EU will seek to limit children's access to social media

movedx01•about 1 hour ago

Why not restrict the addictive design of the algorithms instead? No need to blanket ban social media access if the social media cannot optimize to steal every last inch of their attention. Anything on the feed becomes opt-in only and no engagement data coming from the user or from the outside can be used to optimize it, thats it. Control is back in the hands of the content consumer, parental restrictions become trivial, no black box algorithm deciding what bubbles up and what gets buried deep down.

goobatrooba•22 minutes ago

I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand it clearly is necessary - we expect parents to do this but most are obviously failing (and I say this being a parent myself). Look what any 13 year old is doing on their phone or what disgusting horrors they encounter on the abyss of tiktok or Roblox.

On the other hand the means available to block access are too crude and seem to impinge on everyone's privacy. A shopkeeper checking the age to sell alcohol can look at your face, but an app cannot - so the solutions all seem to resort to quite invasive age checks.

I saw this related EU initiative a few weeks ago (also on HN) which seems to try to find a middle ground where you have to authorise ones and then can simply prove you are 18 without revealing any private info, but I do wonder how this holds up in practice - will the most-in-need-of-protection kids not simply get an adult to do a one-off signup for them?

https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/04/30/what-to-know-about-...

bureaucrap•about 2 hours ago

The last generation with access to social media.

Only government opinion channels are allowed.

daveyyyy•about 3 hours ago

This feels strange. Social media is already a central part of modern life

OKRainbowKid•about 2 hours ago

How is it strange? As far as I know, there's quite some research on negative impact of social media on teens mental health. How is restricting access to specific age groups fundamentally different from restricting access to cigarettes or alcohol?

alexgoodhart•about 1 hour ago

Because speech and communication obviously. That’s a ridiculous comparison.

I am very much not a pro-social media person (this is a social media website, btw) but I am even less a nanny state person. EU loses plenty of support from the citizens of its constituent states when it implements these sorts of limitations, so I hope the benefits meaningfully improve quality of life.

Also, research is not a prescriptive cure, and it isn’t a neutral domain. It is valuable, but not as an unevaluated rubber stamp.

OKRainbowKid•about 1 hour ago

It's not a ridiculous comparison in a world where Meta faces a 1.4T lawsuit over their core platform design being addictive to young people. And that lawsuit isn't brought by the EU, but by US states. So clearly there is more to it than "EU nanny state bad, US wild west good". https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/meta-meta-...

Chu4eeno•about 1 hour ago

Didn't the testifying UK academics explicitly say the current research was inconclusive?

bushwart•about 1 hour ago

You don't need to show your government ID to enter a supermarket.

OKRainbowKid•about 1 hour ago

And you don't need it to access the internet either.

_aavaa_•about 2 hours ago

So was alcohol.

The problem is doing it in a way that doesn’t removal all privacy.

062570864389•about 2 hours ago

*Corrupt regime will restrict access to the Internet further, under the pretense of "protecting the children"

OKRainbowKid•about 2 hours ago

So did you just reframe the headline to match your own sentiment on that issue, or is there more substance to your comment?

EU will seek to limit children's access to social media

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Discussion (13 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews