Monumentally naïve. Zero understanding of the way things work in reality.

Perhaps... but my guess is that repeatability wouldn't depend on the children but on the wants and needs of the governing politicians.

That is, the data would, in my view, likely be worthless for its purported goal, but can give some insight into some political shenanigans.

If it can’t, that’s a strong signal.

I disagree to an extent. Oregons drug decriminalization failed because of a few reasons that are plain to see:

- The people who wrote the measure did not prescribe how it should be done, just what it should achieve.

- The measure demanded changes be immediate, which didn't jive with a very slow running, heavy bureaucracy like Oregons government. More importantly, time was not given for the social services pipelines to fill with cash and plans.

- The law did not also ban public drug use, it depended on the legislature doing this - which they never did. This was the big tipping point. You don't forget the smell of meth or fent, especially outside your grocery store or kids school.

This was a master class in when head in the clouds thinking meets legislative elites who are outright insulted when the people flex their voice.

I do think we'll revisit this again in the future, but hopefully next time we at least ban public drug use.

This is a thing we can do and make work, plenty of other places have had success with it, we just keep doing things in the most Kafka-esque way possible.

Which places, and what do you call success?

The only place in the world that seems to have drugs handled properly is Singapore.

Legalization + proper harm reduction + strict enforcement on public (ab)use is ultimately the way. You get a triple win of tax income, freed up police resources and less pressure on the healthcare system.

If your idea only succeeds when the smartest people are running it, and they can’t make any mistakes, then it’s not actually a good idea.

Do you stop the car, take a look at everything, make changes, and then put the car back on the road? Do you pull into pit row, change the tires in

If the current situation isn't work, the worst thing to do is nothing. Paralysis by analysis can be deadly

Alas, language is not so flexible.

That he was defending people at all associated with the unite the right protest that went all neo Nazi is crazy. Why bother trying to point out that there were “good” and “fine” people protesting the statue when we all know what was going on at that event? It minimizes what happened, and reduces the blame on the literal Nazis marching and driving into crowds.

It wasn’t a “hoax”, but it was choice editing. But if you look at the spirit and context, it’s effectively what happened.

If they do something egregious, then people revolt.

Do you mean something egregious like the mass surveillance of the population, or the mass incarceration of citizens, or widespread theft via civil asset forfeiture, or executions by police, or human experimentation on Americans, or dropping bombs on citizens in US cities, or the military shooting protesting college kids, or lying about weapons of mass destruction to justify wars, or prisoners being tortured, or being subjected to virtual strip searches and groping at airports, or two thirds of the population living in "constitution free zones", or the authorization of the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens, or any of the other many many egregious actions that have already been and/or are still being carried out by our government?

My point is that the threat of revolt is extremely remote. For all of the abuses and the erosion of our rights and freedoms we've had just one attempt at violent insurrection in recent history. It involved about 2,000 rioters motivated by a conspiracy theory and it fell apart very quickly. The threat of a successful revolt is basically zero, and that's actually a good thing. A revolt is highly unlikely to solve the problems that we have. Unfortunately that also means that the threat of revolt is highly unlikely to act as any sort of deterrent that might prevent abuses of power by our government. We're far better off making use of whatever is left of our democracy than trying to re-enact the revolutionary war.

If we look at the quality of life for american citizens compared to other the quality of life of other nations right before revolution (famously french, russian, chinese), we are not close.

So maybe it's not a good idea to burn it down and start over just yet.

> The threat of a successful revolt is basically zero

That's what they all say. But the US lost the war in vietnam and afghanistan to natives with extremely low tech weapons.

We don't test if parachutes work by throwing people not wearing them out of planes, for one.

States can experiment with variability in their legislature, but there is a unified federal law that guarantees certain fundamental rights. Much of the south is currently trampling all over them.

We’re seriously comparing not having TikTok and Instagram for a few years to death?

In fact, none of the other rights matter when the state can control what you can, and can't do with your own body. It is the most fundamental of rights.

They are also doing a great job of trampling on the fourteenth amendment, with the occasional jabs at the first.

