Is it a bad time to mention that sites like stack overflow, discord, sub stack, medium, Reddit, hacker news, GitHub, YouTube, and so forth have the same traits - the same identifying markers - as what we consider traditional social media sites?
How the bill defines social media:
10) (a) "Social media platform" means an online forum that a social media company
160 makes available for an account holder to:
161 (i) create a profile;
162 (ii) upload posts;
163 (iii) view the posts of other account holders; and
164 (iv) interact with other account holders or users.
There’s exceptions for email, Netflix, Amazon, news, traditional media kinds of sites.
> There’s exceptions for email, Netflix, Amazon, news, traditional media kinds of sites.
The fact that there are 20 categories of services exempted shows that this is a terrible bill that is based on punishing specific actors and not regulating data privacy or child wellbeing in a meaningful way.
for reference, line 165 to 224 of that link are the exceptions:
"Social media platform" does not include an online service, website, or application: (i) where the predominant or exclusive function is:
(A) electronic mail; (B) direct messaging [only between two users], (C) a streaming service, (D) news, sports, entertainment, or other content that is preselected by the provider and not user generated, (E) online shopping or e-commerce [when limited to posting reviews and wish lists], (F) interactive gaming, virtual gaming, or an online service, that allows the creation and uploading of content for the purpose of interactive gaming, edutainment, or associated entertainment, (G) photo editing that has an associated photo hosting service, if the interaction with
other users or account holders is generally limited to liking or commenting, (H) a professional creative network for showcasing and discovering artistic content, (J) providing career development opportunities, including professional networking, job skills, learning certifications, and job posting and application services, (K) business to business software, (L) a teleconferencing or videoconferencing service, (M) cloud storage, (N) shared document collaboration, (O) cloud computing services, (P) providing access to or interacting with data visualization platforms, libraries, (Q) to permit comments on a digital news website, if the news content is posted only by the provider of the digital news website, (R) providing or obtaining technical support for a platform, product, or service, (S) academic or scholarly research, (T) genealogical research
I don't know how to judge a bill, but I read this, and it seems that the intent is to broadly ban everything first and then carve out exceptions for almost everything except for a single category: Direct messaging (^B) between MORE than two users for non-creative, non-commercial, non-educational purposes.
AKA forums and memes.
Is that a fair analysis?
[edit] : per privacy advocates - no, I don't think it's okay to start with a law that bans everything and carve out exceptions; obviously, that way lies totalitarianism. I'm just trying to get a handle on the immediate intent. There's a boolean at work here. I guess someone was like, "hey, why chip away at forums and meme sites when we can just ban everything in theory, let most of it slide, and work back toward totalitarianism from there with the law already in place?"
[edit2] HN appears to be totally banhammered under this since /the mods/ don't post the news.
> (F) interactive gaming, virtual gaming, or an online service, that allows the creation and uploading of content for the purpose of interactive gaming, edutainment, or associated entertainment,
Doesn't this loophole even defeat their own hidden agenda? Almost every online game today features a chat function.
Ooh I’m curious to hear more. Do you have inside knowledge, or see widespread evidence of bots? I’ve only seen perhaps a few here and there, almost always downvoted to oblivion.
It's not just bots posting, but other bots upvoting those posts. If it can get on the bottom of the front page for even 5 minutes, that's probably x > 1000 clicks.
It matters because that’s the cutoff in the law. If you want to know why that’s the cutoff in the law, that’s a question for the authors, sponsors, and supporters of the law.
Because every law we write is ultimately arbitrary. Lines have to be drawn through massive swaths of gray area, those lines are entirely arbitrary and should be a sign that making laws like this is pointless.
The 90s Era gun ban that Biden was so proud of is a perfect example. They had to include so many caveats and arbitrary descriptions of what makes a gun an "assault rifle" that manufacturers just dodged the rules with tweaked rifle designs. Something as small as a thumb hole in the grip made a gun legal because of how specific the law had to be.
In this case, what stops a social media company from coming up with some business model where a child company is spun up for every 4.9m users? You could argue its more like Mastodon, a decentralized network that just happens to use the same proprietary protocol, app, and is owned by the same parent Corp.
Marginalium: Some laws are arbitrary, not all. They may all be contingent, which is different from arbitrary. Ultimately, law is a prudential determination of moral principle.
