I like that this article at least links to a document with the features they want under scrutiny, but they do avoid a definition, and nearly all networked systems have at least some of the features in the document[1].
Is google docs social media? It certainly has social features and I've been witness to cyber-bullying via a shared google doc.
What about Spotify? It has social features far beyond just sharing playlists
Discord is 100% social media. Just like WhatsApp. MSN definitely was, remember MSN Groups? MSN Chat (the IRC knock off), and a bunch of other things. As someone who has consumed social media and chat platforms, I will note that most chat platforms are social media in their own regard. Habbo Hotel is another example of social media. :)
I absolutely agree that gamified, algorithm-driven social media should be banned for those under 16. My issue is how that should be done. I sure as shit don't want to have to present my ID to look at dank memes.
I don't think it should be banned, but I'm all for encouraging alternatives that use simple reverse-chronological and don't have the same tendency to create FOMO, a desire to check repeatedly, etc.
Surprised to see this seemingly presented positively on HN.
Social media "feels" like it should be uniquely bad for children but the evidence is low-quality and contradictory. For example, high social media use is associated with anxiety and depression, but which direction does that relationship run? Meanwhile there are documented benefits especially for youth who are members of marginalized groups (e.g. LGBTQ). Don't get me wrong, I think there are a lot of problems with the big social media companies. I just think they affect adults too and that we should address them directly.
But setting that aside, the practical implications of age gate laws are terrible. The options are basically to have an LLM guess your age based on your face, or uploading sensitive identity documents to multiple sites and hope they are stored and processed securely and not reused for other purposes.
But OK let's assume social media is always bad for kids and also that someone invents a perfect age gate... kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe. How is that not worse?
Social media being bad for mental health in childhood is one of the most robust theories I've ever seen for these kind of society-wide problems. You can peruse the After Babel Substack for the evidence if you're not convinced, but Jonathan Haidt has consistently done incredible work here.
All due respect, I do not think the substack of one of the world's leading proponents of the theory that screen time is harmful is a good source for evidence that runs contrary to that narrative.
Here's Nature reviewing his book:
> Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers
> These are not just our data or my opinion. Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews converge on the same message. An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally. Moreover, findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States, has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital-technology use. Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence.
I actually do think that Dr. Haidt is a good source for getting a fair understanding of both sides of the issue. If you've read or listened to him you'll know that it's a huge part of his ethos.
Even the author of your link says "considerable reforms to these platforms are required, given how much time young people spend on them" whilst stopping short of a ban. The problem is these "considerable reforms" will always be half arsed.
> kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe. How is that not worse?
Some will. But I bet a lot of kids "have to be" on Instagram/TikTok/etc because everyone else is. I don't think they all gonna flock to 4chan because they got locked out of the big platforms.
I'd argue even the darkest corners of 4chans aren't as bad as the average daily dose of brain rot delivered to hundreds of millions of people through infinite scroll algorithms on TikTok &co. And once you remove the sickening parts of 4chan I'd say it's overall a much more pleasant place than most other social medias, it's one of the last mainstream website that still somewhat feels like the golden age of internet
Or perhaps we should watch what happens in Australia and draw lessons from it? I have a hard time telling a teenager that they cannot socialize with people just because it is via electronic means. I also do not like teenagers identities manipulated for commercial ends. Though we have done this since the 1950s. Also shouldn't we ban MTV and rock and roll music in general? It's destroying the youth!
That's a good point. The problem for me is where the line is drawn. Is a car enthusiast forum social media? How about youtube comments? I think society is generally improved when the teenage generation is at least part of discussions. We need to protect the young people but excluding them and suppressing them leads to unintended consequences. I am not a tiktok apologist. Hey Facebook used to be enemy number 1 and now it's an afterthought for many people.
I would draw a line at user customized wall of content. All content on sites should be organized in a similar way for everybody (by date, by category, etc.). I think this would reduce a lot the problems that we see currently.
If you want to be bold and imaginative, although doubt this would ever pass, any platform that focuses or allows user content, should not be allowed to show advertisements. Then the incentive to have people stay more to watch more ads would disappear.
