28
votes
Sweden's health minister has urged the EU to push ahead with social media restrictions for kids while insisting it be treated as a pressing matter
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- Title
- Sweden pushes EU on kids' social media restrictions
- Published
- Sep 12 2025
I guess I agree completely with their assessment of the problem and its severity, but don't think age gating is going to solve it. At best the kids'll cheese their way through it, at worst every tech company is required to have everyone's passport on file. Then every subsequent data leak for all time is tied to your government ID. And the kids still cheese their way through it anyway.
I would prefer seeing them regulate addictive practices and dark patterns out of social media. Get rid of the infinite scroll. Regulate content recommendation algorithms and make their logic transparent. Limit how many times a link can be re-tweeted. Stuff like that.
The EU is developing a zero-knowledge proof solution for age verification. With zero knowledge proof, proof of age can be given without revealing to the attestation provider why you want to, nor to the relying party anything else about your identity. Of course, ZKP means that an age proof could be for anyone.
My main issue with it all is that it makes the barrier to entry higher for anyone wanting to run a service which the EU decides must be age restricted. This benefits large, well established businesses with practically endless resources to implement them, and disproportionately burdens new, small businesses. This is an overlooked issue of the "chat control" proposals as well, and even moreso: a complex technical solution (coincidentally pushed by lobbyists intending to sell that solution as a service) is a form of regulatory capture.
I wish the public documentation of this didn't include the use of the word nonce. I've stopped using the term due to its reception amongst the non technical.
I suggest "diddler", for Dedicated Integer Data Dust Lavishing Entropic Robustness.
Worth pointing out (again, I hope) that there is no scientific evidence to support the conclusion that social media is unequivocally harmful to young people, or that it needs to be banned. An intervention like straight-up banning social media is simple and it's clear but that doesn't mean it's right...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2
https://www.tes.com/magazine/teaching-learning/general/jonathan-haidt-anxious-generation-right-about-smartphones
Which is not to say that more targeted regulations couldn't be helpful (and not just for young people). The Nature article again:
It doesn't serve young people to look at them and act drastically without thinking.
Personally I don't need scientific evidence to come to this conclusion. Most children see their friends every day at school anyway. The need to "keep in touch" is far less prevalent compared to adults.
"unequivocally" is a huge bar, but I think we've seen more than enough studies to show that social media does change the way you engage with the world, and that phones in particular do impact your school performance.
I'm not for banning it outright, though. First, we're really bad at it (I probably don't need to flesh out all the compromises we tried). If the website isn't requiring you to be logged in and to provide a legal document to prove you're you, you're not really enforcing much. And even then, kids will at best find alternatives that are too small (at first) to enforce such rules. Or even make their own small chat networks. It's a mess trying to regulate the Internet; much cheaper to do education initiatives.
Second, social media has enough uses that banning it properly will cause adverse effects once you're over the age limit. These things are better in controlled, timed environments. Pacing them makes for much better habits when the times are lifted, and it gives them judgements on when exceptions are truly needed.
The only ban I'm really on board for is no phones in the classroom. That's an easy enough restriction and the effects are quickly seen. But funnily enough, that's something more on the parents pushing back against. That can be a topic in and of itself on how we swung back to the helicopter parent phase.
Although I'm squeamish about photo ID I strongly support banning so-called "social media" for children.
A lot of parents are completely aware of how destructive these things are for their children but if they do the responsible thing, refusing to let their child have a smart phone, then they're ostracised from their school friends. This peer pressure ultimately means that anything other than government intervention is insufficient.