rHXN

France targets Australia-style social media ban for children next year

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/31/france-plans-social-media-ban-for-under-15s-from-september-2026
By: belter
HN Link
triceratops - 1h 50m ago
I'm going to restate my proposed age verification system here. I've posted it several times as a comment on this website. It works as follows:

1. A private company, let's call it AgeVerify, issues scratch-off cards with unique tokens on them. They are basically like gift cards.

2. AgeVerify's scratch-off cards are sold exclusively in IRL stores. Preferably liquor stores, adult stores, and/or tobacco/vape shops. Places that are licensed and check ID.

3. Anyone who wants to verify their age online can purchase a token at a store. The store must only demand ID if the buyer appears to be a minor (similar to alcohol or tobacco purchases). The store must never store the ID in any form whatsoever.

4. Giving or selling these tokens to a minor is a criminal offense. If a store does it, they lose their liquor or tobacco license. Treat it just like giving a minor alcohol or tobacco.

4a. Run public service announcement campaigns to communicate that giving an AgeVerify token to a child is like handing them a cigarette. There should be a clear social taboo associated with the legal ban.

5. The buyer of the AgeVerify token enters it into their account on whatever social media or adult website they want to use. The website validates the code with AgeVerify.

6. Once validated, the code is good for 1 year (or 6 months or 3 months, adjust based on how stringent you want to make it) - then it expires and a new one must be purchased.

7. A separate token is required for each website/each account.

8. The website is responsible for enforcing no account sharing.

No identifying information is stored anywhere. Kids find it very hard to access age-restricted materials online, just like the vast majority of kids don't easily have access to alcohol or cigarettes.

PunchyHamster - 1m 57s ago
No need for separate company. Banks know your age. I'd imagine CC companies know or at very least can get age data from the banks they trade.

So it would be

1. Site let's you pick your "age provider"

2. You log to you bank/govt site

3. They only get age as response.

Even easier with CC, shops could just send payment request with minimal age, if it doesn't pass, no sell

triceratops - 44s 880ns ago
> Banks know your age

They also know who you are. This rules them out of a privacy-forward age verification system.

kurthr - 17m 25s ago
Once you're selling them, put a bounty where kids can turn in the cards for money. Then you'll both set a price floor and know which stores are selling them and you can find out who's doing it. Nothing says that a token has to last for a constant amount of time. If kids turn in more than a certain percentage, then that location would have theirs expire early.

What I like here is that you've turned a digital problem into a physical one where we already have solutions and intuition for how to enforce rules.

mikkupikku - 44m 52s ago
> The store must only demand ID if the buyer appears to be a minor (similar to alcohol or tobacco purchases). The store must never store the ID in any form whatsoever.

Your plan requires nuanced implementation details which the general public is ill equipped to understand let alone independently verify. In particular, it is already normalized (in America at least) that liquor and weed stores will ID even the elderly, and scan the barcode on the ID into their computer. Let's say you want to ban the computer part outright; the public won't understand why, because it's already normal to them. So maybe you permit scanning IDs but regulate the way businesses can store/use that data; the public can't see into the computer, they have no idea if the law is being followed or not. This leads to lax attitudes towards compliance and enforcement both, and furthermore, likely results in public cynicism aka low expectations, which will give way to complacency. This is why I don't think your plan will work well, it's doomed to degenerate into surveillance.

triceratops - 1m 39s ago
I've bought alcohol in many countries, including the US. Never had my ID stored. I am not ID-ed anymore.

But in any case, my proposal would ban ID scanning altogether. There's no good reason to do it for any purchase.

mikestorrent - 29m 9s ago
> it is already normalized (in America at least) that liquor and weed stores will ID even the elderly, and scan the barcode on the ID into their computer

Then why are y'all so against Digital ID? We don't make you do that in Canada, it's just the clerk eyeballing your ID if you don't look old enough. I can't believe people are letting their ID get scanned and associated with vice purchases. Is it mandatory? Land of the free, eh?

mikkupikku - 27m 50s ago
Federal IDs are a political landmine for reasons mostly unrelated to privacy. The American public doesn't understand privacy issues, unless maybe you frame it as "ThE NUmBer OF ThE BeASt" oooo-oo spooky! Otherwise, most Americans just get stupified and say they have nothing to hide.

My point in all of this is that we should not delude ourselves by theorizing about ways this could be implemented in a privacy preserving way, because even if that's technically possible, its unlikely for things to work out that way.

hypeatei - 34m 34s ago
I didn't even think about the ID scanning that already takes place. States that have legalized weed still have people who avoid the legal stores because of the scanning. You don't know who has access to that data and how it could implicate you because weed is still illegal on the federal level (e.g. gun owners may be wary of buying from these stores)
sethammons - 39m 20s ago
In the three states I've lived in, nobody scanned IDs. They eye balled it and maybe enter birthday into a system.
mikestorrent - 27m 50s ago
This is how it should be. If you happen to be 16 and look 19, well, fuck's sake, your body's old enough to drink now. People get so hung up on this kind of think-of-the-children crap like as though every generation before now didn't have plenty of underage drinking and debauchery. I'm more worried about people being shutins and not having any fun than I am about some kid having a beer.
coppsilgold - 59m 59s ago
You can do the same thing with online payments combined with a ZKP token system.

