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"with nine out of 10 parents saying they are in favour of a ban in response to a government consultation"
I wonder why those 90% of parents don't cut their children off from social media right now.
They have the power to do it.
I suspect they don't really; once you give a teen a smartphone your control over what websites they visit ends.
(you will reply "don't do that then")
But also: cutting one kid off from social networks ostracises them. The parents recognize it's a collective action problem.
Network effects from the other side:
If one parent forbids their child then their child becomes a pariah. If no child is able to access social media then they will all interact without it. So yeah, a parent needs their peer's children to also not use social media so that their child is not left out.
In general I'm against age based bans. I think there are alternatives where we would identify and just generally regulate the harmful features of social media. In the meanwhile, I feel empathetic towards the difficulties of parenting in this era.
Yeah, this I will seriously never understand. When I was a kid, if my mother didn't want me doing something then she would make sure I couldn't do it. Is nobody parenting their children anymore? Do they just let them do whatever they want these days? I've got a 2 year old of my own and can't imagine just handing him an iPad and ignoring him all day like I see other parents do. I can't tell if it's laziness, or ignorance, or some combination of the two.
There are more angles on this, not exactly easy. The easiest way to make a kid to do something, is to forbid that very thing.
If you are the one cutting it off, while your kid's whole school is very much up to date with latest brainrot content, then you still lose.
Your kid is the outcast, while it will be exposed to it anyway, through peers. Meanwhile you are the bad one, making it much harder to have an actual conversation on the topic.
I am vividly interested in this, as my kid is growing up. I hear how a bit older kids play and what they talk about on the playground and feel that I have very little time left to react (kid is still just now starting to show interest in phones and such). A ban on all social media for kids would make this so much easier.
> They have the power to do it.
Do they? It seems like schools are pushing tech and "ed-tech" in schools pretty hard while being typically incompetent at actually controlling how students use it[1].
Some choice exerpts:
> Lisa Sunbury is a professor of early childhood education in Santa Cruz, California, and she had a child at Mission Hill Middle School. Her 7th grade daughter has a set of serious issues that require an IEP. Lisa did her part at home, enforcing the low-screen policy. One element of this plan was supposed to be minimal access to school devices and a clear requirement that the device be inaccessible outside of certain classes. This was all on doctor’s orders.
> Yet, Sunbury would regularly find her daughter awake at 3am, playing video games on the school Chromebook that she wasn’t supposed to have. She discovered a prohibited TikTok account, made on the school device, with dance videos posted from gym class using that same device.
> Beverly Hyde, a parent in Concord, North Carolina, was explicitly told that if her son wasn’t going to use his Chromebook, “he will just sit alone and spend the day doing nothing.”
> And this was no empty threat. Linda in Texas discovered that while her doctor-ordered opt-out request for her 2nd grader was technically being honored, the school wasn’t providing any alternative instruction. They were just “having her sit and draw while the other kids were online.”
[1] https://www.persuasion.community/p/inside-the-anti-tech-rebe...
That's like arguing against bans on alcohol and cigarette sales to minors because parents "have the power" to ban it for their kids themselves. There is a role for the state to help parents socialize their children properly.
That does not mean that these parents understand the technical aspects of it.
e.g. How effective it will be: less than they might think, software is not infallible magic
What the side effects might be - more than they might think - excluding the underage means verifying the age of everyone.
So articles like this aim to raise awareness, all of this is clearly spelled out in the article.
Most parents probably don't think, and just say an automatic yes when it comes to governmental restrictions. I am not sure why that is so - they are probably happy with their assumptions about how the world works, so they are fine with governments being restrictive in general.
This statistic comes from here -- https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/parental-support-... -- a preliminary analysis of the consultation. The headline statement is:
"Of the parents and carers of children aged 21 and under who responded to Question 12 on the full-length version of the consultation, 89% supported “a legal requirement for social media services to have a minimum age of access”."
Caveats and limitations
Users should note the following when interpreting these results:
Self-selecting sample
The consultation was open to anyone who chose to respond. The results reflect the views of parents and carers who were motivated to take part, and are not representative of parents and carers nationally. As with any open public consultation, respondents may differ systematically from the wider population in their views and characteristics.
Question routing
These questions were only presented to respondents who wanted to respond to Chapter 2: Interventions for safer, more positive experiences. All questions in this section were optional. Finally, Question 13 was only presented to respondents who answered “Yes” to Question 12 (i.e. those who supported a legal requirement for a minimum age of access in principle). The 96% figure therefore relates to the level of agreement with a minimum age of at least 16 among those parents and carers who opted to respond to this Chapter and already supported some form of minimum age requirement. It does not represent the views of all consultation respondents, nor all parents and carers who responded.