I think the experiment is more about the judiciary and about tribal politics. There's ample case law against something like this, so to me this seems unconstitutional, and I doubt it will stand. But DeSantis will win some more heart and minds of the folks who secretly do want big government protecting them from the boogieman.

Regardless of anyone's views about social media, the fact that the government wants 'papers please' for you to access a website should really scare everyone.

We've been doing that for R and X movies forever.

Those aren't enforced by the government. Movie ratings and the enforcement of them are entirely voluntary on the part of producers and theaters. Some films are released that are non-rated, and enforcement at the ticket booth/theater level has never been consistent or particularly effective. Enforcement by retail is basically non-existent (Nobody is stopping a 13 year old from buying an R rated movie at walmart), and it's the same with streaming services. Quite rightly, it's up to parents to police what media their kids watch.

I recall Howard Stern being fined $millions for indecency on radio.

Overturned by the SCOTUS because of all of that free speech. And CBS was fined, not Janet Jackson. And the Howard Stern content is a well-known free speech issue. And OP was responding to your comment about movies. None of these are movies, so I don't understand why you would bring up something like this. Public radio and TV broadcast are a different beast. Is your argument that private social media services are akin to public broadcasters? Let's see what the courts think.

Those supporters aren't very secret about it. In fact, they are quite open about it.

I think it’s excellent the government is taking a stand to protect kids when it’s obvious most parents are unable to. Kids have no business in the discourse.

The alternative could be to have every piece of legislation go to popular vote rather than elected officials. I feel this could be wrought with problems though as the public could get vote fatigue and weird laws would slip through simply through low turnout or "social media fueled" outliers for extreme turnout on specific bills.

It is an unconstitutional law; it is following the path of similar unconstitutional laws¹²³. Where is the experiment?

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchan...

²https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reno_v._American_Civil_Liberti... (sections about minor access to indecent material struck down)

³https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/ohio/oh...

- social media being optimized for addiction

- social media potentially compromising minors’ physical safety

- social media use having documented adverse mental health outcomes for minors

- the fact that social media use requires an ongoing contractual relationship between the company and the minor

I could see these factors tipping the balance on the “compelling government interest” question, though I see less of an argument for “narrow tailoring”.

I think that the rest of the points you brought up are cultural problems and therefore not in the purview of legality

The features I listed all relate to “protecting the children” in some way, which is why I thought they could be the basis for courts to distinguish previous case law regarding the first part of the test.

Almost right. Strict scrutiny has a third factor [1]: Does the law use the available method which is least restrictive of speech?

An alternative method to banning young children on social media could be to apply the caretaker-consent-or-ban condition on social media only for students on the physical premises of public schools while having the public schools teach students the pros and cons of social media (hopefully noting that social media is more helpful than harmful for most teenagers [2]). Enforcement would fall on parents and public school teachers. That's less restrictive of minors' speech rights because the ban doesn't apply everywhere, and also less chilling of social media sites' speech rights because having to collect more of users' personal information for age verification is burdensome. Not saying that my example method is a good one, just more likely to pass strict scrutiny.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_scrutiny#Applicability

[2] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/18/yet-another-massive-stud...

I can't think of a single argument that fits with trusting a parent's choice for a 14 year old that doesn't trust it for a 13 year old, that also ignore's that parent's choice for a 16 year old.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK594763/#:~:text=Social...

Given it's Florida and the political leanings of it's governor, I would argue the law is more in line with CCP/Communist values: attempt to disrupt the communication networks of a demographic that is highly against you.

The reason this matters is that the precedential effect of a prior opinion such as Brown depends on how similar the underlying facts are to the present dispute. If a court wants to go in a different direction, it will usually prefer not to overturn the previous opinion, but rather to say that it doesn't apply here because the facts are different.

Only the nerds did that and it was in a computer lab. And they knew enough about keeping up appearances to hit Alt-Tab when an adult was getting close.

It’s not like we don’t have other laws that restrict what we can do or where we can do it.