The issue is and will always remain reselling the age verification tokens. The entire system is pretty pointless. Kids will just have some hoops to jump through, and they will be very motivated to do so. Criminals will be eager to aid them for some change too.

Either you forget age verification, or you can forget about privacy. Because identity theft is the only hoop big enough for most kids not to make the jump - and even that may not hold, typically identity theft is carried out for financial returns, the age verification requirement will change the calculus on that and will likely expand that particular black market to both kids and people valuing their privacy.

In my opinion it should be the parent's job to police their kid's access to an internet terminal. It's not even that hard. Mitigating the mistakes of parents at the expense of everyone's privacy is a poor trade.

lo_zamoyski - 33m 545ns ago
Just because something can and will be circumvented doesn't make it useless.

People will continue to murder other people. That doesn't mean that criminalizing and punishing murder is pointless.

Now, whether the above scheme is prudent or workable, that's a separate question. But the counterargument to the scheme cannot be "It's all or nothing".

coppsilgold - 23m 2s ago
Murder is all but impossible to prevent, the reason the murder rate is kept low is because it's difficult to evade attribution after the fact.

In this instance we are talking about a technology that is impossible to attribute by design, the only way attribution will happen is if the reseller makes a serious mistake. There will be resellers that don't make serious mistakes. And unlike murder, very few successful resellers are sufficient to serve everyone.

Ritewut - 1h 10m ago
Japan has a similar system for payments. If you prefer to buy things online with cash they give you a barcode you take to any convenience store. The store scans it and you pay with cash.
nej24swei - 53m 41s ago
And I am going to restate how it’s an absolutely terrible idea, and will always fail with its perverse incentives. This does not solve any problems and creates many more.

Your idea will create a massive black market for “adult validation tokens”, handing billions of dollars to criminal groups reselling these things.

And then where such a system goes in 5-10y. Sure it’s sorta anonymous today, but then new government decides - “let’s make it mandatory to be sold with a binding identity and credit card.” Suddenly you need that token to log in to any public website. And Chinese, European and American authorities demand realtime access to the global logs.

Every censorship system you build, even if it seems “good”, will eventually censor you and the things you care about. Don't design or build oppression technology.

The very idea that you can realistically enforce Point of Sales age checks at scale is not sensible.

noahjk - 13m 53s ago
Some other near-term negatives of the planned idea:

- forces people to go to stores that primarily sell addictive substances

- prices out poor people, who can't afford adult websites, _or_

- even more money meant for bills / food is spent on addictions

- will have a stigma attached (why is that preacher in the liquor store? For porn or whisky?)

JumpCrisscross - 29m 49s ago
> Every censorship system you build, even if it seems “good”, will eventually censor you and the things you care about

Nobody is being censored. We regulate who can buy alcohol or tobacco, gamble at casinos, or operate a motor vehicle without it turning into a slippery slope.

Politically, the free speech argument might have had a point if Silicon Valley’s most-visible “free speech” advocates hadn’t lined up behind an authoritarian who’s creating diplomatic tension (and thus domestic political capital) the world over.

JumpCrisscross - 28m 56s ago
Why do you need a private monopoly or physical tokens?

This is trivially solved with national IDs and strict liability.

hypeatei - 1h 11m ago
So a kid just has to get their hands on a token then access is open to restricted websites for a year (or whatever time period) while adults are inconvenienced? The black markets for these things would pop up instantly and you'd deal with secondary effects of that (scams, fraud, etc.)

I think the whole idea of age verification on the internet is dystopian and should be tossed in the garbage.

postepowanieadm - 1h 44m ago
Nah, EIDAS2 got you covered - you use your european identity wallet.
triceratops - 1h 41m ago
The beauty of my proposal is you don't need that.
9dev - 1h 19m ago
But instead, you need this other thing, which requires elaborate infrastructure and new standards and regulations
buran77 - 8m 49s ago
The other thing OP presents is very different from any eID scheme in terms of anonymity. You'd show an ID to a human at the counter and even if the seller stores your info somehow, it can't be linked to the token they sold to you. The required infrastructure is minimal and relatively simplistic. The only drawback is that being anonymous means it's easy to resell tokens.

An eID system links your real life identity to any use of the eID online. Anyone who thinks there's a math or technology that fixes this misses the fact that it's the trust in the humans (companies, institutions, governments) who operate these systems is misplaced. Math and technology are implemented by people so there are many opportunities to abuse these systems. And once in place I guarantee, without any shadow of doubt that sooner or later, fast or slow, it will be expanded to any online action.

I will take anonymity and the small minority of kids who will find a loophole to access some adult-only stuff over the inevitable overreach and abuse against the large majority of people whose every online move will be traced and logged.

nej24swei - 35m 1s ago
And who is the biggest winner?

Triceratops Age Verification services, provided a state-sanctioned monopoly on issuing Porn Licenses. Awful, really.

AnIrishDuck - 1h 33m ago
Or we have devices attest user age. On setup, the device has the option to store a root ("guardian"?) email address. Whenever "adult mode" is activated or the root email is changed, a notification must first be sent to the prior root email. That notification may optionally contain a code that must be used to proceed with the relevant action, though the user should be warned of the potential device-crippling consequences.

