[jiayo]

How many social media sites allow you to do anything without an account? Twitter used to be wide open but X competely locked down. Instagram lets you click 2 things and then the paywall pops up. I'm not sure about Facebook but it isn't much better.

[somethoughts]

A plus of this law would be if this would force social media sites to stop locking down read access behind a sign up wall.

I think the barrier to entry with creating a new account on each site right now is low when no ID is required - so social media sites lock everything down.

With the new friction of requiring ID, it could be harder to get users to create accounts so locking down everything won't make sense from a viewership access perspective.

[vundercind]

I don’t have a Facebook account, but browse business Facebook pages without trouble pretty often.

[goykasi]

Twitter required a login long before the rename or Elon owned it. He actually removed that restriction for a while before reenabling it.

And with some simple div removal, IG doesnt require a login to view content. This is true about a lot of the paywalled sites.

[kennywinker]

That doesn't sound true to me... Idk specific policies, but my experience was that I was never logged in to twitter on my desktop and I was never login-walled out until recently under elon.

edit: https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/tech/twitter-public-access-re...

> People without a Twitter account or who weren’t logged in used to be able to scroll the platform’s homepage and view public accounts and tweets. But as of this week, when such a user opens the platform they are met with a screen prompting them to sign up or sign in to Twitter.

[appplication]

Without speaking to merits, the entire point of this law is to reduce usage by minors. So being able to do less without an account is a feature through this lens.

[pests]

The question was about merits though, you can't just ignore the question.

How do teenagers find and discover businesses when they are locked behind a sign up wall for social media?

[jandrese]

It will be interesting for businesses like restaurants that don't have paper menus but have you scan a code that opens an IG with their menu in an album. Frankly, I applaud the state for eliminating this use case.