The court reasoned sensibly: it's wrong to violate the rights of all citizens just to weed out a small group of violators. This is contrary to data protection regulations. The controversial Chat Control law follows the same logic: to find criminals, they propose monitoring everyone.
The problem is that any age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system. And such tools rarely remain "just for kids"—they quickly become used for other purposes. The only secure way is to verify not the person's identity, but the device's status (for example, that it's a children's device). This is called age assurance: we confirm age without knowing who exactly is in front of us.
> The problem is that any age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system. And such tools rarely remain "just for kids"—they quickly become used for other purposes. The only secure way is to verify not the person's identity, but the device's status (for example, that it's a children's device). This is called age assurance: we confirm age without knowing who exactly is in front of us.
Age assurance is still treating the symptom. If the platform is designed to addict and radicalize, a children's device getting in doesn't help the child, it just means the harmful design now has a younger victim. The only fix that actually works is making the platform safe for everyone, which means regulating what these services are allowed to do to users in the first place, not building better gates around them.
What is “harmful behavior” when it comes to words? You may have your own definition, but I guarantee that you can’t get a supermajority to agree with it.
(There are some basic things like fraud and such that are already illegal.)
Most people don’t actually want to ban “harmful” speech except for the speech of their political enemies.
Nobody mentioned speech. Infinite scroll isn't speech. Engagement-maximizing algorithms that push increasingly extreme content to keep you on the app longer ain't speech. The business model that makes outrage more profitable than accuracy isn't speech. You can have complete freedom of expression and still regulate that a platform isn't designed to psychologically exploit the people using it. These are not the same thing
Infinite scrolling is now evil? But pagination is fine?
The form you use is part of expression.
Engagement maximizing is a buzzword that translates to content people are interested in viewing. Why would you want to regulate content to be uninteresting? I can't see that benefiting anyone.
I’m fine with regulating some aspects of the business model, particularly targeted advertising (which should fall under interstate commerce). I’m less comfortable with the idea of legislating UX, which does seem to be an issue of speech, equivalent to legislating the layout of books. But if you destroy the engagement farming business model, none of that other stuff matters anyway.
> Engagement-maximizing algorithms that push increasingly extreme content to keep you on the app longer ain't speech
Who decides what makes an algorithm engagement maximizing instead of you know, user satisfaction maximizing (because satisfied users stay around for longer, right?)
And who decides what is extremist and what is acceptable? Was Rush Limbaugh reading the names of patients who died of AIDS on a hundred year old media more or less extreme than someone praising mao zedong for killing all landlords on social media?
> Who decides what makes an algorithm engagement maximizing instead of you know, user satisfaction maximizing (because satisfied users stay around for longer, right?)
Let the user decide. The evil algorithms require the "algorithms" such as "all my subscriptions, completely, in chronological order" to be removed. If "all ragebait" or "maximize profits for facebook" are just other buttons, I have no objection, but I do not think they will be popular.
Ok. What about a "Viewpoint Diversity" tab that lets you read the dumbest opinions from the other side of politics so that you stay in touch with what your fellow countrymen actually thinks. Not rage bait, I promise.
You do they visit or not. Should hackernews be forced to presenting their content a million ways? They present based on decisions made by the people who created the site.
(Forgive the link source - I can see in hindsight how that might not be perceived as the most objective source - but there are many other sources for those who care to look.)
I may be off here, but I believe that they are referring to the political aspect of the word “radicalize”. In a standard democracy, it’s not really appropriate for the government to attempt to halt the spread of competing philosophies that may result in electoral changes. (This doesn’t apply to so-called “defensive democracies” as well as “guided democracies” which IMO aren’t really democracies.)
The problem in these discussions is that radicalize is an overloaded term. It could mean convincing someone of your non-mainstream political view, or it could mean inspiring someone to commit an act of terror. The former seems perfectly fine to me and well within freedom of speech and association.
Here's a better fix: If a parent continuously allows their child to go to a known unsafe place, they are negligent and should no longer be a parent. The exception is if the operator of said unsafe place specifically enticed children. I haven't been following closely but weren't there internal emails showing Facebook was specifically trying to addict and hook teens? That's definitely wrong and a bad thing Facebook did, and they should be held accountable for sure.
However, if my platform says on the outside that it's for 18+, identifies itself as such using machine-readable signals, and I don't take specific action to entice children into the service, it's your failure to parent if they access it, and you should shoulder most or all the liability for it.
