Rahm Emanuel Says U.s. Should Follow Australia's Youth Social Media Ban
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The debate over Rahm Emanuel's call for the US to follow Australia's lead in banning youth access to social media is sparking heated discussions about the Democratic party's platform and its chances against Trump Republicans. Some commenters are skeptical that banning kids from YouTube is a viable or effective solution, with one remarking that it feels like a weak substitute for a more comprehensive platform that addresses the average person's concerns. Others are pointing out the irony that Republicans, often at odds with Democrats, have been behind laws regulating access to online content, such as pornography, citing concerns about its impact on teenagers. As the conversation unfolds, a consensus emerges that simply moralizing or kowtowing to special interest groups won't cut it; instead, commenters are calling for pragmatic, positive proposals that genuinely improve people's lives.
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Obviously the end result is the same, but I think the motivation is different.
They dont care about constitution. And they are in position to reinterpret it however they want to, regardless of its text and meaning.
They dont really care about porn now tho.
Maybe. Most of the debate that I hear feels similar to social media commentary -- teen boys getting their brains fried by constant access to stimulus. I don't hear anything about onanism or sinning.
Mind you, I'm not saying they're right or wrong, but just that most of the arguments I hear are saying "we think this is an identifiable and secular harm."
As it is we now have two parties obsessed with “regulating” the morality of citizens while bleeding them out financially.
Democracy has been known since its invention to be extremely vulnerable to such actors. It's vulnerable to it because it's nearly impossible to counter.
Your critique is valid to some degree, but Trump won simply because he had the shamelessness to lie over and over and over again that he'd bring prices down. That's it.
No "positive, pragmatic suggestions" are electorally stronger than simple untruths stated with confidence ad infinitum.
Which consultants said that?
Biden won because he came hot on the heels of Trump's complete inability to actually govern.
Which specific pragmatic, positive visions did Biden put forth that are so distinct from Harris's that they won in one case and lost in another?
I said that there's no "pragmatic, positive message" that overcomes simply lying and having an entire media and political apparatus that supports it.
Biden's primary advantage was running against a guy who was demonstrably a complete shit show as an actual incumbent. That was memory-holed by the same shameless lying (e.g. ask Republicans who they think "locked people down" during COVID).
Biden (and Harris) then had a similar disadvantage going into 2024.
It's extremely, extremely silly to act like voters were looking for pragmatic messages lol. Simply no evidence for that.
One reason that incumbents are doing so poorly is that they promise nothing, and deliver it. Nations are in decline across the West, and all that candidates are allowed to offer is more of the same neoliberal pablum. Anyone who attempts to offer something different faces a coordinated attack from the media and incumbent political class, and the only ones seemingly able to break through the resistance are dishonest right-populists. The left has to come up with a solution other than dismantling (excuse me, “fortifying”) democracy, which appears to be the EU solution.
There was none.
It turns out that actually you don't need pragmatic, positive visions of the future to win. In fact, we have plenty of evidence that pragmatic policies at all are a massive electoral liability when facing someone who is, again, willing to simply lie about everything.
In Trump, you have clear evidence that people do not need pragmatic solutions to anything. Somehow you are pulling from that the conclusion that Democrats are not pragmatic enough.
What makes you believe there is public appetite for pragmatic solutions? Enough to win a national election?
Credibly fixing both social media and cost of living would be an effective platform across the West.
depends on how or who you poll. I dont think it is popular. It's just that there's a lot of stigma when you try to argue against "saving the children" type policy - which is why this gets used to pass laws that otherwise would be difficult to pass if the true intentions were revealed.
> Credibly fixing
"credibly" is carrying a lot of weight here.
What polls are you looking at?
It’s a shit message, but they’re apparently permanently damaged by the 1980 landslide re-election loss to Reagan and incapable of moving on. IDK if liberal democracy will survive here long enough for us to see if another wing of the party can ever get those folks to let them try something else.