Everybody exactly knows where to draw the line... No one gives a shit about car enthusiast forums, everyone is talking about infinite scroll x targeted content x advertising powered by algorithms exclusively designed to extract your time, money and attention.
Infinite scrolling, algorithm based (not timestamp-based), "stories" (short videos), public (non-friend) accounts make up most of the feed, ads selling views and therefore companies trying to capture attention.
A car enthusiast forum is not doing this. phpBB sites get a pass. YouTube is, though. I think YouTube is part of the brain rot, although not the comments section.
"you know it when you see it" is a trap and ripe for abuse in its own right. Your description however is pretty spot on for this moment in internet evolution.
Interesting to me is that I pay for youtube premium so I don't see any ads. They even have the jump ahead feature where you can skip in video project promotions. It's the most ad free experience I have on the internet. The comment sections are about the lowest of the low knuckle draggers and outright dimwits.
I'm also a bit out of touch because I quit all social media. Youtube shorts is about the closest I get and that's a mind sink for sure. [Edit: and hacker news which I consider social media without the ads]
I mostly use YouTube without ads, and with sponsorblock, so a similar experience.
I think YouTube shorts is exactly the experience we're talking about. And the youth watch it by scrolling up, not by selecting shorts that look interesting.
I resisted shorts for a long time, but I watch them now as well. Prefer them, even.
The fact we're not seeing ads, and that the comments are atrocious content, is irrelevant--our attention spans are at stake, not our wallets.
Anything that promotes short-form video should be looked at.
Youtube promoting shorts is bad.
A youtube long-form video about, say, car repair, or quantum physics, or a history of eastern asian languages doesn't contribute to brain rot.
The Chinese, take it for what it's worth, knew how to control TikTok. They simply banned non educational content on the platform. You want to watch a 5 minute video explaining the basics of a math theorem, or explaining a chess opening? Sure, that's cool. Stupid 30 second clips of dances, memes, reactions, etc? Nah, that's dumb.
As we can see anywhere and everywhere, moderation teams have to use their power, even when nothing is in violation of the rules. They'll start policing more content, and pretty soon they'll be arresting people.
> I also do not like teenagers identities manipulated for commercial ends.
This. If western “liberal” “democracies” are concerned about children’s privacy then we should push back on surveillance capitalism, not force people to submit government id in order to express their opinion online.
it makes sense in terms of grooming. Most parents want to deny their children agency until they're no longer minors and giving them the internet massively undermines that idea. You're plugging your child into a stream of information that is mostly a sewer of misinformation.
they can socialize online perfectly fine. Excluded from the ban in Australia are among others, WhatsApp, Discord, Steam and Facebook Messenger. TikTok, Twitter or Instagram are not and never have been platforms in which people form social communities with their peers.
>Also shouldn't we ban MTV and rock and roll music in general?
No, because there was never any evidence that rock has harmed the youth. Jonathan Haidt, author of this piece, has conducted extensive research to show that social media does.
> Twitter or Instagram are not and never have been platforms in which people form social communities with their peers.
By peers do you mean people they know in person or demographic peers?
I'm not going to anecdata [edit: then I do] but on platforms like Facebook I only have friends that I know personally (or at least when I used to use it). Twitter was the opposite.
Oddly the most online abuse I've had is during in game chats and providing open source software but I digress...
The "rock and roll" thing is because "think of the kids" is a perennial siren call. Only sometimes is it valid. I can't speak for everyone but there seems to be a consensus that "social media" can be deeply harmful for some young people and we should not ignore it. That this one guy made a study and it happened to support his hypothesis isn't enough for this one voter to want to ban online networks of pesky teenagers calling each other names and buying stupid crap.
In 2050 people will say "Do you remember social media?" and someone will say "Oh yeah, those online systems where everything you said was used to build a marketing profile of you? Where every picture you posted of your girlfriend / wife / sister / daughter / aunt / grandmother or child was taken by some weirdo and turned into porn? Where our kids hung out and were radicalized by fanatics and foreign powers?"
If this were to take effect with the bulk of social life taking place digitally we can expect minimum voting ages to be decreased the same and in the case of the US, the age of consent for sex to be standardized in the same direction too with a deemphasis on 18 as the de facto minimum at the cultural level.