The slipperly slope here to avoid is this: do you really want to adopt a model where the state is the one who "owns" your child (except financially, of course, you still have to pay everything) and can unilaterally do things to you and your child in the same of child safety without your input or consent? This exists currently to some extent, it can get much worse.
A government body may review a service and determine it is addictive and radicalizing. This is fine, and helpful. Even requiring the service to display a warning is OK. Then, parents who ignore the clear warning and repeatedly fail to control their children from accessing it should lose parental rights.
> I haven't been following closely but weren't there internal emails showing Facebook was specifically trying to addict and hook teens? That's definitely wrong and a bad thing Facebook did, and they should be held accountable for sure.
> ... and I don't take specific action to entice children into the service
What part of these services have been designed to be inherently addictive do you have a hard time understanding?
It's very strange that you can be aware of the fact that Facebook et. al. have been trying to get kids addicted and then pretend that there's no "specific action" to entice them.
> The slipperly slope here to avoid is this: do you really want to adopt a model where the state is the one who "owns" your child (except financially, of course, you still have to pay everything) and can unilaterally do things to you and your child in the same of child safety without your input or consent?
So you're okay with a model where private companies intentionally get your kids addicted to digital crack and can unilaterally sell all their personal information, advertise all sorts of harmful products and services to them, let predators target and contact them, etc.?
Do you seriously think looking at websites, no matter what kind of websites, is more damaging than separating a children from his or her god damn parents and throwing them into the pit of neglect and abuse called the foster care system?
Get serious. This is not a suggestion on how to protect kids. The kids have everything to lose and nothing to earn under your system.
Parents are not professional when it comes to raising children. If we care about children being raised correctly shouldn't we defer to those who have a certification and an education in raising children.
In the future the state will raise children giving all children an equal chance of a good future. Poor children are less likely to get into good schools and careers where rich families can buy a better future.
Why does your "better solution" shift responsibility from the people who built the unsafe environment to the parents? A platform labeling itself 18+ doesn't make it safe, it just moves the blame. Adult content isn't where the supposed "harms" we are trying to protect children from are coming from. They're from how the platform is designed to keep people on it. That's fixable. Infinite scroll, algorithmic radicalization, engagement mechanics, etc. None of that requires an age label, it requires a different product. I want every platform to be safe no matter who uses them and a warning sticker on the door is not a substitute for that. We don't allow arsenic in bread just because people got used to eating it
Parents already have the ability to control what their children can do on their personal devices.
It would be better to use public resources to educate parents on how to use those existing controls, if that is something those parents choose to do with their own children.
This comes up in every discussion but the argument rests on pretending that we live in a fantasy world.
1. Parents can't monitor their children 24/7.
2. The evidence leaves little doubt: social media platforms have been designed to be ridiculously addictive, with the companies running them choosing to ignore the harms they know they cause.
3. Because these platforms are highly addictive, many parents themselves are addicts and probably ignorant to or in denial about the harms they and their children are being exposed to.
4. Even children who don't use social media can be bullied on social platforms by their peers, and not being allowed to have a phone or social media is itself a characteristic on which children might be bullied.
> Both Android and iOS allow parents to block social media apps and web access to individual websites or the entire web, if they choose to do so.
You ignored three of my points:
1. These platforms are highly addictive, and designed to be highly addictive. Just because these are digital services doesn't mean they can't and shouldn't be regulated like, say, addictive substances.
2. Many parents are themselves addicted and don't understand the harms or choose to ignore them. There are numerous areas where society decides that regulation is appropriate because a product or service is so detrimental and/or being offered predatorily.
3. Even children who don't use social media can be harmed by these platforms. Very few people want to acknowledge that these platforms are being abused in ways that allow users to cause immense harm to non-users.
> It's also a much less restrictive option than forcing EVERYONE to give up their privacy.
You already have no privacy online and these social platforms are among the biggest privacy violators. Why do so many people pretend this isn't the case?
Facebook, for instance, has "shadow profiles" of non-users created based on the collection of data from tracking tools (like Meta Pixel) that the vast majority of people don't even know exist. If you're pro-privacy, would you support laws that ban companies from doing this?
