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Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

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Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#101

Post by echelon »

bilsbie wrote: post #95

Noble goal but it ends up being a defacto internet license. All ages need to show id to use sites and services.

110%.

No website of any kind should require IDV unless banking. It is a tool that will be used for censorship, removal of access to information, destruction of freedom of speech, erosion of privacy, and attacks on political opponents.

We need anonymity, ephemerality, and public square free speech.

Governments should instead regulate what these companies can do. How they advertise. Engagement algorithms. Stop internal efforts to target kids. Etc.

Disallow advertising to kids. Turn off ads on children's accounts if the user is predicted or self reports as a kid. Turn off the algorithm for kids.

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#102

Post by bobthepanda »

peyton wrote: post #43
bobthepanda wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads and media are generally exploitative and manipulative, even if not targeted specifically at anybody. 3 years after the nation of Fiji received its first television broadcasts in 1995, dieting and disordered eating went from unheard of to double digit percentages among teenage girls. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/20/world/study-finds-tv-alte... > Before 1995, Dr. Becker said, there was little talk of dieting in…

I mean as of 2011 over half the native women are obese [1]. I don’t know what to make of it other than that’s a lot. Dr. Anne Becker may be really into preserving traditional Fijian culture or whatever but it sounds like some of the local girls don’t want to anymore. [1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26201444/

The introduction of body shaming media vs. actually improving obesity rates is pretty poorly correlated. Introducing anorexia, bulimia, and now bigorexia to a population is probably neutral or net negative.

If it wasn’t, you would have expected those rates to decline after the introduction of media informing people.

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#103

Post by Arainach »

jimbob45 wrote: post #76
OsamaJaber wrote: post #65

The real question is enforcement They tried this, and kids just moved to platforms nobody knew existed

Eventually group SMS would still function well for this, no? Shared email lists barring that. This seems like a race to the bottom.

Neither group SMS nor shared email lists have the algorithmic dopamine tweaking that are the root of most of the harm.

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#104

Post by LordShredda »

bilsbie wrote: post #95

Noble goal but it ends up being a defacto internet license. All ages need to show id to use sites and services.

Social media's entire income model is finding out who you are to advertise more accurately. Facebook knows your age down to the day, and if they ask for ID this is them taking even more data.

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#105

Post by robbbbbbbbbbbb »

hiprob wrote: post #59

Are they going to conduct an uncontrolled human experiment by requiring age checks to use the Internet (read: surveillance capitalism and Orwellian lack of privacy)?

No, they’ll probably just follow Australia’s lead[1] of: default allow; algorithmic age estimation; account suspend; ID to unblock. Chill.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyp9d3ddqyo.amp

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#106

Post by Telemakhos »

mjevans wrote: post #6

I'm fine with this, as long as they DO NOT require any form of ID or 'age' verification. Instead this should be attacked from the profit side, by banning any form of advertising which might target children. If there's no profit to be made in servicing said demographic and a law requesting at least end user 'agreement' that they are an adult, this should be sufficient.

> If there's no profit to be made in servicing said demographic and a law requesting at least end user 'agreement' that they are an adult, this should be sufficient.

Is it still advertising if an "influencer" takes money on the down low to sip a Pepsi not too obviously in the middle of a video?

Is it still advertising if an attractive and young person provides news that happens to be colored in a way that supports the narratives of a particular political faction?

Is it still advertising if you can't prove that a foreign power encouraged a popular yoga enthusiast or makeup artist to post some whispered ideas that weaken citizens' faith in your institutions? Does that foreign power ever care about profit?

Advertising and propaganda love to explore the grey spaces around definitions, so your bans will end up being a whack-a-mole game. Cutting off kids with an ID check is much easier. Implementing age verification the Apple way would even protect privacy by simply registering whether Apple can attest that the user is over or under the age limit, without handing the ID over to third parties.

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#107

Post by SkipperCat »

logicchains wrote: post #86
Aerbil313 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are downvoted, but you are totally right. Humans are not meant to cry daily over stuff that happens half a world away, or be exposed to a thousand new strangers every day. But thanks to internet, your mom and aunt can have an endless fuel to their various anxieties and your daughter can have eating disorders comparing herself to celebrities. Bring a pre-internet pre-24/7 TV person to present day and they’ll spot…

>You are downvoted, but you are totally right. Humans are not meant to cry daily over stuff that happens half a world away You mean humans are not meant to learn about the atrocities their government is funding half a world away.

Social media is not designed to keep you informed. Its designed to keep you engaged because that helps them sell ads. And the best way to keep you engaged is to keep you enraged. I've seen in the US how social media has been used push false narratives, hate and other falsehoods. Its toxic.

If you really want to stay informed, there are plenty of newspapers, NGOs and other organizations out there reporting the truth.

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#108

Post by malklera »

Do parents do not exist? I mean if the parents pass hours looking at their phone, the kids would want to use a phone, maybe making a law is easier than setting an example? Each parent could educate themselves and bloc "harmful" websites from their kids phones, that is what parental control is for.(single, no kids)

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#109

Post by Tade0 »

beAbU wrote: post #41
Tade0 wrote: post #16

I'm eternally grateful that the social media network that I was part of throughout my teenage years abruptly disappeared from the internet, never to come back again. Some say it was a technical failure during migration when the company was trying to pivot to file hosting, but it's impossible to verify. Perhaps these bans are a blessing in disguise and future generations will be happy to not have their most awkward st…

Are you referring to MySpace? My highschool band had tracks and videos of live performances in the school hall on there that is forever lost and I'm still bitter about it.

I am not referring to MySpace. It was a local-to-my-country social network which was outcompeted by another local-to-my-country social network, which in turn gave way to Facebook.

I was aware of the existence of MySpace at the time, but it never had mainstream adoption locally. We also had not one but two mainstream messaging apps and hardly anyone was using MSN.

Come to think of it, Facebook killed a lot of that homegrown tech.

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#110

Post by dmurray »

bluescrn wrote: post #61
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None. Almost by definition, the folks who satisfy themselves waxing online drive complacency away from real action. That doesn’t, however, mean they aren’t self-importantly organized to later support an organized movement.

Do you think the current anti-ICE movement would have happened without social media? Or Jan 6th, or all the Palestine protests, or even the election of Trump? The US has it's first amendment protections, but other countries seem rather more willing to crack down on online speech.

Why not? The Vietnam War drew plenty of organised protesters. The details would be different, but big popular actions can still be coordinated through traditional media and word of mouth.

Lack of social media didn't prevent the French Revolution.

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