I don’t think there is a technical way to implement this without privacy issues and potential for future misuse and scope creep.
Government doing parenting instead of the parents never works.
I mean, yeah. But also, this isn’t really any different from kids not being allowed to drink alcohol before a specific age, movies and video games having age minima, etc etc.
And I would surmise the same reasoning applies: On average, someone so young has neither the mental development nor the life experience to be able to judge well what they are doing with their own information and how to judge/process the information they get shown.
Of course, this should happen in conjunction with actual education, like I at least had for alcohol and stuff. But it’s an entirely normal thing if it happens as part of a multi-step process (and I am not australian enough to judge how well those things work out in australia in general).
But it IS different. If you compare to alcohol for example, age checks are performed in shops. No record of those is made or available to anyone. There is no centralized infrastructure related to age checks that could be abused in the future to track everyone who buys alhocol.
Yeah but if you think about to, from a law perspective that’s an implementation detail. Sure, from our perspective it’s a really important one, but from the perspective of a lawmaker it’s about whether it should be done, not how it’ll be done in execution (different branches of state, basically).
You are correct that from juridical point of view the difference does not seem great.
Hopefully politicians listen to experts of different fields.
What the government should be doing is mandating that a social media/drugs literacy course is taught in schools. Kids should fundamentally understand that things are not black or white, good or bad; things are grey. They have upsides and downsides; risks and rewards. Kids should be taught that Social media is a great way to connect with your friends, but you are also susceptible to being influenced/manipulated/addicted in X, Y, Z ways.
100% agree. I think it’s a good space for libraries to enter too. Internet literacy, media literacy and critical thinking skills are sorely needed to be taught today.
As if those drug literacy courses helped anyone. We were taught about it aged 12 or something, when nobody really had a clue what drugs are. Around the age where it matters, it was all but forgotten.
i don’t think the always thrown around “more education” is an effective answer to everything
you can educate kids up and down about the harms of smoking- if smoking is advertised as cool in popular media, there are cigarettes with colorful and fruity flavors, and it’s easy for the kids to obtain then they will inevitably smoke cigarettes. everybody has known smoking causes cancer for a half century know.
if you don’t want kids smoking, then you must act with force to restrict something. whether it’s the restriction on subliminal advertising, the ban on colorful cigarettes, or prohibition of selling to underage smokers- you need some sort of ban.
i firmly believe in the near future we will view social media as we know it similar to how we see smoking. addictive little dopamine hits that will over time change the structure of your brain. we look back at the 50s and think it was crazy how they smoked cigarettes on airplanes, drank whiskey at work, and everyone bathed in lead and asbestos. they’re going to look back at our time period and see us similarly
so if I were to say “should kids be using social media?” I wholeheartedly believe they should not be using it until their brains are developed. much like I don’t think kids should be smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, or smoking weed
but the ultimate question is- what are the potential harms of a government ban and are those potential harms worth it?
that’s where I am conflicted. a minor not being able to buy cigarettes is something that I don’t really think hurts society very much.
but a ban on a minor accessing certain online spaces… how do you accomplish that? well, you will need to track people’s identities online somehow. this is the part where I think maybe the harms of kids using social media is not worth giving the government power to monitor and regulate social media websites.
thats a lot of work for the government dude, let them take the easy path
Is anyone talking about the fact that it’s the predatory, short-term-quarterly-gains oriented behavior of the platforms themselves which is in fact rampaging though democracies, massively affecting and survielling Adult’s behaviors on a loop of ragebait-induced dopamine/seratonin manipulation?
Because Kids are going to connect with one another, on whichever the next platform is that’s not banned. What’s more, the institutions they attend will inevitably ask them to do so as…things like Youtube arent exactly 100% avoidable.
Pretty pathetic to clamp down on Youth Liberty in a society that has basically none, when centrally-hosted platforms owned by corporate behemoths are all-but-physically trampling the landscape like some kind of fucked up gentrification-glorifying-voiceline-repeating Megazord
It is easier to enforce access than to enforce ethical algorithm. Sadly, it is not perfect, but it is better than allowing it.
Well we agree but it’s only as much better as it is effective…because when it’s not it’s giving the impression of doing something while in reality it’s legitimizing the stripping of the autonomy.
“best worst case?”
The second i have to hand over my id to a tech company is the second i leave and never come back.
Also how they gonna manage the fediverse? Can someone get fined for providing social media to themselves if an under 16 sets up their own federated instance?
In my country they talked about this. And they thought of a different approach.
The government were to emit anonymous digital certificates after validate your identity. And then the websites were only required to validate these anonymous digital certificates.
Or even it was talk that the government could put a certificate validation in front of the affected ip.
So the bussiness won’t have your ip. Only a verification by the government that you are indeed over certain age.
What if I’m also uncomfortable with the tech company knowing what country I’m a citizen of?
They know it already.
IP reveals general location.
Sure, and my IP is something I can control (VPN). I also travel, and I’m certainly not a citizen of each country I visit.
This kind of control tend to be ip based, like cookies in the eu. So if they don’t know they won’t know. And if they know means that they knew. Nothing changes on that regard.
That depends on the law. For example, it’s possible that the US could require Meta to verify ages regardless of nationality, so you the EU (for example) would be subject to it.
I’m not saying that’s how any of these laws work, I’m merely saying that it’s possible. If enough people sidestep the law by using a VPN, I could countries use a heavier hand (e.g. verify everyone or don’t do business here).
I will always oppose these types of laws. I set up my WiFi to connect over a VPN to the next state over because my state has ID laws for porn and social media. It’s annoying and increases latency a bit (only like 10ms), so I’ll oppose them even if I can sidestep them.
This is technically feasible, and bussiness don’t need to know your id. If anonymous government certificates are issued.
But I’m morally against it. We need to both educate on the dangers of internet and truly control harmful platforms.
But just locking it is bad for ociety. What happens with kids in shitty families that find in social media (not Facebook, think prime time Tumblr) a way to scape and find that there are people out there not as shitty as their family. Now they are just completely locked to their shitty family until it’s too late.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it, we need better terms than “social media.” Tumblr, Reddit, and Lemmy I don’t think should be in the same group as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Social media that uses your real life information should be separate from basically forums that use an online persona.
I don’t know what this legislation says, but I agree with you. It should be limited to restricting the “personal social media,” not glorified internet forums.
I think that the chances of a kid from a broken home finding an exploiter online is much more likely than that kid finding a helpful, supportive community.
Those kids already have exploiters; their parents. The right to communication should be granted to all, and especially the most vulnerable.
They have schools, churches, neighbors, other family, etc etc. There are plenty of organized groups online looking for kids to exploit.
You’re assuming that they’ll find good people online. If they don’t they’ll end up much worse than when they started.
Kids are people and they deserve a chance to try.
I live in New York City. Old timers here remember when 42nd Street was called ‘the Minnesota Strip.’ It got that name because thousands of young people [some as young as 12] would jump on buses and come to New York to live the dream. They’d be met by pimps who routinely patrolled the bus terminal and quickly gathered up as many as they could.
Ok boomer
So, you’re saying my point is relevant, but you’ll ignore it because it involves historical facts?
The fact that people even considered this with a straight face, discussed it and passed it is just indicative how tech illiterate we’ve become.
