Maybe prohibition on social media for kids <18

[Moonchild]

Law in the making to curb social media addiction.
"The era of unfettered social experimentation on children is over, and we will protect the kids"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1zSy5POcA8

Thought I'd share this little tidbit in case others are interested.

[somdcomputerguy]

Un-freakin'-believable. It is to protect the kids though..

[vannilla]

My only nitpick is that this law will be used to justify collecting an uncontrolled amount of personal informations about users.
"But how can we know if the user is really 18 if we don't check??"

[jobbautista9]

I'm all for increased regulation of social media, but this bill sounds crazy bonkers to me, and seems to just shift all the responsibility to the corporations. If mere "contribution" to addiction can get a lawsuit running for social media sites but not for parents, that's just a double standard. Internet access is way easier to control than say drugs. 'Cause otherwise, what the hell are those "parental controls" in your router for?

Speaking of that, it's really concerning to see many millennial parents just give their kids unfettered access to the internet. Their generation is the first to witness the horrors of delving too deep in the web (remember "shock sites"?) while they're young; they should know better not to let their children repeat the same mistake. What happened to the "digital native" they're usually called as?

[THX-1139]

Since I banned YT from my views I went and found the printed story for those of the same attitude-: https://www.businessinsider.com/califor ... 022-5?op=1
So if your kid gets addicted to Google mail you can't sue? not very inclusive me thinks.

[back2themoon]

So... will YouTube be considered social media, too?

[athenian200]

I don't agree with suing the social media companies for making a product that's too addictive. I mean, what are they supposed to do, design their product to not get attention? That doesn't make sense.

However, the idea of a minimum age for using social media may potentially make sense. I mean, we have a minimum age for things like drinking and gambling, so why not social media? It's something addictive that didn't exist in the past. I just worry about that being an excuse for increased surveillance and tracking, though, like what they have in the UK to stop kids from accessing certain inappropriate websites.

[Marcus]

Discipline, education, moral building should start at home.
The problem with our so-called Social Democracies is that they transferred these essential things to the state/school and in the process eroded the family nucleus. And when you destroy the basis of society everything starts to crumble.
This and other "laws" only try to disguise the profound damage our elites did to the Western world in the last half century, by corroding all of our pillars.
The 2014 Eurovision Song Contest was a symbol of the end, the blm riots, more recently, where another.
I believe February 24, 2022 to be the beginning of something good.

[Moonchild]

Potential unpopular opinion but I have to say it: Part of the issue is that (very) young kids are given smartphones/tablets as a pacifier, not always properly supervised or checked. So parents are at least in a substantial part responsible for the addictions formed. Maybe not the intended outcome from the lawmakers but if the prohibition comes through as a result, it'll actually put more responsibility back into the parental corner of things since everyone can lie about their age, but the responsibility for not doing something illegal will then be on the kids and their parents again (where it belongs)

[mintoyatsu]

There is always the possibility that they will force government ID/driver's license verification instead of an "18 or older" checkbox. They already collect your phone numbers for new account signups, so I'll let you decide if you want to give them that information.

[Pause]

The way I see it is that parents/guardians should make sure they are aware of what their kids are up to, rather than expecting technology to babysit them without any oversight.

Are there some things that companies can do to help make that easier? In some cases, yes, and they should do what they can, but nobody should be putting all of the responsibiility (and any resulting blame) on something that parents/guardians should keep an eye on.

I'm not saying parents/guardians (or companies for that matter) can control everything - or even have the time to try to control everything - as nobody is perfect after all, but they need to be as savvy as possible about what their kids are doing.

[athenian200]

In many ways, anything that can be said about this issue sounds like the same points that were historically made about television and then about video games. There was a lot of talk about the TV destroying the family, about how people were now eating TV dinners in front of the TV rather than sitting together in front of the fireplace and the kitchen table for family talks, and it becoming an "electronic babysitter." All of what was said then seems even more true of social media. Not to say those points are invalid, but just that they have become a constant refrain ever since we entered the Information Age.

The only thing I can really think of is to look at how those past issues were solved. And if we use history as a guide, what was done was to put age rating guidance on television programs and video games. The MPAA did it for movies, the ESRB did it for video games. And I suspect the same will be done for social media experiences. They may well wind up creating a separate kind of social media for kids that addresses the concerns of parents, sort of like G-rated movies and E-rated games exist for similar reasons. The legislation as proposed doesn't make much sense, but the concerns behind it would easily be addressed by creating more "age-appropriate" experiences that parents are okay with their kids having access to, and then those kids may not be directly addicted to full-on adult social media, but there will be a natural pipeline from the kids version to the adult version due to brand familiarity.