Or realize that there is no way to know who is using a device without looking at the device holders for all the time they use the device. It's like ordering alcoholics or cigarettes: the seller looks at you see the white hairs (OK) or see a 16yo face (documents please.) A device registered to an adult can be used by a child. I know, it's a failure of parental control, but how many teenagers managed to get adult magazines in the last 100 years? They will get adult devices too. So there is no way to create a 100% effective system. Kids and teenagers will find workarounds, everybody else will live a worse life.
It also means we don't need identity verification. Anonymous scratch-off cards sold in stores to adults, just like cigarettes, can be used to verify age. Or alternatively, device-only attestation. There's no reason to verify age upon every use of the product; only when it's sold.
Nah, we definitely need identity and age verification, if for no other reason than it strips tech companies and data brokers of plausible deniability. They already know who you are and by extension your age, this fight is very much about tech companies avoiding consequences.
> we definitely need identity and age verification...it strips tech companies and data brokers of plausible deniability
> this fight is very much about tech companies avoiding consequences.
If I follow your logic, you seem to be saying: tech companies could easily not target kids if they wanted to, but they don't. That may be true, but I don't see why violating everyone's privacy is the only way to prove it.
This logic is sus. Just because we cannot have a oerfect system doesn't mean we shouldn't have it at all. Like alcohol age limitations, they can be worked around and wont ever be 100 percent perfect but I see regularly teens bouncing off the register at my local store.
So the metric should be case by case for each proposed solution. Most of things proposed are no good, but that doesn't mean there is not a sensible solution out there to limit net for teens.
> The problem is that any age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system. And such tools rarely remain "just for kids"—they quickly become used for other purposes.
XKEYSCORE, the UK system brought in to allow warrantless surveillance for national security purposes and child abuse prevention, ended up being used for such minor offences as catching people dumping rubbish in other people's bin, or parents lying about their child's address to get into a better school district. In the United States, the same system was used for low-level offences like cannabis possession.
No source but a possible counter-example: SIM card carries the date-of-birth of the user (because, really, part of the problem is that you cannot supervise what a kid does with their phone 24/7), age-restricted websites have a flag in their HTTP headers, browser get age from SIM card through the OS. Same goes with app stores etc.
Like copy-protection there's always a way to circumvent it, the name of the game is to make it difficult enough. And for parents, to make it very easy to set-up.
> age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system.
this is fundamentally wrong and accepting this as an industry will only lead to required identity verification becoming the norm sooner or later
the important realization is age verification is in the end "just" a form of parenting tool
this means
- it doesn't need to be a "perfect", glancing at the age of a passport when buying adult products isn't perfect either, but it's good enough. And it doesn't require seeing the address, name, (in most cases) day and month, gender etc. on a id, nor any form of "noting them down".
- it doesn't need to be attestation based, unhackable or anything like that. It complements parenting, not replaces it.
- in turn it also shouldn't need anyones id, in most places children below 18 don't need any id but 16+ is still a age barrier
or to lay it out in rough design
- require multimedia devices sold to have a child "mode" functionality
- allow setting a age category or age (to auto determine and update the category), require a age set for this purpose to be kept private on the device and not shared, analyzed etc.
- require web sites and apps to have voluntary min age limits, similar to other products, block access _client side_ based on this information. The standard should allow region/country specific limits and reason tags.
- There are a bunch of edge cases omitted, like sites serving dynamic content/platforms in general. Requirements for parents to be allowed to define exceptions (in both directions) and handling of sides not having your countries age gating. Etc.
- properly educate parent about it
this provides sufficient functionality to support parents in parenting without requiring any identity verification or overriding the parents right to parent
yes, it's not perfect in many ways. But it doesn't need to perfect, it's "just fine" for what it tries to archive.
it's a parenting tool, not an online banking system
EDIT: Also the most relevant devices are not laptops, but phones, tablets, gaming consoles. Some of them have such a system already working "good enough" for the use cases of "games"/"game stores" and similar. Yes not browser. But very much extensible to that.
This could have been an http header. It's hard to identify people, but blocking child-locked devices should be easy, since the devices can be built to cooperate.
Then it's up to parents to give their kids child-locked devices and for stores to not sell unlocked devices to kids.
People keep saying it’s the parents responsibility to keep their kids safe, and don’t give them the tools! This is such an obvious one. I should be able to lock down a laptop for a child, and then have the browser limit websites to those that are actually child safe. I don’t care if a government agency is the one issuing “child safety certs”. This gets around the whole “identify everyone no matter what” thing, and it means that parents don’t have to run an entire IT department level of security infrastructure to keep their kids safe online.
my kids are not teenagers yet, what am I missing? the iPad I let them use has child safety enabled and it seems to do exactly what the comment above you is suggesting.