[edit] not for nothing, Obama lightly hinted at a move away from that in his campaigning (if not his governing) and it seemed to work pretty damn well. Why they didn’t double down on that is anyone’s guess, but I’d suppose it rhymes with “bobbying”.
[edit] I mean yes 1984's map was even worse, but 1980's was reeeeeal bad. Six states won in 1980, versus one in 1984. And we have a guy who won a pretty ordinary split of states and less than a majority of votes-cast calling his win in 2024 a "landslide", lol. No, Reagan's elections are what a landslide looks like.
They are going to find out soon enough.
Trump won during a time where incumbents lost by ~10 points. He narrowly beat a candidate that lost their only primary run by <2 point.
Trump's very vocal minority is very good at making people think there is a silent majority.
However, the democrats have been elected quite a lot this millennium and they've fully shown they're incapable of making necessary reforms so there's going to keep being populist candidates until there's new blue blood.
If this were true, I’m sure that you wouldn’t have any trouble advocating that we ban it. Many of us remember social media before the algorithmic feed took over, and it was a good way to stay connected to friends and family. Some us also were lucky enough to experience a protracted period of socializing on the internet in the pre-social media days: MUDs, web forums, chat rooms, etc. I enjoyed all of those, in my teen and college years, and like you I count myself fortunate that I was not exposed to social media during a formative time of my life. I think that’s why I hesitate to say that we should outright ban it: I know that the internet _can_ coexist (and even augment) a healthy social life. That said, I don’t use social media at all anymore (unless you count HN), so I’ve definitely voted with my eyeballs.
- What we did on the Internet in the early 90s was not broadcast to our (real world) peers. If some big drama blew up online, we could escape it with the flip of a switch.
- Similarly, we could escape real world drama by shifting to our online relationships.
- Normal people were not online yet, so you didn't have all the normal real world structures of authority and popularity/hostility. It was an Internet of niches, and we could all find our own.
- There was no pervasive profitability goal in keeping our eyeballs on a particular platform, so today's dark pattern manipulation just didn't exist.
- Also, ubiquitous smartphones.
The Internet, back then, was a safe third space.
Today it's often a toxic hellscape, with some exceptional corners.
I would be fine with a ban on social media as it exists. I think it has displaced a lot of things such as forms and chat rooms and a lot more.
The internet can be good, but social media makes the internet worse.
We will come to see social media in its current form the same way we view smoking.
When you start to think about that statement, and why it was written there, why a company chooses to pay $ to tell you this, you know that inherently something went REALLY wrong in the past.
And because it's a company, they're doing the bare minimum to fix it, as to minimize the impact on their bottom line.
It reminds me of the ads against a certain prop in CA, the one that would make app workers (?) employees.
Advertisements taken out by Lyft, Uber, etc, all to sway people.
When companies want you to do something it's not in your best interest. It's in theirs.
I assume you apply this to HN as well? Discord? Forums?
All of these can easily be defined as "social media"
Citation needed.
Look, I am greatly opposed to how US social media giants handle and monetize data, and I don’t like them having the level of control that they do. Antitrust is a great lever to use here, because concentration is the source of many problems. But banning what is in effect public social communications is a giant step over the First Amendment.
People can and do use social media to their benefit, whether it’s for political organizing, whistleblowing, mutual aid, OSINT, or gathering on the ground media and first hand accounts from active events (such as conflicts, protests, or police actions) that may never show up in the news. The professional media cannot be everywhere, and sometimes they will not cover certain events. That’s what social media is good for, despite its flaws.
And free speech: you don't need a mobile phone or tiktok to exercise that right.
I get that it is all about balance, but it is hard to disagree with Rahm here. Top down ban is the only real way to go.
On top of that, you have some of the biggest, most moneyed companies in the country spending billions of dollars to get kids and adults hooked. Even for parents with good intentions, it's not a fair fight.
