RetroFedWe lost, big tech won
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EXCLUSIVE: EU could announce social media ban for kids in September
Von der Leyen is expected to use her annual State of the Union speech to unveil plans for EU-wide age restrictions on social media
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Should be banning endless manipulative opaque algorithmic presentations for everyone.
Require age verification only if you want to get algorithmic recommendations. That way you can still engage in the social internet anonymously as an adult.
The recommendation algorithms give American big tech way too much political sway in Europe and ideally they should be banned entirely, but age verification at least gives the appearance that this is “for the children” and not something with (justifiable) political motivations.
But its not age verification thats actually being implemented. It’s identity verification mislabelled to take advantage of dumb legislation with yet more privacy over reach.
Yeah. Honestly. For platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, mandate chronological feeds of only people you have followed, paginated at like 30.
And mandate they integrate with interoperability standards like activitypub etc so if they start manipulating feeds then we can just exit stage left without losing contact with people we like.
But… That would force them to provide a great user experience in order to retain users!! That’s an unacceptable burden on the largest companies in the world!!
Literally 1984. Those who will refuse to sell their private info to big capitalist will be limited, thus they will be information restricted.
Can we not stay up to date with what is happening without owning a social media account? I think the only thing we are missing is social media trends that change frequently.
Not even close. This will fragment the internet and take power away from surveillance capitalists. A huge amount of people will simply disengage from the Epstein class brainwashing. I’m looking forward to it. The internet used to be way more interesting and fun when it was fragmented.
Maybe more akin to Brave New World, and the “savages” who don’t live in the fucked up society they created.
Just minus the soma holidays
It’s not an age restriction. It’s a mandatory ID for everybody. They know we hate them, and are afraid. Perhaps they should make a law against killer drones instead.
While this is obviously bad, I don’t think there’s ever really a total win or loss when it comes to this stuff. It’s a constant fight. They’ll bring shit like this in and it’ll seem hopeless, then someone will bypass it and it’ll go back and forth. Same as ad blocking or DRM or countless other things.
It’d be nice to not have to deal with it in the first place, but we’ll deal with it sooner or later I’m sure.
It should be dependent on the sites offering adult material to have an account with a login. All other non-adult sites keep operating as before and kids can peruse freely. If a kid steals a password that’s a kid thing, not a system thing. Nothing is foolproof and people get slapped in the face with shit they don’t want to see all the time. Education and proper implementation is the key, not restriction and censorship.
Adoption is perhaps the impetus needed for common sense to prevail. If everyone keeps spending all their money at a partcular casino, they aren’t going to change a thing. But if everyone stopped coming, you can be damn sure they start looking at what they can reform. Nothing improves if people don’t start to care about the security of their PII. That’s a huge rock.
Yeah. For sure. Nothing is simply black and white anymore. Lots to consider.
Now to ban it for all the other age groups, too. /s but only kinda
Kinda with you in spirit. How I think about it is… it is harmful for both adults and children. Esp in big-tech co form. FB, IG, TT, X, and w/e. There’s a lot of research about it. But the cure can be worse than the disease. What the EU wants to do is not the right answer to address the immense harms of social media to our world.
Both the US and Canada have similar bills on boil. Both are also terrible ideas.
I would never have believed it possible that almost all politicians of ostensibly democratic countries almost simultaneously agree to prevent young people from having fun, being happy and finding meaning and fulfillment in their lives. How do these people think of themselves as the good guys?
Hasn’t virtually every single study ever performed on the subject found a strong, direct link between unhappiness and social media use?
From what I’ve seen, the answer is it’s complicated. On avg, you’re right, and it prob does cause unhappiness and mental health probs. But there are unique situations where it can be helpful. Ex, people who do not fit norms of thier peers, and find healthy connections with others more like themselves. So it has no single, simple universal answer.
The algos, esp on big tech social media like FB, IG, TT, X, etc, are very much designed to make you unhappy and outraged. Even the data scientists who designed the algos have testified to that fact before the US congress. B/c anger and outrage is the most powerful way to make you engage more. TT’s internal research shows the more you use TT, the more probs you have with cognitive skills like memory formation, empathy, and anxiety.
Ofc, the harms of social media doesn’t mean these bills are the right way to handle that. I believe we have a prob. But this is not the right solution.
Depends what counts as social media. YouTube could very much be implicated as a social media. Reddit/Lemmy obviously. There’s a ton of legitimately educational material on both platforms. What about Steam? With chat/friends/community function, isn’t that a social media? Where is the line drawn?
How well have these studies accounted for neuro-divergence in kids (something Europe has generally done a pretty poor job accommodating)? What about kids with certain disabilities that put them indoors often if not essentially always? Isn’t the isolation worse for their mental health?
Is there not some point at which you really do just have to depend on parents being parents? I accept that some state involvement is necessary sometimes, but this really feels pretty solidly in the purview of something that should be up to parental judgement.
