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.”
61 per cent of 12-to-15-year-olds in Australia continue to hold social media accounts despite being banned, while 70 per cent said it was “easy” to circumvent the ban.
Well there you go, at least it will do some good for young people. It will teach them how to circumvent whatever age-probing nonsense they come up with for use in Canada. It will teach them that the government can’t be trusted. It will teach them that the right to freedom of expression does not apply to youth. It will make them aware, as they approach the age where they’re able to vote, that the tradition of “good government” in Canada, if there was any life left in it, is now dead.
For the rest of us, and for the international reputation of Canada, it will only be harmful.
The real beneficiaries are not in Canada. They’re the American tech giants who will maintain their grip on Canada all the more tightly with this fancy new regulatory barrier to entry standing in the way of any possible competition, as the blame for whatever they continue doing to their younger users is shifted to disposable 3rd-party “age verification” providers given the job of doing the impossible.
I hear you, but social media is bad for kids. Hell, it’s bad for adults.
How do we solve this without introducing age verification (which I am firmly against)?
It’s actually a good thing for kids to be able to find alternate perspectives online than the ones their parents may have indoctrinated them with/restricted them from learning about in their physical life
Eg, lgbt+ kids - especially trans kids
I agree entirely. I’m LGBT, and the internet was one of the few accepting places for me as a kid.
But, how do we prevent the harmful stuff. Like a lot of those makeup videos, and diet videos aimed at young people.
Pass comprehensive data privacy laws that prohibit the surveillance capitalist business model on which the current social media giants depend. It is the driving force behind their continued enshittification.
I don’t disagree.
But regarding my question, please answer. All social media is dangerous, not just the mega corporations. How do we solve this?
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).
It’s bad for everyone, therefore ban it for everyone. There. Done. Of course, the protests would be immense once the “think of the cheeeldrun” figleaf was pulled off.
Or, write strict and well-enforced laws regarding data collection and retention and on-line moderation and forbidding the more addictive qualities of commercial social media—but even then, some nastiness will inevitably slip through the cracks. Some people are just evil, and we have no way of heading them off before they’ve already done harm.
Lemmy should be legally unable to have up and down voting. Sort by new only. ;)
To be honest, I’d start with the following four rules about what data is presented and how:
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No secret sauce: Any ranking algorithm, and all the inputs to that algorithm for any post, must be available to all logged-in users. If that clashes with privacy laws, that information can’t be used in the sorting algorithm.
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Keep it simple, stupid: If, given the algorithm and a randomly selected set of posts with attached information, a person of average intelligence cannot order the posts according to the algorithm in a reasonable amount of time, the algorithm is too complex and should be discarded.
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No means no: All social media must provide the following basic filters: “Don’t show me any more posts by this account” and “Don’t show me any posts whose algorithmic inputs fulfill these conditions (for instance, “Don’t show me any posts with >100 downvotes”)”, and showing a user a post they have indicated they don’t want to see will be treated as a crime.
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Little by little: Endless scrolling is not permitted. Feeds and search results must be paginated, so that the user is occasionally jarred loose from their train of thought.
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Lemmy needs a little more work on rule 3, but is otherwise doing pretty good.
I mean, downvotes are manipulation. Voting shouldn’t be allowed at all. That’s a gateway to ranking algorithms. Lemmy is a dumpster fire of alt accounts for vote manipulation.
By date only. No preferences in sort or filter unless you specify. No adjusting the results. Everyone gets the exact same thing by default.
I also think blocking a user should block you from them too. Not reddit/lemmy style.
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Social media is great for kids or adults when compared to the monolithic groupthink alternative. The problem isn’t social media, it’s the companies behind it, driving engagement through hate and outrage.
This is a big reason why nonprofit, fediverse options are healthier spaces for everyone: no one is profiting off of making you hate anyone else.
Yes, if you go looking, you’ll definitely find content that’s unhealthy or even dangerous, but (a) federated systems tend to protect against this with defederation, but critically (b) it’s not pushed into your eyeballs by a third party motivated to do so. In this way, nonprofit social media is a lot like real life: sure you can meet Terrible People, but that’s just existing in society.
Well, defed is just when they personally don’t like something. There are right wing run Lemmy instances that defed from lefty instances. And lots of content is removed in general.
Lemmy is just as manipulative as the corporations, just with their own topics.