Maybe I'm going off the deep end, but I sometimes think people that work at Facebook should be considered social pariahs. The amount of damage that company has done to our country and society is truly incalculable. It's really hard for me to forgive anyone who had any part in it.
As a society we choose what to allow or not allow together, collectively, through politics (ideally) and when things damage our collective health we regulate or ban them. All regulations probably seem impossible before they happen. Australia regulated guns, China regulated social media, plenty of countries regulate alcohol, drugs, gambling. It’s all possible, just have to weigh the positives and negatives and find a balance, but the status quo is broken.
What is not fine is proposing to make regulations that purport to do things that are near-universally supported, but in reality further agendas that are widely opposed, agendas that work against the interests of the American people and would never pass otherwise.
That is very clearly what is happening here, and we know that because it happens all the time, using the same tried-and-true formula. In particular, anything claiming to "protect the children" is almost certainly an obfuscated attempt to erode civil rights protections like free speech or privacy, and should be treated with extreme prejudice.
Look at the TikTok “ban” for example. Congress passed a law to ban it because they didn’t have control over what the population was seeing, specifically around the genocide in Gaza. Now US ownership has passed to Larry Ellison, a republican connected pro-Zionist that will make sure the objectionable content that shows Palestinian's suffering does not bubble up in the algorithm. Never mind that you see 10 year old girls practicing TikTok dances when they are standing in line, waiting for the bus, etc. That problem persists, and no one in leadership cares because now the right people are getting rich and censoring the actual content the rulers cared about.
I’m with you on Rahm, but I’m not going to let him trying to hook his wagon to a policy that I support ruin my support of it.
I walk through a casino and see all the flashing lights and sounds and like the casino screen is half as busy as an RTS. It's just not the same level of engagement; it's not overwhelming, it's just slow.
Phones are among the easiest devices to manage.
If those work, sure, although kids tend to be pretty clever about getting around parental controls and are sometimes quite a bit more technically sophisticated than their parents.
It sucks as a parent because you get this from both ends: “parent better! (Putting in tons of work that our parents didn’t have to)” and also “lol what are you doing restricting kids on computers is impossible, give up you idiot”.
(And on some platforms it is, for practical purposes, impossible—looking at you, Linux, not just because it’s a powerful open platform but because its permissions and capabilities system is decades behind the state-of-the-art and tools for sensibly managing any of that on a scale smaller than “fleet of servers” and in the context of user-session applications are nonexistent)
I didn't claim that it's impossible, merely that it's difficult sometimes, as you also implied ("putting in tons of work"). The advantage of physically consfiscating phones is that it's a low tech, brute force method available even to the least technically sophisticated parents.
I'd push the implementation to the router and force root certs on devices and have all clients run through your proxy or drop the packets. That way even live usbs will not get network access. Have some separate, hugely locked down network for kids' friends.
Maybe put a separate honeypot network up with some iot devices on it with wifi and a weak password, and let the kids have some freedom once they figure out how to deauth and grab the bash upon reconnections.
Idk. I'm some years away from this problem myself,but someone recommended this in another thread recently.
https://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/SslBump
That's a lot more difficult if you leave secureboot enabled on the computer. Plus, most devices, especially newer ones, allow you to pin your own certificates and sometimes even disable the OEM certs.
That, in addition with locking the BIOS with a password (and if the device does not have known OEM override passwords like on bios-pw.org), should be more than enough to keep a kid out.
My son's cross country team communicates via GroupMe and it's very difficult for him to stay up-to-date with the web version from a laptop. My daughter's friend group communicates via snapchat.
This doesn't mean parents have to allow everything. My daughter doesn't have Snapchat, for example. But there are definite tradeoffs like her being left out of many conversations and slowly getting excluded from friend groups as a result.
It's too much unnecessary complexity added to parenting and the motivation being profit by mega corps is why I suggest regulation is a valid place to start looking.