The distinction between arbitrary and contingent is very muddy in a legal sense where arbitrary has a specific meaning related to laws and court decisions. The two relevant definitions of arbitrary are:
> based on or determined by individual preference or convenience rather than by necessity or the intrinsic nature of something
> law : depending on individual discretion (as of a judge) and not fixed by law
A law itself fits the first definition. At best, a law is written by a tiny minority of the population but with the intent of best reflecting the majority opinion or preference.
I'd be really interested to hear an example of a law that is based on necessity or intrinsic nature, though maybe there are a few!
content that is generated by an account holder, or uploaded to or shared on the
270 platform by an account holder, that may be encountered by another account holder;
Guess we should ban all teens from stack overflow, LinkedIn, and hacker news because kids might have toxic interactions online if we don't.
Let's also not mention how the only way to reliably do this is to require identity verification from all adults. Get ready to scan your drivers license to post on hacker news and every other site (except traditional news sites apparently).
Utah is small enough that some sites may just geoblock Utah. I know if I had to choose between collecting every user's ID ever and just adding a block list, I'd go with the second.
Kids can be mean to each other, now or in your day. Next they ban kids from talking to each other in person or having friends. Is that the life you want for your daughter?
>(F) interactive gaming, virtual gaming, or an online service, that allows the creation and uploading of content for the purpose of interactive gaming, edutainment, or associated entertainment,
So Roblox, arguably quite harmful to children, is specifically carved out. That's great.
Highly addictive to my kids for reasons that I can't grok.
Unfettered social interaction with other participants in an unmonitored environment that superficially 'looks' like a video game. This social interaction leads to bullshit purchases. Not purchasing the bullshit leads to peer pressure and bullying.
Is it a technical problem? is it lack of content moderation? or do social networks that are catered towards children simply lead to a toxic environment? I can't say if it's more one or the other, which makes it a challenge to try and fix.
That sounds a lot like any other childhood in my opinion. Sure I wasn't feeling pressured to buy digital assets on an online game but I would noticed when half the school has the same LL Bean fleece jacket or backpack with their initials embroidered on it.
Was there peer pressure and potential for bullying based on what others had? Absolutely. Should a state have intervened with a required mandatory dress code and government-approved backpack? Hell no, there's always going to be peer pressure and bullying no matter how oppressive laws become.
I watch my son play Roblox sometimes. The chat is heavily censored.
He also learned most countries, their capitals, and their flags. And that was just a few servers with "country balls".
I find the YouTube videos involving those far more insidious, because children don't really understand biting sarcasm and satire as well as adults, and I'll often make him switch videos.
But I haven't noticed anything necessarily harmful about Roblox.
Then again, don't they make like a billion dollars a year?
I'm more upset that they screw content creators so badly that the "bullying and peer pressure" seems to be necessary.
Roblox is one of those things that seems impossible on a technical level. And with a billion dollars, they could hire social workers, moderators, etc.
But have you actually played Roblox? It’s absolute toxic trash.
Almost every single game is a front for purchases, and those that aren’t are barely games at all. Many Minecraft mods are one time purchases that are way, way better than anything Roblox produces, but Minecraft is so buggy that it’s truly not suitable for kids, or anyone for that matter. Minecraft will continuously corrupt saves, so you need to fully reinstall the game, and log out of your Xbox/MS account and fail to authorize.
I grew up on counterstrike and StarCraft mods, and there is nothing available today that fills the same role. I’ve played chess implemented in StarCraft, DOTA before it was standalone, and zombies maps that wouldn’t be brought to other shooters for years ahead of time.
My kids aren’t allowed to play games I wouldn’t play. The list of actual-games-that-arent-ads is huge, and there is no need to let in Roblox.
This is such a difficult topic. On one hand I want to give the next generation the same freedoms that I enjoyed but on the other hand the “game” has gotten more… everything. Even adults can’t avoid falling for these traps. I’ve seen with my own eyes someone justifying spending USD 90+ on candy crush saying it isn’t that much compared to bla bla.
It is a frightening thought though to think — am I more conservative than my parents?
I'm certainly not. Though i have different conservations in different directions than they could've ever dreamed possible, i doubt that adds up to anywhere near the real conservatism of watching Bill O'Reilly or god forbid Tucker Carlson every night
considering nintendo and sega cartridges were upwards of 60 1980s US dollars, compared to the amount of "game" we get now for the same price, it's almost a wash.