In order to deny minors access to potentially harmful speech, the CDA effectively suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another. That burden on adult speech is unacceptable if less restrictive alternatives would be at least as effective in achieving the legitimate purpose that the statute was enacted to serve.

That's just me grabbing a snippet from Wikipedia, but it seems like a different issue than the impact of social media and whether it should be allowed by minors w/o parental consent.

But of course the elephant in the room is that the makeup of the Court has changed in a markedly more conservative direction and has proven itself not averse to revisiting previously settled law.

Really ?

I mean the entire point of the nanny state argument is to not act as a nanny toward ADULT citizen. Minor should still be protected, especially under 16

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/05/25/dear-school/

To save someone else a click

Then he said that they were going to get all the other kids in the school off the social media site, and asked again what the student would want to be paid to be off the site. The answer was that students would actually pay to be in that situation.

For some kids at least, this is a coordination problem, where they'd all rather not be on social media, but assuming others are, they want to be there. I could be getting the details/dollar values wrong, and I don't know that this bill is the right way to address the issue.

But it's pretty clear that social media is something that many teens wish they could avoid, but currently feel they can't. That doesn't mean we need to Do Something™, but it does mean that we're not currently in the optimal situation.

Edit: found the experiment. Haidt wrote about it, but it was done by University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-...

My solution was to not care if I was missing out. Counterintuitively, it's not until you do that that you're free to find the life you want for yourself. Good luck explaining that to a 16 year old though, they're not there yet, they're not building the life they want, they're finding their tribe, and you have to be connected to do that.

Disconnecting as an adult is much easier/worthwhile because you now have other means of signalling.

From about 13 on we were trusted to just leave the house and go wherever we wanted on our bikes, little to no questions asked. City, rural, suburbs this was a pretty universal experience. One kid in the group might of had a early cell phone and that gave our parents more than enough peace of mind, but no location tracking and it would lose service enough that you didn't have to answer if you didn't want to.

You could meet dates at the mall without mom hassling you about them, you'd often work a part time job rather than playing soccer or similar so you'd have your own money. We were free. You guys grew up in a prison comparatively but since you haven't seen anything else it seems normal. It's also why you guys are less independent, you never had a chance to be.

(E.T. or another period film might be good to watch to understand the independence and agency kids had in this time)

I am in a bit of a weird situation because I’m more independent than most (somewhat absent / workaholic family) but I know that’s the exception.

We had our own cash money. Parents wouldn't know specifics or "help you with budgeting". You earned it mowing lawns it was yours to spend. Getting a allowance on a credit card (in case he buys drugs!) isn't the same.

One last thing. Every night around 9 o'clock, the TV would ask parents all around the country "It's 9PM, do you know where your children are?" beacuse sometimes they would legitimately forget and not notice they haven't come home yet.

Then you come here and write out a post explaining how the kids of today are living in a relative prison and back in the day you got all this freedom to go on dates at the mall that your parents wouldn’t approve of.

Your parents would have banned you from going to the mall if they knew what you were doing - and you’re also an out of touch boomer - and that’s not a comment about your age, but about your mentality.

Boomers trying to mass enforce parental controls via legislation is so bad for freedoms I don’t know where to begin. I wish I could do more than simply “be rude”. There is still not a way to punch someone through a computer screen, unfortunately.

I already didn’t want a Facebook account just to see a businesses specials, now I’ll need to present ID too?

Certainly interested to see how all this plays out.

It also has conditions for which sites are affected by this law. The site has to have doomscroll and already be popular with kids. Google Maps isn't what they're targeting.

Honestly, mixed feelings. I'm in no rush to show Zuck my passport but the flagrant grooming comments on every kid's TikTok account is enough to show there's a significant problem, even if this isn't the right answer.

I agree, but I think your problem isn't Zuck, it's with passports.

Government issued licences aren't fit for purpose any more. They were when all you did with your paper drivers licence is show it to the police, but now they've become a form of ID you show man+dog who gets to scrape a whole pile of into from it that can be used to track you. For example, they can follow your passport number or drivers licence to connect a series of what should look like unrelated transactions.