This setting is stored in a secure enclave and survives factory resets.

I will note that these two systems are not mutually exclusive. There are plenty of ways to "think of the children" that don't trample on everybody's freedom.

iamnothere - 1h 11m ago
Yeah, not doing this on my Linux devices.
EA-3167 - 1h 40m ago
I’m in my 40’s and I’d rather just use a VPN, I can’t imagine that young people will feel any differently. Governments should feel free to take performative measures, and we’re free to circumvent them.

Leave people to their fantasies of digital control and let them learn lessons the hard way. This is not a technical issue anyway.

anal_reactor - 32m 55s ago
A very important part of the system is a nationwide program of sending homeless people to concentration camps so that teenagers wouldn't bribe them to buy TittyTokens.

Like seriously, do you really think that if currently minors can buy tobacco and alcohol using unlawful means, then your TittyTokens will somehow be magically immune to the same problem because you really really wish they would?

You can't patch this without creating some form of a central database of who exactly buys how many TittyTokens.

SilverElfin - 1h 31m ago
While this can work I just don’t want any bans on speech for any age. These social media bans are going to next lead to porn restrictions and ultimately they will mainstream Christian theocratic values in public policy through an ever shifting morality goal post. That’s how it always goes. Enabling it through such solutions feels like a risk.
Greed - 58m 37s ago
It's arguable, even if you're right, that the net loss to humanity is still far greater without these restrictions than with. Modern social media is leading to multiple generations of emotionally stunted, non-verbal children. Many of whom literally struggle to read.

If you haven't seen it in person, it is now incredibly common for children as young as 1 or 2 to be handed an iPad and driven down an algorithmic tunnel of AI generated content with multiple videos overlaid on top. I've seen multiple examples of children scrolling rapidly through videos of Disney characters getting their heads chopped off to Five Nights at Freddy's music while laughing hysterically. They do this for hours. Every day. It's truly horrifying.

Parents are just as poorly equipped at dealing with this as the children are, the difference being that at least their brains have already fully developed so that there is no lasting permanent damage.

sampli - 1h 5m ago
Anti Israel speech will be the first to be banned
umanwizard - 32m 56s ago
I am sure that they will not lead to “Christian theocratic values in public policy” in France. That value system is fringe in France, one of the most irreligious and historically anti-clerical cultures in the world.

Among people who identify as Christian in France, the ones who could be described as radical or fundamentalist are a very small minority.

SilverElfin - 12m 38s ago
My observation is that there is a big resurgence in supremacist politics and the main identity involved is white Christian male. Maybe it’s not yet big in France but that’s what I see gaining momentum in many parts of Europe and North America.
altern8 - 1h 25m ago
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DalasNoin - 5h 4m ago
Many of these "social" media websites increasingly just fling AI-generated disturbing videos at people. I am sure we could build a web that is actually pleasant to use for kids, but we are not building it. youtube for example: https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2006013682472669589
Workaccount2 - 4h 40m ago
From my experience as a kid

"Pleasant for kids to use is the polar opposite of kids finding it a pleasure to use"

onion2k - 3h 10m ago
I think that's provably untrue based on the fact Saturday morning cartoons were massively popular as a curated content feed on TVs through the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Kids (including me at the time) loved them and sank many hours into watching them. They were wholly approved by my parents, to the point where sometimes my parents would watch with me. Unless kids have fundamentally changed (which seems unlikely) the differentiating factor is almost certainly that kids simply now have access to far more unsuitable content.
josephg - 1h 5m ago
Yep. Kids still love engaging with decent content. As any parent knows. Bluey / Peppa pig / Paw patrol / etc do huge numbers.

Children haven’t changed.

Barrin92 - 1h 49m ago
Well, one part of a proper education of a child is to teach them that life isn't about gratification. Neil Postman made this point already in Amusing Ourselves to Death. By educating kids with Sesame street you didn't teach them to love education, you taught them to love television.

When you make learning synonymous with fun people start to believe that if they aren't having fun they aren't learning. Which accounts I think for something that a lot of teachers at all levels have observed, kids are increasingly unable to learn if there's no immediate reward.

littlestymaar - 4h 24m ago
Video games from the 90s were actually pleasant as a kid, and I'm happy to see my kids enjoying them today rather than the slot machines that the industry makes for kids these days…

(Unfortunately I'm well aware that it won't last long, because social pressure is impossible to fight at individual scale)

Ritewut - 1h 12m ago
Social pressure is much easier to fight than you think but it involves being an active parent and letting your kids invite friends over to play. Most parents are not willing or are unable to do take that active role for one reason or another.
aunty_helen - 2h 50m ago
Not sure why you think this has anything to do with children other than in name.

It’s ID verification.

ruszki - 43m 7s ago
You will loose this argument because there is a real problem with children and AI slop. Especially because there is a problem with AI slop and handling it by people in general.

