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Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

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Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#211

Post by jcranmer »

scythe wrote: post #152
captainmuon wrote: post #89

I guess for me it depends on what the law considers "social media". Is something like the bulletin boards we used to have around the late 90s/early 2000s social media? What about chat rooms? Local social web sites for the school or your city? I think a lot of these things can even be beneficial, if I think about my own experiences as a somewhat introverted teenager. And what about things like Netflix, Youtube, Podcas…

> I guess for me it depends on what the law considers "social media". It's a bill written by the Florida House of Representatives, so there's a definition there. Mind you, it's the Florida House, which has put out some extremely bad laws in its current session -- from "Parental Rights in Education" to the Disney speech retaliation. But given that this is a less ostensibly partisan issue, there are reasons for hope. T…

> The definition seems narrowly tailored

The fact that are well over a dozen exceptions carved out strongly suggests that the definition is anything but narrowly tailored, and the authors of the bill preferred to add in exceptions to everyone who objected rather than rethinking their broad definitions.

1a-c will be trivially satisfied by anything that "has user accounts" and "allow users to comment". 1e is clearly meant to cover "algorithmic" recommendations, but it's worded so broadly that a feature that includes "threads you've commented on" would satisfy this prong. 1d is problematic; it can be interpreted so narrowly that nothing applies, or so broadly that everything applies. IANAL, but I think you'd have a decent shot of going after this for unconstitutionally vague on this prong for sure.

Discounting 1d, this means that virtually every website in existence qualifies as social media sites, at least before you start applying exceptions. Not just Facebook or Twitter, but things like Twitch, Discord, Paradox web forums, Usenet, an MMO game, even news sites and Wikipedia are going to qualify as social media platforms.

Actually, given that it's not covered by any of the exceptions, Wikipedia is a social media platform according to Florida, and I guess would therefore be illegal for kids to use. Even more hilariously, Blackboard (the software I had to use in school for all the online stuff at school) qualifies as a social media platform that would be illegal for kids to use.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#212

Post by gnicholas »

pfdietz wrote: post #7

I can't see how this could pass 1st amendment scrutiny.

Minors don't have the same First Amendment rights as adults. For example, government-run schools can have speech codes that students must obey. Although I have not read this bill, the general notion blurs the line between speech and action a bit, which would make it easier to pass muster.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#213

Post by runsWphotons »

somenameforme wrote: post #168
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your answer is yes? Your position is that decisions about youth access to social media should be fully taken from the parents and made by govs instead. Penalties can be assumed from your examples. This is the reality that you want imposed on parents and children - yes?

There's actually a really simple and elegant penalty - forfeiture of the device used to access the social media. With all seized devices to then be wiped and donated to low income school districts/families. This gets more complex when using something like a school computer, but I think it's a pretty nice solution outside of that. That's going to be a tremendous deterrent, yet also not particularly draconian.

Yep thats what low income families need: more cell phones.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#214

Post by rchaud »

monkeynotes wrote: post #190
ajhurliman wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a ban on gambling for minors, so if you see social media as more harmful than gambling (personally, I do) it probably makes sense.

Gambling is outright banned for a majority of regions in the US, not just kids. I don't think they are equally bad, just different bad. Gambling is addictive, and it destroys people. Social media is addictive and socially toxic, on the whole it erodes the very fabric of a society.

Not anymore. A 2018 Supreme Court decision opened the floodgates to legalized sports gambling, much of it online. The only states with existing bans are Hawaii and Utah, which combined have only 5 million residents.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiat...

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#215

Post by ceejayoz »

lbhdc wrote: post #209
ceejayoz wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Smoking sections haven't been a thing in the US for a long time... Yes, the regulations that made this happen are good. That's my point. > Waste from single use vapes is also a huge problem. Nothing like the cigarette butts that used to be everywhere. > Similarly there are health effects specific to vaping, time will tell if cancer is among them. We've plenty of data to safely conclude vaping is safer than smoking…

[flagged]

> It seems like vaping is close enough to smoking to say that it is functionally close enough to be equated.

