- cross-posted to:
- world@quokk.au
- cross-posted to:
- world@quokk.au
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Do it, save the youth.
Classical bingo to authoritarism
It’s only to protect children It’s only to protect against terrorism It’s only to protect against rapist It’s only to protect against murders It’s only to protect against deterioration oups, it’s everyone except the upper class
This is how personal data bills and fingerprint/adn collect bills have evolved
We did the same thing w cigarettes you nobody, and to cocaine in coca cola.
Kids brains aren’t developed yet, give them a chance.
Social media is bad for kids because it amplifies social comparison and algorithm-driven validation, which can undermine self-esteem and mental health during critical stages of brain development. It also displaces real-world socialization and sleep while exposing kids to content and pressures they’re not developmentally equipped to process.
Yep. And it will be use for mass repression
*France seeks to implement mass surveillance online by requesting age verification, but politicians wrap it in “we do it to protect the children” which is bullshit.
Protect your rights to privacy, stand up against such erosion of your rights.
“Protect children” bills never protect children
Sex offender registry?
Banning alcohol and cigarettes from children seems to have worked, if not perfectly, rather fine.
Or requiring school busses to have swing out stop signs and making it illegal to pass them when they’re deployed.
Actual “protect children” laws don’t get talked about because absolutely nobody has a problem with them.
How is that even a comparison?
Both could be true at the same time.
I’ve got four kids. I’d love nothing more than ban social media for them until 16. It really is poison for developing minds.
There are these crazy things called “parental controls”. You’ve probably never heard of them, but they’re on nearly every single personal computing device. OR, and hear me out. You could just buy a dumb phone for your kids until they’re sixteen, and if they want to take pictures, buy them an inexpensive digital camera. It would be cheaper overall than buying them an iPhone. But no, that’s probably too difficult for you, so everyone else has to give even more of their personal information if they want to use Facebook Marketplace or whatever.
It would be nice if there was an actual article discussing how the parental controls on android phones actually work.
Add & manage supervision on a current Google Account - Pixel Phone Help https://share.google/j9ZOyQbpZTh0rnRRs
Buy a dumb phone and make them feel ostracized from everyone else lol. Spoken like someone who isn’t gen Z.
Let’s say you do use a dumb phone. What about everyone else? Others have to make a lot of concessions in order to communicate with you in a group project for example.Best case scenario the group does its communication over social media and calls you directly. You’re going to miss out a lot on communication.
There’s also some aspect of “followers = clout”. Basically what I’m trying to say is expecting your child to be OK taking a dumb phone to school while seeing everyone else with one may have a dramatic effect.
One, I’m not interested in making sure their coolest middle schooler. Well-Dressed and able to express their style through clothes, their bookbag etc. Two, I don’t really want them in a bunch of group chats yapping constantly. Yes, they will miss out on a lot of communication but they don’t need to be in constant 24/7 contact with anyone in elementary school and middle school. And finally, when I see them behaving maturely I may consider getting them a smartphone earlier. But if not they’ll just be waiting until they turn 15. If they want to get on TikTok they can open up the app on the family room TV and they can be the same with YouTube.
I’m not going to go through every single scenario parenting in the digital age, but I have to be aware and I have to monitor. And over time the amount of monitoring I do will have to be reduced based on the maturity that they’re showing but also out of respect for their autonomy.
But you know what’s great about everything I said, you don’t have to do any of that. You can give your kid the smartphone and let them get on FB messenger at 7 years old for all I care. And you know why I don’t care? Because that’s your decision and you can deal with the consequences or benefits of that parenting style.
Though I’ll be honest, I’m not certain what point you’re trying to make here. Are you saying you want the ban so you can give your child a smartphone without thinking about how they’re using it? Or are you saying no ban and iPhones for preteens?
“parental controls”
Yeah … I was the kid that knew how to bypass those and “helped” other kids out in that regard.
Then hold the creators of the parental locks accountable. Why am i loosing rights?
Because they want a parent on autopilot.
Lol. Yes it’s that simple.
