Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media
(yle.fi)569 points by Teever 14 hours ago
569 points by Teever 14 hours ago
IMHO the main point of these schemes is to make it hard for adults to use social media somewhat-anonyously. So the government can more easily identify those posting 'prohibited speech'.
If there was a legitimate drive to protect kids from the worst of the Internet, there'd have been more of a crackdown on porn, gore, etc long before social media became such a big problem. And smartphones would have never been allowed in schools.
Your argument hinges on the assumption that porn and gore etc. have worse impact on kids. I don’t think there’s a concensus on that. One might argue that porn and gore could have been found in print before the internet, but that social media have a more novel impact.
I personally like the theory that most kids problems are actually attributable to family issues. That kids in solid family environment/upbringing will not be “destroyed” by computer games, porn, gore (2 girls 1 cup anyone?), or social media. But that’s also just a theory.
I do not think it is about seeing certain things, that exist in the adult world. That is surely a side effect that one wants, though, protecting minors from a world that they can not comprehend.
I think it is about algorithms targeting you all the time for hours in favour of a company. We see the effects every day. No attention span. Instant gratification. The next kick.
If things in the internet didn’t impact kids or people then people wouldn’t get up in arms about non-PC content, but we know many different kinds of people only want thrown own kind of content out there and would prefer to limit or ban ideas they disagree with.
I'm very critical of all the schemes proposed but this is just a fundamental misconception on your part.
> If there was a legitimate drive to protect kids from the worst of the Internet
As with any disease, the impact heavily depends on virality.
The worst the internet has to offer to children, is not the gore or porn for the few that look for it (usually individually). The worst it does to children is the attention algorithm that captures practically everybody.
in my country you don't have to give a phone number to register a social media website when i was a kid, i always laughed at my internet friends from a neighbouring country, because they had to give their id to get one, which is very intrusive from the government turns out i was the odd one, as most of the world required an id from you
Do children have no phone numbers or do they use their parent's?
> If there was a legitimate drive to protect kids from the worst of the Internet, there'd have been more of a crackdown on porn, gore, etc long before social media became such a big problem. And smartphones would have never been allowed in schools.
Where are you from, because all of these things have/are being tried for a long time in the US (and, I'd note, received significant pushback from civil liberty advocates). Heck, TFA itself talks about how this social media ban is coming after a ban on phones in schools.
What major revolutions or important political shifts have occurred from people anonymously shitposting on Reddit or Facebook ?
I know of one crowd sourced witch hunt on reddit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Sunil_Tripathi
A lot of the cancel culture is also crowd sourced on platforms like these.
None. Almost by definition, the folks who satisfy themselves waxing online drive complacency away from real action. That doesn’t, however, mean they aren’t self-importantly organized to later support an organized movement.
The online right talk about 'the great meme war' that led to the 2016 election of Trump.
Seems pretty clear that social media is radicalising people at both ends of the political spectrum, and it's not surprising that governments would want to restrict/police it by trying to criminalise 'hate'/'misinformation' and taking away the shield of anonymity.
I really doubt bots are using legitimate IDs.
The target for those age verification schemes (beyond actually preventing the kids' brains from being rotten by American ad supported skinner boxes) is probably to make schemes like IRA [1] just slightly more complicated. (I said "more complicated", I did not say "impossible" - I very much know that bot factories will find their ways around any kind of verification ; part of being on the defensive side of a conflict is about not giving up.)
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/19/airbus_sovereign_clou...
Finland has a whole national ID system, all interlinked. They aren't going to be scanning faces to implement this stuff here - and anyway the government here already knows what you look like.
"Social media" doesn't just mean Facebook right? It includes sites like Hacker News, yeah?
No, HN is more like a forum. It doesn’t have dark patterns and addictive engineering built in, even if it could itself be addictive. There ‘s been functionality built in to limit time spent on HN for a long time. Look at noprocrast setting for example. Even if HN could be seen as social media it’s not in the same category of destructive social media a la Facebook/Instagram/Tiktok
HN has upvotes, downvotes, and people chasing them for exposure, just like Reddit. The biggest difference is the lack of subs. Everything goes into the same category so you can't have highly specialized echo chambers. The moderators also seem to be a touch more professional.
HN is absolutely social media and it does have some of the dark patterns that plague other platforms. They're just more reigned in. A change in moderation policy or new moderators could destroy this site in a week.
