I'm willing to buy an argument that certain kinds of "social media" have negative impact on kids under 16; but I'm absolutely not willing to buy an argument for a world in which the government is able to ban your communications with other people because you're under 16.
Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16
251–260 of 720 posts
Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm curious how this will be implemented The only way to determine age is to compile a database of gov-issued IDs and related data. Which is an unconstitutional barrier to speech. Which is why this will get struck-down like each similar law. The part about ID data eventually being shared with 3rd parties, agencies - and/or leaked - is a bonus.
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…
> With some additional safeguards in the protocol and in what sites are allowed to be the ID checking sites it can even be made so that someone who gets records of both the social media site and the third site can't use timing information to match up social media accounts with verifications and so could work with sites that allow anonymous accounts.
I'm assuming that there will be some kind of way to prevent matching of logged IP addresses between the social media site and the verification site. Is there really a method for preventing matches of timing without requiring the user to bear the burden of requesting tokens from the sites at different times?
As I hinted at in a different comment [1] though, there remains a tradeoff of letting the verification party know how frequently I visit a single type of website vs. avoiding the first problem but needing my ID for multiple types of websites i.e. more of the internet.
Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16
#253Earlier 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.
>Social media is addictive and socially toxic, on the whole it erodes the very fabric of a society. It's interesting how every generation seems to decry new forms of media as eroding the fabric of society. They said it about video games, television, music, movies, etc. I'm sure we're right this time, though.
Television clearly did something pretty significant to society. Cable news makes the country more polarized, that we didn’t do anything about it doesn’t mean it wasn’t a problem. We just missed and now the problem is baked into the status quo.
Video games are typically fiction, so the ability to pass propaganda through them is usually a little more limited. It isn’t impossible, just different.
Social media is a pretty bad news source for contentious issues. We should be pretty alarmed that people are getting their news there.
Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16
#254I 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.
My understanding is that minors _do_ have first amendment rights, and school restrictions on speech can only apply to instances which disrupt the learning environment.
Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16
#255Earlier 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.
>Social media is addictive and socially toxic, on the whole it erodes the very fabric of a society. It's interesting how every generation seems to decry new forms of media as eroding the fabric of society. They said it about video games, television, music, movies, etc. I'm sure we're right this time, though.
Apples-to-oranges comparison.
Plenty has been written already on the ravaging effects of social media on society and it's pretty plain to see.
https://www.mcleanhospital.org/essential/it-or-not-social-me...
> Rates of sexual activity have been in decline for years, but the drop is most pronounced for adults under age 25 (Gen Z).
> For Gen Z, a rise in sexlessness has coincided with a decline in mental health.
> Sexual activity can boost mood and relieve stress and may serve as a protective factor against anxiety and depressive disorders.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-myths-sex/2022... missing-out-the-benefits-sex
Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16
#256I 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…
> destroying the anonymous nature of the internet
Aren't the really problematic social networks the ones where you've lost your privacy and anonymity long ago and are being tracked and mined like crazy?
Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
And what makes a site a social media site? Anywhere you can post interactive content? You do realize that laws like this would apply to sites like HN, Reddit, the comment section of every blog, and every phpBB forum you ever used? It's not just Instagram and Tiktok.
I think a perfectly clear line could be drawn that would separate out phpBB from TikTok very easily. I genuinely don't understand this comment, we shouldn't do it because it's hard or the results might be imperfect?
Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16
#258This 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 some…
Agreed, some are easy to classify like nude content, but what about a website about war history, that content is simultaneously factual and explicit. This is why I say its up to the website owner to register for the blacklist. That in itself has an incentive to reduce the surface of liability of the website.
Social media is a hard problem. What is exactly the issue? Is it creating a larger social hierarchy than children can cope with? Is it meeting and interacting with strangers? Is it reinforcing dopaminergic pathways from superficial digital content and approvals?
Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> But the only way to do this is to require ID checks, effectively regulating and destroying the anonymous nature of the internet That seems intuitive, but it's not actually true. I suggest looking up zero-knowledge proofs. Using modern cryptography, it is easy to send a machine-generated proof to your social media provider that your government-provided ID says your age is ≥ 16, without revealing anything else about…
It'd be cool if any of the proposed bills actually suggested something like this. They do not. They specify an ID check.
Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16
#260This 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…
I think that online anonymity is overrated (and yes, I'm aware of my username). Social media platforms ought to require traceability and age verification.