Comment by kulahan
3 days ago
A lot of studies came out kinda at the same time showing how harmful it is and people aren’t coming up with alternatives. What else can you do?
3 days ago
A lot of studies came out kinda at the same time showing how harmful it is and people aren’t coming up with alternatives. What else can you do?
Attestation of age should suffice; no one in a building somewhere needs to verify my age. If I tell you to treat me like a minor, you do it. Operating systems and browsers can work together to send this as a header. If you're a concerned parent: set your children's ages in their device accounts.
Done. This alternative solves the whole problem and it's been brought up a million times, but it doesn't matter, because this isn't about protecting children or anything about ages. It's about locking down anonymity, and money for a few interests who want to be the verifiers and craft a future where they hold the keys.
I don't agree with age verification, but there isn't anywhere 'set your children's ages in their device accounts' that limits their access to inappropriate content and social media.
You can set age in Google Accounts, but they can access pretty much anything when they reach age 13 (which is about the age a lot of these things start to become a real problem) and as a parent you don't have any way to limit that. They don't even need to ask to install new phone apps.
Children also use computers as well as phones and you don't want to stop them using a web browser! You also obviously can't supervise them every moment they are online even if you wanted to.
In moments where you can not supervise them, do not let them play with the dangerous device anymore. You wouldn't leave a kid alone with a gun either.
I think there are many ways to limit that. E.g. Google Android parental control https://support.google.com/families/answer/7103028?hl=en#zip...
I understand technological advancements can be overwhelming for older people. But that does not warrant giving up on kids...
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Agreed. Many parents I've spoken to want operating systems to provide a standard set of age and/or content flags that app stores and websites are required to respect.
But various groups are deliberately conflating that desire for self-attested flags with verification: Politicians who want to police speech, companies who want to advertise to verified humans, and privacy advocates who want an easier strawman to attack.
> If you're a concerned parent: set your children's ages in their device accounts.
And if you're a concerned government, make OS vendors support it and make parents criminally responsible for not setting it.
Aren't parents already responsible for protecting their kids well-being legally?
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The problem is that not all parents are "concerned parents" and children dont deserve to be taken advantage of by trillion dollar corporations for the crime of having bad parents.
That's the classic question of when the state should step in to correct bad parenting, and when it should leave well enough alone. I'm sympathetic to the idea that this is one of the "step in" times, but I think the negatives for doing so seem far too costly.
At any rate, with age verification, un-concerned parent will likely just want their kid to shut up, and will verify using their own details to give the kid the (adult) access they want. So I don't think that changes much here.
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These parents will do age check themselves on kids devices. Why? To not be bothered or to elevate the kid in peer group.
No system is going to fix "unresponsble" parents until we end up with a state completely replacing parent like in Brave New World.
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> The problem is that not all parents are "concerned parents"
Unfortunately, this doesn't address that problem.
Children also don't deserve to have uncaring parents
Our environment contains harms. Vehicles are several tonnes traveling 60+ mph, they make guns look safe. The calculation is a risk-reward one.
The question we have to ask ourselves is whether these "protect the children" laws are worth the internet freedoms they are about to erode. I would argue not.
1. It is not the state's responsibility to raise your children. They should ensure that safety is available, they should have some ability to deal with clear cases of abuse - but otherwise you're on your own. Anybody who thinks they want a nanny state just has to imagine the worst possible government abusing this power.
2. On the basis of providing safety, it would be enough for example for mobile phone OSes to provide parent restrictions (as they currently do). Kids can't afford to buy phones, so it's the parents in almost all cases giving them unfiltered access. If you really really want to ensure that all children have filtered access on phones, just spot check kid's phones and confiscate them if they do not have the locks enabled.
It seems insane to me that so many parents believe they have zero responsibility for their children's access to the internet, despite being the source of that access. I'm sorry, parents need to step up.
I’m glad you think parents need to step up. They aren’t. Stop pretending that the solution is “people should just stop doing this thing I dislike” because it will literally never work in any situation where you’ve got even an ounce of compassion.
there are plenty of alternatives if we're willing to shift these costs and responsibility to ISPs, which could separate the internet into two networks, one for children and the other for the rest of us. This is technically just as feasible, and probably cheaper than requiring every website to process (and probably retain) personally identifiable information.. significantly safer too.
But that wouldn't come with baked in surveillance, so "what else can you do" sounds a bit unnerving.
> if we're willing to shift these costs and responsibility to ISPs, which could separate the internet into two networks, one for children and the other for the rest of us. This is technically just as feasible, and probably cheaper than requiring every website to process
It really wouldn't be.
Do that at OSI layer 3, every routed packet would have to have an "was this sent by a kid's device" flag.
Higher levels aren't the ISP's role. Lower levels, you'd need duplicate hardware specifically for kids, which couldn't connect to the adult's internet.
In the real world, we're still arguing about something that was already embarrassingly slow in its roll-out during my degree, and I graduated 20 years ago: IPv6.
> Lower levels, you'd need duplicate hardware specifically for kids, which couldn't connect to the adult's internet.
This would also breed more interest in hardware modifications and thus leading more kids into the technical field. Sounds like a win win situation.
