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Taking away their freedoms is the wrong approach. They need to go after the social media companies for not protecting users from harm, regardless of age. The platform needs to be the start of regulation, not the citizen.
If this law had even a tiny bit to do with protecting children they might start considering all the perverse incentives and counterintuitive outcomes. But since it is just a surveillance measure that they are couching in "won't somebody think of the children" they do not give a fuck.
The real players pushing this are unelected members of the intelligence community who are entirely insulated from accountability so they are going to push until they get their way no matter what it costs the country or how many politicians it costs their positions and/or souls.
How is a social media ban a surveillance measure? It literally makes it much harder to monitor what people do
So the government mandating ID checks on the must popular websites makes it harder to monitor people? You're going to have to explain that one to me.
Imagine if you couldn't enter certain public spaces without providing ID, because otherwise unsupervised kids might get in there, then imagine the records of who had been in that places was stored in some random spot online with only loose platitudes that the government expects companies to try really hard not to leak that data. Would you then feel that this was a safe place?
Also because the kids are smarter and more motivated than the government gives them credit, they start using work arounds to access that place, so the main way to get penalised and potentially have your identity stolen is to engage with this pointless and flawed system in good faith.
This is a debacle on an epic scale, they could instead be putting in place some real legal consequences for companies that facilitate or engage in abuse. We know for example that Facebook has experimented on manipulating algorithmic results of teenaged girls to make them better consumers by heightening body image issues. Round up the Australian Meta executive team and throw then in jail for a decade or two when that sort of shit comes out. When a data leak takes place extradite the CEO and give him a day of jail for every user that was put in jeopardy, it'll only take a couple of CEOs sing jailed for multiple centuries before data security becomes a top focus in every company.
No instead let's institute a poorly thought out ban on a non voting block, to disguise the first steps in establishing the framework of the actual surveillance state we are working up to.
You mean those social networks full of your pictures, coupled with your profile info such as name and maybe date of birth? Sure bud
Yeah I mean the one good thing we can agree on about social media is that it's a perfect record, no one lies and all the information uploaded to it is so truthful that you can basically treat it as a complete record. Imagine, if the opposite were true, people could engage with social media without having to provide any information they didn't want to. Not even going to get in to the pros and cons of this. But it all comes down to penalising those who engage in good faith. Don't forget, we have a wildly impractical law om the book that allows our government to compel any citizen who works for one of these large companies to install back doors into the system with a potential stay at a Federal prison for any objection or disclosure. The groundwork has been getting laid for a long time on this project.
Why do kids at that age want to be on reddit and Facebook so much they will develop a work around?
They don't that would be old people social media. Snapchat and Tiktok on the other hand... Maybe some Instagram.
It bans only certain people by age. Now how do you figure out their age? Photos, ID both work, but simply asking for age is not considered enough by the government.
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It is probably not going to succeed; young people are approximately the only minority whose rights can be restricted completely arbitrarily and which tends to have fewer, not more, rights over time. But still a good thing to try and I wish them the greatest success.
Reality is social media companies are publishing companies and need to held to the same standards as publishers.
What standards are those? ... Also, if I run a social media server, like Lemmy or Mastodon, am I now a publisher?
Vary by country but in nutshell Laws applying to newspapers cover a range of issues, including freedom of the press, defamation, privacy, intellectual property (authors' rights), and legal requirements for advertisements and public notices.
The main issue with today’s social media is the algo that act like a chief editor pushing opinion/specific in your face. Regarding fediverse, yes. If you start to hosting/publishing, copyrighted article, illegal content , etc.related to where it is hosted you will face the law in reality. This is why each server have their specific approach to this problem depending on where they are hosted https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/ as an example
Is there a right to communication medium?
Just to be absurdly weird: Spent shell casings with writing on them seem fair to ban. Maybe? I dunno. (I’m just being cheeky)
This also reminds me of “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.”
Surprised to see so many people on Lemmy in favour of social media. It's horrendous for everybody, adults and children alike. I don't think kids should be on there.
Usually for things like this, I'd be fine with parents handling it and controlling their own kids' access. But social media is too pervasive, you'd turn your kid into an outcast if they didn't have it when 96% of their peers did.
I would cheer if they banned social media for everyone, but since it's targeted their enforcement mechanism is privacy invasive age verification for everyone else. They couldn't care less about children if they tried, it's all about data collection. Pure and simple.
Lemmy is social media
Good on them. Wish there was more details on how to support them.
I hope this fails, social media has had horrible outcomes for young people.
It’s an authoritarian power grab veiled as protecting the children, an ancient play from volumes scribed in clay.
Social Media, as it’s currently implemented, is an overwhelmingly negative to everyone, but banning it for anyone is a wilfully ignorant and lazy action.
The legitimate platforms have been gifted an abdication of responsibility to make their platforms safer, and the illegitimate ones have gained a greater potential audience.
The adult action would be to require the platforms prove they’re prioritising safety above profit, with embarrassingly transparent audit visibility; but this is the antithesis of how government and corporate entities are structured, and such measures are denigrated and dismissed.