Florida's DeSantis signs law restricting social media for people under 16

> It can be measured?

If it can’t, that’s a strong signal.

> If they do something egregious, then people revolt.

Do you mean something egregious like the mass surveillance of the population, or the mass incarceration of citizens, or widespread theft via civil asset forfeiture, or executions by police, or human experimentation on Americans, or dropping bombs on citizens in US cities, or the military shooting protesting college kids, or lying about weapons of mass destruction to justify wars, or prisoners being tortured, or being subjected to virtual strip searches and groping at airports, or two thirds of the population living in "constitution free zones", or the authorization of the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens, or any of the other many many egregious actions that have already been and/or are still being carried out by our government?

My point is that the threat of revolt is extremely remote. For all of the abuses and the erosion of our rights and freedoms we've had just one attempt at violent insurrection in recent history. It involved about 2,000 rioters motivated by a conspiracy theory and it fell apart very quickly. The threat of a successful revolt is basically zero, and that's actually a good thing. A revolt is highly unlikely to solve the problems that we have. Unfortunately that also means that the threat of revolt is highly unlikely to act as any sort of deterrent that might prevent abuses of power by our government. We're far better off making use of whatever is left of our democracy than trying to re-enact the revolutionary war.

"Subjected to" is unrealistic, given the vast majority of trans people never get the chance to use them — waiting lists for treatment are so long that most trans people are forced to undergo their default puberty and then try to claw some of the changes back with hormones when they can get them.

~30,000 diagnoses of gender dysphoria in children in the US per year VS ~1300 initiating puberty blocker treatments.

This is not something that happens to them, or that they are subjected to, this is something they essentially campaign for, for themselves, for years.

> How do you imagine that will be enforced? Perhaps by... ID?

Emphasis mine. It's that that which I'm disputing.

This law does not require you to have an account to go onto a website. It is a law that requires you are age-checked to hold an account on social media platforms. These are different things.

Holding an account —broadly speaking— allows you to post, like, comment, follow and be profiled in an enduring fashion. Some of these can have life-long implications that 12 year olds aren't equipped to evaluate. How many adults can identify unhealthy social media usage and do something to stop it?

I don't know how age verification will work in practice. Checking a government ID is one way but if you're handing that off to a third party service, it's expensive. They don't need to know who you are for certain. A similar check is when you buy alcohol. If you look young, you're asked for ID.

When I buy alcohol, I'm not because I look like a man with kids nearing his forties. It would be far cheaper for Facebook to have an AI watch a video of you speaking to camera, with ID as a fallback. Many social media platforms are ingesting gigabytes of our faces every day so. They probably already know the rough ages of their users.

But going on a website (eg Youtube) doesn't require you have a profile. Going on Facebook business pages doesn't require it. If anything, laws like this might mean that things like Instagram have to be more open to preserve their reach. Not a bad outcome, IMO.

> Although I don't support it, would the internet be a better place with people being identified?

I don't believe so.

> For this to be a constructive discussion, can we assume companies have a proper and secure way to validate identities and store your data?

What?! No, we absolutely can't assume that. In fact, good default is to assume that data stored will be eventually compromised with high probability. Assuming otherwise is like believing in some magical backdoors in cryptography that only "good" guys can access and other such nonsense.

> I sometimes wonder if the internet as we know it and social medias pervasive influence would be much different if people were less anonymous.

Social media as we know it today mostly stems from FB which has a real name policy. Don't think FB is much better than others (by any measure that interests me at least).