And we can expect 15 year olds to hit the workforce full-time around then too I reckon. Or younger. Imagine 9 year olds stowed away in Waymo taxi trunks with socket wrenches and cyberdecks.
Is this ban actually effective and going to be enforced, anyway? My 15-year old niece just returned from Australia where she reports she was definitely still able to access Tik Tok and Instagram while in the country. Her similarly-aged Australian cousins thought it was all a bit of a joke too, apparently.
There are two objectives that western regimes have for pushing these draconian measures: the first is to end the historically unprecedented era of free and anonymous political speech by ordinary people. The second is to prevent anti-imperialist arguments and perspectives from reaching the eyes and ears of young western people. Young people will only hear the perspectives taught in government school and on corporate media. No choosing a different perspective early in life.
On the idea that this is needed to “protect children” it is the job of parents not the state to decide what media their children consume. If you want to make that easier for parents then regulate and mandate parental controls and make sure parents always have the choice.
We shouldn't ban social media we should ban algorithmically curated feeds that push any specific type of content. Outrage sells and so platform curated feeds have curated outrage and extreme content.
In practice I haven't seen much useful political discourse by the average person, but as long as we don't selectively amplify voices through machine signals and they NATURALLY accrue followings then whatever I guess.
So you say, but I don't think social media companies are benign or have the best interest of visitors at heart. If anything they make it far easier to identify users who are susceptible to propaganda and feed it to them in bulk.
i totally agree, but the solution to corporate manipulation of our feed is to regulate social media so that the first amendment applies to the algorithm so the companies themselves dont have the power to push their own propaganda. People should decide for themselves what perspectives they agree with online.
Too bad, they have too much money to bribe lawmakers with. Zuck is worth a quarter trillion dollars, and he ain't in a rush to give up so much as a penny of that if it doesn't fufill his goals of enriching himself further.
Exactly. The fact that western governments have held that the corporations themselves have a free speech right to control your feed and speech but you do not have a free speech right to choose what the algorithm feeds you or what you say is absolutely stunning and reveals that capitalism is more powerful than liberalism in the west.
> The second is to prevent anti-imperialist arguments and perspectives from reaching the eyes and ears of young western people.
Sounds like you're complaining that these measures will make it hard for authoritarian governments to astroturf young western people so that they radicalize and hate each other more.
> the first is to end the historically unprecedented era of free and anonymous political speech by ordinary people. The second is to prevent anti-imperialist arguments and perspectives from reaching the eyes and ears of young western people. Young people will only hear the perspectives taught in government school and on corporate media. No choosing a different perspective early in life.
Yet my motherland, the nation with arguably the most liberal social media in the world and the least functional school system among "western regimes", is the most socially polarized, has voted in an insecure bully on a platform of hate and prejudice, and is about to plunge into imperialistic conquest, possibly against our allies for 70 years. I can't see how age-gating social media can do any more harm.
Well said. The value of free speech is that all perspectives are heard, so that the best hopefully prevails. Social media is not doing that. You only see the shit you already agree with or the most ridiculous and extreme points on the other side.
There are a lot of problems with age verification schemes, but you are doing your position a disservice by suggesting that anybody that doesn't want their kid to be bullied on Snapchat is actually just a puppet of fascist regimes trying to stifle political speech.
You should learn to appreciate the nuance of opinions that differ from your own if you actually want to, you know, convince anyone of anything.
I don't think that social media has had that effect in practice.
We're all scrolling through algorithmic feeds on walled gardens owned by some of the greatest capitalists in history. Domestic and foreign disinformation campaigns are not uncommon, and have affected election results and fomented atrocities (as in Myanmar). The US, which birthed most of these technologies, has grown more imperialistic and conservative since their adoption.
EDIT: I saw your edit. I agree that enforcing an industry-wide standard for parental controls, preferable one that can be set per-device and must be respected by all social media services, is the right way to do this. Internet ID laws are dystopian insanity.
There's been some pretty clear information from countries enacting online ID laws that they want it precisely so that they can control discourse, not for any kind of protection. This isn't a hypothetical, it's the actual stated goals.