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I had an idea the other day that children could have some kind of jewellery that they can't remove like a curfew device. Probably impractical but at least it matches - children=limited rights and need protection. Once of age, no need, come of age, can remove.
The idea that the state should get to tag some subset human as undeserving of rights is not something we should let ourselves get accustomed to.
Children already have less rights. Like voting rights missing, the right to buy alcohol (at least here in Germany), not allowed to drive a car, Forced to go to school, not allowed to watch quite a lot of movies - just to name a few, but also special protections. As they can't be held responsible below the age of 14 (so not court cases and prison time for kids <14). Just as one example.
So we already treat kids quite differently from adults. And tht is - imho - fine. Because kids are not just "small grown ups", they are just growing up.
I just do not think, that KYC/age verification is the right way to go - or even feasible in how it is being approached. I am for denying Meta, TikTok and the others the opportunity to exploit kids. But I would rather much have them regulated in a way that just forbidds them their predatory ways overall, then to give them even more data in the form of verified idetities and the knowledge that this account is within a specific age range ad also a "real human being", making that data even more valuable for advertisers.
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"Once of age, no need, come of age, can remove."
This seems very naive to me, to be honest.
Yes! I was just thinking that - what if they become conditioned.. still I think it's worth considering, as a thought experiment in light of what seems to be happening - you get the same chains when you come of age instead, although they are virtual....
If you're concerned with the fact that the government might have misaligned incentives to use a system beyond the originally given intent, I think the actual approaches that are in danger of being implemented should probably be something you focus on more than something that one person on an internet forum casually suggested
> Once of age, no need, come of age, can remove.
children don't tend to object to losing rights they never had in the first place.
get them used to livign with less rights and a lower standard of living and they wont' know what was taken away from them.
well, I agree with this, however... if you make it soo bad that it seems that adulthood will be a joy, maybe it will reduce the crash as the responsibilities start coming in? The restrictions that would ensure should be pretty transparent along the lines of well you can't do that because you're a kid, right?
At this point you might as well make it Battle Royale style. If you're not next to your countability buddy (an adult) when you use the internet, poof.
stupid idea
Stupid comment
Oh good, there have never been studies coordinated to come out to influence public opinion based on shoddy science before; just ask the tobacco industry
You realize in this scenario you’re actually defending the tobacco companies, right?
Tobacco companies: “CIGARETTES ARE FINE!”
Society: “we should regulate that.”
Social media companies: “SOCIAL MEDIA IS FINE!”
Society: “we should regulate that”
You, apparently: “if the tobacco industry lied, it proves… social media… is being honest???? Or something???”
No, in this scenario I'm defending the idea that sometimes "a lot of studies" that come out "kinda at the same time" aren't necessarily due to robust science but can be pushed by a specific agenda. If you actually cared to include the specific factor that you cited as a rationale for regulation, you'd get this:
A bunch of studies: “CIGARETTES ARE FINE!”
Tobacco industry: "We don't need to regulate that"
A bunch of studies: "SOCIAL MEDIA IS DANGEROUS"
Government: "We need to regulate that"
Never mind that there's widespread scientific consensus on plenty of things that we're actively dropping the ball on (e.g. human causes of climate change) that nobody seems to feel the need to rush on as much as this.
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The internet was never a danger to children’s mental health until social media engagement algorithms. The real solution is to ban any and all engagement algorithms that are designed to get people addicted. Age checks, aka identity checks, are just another blatant attempt to siphon more personal data by linking your real identity to all of your web activity
> The internet was never a danger to children’s mental health until social media engagement algorithms.
I suspect that depends on subtle phrasing.
If for the sake of argument I presuppose that film classification ratings are necessary to protect children’s mental health, then the un-filtered contents of shock sites and porn sites will have had an impact even in the early years of the internet.
However, the early years of the internet simply had a much smaller proportion of kids online to experience this.
I don't think the distinction matters that much. Remember ogrish? I was already an adult when that gore came out and I was terrified. I can still picture the throat gasping for air as he was being sliced alive.
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It would benefit adults too...
This is conspiracism-adjacent and therefore unhelpful IMO. Perhaps people (and therefore politicians) simply believe that it is more feasible to implement end-user ID checks than somehow to put the genie of two decades of social media back in the bottle. I agree that this is not necessarily true but the failure of imagination seems very plausible.
Its reasonable to agree a problem exists and that we don't yet have a solution worth implementing.
Until there's a solution that actually addresses the problem without creating more, we should just try to make sure more people also know the problem exists and try to help equip parents to deal with it as best they can for now.
> What else can you do?
We could recognize the attention economy as inherently destructive to society and ban it altogether.
Well, I guess there is no other option then. Follow the science.
Can you give some examples of such studies? The ones I've seen are all pseudo-scientific or provide very low grade evidence, often nothing more than simple correlations.
The default value assigned to a social study from academia should be zero these days, so there merely being a lot of them doesn't mean anything. You really need some very high quality evidence to justify this kind of huge change.
> What else can you do?
Educate the parents maybe?
Sure. A national training program sounds dope. Let’s get on it.