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Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services

blog.ericgoldman.org

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Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services

#91

Post by theamk »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #83

As far as I know there are no social media platforms operating in Minnesota, unless someone is still using the Gopher protocol? So this is a nothing burger. Even so, chronological ordering is the worst choice. Now you can just flood the stream with whatever crap you want and it will push all the legitimate content down off the page.

You flood the stream with "whatever crap", people get annoyed and unsubscribe/mute. You can no longer flood, the problem is fixed.

That's how the things are used to operate, and that is the correct way. After all, if someone is annoying IRL, you stop make a decision to stop talking to them, you don't expect some random third party to remove them.

Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services

#92

Post by Mezzie »

ipnon wrote: post #26
GameOfKnowing wrote: post #20

Most technical adults I know are in some stage of trying to revert their internet usage back to the offerings this bill would allow through. The less than 1 million users careveout is HUGE— allowing for the power of small forums, federated socials, etc. seems like a great bill unless you’re trying to exploit young people.

It seems you're implying everyone who disagrees with you is trying to exploit young people. It's the same rhetoric as the politicians who drafted the bill. We need to have open minds in civil society, some humility to anticipate desenting opinions, and careful fingers to type out comments with.

Yes.

I have some concerns about this bill and tactic. For example, even if it worked as intended, would we see an uptick of problems in 18 year olds' use of algorithmic social media as they're suddenly away from home/out from under their parents' supervision and given access to a bunch of exploiting content? It's similar to how the first two years of driving are more dangerous regardless of when those 2 years take place.

And as somebody who was 12 when COPPA went into effect, there are unintended consequences of banning minors from platforms:

1.) They lie, so either that's going to be commonly known/accepted OR a giant millstone around the neck of any existing company. This makes it a lot harder to pick out accounts that belong to minors, which makes it harder to both research and protect kids.

2.) Related to that, if you're breaking the rules by being in a space, you are way less likely to speak up. If you're a 15 year old who lies and says you're 18 to be on whatever social media platform, then if somebody harasses you, you're less likely to report it because it would get your account banned.

That's not even mentioning what something like this would do for the edge case of kids who genuinely are artists or content creators.

Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services

#93

Post by colechristensen »

kristopolous wrote: post #88
colechristensen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be difficult to enforce? >In addition to other damages, the PRA authorizes statutory damages of $1k per violation, capped at $100k per account holder per calendar year. There are 1.3 million under 18 in MN, some percentage of those have social media accounts, let's just guess 500k, so a maximum statutory fine for non-compliance of $50 billion per year per social network. All sorts of ways to adjust that…

because it's general enough that it can be challenged. I have an amazon profile. The reviews are user generated. They certainly rank popularity into categories. In fact, I also have a wikipedia user profile as well and there's talk pages and here's the trending topics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Top_25_Report Same goes with youtube, twitch, imdb, discogs, substack, medium, and oh yes, video games. Lots o…

On what grounds could it be challenged?

Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services

#94

Post by temp8964 »

nybble41 wrote: post #89
temp8964 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The description sounds heavily biased. I know lots of people want to see Facebook content chronologically ordered. People also want this so others can see their posts, not just posts from popular posters. Facebook seems to have this option, but I can’t get it to work. So I uninstalled it again.

Having this as an option might be nice, though it's more likely to be useless at scale. Having it as the only option sounds like a nightmare: Blink and you'll miss the content you're interested in, with no easy way to get back to it. To actually stay connected and up-to-date you'd have to monitor your feed 24/7, manually filtering through piles of data you don't care about to find the rare gems. And what these busybo…

This sounds like you are following way too many sources.

Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services

#95

Post by kristopolous »

colechristensen wrote: post #93
kristopolous wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because it's general enough that it can be challenged. I have an amazon profile. The reviews are user generated. They certainly rank popularity into categories. In fact, I also have a wikipedia user profile as well and there's talk pages and here's the trending topics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Top_25_Report Same goes with youtube, twitch, imdb, discogs, substack, medium, and oh yes, video games. Lots o…

On what grounds could it be challenged?

It'd have to be demonstrated. There's always places to hide in generalities.

Every word can be quibbled over as not actually applying and thus sitting outside the definition.

It's a prohibition against a generally described feature which makes it fundamentally contestable.

And say you nab them. Then they just have to do an otherwise meaningless permutation to the feature and claim they're compliant and you're back in court.

Ianal btw

Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services

#96

Post by krisoft »

aasasd wrote: post #80

> the bill only applies to social media platforms with more that 1M “account holders” (defined as people who access a “social media account,” an undefined term) “operating in Minnesota.” I'm always baffled by these nonsensical and arbitrary cutoffs. Obviously the proper approach is to define a function, either linear or logarithmic. In this case it's a reverse proportion: if you serve 500000 people in Minnesota, you…

> I'd say the optimal function …

Optimal in what sense?

Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services

#97

Post by anjc »

The bill doesn't propose to ban children from social media, but rather bans them from being recommended content. In practice it would likely mean that a child's account will just view most recent or top content, or would require them to search for content. As opposed to being profiled and recommended content outside of their/their guardian's control.

I see no problem with this for children. I think that it's inevitable that this is instituted in the EU for children, and I think it should be an option for all people.

Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services

#98

Post by acover »

encoderer wrote: post #33

Two things are true: 1. this bill is trash, it couldn’t be enforced, it’s pandering. 2. Social media as it has existed for the last 5-10 years is harmful for teenagers. Instagram is making teens depressed and suicidal. TikTok videos have people celebrating mental illness like Tourette’s and has brainwashed impressionable kids into believing they too have tics or multiple personalities or Tourette’s. Something needs t…

Trends in teen suicide don't seem to have changed that much.

1991-2017 https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/suicidal-teens

2012-2020 https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/health-of-wom...

Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services

#100

Post by aasasd »

krisoft wrote: post #96
aasasd wrote: post #80

> the bill only applies to social media platforms with more that 1M “account holders” (defined as people who access a “social media account,” an undefined term) “operating in Minnesota.” I'm always baffled by these nonsensical and arbitrary cutoffs. Obviously the proper approach is to define a function, either linear or logarithmic. In this case it's a reverse proportion: if you serve 500000 people in Minnesota, you…

> I'd say the optimal function … Optimal in what sense?

In not being suboptimal for our purposes.
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