As an example, now when a car rental company wants to know you have a valid licence they demand a copy of it. If you have an accident they use the copy to prove they verified you are licenced to drive, if you do something illegal they can hand over your ID so the police can chase you down. FIDO / WebAuthn / PassKey shows how those things can be achieved without leaking all the information on the licence. It can hand over a one time token saying you have a valid licence and signed by something that chains back to a public key held by the government. The token reveals nothing more than that to the car hire firm, but should they hand it over to the police they can decrypt it to identify you.

These tokens are useless if stolen. They can't link you to other transactions and don't identify you in any way, and yet are far more secure than a bunch of unsigned pixels. In other words unlike a copy of a passport, mostly harmless.

I can't help but feel your argument is with data protection [and the broad lack of it in the US] rather than government-held databases.

I have a couple of online government authentication methods. There could easily be an AVS API where a website kicks me off to to my government, and they sign a request for age verification, all with very little cost and fuss. That obviously causes uproar from people who think my government doesn't suspect I touch myself when they're not looking.

And a suggestion I've made in a couple of other sibling threads is having an AI watch you reading a script in realtime. I had to do this for a mortgage application a few years ago. Probably cheaper than a government API, and a high success rate on 25yo+ similar to facial-only checking in bars.

It goes deeper than that. Recently in Australia we've had two data breaches, one from a Telco [0] and another from a credit card company [1]. Both were required to collect ID by law, so they gave you a portal to upload photos of drivers licences, government medical insurance cards, credit card and so on. In both cases they leaked the lot.

To say they were unpopular was an understatement. Perhaps 10% of Australia had to get new drivers licences. The were hauled up to front senate committees, CEO's fell on the sword. A lot of political theatre in other words, but while this "take a copy of a government licence as a form of ID" madness continues it will keep happening.

In other news, social hacks against the government electronic ID for their website were used to collect around 1/2 a billion in fraudulent payouts (tax refunds and the like) [2]. And a few years ago the tax office was done for $2B or so for ID fraud waged against our VAT collection. [3] That one was perpetrated by thousands; the instructions went viral on TikTok.

We live in a digital world now, where it's easy to take a copy of any bag of bits. Relying on ID's that don't mutually authenticate and vigorously protect the information they do hand out is downright dangerous.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Optus_data_breach

[1] https://asic.gov.au/about-asic/news-centre/news-items/guidan...

[2] https://theconversation.com/the-500-million-ato-fraud-highli...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/feb/13/ato-s...

That's a critical flaw to those in power.

Regardless, I won't bemoan the demise of either business. We need something simpler to drive traffic.

It's more that having a website never became a thing for many businesses in the first place. 30 years ago they might have had a listing in the phone book. Nowadays that kind of business might have a facebook page, or more recently an instagram account. Creating a website (even with something like wix) requires a level of skill and effort above that.

I’ve seen a lot who are still paying for a site but rarely bother to update it. All the traffic’s on Facebook.

If you don't like it, that's your problem, not theirs. You're part of a small enough group they don't care about. I'm not sure how that's an age question in the first place, though. The "being run by millenials" throwaway by GP is just... well, at best, sloppy thinking.

There are GenZ businesses websiting, there are boomers insta-ing. You pick the tool for your niche.

All the information is already on google maps and IG/Facebook.

They have 2-3 billion people in their target audience.

And the point isn't if Wix is hard or not. It's that they answered the question "where do we need to advertise" for themselves, and just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's wrong.

Facebook is more generous.

I think the barrier to entry with creating a new account on each site right now is low when no ID is required - so social media sites lock everything down.

With the new friction of requiring ID, it could be harder to get users to create accounts so locking down everything won't make sense from a viewership access perspective.

edit: https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/tech/twitter-public-access-re...

> People without a Twitter account or who weren’t logged in used to be able to scroll the platform’s homepage and view public accounts and tweets. But as of this week, when such a user opens the platform they are met with a screen prompting them to sign up or sign in to Twitter.

from 2021: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/pa6dra/twitter... and from 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30615371

How do teenagers find and discover businesses when they are locked behind a sign up wall for social media?

