Canada

Or you know, you can let parents take care of their own kids. Stop telling me how to parent my own kids in my own house!

Also obligatory reminder, consumer home routers have had parental controls for years. You can use these functions to whitelist specific websites for your children, while simultaneously block everything not on said whitelist.

On top of this, this is the most privacy respectful option as it means no third party is snooping on what sites your visiting, no one is collecting analytics, and no personal information is made available to said third parties to be hacked and compromised, ultimately protecting you from any identity theft.

On top of this this "same issue" was why TVs have had parental controls for ages. All a parent would need to do is choose to enable and block certain channels behind a passcode/pin for their children. And somehow this solution has worked without being privacy intrusive.

Idiots

We'll try literally anything but regulating big tech.

The problem here is not parenting, it's not even the idea of social media, but rather the algorithms that amplify the worst behavior and encourage it. These need to be banned for all ages. This is why we have these negative feedback loops causing grown men to draw political opinions on the side of their trucks.

Have some of you never seen a single dystopian scifi film????

???????????

The idea that people on the fediverse would support this blows my mind.

People are so ignorant asking for Australia’s age verification. That’s basically asking Ottawa to take away their freedom.

I agree, BUT it needs to be the parents who enforce it by simply not giving them pocket computers.

New laws should always be the last resort, not the go-to "solution".

Bloody fools, giving up your id to silicon valley, surrendering to them, letting in the trojan horse of ai censorship behind the walls of liberal democracy, to protect the kids. Which it won't protect them to have silicon valley, and every other predator on the internet knowing everything about you. Sweet dreams.

This is what the OS level age verification is meant to do. It shifts the burden of age verification from the social media companies and websites to someone else.

What even constitutes as "social media"? If a website has a comments section, is that now blocked? What about Wikis that have a "talk" tab for discussion? Message forums? What about social apps like Discord and IRC? Does YouTube count as social media?

We don't need to ban social media, we need to start really pushing critical think and education.

Something I see coming up a lot in this comment section is this question of how this would be enforced without the invasive age verification we're seeing in the US and UK.

My answer to that is that it should be enforced at the level of people posting content, along with some amount of self-policing. If you create events for kids under 16 as a Facebook event and ask them to RSVP through Facebook, then that's breaking the law. If you're a school sharing content for your students on these platforms, that would also be breaking the law. If the kids are aware enough of the problems with social media, then simply having a law in place is enough to steer some away from those platforms and convince others to join them. This also gives people an extra tool to point to when it comes to asking businesses to post their information somewhere other than Instagram.

If it can't be done that way, then it shouldn't be implemented.

I don't expect this to eliminate social media use altogether for kids in that age bracket. I do expect it to be an improvement, not just for the kids, but also for us adults who don't want to be forced to use these platforms.

Force everyone back into the real world, that's where the important things are happening anyways.