I personally don't think kids need to be banned from participating here. However, the law is often a blunt instrument and it's probably better to get kids off of Facebook and HN if distinctions cannot be made.
The relative lack of dark patterns is true, but the more distinguishing feature is that HN is boring to the majority of people, and isn't destructive because not using it doesn't make you excluded from society, and hence it has little leverage on the users. If HN pulls the enshittification trick, a much bigger portion of people will just stop using it.
I'll try to convert it into a metric: measure the number of involuntary users via the comments saying "I hate this website". You rarely see people here saying HN is bad to the point of being a net negative on them, for example, but this is true of all normie sites, including reddit.
Yeah, agreed. While there are gray areas in the definition, and I can certainly waste an absolute shitload of time on HN and Reddit, both of those sites allow anonymity, and neither provide user-specific personalization (with Reddit you can obviously choose to subscribe to certain subreddits, but that's not done for you, and AFAIK everyone gets the same view and order of stories and comments). What you see in the future is not just inferred from what you clicked on in the past, and that for me is the cardinal sin of most social networks.
Retweet/repost is a part of your first bullet point, and is big in itself. There is a book about the history and present of social media from a few years back that calls out the retweet function as a major clshift in the viral nature of social media and its use to spread (mis) information.
The two first I'd get behind, the latter two I just don't think matter too much.
Algorithmic, for profit, social media is by far the worst technology ever foisted upon humanity. Even most of the issues with AI/LLMs become moot if we where to remove platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, X and to some extend YouTube. Removing the ability to spread misinformation and fueling anger and device thought would improve society massively. Social media allows Russian and Chinese governments to effect election, they allow Trump to have an actual voice and they allow un-vetted information to reach people who are not equipped to deal with it.
It's time to accept that social media was an experiment, it could have worked in an uncommercial settings, but overall it failed. Humanity is not equipped, mentally, to handle algorithmic recommendation and the commercialization of our attention.
I think it’s pretty easy to write a law that doesn’t include email and sms. They have no engagement algorithms.
Forums require a little more finesse - but a good starting point is distinguishing upvotes from personalized engagement-based algorithms.
Basically I don’t buy that your concern is a problem in practice.
Edited to add - here is the guidance for Australia’s law for reference: https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/soci...
Do you not see the irony of posting this on a social media site (hacker news), given you're one of the users?
I guess self-hatred is one of the motivating vectors of authoritarianism.
Would you also secretly like it if daddy government was always watching you on camera and triggered your shock collar every time you reached for a candy bar?
Rather than really address what is ass about social media, we just "ban" it for folks who we can ban it for. This seems off.
Kid's have unlimited time. They'll find something else, likely pretending to be adults and thus even more at risk.
Meanwhile everyone else gets an internet license and the government every website tracks you ...
This is a classic case of nice idea and the results will be all wrong / not even address the problem.
By creating 'rules' for social media based on what's good and bad instead of banning it altogether you end up creating loopholes instead. Even in the case we instead first discuss what is "ass" we will probably end up having a debate instead of getting anything done for another 10 years. I'm on team, just get shit done.
I’d say status quo is before social media as that’s where most childhoods have happened. Targeting children with social media is definitely a new thing and still an experiment since those poor souls that had their lives surveilled by Meta are just coming of age and we’re just learning about the damages.
The fact that you're the only one calling this out is quite frankly alarming.
It's one of the most authoritarian statements I've ever heard from a western government. And just because its the trendy moral panic of the day, everybody is cheering it on.
Anything where we allow people free will is by definition an "uncontrolled human experiment" and the basis of any free society.
Should we also end the "uncontrolled human experiment" of allowing people to have private money and make their own purchase decisions? Should we end the "uncontrolled human experiment" of allowing people to select their own romantic partners?
The headline is missing an important “looks to”. Politicians and public opinion seem to be in favour.
> Finland looks to end "uncontrolled human experiment" with Australia-style ban on social media
Open Internet dying in front of our very eyes.
Let's not forget that social media are just one of the many scapegoats tried over the past decade in hopes of pushing this idea forwards. And while there's no denying that today's social media have gotten destructive, they're still only a scapegoat; no attempt is being made here to bring them back to their original, non-malicious shape.
Is the social media hate really so powerful that, channeled carefully, it can overshadow free speech?
> no attempt is being made here to bring them back to their original, non-malicious shape.
