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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

#231

Post by JeremyNT »

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…

Yes, this isn't the right solution. The power needs to be given to the users.

A better solution is more robust device management, with control given to the device owner (read: the parent). The missing legislative piece is mandating that social media companies need to respond differently when the user agent tells them what to send.

I should be able to take my daughter's phone (which I own), set an option somewhere that indicates "this user is a minor," and with every HTTP request it makes it sets e.g. an OMIT_ADULT_CONTENT header. Site owners simply respond differently when they see this.

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

#232

Post by throwaway-blaze »

thsksbd wrote: post #44
lsiunsuex wrote: post #20

As a Floridian and someone in IT - I'm curious how this will be implemented I can't remember the last time I signed up for a new social network; do they ask age? Is it an ask to Apple / Google to add stronger parental approval? Verify drivers license #? We heard about this days ago on local news and I've been struggling to figure out short of are you 16 years or older how this is gonna get done and how do you fine so…

(Putting aside if the law is good or bad and the constitutionality of it.) Put criminal penalties to the directors if no reasonable attempt to keep kids out. Plus corporate death penalty if they purposely target kids. Then how they enforce it doesn't really matter as long as there are periodic investigations. The personal risks are too great and the companies will figure it out.

The FTC already implements a "corporate death penalty" in the form of massive fines if an organization collects data on kids and uses it to target advertising (see COPPA)

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

#233

Post by djfdat »

manicennui wrote: post #143

Perhaps a better solution is to allow children on social media, but drastically limit how companies are allowed to interact with such accounts. Random ideas: no ads, no messages from people they don't follow, limit ability to follow other accounts in some way.

Can I have that as an adult please?

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

#234

Post by cheschire »

brocklobsta wrote: post #222

This is a very complex problem. Its not just social media, but porn and other content that is not intended for young eyes. One issue I have is with the age verification system. This will either be totally ineffective or overly effective and invasive. I feel legislation is drifting towards the latter with the requirement of ID. One idea I had is a managed dns blacklist of inappropriate content. The government can have…

What qualifies for the blacklist? It's a moral question. What happens when the blacklist maintainer's morals differ from your own? Sure, in the U.S. it seems fairly uniform that most people do not want children having access to porn. But what about women having access to information about abortion? Or information about suicide? The use of drugs on psychological conditions? Vaccination efficacy?

Really sucks when someone that controls the blacklist decides you're on the moral fringes of society.

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

#235

Post by alexb_ »

rchaud wrote: post #214
monkeynotes wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

This is just blatantly not true, anyone who has tried to gamble on sports can tell you that companies go to quite incredible lengths to make sure that nobody outside of the few jurisdictions where they're legal can gamble online. I live in Nebraska, and I have to go travel across to Iowa before I can do anything.

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

#236

Post by throwaway-blaze »

bilsbie wrote: post #141
tzs wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you are envisioning age verification that involves just two parties: the user and the site that they need to prove their age to. The user shows the site their government issued ID and the site uses the information on the ID to verify the age. That would indeed allow the site to compile a database of government issues IDs and give that information (willfully or via leaks) to third parties. Those issues…

I don’t think anyone in government is smart enough to enable or allow this.

That is literally how the age verification for porn works in Louisiana and Virginia among other states.

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

#237

Post by voidwtf »

syrgian wrote: post #169
tokai wrote: post #90

Its impressive how people here, that should know better, are cheering this on - just because they are parents themselves. Even disregarding the legality, its not going to work technically. The perceived safety of ones kids really crosses some wires in parents.

It would definitely work if a parent could report the accounts of all the kids involved and their tiktok/whatever accounts got deleted + their phone numbers and emails got block-listed for the service. Even more if the system worked in a centralized way: this email/phone is used exclusively by a kid, so now all on-boarded companies must delete their accounts and not allow them to register again.

Herein lies the rub, every time I've seen this happen in the past companies just applied blanket wide bans to accounts. Sometimes retroactively for accounts that were illegal at the time of their creation regardless of the users current age. Both Google and Twitter did this to users who created accounts before they were 13 but were then adults.

If you're going to introduce legislation like this, then it needs to include provisions that it will not permanently bar those users access to the services once they are of age. I manage my children's social media interaction (near 0 with the exception of YouTube), if their accounts get permanently disabled that would be unfortunate in the future when they are old enough.

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

#238

Post by verall »

monkeynotes wrote: post #199
55555 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're proving the argument that the parent set forth. Anyone who wants to visit Pornhub can just visit one of the many sites that isn't abiding by the new law. However, that's not due to a lack of legislation, but rather a lack of enforcement, or, perhaps, enforceability. If laws always worked I'd be for more of them. My argument is not that we should never make laws because it's futile but rather that some laws are…

Also social policy enforcement is a generational thing. The UK is only just getting toward outright banning cigarettes by making it illegal for anyone born after X date from ever buying them. Eventually you have a whole generation that isn't exposed to smoking and on the whole thinks the habit is disgusting, which it is.

Except that some people born after that date will still acquire them, get addicted, and then what? Prosecute them like drug possession?

It's infantilizing and dumb. Grown adults should be allowed to smoke tobacco if they so wish and smoking rates are already way down due to marketing and alternatives. Noone needs to be prosecuted.

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

#239

Post by kcrwfrd_ »

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…

Yes. Rather than mandating verification, can we just mandate that there a registry or that websites are legally required to include a particular HTTP header, combined with opt-in infrastructure in place for parents to use?

e.g. You could set up a restricted account on a device with a user birthdate specified. Any requests for websites that return an AGE_REQUIRED header that don’t validate would be rejected.

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

#240

Post by angra_mainyu »

rschneid wrote: post #93
matthewdgreen wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several governments have already effectively banned sites like Pornhub by creating regimes where people have to mail their ID to a central clearinghouse (which creates a huge chilling effect.) The article talks about “reasonable age verification measures” and so saying it’s unenforceable seems a little bit premature. Also, you can bet those measures won’t be in any way reasonable once the Florida legislature gets thr…

>effectively banned In my opinion, these governments haven't implemented 'effective' bans (though maybe chilling, as you say) but primarily created awkward new grey markets for the personal data that these policies rely on for theatrics. Remember when China 'banned' youth IDs from playing online games past 10PM? I think a bunch of grandparents became gamers around the same time... https://www.nature.com/articles/s415…

At least from personal experience, when there was a period where my ISP in the UK started requiring ID verification for porn, I literally ceased to watch it.

Making something difficult to do actually works to _curb_ behavior.

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