Freemium games make sure there's enough "there" there to keep casuals almost happy. The trick is to make the $5 and $10 premium purchases let you do around 4-12 hours of gameplay advancement, but that's it. Consider something like Shop heroes (or whatever) where you can put thousands of hours into the game for free, a day or two "skip" for $10 isn't a good value proposition. But skipping a week or a month? maybe after someone has put $10 in a few or several times and gotten that little jolt they want to feel the big jolt of a lot of money.
I know i spent around $100 in the blizzard RMAH (Real Money Auction House) on diablo III and it netted me nothing - nothing at all. So i learned my lesson real quick. Real money for virtual goods is a non-starter.
Now as far as robux goes, I want my child to understand that it's ok to pay people for their work (designing the levels, making items/skins). So he can choose to spend his money on hotwheels, paints, robux, google giftcards, whatever, $5 at a time. I do sometimes make a frowny face when he chooses robux, though; because as i said, a billion dollars!
I would not let my child pay for in app purchases period. They are entirely built to trigger the same broken mental pathways as gambling and we generally try to avoid letting kids gamble
> Minecraft is so buggy that it’s truly not suitable for kids, or anyone for that matter.
> Minecraft will continuously corrupt saves you need to fully reinstall the game
I don't recognize the game you are describing. I've never heard of a paid minecraft mod, they're all free. Buggy? It has some odd in-game behavior that you could reasonably call bugs, but the only crashes I've ever gotten were during modding, caused by incompatible or low quality mods. Corrupting saves? I've never experienced it, nor can I imagine how a corrupted save would be addressed by reinstalling the game. What is the supposed connection between a save file being corrupted and needing to reinstall the entire game?
You've obviously got some strange prejudices about this game which simply don't resemble reality.
Sure sounds like a game that will suck and go unplayed if kids just aren't allowed to click the buy button. Children don't have to have access to spend money online and a parent is well within their right already to not add a credit card.
That one change would make Robolox a terrible game based on how you described it. Isn't that problem solved without the need for a complex law full of arbitrary definitions and one-off carve outs?
There's a game engine/a large variety of games combined with a common community. The games can be silly, but they're silly with other people who recognize they're silly, and others who aren't in on the joke yet
My kids never paid anything on roblox. Also, the bullying you describe sounds like issue with real world bullies in group ofnkids your kids know personally. That sux and is hard to fix, but blaming roblox is weird. I would blame those kids parents.
Basically every negative aspect of modern gaming at once. Loot boxes, exploitative use of user-created content, unmoderated interaction between adults and children, free-to-play treadmilling to peer pressure children into spending money, etc etc.
The church is often on their "team" so it gets a pass for rampant child abuse. Notice none of the groomer allegations are directed at the church despite the church abusing exponentially more children than people in drag. There is no global drag organization which is protecting members found to be abusing children by moving them into new areas where people don't know their priest is a pedophile the way we see in the church. If the "protect children" cries were honest, the churches and clergy should be one of the primary targets.
> Nearly 1,700 priests and other clergy members that the Roman Catholic Church considers credibly accused of child sexual abuse are living under the radar with little to no oversight from religious authorities or law enforcement, decades after the first wave of the church abuse scandal roiled U.S. dioceses, an Associated Press investigation has found.
> These priests, deacons, monks and lay people now teach middle-school math. They counsel survivors of sexual assault. They work as nurses and volunteer at nonprofits aimed at helping at-risk kids. They live next to playgrounds and daycare centers. They foster and care for children.
> And in their time since leaving the church, dozens have committed crimes, including sexual assault and possessing child pornography, the AP’s analysis found.
(G) photo editing that has an associated photo hosting service, if the interaction with
other users or account holders is generally limited to liking or commenting
Does this mean the 2012 version of Instagram is rendered immune to this law thanks to this obnoxious Google Photos carveout?
LOL, according to this, my family's group text thread is illegal under this law, as DMs can only be between 2 people.
EDIT: serious question; would Slack be professional networking or, how does that work under this bill? It's DMing for business, but it isn't really networking.
> (I) shared between the sender and the recipient;
171 (II) only visible to the sender and the recipient; and
172 (III) are not posted publicly;
maybe sender and recipient can be considered a group chat with multiple recipients? Otherwise you wouldn't classify something like Kik or Discord as social media.