> The U.K. Online Safety Act was (avowedly, as revealed in a recent High Court case) “not primarily aimed at protecting children” but at regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse.”
> There's been some pretty clear information from countries enacting online ID laws that they want it precisely so that they can control discourse, not for any kind of protection.
I'm not seeing how it's an example showing that they're doing it "precisely so that they can control discourse".
You could still argue that ID checks are done to partition content by underage/adult which for many is a reasonable thing to do absent any better solutions.
I am not a fan of governments controlling the internet and of Australia in this regard in particular, but Feature 4 makes it all acceptable to me. We shouldn't ban all of web 2.0, people, including children, have right to talk to each other, but gamified, attention-leeching design is absolutely harmful, and I would be happy to see banned for everyone
Am I crazy for thinking setting age limits is just a lazy half measure by politicians who don't want to actually draft meaningful legislation for social media?
Like the negatives of social media aren't just isolated to just kids and while shielding them from it is generally a good thing it still seems like putting duct tape over a giant crack in the foundation.
No at all, this is my actual problem with the proposal.
We're 6 months away from the news report about "the new thing kids are using on the Internet" but the open propaganda and AI forgeries on Twitter and Facebook will continue to do their work on everyone else.
doing nothing. Governments typically marginalise techies when it comes to decision making, so the least they can do is make the call of lesser harm.
If kids really want to use social media, they'll find a way. Its more about making it hard/impossible for those who haven't yet grasped their agency. As ever, its about electors and in this case: parents.
Maybe the problem isn't the teens. Bullying is bullying no matter where it happens.
Profiting via dark patterns is despicable, whether it's preying on teens or the elderly. How many elderly people are fed distorted, sensational news and believe it wholesale? At least our teens have learned to be skeptics.
Instead of punishing the innocent to gatekeep a system that is one of the most important innovations in history, maybe we should focus on the root cause: the crappified, ad-based internet that glorifies "clicks" above all else.
We might have to face the fact that "free" accounts have become too expensive. If the cost of a free internet is a business model that monetizes outrage and addiction, it's not working. I don't love the idea of paid-only access or enforced identity, but applying a single standard to everyone might be better than what we have now.
I still believe in the free internet, and I know what I want to do to build it: Make excellent content. Teach good things.
I want to prove the value of an open and positive system.
If something is unacceptable for a 15 year old, it is unacceptable for the majority of the adult population too. I do not support age restrictions on information in any form. If you don't want your kids to do or view certain things, that is your problem to solve. There are plenty of parental control options and apps already, we have had legislation proposed to label adult content, the reason all this verification crap keeps getting pushed is because corporations want your full identity to sell and fascist supporters want to dox everyone and their ideas and activities for the government to control and punish people for.
Did they really need to push the evil lever to 100% just for engagement? Or could they have pushed back on shareholders just a teeny bit, in the name of long term legislative freedom?
Honestly it should be even older than that. Should be 21. Let's not let easily influenced teenagers on what are effectively mass advertising platforms designed to make the likes of Mark Zuckerberg even more money.
It’s governments with similar cultures and practices, all tackling a relatively new phenomenon.
Coming up with similar laws could just be convergent evolution rather than coordination.
You also can’t discount that once one country has tried it others that we’re considering similar legislation are much more likely to take the plunge if the outcomes in the first country aren’t negative
People under 16 should not be permitted to socialize or express themselves, nor should they be allowed to hear words from adults at all, not just online.
Is google docs social media? It certainly has social features and I've been witness to cyber-bullying via a shared google doc.
What about Spotify? It has social features far beyond just sharing playlists
WhatsApp? Discord? MMS?
1: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GVO7sNuCNmNwqVK64PHQ...
Social media "feels" like it should be uniquely bad for children but the evidence is low-quality and contradictory. For example, high social media use is associated with anxiety and depression, but which direction does that relationship run? Meanwhile there are documented benefits especially for youth who are members of marginalized groups (e.g. LGBTQ). Don't get me wrong, I think there are a lot of problems with the big social media companies. I just think they affect adults too and that we should address them directly.
