Why would you think that? Most of my friends are parents now and all of them are quite concerned about the effect of social media, phones, and technology more broadly.
Basically all of them are planning to delay exposing their kids to phones and screens for as long as possible.
The sentiment of "keep my kids safe on the internet" definitely comes from parents. Yes. We agree.
How we actually get there in a privacy-respecting way is the issue.
If we must have something, I’m in favor of the OS-level flag where a parent can set the device as belonging to a minor and the apps and browser can receive the flag. Lock it behind the most basic parental controls that can be protected and remotely monitored. There are some loopholes with kids downloading apps that allow custom web requests without the flag being sent, so there probably needs to be an app allowlist or special App Store category to match.
Carve out some legal exemptions for Linux distributions that no kids are using and leave it to the iOS, Android, Windows, and Macs of the world. Any parent who doesn’t like the idea doesn’t have to enable it on their kids’ devices.
Parental controls already exist. Lawmakers want to step in and parent peoples' kids for them by removing these freedoms from everyone.
What a fucking stupid, impossible, idea.
Like, explain to me how you think this could be done meaningfully other than some setting that can just be arbitrarily flipped without adding massive complexity.
And arbitrarily changed? Can a regular user arbitrarily change the super user password?
Parents do not have the time or energy to configure modern parental controls which work more like tuning firewall rules.
The other part of the problem is you need collective action, if you ban your child from Facebook, they won’t get invited to parties anymore. If all children get banned, the parties will be arranged over sms or some other non social media. As it is today, banning your kids from social media is overly punishing since all the other kids are using it.
If we actually cared about supporting children and parents as a country, parental controls and access, and making sure that systems were actually safe and protected privacy, would NOT be an afterthought.
The polling I have seen from Germany and Australia of a social media ban for children was quite in favor of it. Sentiment here on HN and on Reddit was the polar opposite. We are in a bubble.
The answer every time is “well then Google/Apple/Facebook/Shopify/mcMaster Carr shouldn’t exist as a business” and if I’m being honest that is not an achievable target so you’re going to arrive at the attested internet.
I'm not trying to call everyone else voting for these things dumb, but does the average person who doesn't think about this stuff for a living actually know what they're voting for?