This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
What if, instead of trying and failing to kick kids off social media, we focused our attention on the reasons why being online is so often detrimental in the first place?
Pre-fucking-cisely.
Then you'd have a massive "but what about the children?!" censorship situation for everyone.
We already have that, and it has solved absolutely nothing while potentially making online surveillance and privacy issues worse.
The answer isn't age-gating or ID verification, it's changing how the sites themselves operate. Get rid of the idea of "driving engagement", no more stealth ads, and no corpo, media, political party, or lobbyist accounts. Hold influencers and podcasters to the same kind of standards we used to hold journalists to, where they're required to tell you when the're shilling for some kind of shady supplement company or political huckster.
You know, the kind of shit any sane species would do with this sort of tech, but when have we ever been sane?
The addictive design of platforms, software and algorithms should be adressed, not the users age.
And the tech companies should be made responsible to design more healthy platforms, etc.
The problem is the design of tech, not the people using it.
Why is everyone forgetting the parents in this shit. They are the ones giving their kids access to this shit, not monitoring and moderating their access to this shit, and letting screens do the job of raising their kids instead of doing it themselves.
The same parents who scream anytime a teacher grades them fairly?
Teachers should be legally allowed to posses a metal gauntlet for backhanding idiot parents across the face.
You are correct, but that does not absolve the companies or the government of any responsibility. It should not be "anything goes" as far as intentionally addictive designs on anything with a screen for the same reason they can't just put cocaine in Doritos. They still engineer in what they can, but with some guardrails. And even in that case the regulations here in the US leave a lot to be desired.
But without the addictive design the users don't spend enough time to see all the ads and tracking required to reach the target growth. Somebody think of the shareholders /s
It's interesting because I was talking to my psychologist about this last week.
Mental illness runs in my extended family specifically my best friend is a functional alcoholic. He grew up the son of a functional alcoholic.
We all agree that alcoholism is an addiction, just like gambling, social media, etc.
The problem is that as a society we are addressing the specific addiction. AA for alcoholics. For gambling the government has programs you can admit yourself to.
What I was postulating to my psychologist is the real problem is some people have un underlying susceptibility to addiction. My experience with addicted people is regardless of good or bad if you remove an addiction they will replace with an unhealthy obsession on something else. Alcohol will be replaced with something else because the problem is the person has an imbalance they can't do something in moderation. I've seen this time and time again.
Plus factor in comorbidities like ADHD and you have a stew going.
My point being, yes you're correct tech is a problem, but it's 100% the people too in some cases it's just without the social media their addiction may have been benign so not visible. "Oh look at Mary with her beanie baby collection." Or "oh look at Jack he really is a go getter running his 10k rain or shine every day."
I guess the difference between addictive tech like social media and stuff like alcohol is the scale.
Alcohol is more a problem of an individual and its nearest people.
Big tech is a threat to democracy and the cohesion of society.
The fallback argument for the social media ban is that it’s better than nothing. But with results like these, it may be worse than nothing, given it potentially creates new problems. Children will remain online with arguably less supervision and support, new privacy and digital security vulnerabilities seem to have appeared and the worst aspects of social media lay largely unaddressed.
I wish more people understood this. Changing something can mean you've caused harm unintentionally, even if you haven't identified it yet. Too many people seem to have the thought process "We have to do something! This is something. Let's do this." without ever considering the harm they might do.
A 30% reduction of kids being exposed to these harmful platforms is a good thing and I'm glad to see it.
Also, all laws are imperfect, and expecting 100% efficacy is moronic.
As a parent who dont like id requirements but who also wants my children away from social media, this is my take:
Social tech does not require a tech solution, but instead a social solution, because social media is a social problem. My children has restricted access, no accounts etc. But that helps little when all the other parents believe social media to be fine. A law clearly sets a social norm, which apparently 30 % of parents understand.
Right, but the politicians didn't sell the law at 30% efficiency. They sold it at something like 95% efficiency. So they lied and they haven't solved anything.
Maybe they could have used all of that money to run campaigns to help convince parents to properly supervise their children. Maybe that would have done more than this 30% figure.
Or maybe, instead of creating privacy-infringing laws or blaming parents, we actually dismantle the tech companies who created them and imprison their leaders. We all know corporate social media is cancer, that’s why we’re on Lemmy. So let’s fucking do something about the cancer instead targeting the victims or worse, exploiting the situation to expand the surveillance state.
