Banning teens from using corporate, for-profit, surveillance capitalism, data-mining machines fronting as "social" "networking" sites? Yeah, I'm down. Kids can move over to decentralized, federated services and take those to the next level. Where do I sign? Ban everyone. Ban the sites completely. They're corrosive and trash.
Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services
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Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services
#112there are only about a million teenagers in minnesota per this https://www.mncompass.org/profiles/state/minnesota/age
so in practice you could make a dedicated platform for minnesota teens and never hit the '1M account holders' limit
also not sure how your content is going to 'appear in a chronological manner' without algorithms
Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why isn't it enforceable? State attorney general notices his kid's social media app is giving algorithmic instead of chronological results, subpoenas social networks for number of under-18s in Minnesota, files charges, court sets up enormous fine. Which part of this process is impossible?
Kids will lie about their age. They already do. You aren't supposed to sign up until you are 13. There are lots of pre-teens on Social Media. Stopping that would mean a KYC process for every social media signup. I don't think that works either.
From the bill's text, as quoted by the article:
> (b) The social media platform is liable to an individual account holder who received user-generated content through a social media algorithm while the individual account holder was under the age of 18 and was using the individual account holder’s own account, if the social media platform knew or had reason to know that the individual account holder was under the age of 18 and located in Minnesota. [...]
Sounds like they're not requiring unreasonable knowledge of faked ages.
Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services
#114This would effectively ban minors from the Internet. And many walled gardens. EDIT: There’s a case to be made for it! The Internet, especially social media, is as powerful as illicit drugs and probably impacts development. But IMHO, this should be up to parents to decide, and I think the lawmakers probably have no clue the extent of this kind of rule would be.
I don't think it would ban minors from the Internet.
I actually tend to avoid the types of services proscribed by this proposal myself! There's still plenty of Internet left for me.
Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services
#115how are they even planning on enforcing this?
These old farts couldn't even sign in to Facebook without technical support. Do you think they understand even a glimmer of the technical ramifications of their proposed law? Usually when laws like this fail for technical reasons, they try to compensate the embarrassment by hammering harder with the penalties.
Signing in is still relatively easy. What takes a bit more skill is to get rid of the account once you no longer want it.
Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services
#116> 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’m baffled that you see a simple easy to understand rule and think we should spice it up with a logarithmic curve.
The goal is simply to say that big social media companies must comply and small niche ones are ok. It is arbitrary. It’s also probably fine. Note it’s not 1M people in Minnesota. It’s 1M users anywhere.
Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Not sure what you're looking at. There is a clear, sourced, and cited upward trend in teen suicides between 2012 and 2019.
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Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services
#118Earlier 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…
Hrrrm, you're not wrong. I don't think the law is intended to target wikipedia or imdb as such. Some of the others might actually be intentional though.
Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services
#119Two 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...
Yes, "only" a 33% increase from 2012 to 2020.
Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Not sure what you're looking at. There is a clear, sourced, and cited upward trend in teen suicides between 2012 and 2019.
Yes, there is an trend upward since the mid 2000s. I was just expecting a 10x.