Look, I’ve raised 4 kids. I run OPNsense with filters. I’ve enabled parental controls all on their mobile phone connections. My kids were and will be the last that got a smart phone in their year. I’m an active member of smartphone free childhood in the UK; I’ve engaged with U.K. members of Parliament on the topic. I’ve worked for tech giants whose sole purpose it is to create “habits” ie addiction in amongst children. Regardless I’m not talking about just my kids, I work in education and engage with multiple schools on the topic.
You come back to me when you’ve taken kids through the landscape they exist in today. What’s more, it is possible to verify age online in a way that doesn’t enable governments to see what sites you visit (not that they can’t already get that your ISP); of course I’m against government oversight of everyone’s internet habits. But both can be achieved; anonymity and age verification is possible.
It sounds like a pretty one sided view you’ve got there and maybe, just maybe, it could do with some nuance.
There is no such thing as anonymous data. It has been proven all data can be linked to you. The only data that is anonymous is the one they don’t collect.
the only way to have privacy-preserving age checks is when there’s a variable on the phone that stores whether the user is old enough. and gives that data forward to apps/websites trying to do age checks.
that variable can only be changed if you’re the rightful owner of the device, i.e. if you paid for it and have a code that’s on the purchase bill or sth. and children wouldn’t have access to that.
I agree that for the system to be anonymous the state has to live up to its commitment to anonymity. Have you read the EU’s regulation about this? In there is exactly a commitment that age verification has to be anonymous.
But, let’s take a reality check here:
- For the vast majority of the population, their ISP already collects every single website they visit.
- if the state wants to know what you’ve searched for and where you’ve been online, they already have that data stored. They can only access it legally with a court order.
Yes you can circumvent this logging (to some extent) through VPN - just like you can circumvent the requirement to verify your age with a VPN. But the vast majority don’t.
What the fuck are you talking about? They want your damn photo ID of course they know who you are. Truth just wanna silence young people because they don’t like genocide
What are YOU talking about?
I’m talking about French age verification, which is a national example of the EU’s ZKP age verification system, and which the article is about.
To the instance that issues the ZKP tokens you of course have to prove who you are. Once you have the ZKP age verification tokens and actually use them to prove your age, those tokens are negotiated solely between your device and the asking entity.
Have you actually read the EU’s required structure for this?
Im not sure what youre arguing here? its possible to control access well as a parent, but so much easier if the state force everyone on the internet to provide id in order to prevent teenagers talking to eavh other?
You yourself csn target what you think is harmful but a law will hit everything and everyone, and like i implied in the driveby about roblox still might not actually block something you find unacceptable.
This is just the wrong approach to achieve the goal.
Youre on lemmy! This is like the one place people will decry facebook, x, reddit, insta etc. But what your arguing for will end up with them as the only services that can navigate existing legally, and children will still work around blocks because they simply dont care about consequences for lying about their age.
Our democracy regulates a lot of things that it (we) believe to be harmful to children: Cigarettes, gambling (also online), pornography, violence in media, alcohol etc etc.
Why is social media any different?
Who said that there can’t be regulations? The argument that we’re making here is that a ban that requires users to give out more information to companies that have a horrible track record in protecting user information is a bad form of regulation. I for one would be extremely happy if there were tighter and more severe penalties for advertising to children. Removing the profit incentive for any of these companies to have children on the platform at all.
Legally requiring human review for things like YouTube Kids (which nobody should be using anyway, especially when the PBS kids exists) and having a harsh penalty if an Elsa gate scenario happens again, like it ever stopped but still.
There’s nothing in the EU age verification structure that requires you to hand more information to the places where you need to verify your age. In fact the system expressly prevents it. Similarly in the ZKP architecture, it it not legal, nor possible, for the age verification service to know where you log in.
Maybe I’ve misunderstood your comment and so I say this in great respect; but if you don’t understand the technical details about the system the EU has defined, you may be basing your resistance on wrong assumptions.
Because the line between “social media” and “talking to other people” is so blurry as to not exist.
Also, and more importantly, the power of these companies is so great in effect youll only enforce that facebook etc. are the only ways of talking to each other that can exist legally and entrench the very problem you want to solve.
For example, is whats app social media?
Defining what is and what isn’t something is exactly what law has to do every single time it gets defined. I’m sure we can work this one out too.
The size of the tech giants cannot be the reason to not attempt regulation. If anything, it’s exactly the reason to regulate.
What’s more, it is possible to verify age online in a way that doesn’t enable governments to see what sites you visit
Would you upload your ID to Lemmy? Because that’s what the “age verification” requires you to do. Maybe you’d rather upload a video of your face from many different angles, which is absolutely never going to be used for nefarious purposes, pinky promise.
Without Karens like you, we wouldn’t have shit like the OSA. That’s why there are so many angry replies. Now you have to pay for a VPN to have free access to the internet in the UK, many UK hosted sites had to shut down or block the UK wholly for UK users.
Yeah that person sucks ass. I won’t tolerate that shit
Once again, have you read the EU proposal? We are, after all, talking about France here, not the UK.
The UK, no longer part of the EU, of course have gone much softer and enabled non-anonymous verification. I am of course deeply against this.
What I AM talking about is the ZKP method mandated by the EU, which is anonymous.
I’ll ignore your name calling; not very conducive to a debate.
No ZKP system can work because someone can generate hundreds of tokens and hand them out to whoever wants one.
Only the entity that owns the private key can generate signed tokens. You can read about the Danish solution, which is the first and most developed implementation of the EU’s requirements for anonymity: https://digst.dk/media/5gybwsaq/implementing-age-verification-with-danish-digital-identity-wallet-dktb-09.pdf
There’s no such thing as anonymous age verification, you can browse the web freely without creating an account. Age verification removes that anonymity. I don’t really care about the EU age verification shit, we already have that in Germany, porn websites of course ignore that law because nobody would use their site if they had to verify everyones age. They just removed all .de domains.
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You can.
You just don’t want to either a) put in the legwork to do so, or b) be the ‘bad guy’ to your kids for doing it, so instead you just want the government to do it for you.
What’s stopping you from setting up pihole or configuring your home router to block social media sites at home, or turning on parental controls on their phones and blocking the sites and apps?
Most parents either don’t know how to do that, or don’t care enough to stop their kids from using social media, despite how harmful it is for society as a whole, and especially children, and since all their friends are on social media, a child can credibly argue that they need to use it to maintain their social life. If social media is banned for under 16’s, then children would have to communicate with normal chat apps. Also I know from experience that parental controls can easily be bypassed by a dedicated child.
A propely implemented (as in ZKP verification that gives no information to the service other than the age category) age gate is a good thing in my opinion, because at some point some systemic problems are better served by systemic solutions. We don’t let parents decide if their kids should smoke or drink alchohol either.
Cite sources, I think you’re lying to me
Which part do you think I’m lying about?
I agree that big tech’s social media is like digital heroin, not only bad for kids.
But it should be up to the parent to protect their kids, you also don’t let them walk the park alone, why should you let them browse the web un-supervised.
There are parental tools to restrict your child’s internet access, those should be applied by the parent.
Not every citizen should be under surveillance by the government under the rouse that they’ll protect your kids, which they won’t.
The real goal here is to detect people who go against the government and block them. While kids & criminals slip through the cracks by finding sketchy un-surveilled sites and messaging channels.
And if you really think your government gives a damn about your kids safety, then I urge you to look in the epstein ph/f-iles
I appreciate the nuance. Thanks for a thoughtful answer.
You’ll see from different answers I’ve made to the reactions on my first comment that I also approach this with nuance.
I know many people that work in government. Not the US government, but across Europe. I can’t answer for the US government. But I can tell you first hand that the people I know aren’t in it to gain some kind of Orwellian control.
When I last spoke to a U.K. MP about this he was in fact understanding the complexity here, and the lens that many people want to see it banned and many see it as governmental overreach. Decent, hard working people are trying to balance these tough choices where I live. I’m sorry if that isn’t the case where you live.
I’m also living in the EU,
however I notice a global push to such mass surveillance. The EU has been under attack by Denmark for years now e.g. by pushing through chat control (a government backdoor into encryption).However there ain’t such thing as a backdoor only for the good guys, this can and will eventually be abused, either by extremist governments, which may not yet be in power, but might come some day, or external countries, hacking into the backdoor.
Privacy and technology experts have been warning against chat control and age verification for these reasons, however we do feel ignored, since the topics keep on coming back up.
I kinda doubt that most of the politicians graps these risks though, and kinda find it dissapointing and demotivating that our rights to privacy keep being put under scrutiny again and again.
However I’ll refuse to give up, since maintaining your rights is important, and gaining them back once lost is often very hard / nearly impossible.
Thank you for being open minded and up for hearing my arguments though! :)
Chat control was an insane suggestion that wouldn’t work politically nor technically and, logically, has been abandoned. For Denmark not to check Germany’s position on it, and for the flagrant disregarding of all technical positions that called out the utter bullshit, was laughable and one of the major failings of Denmark’s presidency.
But chat control and age verification is not the same and one sensible suggestion shouldn’t fall on the insanity of another suggestion.
Is something nobody discusses out loud is the fact that literally in you internet service where users can post is covered by these laws, they’re not microtargeted at Instagram or anything like that. Also politicians explicitly say things like this is meant to stop transgenderism or this is about Gaza out loud
I don’t give a flying fuck about your kids or your inability to parent your fucking children.
If you don’t want them using social media stop them from using social medi. It’s your fucking problem, and I am NOT okay with having the worlds turned into an Orwellian hellscape for the sake of a bunch of stupid fucking kids with dumber parents.
You’re a charming fellow aren’t you?
Consider for a second if my position came from knowledge and wisdom, rather than knee jerk. Consider if you understand all nuances here. Change your tone. Then maybe we can engage on this.
Why would you not just want social media to be better regulated by the law? You can’t seriously believe that your children are going to have no access to social media, even with an age ban, unless you intend to lock them in a room and home school them till they’re 18.
The absolute binary inability for children to access social media shouldn’t be the litmus test for whether we should try.
Some children manage to buy lottery tickets or gamble for real money online. Some manage to buy alcohol even when they’re underage. Some manage to buy cigarettes. Inadequate parents will even sometimes support this.
But we aim to create an environment where that is difficult. And by doing so we shape culture. And culture shapes patterns. My aim isn’t to remove the harm social media perpetrated on children, but to reduce it. All law works like this - speed limits are routinely broken but most drive sensibly.
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Well we definitely agree pretty much 100% about social media as it stands today, in terms of its ills.
I don’t know what “regulation” of social media would be without requiring identification of users, though. The vast majority of its ills comes from, as you identify, monetised engagement which promotes bots. Therefore it is in social media companies’ interest to allow bots to play, which enables an undermining of our democracy.
Though we will disagree on what “verification” of users mean in terms of privacy risks.
The EU proposal for age verification has a legal requirement for anonymisation. This means that your “age verification” app simply holds signed verification tokens that it hands over to the service. There is no way for that token to be tied back to an identifiable user.
And there’s a million ways that could be circumvented by the state, agreed, but if the state circumvents its own laws (“must be anonymous”) they are already able to circumvent ISP logs, phone records etc. We have laws for dealing with it.
My point being that you either trust your government, in which case the requirement for anonymity will be upheld, or you don’t, in which case this doesn’t increase your risk surface (as you already believe your government circumvents laws and accesses logs illegally).
How do you stop me (or hypothetical EU based me if you can’t make ZKP tokens from the USA) from making age verified tokens en mass and hand them out to sabotage the system?
You don’t own the signing private key so you can’t - mathematically can’t, not opinion can’t
I’m an anarchist and an anti-capitalist, and usually appeal to the choices that have the best outcomes.
The government and every corporation having a direct personal dossier with my information in it is very specifically against my beliefs.
I think that social media should be designed like the fediverse. Organized around communities and those communities should be obligated to moderate themselves. Meta literally does not moderate any of its platforms. They know that Facebook and Instagram are full of misinformation, pedophiles, scam artists, and they do not care. The websites are designed to harvest money and data. They are not actually designed to create sustainable healthy social communities. There should be laws mandating routine auditing of the entire moderation ecosystem at social media platforms. If child safety is our concern then it should be the law that social media platforms have to actually deal with threats to child safety and make their platforms usable for children.
I don’t understand why there exists seemingly a widespread interest in protecting Facebook and TikTok? Why? I dont think the fediverse is bad for you. I wouldn’t come here if I believed that. The idea of social media itself being harmful is just a liberal misdirection right? Its all just to distract from the fact that Mark Zuckerberg has more power than most nations and is functionally beholden to no laws. He is entirely ambivalent to these laws because they make really no difference to his bottom line. Kids will still use his platforms. And the platforms themselves are entkrely unaffected. Perhaps even emboldened. Its an “adults only space” after all, which basically let’s them fuck off on all moderation of any kind. After all, all their users are adults now right. So why would they need to moderate? They’re already starting to do this. And kids are still going to access the sites anyway. So they just get access to a worse platform with even less protections for its users and designed even more aggressively to harvest their money and data.
I just see literally not a single positive in a law like this. I don’t get why the answer is to functionally inconvenience every single person and overnight destroy any semblance of human privacy. For nothing. For a net 0 gain. It’s all to protect the policies and actions of meta and TikTok and Snapchat and so on.
I’m not an anarchist nor an anti-capitalist but I really appreciate the civil discussion.
I am 1000% aligned that no government nor corporation should have a dossier with your information.
That’s why I’m actually able to support age verification online in the EU, because the proposed system prevents exactly that. Your device will literally be issued with ZKP tokens, which solely verifies “the person handing you this token is above 18”. It is a specific requirement that no knowledge can be inferred about who is passing the token (hence the name “Zero Knowledge Proof”). This is a mathematical possibility we can utilise and which the proposal relies on. The Danish trailblazer system is built exactly to this spec.
I do understand the concern about implementation burden for smaller players (like federated services). In every other case where the burden has been large, open source has sprung to the rescue (eg Let’s Encrypt); I am convicted the same will happen here.
Dont worry theyll get plenty of poison after the ban too from roblox chat
That’s propaganda
I haven’t got the foggiest idea what you mean. I’ve expressed my opinion. You choose to call it propaganda because you don’t like it.
The thing is it’s a line being pushed with bad intent and I gotta push back against it where I see it
My intent isn’t bad. I want kids to grow up without the harms of social media, just like I want them to grow up without the harms of gambling, tobacco etc. I wouldn’t expect children to be let in to see an 18-rated film? Why is social media any different? If we define it causes harm, which it definitely does, then why can’t we attempt to minimize harm through regulation?
Sound like a you problem
Governments already have access to your data and can easily link you to your social media accounts
This is a rather defeatist take. It’s also wrong.
I don’t mean it to be. I’m trying to be a realist so that I can take appropriate steps to protect myself online. If you want to be anonymous on social media then you should only connect via a VPN. And if you’re using a VPN you can set your location to be somewhere that doesn’t have these requirements. There are other ways that these companies can track you as well and they will freely give this data to the authorities. Even if you’re protect yourself from all of those vectors, if you upload a photo of yourself or someone else tags you then there is a good chance you’re identifiable with tools like ClearView. People making the argument that this new restriction will allow governments to track citizens clearly have no clue about the current surveillance systems. I’m not pro these surveillance systems but this ignorance is dangerous. The biggest danger I see from these new rules are data leaks.
Whenever this comes up, it feels like a play to harvest people’s data and / or to slip additional laws into place under the guise of “protect the children”.
On one hand I don’t think it’s terrible to try to guide kids more. I think parents should be doing more parenting tbh. If a parent wants to put parental locks in place, they can. Even blocking specific sites from being accessed entirely. I think the bigger issue is people don’t understand how to use computers so they think there’s nothing they can do lol.
On the other I think it runs the risk of preventing kids from accessing information online, finding safe spaces online, and isolating kids more than they already can be. It also limits things like teaching kids about technology and how to use it safely.
finding safe spaces online
What do you mean by this? How can an online space be safe for a child?
The old canned chat Club Penguin was a safe space for kids on the internet in my youth. Sure, you could have snowballs thrown at you, but since there were canned-chat-only servers, it was a safe space to hang out and make friends, despite not getting to know them very deeply.