Social networks can revert back to original form any minute, nobody’s stopping them.
> Is the social media hate really so powerful that, channeled carefully, it can overshadow free speech?
Bots giving platform to schizos and fringe radicals is a freedom of speech?
Has anyone ever argued that children should have full access to the entire internet?
Seems like a horribly bad idea.
We should ban dynamic feeds that aren't based on explicit user action. E.g., Youtube should only be able to show search results based on search term, not search context. The recommendations should only be videos from channels you have subscribed to.
The dangers of algorithmic content are so obvious, and the only way to stop companies from doing this stuff is to legislate against it
Does this actually solve the problem? Or is the problem something deeper in the human psyche that keeps us addicted to pleasure and avoiding pain regardless of the moral or psychological repercussions? I have a feeling if you remove one vice people will just replace it for another if the underlying cause is not treated.
Is it really so controversial to ban it entirely? We ban heroin and other hard drugs.
I think most people are better off, and have a more nuanced view of reality if the only news they get is local. Or the updates from people they know always in person.
I remember reading the Montreal Gazette as a kid, with their lopsided takes on various issues (local and international) as a result of their "organic local" writers. The local talk radio (CJAD) was worse.
I much prefer Youtube videos and international media from multiple viewpoints to that world.
Compare it to marijuanna instead. Then it’s on the same level of controversy.
You are downvoted, but you are totally right. Humans are not meant to cry daily over stuff that happens half a world away, or be exposed to a thousand new strangers every day. But thanks to internet, your mom and aunt can have an endless fuel to their various anxieties and your daughter can have eating disorders comparing herself to celebrities.
Bring a pre-internet pre-24/7 TV person to present day and they’ll spot the problem straight away. Amusing Ourselves To Death was written in reaction to the societal changes brought by the TV. What about the impact of Internet news, and Facebook, and Tiktok?
>You are downvoted, but you are totally right. Humans are not meant to cry daily over stuff that happens half a world away
You mean humans are not meant to learn about the atrocities their government is funding half a world away.
Social media is not designed to keep you informed. Its designed to keep you engaged because that helps them sell ads. And the best way to keep you engaged is to keep you enraged. I've seen in the US how social media has been used push false narratives, hate and other falsehoods. Its toxic.
If you really want to stay informed, there are plenty of newspapers, NGOs and other organizations out there reporting the truth.
No, governments are not meant to be able to fund atrocities half a world away. Just as your body is not meant to sit at a chair and your eyes are not meant to look at a distance of 50cm for 8 hours a day.
The entire current human existence right now is at odds with human biology and psychology. One has to swim against the current just to be physically, mentally and spiritually healthy.
Were our ancestors physically mentally and spiritually healthy? When exactly was this?
I'm working on an article targeted at a Taiwan audience titled "你不是人類，你是IG代理," "You aren't a human, you're an Instagram agent." I want to reframe how everyone with their phones out at the rave isn't there for themselves, they've been directed to attend by IG so as to acquire training data for IG visual models. IG can't just order humans around like we do for LLMs but it's easy enough to program our sloppy brains: just chemically induce FOMO, show the right ads at the right time, easy, off go your little data acquisition agents to physically film the required data.
The real question is enforcement They tried this, and kids just moved to platforms nobody knew existed
There's still a double digit percentage of parents that oppose the ban. The only way to make a ban work without parental support is requiring a video camera to be running constantly doing facial verification while the app is running, completely unfeasible.
I cannot overstate how sympathetic I am to this in theory but the only way this is enforceable is through ID laws that endanger privacy online for everyone.
It’s going to be interesting to see how these types of bans play out.
One alternative to bans could perhaps be if the EU created an IdP or something similar, with a fee for each authentication request, and then forced all commercial services within Europe to use it. I’m not sure if the fee should go back to the user or be paid as tax to the government, but either way, it would change the incentives around connecting traffic to you and making profit from it by harvesting data or steering recommendation engines.
Because I do think there’s nothing wrong with the government doing this, just like in the physical world.
And in some cases, we might prefer cheap authentications… like when posting comments, to avoid trolling/manipulation/bullying. Perhaps when doing “writes” on the internet, if there’s a robust way to identify that type of traffic.
It's all picking up steam. The thing is whatever the implementation may be, the writing is on the wall that social media's are numbered, well at least its in current form.