Provide a solution which doesn’t require that, like some other top commenter did. Otherwise, you have already lost.

piker - 4h 55m ago
This must kill that platform.
Der_Einzige - 2h 4m ago
This has been going on since well before COVID:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate

Eddy_Viscosity2 - 4h 56m ago
If we did build it and it became popular, it would quickly be taken over by the same forces that are destroying the current internet. To get good social media sites (and a better internet as well), you would first have to change the economics of the entire system driving these forces. But as is said "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism".
pear01 - 2h 23m ago
It's really not that dramatic. Just build it like more classic media. Curated content the company takes responsibility for, closed platform, pay upfront. Or have public programming, that is the oldest model there is.

Ad driven online content is especially bad for kids. But let's not pretend the only way to find an alternative is to end the world.

The fact is the "bad" solution is popular because consumers say they care about these things but then in real life they act like they don't. If no one watched the problem would solve itself. Thus, I'm not sure the solution is even to be found in platforms, if parents are burned out or don't have ways to make better choices for their kids.

That's a reason for these laws, to essentially just take it out of people's hands.

Eddy_Viscosity2 - 1h 11m ago
The consumer gets bait & switched. When ad-free pay upfront cable tv first started, people switched over. We showed that yes indeed we like ad-free shows and are willing to pay for them. They said, well that's great, but we can make more money if we show you ads so they did and we ended up paying up front and getting obnoxious ads. Then when online streaming started, we all switched over. We showed that yes indeed we like ad-free shows and are willing to pay upfront for them. They said, well that's great, but we can make more money if we show you ads so they did and we ended up paying up front and getting obnoxious ads. The moment it become sufficient popular and the people get sufficiently locked in, the ads come. Every time.
IncreasePosts - 2h 45m ago
it doesn't need to be social media, it could be an entirely closed system with some moderators curating content.
Eddy_Viscosity2 - 2h 26m ago
Well, that's why we use HN. So far no ads, how long that lasts is anyone's guess.
egorfine - 1h 24m ago
I'm pretty sure it is going to pass.

Too much of a coordinated efforts between western countries, thus it cannot fail. The decisions have been made and your voice pretty much doesn't matter.

JumpCrisscross - 26m 53s ago
> The decisions have been made and your voice pretty much doesn't matter

Source for these bans being unpopular?

herunan - 3h 17m ago
This is just cop out legislation. I wanna see laws targeting addictive design systems and harmful content. Social media is only part of the problem.

There’s so much that falls out of the social media definition. And regardless, kids are not stupid… VPNs, proxies, etc are easy to circumvent with.

soperj - 2h 38m ago
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of good.

Who cares if many can get around it, if the majority can't or won't, then it kills the network effects.

Ritewut - 1h 11m ago
I don't think this is good though. It's a police state masquerading as "SAVE THE CHILDREN!"
soperj - 58m 8s ago
yes, the police state is preventing Mark Zuckerberg from being a trillionaire.
sethammons - 26m 18s ago
I'm sorry. What?

This legislation is very much giving more power to the government over what its citizens cannot do. The real impetus is control by the powers that be. The ideal citizen for an authoritarian would be fully controllable via digital means. A digital id that is networked with services is a wet dream for authoritarians.

What does this have to do with limiting Zuck's net worth? Because less kids will see less ads? How much will this reduce his net worth? If we took licenses from kids and had them wait until 18, would you be claiming this is to prevent Musk from gaining more wealth?

amelius - 2h 42m ago
Step 1 should be to kill the ad based monetization model.
astrobe_ - 4h 17m ago
The question is how this is implemented, in particular age verification.

It's usual to say that MPs are old people that don't understand current technologies, but in law preparation committees they appear to be well aware; in particular, they mentioned a "double-anonymity" system where the site requesting your age wouldn't know your name, and the entity serving age requests wouldn't know which site it is for. They are also aware that people walk-around age verification checks with e.g. fake ID cards, possibly AI generated.

I'm not sure if it is actually doable reliabily, and I'm not sure either that the MPs that will have to vote the law will know the topic as well as the MPs participating in these committees.

I would personally consider other options like a one-button admin config for computers/smartphones/tablets that restricts access according to age (6-14, 15-18) and requiring online service providers to announce their "rating" in HTTP headers. Hackers will certainly object that young hackers could bypass this, but like copy-protection, the mission can be considered complete when the vast majority of people are prevented from doing what they should not do.

Alternatively one could consider the creation of a top-level domain with a "code of content" (which could include things like "chat control") enforced by controlling entity. Then again, an OS-level account config button could restrict all Internet accesses to this domain.

Perhaps an national agency could simply grant a "child safe" label to operating systems that comply to this.

This type of solutions would I think also be useful in schools (e.g. school-provided devices), although they are also talking about severely limiting screen-time at school.

For the french speakers, see:

[1] https://videos.assemblee-nationale.fr/video.17950525_6942684...

[2] https://videos.assemblee-nationale.fr/video.17952051_6942761...

triceratops - 1h 49m ago
Here's my proposal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46447282

It protects privacy while being as robust as any other existing age restriction method.

felipeerias - 2h 48m ago
Yes, perhaps the most reasonable approach is to tie these restrictions to the specific device (and, where applicable, account).

The ban doesn’t need to catch every single case, it just needs to add enough friction to stop the most frequent and destroy network effects.

logicchains - 3h 10m ago
The only way they could successfully implement it is with constant live video surveillance, otherwise parents who oppose the ban can easily get around it. Which is going to be at least a double digit percentage of the population. And the police don't even have the resources to investigate theft and robbery, let alone go after millions of parents for helping their children create social media accounts.
astrobe_ - 22m 12s ago
> parents who oppose the ban can easily get around it

Irresponsible parents are irresponsible parents, and they can do much worse than letting their children wander on the Net alone. IFAIK no law at least here forbids parents from giving alcohol or tobacco to their children, even though it is forbidden to sell those products to them. Toxic social media are mostly the same.

Although the topic is a ban, I think the idea is less about forbidding and punishing, and more about helping - albeit in questionably manner according to some - helping parents with "regulating" the access of their children to the Net. Of course, the easy answer is to recommend giving them dumb phones instead of smartphones, but really a smartphone is too useful to be ignored around high-school age.

AshamedCaptain - 4h 53m ago
Devil's advocate: what is the difference between "social media" and a website very much like this one? When can I look forward to having to give a DNA test to read HN?
Pooge - 4h 51m ago
The main difference in my view is the personalized algorithm that determines what to feed you next.

HackerNews has an algorithm but it's not personalized—i.e. everyone sees the same thing.

AshamedCaptain - 4h 46m ago
My own website has a bulletin board that offers a personalized list of messages after you login: whatever threads you have not yet read. And so do many other websites of this style. So this cannot be a differentiating aspect.
andrewinardeer - 4h 28m ago
Are you also harvesting teens data and selling it to the highest bidder or using it for target advertisements?
AshamedCaptain - 4h 23m ago
Not intentionally - but in the past I did have advertisements to finance it , which I had to stop since that is enough under a lot of jurisprudence to qualify as running a for-profit, which usually means less leniency from judges.

So it is advertisements where we should draw the line -- websites with advertisements should require age checks?

andrewinardeer - 4h 9m ago
Why did you cherry pick advertisments from my reply and run with that?

It clearly isn't just a singular data point that is a True or False that would include a site in the ban.

Perhaps it should be, "If I had a 12 year old daughter, do I want her to have easy access to pornography, self harm material and the ability to receive private messages from a 45 year old registered sex offender?"

I get your point - "Where is the line in the sand?" and it's a valid point but no need to argue in bad faith.

AshamedCaptain - 3h 8m ago
Because it is the ad network that I chose 30 years ago that was doing any of the types of tracking you mention. In fact, all of the ad networks from 30 years ago would be considered as doing "teen tracking" today. I do not know how you can do tracking without doing teen tracking, barring precisely I troducing age verification on every single website. And I also do not know if there is any network out there doing advertisements without tracking -- certainly none of the major local news websites use it.

I do think the "wont somebody think of the children" arguments are in bad faith though, and I say this as a father.

squigz - 3h 1m ago
> Perhaps it should be, "If I had a 12 year old daughter, do I want her to have easy access to pornography, self harm material and the ability to receive private messages from a 45 year old registered sex offender?"

If parents are concerned about this, why let them on the Internet? Why not use parental control systems? Why not teach your children healthy sex education, how to deal with their feelings, and to tell old creeps to fuck off?

adamnemecek - 4h 44m ago
They are very different.
Workaccount2 - 4h 42m ago
>So this cannot be a differentiating aspect.

Now explain that nuance to an 80 yr old law maker who hates the damn email.

seszett - 4h 30m ago
Not to say that they are technically literate, but the average age of French lawmakers (which are just the members of parliament) is 50 years old.

It's actually the same as the average age of voting-age French citizens, so they are quite representative on this regard.

potato3732842 - 4h 2m ago
These 80yo lawmakers have kids and grandkids and advisers. They know how social media works.

They hate social media because it gives people the power to talk in public about them with near impunity. They want to go back to the old days when if you wrote a letter to the newspaper about potential corruption or wrongdoing among the "more equal animals" you'd get pulled over for a light out whenever you went through that town for the next 20yr.

skydhash - 3h 24m ago
> They hate social media because it gives people the power to talk in public about them with near impunity.

If you think you have even near impunity on social media, I have a bridge to sell you. Even a town to go with it.

potato3732842 - 3h 11m ago
>If you think you have even near impunity on social media, I have a bridge to sell you. Even a town to go with it.

I specifically said "near" impunity. If you do something bad enough they'll come after you but even then if your gripes are legitimate that's likely to amplify it.

Surely you're not honestly claiming that there is not a significant practical difference between modern internet criticism and the old ways when messaging that could reach the broad public was far thoroughly gated by people and things that had more stake in the power structure.

skydhash - 3h 2m ago
I wouldn’t say it was gated. More like it was costly. And people having the means to do so was a very small set and prone to agree with the status quo.

But even now, a lot of messages are lost on the internet. And the internet is only decentralized for messages propagation, not for access.

potato3732842 - 2h 29m ago
Fractionally gated is still gated. At some point a difference in quantity is a difference in quality.
AshamedCaptain - 4h 41m ago
For the record, that is exactly my point . I do not want yet another sword of Damocles for websites, even less if it depends on the mood of a clueless judge.
dfxm12 - 4h 2m ago
From a definition standpoint, hn is a social media site. From a legislation standpoint, it's not nearly popular (infamous?) enough to legislate (the mentioned sites have had enough negative coverage to manufacturer consent for this invasion of privacy: cyber bullying, destructive challenges, etc.)