I think it was a pretty solid approach to teaching children how to interact with the internet
First I think it depends on what we are considering kids. I was online from age 8 but didn’t get into online games or communities until about 10. But in the case of the law, they’re often saying anything below 15, 16 or 18 etc. It depends on the country/jurisdiction.
There are lots of places kids can find community. When i was a kid I was playing on neopets, club penguin, old school runescape, guild wars. I made friends with people from all over the place. One of my best friends in my youth is from across the continent, and we have been friends for 20 years now.
I think the bottom line is parents should parent. When I was a kid the PC was in the main room. My parents spoke to me frequently about staying safe online and asked me about what I was doing on the PC. They made sure I was only accessing kid appropriate sites and that I wasn’t getting myself into trouble.
Could I have gotten in trouble? Yeah possibly. I also could have gotten kidnapped at the local park
Why can’t they be?
I’m sure it’s possible, but it’s also a total dice throw with nobody responsible watching over the result. And the potential consequences of unsafety are pretty bad.
We need to build it for them
Lemmy folks? Ok buddy.
Wouldn’t this just wind up being a de facto ban on the platform we’re using right now? How could Lemmy implement an age verification system? If social media platforms that dont comply with age verification are banned, then by default there goes most of the fediverse.
Odds are someone would make an open source service that does the age verification that server owners could setup easily, that is, if the verification is done using franceconnect or some Zero Knowledge Proof service.
If it’s ID verfication then it would be awful.
How could Lemmy implement an age verification system?
I don’t think that it would matter much. Assuming that the legislation applies to the Threadiverse and doesn’t have some sort of exception, it’d still be effectively unenforceable, because most instances don’t operate in France’s legal jurisdiction, and I imagine that most users, even in France, don’t really care whether their instance is in France or not.
If headlines were honest: France seeks to prohibit early teenagers from social interaction with peers unless they are good at doing it offline.
If I hadn’t had the Internet in the years before my 15th birthday, this would in my retrospective opinion have amounted to near torture.
Can we finally get politicians who grew up with the Internet into power? How many more years must people the age of Macron be allowed to make these kinds of decisions? 😟😡
There was a point, about 10-12 years ago now, where The Algorithm™ took over social media entirely.
If you were around before that, you would have noticed the shift. Your friend’s comments and posts started to get intermixed with “other stuff” , and eventually you could scroll endlessly and not see anything from your direct friends, or friends of friends. Forever.
What decided what you could see? Why, The Algorithm™ , of course. So, at that point right there, that’s when a direct and consistently biased feed of someone else’s opinion about what you wanted to see got pumped into people’s brains. And you can bet it’s going to be designed to be handing out the most engaging things that it can find for you, to keep you scrolling away on their platform. But it doesn’t matter a fuck if what its handing out i’s mentally harmful to you personally, as long as you’re engaged.
And just like schoolkids in the USA reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, reinforcement of whatever The Algorithm™ wants (simply: more engagement) becomes pretty trivial when it’s crammed into your head consistently from a young age. Lacking any other reference points, children are the ones with the least amount of defenses against all of that shite.
These kinds of laws worldwide are trying to stop that kind of thing from happening, because they can’t stop the source directly. Social media companies hold too much sway over the population and the economy now, it would be political suicide to try and go toe to toe with them.
In my opinion, The Algorithm™ as it stands now is a cancer that needs to be cut out of social media by any means possible. Whether there’s anything left remaining after that is debatable.
I’ve recently said this in another thread, and I’ll repeat it here: this problem would easily be solved by changing content liability laws (e.g. section 230 in the US) so that anything recommended by an algorithm counts as speech by the platform and the platform is liable for it if it turns out to be illegal (e.g. libellous).
That would mean that you could operate a forum or wiki or Lemmy or Mastodon instance without worrying about liability, but Facebook, YouTube, TikTok would have to get rid of the feature where they put “things that might interest you” that you didn’t actually choose to follow into your feed.
None of that has anything to do with anyone’s age.
I would have died. This is enforced social isolation. We have to help trend circumvent these laws
This is the outcome when you continue voting the same old blokes into power
