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?
Home routers have something called parental controls which can help parents block certain websites and platforms at the home network level.
This together with parenting and education of ones children can help, all without sacrificing and giving away our privacy to third part corporations.
At a regional and country level I would suggest a public service similar to a library to index the internet. Similar to how books are classified by age and genres. These lists can be provided within each home router defult, or made easily available for upload by parents or users.
Parents that can be offloaded a little of the “curration effort”. This can be simply setting of applying the proper age appropriate whitelist and block everything else that is not on the approved list.
This would be the most privacy respectful option IMO over things like age verification or any other alternatives being suggested by corporate tech firms at the moment.
Best solution IMO: Don’t let them use social media. If they really need to communicate, just buy them a SIM and or let them use your phone and SIM to contact them directly.
And if you must let them use social media, set up parental controls on your router. I suggest NextDNS for this. And basically, monitor everything your child watches or interacts and engages with. If they’re using YouTube, check their accounts to see what content they’re consuming.
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.
Easy: by dropping social media completely.
By making it so that social media can’t harm anyone, not just kids.
How can we make it so that social media cannot harm anyone?
Amen
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.
How to say you’re from Vermont without saying you’re from Vermont. 😁
This is an interesting idea
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.
Past a certain age this may start to become socially isolating for the children
This is the solution in my home… Seems to work pretty well…
Better education especially for digital stuff and stop giving kids phones!!
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.
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.
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.
Of course there is a role for parents to play here, but I worry that making this the sole responsibility of parents allows big tech to evade responsibility. Vendors are not allowed to sell things to children that we can reasonably foresee will cause them harm, like alcohol or cigarettes. Why should social media be any different?
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.
Would you feel differently if you had a daughter who developed body image issues from instagram?
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.
