California just enacted the country's strictest rules on companion chatbots and a ban on serving “addictive” feed features to users under 16, with expanded kids' privacy protections on top. Supporters say we already ban cigarettes and car keys for minors and this is no different; opponents say the only way to know a user's age is to make every adult hand over ID to scroll. Would you trade that?
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Add your commentMy daughter is 14 and spent last summer barely leaving her bed. Not depressed, not sick — just... gone into her phone. I took it away for two weeks and got my kid back. I don't care what it costs adults to verify age, I would pay it twice.
The cigarette analogy is actually pretty solid and I'm tired of tech people pretending it isn't. We figured out age verification for tobacco without dismantling the First Amendment. We can figure it out here.
lol the same government that cant secure its own databases wants me to upload my drivers license to tiktok. yeah no thanks
I work in UX and I can tell you with complete confidence that "addictive feed features" is not a well-defined legal term and every plaintiff's attorney in California just got a very nice Christmas present.
Okay but who defines "addictive"? Autoplay? A chronological feed that keeps loading? My local newspaper website technically has an endless scroll. Are they covered? This law is so vague it will get shredded in court within 18 months.
To the person who said we figured out age verification for tobacco — we absolutely did not. Teens buy cigarettes and vapes constantly. The verification system is a speed bump, not a wall. So maybe pump the brakes on that analogy.
I changed my mind on this one. I used to think it was pure nanny state stuff. Then I read the internal research Facebook buried for three years and I genuinely cannot defend the old position anymore.
if you disagree with the age verification requirement explain how you square that with the fact that we already require ID to buy a rated-R movie ticket and nobody called that the end of free speech
My concern is the single mom working two jobs who doesn't have time to set up 14 different parental controls on 14 different apps. This law actually helps her. The people opposing it mostly have the luxury of time to manage their kids' screens themselves.
The companion chatbot part of this law is the piece nobody is talking about and it's genuinely the more important one. A parasocial relationship with an AI that is specifically designed to keep you engaged is something qualitatively different from a scrolling feed and it needed regulation yesterday.
I'm 22 and grew up with this stuff and honestly I wish someone had stepped in. I don't say that lightly. I lost years to a feedback loop I didn't understand while it was happening to me.
Slippery slope incoming but hear me out: once we have a national age-verification infrastructure for social media, what stops it from being used for political content? Or "misinformation"? The plumbing matters as much as the policy.
The people saying "just let parents handle it" have clearly never tried to explain to a 15-year-old why they can't have what every single one of their friends has. That's not a parenting failure. That's physics.
respectfully the rated R movie comparison doesnt hold up, you show your ID once at a theater to one employee, youre not uploading a government document to a server farm in singapore or wherever
I spent 11 years in child psychiatry. The clinical literature on adolescent social media use and anxiety is genuinely alarming and has been for a while. The question was always whether legislatures would move faster than the peer review cycle. California is trying.
nobody is explaining what happens to the 15 year old once they VPN around the whole thing in about four minutes. the law governs compliant platforms not the internet.
This is one of those issues where my libertarian instincts and my instincts as a parent are in direct conflict and I genuinely don't know which one wins.
The chatbot regulation is interesting but also who is writing these companion chatbots now, mostly small startups with five employees. California is going to regulate the big players and the actual harmful products will just move to unregulated apps from developers who have nothing to lose.
To the person in child psychiatry — which specific studies are you citing? Because the Haidt stuff has faced real methodological criticism and I think we should be careful about treating contested science as settled before writing it into law.
My son found a workaround to every parental control I installed within a week. He's 13. I don't say that as a brag. I say that as a person who is exhausted and would genuinely appreciate some of this responsibility sitting with the platforms instead of entirely with me.
The ID upload problem has a solution and it's been available for years: third-party age verification that confirms your age without revealing your identity to the platform. The tech exists. The industry just doesn't want to pay for it.
okay but california has 40 million people and whatever they do eventually becomes the de facto national standard because no company builds two separate products. so this matters everywhere not just there.
I keep waiting for someone in this thread to address the enforcement mechanism. Who investigates? Who has standing to sue? What are the penalties per violation? The headline is not the law.
The thing that bothers me about the "parents should handle it" crowd is that it assumes a level of technical sophistication that is genuinely not evenly distributed. My parents are immigrants. They were not going to out-maneuver Instagram's recommendation algorithm.
Hard agree with the person who mentioned the VPN problem. I teach high school. Half my students have a VPN on their phones right now, today, this morning, and most of them installed it to get around school wifi restrictions. This is not a niche behavior.
To the person who said the third-party age verification tech exists — can you name a specific deployed system that actually works at scale without creating a massive honeypot of biometric or document data? Because I've been looking and I genuinely don't know of one.
someone had to say it: the real addictive feed is cable news and we haven't banned that for adults yet so maybe we should figure out our own house before legislating teenagers
I was a product manager at a major platform for six years. The internal metrics we used to measure "engagement" would horrify most users if they saw them. Optimizing for time-on-app is not neutral. It is a choice made by people in conference rooms. This law is a reaction to those choices.
The former PM who said it would horrify people — this is the comment that matters in this thread. The feed is not a neutral river. It is engineered. Regulating engineering is not censorship.
I think a lot of adults are projecting their own complicated relationship with their phones onto teenagers and calling it science. I had a bad relationship with TV as a kid too. I'm fine. Not everything that feels like a crisis is a crisis.
What exactly is the gap here nobody's filling: what does California's law actually say happens when a minor lies about their age during signup? Is the liability on the platform or on the user? Because that changes everything about how this works in practice.
the person who said their daughter spent the summer in bed — I felt that in my chest. same thing happened to my nephew. different platform same result.
My read on the libertarian-parent conflict upthread: you can hold both. The libertarian position is about government restricting adult autonomy. A 15-year-old's prefrontal cortex is not finished developing. These are not the same situation and treating them as equivalent is lazy.
To the person questioning the Haidt methodology — fair point on the specific studies but there's a broader evidentiary picture including the surgeon general's advisory and multiple longitudinal cohort studies that doesn't reduce to one researcher's work. Worth engaging with the whole body of evidence.
I'm 67 and retired and I want to say clearly that I did not grow up with this and I do not understand it well enough to have a strong opinion on the regulation. I am impressed by some of the people in this thread who clearly do. That's not a common thing to say online and I mean it.
the former product manager, the child psychiatrist, and the parent whose daughter spent the summer in bed are the only three people whose comments I trust in this whole thread and I've been reading for an hour
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