> If only a minority is out, they will just be outcast.
My kids do not have a social media presence, we have parental controls set on their devices, and the router only lets them online for a small window of the day. They still manage to communicate with friends via email, shared Google docs, phone calls, and actually meeting up. (Remember when people would agree to meet at a particular time and place, and then just show up with no further discussion? It still works.)
Parents generally have their own children's best interests in mind. If you personally have kids, feel free to delegate responsibility to someone else, since you believe that you're shitty to your own child. But you do not get to decide how to parent other people's children.
Regulating such a list seems like a very backwards and expensive way to do this when kids will just use their parents identity (or make up one wholesale). Surely this is really about trying to hold people liable for speech politicians and lobbyists don't like.
Ok, what is your stack? Which MDM did you put on your tween's devices? What about the 15 year old who really wants Graphene OS? Do they VPN back to your home network to ensure your DNS and IP block based filtering applies to their mobile usage? Are you caching the teachers' recommended YouTube videos to Plex from the YTDL container or just monitoring their watch list stats of brain rot shorts?
He’s saying that parents will always allow their kids to see, think, learn, and say things that he believes should be off limits, with government stepping in to decide that.
Some parents will berate their kids or discipline them inappropriately and instill stress and anxiety in them that causes them to seek out things that should be off limits. It's easier to see a solution for the second issue when the first is not socially acceptable to talk about out loud. Nobody wants to be told they are parenting their own kids inappropriately. But in some cases, that just reality. Tech CEOs are a 100% reliable source of blame; parents - the people who are physically around their children the most - are not. (Source: myself. The best I managed to escape childhood with was C-PTSD, and I have had to get therapy to be able to manage my digital device usage ever since.)
So rather than work on the first problem, which is admittedly difficult, you want to remove the outlet that helps them cope? What do you imagine to be the most immediate consequences?
I mean I think we can all broadly agree that showing snuff and hardcore porn to 11 yr olds is objectively bad. There is a line, we just might not agree on exactly where it should be placed.
Except technicality absolutely factors in. Sure there's mouthbreathers out there that exercise no oversight at all over the content their kids are exposed to but there's also a large group of well-intentioned parents that would likely do a much better job at this if the bar wasn't set quite so high.
> And before anyone blames the parents, parents will always be shitty. They are an impediment to children's health society must work around.
...huh? This is completely backwards. We should be making laws that punish parents for failing to parent properly. Not laws that punish everyone.
If we pass a law that children under a certain age may not use social media, then giving your child a non-child-locked device should be treated the same way we treat giving your child alcohol or cigarettes.
Cultural tangent: in France, "the government" is the group of ministries (or departments in the US), part of the executive branch. So, the judiciary is not part of the government, and the National Assembly and the Senate (legislative branch) are not either. The head of state is not part of the government either, which is how you can get headlines about disagreements between the President and the Government. It’s quite different from how things are managed in the US. My understanding is that it is somewhat similar in the UK, which would be relevant in a BBC story.
In Western countries, the judiciary and the executive (which contains the day-to-day operations of the government) generally operate independently and can rule against each other. I'm most familiar with the US, and I think its constitution was the first to encode judicial independence - and constitutional review by the Supreme Court was established early on in US history. But all Western countries these days have had judges rule against executive policy and the executive obey it.
The details of how to override a ruling against the executive does differ between countries, and also on whether its considered just an interpretation of law or a constitutional question. Both the US and France have a written constitution that's binding on other branches, while the UK does not.
> The details of how to override a ruling against the executive does differ between countries, and also on whether its considered just an interpretation of law or a constitutional question. Both the US and France have a written constitution that's binding on other branches, while the UK does not.
Yeh. In the UK, the supreme court can not strike down primary legislation. It can rule executive actions are not following the primary legislation or unwritten constitutional rules, but if parliament passes a law that says oranges are now green, the supreme court is in no position to challenge it.
The UK does have the Principle of Legality, which is a way for courts to strike down an application of primary legislation by requiring a clear statement to abrogate common law and constitutional norms: https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/2024/05/20/hayley-hooper-his...