It doesn't have to be a 24 hour a day ban. A kid could be limited to an hour a day or phone use or something like that.
> It's too much unnecessary complexity added to parenting and the motivation being profit by mega corps is why I suggest regulation is a valid place to start looking.
The inevitable result would seem to be that all adults, parents or not, would be forced to present their identification online to use the internet. I think that's too much personal freedom to sacrifice, regardless of how noble the goal.
Limits help, for sure. But it's like setting limits for addictive products like "one cigarette a day". It's better than a pack a day but the impact addictive products have on kids don't stop once their limit is up.
> I think that's too much personal freedom to sacrifice
That's why I started by saying I don't have the solution. Regulation and fines for companies that target kids feels plausible. While not exactly the same, we curbed teen cigarette use by imposing marketing restrictions and issuing fines to tobacco companies (and drastically reduced adult smoking too for that matter).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans_in_the_Un...
Minecraft is notably insane due to this. I don’t know how normies get their kids playing online with it (ours is locked down to just-with-friends, and we gatekeep the friend list), I thought it was hard as a techie. Cross-platform play (outside of X-Box, I suppose) requires creating and carefully-massaging permissions on two overlapping but unrelated systems, both the account on the console itself and a Microsoft account (and their UI for managing this is, in modern Microsoft fashion, entirely nutty). Then, if anything goes wrong, the error messages are careful never to tell you which account’s settings blocked an action, so you get to guess. Fun!
(Getting “classic” Java Minecraft working, just with a local server, was even harder)
Your options are to go all-in on one or two ecosystems; to take on just a fuckload of work getting it all set up nicely and maintaining that with a half-dozen accounts per kid or whatever; or to give up.
Then schools send chromebooks home with less-restrictive settings than I’d use if I were managing it and no way for me to tighten those, and a kid stays up all night playing shovelware free Web games before we realize we need to account for those devices before bed time. Thanks for the extra work, assholes.
Submit a zkp that you are over 18 to the website that requires it. The proof need not be tied to the identity of the user.
I personally don't think self-regulation works. It's harmful so the next best option is the government regulating it.
Anyway, the government can already take away your bank account. No need for them to introduce such a complex scheme.
I've read that after elementary school parents have an incredibly small impact on their children's development, peers and their environment (which includes virtual one), has virtually all of the impact on your children's development.
This shit of government forcing everyone in the country to have to doxx themselves just so preschoolers can't access social media(which they will anyway), is like if prehistoric humanity were to stop using fire just because the village idiot burned his house down.
Collective action? Like some sort of communist? No THANK you!
You can get a dumb phone since having a phone (not necessarily smart) is a good idea. There's also parental controls on smartphones that let you control the apps and sites they get access to.
Skipping lunch and saving up the dinner money to spend on an ex-demo Performa 5200 and a 56k modem is how I got online back in the late 90s…
Your parents couldn’t be arsed to cook even a single meal for you?
Before I left the UK, there were remarkably good options for that as both a phone SIM and mobile internet dongles.
Does the USA not have PAYG options?
A more extreme policy would be to treat smartphones themselves the same way we treat alcohol and cigarettes, enforcing an age minimum at the point of purchase. Of course the giant tech corporations would fly into rage over this suggestion and lobby heavily against it.
Agree. A simple solution would be to regulate social media by forcing a maximum time per user per day or banning it altogether. But that's clearly not the agenda. (same with all the other dog-whistles).
When I was growing up, I had very limited access to real life social spaces that I actually enjoyed participating in. Online communities were my respite, the light in the darkness that honestly kept me alive until I managed to make it to college. If there was an overbearing nanny state preventing me from knowing that there was a better life waiting for me after grade school, I'm not sure I would've bothered to stick around until then.
That said, most of modern social media isn't the same as the online communities I and many others grew up on. It's a free for all with very thin walls between social spaces, almost no human oversight, and run by the most despicable and immoral people on God's green earth. So I am inclined to agree with the people who say that kind of social media is a bad influence and should be curtailed.
