Comment by Marsymars
2 days ago
The upside of well-crafted social media bans for kids under a certain age is that you can use them to apply financial pain to social media companies for failing to prevent kids from signing up.
2 days ago
The upside of well-crafted social media bans for kids under a certain age is that you can use them to apply financial pain to social media companies for failing to prevent kids from signing up.
Applying stiff financial penalties for allowing kids to sign up for social media sites is another way of saying that you want to have to provide your ID to log in to social sites.
Reddit, YouTube, Discord, and even Hacker News qualify as social sites. I don't know about you, but I don't want to have to start providing ID to log in to everything.
If you think these imaginary laws would only apply to Facebook and TikTok, you must have missed all of the discussion where they've been extended to many more sites with social features. Goodbye privacy!
> If you think these imaginary laws would only apply to Facebook and TikTok
We can literally write "these laws apply only apply to Facebook and TikTok" into the laws.
Or base it on sites that have advertising. Products/services that are targeted to minors shouldn't be permitted to have advertisements anyway.
I don't find "We've done a bad job with X so we should abandon X rather than attempting to do X better" to be a compelling argument on its own.
> We can literally write "these laws apply only apply to Facebook and TikTok" into the laws.
I don’t find it useful to imagine laws like this. This isn’t what happens in real law making.
I’m talking about real, actual laws that are getting passed.
It’s not going to be perfectly targeted at websites you don’t use while leaving everything you like free, open, and privacy preserving.
It’s really important that we’re being realistic and honest about this. Inviting bad laws into the internet with fantasies about how they’ll be carefully scoped and limited to other websites is not realistic.
2 replies →
What would be the point? If the goal is to "protect the children", then banning only 2 companies from providing social media to kids will do nothing after at most a few years - kids will just move on to the new social media that is not yet banned.
Of course, this says nothing about the many kids who will be hurt by being denied access to social media, such as the many gay or trans kids living in conservative families that found some solace in online communities that would accept the real selves they otherwise have to hide.
1 reply →