When it is, and when your local government becomes sufficiently captured by the user surveillance industrial complex, you will need real world verification here.

grunder_advice - 2h 5m ago
>hn is a social media site

Social media typically implies a website where users are sharing self-created content. If a website with comments counts a social media, than all web2.0 is social media and there's practically no distinction between the web and social media.

lm28469 - 4h 49m ago
> what is the difference between "social media" and a website very much like this one?

Pretty much everything? Not the same intent, not the same usage, not the same business model, not the same users, &c.

AshamedCaptain - 4h 43m ago
Frel free to name something concrete. Remember that Reddit has already been targetted by this in Australia.
immibis - 4h 30m ago
Why do you think Reddit is any better than Instagram or X or TikTok, such that it doesn't deserve to be targeted according to the same principles?
AshamedCaptain - 4h 26m ago
I used it to follow some functional programming discussions that had chosen it as it's main bulletin board, as did many other software projects. (I am not a fan of Reddit, which is why it is of paramount importance to me to be able to continue to browse it without an account.)

But fine: if you think Reddit deserves the cut, please let me know why you think this site does not deserve it. Or why Discord (also used by a lot of software projects, to my annoyance ) does not deserve it. In a way that a "80 year old judge which hates computers" can understand.

We should have kept to mailing lists, as I said many times.

immibis - 1h 25m ago
Reddit has pockets of sanity, but as a whole it is insane. The same is true of Instagram, TikTok, X, etc.

If Hacker News doesn't improve its moderation (especially of fascist propaganda) I do think it should go the same way. HN openly flaunts the fact that it only follows American law - e.g. the fact that it completely ignores GDPR. It wouldn't happen until HN got big enough to make some politician pay attention though, and HN is kept relatively small by design.

lm28469 - 3h 42m ago
Reddit is a cesspool of bots reposting the best performing images and rage bait of the last 5 years ad nauseam, that and porn makes up the bulk of the traffic. So yes, again, there is nothing in common between reddit and hn
Hizonner - 2h 19m ago
I read several subreddits and see nearly no images, nearly no rage bait (probably less than on Hacker News, in fact), and exactly no porn. My daily Reddit experience is so close to Hacker News that I've been known to forget which one I'm on.

Reddit still has the capacity to show you what you're actually looking for. It still lets you find content by interest, rather than by personalities. It still keeps replies together, still lets you order by time easily, and doesn't stick too much random crap in the middle (none if you use a decent ad blocker). It handles long form content well and doesn't try to force everything to be a sound bite that you have to click on to see more. It's still convenient to use it that way, and most users probably do use it that way.

Compare to, say, Youtube, which fight you ever step of the way if you try not to be drowned in a disordered flood of some combination of what a computer guesses you might want and what it's most profitable for the site for you to see (including what will keep you on the site), with your only control being which "influencers" you uprank by "subscribing" to them.

throw_m239339 - 1h 35m ago
> Reddit still has the capacity to show you what you're actually looking for.

Reddit has the capacity to manipulate minors and groom them into believing all kind of sick "fictions", endorsed by the admins. It should absolutely be banned for minors.

AshamedCaptain - 3h 16m ago
This lacks hindsight. Whatever you subjectively dislike about Reddit will certainly apply here, if not today then tomorrow. If you want proof, check out Slashdot.

Also, no porn on /r/haskell.

potato3732842 - 3h 31m ago
Eh, with user links, user commentary, profiles and votes HN is "basically the same" on several key aspects and there is quite a bit of demographic overlap. It's just reached a very different equilibrium as to what goes on here due to the 2nd and 3rd tier aspects that are different.

Take two cesspools (I'm not gonna pass up the chance to use the analogy, sorry not sorry). Assume they are both serving the same quantity and quality of people. Feed one a bunch of inorganic matter, laundry bleach and only the finest most heavy duty multi-ply shit tickets. Feed the other nothing that shouldn't go down a drain, no bleach and Scott 1-ply. The latter will perform way better and go way longer between needing service despite the only differences being minor differences that don't even matter in system design.

snowpid - 4h 37m ago
Does HN spread Fake News? Facebook and Youtube do. Do you feel bad after using HN? Insta and Facebook it happens. Does HN collect data to specify marketing? Every other Social Media do.

This is hard to define in laws so e.g. the EU chooses to force concrete measures from the social media pages.

tekla - 4h 27m ago
> Does HN spread Fake News?

Yes?

snowpid - 4h 19m ago
Give me an example of websites on HN, which spread fake news by purpose and it was allowed by the mods even they knew the news / artice / website was spreading fake news.
AshamedCaptain - 3h 5m ago
You have quite an unatenable position (you really think there have never been outright wrong headlines on HN?). Even this very article is (being very generous) clickbait.
AshamedCaptain - 4h 31m ago
> Does HN spread Fake News?

Yes? Even newspapers do that. You have never had Gell-Mann when reading something here outside mainstream topics of interest? (e.g. almost anything from outside the US, or health related).

