I’m asking for public policy ideas here. A lot of countries are enacting age verification now. But of course this is a privacy nightmare and is ripe for abuse. At the same time though, I also understand why people are concerned with how kids are using social media. These products are designed to be addictive and are known to cause body image issues and so forth. So what’s the middle ground? How can we protect kids from the harms of social media in a way that respects everyone’s privacy?
By getting rid of shitty corporate social media that makes money by exploiting people.
This is like suggesting that the solution to protecting your kids from tigers roaming the street is to lock them in their rooms. Nah, just rid of the fucking tigers.
As long as corporate social media is closed source, it would be hard to know if a no-advertising policy is being fully adhered to. A good example of this is the class action lawsuit against Chrome’s incognito mode: for years, Chrome got away with collecting personal browsing data when people browsed in incognito mode despite insisting that they didn’t do that. Something similar might happen with social media. To get around that, there could be a legal requirement for social media to be open source. That might run into issues with intellectual property law though, and the lobbying against it would be so intense that I’m not sure if a law like that would ever pass without massive political will.
Thats true for social media, but social media isn’t the only time you want to do age verification.
If you want to see porn or order (legal 😇) drugs for delivery.
And this is just times where the way to “protect kids” is age verification online. There are other times where you want to protect kids too, but doing so is invasive.
Sure, my answer is limited to social media because that is the question that is being asked here.
Ah, I suppose it is.
So I suppose I should direct my grievance at OP for being too narrowminded. There may not be a single solution for protecting the kids, but surely cast a wider net than this.
Also fwiw I think that the profit motive only makes an existing problem worse, it’s not the cause and therefore removing it isn’t the solution. It helps so we should still do it, but we have to be prepared that the job isn’t done.
exactly. im just spitballing but there should be a kid only Neocities website or something that is anonymous with pre-selected prompts you can send to other kids, no DMs or personal pictures allowed. kids and teenagers on instagram/tiktok is like kids of the early 1900s smoking a pack a day. and of course active parenting limiting how much time they spend online. as a kid in the 2000s, our bare bones sites was enough to let us feel involved with the world and still use the internet safely.