An interesting twist to UK constitutional jurisprudence is that until relatively recently the House of Lords was the highest court. In fact, the very origin of Parliament was as a court. The devolution of legislative and judicial (and executive) powers from the king had always been intertwined. So contrasting constitutional judicial review between the US and UK by gesturing at the principle of Parliamentary Supremacy didn't necessarily prove anything as the House of Lords was, in a sense, Parliament. (This was often a rebuttal for when people brought up the Principle of Legality as contradicting Parliamentary Supremacy, or otherwise interjected in discussions of judicial review in the UK.) Now that the highest court is independent, the next 100 years of constitutional jurisprudence in the UK should prove interesting.
I checked your profile and you are cofounder of a company with branches all around Europe. At least the countries in the EU should have separation of powers, and the judicial (the courts) are independent from the government and there is a parliament which is more or less independent from the government too. Of course the government is usually backed by the majority of the parliament so the two of them often act together. The courts apply the law, whatever it is, but if the parliament or the government or the president (for presidential democracies) do something against the law or the constitution (or equivalent chart), there is at least a court that can undo that legislation and send it back for an overhaul. This is what happened in France.
I am not sure. In French that would be the state (L’État). It’s more complicated in the U.K., with its layers of national, devolved country, and local governance. Then, it would be different again in federations like Germany.
Seems like there are many ways to get toward the best of both worlds -- don't allow people to upload pictures of kids who are clearly under 15 to social media would get us a lot of the way there.
Also all of these companies know from advertising data, and location data, that you are at school, who you are, etc. They would also know that all of your friends are also teenagers.
If the law is serious there are many many ways to enforce this without violating privacy.
Without further violating privacy. I would say that the data these companies are already collecting on people (including children, who many believe should be afforded extra protections from such companies) is a major, systematic privacy violation.
> Seems like there are many ways to get toward the best of both worlds -- don't allow people to upload pictures of kids who are clearly under 15 to social media would get us a lot of the way there.
How do you prevent kids uploading photos of themselves?
What I find interesting is that Texas did it with just pornography sites, everyone complains. Then California, which included those that complained by Texas' law, says they're going to do it at the OS level, some people were okay with it but some still opposed it and possibly some others opposed it. Yet, they're still pushing forward with both?
Just like all the other policies that somehow manage to move at the speed of light across the globe. These politicians are seem to all be influenced by the same thing, with that usually being in opposition to the people that voted for them.
As french citizen what I can say is: Parliamentary time wasted. During the initial work the deputees that have initiated the project could have figured out that the constitutional court would, in fine, block the text.
Sometimes they do know but do it anyway (or even for that very reason) because it serves their political interests and then the great bill they were supporting is blocked by someone else, which can be blamed as needed.
I think Trump played that game a number of times, for instance.
I always find it weird when people declare things “are” rights, as rights are things societies create. “Should be a right” seems like a more appropriate framing
There are. In the constitution, as the court found. There are also reasonable arguments that they are an unavoidable consequence of Human Rights, as described in the declaration of 1789, which is also in the constitution.
The right to privacy is also explicitly in the Code Civil since 1970, in the European Convention on Human Rights and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (both are binding to EU member states).
Nuanced, but I don't think you're disagreeing that privacy is a right. Very few people do and most of them would be classified as sociopaths. ex. Zuckerberg, Langley, Altman, et. al. Anti-privacy actions are often immoral, sometimes illegal and almost universally anti-social.
Where did you get that from? I am not referencing privacy at all. I was responding to the parent who basically said that all rights come from society, which is not at all the historical philosophical basis for rights in the US.
It is unclear to me how you can regulate any digital service with respect to any demographic identity without regression to full identity check.
Parental controls are not a solution, either. People are free to use any terminal they wish. If you wanted to change that then it again regresses to the same issue.
A few options: (a) load a digital copy of an existing ID into your OS's wallet app then the wallet app can simply attest to any service that the device is owned by someone over 18 (b) sell single-use tokens in grocery stores that require an ID to purchase like alcohol. token can be used to verify you're 18+ for one site. (c) require that any network-enabled device can only be bought by showing ID to prove 18+ and then when set up can be configured at the OS-level as child-owned so a parent can buy a device and do the initial setup so it's locked in child mode.
I love how the french can go from bieng, from bieng, French, to making complete rational sensical descions that they will then stick to but refuse to discuss.