Is this really the criteria you want to use to decide whether to require age checks for a website?

> the EU chooses to force concrete measures from the social media pages.

This just sidesteps the issue of how a website ends up in the list. Today, Reddit. Tomorrow, Discord. Then Github. Eventually, HN.

snowpid - 4h 28m ago
My news is almost outside of the US as I am not American. (wow this should be sent to r/USDefaultism). So let's say like this: I do read a lot outside of "American mainstream media".

Most good working journalist try to verify claim and statements. This is the opposite to Fake News, Clickbait and Russian state propaganda spread in Social Media because its their business model.

astrobe_ - 4h 2m ago
Proper moderation, and - how to say it without sounding elitist? - more mature users.
astura - 31m 23s ago
This website is social media.
throw_m239339 - 1h 37m ago
None. HN is a social media since it's an online forum. In fact HN runs afoul of many EU regulations already, GDPR, cookie law, ...
Alex2037 - 4h 33m ago
the services that comply with speech suppression and privacy violation orders will be deemed acceptable, and those who don't won't.
immibis - 4h 31m ago
With the caveat that by "speech suppression" you mean "spam suppression" and by "privacy violation orders" you mean "search warrants"
Alex2037 - 4h 16m ago
[flagged]
SauntSolaire - 2h 36m ago
Pointing out your Russell conjugation does not make one a bootlicker.
Alex2037 - 2h 15m ago
insisting, against an overwhelming amount of irrefutable evidence to the contrary, that states like Australia and France are benevolent toward their citizens, does indeed make one a bootlicker.

was persecuting COVID dissidents "russian spam suppression"? are government-mandated backdoors "search warrants"?

immibis - 1h 23m ago
Yeah pretty much. We know Russia was behind a whole lot of the pro-infection movement. Ostriching that fact doesn't make it stop being true. They've been doing stuff like this since the communist days, so they're very good at it now.
Alex2037 - 34m 9s ago
>We know Russia was behind a whole lot of the pro-infection movement.

yes, yes, there was no vaccine skepticism in the West before COVID.

bbbhltz - 4h 13m ago
I'm one of the weirdos that should be on board with this, but I'm against it. This will do harm to marginalized youth and push younger people to lie and find ways around the ban.

Plus, we saw that in Australia that the lobby behind the ban was in fact an ad agency that makes ads for gambling apps.

Here is France, the ban is probably just a way to avoid legislation against companies selling crap that isn't for kids like vape pens and sports gambling apps.

Insanity - 5h 9m ago
Good, social media should be considered a harmful substance. Even for adults it’s probably a bad thing.
dfxm12 - 3h 51m ago
It sounds like you don't like social media. With that in mind, why is it good to add a layer of user surveillance on the Internet? Where's the connection between "social media is harmful" and "it is good to add surveillance"?

If you think social media is harmful, wouldn't it be good to regulate social media? What does regulating French (or Australian, or wherever) citizens have to do with it?

everfrustrated - 4h 10m ago
A ban on social media for children is a different way of saying ID Verification for the entire population.

They are implicitly the same thing.

You can't exclude children without first verifying _everyone_ and from there excluding people who match age < approved. This is basic logic.

If you were a cynical person you could imagine this is actually politicians wanting to bring in an ID law and using "think of the children" as the social justification for it.

If you're a conspiracy theorist you'd wonder why Apple and Google have now added the ability to upload and link your passport and other real id into their respective app wallets. How long before your phones browser is digitally signing all your social media posts with your ID...

someNameIG - 50m 48s ago
I'm Australian and neither any Meta platform nor Reddit have asked to verify my ID, as I presume both just inferred that I was over 16 and that was adequate.
onraglanroad - 1h 28m ago
> If you were a cynical person you could imagine this is actually politicians wanting to bring in an ID law

Sounds like a good theory, apart from the minor flaw that France already has ID cards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_card_(France)

hexbin010 - 2h 22m ago
Yup the aim is to de-anonymise the Internet for increased policing/spying abilities

> How long before your phones browser is digitally signing all your social media posts with your ID...

Under 10 years I'd say at this rate

hollow-moe - 5h 14s ago
> If a child is in a Formula One car and they turn on the engine, I don’t want them to win the race, I just want them to get out of the car. I want them to learn the highway code first, and to ensure the car works, and to teach them to drive in a different car.

Yet computer education in France has been severely lacking for so long. From middle school to even universities (except the courses computer focused obviously) people aren't taught correctly. Teachers themselves are lost to computers and lectures are bad.

The goal is obviously to have tech illiterate people knowing just enough to use computers for the job but not worrying about the digital autoristarism currently being deployed.

tonfa - 4h 49m ago
> The goal is obviously to have tech illiterate people knowing just enough to use computers for the job but not worrying about the digital autoristarism currently being deployed.

