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?
I’m not necessarily advocating for ID verification, but to answer your question: most instances require an application to join anyway, so this could simply be tacked ontop.
From what I understand aussie.zone already does something like this. To join, apparently they require a picture of you at a bar with a beer to prove that you’re over 18. Not a perfect method but procedurally not that different from checking IDs.
How is it enforced on them? How can many even afford it?
This doesn’t scale at all. Also, I’m not sure why aussie.zone is doing that because Australia’s social media requirements specifically only apply to large websites.
It’s not scalable for hobbiest run social media like lemmy. It would probably put a cap on how many people could sign up on some of the big instances, which could have the effect of more instances being created and the fediverse becoming even more decentralized so the load could be shared.
And how on earth would a regulator chase hundreds of different instances hosted all over the world to force them to implement age-ID?
The same way they chase 100s of different pot shops and liquor stores to make sure they aren’t selling to anyone under 18