Bravo vive la france!
Frankly, the proper solution is to ban social media regardless of age. We are already doing it with heroin and other similar substances and clearly social media are pretty bad for everyone and anyone.
Tobacco and alcohol are scientifically proven carcinogens, yet they are sold ubiquitously in the [western] world. I would argue they are more dangerous than social medias. Yet we don't see any push in banning tobacco and alcohol for 'everyone'.
We won't ban any of all these things because there are people with political power that make fortunes out of them. Whether that's alcohol, social media, tobacco or otherwise.
We will not go for the proper solution, not because it's not the proper solution but because powerful people won't allow it.
If you do look at the things we have indeed banned, you will find that they are mostly coming from outside our countries. It's not cut and dry, but it's very geopolitical pretty often.
Alcohol story is a lot more than just it being a good business, in vino veritas and all. There is a huge cultural aspect around it for better or worse.
I haven't seen children doomscrolling HN lately, have you?
But, whatever it takes. Social media in combination with mobile phones is destroying the latest generations. Add AI in the mix, and we're on the road to Idiocracy.
The problem is that any age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system. And such tools rarely remain "just for kids"—they quickly become used for other purposes. The only secure way is to verify not the person's identity, but the device's status (for example, that it's a children's device). This is called age assurance: we confirm age without knowing who exactly is in front of us.
Age assurance is still treating the symptom. If the platform is designed to addict and radicalize, a children's device getting in doesn't help the child, it just means the harmful design now has a younger victim. The only fix that actually works is making the platform safe for everyone, which means regulating what these services are allowed to do to users in the first place, not building better gates around them.
(There are some basic things like fraud and such that are already illegal.)
Most people don’t actually want to ban “harmful” speech except for the speech of their political enemies.
The form you use is part of expression.
Engagement maximizing is a buzzword that translates to content people are interested in viewing. Why would you want to regulate content to be uninteresting? I can't see that benefiting anyone.
Who decides what makes an algorithm engagement maximizing instead of you know, user satisfaction maximizing (because satisfied users stay around for longer, right?)
And who decides what is extremist and what is acceptable? Was Rush Limbaugh reading the names of patients who died of AIDS on a hundred year old media more or less extreme than someone praising mao zedong for killing all landlords on social media?
Let the user decide. The evil algorithms require the "algorithms" such as "all my subscriptions, completely, in chronological order" to be removed. If "all ragebait" or "maximize profits for facebook" are just other buttons, I have no objection, but I do not think they will be popular.
Not if you must ID before accessing information on the world wide web.
No. I don't want to be treated like a child.
It always beautiful how single-word choices like this can reveal the actual intent behind seemingly "reasonable" words.
(Forgive the link source - I can see in hindsight how that might not be perceived as the most objective source - but there are many other sources for those who care to look.)
The problem in these discussions is that radicalize is an overloaded term. It could mean convincing someone of your non-mainstream political view, or it could mean inspiring someone to commit an act of terror. The former seems perfectly fine to me and well within freedom of speech and association.
However, if my platform says on the outside that it's for 18+, identifies itself as such using machine-readable signals, and I don't take specific action to entice children into the service, it's your failure to parent if they access it, and you should shoulder most or all the liability for it.
The slipperly slope here to avoid is this: do you really want to adopt a model where the state is the one who "owns" your child (except financially, of course, you still have to pay everything) and can unilaterally do things to you and your child in the same of child safety without your input or consent? This exists currently to some extent, it can get much worse.
A government body may review a service and determine it is addictive and radicalizing. This is fine, and helpful. Even requiring the service to display a warning is OK. Then, parents who ignore the clear warning and repeatedly fail to control their children from accessing it should lose parental rights.
> ... and I don't take specific action to entice children into the service
What part of these services have been designed to be inherently addictive do you have a hard time understanding?
It's very strange that you can be aware of the fact that Facebook et. al. have been trying to get kids addicted and then pretend that there's no "specific action" to entice them.
> The slipperly slope here to avoid is this: do you really want to adopt a model where the state is the one who "owns" your child (except financially, of course, you still have to pay everything) and can unilaterally do things to you and your child in the same of child safety without your input or consent?
So you're okay with a model where private companies intentionally get your kids addicted to digital crack and can unilaterally sell all their personal information, advertise all sorts of harmful products and services to them, let predators target and contact them, etc.?