But even today, that isn't everything that's on the internet these days. Discord especially has quietly become the socialization hub of most of the younger folks I know of, and a large part of that is because it allows the creation of private, invite-only groups moderated by actual people. As far as I'm concerned, the Internet needs more Discords and fewer Twitters and Instagrams. There shouldn't be an arbitrary limit on socialization, but socializing should be...social, not some weird performance art done in front of the entire internet.
then let the courts decide. they'll clean up their act pretty quick when lawsuits come pouring in, and it removes the central govt's role in USER ID's and other 1984 schemes.
So you want to make it legally viable for religious parents to sue social spaces that allow for their children to question the religion of their parents? That's totally something that I could picture happening under such a regime. And that's ultimately indicative of a larger conundrum we face as a society.
The fact that as a society we seem to favor giving parents the ability to make their children in their own image, over giving their children the leeway to figure out who they truly are outside of their parent's guidance. And that's a truly difficult line to tack. Sometimes the parents are 100% right and the children would self-destruct under their own supervision. Other times, the children are being abused and tortured for not following the whims of their selfish parents.
I was lucky, all things considered. My parents were well meaning, just extremely overbearing and micro-managing. Some of the outright abuse that some of my acquaintances describe undergoing would make y'all sick if repeated here. I don't know if there's any solution, but I'm not sure giving helicopter parents more leverage against social spaces is the right play.
Why not. In a court of law, and facts, such lawsuits would only serve to highlight that religion is not a real thing. That would be a good thing for the world.
This is indeed a problem. Especially when growing up in a small town you can get stuck in a monoculture where people all have the same interests (I think in the US that's often sports and religion I think, in my case it was a bit different). I have zero interests in any of those and I don't do pretend. So I never fit in well either.
I also started looking for online places and started embracing being different. It wasn't easy but it did shape who I am. I'm still very much in alt cultures now.
These days I live in big cities where it's much easier to find groups to fit me than to try and fit in to whatever monoculture exists.
It was the same in the past. The difference is that the house odds were different. You didn't have algorithms cramming the worst of the worst down your feed, forums, IRC, message boards and the like weren't built with the goal of maximizing engagement. Heck, even vote based communities which inevitably turn into low common denominator groupthink producing cesspits are mild compared to modern stuff.
It's not though. That's just the popular meme among easily influenced and excitable social groups (like parents). It's not reflective of reality. The idea that mobile devices are somehow damaging to mental state is not supported by scientific studies. Nor is the idea that online discussion forums and markets are.
What is dangerous is mis-using medical terms like "addiction" in apparently an intended medical context. When you start throwing around words like addiction governments get really excited about their ability to use force and start hurting and imprisoning people. Even murdering them. Multi-media screens are not addictive. There is no evidence supporting such assertions in reputable scientific journals.
Here's a review (a paper that collects results of many other papers) from 2022:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9052033
Social studies are useless anyway. Academic social studies are so biased that anything they say on the matter should be discarded. They will always produce "evidence" on demand for whatever the left want to do.
Social media should be left alone. Parents who want to can block it on their children's devices. There's nothing more that needs to be done.
This study is taking "problematic social media use" as it's implicit given and then from this arbitrary base it is then saying this small subset of problematic people experience depression because of the fiat declaration of "problematic".
But then it goes on,
>While there exists no official diagnostic term or measurement, Andreassen et al [17] developed the Facebook Addiction Scale, which measures features of substance use disorder such as salience, tolerance, preoccupation, impaired role performance, loss of control, and withdrawal, to systematically score problematic Facebook use.
Which isn't even a real journal article but instead a comment in a non-research paper which hasn't ever even been cited by anyone else until this paper. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C29&q=Dev... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22662404/
This is not real science. This is anti-facebook political manipulation via science sounding words. I'm plenty anti-facebook myself but I am very pro-science so it's sad to see this successfully masquerading as real science.