Why is this even a problem?

Oh no, businesses can’t target advertising directly at children?

This is about businesses using Facebook as their main website. Where do ads come in?

Are teenagers not real people or something? They don't buy things or shop?

That's like saying you go to Pornhub to buy Manscaped Hair Trimmers. You don't. They _advertise_ on PH, but that's not where you buy them at.

Why is everyone replying to me about ads? Who said anything about ads?

so...everyone - that Facebook or whatever considers to be in Florida - has to provide ID to post, then?

Registration and access maintained at the county level or smaller so that community standards and relationships shape adoption and use.

Low age cutoff with actual adults trying to connect put in jail and on a list.

There have been cases where the cops arrested someone for criticizing them on Facebook

https://theconversation.com/mocking-the-police-got-an-ohio-m...

The cops also raided a newspaper for criticizing them

https://kansasreflector.com/2023/08/12/in-marion-county-news...

We have to be free to criticize the government anonymously

For reference: https://flsenate.gov/session/bill/2024/3/billtext/er/pdf

The Texas porn law similarly required no records be retained, with pretty steep penalties ($10k per record) for noncompliance.

Do you have another method to prove age? One that doesn't require ID, and can be implemented as of today?

Emphasis mine. It's that that which I'm disputing.

This law does not require you to have an account to go onto a website. It is a law that requires you are age-checked to hold an account on social media platforms. These are different things.

Holding an account —broadly speaking— allows you to post, like, comment, follow and be profiled in an enduring fashion. Some of these can have life-long implications that 12 year olds aren't equipped to evaluate. How many adults can identify unhealthy social media usage and do something to stop it?

I don't know how age verification will work in practice. Checking a government ID is one way but if you're handing that off to a third party service, it's expensive. They don't need to know who you are for certain. A similar check is when you buy alcohol. If you look young, you're asked for ID.

When I buy alcohol, I'm not because I look like a man with kids nearing his forties. It would be far cheaper for Facebook to have an AI watch a video of you speaking to camera, with ID as a fallback. Many social media platforms are ingesting gigabytes of our faces every day so. They probably already know the rough ages of their users.

But going on a website (eg Youtube) doesn't require you have a profile. Going on Facebook business pages doesn't require it. If anything, laws like this might mean that things like Instagram have to be more open to preserve their reach. Not a bad outcome, IMO.

And is AI the new blockchain that will magically solve every problem? And most children over 14 don’t have government IDs either.

If you don’t want your kids to be on Facebook, use parental controls. It’s the parents responsibility.

I live in Florida for context. The same government officials talk out of the left side of their mouths about “parental choice” and now this law says children can’t be on social media even with parental consent.

You don't know how much their child is being affected by platforms that have been designed to be addictive, that go out of their way to spur conflict and argument (sorry, "engagement"), and that have so few parental controls that it's near impossible for a parent to actually vet what's going on, who's interacting with them.

You're not even allowed to give your kids alcohol. There's clearly some precedence for protecting kids from their parents' inability to make informed choices.

And ML models for detecting age have existed for a long time. It's not magic unicorn dust. It's just one way to avoid this ID stuff that everybody is upset about.

Bars do it by having you show an id.

Online pot dispensaries do it by having you upload an id.

Texas expects porn sites to do it by having you upload an id.

How does Florida expect a site to do it?

This is a legitimate question that I want the answer to. Presumably "check this box" isn't going to cut it. So if it's not the most common way to enforce an actual legal restriction, then what is it?

Parental control software picks up on that. [1]

Social media could do the same thing: make a social media adults-only meta tag for parental control software to use.

For the parents that care, and use parental control software, the ID laws won't stop their kids running into porn. The porn their kids are going to encounter is going to be on non-porn sites like twitter or reddit (or small sites that don't care about these laws anyway).

Maybe we needed a bigger push for more awareness or better parental control software but the ID law push is weird and unamerican to me.

[1] https://www.rtalabel.org/

That's client side. This law specifically makes this a server-side issue; the service cannot let a minor make an account.

How do you do that without ID?