I.m sure there'll be downsides to this but, have to say, I'm happy the de facto position that social media's should be allowed to be the wild west is now seriously being questioned
>the writing is on the wall that social media's are numbered, well at least its in current form
There's enough of us devs that absolutely fucking hate the idea of governments controlling how people communicate that the next stage of social media will probably be a decentralised system that's extremely difficult to shut down. Unless every government devolves into full on China-style authoritarianism with deep packet inspection, a national firewall and ubiquitous surveillance, there's no way to stop a well designed distributed social media platform. There just hasn't been enough incentive yet for people to build one.
The internet should be 18+, no internet for kids, there is literally no need for kids to have internet access and its easy too, treat the devices themselves as contraband. This way you need no age checks for social media because internet itself is 18+.
Social media age restriation is just an anonymity ban in disguise. Governments should focus on regulations knowingly addictive and overly engaging mechanics instead.
Maybe it's time to start auditing social network platforms and disallow certain practices.
No, they’ll probably just follow Australia’s lead[1] of: default allow; algorithmic age estimation; account suspend; ID to unblock. Chill.
So yes, you will need to show your ID which will connect to your account and obviously be used to surveil everything you post online. People on HN of all places need to stop being so naive.
I just wish this was possible somehow without essentially making corporate mass-surveillance a requirement.
Welp, let’s just keep screwing over anyone who doesn’t fit society’s mold of who is acceptable. Particularly queer kids, neurodivergent kids, disabled kids, etc.
How do they even define “social media”? Do they just ban kids from participating in society using electronic communications? Or maintain a stoplist “here’s what we consider to be social media”? Or what?
I mean, sure, prime examples of what is colloquially called “social media” is crapware. I do get the intent.
But I wonder what sort of unintended, unplanned, odd and potentially even socially harmful consequences it would possibly have.
Australia enacted this through a stoplist, but also appears to require self-assessment by the services themselves.
https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/soci...
"Citizens should be free to make their own choices for themselves and their children, especially benign ones about how to socialize and who to socialize with."
It's interesting how few governments believe this. Your rulers know what's best for you, and it's not freedom.
Parents can give their kids alcohol and cigarettes, that's fully legal.
Driving involves danger to other. We restrict adults from doing things that are a danger to others, it has nothing to do with being "vulnerable."
What matters is content, not communication. They could build a platform to chat with each other, but they could just use WhatsApp or text or email for that. But they can't build a platform with an infinite stream of targeted content (until AI generates content I guess).
Tiktok was also the wake up call for US and other western countries who found out they lost a part of their youth about the Israeli war on Gaza. Youth thorough the ages always stand against perceived injustice. The oligarchy also want to control that aspect.
People in this thread are celebrating this, though it inevitably means ID-checking and mass surveillance. Australia's ban also exempted Roblox, a platform that exploits children and is a haven for child predators. Also, it's no coincidence that all these social media bans are arriving the same time youth are using social media to spread awareness of Israel's genocide of Palestine.
Social media really is downhill from here. There is already a lot of bot activity (and I don't mean moltbook) and it will only get worse.
This will become closer to truth than conspiracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
"FISTA has taken advantage of the law change, brought in last August, which allows schools to restrict or completely ban the use of mobile phones during school hours."
I find it interesting that a law change was needed to allow schools to do this.
Students do have rights - and indeed also property rights - here. Of course, when in class the students could be asked to bring their phones to the front and be given them back afterwards, but without the law, the use of phones couldn't be restricted during breaks etc. Thus the new law which can make the restrictions even more severe during school hours.
Students don't have many rights when it comes to what you can bring to or do at school. We were prohibited from wearing certain styles of clothes, hats, couldn't even chew gum in class. Pretty much anything that could be called disruptive, damaging, or dangerous was banned. I'm not sure how phones ever were considered acceptable in the first place. Even in the pre-smartphone days, SMS was a huge distraction.
Phone is a personal item. It doesn't disrupt anything by itself.
If a kid is using it during the class, then it is disrupting, but that can be dealt old-school way without the overall phone ban. If a kid starts stabbing others with a pencil, it will have to be dealt with, without the need for a pencil ban.
The phone disruption happens to the kids themselves and during the breaks (their free time).
Of course people have rights... the point is that schools seem not allowed to set their own rules.
The school my children went to in the UK has had a no phone policy for many years: phones must be off and kept in the pupils' bags. No need for a law change...