Group chats wouldn't be illegal, that's not an online service where you sign up and make a profile etc. This applies only to sites that would serve you random content from random users... i.e. Social Media.
The list of bills that don't require long lists of arbitrary definitions and exceptions is ridiculously small.
Making laws that cover millions of people is way too complex for something so detailed. There's no way around that complexity leading to a pile of garbage legal mumbo-jumbo as they realize it's nearly impossible to draw a neat line around the problem.
This is the area that gets grey. If the provide applies any filter or AI judgement it becomes preselected. This applies to tiktok, facebook, youtube and ig.
This law bans old school forums and reddit but not if results are displayed by "best match"
I’m not opposed to the idea of whitelisting healthy online activities and limiting anything else. They could go further and whitelist sites like HN, arch forums etc where it’s educational
Sibling comment mentioned how group chats aren’t exempted. I’ve seen group chats get very unhealthy before. 2 is low, maybe 5 or 8 participants max would be ok.
I hope you realize that every adult in the state will now have to verify their state ID to use an account on virtually any website so that the site can prove they're only serving adults. These lists of IDs will leak.
I mean when teens/children congregate in large numbers anywhere they get unhealthy. Like it or not, the digital realm is part of life and they have to learn to handle disagreements, toxic people, etc. at some point. If their adults won't supervise them/help them, that's on the adults. If they can't, then our society needs to start educating adults on how to parent in the digital age. But that would be slow and cost $$$ and possibly empower the populace, so we won't do it.
Given how the government reps talked (hah) to the TikTok CEO, and some of the speeches leading up to that farce, I’m pretty convinced it’s entirely intentional.
It gives power and eyeballs back to the entrenched traditional media moguls.
There won’t be any. Look, it’s fun to imagine these shitty lawmakers getting bit by their own laws applied to the letter but that’s not how it will go. The law will only ever be enforced against social media platforms they see as threatening their ability to shelter their kids.
I think it says a lot about any politician that pushes for laws that are meant to be selectively enforced.
> Look, it’s fun to imagine these shitty lawmakers getting bit by their own laws applied to the letter but that’s not how it will go. The law will only ever be enforced against social media platforms they see as threatening their ability to shelter their kids.
It’ll be enforced against whoever individual citizens decide to enforce it against; its a purely private right of action.
Ah, that's the carveout against the 1st amendment.
Conservatives have discovered that the constitution only binds the state, so if they delegate enforcement to private lawsuits they can completely bypass protections.
I don't understand how any court allows this interpretation to exist. If a state deputizes a person to act against the rights of others, that person is acting as the state, and should be bound as the state is bound. Otherwise the state can abrogate all limitations on its powers by deputizing people or companies.
Because it turns out a lot of the higher courts in the US are absolutely captured by people who let their religion and or ideology and or private opinion affect their judicial decrees. This has been the case since even before Dread Scott though so I don't know why we have ever pretended otherwise
I haven't read the bills yet but according to the article it applies to children under 18.
17-year-old me would have considered this draconian bullsh*t, for the same reasons I would now. (So does dad me, incidentally. My kid's messages have always been her business, not mine.)
> 17-year-old me would have considered this draconian bullsht, for the same reasons I would now.
If anyone thinks that this bill is going to keep 17 year olds from accessing everything from Reddit to GitHub, they are going to be very disappointed.
It's kind of wild to see so much of these comments insisting that anyone under the age of 18 be locked up and prevented from accessing basic internet sites and* encouraging laws that would force every site to implement strict ID verification just to use it.
Did everyone just forget what it was like to grow up with draconian content blockers at school preventing you from getting to benign information on the internet?
most school content blockers were pretty easily bypassed in my experience. i was in school relatively recently, my highschool had fortinet which sucked (sni blocking + blocks a bunch of protocols), but tor still got through if i used a bridge. i probably could've used a vpn but tor was easier. before highschool there wasn't anything more than dns filtering (and briefly http host blocking but not sni blocking) which was bypassed by approximately everyone (who wanted to bypass it). most people used random vpn apps, i changed dns, both worked fine.
> I'm sure many of us wouldn't have been a programmer if we hadn't had access to SO/Github around 17.
I'm sure many of us didn't have any access to StackOverflow and GitHub when we were around 17 years old, because StackOverflow and GitHub didn't exist yet. For several of us, git didn't exist yet. Heck, for some of us, the web didn't exist yet!
