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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

#431

Post by neom »

satellite2 wrote: post #420
jlokier wrote: post #249

Earlier 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 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…

I'm not a cryptographer so I might miss something but I have the impression that - either a stolen card can be reused thousands of time meaning that it's so easy to get a fake that it's not worth the implementation cost - either there is away to uniquely identify a card and then it becomes another identifier like tracking ids.

It would be neat if some authority like the passport office or social security office also provided a virtual ID that includes the features OP described and allowed specific individual attributes to be shared or not shared, revoked any time, much like when you authenticate a 3rd party app to gmail or etc.

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

#432

Post by mrguyorama »

ditto664 wrote: post #167
Clubber wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>children are having their youth, innocence and brains destroyed by tiktok For one, ease up on the hyperbole if you want to be taken seriously. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt because the news is nothing but hyperbole these days, so it's easy to pick up the habit. Second, most kids aren't having "their youth, innocence and brains destroyed." The news takes the edge cases, amplifies them and presents it as the…

> For one, ease up on the hyperbole if you want to be taken seriously. I disagree that this is hyperbole. It's a huge problem among kids. Literacy rates are dropping. Listen to the stories you hear from teachers.

Teachers have ALWAYS made those screams. My mother, a french teacher always complained that before she could teach kids french, she had to teach them how to read a clock, how to do math, and how the days of the week work (these were fifth graders mind you). She blamed education policy, but this is nothing more than what happens when 30% of your students are in poverty.

The reality is that some percentage of students will always fall through the cracks, and the human brain loves to blame whatever is "new" for problems that are "new" to you. This has been a problem for teachers since at least the No Child Left Behind policy, and even goes as far back as Socrates bemoaning his students being terrible because books meant they didn't have to have perfect memories.

Students suffered because covid was both a huge disruption to their education, and parents freaked out instead of trying to handle it (and plenty of people literally could not handle it anyway). It doesn't help that half the country openly cries that education is nothing more than liberal indoctrination, and openly downplay the value of even basic education, like the three Rs, and claims that anything higher than a high school education is also liberal indoctrination, is "woke", and is valueless.

I 100% hate tiktok, but I don't think it is (currently) being used to mentally attack the US. Maybe someday if we are ever at war with China, but right now they are content believing that inclusivity is toxic on it's own. I don't think tiktok changes people's brain significantly. I do think it is extremely low value way to spend time, and that it is addictive, two serious issues when taken together, but then again I spent my life watching several hours of TV a day. I especially don't like how tiktok seems to purposely direct new male users to what is basically softcore porn.

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

#433

Post by badpun »

viraptor wrote: post #367
lumb63 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

… we’ve been right. Television, music, video games, movies, etc., have decimated social capital and communication in the western world. It is not uncommon to “hang out” with people who are your “friends” without ever interacting with them in any meaningful way because everyone is focused on, e.g., a television. That’s assuming everyone isn’t too busy playing video games to leave their houses. Whether you agree or not…

People are interacting through online games quite often though. You can't throw them all in one basket. You can make friends / longer term connections that way (I did) or keep in touch with people you don't live near to.

That's not community, though. You're not inhabiting the same space, share the same problems and try to work them out them together. You're not helping each other out if someone falls into trouble.

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

#434

Post by diputsmonro »

dylan604 wrote: post #315
andy99 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a societal problem that is beyond just parenting. The peer pressure for kids to feel left out and ostracized because they are the only ones not on the socials is something a teen is going to definitely rebel against their parents on. It's part of being a teen. I'm guessing the other parents would even put pressure on the parents denying the social access. To me, the only way out of this is by changing one ni…

Is talking to other people online really so bad that we need the government to step in and tell us who we can and can't talk to? How quickly will that power expand to what we can and can't talk about?

I agree that neither solution is perfect, but exchanging an imperfect but undoubtedly free system of communication for one that is explicitly state-controlled censorship is an obvious step backwards.

"Thinking about the children" should also involve thinking about what kind of a society you want to build for them. A cage is not the answer, especially not with fascism creeping back into our politics.

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

#435

Post by hn_acker »

jlokier wrote: post #312
hn_acker wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Even if the verification system were set up in such a way that the third party wouldn't be able to know which exact website I'm trying to visit, the third party would be able to track how frequently I visit websites that require age verification. It…

Do you mean that I can get a permanent age-verification key from the third-party authority, then never have to contact the authority again (unless I want a new key)? If so (and assuming that zero knowledge proofs, which I'm not very familiar with, work), then my privacy concerns are resolved. (Well, I don't want the authority to keep a copy of my verification key, but FOSS code and client-side key generation should be feasible.)

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

#436

Post by arijun »

financypants wrote: post #422

This is such a silly issue on a governmental level. Shouldn't the parents, who spend more time around their children than the Florida House of Representatives does, worry about and monitor their own children?

Off the top of my head, I can think of two reasons why it might be preferable to have the government intervene.

1) We are happy to have the government intervene in other cases for the sake of children; I would be pretty upset at any politician who espoused removing age restrictions on cigarettes. I don’t know that social media is as bad but it certainly has some of the addictive properties

2) An argument from tragedy of the masses: if all kids’ social lives currently revolve around social media, unilaterally disallowing one child to use it could result in alienation from their peer group, which might be worse for the kid than social media. A government mandate would remove this issue.

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

#437

Post by tempestn »

ChrisLTD wrote: post #405
tempestn wrote: post #301

16 seems ridiculously old for such a ban. Especially if sites like YouTube count as social media (and I can't imagine how it wouldn't, given most of the content is identical between the short video platforms).

Why does 16 seem ridiculously old?

Because 15 year-olds are the prime audience for a lot of social media. And while much of it is a waste of time at best or actively harmful at worst, a lot of it is also engaging or even educational content that high school students should be allowed to access. And will access regardless; it'll just be a hassle for them or their parents to have to jump through hoops to get to it.

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

#438

Post by johnhenry »

jlokier wrote: post #249
lukev wrote: post #210

Earlier 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…

> I suggest looking up zero-knowledge proofs.

Sure, but is the Florida legislature actually looking into stuff like this?

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

#439

Post by dylan604 »

diputsmonro wrote: post #434
dylan604 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a societal problem that is beyond just parenting. The peer pressure for kids to feel left out and ostracized because they are the only ones not on the socials is something a teen is going to definitely rebel against their parents on. It's part of being a teen. I'm guessing the other parents would even put pressure on the parents denying the social access. To me, the only way out of this is by changing one ni…

Is talking to other people online really so bad that we need the government to step in and tell us who we can and can't talk to? How quickly will that power expand to what we can and can't talk about? I agree that neither solution is perfect, but exchanging an imperfect but undoubtedly free system of communication for one that is explicitly state-controlled censorship is an obvious step backwards. "Thinking about the…

I think you are willingly playing this down as "talking to people online" to make some point. However, it is beyond what one kid online says to another online. It is what predators say to those kids online. I don't just mean Chester and his panel van. I'm talking about anyone that is attempting to manipulate that kid regardless of the motive, they are all predators.

Social media has long since past just being a means of communicating with each other, and you come across as very disingenuous for putting this out there.

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

#440

Post by badpun »

zhivota wrote: post #341
verall wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't need to prosecute any buyers at all though. All you need to do is make it illegal to sell in shops, and illegal to import. There will be a black market, sure, but how many people are going to go through the trouble and expense to source black market tobacco? Not that many. And everyone benefits because universal healthcare means everyone shares the cost of the health effects that are avoided.

> how many people are going to go through the trouble and expense to source black market tobacco? Not that many.

Just see how many people already go through that trouble to source illegal drugs...

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