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?
For one a law that prevents infinite scroll and another that prevents algorithm that sole purposes is to keep people engaged on the platform.
Those are good ideas. I think another (somewhat radical, unlikely to be implemented) idea would be mandating that these services use open source code, so we can see exactly what shenanigans they’re up to.