I’m kind of surprised but also not surprised in the outrage over the “draconian bulls*t.” The problem I have as a parent is that I can see it causing real social damage to adults around me, my own kids, and kids around my kids. Anti-social behavior, Disrespect for authority, extreme violence is easy to see and normalized (stuff that would normally be considered traumatic), wokeness and anti-wokeness is normalized (must we all have such strong opinions?). I’m talking behavior way more at extreme ends of the polarized spectrum and at earlier ages than what I grew up around.
It’s basically force-fed opinions at a global scale, how can that possibly be healthy? We can barely fathom how this media impacts adults as it stands. All this clear evidence aside, I feel like it’s obvious, how can the absence of these things do any measurable harm to kids?
Regardless of your ethical stance on the subject, it would be a good exercise to consider who you're ok with determining what kind of content your children can view. Allowing a government to step in to pass laws like this is a draconian step too far.
As a parent do you not already have all the tools you need to ensure your children don't use tik Tok? From the light touch and mundane, using the built in features of the operating system (parental blockers and app timers are available on Android and IOS) to the heavy touch of not allowing your kid to have a smartphone.
Why do you want the government taking over this role for you? Maybe there's some parents who don't care if their children are on tik tok. Why should they follow the same parental strategy you have?
I do think this a reasonable rebuttal, but there must be some middle ground here. Generally speaking, I can block TikTok sure, but because it’s so ubiquitous, my kids are ostracized because all their friends have access to it, they still pass around the content like drugs, alcohol and tobacco. It almost becomes one of those things that because they’re not allowed to have access to it, it does just as much damage, socially.
There are three general categories of parents on this, and to be clear, I don’t think any of these are bad parents:
1. Those who are extremely weary and tech savvy, like myself
2. Those who are weary but have no earthly idea how to set up these controls effectively.
3. Those who don’t give a f*all about it at all.
I tend to believe it’s just as bad but it’s about as misunderstood as tobacco used to be. The industry KNOWS it’s bad for kids, it’s been proven bad for kids but it’s peddled to them anyway.
All that aside, let’s just say hypothetically I wanted to manage this all myself and wanted the government out of it, sounds good in theory. The tooling around limiting inappropriate content is mind-blowingly inadequate. At the very least this should be mandatory and more concretely standardized. I’m not flatly against giving kids some access to it but it’s reached a point where my kids can’t even do their homework at all without full access to all of Youtube which by itself has loads of content not remotely appropriate for elementary school kids. Youtube kids is a joke.
It’s pretty frustrating as a parent to manage content restrictions for the 3-4 major browsers, search engines, youtube, messenging apps, iphones, macbook, windows app store, and so on. This could be a full time job. Then, the kids bring home a school provided chromebook or login to chrome with a school account which has no content restrictions at all and I have zero control over anyway. Honestly, parental controls in the current state is largely a waste of time.
The overhead of managing content restrictions on families devices is a very good point. I'll be reaching this stage soon and I'm not looking forward to this additional task.
I also think state sponsored content moderation should be used to restrict access to harmful online media as opposed to lumbering this task on individuals. As you've mentioned, some parents need this enforced upon them.
If we were talking about vaping, which is still highly unregulated and available for children to buy, I'm sure the majority would be in agreement about age restrictions. The fact that we're talking about preventing psychological addiction and trauma makes it harder for people to agree on the harmful effects of this type of content. It's simply not as visible as the huge plumes of oil-steam breathed out by every 12 year old in a bus stop these days.
However, I don't agree with the implementation of content moderation proposed by Utah state. It's totally unworkable and poorly thought through.
Yes, parental controls are not are replacement for teaching kids why this stuff is damaging. It’s not an excuse to be lazy parents. Kids need to hear their parents say it (with the why). Setting limits instead outright blocking can be helpful. It sets the stage for letting the kid decide if they would consider what they just watched be viewed as inappropriate, which believe or not does happen, but some content really shouldn’t be available to them at all.
This probably varies depending on where you live, but where I grew up (in a small town in the UK), the vast majority of 13 year olds did have access to drugs, alcohol and tobacco (which didn't necessarily mean the vast majority were indulging in those things, but they were definitely available).