But setting that aside, the practical implications of age gate laws are terrible. The options are basically to have an LLM guess your age based on your face, or uploading sensitive identity documents to multiple sites and hope they are stored and processed securely and not reused for other purposes.
But OK let's assume social media is always bad for kids and also that someone invents a perfect age gate... kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe. How is that not worse?
Here's Nature reviewing his book:
> Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers
> These are not just our data or my opinion. Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews converge on the same message. An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally. Moreover, findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States, has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital-technology use. Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2
Here's his rebuttal to that article: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi....
I think you'd struggle to find someone more earnestly trying to get an unbiased understanding of the reality of this topic.
Some will. But I bet a lot of kids "have to be" on Instagram/TikTok/etc because everyone else is. I don't think they all gonna flock to 4chan because they got locked out of the big platforms.
AIM/ICQ didn't rot our brains or attention spans.
If you want to be bold and imaginative, although doubt this would ever pass, any platform that focuses or allows user content, should not be allowed to show advertisements. Then the incentive to have people stay more to watch more ads would disappear.
Infinite scrolling, algorithm based (not timestamp-based), "stories" (short videos), public (non-friend) accounts make up most of the feed, ads selling views and therefore companies trying to capture attention.
A car enthusiast forum is not doing this. phpBB sites get a pass. YouTube is, though. I think YouTube is part of the brain rot, although not the comments section.
FB, Instagram, X, tiktok, YouTube, Snapchat, etc.
Interesting to me is that I pay for youtube premium so I don't see any ads. They even have the jump ahead feature where you can skip in video project promotions. It's the most ad free experience I have on the internet. The comment sections are about the lowest of the low knuckle draggers and outright dimwits.
I'm also a bit out of touch because I quit all social media. Youtube shorts is about the closest I get and that's a mind sink for sure. [Edit: and hacker news which I consider social media without the ads]
I think YouTube shorts is exactly the experience we're talking about. And the youth watch it by scrolling up, not by selecting shorts that look interesting.
I resisted shorts for a long time, but I watch them now as well. Prefer them, even.
The fact we're not seeing ads, and that the comments are atrocious content, is irrelevant--our attention spans are at stake, not our wallets.
Youtube promoting shorts is bad.
A youtube long-form video about, say, car repair, or quantum physics, or a history of eastern asian languages doesn't contribute to brain rot.
The Chinese, take it for what it's worth, knew how to control TikTok. They simply banned non educational content on the platform. You want to watch a 5 minute video explaining the basics of a math theorem, or explaining a chess opening? Sure, that's cool. Stupid 30 second clips of dances, memes, reactions, etc? Nah, that's dumb.
As we can see anywhere and everywhere, moderation teams have to use their power, even when nothing is in violation of the rules. They'll start policing more content, and pretty soon they'll be arresting people.
There are still other means to chat with other individuals or groups that don't involve social media.
This. If western “liberal” “democracies” are concerned about children’s privacy then we should push back on surveillance capitalism, not force people to submit government id in order to express their opinion online.
they can socialize online perfectly fine. Excluded from the ban in Australia are among others, WhatsApp, Discord, Steam and Facebook Messenger. TikTok, Twitter or Instagram are not and never have been platforms in which people form social communities with their peers.
>Also shouldn't we ban MTV and rock and roll music in general?
No, because there was never any evidence that rock has harmed the youth. Jonathan Haidt, author of this piece, has conducted extensive research to show that social media does.
By peers do you mean people they know in person or demographic peers?
I'm not going to anecdata [edit: then I do] but on platforms like Facebook I only have friends that I know personally (or at least when I used to use it). Twitter was the opposite.
Oddly the most online abuse I've had is during in game chats and providing open source software but I digress...
The "rock and roll" thing is because "think of the kids" is a perennial siren call. Only sometimes is it valid. I can't speak for everyone but there seems to be a consensus that "social media" can be deeply harmful for some young people and we should not ignore it. That this one guy made a study and it happened to support his hypothesis isn't enough for this one voter to want to ban online networks of pesky teenagers calling each other names and buying stupid crap.