Do you seriously think looking at websites, no matter what kind of websites, is more damaging than separating a children from his or her god damn parents and throwing them into the pit of neglect and abuse called the foster care system?
Get serious. This is not a suggestion on how to protect kids. The kids have everything to lose and nothing to earn under your system.
In the future the state will raise children giving all children an equal chance of a good future. Poor children are less likely to get into good schools and careers where rich families can buy a better future.
Think of the children.
It's angels and saviors like you who make the world a living hell.
It would be better to use public resources to educate parents on how to use those existing controls, if that is something those parents choose to do with their own children.
1. Parents can't monitor their children 24/7.
2. The evidence leaves little doubt: social media platforms have been designed to be ridiculously addictive, with the companies running them choosing to ignore the harms they know they cause.
3. Because these platforms are highly addictive, many parents themselves are addicts and probably ignorant to or in denial about the harms they and their children are being exposed to.
4. Even children who don't use social media can be bullied on social platforms by their peers, and not being allowed to have a phone or social media is itself a characteristic on which children might be bullied.
That's not a fantasy.
It's also a much less restrictive option than forcing EVERYONE to give up their privacy.
You ignored three of my points:
1. These platforms are highly addictive, and designed to be highly addictive. Just because these are digital services doesn't mean they can't and shouldn't be regulated like, say, addictive substances.
2. Many parents are themselves addicted and don't understand the harms or choose to ignore them. There are numerous areas where society decides that regulation is appropriate because a product or service is so detrimental and/or being offered predatorily.
3. Even children who don't use social media can be harmed by these platforms. Very few people want to acknowledge that these platforms are being abused in ways that allow users to cause immense harm to non-users.
> It's also a much less restrictive option than forcing EVERYONE to give up their privacy.
You already have no privacy online and these social platforms are among the biggest privacy violators. Why do so many people pretend this isn't the case?
Facebook, for instance, has "shadow profiles" of non-users created based on the collection of data from tracking tools (like Meta Pixel) that the vast majority of people don't even know exist. If you're pro-privacy, would you support laws that ban companies from doing this?
2020s: >%2 of all teens smoke
Kinda suggests that putting limitations in place actually produces results. Crazy innit?
If you weren't aware, smoking became uncool a long time ago. Teens who consume tobacco use vapes or Zyn now.
> this fight is very much about tech companies avoiding consequences.
If I follow your logic, you seem to be saying: tech companies could easily not target kids if they wanted to, but they don't. That may be true, but I don't see why violating everyone's privacy is the only way to prove it.
So the metric should be case by case for each proposed solution. Most of things proposed are no good, but that doesn't mean there is not a sensible solution out there to limit net for teens.
source?
Like copy-protection there's always a way to circumvent it, the name of the game is to make it difficult enough. And for parents, to make it very easy to set-up.
this is fundamentally wrong and accepting this as an industry will only lead to required identity verification becoming the norm sooner or later
the important realization is age verification is in the end "just" a form of parenting tool
this means
- it doesn't need to be a "perfect", glancing at the age of a passport when buying adult products isn't perfect either, but it's good enough. And it doesn't require seeing the address, name, (in most cases) day and month, gender etc. on a id, nor any form of "noting them down".
- it doesn't need to be attestation based, unhackable or anything like that. It complements parenting, not replaces it.
- in turn it also shouldn't need anyones id, in most places children below 18 don't need any id but 16+ is still a age barrier
or to lay it out in rough design
- require multimedia devices sold to have a child "mode" functionality
- allow setting a age category or age (to auto determine and update the category), require a age set for this purpose to be kept private on the device and not shared, analyzed etc.
- require web sites and apps to have voluntary min age limits, similar to other products, block access _client side_ based on this information. The standard should allow region/country specific limits and reason tags.
- There are a bunch of edge cases omitted, like sites serving dynamic content/platforms in general. Requirements for parents to be allowed to define exceptions (in both directions) and handling of sides not having your countries age gating. Etc.
- properly educate parent about it
this provides sufficient functionality to support parents in parenting without requiring any identity verification or overriding the parents right to parent
yes, it's not perfect in many ways. But it doesn't need to perfect, it's "just fine" for what it tries to archive.
it's a parenting tool, not an online banking system
EDIT: Also the most relevant devices are not laptops, but phones, tablets, gaming consoles. Some of them have such a system already working "good enough" for the use cases of "games"/"game stores" and similar. Yes not browser. But very much extensible to that.