I mean it’s somewhat true, if it were legal for 12 year olds to have these things AND it was marketed toward them, way more kids would be have it than not. That’s not to say they can’t get it now, but it’s harder and somewhat self regulating because the stigma around doing something illegal.
This doesn’t invalidate your point (I think your correct that making it illegal provides a disincentive and reduces overall uptake), but I should note that making something legal does not necessarily mean making it legal to market it towards kids.
Case in point being that here in the UK it is illegal to market tobacco products at all (including to adults in this case). This also applies to politicians, prescriptions medicine and a bunch of other things. And IMO it’s often a good compromise that allows for harm reduction without outright banning something.
I also want to recognize that in the case of Utah’s implementation，it likely doesn’t have my best interests in mind so I do see your point. There’s always a possibility of an agenda which isn’t necessarily “good for kids.”
Maybe what we should focus on is more standardization, effectiveness of controls and requiring these trillion dollar companies to build parents one single pane of glass to monitor and control content for all platforms. May not even be feasible but it really just sounds like another engineering challenge that requires a major investment to get it done.
Wow I'm almost 50 and I have been interacting through forums (first one on minitel when I was 12), bbs, newsgroup since I was a young teenager. Maybe github or stackoverflow didn't exist but they were plenty of cool places where to exchange.
Haha...I learned when the web was mainly AOL. MSN at the time had pretty good forums which helped a lot. But the main place I was learning programming from was books, but they were expensive - especially for a college kid. When I would run into problems I couldn't solve I would head to the book store with a pencil and paper and copy bits and pieces that I hoped would help. Then head back home and try again (talk about a long debug run loop). Luckily this was around the same time of the rise of big bookstores where they encouraged hanging out so no one ever questioned me.
I remember having to send an email to the admin of sourceforge for permission to have a project and thus CVS access. "Please sir may I contribute to open source?"
Many of us, older people, had access to similar things that made us interested... in the 70/80's it was computer magazines (paper magazines, that is) as people got their first home computers and could follow along programming examples, play games etc. If you ran into trouble, you needed either help from someone you already knew or you would have to find a book or manual.
In the 90's most teens already had access to a primitive internet where they could chat with anyone in the world using BBS[1], which was not too different from a modern social network. Email was already a thing as well for some time, but probably became widespread at this time... by the late 90's the internet was already quite similar to today for geeks, except perhaps videos (and even high resolution pics) were not a thing due to the low speed of the net.
StackOverflow and GitHub only came around in the late 2000's, which is basically yesterday. Before them, there were similar sites as well (the infamous expertsexchange for SO, and SourceFourge for GH, for example) for quite some time, but they surely became very dominant in their areas.
And I know these. I'm not "punched card old" but I did start learning programming before SO got traction. And I remember how big the difference SO made for my own learning/career path, compared to mailing lists.
As a side note, my first intern job was to make a localized ripoff of SO (within a team, of course). It was still a relatively shining new thing by the time.
Cool... it's just that your comment seems to imply that a lot of programmers were learning their basics when SO was already there to help us... that's only true for those of us lucky enough to be really young, like in their 20's :D. Hope you understand many of us are well past that and watched GH and SO take over the world as a very recent phenonenom.
Uh, yes, this is why I said "many of us" not "most of us". (not sure why i need to repeat this...) Of course I know people who are in 20s are not necessarily the absolute majority of HN. But there are still many of them.
Oh I have a lot of ideas. I started learning programming before Stackoverflow got traction. Plus I'm not a native speaker and by the time I didn't really speak English at all. So I practically needed to learn what "Reached end of file while parsing" means in plain English, then tried to find out that I had missed a semicolon :'(
Reddit is also an incredible resource for niche, constructive topics like learning how to build a computer. You could draw the line anywhere you want for social media.
I mean, this is why it's a common thing to append reddit.com to your google searchs nowadays. Seeing how others solved problems or getting a feel for their opinions on certain things is actually super useful.
> I’m sure our parents would have all let us sign up for a programming site. This bill still allows for that.
But would the site let you sign up if even with parental permission if it had to do additional identification verification to identify that the permission was from your parent, and was liable for (1) actual damages if you got addicted [0] because of some element of their site design, and (2) huge ($250,000 per feature) penalties if they also didn’t do quarterly audits to identify, and within 30 days after identification eliminate, any feature which might addict you?
How many programming sites see minors in general, much less Utah minors specifically, as that important to their mission to take on the extra costs and risks this bill imposes on serving that population?