Youtube is a massive problem for boys. There may be a couple of educational things on there but it’s adjacent to awful recommended content.
I would debate the value of the “educational” content as well. We certainly aren’t getting smarter through the internet. Read a book, find a mentor, stay in school.
So is it worth losing access to Veritasium, Extra History, Professor Dave Explains, countless sources for learning programming…? This is like banning kids from TV because Jackass exists. It’s always been parents’ job to help guide their kids towards media that is more wholesome and fulfilling rather than tripe.
True of books, too, by the way… the written word isn’t an automatically higher art. Pulp has always been a thing, and anyone who actually does do a lot of reading can confirm there is a lot of tripe out there right now in book form.
Learning to use digital content is a big part of school. It isn’t the 70’s anymore. This is like pushing for abstinence only education… it is pretty much proven, from sex ed to drugs, not to work. You need to teach responsible use.
Youtube as a platform is trash (in my opinion). Not to say there aren’t some gems in there.
I’m not familiar with the channels you mentioned but trust your judgment. I would love to see a platform curated with high quality content.
“Hey mom and dad can I use ‘historyTube’” “Absolutely!”
Easy.
The analogies don’t really hold. Traditional Broadcasters have some standards. Jackass is Disney compared to the back alley swamp that is YouTube.
Think about the experience of going into a library or bookstore vs. YouTube, the content mix is not comparable.
The algorithms, content scale, and access is another world.
Nebula. It isn’t perfect, and it needs more creators, but that’s the closest I’ve come.
Well, not if it’s banned as social media, that’s the issue.
Broadcasters did because they had laws restricting their content. Cable very much did not.
My experience is that the stuff pushed by most libraries as their hot new items, things to read, general recommendations, are pretty much slop. Romantasy slop is a big genre all its own.
Which isn’t to say people can’t enjoy it, but it really isn’t much better than YouTube slop.
Now that, I agree is an issue, but that’s just as true for adults as we’ve seen. I’d have less issue restricting how algorithms are pushed than mandatory ID… it would benefit all of society, not just kids, and it’s actually a positive improvement on privacy since it disincentivizes profile building.
Speak for yourself. I am, without a doubt.
To a large degree, yes, but blanket bans on social media use for minors will fail for multiple reasons.
On the bright side, young people are learning about circumventing government censorship.
Very true, but that may make things worse down the line. Once they realize that kids are circumventing their restrictions, they won’t think, "Hmm, maybe a blanket ban of social media for minors wasn’t a great idea." They’re just going to double down and say that there needs to be more hardcore restrictions on all internet/computer activity. More sensorship, more data harvesting, mandatory governement spyware in all devices.
Essentially the Great Firewall in China. Many governments have already expressed interest in modeling national internet access after China.
Point 3:
Adults have been making the outside more and more hostile for kids. There’s no more third spaces. So like you said, they’re removing a third space with nothing to replace it with.
I wonder how much more effective the Australian ban will be when peer countries follow suite and erodes network effect.
If that is so, which I do not know, the only logical explanation is that people who are already unhappy, for unrelated reasons, are more likely to need to find at least some happiness in their lives by participating in online communities.
because these are not democratic countries, these countries are the same that gave birth to fascism and pushed for years for the surveillance state you so fondly complain about in china, the same countries that kill people based on metadata, this is the logical conclusion. as always, ewwwrope is filled to the brim with the flowery phrases of rhetoric and not actual praxis on any meaningful thing that could imply the wellbeing of their citizens.
Most people support these social media age gates:
https://documents.leger360.com/hubfs/%C3%89tudes%20M%C3%A9diatiques/%C3%89tudes%20M%C3%A9diatiques%20-%202026/5.%20%C3%89tudes%20M%C3%A9diatiques%20Mai/Leger_Social_Media_Ban_2026.pdf (page 11)
this poll is for canada, not the eu, but I couldn’t find good polling for the EU.
So how is that going to work exactly?
Facebook is easy, you force the company or block it.
But how about, say, Lemmy, or other self hosted places maybe where where people do use their real names? How is any of this supposed to work?
Well… how many Lemmy instances are hosted in the EU, Canada, USA, Australia, UK, …? They can be threatened under the full power of the state, unless they req ID checks.
OK, you may say, just use one in Tuvalu! But someone below mentioned it. Govs will not think, gosh darn it! I guess we got foiled by those rascally nerds! Pack it up guys, we lost! No, they will double down. They will create national firewalls. VPN bans. Already the UK, and Utah in the USA are pushing for VPN bans. They will make examples of people, to deter the rest.
It’s very hard to solve political probs with technical methods.
I’ve been trying to capitalize on the commotion about all this in /r/privacy to bring more people to Lemmy. I’ve converted at least one redditor already!
For one, they want all our data, they want to know all we do online.