I think we should conversationally separate “access to information” from “social media.” Although they sort of go hand in hand.
I’m sure there probably are far-right instances out there somewhere federating with each other. If the Naziverse federation somehow grows to have anything like the cultural relevance of the mainstream Fediverse federation, the problem will not be the technology. The problem will be that your society is full of Nazis.
As well as privacy laws, another route would be limitting the control the companies have over what you are shown. If these social media companies are going to exert control over everything the user sees, they should be responsible for the consequences of what is shown. After all, if a TV station broatcasts a show that, for example, encourages suicide, it would obviously be held responsible. If social media is dictating what a user sees on the platform rather than the other way around, whats the difference?
The problem is who decides what is and is not acceptable content. The government? The community? The moderators? All of those things could be bad.
Theres plenty of different ways to handle it, but the simplist would be based on if avoidable harm can be problem in a court of law. If a social media site shows someone a parade of content telling them to kill themselves, they should be able to be held liable, whereas right now the currators recommending negative content and hiding positive are held as innocent bystanders.
So harm is distributing anything labeled antifa?
I mean, if the courts will actually convict for that, you’ve got a much bigger issue than social media - at that point the government in question can arrest anyone whenever they want.
It’s getting close to that in the US, and it’s already there in Russia and China.
Right now the social media companies are deciding, which is why alt-right, pro ana and other reprehensible things end up ‘trending’ because they have engagement and are therefore profitable
Instead of, you know healthy things.
Don’t worry about it, now the alt-right Christo-facists control the Internets on ramps, and will “protect the children” from the “propaganda” of the “atheist/gay/communist/liberal agenda”…
Crazy how Canada is like 'This is going terribly for other countries… We should totally do it too!"
Time to get SSH-based BBSs going, I guess.
BBSs never stopped.
True, but I hope they become more popular
From metafilter:
"[…]Anyone who sees a conversation about how age verification laws are going to cause widespread significant harm to lots of different groups of people and decides instead to talk about how social media is harmful to children is doing the work of disinformation spreading propagandists.
They might not be disinformation spreading propagandists, they might have just been duped by disinformation spreading propagandists, but either way they are doing the work of disinformation spreading propagandists.
This is a propaganda and PR technique that is in common use today.
This is how it works:
Person 1 makes a point that is harmful to the narrative the PR firm has been paid to protect.
One or more accounts on the payroll of that PR firm, who usually just posts innocuous stuff but who always has an opinion on the topic of the day, chimes in with an indirectly related smokescreen argument, usually accompanied by an accusation or an emotional appeal.
Person 1 then gets bogged down with that argument, tacitly approving that the two topics are in fact one topic.
Lots of people then see the argument, and come to associate the smokescreen with the real issue. Some of them will be swayed specifically by the emotionally appeal (“think of the children”) and some of them will genuinely believe in the smokescreen issue (“social media is bad for children”) and accept that the smokescreen is important enough to justify accepting whatever the original post was arguing against.
There are lots of these PR accounts floating around out there. They’re sockpuppets. They look like real people, sometimes they are real people, but they’re also sockpuppets.
The end result of that is a bunch of people popping in to conversations about Age Verification laws to talk about separate and legitimately important issues as if those issues and Age Verification laws are the same thing.
And some of those people might be paid PR Sockpuppets, but some of them are definitely real people who really care about the harm social media might have on children.
And so we spend so much time talking about the nuance and potential solutions to this much more complicated problem that the real issue (these proposed Age Verification Laws are actually tools of fascist surveillance and control which will be used to suppress dissent and harm marginalized communities) gets lost."
It’s a start but it should be banned for all ages.
I’m skeptical that this will be any better than the bullshit we’ve seen in other jurisdictions, thanks to $millions of Meta lobbyists, but a ban isn’t the problem, it’s age verification that’s a problem.
A ban is a great idea, with absolutely no consequences for youth and no age verification. But rest circumvention doesn’t mean a ban is useless.
A ban could make it illegal for businesses to target youth under 16 for social media, ban schools from allowing social media to communicate with students (like is currently the norm for many school-sanctioned clubs and sports teams), and we could use illegal use by children as an avenue to educate parents about the harms of social media.
My guess is that Canada is about to get a terrible written-by-Meta bill announced tomorrow, but there’s a chance it could be a reasonable law. (I won’t hold my breath.)