Full consultation only
The figures relate only to the full-length version of the consultation, not the streamlined parents’ and children’s consultations. These figures should be treated as provisional. A comprehensive analysis of all consultation responses will be published separately.consultation, respondents may differ systematically from the wider population in their views and characteristic
The representative study isn't published yet. The provisional headline 90% number is.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/educatio...
denying smartphone basically makes your kid an outcast, which might be fine for some kids, not fine for others, but ignoring that, the school basically requires smartphones, even uses apps to open the lockers, or to communicate about group projects.
apple's parental controls are total joke, per app blocks are not good at all, what you want is content type blocks, which of course is impossible.
example: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254480754?sortBy=rank
You fail to understand just how good kids are at getting around restrictions. This despite having been a kid yourself who would have found ways around it.
Often we don't really have the power we want either. It is easy to say ban everything. However realistically that isn't the correct answer, too much school work really is on devices - often provided by the school so I can't lock them (except for the limited controls the school gives to us - if the correct app works on our devices that then we are expected to have). Every week some new hole in their block app gets spread around school - until the school figures it out and blocks it all the kids have it.
The only think unique about the above is devices. I guarantee if you go back 3000 years in history you will find parents complaining about their kids in similar ways.
Are you a parent?
Has been discussed here again and again.
Apparently parenting "its too hard", you "dont know how hard it is", and the alternative of "not having kids" is somehow impractical.
I believe we could solve a lot of these problems by making it illegal to advertise to minors.
I'm reminded of the settlement with Facebook where it was illegally allowing racial targeting in ads for housing, which is illegal [1]. If platforms were suddenly liable for allowing or failing to stop the targeting of minors, they'd suddenly have a lot of incentive to figure this out.
The beauty of this is that they already do it. Your profile with FB, Google, etc has a lot of implied demographic information based on your activity because they want to sell audiences with certain demographics.
As an aside, whenever I see "think tank" my first question is "who is funding this?" and I learned something I didn't know previously. In the UK, these bodies often aren't legal charities. Instead they are non-profit companies limited by guarantee [2]. One consequence of that is that they don't have to reveal their funding like a 501(c)(3) would (and, yes, US think tanks are generally 501(c)(3)s).
I didn't see any obvious red flags in the trustees for Foundation for Information Policy Research for what it's worth and it's an almost 30 year old organization.
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
This is by far the best solution and should be the top comment.
Why is the onus on the parents to chase after their kids - screen time is awful and kids get around it.
The social media and porn sites should be penalized and the onus should be on them. Just like when we were kids, the channel couldn't show certain content like nudity and cursing or they'd be fined.
How is it suddenly the obligation of the parent to supervise a million options with horrible interfaces.
How would you know if someone was a minor? Facebook knows even if you don't tell them, but I don't.
Would it be combined with the California-style OS age header?
You're right to be concerned about thinktank-washing, but FIPR themselves are fine: one of the academic:policy bridge groups rather than an astroturfing organisation funneling dark money.
I don't always agree with their stuff, but they're good faith actors.
Unless you make age verification and age assurance illegal with massive fines that are larger than your proposed fines, that is a terrible idea.
https://fipr.org/20260526-GrowingUpInTheOnlineWorld.pdf Actual response, instead of an article reporting on an article reporting on a response.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Information_Pol... Context of FIPR
People are worried about tech companies collecting data on minors, so they ban tech companies from collecting data on minors. Tech companies rally behind "Age Verification" laws so they can collect data on minors again under the guise of protecting minors. The people who don't understand why that's a bad thing count it as a win and we're right back where we started.
We're not right back where we started, we're in far far worse place where all online activity of every single person is de-anonymized (associated with their full legal ID). Tech companies are salivating at the thought.
Yes. It's astounding how stupid average voter is.
If you make law-abiding sites like Pornhub hard to access, consumers will move to black markets like the Dark Web, which hosts illegal content.
As the article mentions, kids are able to bypass the age verification with ease, so it doesn't even fulfil its stated purpose. We didn't even need age verification, because parental controls have been an option the entire time.
It's not about the children, never was.
The goal is to use one ID system for everything.
I sound like Alex Jones, but we already have a system for bank login, and other trusted identity login. They want to use this for everything.
I think it's rather that they want to de-anonymize internet users by linking all activity to one or more identifiers.
An IP address only links you to a physical address, at best. Account requirements with identity verification link the user's real-world identity via government ID, credit card, or face photo.
Obviously? I'm shocked that lawmakers are so okay with giving up their sons' and daughters' personal information.
The nice solution would be <adult age="18"> content </adult> tags, standardized by w3c.
Bad parenting wins again while everyone else suffers.
If you wanted to actually empower parents in helping their kids, you'd make sites emit some form of standard as TXT, SRV, /.well-known, whatever end points
Then you'd make sure that the owner of the device has the ability to enable this, factoring in some tags for the category
us-min-age:21:drinking gb-min-age:18:drinking au-min-age:16:socialmedia us-min-age:13:socialmedia
Then I can use my existing parental controls (including on a linux laptop if I don't give my 13 year old root) to apply or not apply rules
If I don't want social media regardless, then I apply a rule "no scoial media". Or I can apply "1 hour max" per day for the category
If I'm happy with my 16 year old spending half an hour on playboy.com or whatever, then that's fine too -- I'd rather they went somewhere like that then some of the shadier sites
This gives no power to large companies, but helps the parents, who can apply "default" profiles -- hell you can distribute default profiles as part of the onboarding process.