Presumably that is what is actually wanted by lawmakers, otherwise they would outright say kids should be banned from social media (which you'll notice isn't what they are saying). But this vague implication that companies should "work not to addict kids," is implying instead of prohibition that the social media of adults is not appropriate for children and companies should make an effort not to subject them to it, whether that means banning them outright or creating a curated children's experience in cooperation with concerned parents, and probably leaning towards the latter. I'm not even sure doing so would harm the social media companies. They would be able to age-target their advertising more effectively than they already do, and kid-friendly companies trying to market themselves would appreciate the room to differentiate themselves as "age-appropriate" or "family friendly." I think this legislation is actually intended mostly as a threat to try and get the industry to regulate themselves, lest the government do it for them. It sounds a lot like the threats by some lawmakers to ban violent video games altogether. It never happened because the industry took the hint and pacified parents with a rating system. Not to say heavy-handed government regulation isn't a possibility if the industry fails to regulate itself, but if the concerned parents pushing for this stuff are pacified in some other way, then the politicians won't have to care about it anymore, so it is in the best interest of social media companies to take a page out of the gaming industry's book.

Here's an example of what I am visualizing. I'm old enough to remember how Facebook worked back in 2007 or so, at first you could only interact with people in your "network" which was generally your high school or university. It meant your circle of friends was restricted to people inside organizations you already interacted with in real life. Facebook for Kids could pretty much bring something like this back into play, along with perhaps a reduction in notifications and other "gamified" features as a way of appeasing parents who are considering removing Facebook from their children's lives altogether. The children's version of the experience would now be limited to organizations their parents approve, and the children's interactions would be supervised by adults they trust, perhaps teachers or coaches. For instance, they would be allowed to interact with their classmates on Facebook as part of the school's "network," but not with random strangers on various public pages, etc. They would also age out of these networks as they got older and went to newer schools, etc. This would also have the benefit of limiting the interaction/mixing between adults and children online, which is something that has been controversial for a while. This is ultimately what I think they are trying to "nudge" social media companies towards doing, and that actual prohibition isn't the current intention. Interestingly, it might result in adults feeling more pressure to have a Facebook account so that they can approve or disapprove their children's friend requests, keep an eye on them, etc. They get their feeling of control back, and Facebook gets to keep everyone on their platform.

It's also worth noting that COPPA is already a federal law, and many websites simply want nothing to do with anyone under the age of 13 due to the cost of complying with the law. I doubt whatever restrictions they come up with relating to children's use of social media can do much more than COPPA does if enforced properly.

[Moonchild]

I'm afraid trying to apply ratings or segregating age groups on an interactive medium is going to be a lot harder than broadcast (= read-only) media.
Say, you get a lot of friends on the "child" variant of social media. Then you turn 15 or 18 or whatever the limit is, and you have to switch to the "adult" version... losing all your connections? I'm not sure how that's going to work, so it'll be a very tough nut to crack if they want to start doing that.

I think simply putting a hard limit on it may be the only way forward there. No different than, say, not being allowed into bars until you are of legal age.

[athenian200]

I would say that from a practical standpoint, you are correct. A prohibition on social media for kids would be a lot easier for everyone to understand and easier to enforce. It could even be that in Europe an idea like what I'm considering would be illegal because of GDPR, since it would potentially prevent websites from collecting the data they need to verify someone's age in a way that would be needed to satisfy parents as a condition of service, and there could even be laws in Europe that would make parents having this level of control as a violation of children's privacy. So international viability of any such scheme is something that would be a blind spot for me.

However, we are mostly not talking about practical people who understand technology here, among either politicians or parents. It's debatable how well ratings work on movies and games... there are still plenty of children getting their hands on age-inappropriate movies and games, but because the ratings exist, theaters and production companies are seen as having "done their part" to protect kids, even if in practice it doesn't always work. Facebook can now say their "normal" website is an adult experience. A lot of the heat is now off them because they have given parents a tool they can use to aid their judgment in selecting which experiences are appropriate for their children, and in general acknowledged their right to provide parental guidance.

