Enforcing a ban also presents additional privacy risks, experts add.
Under the Australian law, platforms looking to verify a user’s age can either request copies of identification documents, use a third party to apply age estimation technology to an account holder’s face, or make inferences from data already available such has how long an account has been held.
Michael Geist, a professor and Canada Research Chair in internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, said that potential data collection alone is concerning and would need to apply to all social media users regardless of age to be effective.
He noted that it can be difficult to discern between a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old by appearance alone, whether in person or online through biometrics systems.
“So what those systems tend to do then is dig deeper,” he said. “They look at who your friend circle is or the language that you use when posting to try to make a better guess.
“Well, now they’re literally engaging in increased surveillance in order to try (to identify your age), and raising even more privacy concerns in order pull this together.”
If free-world social media like mastodon is too dangerous for you I really don’t know what to recommend, because obviously going outside instead would be even more risky.
So, free-world isn’t the problem. The content is the problem. People who distribute things like, for example, body shaming videos or videos that teach kids to hate themselves, are still available on mastodon.
So, it sounds like you just care more about crushing big social media than actually talking about the harmful content online?
I’ve been exploring the fediverse for several years and have never seen anything like “body shaming videos” anywhere on it. Have you? Really? I think you’d really need to go out of your way to look for it, because any instance routinely allowing that kind of shit would be quickly blocklisted into oblivion, perhaps still in existence but unseen by casual users.
There do exist other things that one might say are not suitable for children here and there — but on social media that respects its users they are not pushed on people who don’t want them by algorithms designed to hook into people’s anxieties and keep them dependent.
So “that stuff isn’t here” and “people would block it” aren’t actually solutions.
Let’s say TikTok, Reddit, Facebook and Xitter shut down. They would find their way to places like the fediverse, and distribute the same content.
The ONLY reason why we don’t have a lot of that is because we have very few users. Not because we are quality people (we definitely are not).
That’s getting awfully hypothetical. Should we not wait and see if the social norms of fedi continue to hold up before condemning it along with its more evil-oriented analogues?
It seems like you are dead set on a course that leads only to concluding that humanity is evil at heart and we should all be locked up and prevented from ever being seen in public in the name of safety. In an era where so much of social life is online that’s only a few small steps beyond the idea of making everyone show their ID before they’re allowed to use the Internet. Even if it’s done in the name of safety, it works in service of oppression.
Seems like you’re dead set on “fedi perfect” nonsense and you don’t want to engage in actual conversation. Pretty standard Lemmy.
🚫👋
“People would block it” is the solution, yes. Not that Fedi is perfect but it got that bit right.