[0] Using an intentionally broad definition of addiction
You underestimate how hard it might be to get your parent to sign some weird consent form from a "github" site, especially if it asks for a picture of the parent's ID (to ensure the kid isn't accepting the terms on their own behalf).
Technically it's not spelled out, but chances are Utah law enforcement / regulators won't accept a tech company's measures if a kid can just say another one of their own emails is their parents' and can then consent to the social media access themselves. Everyone affected by this will likely outsource it to a company like Stripe with their Identity product, where you're entrusting Stripe to do the ID verification and to delete the data once it's been verified.
The good part about the COPPA law is that it's an IQ test. If you're under 13, you have to be smart enough to understand that it's a "don't ask don't tell" situation and know to keep quiet. I did when I was 10 and joined Yahoo (the most popular social media site at the time) so I could have a Geocities web site and play fantasy baseball.
I'd suggest that teens in Utah just use a VPN but social media sites have been cracking down on VPN users for years and many of those sites now require phone number verification to sign up. This law illustrates yet another reason why that's a bad idea.
Looking back on my youth, I think these age verification check boxes were my earliest disregard for authority. I understood the checkboxes were there because there was a law that wanted to prevent me from accessing an online service. I thought the law was stupid, and after contemplating it for days decided to ignore it.
I probably wouldn't be a programmer without ordering floppy disks full of random source code by post from software-by-post catalogues - one letter to ask for a catalogue, get the catalogue in the post, send them a letter with your order and a cheque and receive a bunch of disks a week later...
Reading these comments about people relying on SO - a site founded in 2008 - at age 11, doesn't make me feel any younger, and I'm not even that old (inching closer and closer to my mid-30s). I got into Linux and bash/Python scripting by following tutorials on random shady sites and reading official documentation and manpages. Let's just say it wasn't as seamless as Googling an issue and having a SO thread directly answer my question.
Yes, I do realize I now sound like I just said "back in my day, we walked to school, uphill both ways".
Right? I learned through reading browser documentation in elementary school when CSS and JavaScript were implemented and then running to my dad or internet forums/chat rooms when I ran into topics or problems I didn't understand. None of us knew what we were doing. It was great.
"I feel old" on the internet can mean 15yo to 80yo, so you have all the right to feel old at mid-30s lol
When I learned my second programming language (JavaScript), I asked most of my questions via a mailing list. It's quite weird trying to recall it... I almost forgot how mailing list work today.
Yea, it was actually wild when SO came out, because I'd been teaching myself lua pretty much independently, and by the time I got to high school, SO just barely on its way out and immediately everything was a lot easier.
Old man yells at cloud, but kids these day won't even have to look at code, everything will be filtered through natural language.
Certainly you participated in related forums right? Before SO I was much more involved in online communities like https://gamedev.net/ which are also at risk due to this sort of bill.
I actually did not, for some reason. I was on a bunch of phpBB forums in high school, but none surrounding programming/tech. I was obsessed with music and gaming way more than IT stuff, back then. I initially learned programming more as a means to an end (my first scripts were to automate backups to an external drive, transfer stuff between Windows/Linux, that kind of stuff), and just generally for my own enjoyment, than a real plan to do anything with it. I don't even think I realized it was a potential career path before I was already out of high school lol
90%+ of the useful interactions I have with other humans working on interesting problems is through Discord these days. If I have an issue with a library, or run into a tough to solve physics problem, basically anything where I might want to talk to someone more knowledgeable or experienced than me the answer is hop on a discord server and ask. It's absolutely asinine to deny this resource to kids.
At least we're teaching kids the basics of computer security by forcing them to circumvent these restrictions, and I have full faith than they will. Most kids are much more technologically literate than someone who would unironically type "groomercord".
Discord is where my friend runs his youth DM games where he carves out a safe space for teens to dip their feet into playing D&D and having healthy interactions with adults on his discord server. We keep it PG-13 and it’s fun. I’ve been giving a kid pointers on AI art generation.
It’d be sad if all them got run off because of hysteria about them being “groomed”.
Ends up being this weird blend of "disturbing kid crack" videos that you really shouldn't leave a child unattended with. The whole "Peppa Pig Drinks Bleach" stuff was only the shallow end of the darkness of the stuff generally tossed in the "Elsagate" category.
