this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025

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Virginia Enacts Stupid, Completely Unworkable ‘Social Media Time Limit’ Law (www.techdirt.com)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

At this point, I'm thinking about the silver lining. If a web of federal and state laws require everybody to prove their identity to some central identity broker, in order to prove they aren't underage, before creating an account on Facebook or YouTube or TikTok, that's going to interfere with a lot of spambot and AI garbage.

It's a horrible privacy violation, of course. But at this point, with AI chatbots that are indistinguishable from humans, I don't see how we can effectively restrict account creation to humans without some sort of oracle confirming an online account is an actual human being.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago

Young people criticized Israel and are having their free speech taken away. That'd what's going on. We must help them get around these fascist laws

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

Techdirt has been killing it since they decided to start covering politics.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

So this bit here:

Populate a public list of other users with whom such user shares a social connection within such service or application

seems like the easiest way to circumvent this law, with the least effort. Just hide connections for users in VA, and now you're not a social media site. You could even give them their own domain like facebookva.com that only they route through, in case the VA govt try to claim all users on the site have to work the same way. Tie them up for years.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

The unworkability is a feature, not a bug.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

We only elect the best here in the USA. Hey, VA, thanks for taking the heat off our idiots here in AR. We are collectively stupid here in the US south. We need a fresh wave of Darwinism down here to wash out the stupid.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Worst thing about this is it stops at "non-adults", and puts the burden in individual services(which would be un-workable, yes) rather than ISPs(which have the means). God forbid we do anything to help society as a whole.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Don't advocate for fashy shit like ISP restrictions

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Might as well call peak usage rates for electricity "fashy shit". Excessive social media usage helps no-one. In fact its the opposite, and particularly so for marginalized groups.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Excessive social media usage helps no-one.

Only commercial social media.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Even if they somehow limit time spent on forums, mastodon, whatever, content can be saved for later consumption, and responses composed for later posting. Instant access to the latest tweet or tiktok isn't helping anyone but advertisers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

We aren't sure how this rebutts what we said. Commercial social media seems to us to be the problem for the most part, open source social media run by real people seems to be a lot healthier from what we have experienced.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This place feels like Reddit before it enshittified. I missed those old days.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

That's somewhat depressing if so as I've run into so many assholes here. Still, interesting to know.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago

I'm talking like 2012 era. I mean where are assholes and dumbasses but that was what it was always like. Things got worse because corpos are abusing us for money and now we're returning to the mean, where good things are possible again. You just gotta turn out the shitheads that's all

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

If you read what I wrote, open source social media is also easier to consume and interact with in the manner I described. Usenet, e-mail, IRC, forums, even private messaging and group-chats are both healthier to interact with and less demanding of our time than "services" that bury the content we want to see like facebook and the rest.

Every single one is still around and in use by the same people who built the internet and others who get more done for themselves and open-source projects than you or I or most of us on Lemmy and the more modern de-federated schemes.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

So.why do you want restrictions targeting marginalised groups?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

What in god's green earth about limitting social media usage for everyone on a daily time-use basis implies anything about targetting marginalized groups? Things that are detrimental to mental health, like excessive social media consumption, aren't magically less-so for marginalized groups.

If anything, such media is a distraction and pacifier of sorts.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

There are people who literally cannot leave the house and their community is literally on social media. Are you saying their mental health would not decline if they were unable to reach their community due to some asinine law like this?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Get this straight: Private Messaging and e-mail are not Social Media in the context of this law, and neither are phone calls or texts. Give me an hour, and I can download enough pages of whatever I like to keep me busy for a week.

Seeking validation from strangers in real-time is bad for your mental health. Yes, even for the home-bound. That said, your argument would probably win-out in court, so there would have to be exceptions. "Adult" is still too broad of an exception on its own IMHO.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago

Yes, I understand that. But not everybody can talk all the time like that, some people can only really have enough energy for social media, not talking one-to-one, I know a few.

Woah, I'm not talking about "seeking validation from strangers". I'm talking about building actual community online, and that being all some people have due to either homeboundness, or other reasons where online is the only community they can know, I'm saying such a law would genuinely put those people in jeopardy, no matter what age they are.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You k.ow they want to to go after LGBT people and Palestine protestors right? That's their while thing and they've admitted it? Why do you wanna help the evil people?

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Limitting time is nothing like limitting speech. If I want to write a lengthy post, I can write it off-line, copy-and-paste without wasting quota time or whatever. Same goes for reading lengthy content; Copy/Paste(or print2pdf) and save for later.

Missing the latest short-form content garbage would be a boon for those who otherwise insist on wasting their time, mental and emotional energy like so.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What? Your logic is insane

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago

The internet was better before ignorant takes like yours showed up. Facebook, tik-tok, and the like invented nothing that wasn't done better previously. Are you really so addicted to all this Web 2.0 non-sense? Of course you are. Get help.