I think this is about approach to regulation and flexibility. In general being too restrictive about what is allowed makes things inflexible and poor at adapting.
Its a very dangerous experiment. Remember: we only get ONE childhood. No do overs.
Wrong. Ban phones. Would benefit more than just children. The internet must again become something you sit down to use.
This is of course a trend in many western countries. With some, like the UK and Australia, leading the way.
At this point I do not think it is reasonable to deny the harm that certain modes of social interactions over the internet have caused. At the same time these bans should not be considered reasonable options. They exist to cover for the decade of inaction of politicians in addressing youth dissatisfaction and dysfunction.
A reasonable approach should not assume that the root cause of this dysfunction is youth interacting with social media, but should consider what lead to this in the first place. Apparently most adults seem to be capable of dealing with this situation, if they are not why would this ban, or at least some regulation, not extend to social media for adults.
In general I believe that dysfunction in the youth has multiple causes and that overuse of social media is just on part of the puzzle and that unhealthy use of social media is often caused by other problem and used as a coping mechanism.
These bans will not be effective and they will be assaults on the free internet, as the bureaucrats establishing the laws are also seeking to control the internet for themselves and will use this as a backdoor.
> At this point I do not think it is reasonable to deny the harm that certain modes of social interactions over the internet have caused
Yes, it is reasonable to doubt the purported harms are real, because
1) I've yet to see evidence that the medium is the problem,
2) people keep telling me that they don't need evidence because the harms are obvious, and
3) I have an strong prior, as an American, that anyone preventing people sharing ideas with each other is a villain of history.
The furor over youth social media has all the hallmarks of a moral panic, including over-reliance of weak evidence, personal attacks against skeptics, and socially disruptive remedies of dubious efficiency, the collateral damage of which people justify by pointing to harms to children they say, falsely, are obvious and ongoing.
I'm not convinced that these social media bans are solving a real problem. The more people breathlessly tell me I'm a bad person for asking for evidence of the alleged harms, the more I think it's a public mania, not a civilizational problem.
It really doesn't help that it'd be suspiciously convenient for the worst actors in power if sharing ideas on the internet required ID.
For the reasons outlined in my post I believe that it is hard to show specific causal claims which relate overuse of mobile devices and especially social media to specific problems. Although I think for some specific cases this could still be reasonably inferred.
Just to be clear, the evidence seems overwhelming. This is not some novel research field, but this questions has been researched for long enough to have been pretty conclusively answered.
>1) I've yet to see evidence that the medium is the problem,
This is not relevant to the claim. The claim is that the specific usage pattern of young adults is harmful to their development.
>I'm not convinced that these social media bans are solving a real problem.
I largely agree.
The impression that one might get from this article is that the ban is essentially a done deal, but it’s not. What exists right now is political signaling by Prime Minister Petteri Orpo, plus preliminary fact-finding and position papers by ministries and agencies, but no enacted legislation. There’s still a big gap between "government floats an idea with broad public support" and "a legally enforceable, technically workable ban".
The Finnish language article about it is much thinner.
Do people under the age of sixty even use traditional social media anymore? Do we have actual stats?
I am in my late thirties so surely out of touch, but am friends with people in their mid twenties and frankly I don't know anyone who spends any significant time on anything other than TikTok. I guess you could call TikTok "social media", but it wouldn't fit my old person definition.
I think pretty much everyone below the age of 60 is aware that Facebook/Instagram/etc is just slop now. You don't even see your friend stuff. You just see slop. I use Facebook primarily for marketplace these days, but when I do scroll my feed, it's all like weird east asian AI slop. Women cutting open impossibly large fruit, fake tartar removal, fake videos of fights.
Literally nothing that compels me to stay on the site like I hear people on here talk about.
>I think pretty much everyone below the age of 60 is aware that Facebook/Instagram/etc is just slop now.
Sorry, but to me you just revealed you don't speak to many women.
Watching people cheer this on uncritically without thinking through what this actually means in practice (the end of privacy on the internet, forever)...just because of some silly moral panic and people being too lazy to parent their kids...it's just sad.
Unfortunately, rationally thinking through 2nd and 3rd order effects is hard. As we see on social media, appeals to emotion drive the highest engagement, and "think of the children" is the ultimate emotional appeal.