Bullshit. Both are nicotine delivery methods. One is far better for both individual and societal reasons. Water and whiskey are both wet, but that doesn't make them the same.

> But you have raised my curiosity about your relationship with vaping. Do you work in the industry?

No, nor do I vape/smoke. I'm just old enough to remember how shitty it was to have smokers everywhere, in a way that isn't the case for vapers... and I've seen the multi-decade decline in lung cancer incidence stats.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#216

Post by LynxInLA »

ceejayoz wrote: post #164
LynxInLA wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you not seen people vaping at a young age now?

Vaping isn't the same thing as smoking.

I agree it is different, but the jury is out on whether it is better. Banning "social media" is likely to push users to a "lite" version of it. I'm not convinced that will be better.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#217

Post by ribosometronome »

andy99 wrote: post #49
causal wrote: post #36

I might be the only one here in favor of this, and wanting to see a federal rollout. It is not reasonable to expect parents to spontaneously agree on a strategy for keeping kids off social media- and that kind of coordination is what it would take, because the kids + social media companies have more than enough time to coordinate workarounds. Have the law put the social media companies on the parents side, or these k…

I'm in favor of kids not using social media, but not of the government forcing this on people nor spinning up whatever absurd regulatory regime is required. And the chance of actually enforcing it is zero anyway. It's no more realistic to expect this to work than to expect all parents to do it as you say. It's just wasted money plus personal intrusion that won't achieve anything.

Social media's existence is predicated on their algorithms being good at profiling you. Facebook's already got some level of ID verification for names, where they'll occasionally require people to submit IDs. No reason that similar couldn't be applied to age if society agreed it was worthwhile.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#218

Post by kaibee »

hn_acker wrote: post #197
tzs wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A data breach where? The central authority should be someplace that already has your non-anonymous ID data, so using your ID for age verification doesn't give them any new ID information. The only new thing that them doing age verification adds is that they might keep a list of verification tokens they have issued. Someone who obtained copies of the verification tokens you requested might go to various social media s…

> The central authority should be someplace that already has your non-anonymous ID data, so using your ID for age verification doesn't give them any new ID information. The only new thing that them doing age verification adds is that they might keep a list of verification tokens they have issued. But the central authority, a third party, will get a heads-up every time someone - whether child or adult - logs into the…

> But the central authority, a third-party, will get a heads-up every time someone - whether child or adult - logs into the social media site. That's a privacy violation.

Why would you do age verification on login? It only needs to happen once on account creation.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#219

Post by thinkingtoilet »

lukev wrote: post #210
causal wrote: post #36

I might be the only one here in favor of this, and wanting to see a federal rollout. It is not reasonable to expect parents to spontaneously agree on a strategy for keeping kids off social media- and that kind of coordination is what it would take, because the kids + social media companies have more than enough time to coordinate workarounds. Have the law put the social media companies on the parents side, or these k…

But the only way to do this is to require ID checks, effectively regulating and destroying the anonymous nature of the internet (and probably unconstitutional under the First Amendment, to boot.) It's the same problem with requiring age verification for porn. It's not that anyone wants kids to have easy access to this stuff, but that any of these laws will either be (a) unenforceable and useless, or (b) draconian and…

> effectively regulating and destroying the anonymous nature of the internet.

Not at all. Just the social media sites, which are objectively bad for kids. As an adult, you do what you want on the internet.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#220

Post by lbhdc »

ceejayoz wrote: post #215
lbhdc wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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> It seems like vaping is close enough to smoking to say that it is functionally close enough to be equated. Bullshit. Both are nicotine delivery methods. One is far better for both individual and societal reasons. Water and whiskey are both wet, but that doesn't make them the same . > But you have raised my curiosity about your relationship with vaping. Do you work in the industry? No, nor do I vape/smoke. I'm just…

[flagged]
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