You don't think they'd happily target Lemmy if it were larger? It's still "social media" to them
Don't you know? Nothing is worth doing unless it solves all problems at once right away
Key point: "Ultimately, the fundamental problem with age-gating is that it fails to address any of the root problems with our current online landscape – that is, the extractive business models and pernicious design features of mainstream tech companies. We all exist in a highly commercialised information ecosystem, rife with algorithmically amplified misinformation, scams, harmful content and AI slop. Children are particularly vulnerable to these issues but the reality is that it impacts everyone, even if you’re blissfully absent from Facebook or Instagram."
They don't wanna solve the root problem, they just want to make the big tech companies happy as well as the people who is sayiing shit about social media happy, Age verification is their stupid answer to which translates to "We don't give a flying shit about kids"
I've talked to heaps of parents and heaps of kids about this. What I think is interesting is that people face-to-face seems to be generally supportive of the law. They say that social media is problematic, and that the law helps by discouraging its use. A few different kids have said that they it helps them break an addition. Other kids say they don't care, because it hasn't blocked them. So mostly positive or neutral responses when face-to-face.
But every time I see this mentioned on the internet, it's very negative. There are always heaps of comments saying that it is a failure, and could never work, and that the government is stupid; and there are often other comments saying it is a part of a secret plan for the government to track us or whatever. In any case, mostly negative views - with just a sprinkling of fairly neutral views such as "it hasn't been active for very long. Lets wait and see."
I just think that's interesting. I guess my real-world social circles don't totally match my internet social circles.
Kids will often just repeat what they've heard to adults.
But the largest problems to these laws is the way they affected minority groups. If followed, the law would disproportionately affect disabled and queer teens who may suddenly be unable to access help and community.
I suspect there's some selection bias in the kids you're speaking to.
A blind spot i know i have is that i grew up without social media and the internet as it exists now, when i was a teen the internet was a place to spend some time playing goofy games on newgrounds or neopets, maybe downloading some movies or music from Limewire or Kazaaar.
I have no idea how i would have gone growing up with this insidiously tailored and hyper addictive environment, honestly it feels like giving every kid their first hit of heroin in high school and sending them on their way.
So i get why kids might be both 'thank you' and 'fuck you' in equal measure, but just like heroin there will be plenty that never recover, and it all could just be resolved by reigning in the social media companies.
Or, the internet, the same medium upon which the noisome roots of social media depend, has some induced self-selection bias for increasing connectivity. It's basically behaving like a weird superorganism and advocating for conditions to make it grow. At, I might add, the expense of the host species.
This and the porn thing have been massively invasive in terms of privacy. It's so transparently just building a database of facial data. It doesn't even make an attempt to comprehensively block everything on the internet, or realistically enforce compliance.
Censorship is never the answer. Teaching values and the corresponding ethics and morals that come with it is closer to the answer. A world where you burn down shit just to get a job as a firefighter makes this path a bit more difficult and harder to follow.
Censorship is never the answer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Formally banning certain forms of vulgar and bigoted expression establish a code of conduct for the community, even if they aren't strictly enforced.
Teaching values and the corresponding ethics and morals that come with it is closer to the answer.
Morality is as much about proactive and affirmative pursuit of justice as internalized codes of conduct.
If there is no social consequence for immoral behavior, there is no reason to believe the act is immoral.
Censorship was never their intention. So they couldn't give any less fucks. They just want to control us.
Right it's going to take longer than a few months to enforce properly and undo the damage and protect new generations from its negative effects.
At least it's a start.
Or maybe it's never going to work because you can't enforce it properly because the parents don't want it to be enforced. And the damage you're talking about is not backed up by as good science as you think it would be if you were going to pass a law such as this.
But many people are of the mindset that oh my God. Oh my God we have to do something and this is something and therefore it's better than nothing, and they're wrong. If you don't have a good plan, that doesn't make your bad plan reasonable.
Get ready for even more surveillance, censorship and restrictions. That's all they know about how to fix problems - bandaids to hide symptoms instead of addressing the root cause of issues.
Perhaps this was always the plan. Introduce a law for "protecting children" knowing it won't work as it stands, so then it will be easier to introduce even more surveillance and restrictions to fix the current law,
All in the name of protecting children. How can you be against it? /s
What? There is emence amounts of joy in "I told you so". The majority of people warned them this was a stupid idea and now you want to piss on the good feeling of smug correct calling of the clearly failure idea? Fuck off.