If anything, without social media access, kids are more likely to play/hack around.

tokai - 4h 9m ago
Its a weird analogy. Plenty of people have years of racing experience before they get their drivers license.
hollow-moe - 3h 7m ago
So it means they got lectures and training beforehand. Which currently neither (the vast majority of) parents nor public education is properly providing for computer usage. Main difference being there's no licence required to access the internet, for the best and the worst.
orbital-decay - 3h 23m ago
Yeah. F1 drivers in particular start their training from the age of 4-5. By 6-7 they participate in competitions, at 12-13 they are already at the professional level in karting. Verstappen got his F1 license at 17, which technically qualifies as a "child" for the law.
potato3732842 - 3h 53m ago
I'd be very surprised if the overwhelming majority of F1 drivers weren't in some sort of go-kart racing league long before they held government licenses.
aucisson_masque - 2h 26m ago
I remember when I was a kid I listened to radio until very late in to the night.

Unless they want to remove all of technology from 10pm to 8am, this bill is going to be ridiculous. Teenager and kid will always find better things to do than sleep.

like_any_other - 1h 45m ago
Ban for children, and mandatory deanonymiziation [1] for everyone else.

[1] At best with a "trust us we won't tattle" "privacy" architecture.

RickJWagner - 3h 37m ago
Good for France!

I wish my country (USA) would adapt similar laws.

meroes - 2h 37m ago
More!
Simulacra - 2h 48m ago
This is such a fools errand, there will always be services popping up faster than regulators can ban them. This won't stop a lot of the kids. So wasteful.
fidotron - 2h 20m ago
That's not how they think. They will ban everything and only allow that which is explicitly permitted.
snowpid - 4h 36m ago
I am convinced that the current world wide rise of (right wing ) populist movements is mainly caused by social media. By regulating like this my hope is we can reduce their spread.
Legend2440 - 4h 10m ago
I'm not convinced social media is to blame. Plenty of extremist movements have arisen throughout history without social media. Politics has been bad for a long long time before social media existed.
galleywest200 - 2h 47m ago
They did exist, but you had to seek them out. You had to send them a letter and ask for their pamphlets to be mailed back to you.

Now you have right-wing extremists running the sites and deciding what you should view, just look at Twitter/X and Musk.

dfxm12 - 3h 43m ago
Consolidation of all kinds of media (social, print, TV, radio, etc.) is a big ingredient in this. Another ingredient is the enshitification of the net, along with the value of unfettered collection of user data.

The problem isn't that people are consuming (social) media, it's that everything is owned by so few people. We shouldn't be punished for this by having to submit to even more surveillance.

andrewinardeer - 4h 25m ago
What's wrong with right wing populist movements? They come and go just like left wing populist movements. The pendulum swinging across both the political spectrums over election cycles is a thing of beauty.
snowpid - 4h 16m ago
both are a threat to democracy like we see on Trump.
logicchains - 3h 16m ago
Populist movements are the opposite of a threat to democracy; they represent the actual views of the people, not the views of some cultured elite. Real democracy, not some republican elitism.
plaidthunder - 1h 53m ago
The flip side of that, is that the same sense of urgency that flings populists into power also compels them to start to bend the systems that got them there in order to maintain power.

After all, if the evil "elites" -- as if populists don't comprise their own elite class -- ever gain power again they could undo all of our "progress".

You can see this tendency in how some red states, like Texas, have tried to furiously redraw their maps to maintain control of the US house. They are doing this because they fear that "the people" will not choose to give them a majority again. They even admit to it openly. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/15/trump-five-seat-pic...

California had a state wide vote to do the same thing. But they were acting in kind. Tit-for-tat is a reasonable strategy what Texas did. Though it remains a shame that it came to it.

Cumulatively, these actions represent a breakdown of the machinery in our system that allows us to course correct. It's not healthy for anyone.

Planned markets lead to bad economic outcomes, why? Because when you fix prices you lose the ability to react appropriately to changing conditions. Managed democracies lead to bad social outcomes for the same reason. You need reasonably fair elections in order to sense the condition of the population and react to it.

Yet, populist rhetoric ups the emotional ante to the point where it starts to convince people that it's a good idea to subvert this. The old "Flight 93 Election" essay from 2016 is the perfect case study in this sort of absurd rhetorical escalation. Where they literally said, if Trump doesn't win America is doomed forever. We have to "charge the cockpit" before the plane crashes, so to speak.

Yet, when he lost in 2020, America didn't end forever. It's all been a farce and a grab for power.

logicchains - 3h 17m ago
Social media is just decentralised information flow. Populist movements are rising because people are finally seeing how absolutely exploited they are by the elites, because the elites no longer have complete centralised control over the flow of information.
Hizonner - 3h 12m ago
So wait. You upload everything you post to a centralized service, which uses a centralized algorithm to decide which of the billions of available uploads to show to each person, in order to increase the advertising profits that accrue to the centralized corporation that owns the whole thing, and that's decentralized information flow?

Have you considered the possibility that you may be an idiot?

SauntSolaire - 2h 29m ago
Content sourcing is decentralized, sure, content distribution is not. Through curation, one can craft a narrative without even needing to pay propagandists to write copy.
golemiprague - 1h 50m ago
[dead]
nephihaha - 5h 43m ago
What a coincidence.
brewcejener - 5h 30m ago
HN readers won't be able to find online partners if this accelerates.
ta9000 - 5h 18m ago
The trade war continues. We’ve known these shitty platforms were polluting kids for at least a decade.