The thing is, if these were run by the same companies, aging into the adult version wouldn't mean losing all your connections. That's precisely why these companies would go for it. I'm sure they would love to be allowed to work with parents to provide a cut-down product for kids that parents don't see as harmful, as the price of having some degree of "buy-in" for the adult version later when those kids grow up and want access to their friends and past connections. Because the access was previously restricted to networks of people your parents had approved (again, this would usually be school networks), and presumably you were already aging into "alumni networks" as you graduated from each level of school or whatever, then when you are finally on the adult variant, all your friends are aging with you and they are automatically shifted over to adult as well. There could be an option for the 18-year old to not create an adult Facebook and delete everything, but most people would agree to those new terms because they wouldn't want to lose all their childhood friends.

So the thing is, you wouldn't simply lose all your connections... there would at worst be a hard barrier between those above 18 and below 18 and connections would filter back in as people younger than you turned 18. Quite possibly they would be able to work something out with colleges and high schools where as long as you're enrolled as a student, you can still interact with your peers until graduation, in case someone turns 18 before graduating high school for instance.

This definitely wouldn't be a simple rating system by any means, but it's similar in concept, and comes down to parents being given the power to decide who their children are allowed to interact with online. Offering them that control when smaller platforms can't or don't suddenly makes them one of the "good guys," and gives people a reason to stick with established brands. Essentially, parents would have the power to control which closed-off "networks" their kids have access to, monitor what their kids are doing online, and approve/disapprove friend requests until the kid turns 18. They would of course do this via Facebook itself, with their adult account. Meaning that now parents would be pressured by their children to have a Facebook account, precisely because their kids can't have a Facebook account unless their parent has one and adds them as a child so they can be supervised. The thing concerned parents are reacting to, mostly, is a feeling that they have lost control over their children and that Facebook is deciding who their children should interact with and what they should see instead of them. If they are offered back that power (and maybe even more granular control than they had in real life) by Facebook itself, for instance, that might pacify a lot of them and they would go from seeing Facebook as the worst company to seeing them as the company that lets them control who their kids interact with online and monitor them until they turn 18.

The goal wouldn't be so much an objective ratings system, but rather to restore some semblance of how the parents think things "should be," something closer to the situation before social media when they could control who their kids interacted with, what clubs they joined, supervise them, and generally make decisions for them about things like that until they turned 18. It remains to be seen whether a proposal like that will pacify parents, but I'm sure that the bigger companies will try, and this idea in some form will be pitched to parents and lawmakers at some point.

Though honestly, if I was a king? I'm not sure I would allow social media in its current form at all, for kids or adults... I'm just talking in terms of what I think people are likely to do rather than what I actually want.

[Mæstro]

I recall clever teenagers hosting and administering bulletin boards for Club Penguin and the like in the 00s. These were either funded as a hobby, or else used banner adverts and the like as were standard then. Most users were children under 14. The chief difference between these, or traditional Web logs, and the modern social networks, as far as I can tell, is that they sort posts other than by age or author and try to keep users on the Web site for longer for to heckle at them by showing them unrelated things. (Compare also early and modern YouTube suggestions.) The last makes social networks so addicting for any age; the first serves this end. (I doubt that likes, shares and follows are addicting in themselves, any more than the post count or reactions that bulletin boards like ours are.)

[leothetechguy]

Everything is designed to be addictive, every app, every webpage and every social media algorithm. Maybe we should just ban algorithmic sorting and sort by Date or Author if it isn't information you are specifically searching for.

[Mæstro]

On Pixiv, pictures like that being viewed appear below the main image, after the same artist’s other works by age. The artist may also tag his work. One must use algorithms to yield the first because Pixiv is nearing a hundred million pictures and combing through thousands of fandoms to assign relevant pictures by hand is hopeless. (Pixivision offers a smattering of this.) Only Pixiv’s home page suggests artists, tags or works like what one browses, likes, bookmarks or follows already, which is logical. My background is in mathematics, and I have studied, albeit superficially, the algorithms involved, and they are harmless in themselves if kept to one site and used for sensible ends. When the goal is to stall for time or sell things, one falls into fraud.

[leothetechguy]

Yes, but regulating that would be much harder and require disclosing how these Algorithms work, which Politicians can't fully understand unless they are programmers and read it line by line.

[Mæstro]

I wonder whether any formal research has studied why social networks addict users. While we have held above that it is deliberate effort to keep users on site longer, I have heard other possibilities, like the random reward schedule in others’ praise or outrageous content, that users can form for themselves without coaxing from above.

[Moonchild]

I wonder whether any formal research has studied why social networks addict users.

Yes, many people have researched it and confirmed that it is a real addiction.
For social media addicts, getting a ton of likes on something they posted is euphoric and giving them a rush. If a post does poorly it can outright depress them.