Then it's up to parents to give their kids child-locked devices and for stores to not sell unlocked devices to kids.
<https://www.rtalabel.org/page.php?content=howtofaq>
Maybe we need a "it's not for kids but it's not porn either" header.
And it's the same reason why everybody keeps pushing the stupidier, most obnoxious and invasive tools to "protect the children".
If you want kids to not access social networks, you need to have most of them out. If only a minority is out, they will just be outcast.
That said, "everybody must do that thing that Apple does" may be a very good example of good regulation. IDK what Apple does, though.
My kids do not have a social media presence, we have parental controls set on their devices, and the router only lets them online for a small window of the day. They still manage to communicate with friends via email, shared Google docs, phone calls, and actually meeting up. (Remember when people would agree to meet at a particular time and place, and then just show up with no further discussion? It still works.)
I think they'll be fine.
Companies like epic and Microsoft dont. The easy path is just a default install
I suspect this is by design.
And before anyone blames the parents, parents will always be shitty. They are an impediment to children's health society must work around.
I wish we would just pull the plug on ad-based social media altogether. The incentives add up to destroying society.
The health of kids with parents is infinitely better than those without. Just saying
Zuckerberg was not a parent when he conceived of Facebook and "society" as a whole is pushing social media on kids, not parents.
Maybe cut nontechnicals a little slack? Their adversaries have invested literally billions of dollars in R&D.
> And before anyone blames the parents, parents will always be shitty. They are an impediment to children's health society must work around.
This is what I was referencing. Your reply is a non sequitur here.
...huh? This is completely backwards. We should be making laws that punish parents for failing to parent properly. Not laws that punish everyone.
If we pass a law that children under a certain age may not use social media, then giving your child a non-child-locked device should be treated the same way we treat giving your child alcohol or cigarettes.
The details of how to override a ruling against the executive does differ between countries, and also on whether its considered just an interpretation of law or a constitutional question. Both the US and France have a written constitution that's binding on other branches, while the UK does not.
Yeh. In the UK, the supreme court can not strike down primary legislation. It can rule executive actions are not following the primary legislation or unwritten constitutional rules, but if parliament passes a law that says oranges are now green, the supreme court is in no position to challenge it.
An interesting twist to UK constitutional jurisprudence is that until relatively recently the House of Lords was the highest court. In fact, the very origin of Parliament was as a court. The devolution of legislative and judicial (and executive) powers from the king had always been intertwined. So contrasting constitutional judicial review between the US and UK by gesturing at the principle of Parliamentary Supremacy didn't necessarily prove anything as the House of Lords was, in a sense, Parliament. (This was often a rebuttal for when people brought up the Principle of Legality as contradicting Parliamentary Supremacy, or otherwise interjected in discussions of judicial review in the UK.) Now that the highest court is independent, the next 100 years of constitutional jurisprudence in the UK should prove interesting.
It’s a good thing MPs are serious people and Parliament would never do that, right? :)
In the US "government" generally refers to all three branches; is that not the case in Europe?
"State and government" section in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(polity)
Also all of these companies know from advertising data, and location data, that you are at school, who you are, etc. They would also know that all of your friends are also teenagers.
If the law is serious there are many many ways to enforce this without violating privacy.
How do you prevent kids uploading photos of themselves?
Maybe we need an adult only portion of the Internet and verify identity only on that (like bars do to keep out kids).
New TLD maybe? .adult
I think Trump played that game a number of times, for instance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law
The right to privacy is also explicitly in the Code Civil since 1970, in the European Convention on Human Rights and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (both are binding to EU member states).
Now it is time to disband Facebook - companies leveraging lobbyists to try to destroy democracies, must be disbanded.
This give parents useful control, and removes the state overreach.
Parental controls are not a solution, either. People are free to use any terminal they wish. If you wanted to change that then it again regresses to the same issue.
We will not go for the proper solution, not because it's not the proper solution but because powerful people won't allow it.
If you do look at the things we have indeed banned, you will find that they are mostly coming from outside our countries. It's not cut and dry, but it's very geopolitical pretty often.
But, whatever it takes. Social media in combination with mobile phones is destroying the latest generations. Add AI in the mix, and we're on the road to Idiocracy.
Also, ad hominem are the tool of the really stupid. Be better than them!