Disclaimer: not a parent, as will soon become apparent.
Several people have made the argument that individual parents can't simply cut their children off from social media, as said offspring may be ostracised (or simply look at their friends' phones, assuming they still have any).
That argument makes sense to me, to an extent.
What I don't quite understand is the conclusion that this leaves parents with only two (equally unpalatable) options.
Parents don't have to act individually. They could act as a collective, especially within the context of a small social group.
Is that really such a naive suggestion?
Age verification is identity verification. It puts everyone at risk.
Here’s a crazy idea. Parents should parent.
I was over for dinner with a family and their 13yr old daughter was complaining about being “grounded forever” because she snuck access to an iPad and signed up for instagram. Instagram is cancer, but. I still don’t think age verification (at the service and government level) is the answer.
"Think of the children!" - Say the 40-year-old millennials who were exposed to the Wild West of internet content as children and are still fine.
"We can't censor the internet on their devices!" - There's a $2.5B market in parental censorship software. You can censor their devices.
"Our child will become a pariah without the internet!" - In what way, exactly? They still go to school, still play sports, still go to chess club/band/theater/etc, still ride bikes around the neighborhood, still hang out at friends' houses, etc. All the kids will not hate them because their parents refused to give them a smartphone. (How do I know? I know a kid who grew up without one. Has plenty of friends.)
"But they need to be able to contact us!" - Dumbphones work fine. Teach them how to text and make calls. I guarantee they will use them.
Parents are lazy and want us to do parenting for them, not really a newsflash. But none of that is the point. "Age Verification" laws are stupid because 1) the kids will get around the verification, 2) plenty of the internet does not abide by the law, 3) it is government mass-surveillance in a "think of the children" disguise, 4) it makes privacy (surfing the web without a Government-issued ID) illegal, 5) if it's taken seriously, the only way to actually enforce it is a Great Firewall of America.
These laws are the gravest threat to personal liberty in the history of mankind. It cannot be understated how pervasive it is. At no other time in history has it been possible to not only track one's movements 24/7, but also the content of everything they read, everyone they talk to, etc, even in the privacy of their home. These laws don't work without that.
They are right, but this is the end goal anyway - age sniffing is all about spying on people. Children are the excuse. Usually it is either children or terrorists; these are the buzzword bingo memes used by lobbyists.
If websites can block or restrict underage users based on data they receive, bad actor websites can target underage users specifically.
To say nothing of the fact kids will obviously bypass it as well.
Why do we need age verification tech in the first place? We also don‘t have speed verification tech on the streets, but we have speed limits everywhere.
> system akin to film classification age ratings
I am pretty sure that most parents let their kids watch movies that are rated for a higher age group then their current age.
For example a lot of marvel movies, harry potter or pirates of the caribbean are usually in this category.
My conclusion the parents are not lazy they care to be breaking the age restriction. A lot of parents even go out of their way or get aggressive to make sure they can age rated movies to their kids as they think the age ratings are bullshit.
I would suspect age verification to have similar effects in practice, and there is the additional hurtful factors as well leading to a net negative. Not just for minors but also for adults that now have to deal with this crap.
it's only like everybody who isn't a rube who always falls for "think of the children" has been saying this since all these new proposals and laws started coming back
It was never about the children
UK: sounds good let’s do it
Another instance of pure power games if you track the political "reasonings" and technological "solutions".
It's the same fight with yet another face; we must keep pushing back at the hydra.
I am shocked, shocked to hear that there are ulterior motives behind age verification and that the stated benefit is in fact exactly the opposite of what happens irl. Shocked!
"The think tank warns that no age verification system, however technically secure, can prevent a motivated user from bypassing age restrictions.
The Tor Network, which is widely used by journalists, whistleblowers, NGOs, security researchers and dissidents in repressive countries to protect their privacy and security, makes blocking or age-gating virtual private networks (VPNs) a pointless and harmful exercise, FIPR argued."
If true, then how do we explain comments on HN that oppose age restrictions if these commenters are supposedly "technical" (cf. "non-technical") and understand how to use Tor
Another possibility is the opposition to age verification is not based on the opponent's own social media use, it's based on the effect that age restrictions would have on a social media _audiences_ comprised of "non-technical" people, "normies", that are the _targets_ of the opponent's activities
The arguments made by this "think tank" (read: advocacy group), similar to aforementioned HN comments, lack originality and insight and are thus not persuasive
Perhaps there are entities and/or individuals that stand to lose from age verification who not mentioned in this "study" nor in HN comments that oppose age verification who are not necessarily social media users but are engaged in _exploiting social media users_ for profit, e.g., targeting them with surveillance and ads, and taking a percentage of any revenue derived from users' work ("content creation")
Those entities and/or individuals, namely the entities running oversized "social media" websites to attract large audiences for advertising, and others who profit from this flawed "business model", must be considered in any analysis of the _potential_ effects of age restrictions