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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

#651

Post by beretguy »

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…

> But the only way to do this is to require ID checks, effectively regulating and destroying the anonymous nature of the internet

Hopefully this will reduce amount of people using social media.

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

#652

Post by forgetfreeman »

hobs wrote: post #545
forgetfreeman wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet has not been anonymous in fact or theory for decades now, and if you think the government can't get your complete browsing history on a whim I'm guessing you haven't paid any attention to the news about NSA buying user data bundles from online brokers. That said, "muh freedoms" is hardly a quality argument in the face of the widely documented pervasive harms caused to children by exposure to social media…

As the OP said, if freedoms are not a quality argument then we can rid ourselves of millions of guns, but this is a non-starter for the freedom crowd.

Ironically the "freedom crowd" are also statistically significantly more likely to get shot by their own toddlers accidentally so I'm not convinced they represent a pool of quality decision-making or grounded worldview. It's interesting how quickly any discussion of potential solutions to real-world problems gets chucked out the window the second someone says "freedom".

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

#653

Post by bryan_w »

Clubber wrote: post #43
zo1 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While people are on the fence about it, our children are having their youth, innocence and brains destroyed by tiktok et al. Those platforms are cancer to adults even, let alone impressionable kids... yet here we are still debating it and faffing around about "1st amendment yaddi yadda".

>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…

You can tell by how many different replies that needed you to believe the hysteria, that there's something inorganic about this topic.

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

#655

Post by djfdat »

brocklobsta wrote: post #258
cheschire wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 child…

Even worse, what happens when the deciding party decides that their opposition's gathering sites or news sites should be blacklisted?

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

#656

Post by djfdat »

wan23 wrote: post #503

I'd like to see a federal law mandating that any future law or regulation that restricts what children are allowed access to makes the parents solely liable if the children gain access. There should be a standard way to declare pages are age restricted, and the browser on the child's phone or computer should check it. But if the child bypasses that somehow, that's on the parents.

So, we don't trust parents to monitor their children's online activity the way the government finds acceptable.

So now we will punish parents for their inability to monitor their children's online activity the way the government finds acceptable?

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

#657

Post by djfdat »

apapapa wrote: post #602

I think that instead of banning it all together, they should ban practices within those platforms.... Wtf Florida, this sounds life something CA would do... It's almost as if they banned all speech because some speech is hurtful

How does this sound like something CA would do? This sounds exactly like something Florida would do.

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

#658

Post by djfdat »

spdustin wrote: post #378

I truly don't understand how the party of small government and parental rights of determination can justify passing this. Perhaps more relevant to HN, it seems to me that any solution here would be a dramatic loss of agency, privacy, and anonymity.

They've never been the party of small government and parental rights. That's just their sanctimonious tagline they use when convenient.

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

#659

Post by djfdat »

bandyaboot wrote: post #506

I’m no fan of some of the things that have been happening in FL, and I’m not sure that a simple outright ban on “social media” for <16 is the way to go, but at the same time, I think it’s a good thing they’re pushing this because the conversation needs to happen and with more urgency.

We really need to find a better way to have these conversations as a society.

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

#660

Post by merdaverse »

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 problem with this definition is

> Utilizes addictive, harmful, or deceptive design features, or any other feature that is designed to cause an account holder to have an excessive or compulsive need to use or engage with the social media platform.

Many platforms can argue that they're not engaging in this behavior. Do Mastodon and Lemmy count as addicting? They look like Twitter and Reddit on the surface, but they don't have a sorting algorithm that maximizes for engagement. So would they be included in the definition or not?

And if they don't, what's stopping big companies from claiming the same, since you can't actually see their source code for news feed sorting?

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