There is no "safe" way for a... oh, 2-7 year old, I'll be nice, to use the internet unattended. I've seen an awful lot of it out and about.
I've found YouTube kids content to be significantly worse than general YouTube content. Not to say that there isn't a lot of content inappropriate for kids on YouTube, but the Kids version is explicitly designed to target kids with addictive content. The advertisers targeting children for their products is brutal on YouTube Kids. Since pushing my kids onto the full YouTube, they are consuming better content.
If Github wasn’t confident that (10)(b)(i)(N) excluded them from coverage, they probably wouldn’t allow Utah minors to use the site at all (and the same would be true of any other covered or potentially covered site) because, even if they are allowed parental access, of the civil penalty and actual damages for “causing addiction” (under the statute’s non-clinical definition of “addiction”), only the civil penalty portion of which is avoidable with costly quarterly audits. It is a whole bunch of dumbass liability that can be almost entirely mitigated by excluding Utah minors, and if that does economic and developmental harm to Utah, that’s not the sites’ problem.
Hacker News had a good run. I'm going to miss it when it's decided that tracking enough PII on its users to be compliant with this law (and the ones that will follow) is more trouble than it's worth to Y-Combinator, but so it goes.
The open forum era was a grand experiment, and the experiment is winding down.
Can you not just vpn in to Canada with me for the time being? I mean hopefully they don’t implement it site wide for all regions I can’t imagine them doing that.
This is a Utah law and for now I don’t think most companies will implement it site wide but rather just comply with state laws. So vpn into Canada would not trigger the age verification.
That won't be sufficient for companies to comply with the law. The way Utah's law is structured it is incumbent upon the company to determine whether a user is a Utah citizen or not. I haven't seen anything to suggest the courts will decide that a simple IP address filter is sufficient to be considered compliant.
There is a point to be made that anything coming from Meta is just designed by its makers to destroy your mental health for ad clicks. Other companies do not have such toxic business model even Tiktok.
Stack overflow and GitHub both allow you to make public posts and interact with others. The text targets public user posts and interactions between users explicitly.
Whether the consequences are intentional or not is still to be determined.
Well, here’s their definition of such a company (from the same link):
155 (9) "Social media company" means a person or entity that:
156 (a) provides a social media platform that has at least 5,000,000 account holders
157 worldwide; and
158 (b) is an interactive computer service.
So, size is really the only relevant discriminator.
> None of which clearly protect GH or SO, the subjects of this thread branch.
I disagree, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35310413 (especially considering that because this law creates a penalty, and because it restricts speech, its definitions of the covered parties and conduct must be read narrowly – and its exceptions read broadly [0] – per the rule of lenity in statutory construction.)
[0] if, in the first instance, it is Constitutional at all.
I don’t consider Reddit, HN, etc. to be social media, at all. There might be media, but there is no social. Social requires a network of real people. You can’t prove that anyone on these sites is a real person, other than yourself. Maybe I, and everyone else on here, is a bot. When everyone is anonymous, there is no network. And, not only is everyone anonymous, but there are no connections. To the best of my knowledge I have never read a post or comment from the same “person” twice. Every single interaction might as well be (and probably is) our first interaction on the site, ever. Complete strangers passing in the dark.
Reddit used to have an actual community, things like in person meetups and its own culture based on various in-jokes (bacon,narwhals, etc) and behavior expectations. It was pretty social I'd say, though now it's basically just an aggreator and not that different from google news for various interests.
Can a site without discrete named accounts, where everyone is called 'Anonymous', claim that there's no way to verify whether the content is generated by humans? It's basically the 4chan model.
If we ignore the content associated with them, 4chan and other imageboards are actually a nice low-speed format for casual online interaction: the content is divided into threads, the board catalog can only hold some amount of active threads, threads have a finite lifespan measured by post count, threads are auto-pruned after a while, there's no secret sauce algorithm to game your attention span (catalog has simple rules for sorting by thread activity and such), visual content is limited, etc.
How the bill defines social media:
10) (a) "Social media platform" means an online forum that a social media company 160 makes available for an account holder to: 161 (i) create a profile; 162 (ii) upload posts; 163 (iii) view the posts of other account holders; and 164 (iv) interact with other account holders or users.
There’s exceptions for email, Netflix, Amazon, news, traditional media kinds of sites.
https://le.utah.gov/~2023/bills/static/HB0311.html