In 2050 people will say "Do you remember social media?" and someone will say "Oh yeah, those online systems where everything you said was used to build a marketing profile of you? Where every picture you posted of your girlfriend / wife / sister / daughter / aunt / grandmother or child was taken by some weirdo and turned into porn? Where our kids hung out and were radicalized by fanatics and foreign powers?"
"Oh yeah, whatever happened to them?"
And we can expect 15 year olds to hit the workforce full-time around then too I reckon. Or younger. Imagine 9 year olds stowed away in Waymo taxi trunks with socket wrenches and cyberdecks.
On the idea that this is needed to “protect children” it is the job of parents not the state to decide what media their children consume. If you want to make that easier for parents then regulate and mandate parental controls and make sure parents always have the choice.
In practice I haven't seen much useful political discourse by the average person, but as long as we don't selectively amplify voices through machine signals and they NATURALLY accrue followings then whatever I guess.
The world will be better for it.
Sounds like you're complaining that these measures will make it hard for authoritarian governments to astroturf young western people so that they radicalize and hate each other more.
Yet my motherland, the nation with arguably the most liberal social media in the world and the least functional school system among "western regimes", is the most socially polarized, has voted in an insecure bully on a platform of hate and prejudice, and is about to plunge into imperialistic conquest, possibly against our allies for 70 years. I can't see how age-gating social media can do any more harm.
You should learn to appreciate the nuance of opinions that differ from your own if you actually want to, you know, convince anyone of anything.
We're all scrolling through algorithmic feeds on walled gardens owned by some of the greatest capitalists in history. Domestic and foreign disinformation campaigns are not uncommon, and have affected election results and fomented atrocities (as in Myanmar). The US, which birthed most of these technologies, has grown more imperialistic and conservative since their adoption.
EDIT: I saw your edit. I agree that enforcing an industry-wide standard for parental controls, preferable one that can be set per-device and must be respected by all social media services, is the right way to do this. Internet ID laws are dystopian insanity.
You may argue that the approach is bad (I would agree) but it's not because of some evil mastermind plot.
https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy2...
> The U.K. Online Safety Act was (avowedly, as revealed in a recent High Court case) “not primarily aimed at protecting children” but at regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse.”
Please do share that information.
You could still argue that ID checks are done to partition content by underage/adult which for many is a reasonable thing to do absent any better solutions.
Like the negatives of social media aren't just isolated to just kids and while shielding them from it is generally a good thing it still seems like putting duct tape over a giant crack in the foundation.
We're 6 months away from the news report about "the new thing kids are using on the Internet" but the open propaganda and AI forgeries on Twitter and Facebook will continue to do their work on everyone else.
If kids really want to use social media, they'll find a way. Its more about making it hard/impossible for those who haven't yet grasped their agency. As ever, its about electors and in this case: parents.
Profiting via dark patterns is despicable, whether it's preying on teens or the elderly. How many elderly people are fed distorted, sensational news and believe it wholesale? At least our teens have learned to be skeptics.
Instead of punishing the innocent to gatekeep a system that is one of the most important innovations in history, maybe we should focus on the root cause: the crappified, ad-based internet that glorifies "clicks" above all else.
We might have to face the fact that "free" accounts have become too expensive. If the cost of a free internet is a business model that monetizes outrage and addiction, it's not working. I don't love the idea of paid-only access or enforced identity, but applying a single standard to everyone might be better than what we have now.
I still believe in the free internet, and I know what I want to do to build it: Make excellent content. Teach good things.
I want to prove the value of an open and positive system.
If burning HN to the ground deleted Facebook and Tiktok out of existence, then let it burn.
Did they really need to push the evil lever to 100% just for engagement? Or could they have pushed back on shareholders just a teeny bit, in the name of long term legislative freedom?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/15/meta-ai-c...
I don't think Europe and the US share enough values to do it on a lot of fronts, so perhaps that will shield me as an American.
But it seems like a lot of that coming down the hatch for most of Europe.
Coming up with similar laws could just be convergent evolution rather than coordination.
You also can’t discount that once one country has tried it others that we’re considering similar legislation are much more likely to take the plunge if the outcomes in the first country aren’t negative
/s