Is it? Or is it "bloody obvious" to morons who mindlessly accept whatever they are told? The world is always collapsing right?
> Check out what teachers have to say about the attention span of the current generation pupils.
Before smartphones, it was TV. TV was rotting kids brains. But the world did end. Did it? Besides, aren't teachers really complaining about smartphones usage DURING class?
It's dumb chicken littles like you that are the bane of freedom and civilization.
The don't tread on me angle is just as overplayed as the one you're complaining about.
> Aim higher.
Touch grass.
> The don't tread on me angle is just as overplayed as the one you're complaining about.
Not as overplayed as the passive aggressive social engineering sneaks like you. Aim higher.
HN is full of manipulative tone policing by people who can't argue, and it's refreshing to see someone put their foot down.
It's much easier to say to a child "you can't have a social media account, it's the law because experts have determined it's not healthy at your age" than "your mother and I think that social media is bad for you".
source: was once a child
It didn’t work very well.
Some schools have these rules, but unless they are practically enforced, kids get around it.
I worry these laws will result in the worse of both worlds.
We need really well moderated forums for kids, along with practical bans for everything else.
I’m not sure how that happens.
asking households to voluntarily leave is like asking people not to get fat -- ain't gonna work, esp. when mega corporations want you to consume consume consume.
it needs to be a law, and it needs to be enforced.
They wouldn't have a clue. Hell, I personally had this addiction for a long time and it just takes too long to see what a horrible experience it is in the long term. You can argue you should be able to do whatever you want at any age, I'm not the person to say anything about that.
But I totally agree that, as other comments point out, they use it as a justification for all sort of surveillance, I don't really think it is necessary to go that hard because whoever want to get access, they will. It's the internet after all.
That wouldn’t solve anything.
We all agree there's a problem. But simply letting the .gov do whatever it finds convenient will likely not solve the problem any better than any other option, and will likely make a whole bunch of other things way worse.
But that's fine because it's for the children, right?
Such as?
Facebook knew for years its social media was hurting the mental health of teenagers, and not only they doubled down on it because it makes money, they will also face zero consequences.
Corporate self-regulation is a myth.
“It’s for the children” is the siren song of tyranny.
The only person that hasn't degraded is my grandma as the only internet feature she uses are video calls.
https://www.todayville.com/canada-moves-forward-with-digital...
https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/FINA/Brief/B... "Oct 7, 2022 — Recommendation 1: That the government drive economic growth by prioritizing and investing in the government's digital identity mandate."
However its saying digital validation for federal benefits - I mean given the amount of fraud in the US social security system of recent years it seems like having some kind of protection is important to not waste our tax payers benefit. And if you cross the border you are immediately in a digital system in the US.
That said this isn't saying digital identity for websites similar to what AUS is proposing.
It's not really "amazing" at all, when you consider that the working class in those countries has finally woken up to the fact that their biggest present day issues, like housing unaffordability and low purchasing power, have been caused by the intentional fiscal policies of their governments over the last 30+ years, instead of the usual boogeymen (Xi Jinping, Putin, Covid, foreigners, etc), and now the people are trying to hold them accountable for it so the elite are switching tactics now that the ye olde reliable tactic of gaslighting the people doesn't work anymore.
Your request for evidence reminds me when the 3 telco operators in my country raised their prices simultaneously on the same day, and the nation's anti monopoly watchdog said they found no evidence of price fixing lol
You do not need collusion for people with similar aims and interests who look at each other for precedents to behave in the same way.
When has this happened in the countries you listed?
"Oh, but it was 'our team' so it's different."
whatever
The linked Pew Research article also lists YouTube up there. Why not restrict its use by teens as well? It is because it also has wholesome material?
Once you realize their perverse nature where they walk the line of barely useful vs maximizing income, using the application starts to feel icky.
But sadly that knowledge only comes with age and experience.
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