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
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.
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?”
teen go to website
please enter your birthdate
1/1/2000
welcome!
Lawyer sues tech company
But we asked for the birthday
Lawyer points to law text
Company fined
I don’t see many options between asking for a birthdate and asking for ID for this problem. I don’t see any way that this can be enforced that isn’t problematic.
Facebook/Meta has developed software to estimate the age from a video.
I don’t see any way that this can be enforced that isn’t problematic.
Comes with the territory. The point is to control who has access to what information so that they don’t get wrong ideas.
if you think AI software will be able to differentiate between a 15 year old and 16 year old then I have this cool bridge in Brooklyn that you might be interested in.
This is delusional to the point where it feels like we’re literally devolving.
Trusting your face to Facebook is just as terrifying, thanks.
(Plus I have concerns as someone who still looks teenage in her 20s)
I don’t see many options between asking for a birthdate and asking for ID for this problem. I don’t see any way that this can be enforced that isn’t problematic.
The senate inquiry outlined the two likely solutions :
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Uploading ID to the website.
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3D face scanning. This will include continual monitoring so if another person comes into view they will have to face scan in. Remember, its prohibited for chidren to even watch prohibited content with their parents.
Lol those options harm children
How can it possibly be legal to 3D face scan a child, especially if it needs to be authenticated by a remote server somewhere.
I can only ever see option 1 working
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A large part of this will help maintain liability for harm to young people. How ages is verified is irrelevant
How ages are verified are irrelevant? Until a whole collection of faces or government IDs inevitably leaks!
Are you over 16: Yes/No.
That wasnt difficult.
If this would indeed be the case, I would be really happy.
They have no specified otherwise so its a case of why would they waste money doing otherwise.
Problematic for who, the tech companies? They’re practically printing money. Let them spend it on actual solutions to issues that are causing problems for the World.
It forces them to implement solutions that make having anonymous accounts impossible.
