Malaysia enforces ban on social media accounts for children younger than 16

>banning personalised feeds

This is just banning social media with one extra step, these apps are virtually useless without personalization and their economy relies on it. I'm all for banning these platforms, we're all hooked on them and we need a hard ban, I know it won't happen but it's the only way.

I am completely on the fence regarding these age bans. On one hand you are correct, but on the other hand consider that what’s lost is something most of us probably could live without. I am putting both social media and porn into that bucket.

The more I think about it the less and less difference I see between social media and porn.

I marketed on FB before ads, our first client at the social agency I worked at in 08 was nature made supplements. It was fun and interesting at the beginning, then ads rolled in and I got out of it. It turned into something like the neighborhood swimming pool where everyone was swimming in each other's... I could see it and feel it.

Since about 2012 or so I was dreaming of a simple law or something on the books that banned ads in algorithmic feeds. It would be a really easy way to stop us from getting where we are today. It certainly would have slowed down the walled gardens and shittification of the internet.

I deal with teenagers that are on this stuff now and it's a fight, constantly. They hate hearing me go on about it.

What do yall think of Snapchat b.c we just caved and let my daughter use it.

In our liberatarian paradise where everything is ads and poison because of the ruthless aim of maximizing profit, the biggest enemy is heavy regulation from to some other body that is not a for-profit entity, be it a moral and spiritual guidance of a church or lifestyle or a strong government apparatus that is true to it's aim to improve the lives of it's citizens.

This is the way! Age verification will expand, to include ban on VPN:s and eventually into total surveillance, and then we'll be slaves of the state, instead of to social media.

I'd much rathar have social media and not be a slave to the state.

Well, one example is the "are you a bot check". If you don't give out your age and let the provider verify that, you are banned from using the internet.

Thse are new "freedoms" we are going to enjoy in a little while.

personalised feeds are great when its actually doing what you (the user) want and not pushing paid ads or political agenda. the whole reason i dont use fediverse apps that much is they built up a culture of "respects your attention" with algorithms that are built to be non addictive. i just need that dopamine rush.

instead we should force these platforms to open source their algorithm and give users choice with a following only feed. or make bluesky/at protocol style federation mandatory to prevent vendor lock in. you decide.

I'm against all those things as well but placing a ban on them is the same mechanism as banning anything. People should have the freedom to do things we disagree with. I haven't used social media (other than HN if it counts as one) for almost 20 years. I think they're toxic and a waste of time. But that doesn't mean other people shouldn't be allowed to use them. If people want to watch brainrot all day its they're life and I have no say in that. This is so my own personal freedom is preserved.

Yes - Australian here. We started this, somehow.

I agree. I’d much rather if we simply banned personalised algorithmic feeds, for everyone. They’re the new smoking. They’re toxic to mental health and to society more broadly. They’re no good for adults or children - so no need for age checks for any of it.

YouTube and Facebook could still work. Just show the channels I’m subscribed to instead of whatever an AI thinks will drive me toward addiction. Even YouTube’s recommended “watch next” could survive. They’d just have to base the recommendations on what the viewer population as a whole enjoy instead of putting me personally in a bubble.

Personally I believe that our communities and mental health deteriorate through social media especially in a young age.

Although I am a firm believer of the above, I do not believe that Governments are doing it because they do care about our health. Quite the opposite. I believe they want to manipulate us as much as they can so they can keep in power.

Although they want that, they have seen that social media has the power on gathering people and creating protests, so I believe they want to cut it off on younger people that usually have way more anger and got much less to lose (nowadays that the light at the end of the tunnel is fading) than a middle-aged man being mind-controlled his whole life being a good abiding citizen.

Its a power tool, they are just swinging it where they want. Soonish in EU we'll have the same ban, but it won't be because EU politicians cares about children, it is so they can keep their power and not have a generation that has access to other sources than traditional media and structured schools grooming them on just obeing their masters.

I’ve given this a lot of thought as well and I’m also generally a little unsure, especially because the Internet was so positive for me in most other ways (it’s hard to overstate what battle.net communities did for my psychology and confidence as somebody who felt kind of alone) but I think what ultimately distinguishes the current harm of social media is that what we had back then was not nearly as sophisticated. Yes I’m sure they were getting some data from us, yes there was exploitation and problems, But the current infrastructure of the “attention economy” is absolutely insane and beyond destructive.

From a social perspective, it wasn’t really until Instagram blew up in popularity and we had to start learning not to take people’s feeds as representative of how great their lives were that this stuff started to creep up. IMO Facebook was a little more text driven and myspace was mostly just middle school drama that would’ve taken place IRL anyway.