I'm a parent I have parent controls setup on my child's devices but it's very hard to dial it in properly and cover all the bases. It should be far more straight forward to manage than it is now.

I'm obviously pretty tech savvy and I would say 99% of parents are not going to get this right.

I do disagree that a technical solution could have avoided laws like Texas. It’s not about “protecting the children”. It’s never about the children. It’s just censorship. It’s just easier to go after a porn site than it is a library.

Microsoft's parental controls are sort of ok. I also have separate control software for Windows and I have controls at the router. Of course, none of things can talk to each other to create a coordinated plan (say giving X number of screen time hours per day).

Besides the easiest way to know what you kid is doing online is to watch them -- much easier to do if I control when they use it.

Get informed.

I'm not asked for ID when I order a drink. The bartender takes a look at my ugly mug and makes the call: I'm [painfully] clearly over 25.

Facebook has more than enough processing power to have an AI watch you reading a script straight to camera for 30 seconds to work out a rough age. If you're within 5 years of their idea of 18, surrender that ID, the same way you would if you were in a bar. Don't want to? Don't maintain a social media account. Don't have that drink.

The alternative is setting up a government-maintained 0Auth-style hand-off. They know who you are. The social media site could open a verification ticket, you authenticate with your government and they sign your ticket without the social media site getting any of your details. The trade-off with that is cost and your government now knows you're on TikTok. For some people that last one matters.

If you paired these laws with strong PII protection (see GDPR) to stop social media sites storing this stuff indefinitely, using your data against you, it might be an easier sell.

You have a bit more faith in a technical solution working at scale than I do, but I have to point out, that after repeatedly claiming that no one wanted an ID scan, your proposal involves an ID scan.

I also have to point out, that PII and GDPR protections are meaningless here. Under a government mandated censorship regime, the threat is the government, not some data broker somewhere.

They have innumerable GPU cycles they could redirect to a ML solution, and more importantly this is something that ML and facial recognition systems have been doing in prosumer-grade hardware for well over a decade. If I could set something up to do this in an afternoon, I believe Facebook probably could too.

My proposal only involves ID if you look young enough that the AI isn't certain or you don't want to upload a video. It's cutting out ID checks for 99% over 25yo.

But I do see this more about child safety than a censorship regime. Social networks are poison, even to adults. They're designed to trap us there, keep up "engaging" and not wander off to another platform. Our ability to make an informed choice about whether our kids are being damaged by them (and the people on them - who we have no control over) is seriously diminished. I've seen the stuff my daughters' 8yo friend uploads and the comments would change your mind. Yes, I'm biased, but I don't think that makes me (or this) wrong.

And I should have to do that as a 50 year old guy with grown kids for “the children”?

How about if parents are concerned about their kids, they should use the parental controls that are already available.

And this isn’t theoretical for me. I live in Florida.

The bill summary on the Florida senate webpage says:

> Such commercial entities must verify, using either an anonymous or standard age verification method, that the age of a person attempting to access the material harmful to minors satisfies the bill’s age requirements.

It sounds to me like “anonymous age verification method” could just mean that the website asks how old you are? What constitutes verification here? That sentence makes it sound like they can choose to use whatever feeble method they want.

At face value this law seems like political points being scored by passing a widely popular law that changes very little in practice (bumping the minimum age from 13 to 14).

That doesn't sound very anonymous to me

I think the point is that the internet and particularly social media is now the de-facto town square. States are basically requiring identification to speak or criticize government in the town square. If you take a step back and look at it that way, it's grossly anti-American.

Imagine back in the day, if you had any type of meeting/gathering to discuss anything that might be related to politics, and the police were there to collect everyone's Id. AA meetings, computer meetups, hobby gathering, HOA meetings, etc. This is essentially that, except on a computer. Just think of the children!

Also no one lives or eats or breathes on Twitter so the notion that they are exercising an online platform the same way they would exercise the park on Main Street does not follow.

Not to mention the fact that the entire point of the town square is that it is a place for discussion of the function of the polis with the citizenry of the polis. Online social media is a place to consume garbage from foreign actors and influencers.