But hey, with European countries moving to tie all internet activity to their national ID system to "protect the children from social media" and "ban speech we don't like" maybe we can finally get rid of those cookie popups?
Making Lambi Toilet Paper jump through bizarre hoops when targeting their toilet paper ads to people seems silly now...given we're voluntarily handing our browser history & permission to access the open web to a much more powerful entity (the government). Consumer goods companies combining your IP address and email address together for the purpose of selling you more toilet bowl cleaner...becomes a bit of a moot point, no?
Can we be it for adults now? Seriously, can we?
I mean, if it affects a children’s what makes we think it doesn’t affect adults? Alcohol affects children, and it affects adults. If social media affects children, it also affects adults.
The big live social media was it was meant to connect people but in truth, it was designed to control people.
If it was a pure communication platform, we wouldn't be in this situation.
Social media as it exists in mainstream life is an advertising platform which happens to have a few methods humans can use to communicate with each other. But that's a bug, not a feature.
>The big live social media was it was meant to connect people but in truth, it was designed to control people.
This is absurd. People have access to far more information today via decentralised media than they did when information was filtered through a small elite cabal of media company CEOs. Restricting access to information is a means of controlling people, and that's exactly what the governments pushing to ban social media want to do.
Banning youth from communicating is just not appropriate. And forcing adults to give up privacy to discuss things is a huge risk and a path to enabling authoritarianism, like in Trump’s America.
Do parents do not exist? I mean if the parents pass hours looking at their phone, the kids would want to use a phone, maybe making a law is easier than setting an example? Each parent could educate themselves and bloc "harmful" websites from their kids phones, that is what parental control is for.(single, no kids)
Hmmmm. So I do understand some concerns here. On the other hand, I also absolutely hate all forms of censorship. I don't use any of these anti-social media myself (though, perhaps hacker news is declared social media? I also used to use reddit in the past, is that social media? Where are the boundaries of that term definition by the way?), but I still absolutely dislike state actors banning websites. I have no illusion about e. g. Zuckerberg and others here; see the recent news how Facebook tried to "hook" up young kids like a drug addict; Google via Youtube on the "swiping" of videos (that one is hard to resist ... I keep on scrolling down in the hope of finding better videos, fail, and eventually realise how I am wasting my time swiping ...). But even then ... I actually think I dislike censorship more than those anti-social websites that I am not even using anyway. This may be different for younger brains, so it is not that I am not understanding the rational behind. But still ... I can't get myself to want to like censorship either.
I wouldn't call it censorship. We don't allow kids to drink or smoke either, is that censorship? Gate keeping media thats possibly harmful for developing brains, when the users are possibly unable to make an informed decision for themselves, isn't inherently bad.
As someone who has literally been on the internet since BBSes, the idea that those days were better absolutely is contradicted by my own experience, in which I was victimized and exploited several times because of the lack of any real moderation.
Enforcement of that law is going to be a certifiable joke. My Chinese classmates back in undergrad in the early 2010s used to use a VPN to access their Facebook accounts when they went home for break. Like anyone else around here in their 30s, I didn't have much trouble bypassing "WebWasher" or its ilk in the 00s either. I have a better proposal to get kids off social media, hear me out:
In order to make a teenager stop doing something, all you need to do is show them videos of someone their parents' age doing it. Juxtapose a bunch of 40-somethings doing cringy little "TikTok dances" alongside people young enough to be their classmates, and they'll stop. Make another TikTok Cringe Compilation, but this time add more clips from middle-aged TikTok users.
My proposal might be insufficiently sophisticated and too actionable for the members of this community who think themselves to be righteous members of an enlightened class and who seek only to complain about current events to self-affirm their superiority. Nonetheless, I insist that anyone who will listen gives the following proposal consideration for the future of our children, whose FICA taxes shall pay for our retirements.
I didn't misunderstand anything. Your little "network effect", as you have so pretentiously worded it assumes teenagers are only getting on social media for their classmates, not for all the other users on a social media site. You also assume a little government-made dumpster-tier firewall written by peons making $70k like "WebWasher" is going to stop them. It didn't stop me from opening up goatse, meatspin, or 2G1C, so your argument carries no water.
All they need is one classmate similar to most of us here on this site. Someone in their high school who will show them how to use a proxy or a VPN not for cred, not for reward, but just because "fuck it, why not?"
I secretly wish it would use a verification scheme that's so invasive/annoying, that even adults would stop using it anyway.