The Anxious Generation is a recent book that extensively explains the damage caused by social media before age 16. The arguments in the book would support such a ban if it manages to get the majority of kids off social media, but it has to be a critical mass and not easily evadable

I'd be very careful about studies that show a result favourable to the current zeitgeist's moral panic:

"A recent study claimed to show that social media use was hurting kids' cognitive development.

But I had access to their data, so I was able to show that they were completely wrong."

https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/social-scientists-are-lazy

But you refer here solely to social media.

This is separate from mandating age verification onto everyone.

Personally I don't really care as to whether social media is banned or not, though I also don't think state actors should even be able to restrict us. However had, when it comes to age sniffing, I fail to see why I should yield my personal data, in order to access information on the www. This kind of defeats the purpose of www if a state can restrict us here (any state - not surprising in a dictatorship, but odd in a democracy).

The real subject is what it implies: identification of every Malaysian posting on social media to enforce this ban.

Control of speech through think of the children rhetoric.

Does take a rather different tone when you consider the FB whistleblower: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48353965

But I think the conversation people aren't having is the reverse of this: when is it time to ban people over, say, 65 from social media? They're often victims of scams and propaganda bot farms.

What do we do about adult radicalization on the Internet?

In many countries, targeted ads aren’t allowed for kids. By forcing age verification, companies in the targeted ads business (like Meta) can shift liability away from themselves and rely on forced identity verification done by someone else. It means they get to advertise a whole lot more, since they can blindly trust the verification instead of having to be on the side of caution and advertise less.

This is why they have lobbied many states in America for age verification laws, and are the alleged main funding source for the campaigns trying to make this about child safety when it’s about their profits. And the governments support it because it means they can identify people online and suppress speech. It’s literally the fascist notion of merging corporate power and authoritarian government power.

I'm about as cynical and open to conspiracy as anybody, but I strongly disagree on this one. Social media is a cancer on society as a whole, let alone children who are still trying to figure out who they are. It serves absolutely no positive purpose that couldn't be done at least as well through private chat groups and the like.

I will absolutely be barring my children from social media. I fully expect them to use it or similar sorts of stuff behind my back, but that's okay. It will then be hidden and scarce, which limits the overall negative consequences it can have. Being in a country where this is enforced at a national level is extremely appealing to me.

I mean none of the big social networks have any privacy anyways, they can exactly pinpoint who you are. I'm ok with this additional verification since no privacy is being lost really. No real politically endangered group is going to communicate via these networks anyways.

I like this. I'm just worried that it's going to make it way harder to create new independent small websites, if the webmasters have to check their users' age.

The list is pretty small, so I wonder if this just drives users to other, smaller platforms. That said, the list of platforms includes all the biggest offenders of engagement optimization, so it feels more like a ban of addictive social media than all social media in general. But it's also interesting they ban messaging apps, which I assume parents use to keep contact with their kids.

Social media is inherently mass surveillance, or at least that's the narrative the big companies themselves sell to those who want ad slots in order to justify the prices they charge.

> The social component was meant to be socialising with friends and like-minded individuals.

That still exists. I know people who mostly use just that part and don't like to doomscroll. I also personally connected to new people through socials and these friendships are pretty strong.

Social media today is just designed to induce a zombie state where you sit for hours scrolling short form video and adverts. If it was destroyed entirely society would be better off.

> Remember, Malaysia is an officially Islamic country, with Islamic laws.

Malaysia is a secular country with secular laws. Islam is its official religion, and has a Syariah court that only applies to Muslim with limited jurisdiction.

Big difference than what you are trying to paint. As they cannot "suppress speech and civil liberties" if the law reach is limited.

It might be a good business (like youtube for kids) but would it actually be good for kids? They should go outside with their friends, and people in the tech industry should stay away from them. Allegedly good intentions ("help you stay in touch with your friends") will eventually turn into what it always turns into.

Actually "completely disconnected"? That would be impossibly expensive.

Easier but still hard would be e.g. a child-mode[0] for consumer[1] operating systems that can only connect to a DNS resolver which itself only resolves certified-by-age-rating content. This would "only" be "extremely expensive": people complain about the cost of getting a film an age rating, and they're only 1-3 hours long and don't get near-continuous updates.

My guess, and it is a guess, is that content for children shouldn't be "the internet", but a small and specifically curated collection for each age range[2], essentially the back catalogue of all the things we've already made for kids, from Saturday morning cartoons to Scholastic books. Of course, this is still flawed, hence my parents' generation fretting over D&D, Harry Potter, and anything about sex education (and twice over if it was gay).

[0] or a multitude, corresponding to film content rating systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_picture_content_rating_...

[1] Despite having learned to read with the Commodore 64 user manual, I'd say that if you can get into a command-line OS today with all our easier distractions, then you shouldn't even get asked how old you are.

[2] Even single shows split content in this way, e.g. Sesame Street has different muppets be representative of different developmental stages of kids.