the user's data (…) use this information to train AI models (…) use this information to serve Ads
They are taking a position that cannot be argued against or even discussed because they don’t make that position clear.
So one of your suggestions of what the OP could mean was something you explicitly don’t think is true and would argue against? That sounds like a bad faith straw man set up.
Perhaps it’s just as well that the OP didn’t provide one specific reason to be nitpicked ad nauseam by an army of “well ackshually” missing the forest for the trees.
You could, as the HN guidelines suggest, argue in good faith and steel man. The distinction between “selling your data” and “profiting from your data” isn’t important for a high level discussion.
Can you truly not see through Meta’s intentions? There are entire published books, investigations, and whistleblowers to reference. Zuckerberg called people “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their data and has time and again proven to be a hypocrite who doesn’t care about anyone but himself.
What prevents you from saying "Yes, and Xyz!!" and another poster "Yup, and Pdq, and Foo too!"
Or, maybe OP is just being a bit lazy, but again, it seems the context is conversation, not formal scientific inquiry where everything must be falsifiable?
You’re conflating different things. The OS-level age setting proposals are not the same as scanning IDs and faces.
I’m anti age check legislation, too, but the misinformation is getting so bad that it’s starting to weaken the counter-arguments.
> Their stated reason? Child safety.
> Their actual reason? You can figure that out.
We’re commenting under an article about one $375M lawsuit over child safety and many more on the way. They are obviously being pressured for child safety by over zealous prosecutors. This is why they reversed course and removed end-to-end encryption from Instagram because it was brought up as a threat to child safety.
Also your “you can figure that out” implication doesn’t even make sense. The proposal to move age verification to the OS level would give Meta less information about the user, because the OS, not Meta apps, would be responsible for gating age content. I’m not agreeing with the proposal, but it’s easy to see that it would be more privacy-preserving than having to submit your ID to Meta.
I find it hard to believe that meta doesn't already have a pretty good age estimate for 95%+ of their users.
What offloading the responsibility to the app stores (or OS vendors) gives Meta is exactly that, offloading responsibility. In a future lawsuit, they can say that someone else provided them with incorrect information.
Currently, websites and apps are supposed to ensure they don't have kids under 13, or if they do - that they have the parents permission. That's federal law in the US.
These laws make the operating system or app store (depends on the particular law) responsible for being the age gate.
This doesn't stop the federal law from being enforced or anything, but the idea is apps/websites don't handle it directly, that's handled by the operating system or app store.
So now - companies like Meta can throw up their hands and say "hey, the operating system told us they were of age, not our fault." It also makes some things murkier. Now if Meta gets sued, can they bring Google/Apple/Microsoft in as some kind of co-defendent?
I think that murkiness is the point. They don't need to create the most bullet-proof set of regulations that 100% absolves them of all responsibility, they just need to create enough to save some money next time they get sued.
I can think of a ton of regulations we could create to better help protect kids. We could mandate that mobile phones, upon first setup, tell the user about parental controls that are available on the device and ask if they'd like to be enabled. Establish a baseline set of parental controls that need to be implemented and available by phone manufacturers, like an approval process that you need to go through to hit store shelves.
We could create educational programs. Remember being in school and having anti-drug shit come through the school? It could be like that but about social media (and also not like that because it wouldn't just be "social media is bad," hopefully).
Again all these laws do is take what should be Meta's burden, and make it everybody else's burden.
Now the easiest law change - that wouldn't required anyone to change anything - would be to revoke Section 230. This would make service providers liable. Everything else is a band-aid. I doubt that this verdict will survive appeal (due to Section 230). But if it does, then again there is no need for any new regulations. The tort lawyers will solve the problem for us.
If we do have device age verification, then it still doesn't shield Meta. The lawyers will sue everyone involved, and disclosure will show if Meta had data that will have shown that user should have been blocked.
The purpose of age verification is to avoid all this. Of course the current proposals suck and won't achieve this. The market will not accept an approach that would work - which would be for anything with a screen or speaker to be permanently tied to an individual user. "OS verification" cannot succeed - it must be one-time hardware attestation. Even a factory reset wouldn't remove the user assignment.