For other, they found out children who grew exposed to people’s opinions online grows more critical that kids that grew on they caged propaganda. Not good for their business to have citizens that can actually think.
So your take is that social media is actually good for kids? Any citation for this?
Without access to that the children view of the world gets limited by what their parent’s and their government said. It’s just basic logic .
Anyway if you want to talk in papers,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK594763/
This says that social media have both GOOD and BAD effects on kids and teenagers. Both.
I hate EU. Nothing but bad news from them.
I don’t know where u live but EU brings good things too. Go and ask the Brits who are mourning the departure they voted for 10 years ago. Of course there are a lot of things that could be improved but that is the responsibility of us citizens.
African folks love the kindness of Europeans.
… is a statement which, even if correct, contributes absolutely nothing to the current debate. Feel free to open your own thread about it.
There is a difference between psyops that make you think EU only does bad things and reality. EU has been the most successful peace project in history. It has lifted millions of people out of poverty too. There will always be political tensions and work to be done. We can never rest on our laurels but if you honestly believe what you wrote, then congrats you’ve been brainwashed by the Epstein class.
As an American, I envy their news
Strange title. Big tech lost huge on this. They want to advertise to your kids. These bans make sense to protect the vulnerable.
A) It’s very unlikely to actually stop kids from accessing social media. VPN’s, purchasing blackmarket accounts that have already been verified, classic fake ID’s (in the age of AI generated images, no less). So they’ll just keep building profiles for them anyway (it’s already known they do this now for people not actually signed up with social media, their trackers are all over the web and it’s easy to build a profile without concerted effort against it). Why do we always think “this time for sure forcing abstinence will work!”? It never does.
B) In addition to not actually stopping building profiles on kids, it now hands them a goldmine of information on adults. Mandates it, even. Data leaks are going to get a lot more “fun”…
How would a VPN help at all if you still need an ID?
And maybe I’m wrong but I find it hard to believe that kids will purchase black market accounts for this. Aren’t the IDs verified by a gov database? Anyone selling the account would be legally responsible for it and identifiable.
This is different from pirating stuff where no IDs are involved.
They’d sell accounts with other people’s ID? Those will inevitably get leaked. So for example your ID will get leaked and used and you’ll be the one to face the consequences. This is not new at all.
The VPN works because you can use the service in another country that doesn’t require digital ID.
Ah that makes sense.
Honestly, in 2026 do you really think this won’t be subverted?
VPN to countries that don’t require identification. Done.
Kids have been buying accounts for years now. It isn’t new. See: WoW. This isn’t anything new, just a new market for it.
lol regarding holding anyone legally responsible. Good luck is all I can say. The US doesn’t prosecute firearms owners who claim a stolen gun that was involved in a crime, only in very clear (and especially stupid) cases. No chance this happens with social media accounts. Just none, on any wide scale.
And again, pretty easy to AI generate an ID these days… kids were doing this in the 70s and it was way, way harder back then.
And this is at the cost of mandatory handing of IDs to big tech that will inevitably leak. Are you comfortable posting a picture of your ID right here? If not, you should be no more comfortable handing your ID to Facebook.
I’m not willing up give up my right to privacy because someone else is a shitty parent, sorry. I’ll subvert it because it’s unethical.
Holy shit, is this what people actually believe?
That’s honestly wild.
For sure. Reddit doesn’t start “testing” it just for sport.
Where have I seen such worldwide concerted action among all governments and corporations. Ah yes, when China “leaked” a virus.
Did they save lives?
or
Did they put us in house arrest?
And they put people in house arrest, because… ? I just saw tanks being transported on public-roads today. So the reason couldn’t be to covertly move weapons: that goes on in public, in broad daylight and that transit sits alongside vans delivering ice-creams to convenience stores. So, the big cabal wanted to put people under house arrest… to do what?
Pick up a book. Pandemics aren’t new and neither is the orchestrated response to them by governing bodies. History can be a good reference.
So they used medieval techniques got it.
Well they didn’t, but concerning your teensy little pee brain of yours, could as well have.
I know they did the same in 1919, that’s barely 20th century. And an entire century of medical progress early.
Maybe you can clarify what your point here actually is?
op seems to think that pandemic response is tradition based, rather than science based.
tradition as like in 1919 where people were told to put a rag on the face, ritualistic hand washing etc, and rushed novel vaccines with bacteria. Everyone died anyway.
Yeah I picked up the history book
They saved lifes.
Glad to have cleared that up for you 👍
Oh boy, you’re one of THOSE dumbs.
The fuck? What are you even trying to say here? Are you upset about the existence of a pandemic response?
They turned authoritarian without batting an eye. Worldwide. That’s what they really showed themselves to be. Cancelled freedom and privacy, destroyed local business and handicapped the developing children of that time. And will continue to do these things.
And yes it was unnecessary. I know you want to read into this and say I was against “a pandemic response”, but not “that” pandemic response..