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?
The answer is that we shouldn’t have most social media to begin with and parents need to actually fucking parent their kid’s usage. Social media is just the television replacement.
By making it so that social media can’t harm anyone, not just kids.
Amen
Kill the engagement algorithm. Your feed should contain a chronological list of posts made by people you subscribe to. In one stroke you could end the doomscroll - not just for kids, but for everybody. Also, infinite scrolling should be banned.
Your feed should contain a chronological list of posts made by people you subscribe to
Should that be the only way the feed should be organised by law?
in my opinion, yes. the point is to make it less addictive- and this will take away some of the ‘fun’ without isolating kids. social media is entertainment that has been branded and marketed as an essential by the people getting rich off it. i find plenty of good things on youtube without ever signing in - i just search for them. if youtube or whoever wants to use its own ad space to promote channels, i think that is probably ok - provided that the choice is not personalized by an algorithm.
How is this even remotely enforceable?
Yeah, don’t give them phones.
This is the solution in my home… Seems to work pretty well…
Ban advertising.
No, seriously, think about it. Imagine a word where narrow, strictly defined thing called “advertisement” is illegal. I mean, obviously, we’re in magic fairy wonderland here, but y’know… I live in a state where billboards are illegal. Nothing’s truly impossible… just ‘unthinkable’ mostly. Without ads, the incentive to make the platform addictive evaporates, suddenly companies are competing just to, y’know, make a better platform.
Punishing parents for giving their kids access to social media is one way, maybe only dumb phone for kids?
Mandatory education about safety for children on the jobs and the midia is a good one.
I would go as far to forbid children photos on the internet/social media, so AI Porn and Pedophiles would not be interested anymore eventually.
And all of this has to be state policy (not goverment policy), because government changes from time to time.
I think this point is getting buried, but the regulatory change that needs to happen to start with is not the algorithm alone, but Monetization realignment!!
- Shift ad models to reward completion (e.g., pay creators per finished video) rather than scroll depth
- Offer paid tiers where users pay $2-5/month to disable all addictive features (no A/B testing on these users)
- User-controlled ad preferences with revenue sharing
- Behavioral cost transparency
Or others. Basically disincentivize addictive apps. I would also suggest penalizing harshly those that do, as many of these companies make so much off of this that only the harsher enforced penalties will force change (if they don’t avoid it through regulatory capture).
Be a parent. If you’re going to fuck and have children, you need to be prepared for the responsibilities ahead. Stop trying to automate it by dumping those responsibilities onto others.
Everyone here is going to say: “Be a parent.”
It’s a meaningless platitude.
That is not a policy idea and sounds a whole lot to me like “just recycle, bro” and we can readily look around us and see that expecting individuals to act responsibly is shitty public policy.
I understand the hysteria over providing ID’s, but understand, the social media companies already have all of your information as a user. You’re sacrificing your privacy and that of your kids by using them to begin with. Providing and ID is just a formality, and an easy one, because it’s something that (obviously) only an adult can provide.
This game is only one by not playing to begin with and disallowing any electronics in the home.
Sorry, why are you on Lemmy then if you’re non-plussed about handing over your ID? Social media sites (that I use) do not have a picture of me, or my acrtual identity.
I think that answer is obvious.
Also I think it’s naive to think you’re not already cataloged, especially given that we recently learned definitively that Google is feeding data to the government illegally without a warrant, thanks to the FBI desperately trying to look competent by publicizing doorbell camera footage for a person that didn’t have a Google account.
If Google is doing this, every corporate social media site is doing it.
Tbh not really
Well, take a moment to think about it.
I could think of some reasons maybe, but none seem to stand out. The fact that big-tech is going to increasingly flagrantly violate our privacy as a precondition to use the services is an increasingly major one.
Ask yourself why you’re on Lemmy instead of Reddit, or FB, or Twitter.
That’s what I’m getting at.
Comparing one to the other is illogical, because even though they possess similar functions, they are completely different.
There is no algorithm here, no ads, no tracking. There are actual enforced rules and human moderation. I am not having my feed tracked to sell me bullshit, and no one needs my ID.
That’s my I am here and not there.
However, the big tech companies are not asking your permission to spy on you, as has been proved by the Guthrie case.
Ask yourself why you’re on Lemmy instead of Reddit, or FB, or Twitter.
Privacy is a big reason.
How do you even expect a decentralised service run by hobbyists to even implement age-ID in the first place?
However, the big tech companies are not asking your permission to spy on you, as has been proved by the Guthrie case.
Yes, but again, they do not have my face or my actual ID. They can make a profile from my posts and it would resemble what I believe but in theory, after long posting on Lemmy or Piefed - they could implement tools to do the same thing.
If they already have our information, then they don’t need our ID for any legitimate purpose.
The government has all your info but you still have to show ID to vote.
Requiring an ID is a useful way to regulate many things, like ensuring children cannot access social media.
Yes, show, not give. There is a huge difference. In person, you can show them and know that they don’t have a copy squirrelled away somewhere. With digital, you have to give them a copy, and you have no real way of knowing if they kept a copy or not. And given how untrustworthy these corpos are, they almost certainly did.
Same as always, better patenting.
My three boys don’t have filters on the internet, instead of blocking them from the world, I raised them in it.
I have no answers at this time, but THIS IS THE CORRECT QUESTION
Maybe sidestep this by asking more questions.
Why do kids use social media? What do they get from it? What could it be replaced by that’s positive? What is social media?
That sort of thing.
Regulate advertising space and personalization algorithms.
Yes, it will kill a large portion of current economy, so maybe do it slowly. But generally speaking you should be able to find what you want on the internet, not what advertisers want you to see.
This is it. We regulate drugs, so likewise the addictive algorithm needs regulation, but no lawmakers want to go after the oligarchs.
It’s a vaguely similar situation to immigration. If the US really wanted to stop illegal immigration they could take care of the vast majority of it immediately with harsh penalties for any employer caught with illegal employees, but no one wants to actually keep immigrants out because that would be admitting to the fact that they’re crucial to the economy.
There is no “harms of social media” per se. There are harms of unregulated companies that purposefully create addiction machines that are harmful to everyone, young and old alike. Our collective grandma became an antivaxer at the ripe age of 71, our collective dad became racist not at 13 either.
In not in favor of providing ID for anything. If a service requires it, I won’t use that service. Also, I can’t think of a verification system like this that hasn’t been bypassed or exploited, so it’s largely an exercise in futility.
However, a compelling argument is to use your phone’s biometrics to perform a challenge and verification. Basically, your device acts as your ID so sites never have it. I think this way better than all websites to keep a copy of the identity.
Make chronological feeds mandatory. Accounts you follow shall not be filtered nor censored and posts of accounts you have not followed should not be shown. Algorithmic feeds are allowed but should be opt-in inside the settings.
And also schools teaching and parents parenting.
Chronology is only one part of this, although I think it is the right foot forward.
We also need:- Mandatory session limits with friction
- Notification redesign replacing real-time alerts with scheduled digest batches
- Engagement friction mechanisms
- Especially need algorithmic transparency & control to make the user aware and in not manipulated
- Behavioral feedback systems
- An most importantly Monetization Realignment
The parents point is true, but more generally I think it needs to be that “people” need to be held responsible and accountable for their actions both as adults and children, and to enable this they need to be taught critical thinking skills as well as given the tools to make this happen. Common sense isn’t common, it’s instilled.
Mandatory? So Lemmy/Piefed should be forced to only list by /new/?
Yeah, no. Let me rephrase “make personalized algorithms opt in”?