Are the kids alright?
Since the dawn of the Internet era, we've had a legal principle that platforms are relatively shielded from liability for what their users do.
It's the Internet. There's sexual content and sketchy characters on it. Occasionally people will encounter them -- even if they're under 18.
Anyone who grew up in the mid-1990s or later, think back to your own Internet usage when you were under 18. You probably found something NSFW or NSFL, dealt with it, and came out basically OK after applying your common sense. Maybe it was shocking and mildly traumatizing -- but having negative experience is how we grow. Part of growing up is honing one's sense of "that link is staying blue" or "I'm not comfortable with this, it's time to GTFO". And it seems a lot safer if you encounter the sketchy side of humanity from the other side of a screen. Think about how a young person's exposure to the underbelly of humanity might have gone in pre-Internet times: Get invited to a party, find out it's in the bad part of town and there are a bunch of sketchy people there -- well, you're exposed to all kinds of physical risks. You can't leave the party as easily as you can put your phone down.
I stopped logging onto Facebook regularly around 2009; I only log in a couple times a year. I hate what Facebook has become in the past decade and a half.
But giving a site with millions of users a multi-hundred-million-dollar fine because some of those users behave badly seems...asinine.
If your kid is old enough and responsible enough to be given unsupervised Internet access, you'd better teach them how to deal with the skeevy stuff they might encounter.
Letting companies sell addiction has pretty significant negative externalities. That’s why we regulate gambling and drugs. Facebook sells addiction, so it makes sense to regulate it like we do drugs and gambling.
...when they've made a good faith effort to address harms.
That's pretty cheap when it comes to deception.
The eyes of Texas should be upon this, which is 15X the size and should not settle for less than $1000 per person, where deceptive trade practice is much more serious than other places.
Now that would set a $30 billion example which may not be enough of a deterrent either.
But there are probably plenty of people for whom a $5000 one-time payment might not come close to being fair compensation for what's already happened, especially with Meta allowed to continue as an ongoing concern, that's got to be psychologically harmful.
To really fix it each state would have to follow "suit" while greatly upping the ante so there's at least hundreds of billions at stake.
Meta can afford it and who else is responsible for so much widespread sneaky deception at this scale for so long ?
If you want to punish Meta then you have to punish the wonder boy who runs it. Not even share holders can fight off the guy spending 80B on the metaverse.
One of the challenges we need to resolve is the race to the bottom for online communities - engagement metrics will always result in a PH level that supports more acerbic behavior.
There’s multiple analyses that you can find, if not your own experience, to believe that we should be able to do better with our information commons.
Just today, I found a paper that studied a corpus of Twitter discussions and found that bad-faith interactions constituted 68.3% of all replies (Twitter data).
The engineer and analyst side of us will always question these types of analyses.
I’ve read enough papers at this point for the methods to matter more than the conclusion.
1) meta, and the other tech platforms need to open up their research and data. NDAs and business incentives prevent us from having the boring technical conversations.
2) tech needs someone else to be the bogeyman - the way we did for tobacco. The profit incentive ensures profitable predatory features pass review. Expecting firms to ignore quarterly shareholder reviews for warm fuzzies is … setting ourselves up for failure.
Regulators (with teeth) need to be propped up so that the right amount of predictable friction (liability) is introduced.
3) tech firms need an opportunity or forum to come clean. The sheer gap between the practical reality of something like content moderation vs the ignorance of users and regulators - results in surprise and outrage when people find out how the sausage is made.
4) algorithm defaults decide the median experience for participants in our shred market place of ideas. The defaults need to be set in a manner that works for humans and society (whatever that might be).
Economies are systems to align incentives to achieve subjective goals.
Unfortunately, as we found out recently, Meta's lobbyists are a powerful force to contend with and I do not trust our governments to stand up to them.
Stopping misleading advertisments and mental health issues while claiming to be protecting children is not on the parents. The parents were given the false information to believe their kids would be safe.