Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

You must be trolling.

> it is likely, despite any mitigation measures that the provider may have taken or will take, that the service is used, to an appreciable extent for the dissemination of known child sexual abuse material

That is an absolute vague definition that basically encompasses all services available today including messaging providers, email providers and so on. Anything can be used to send pictures these days. So therefore anything can be targeted, ergo it is a complete breach of privacy.

> Because the proposal does not itself require any scanning. It requires Member states to construct an authority that can then mandate the scanning, in collaboration with a judge.

Your assertion makes no sense. The only way to know if a message contains something inappropriate is to scan it before it is encrypted. Therefore all messages have to be scanned to know if something inappropriate is in it.

A judge, if necessary, would only be participating in this whole charade at the end of the process not when the scanning happens.

This is taken verbatim from the proposal that you can find here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM%3A20...

> [...] By introducing an obligation for providers to detect, report, block and remove child sexual abuse material from their services, .....

It is an obligation to scan not a choice based some someone's opinion like a judge, ergo no one is involved at all in the scanning process. There is no due process in this process and everyone is under surveillance.

> [...] The EU Centre should work closely with Europol. It will receive the reports from providers, check them to avoid reporting obvious false positives and forward them to Europol as well as to national law enforcement authorities.

Again here no judge involved. The scanning is automated and happens automatically for everyone. Reports will be forwarded automatically.

> [...] only take steps to identify any user in case potential online child sexual abuse is detected

To identify a user who may or may not have shared something inappropriate, that means that they know who the sender is, who the recipient was , what bthe essage contained and when it happened. Therefore it s a complete bypass of EtoE.

This is the same exact thing that we are seeing know with the age requirements for social media. If you want to ban kids who are 16 years old and under then you need to scan everyone's ID in order to know how old everyone is so that you can stop them from using the service.

With scanning, it is exactly the same. If you want to prevent the dissemination of CSAM material on a platform, then you have to know what is in each and every message so that you can detect it and report it as described in my quotes above.

Therefore it means that everyone's messages will be scanned either by the services themselves or this task will be outsourced to a 3rd party business who will be in charge of scanning, cataloging and reporting their finding to the authorities. Either way the scanning will happen.

I am not sure how you can argue that this is not the case. Hundreds of security researchers have spent the better part of the last 3 years warning against such a proposal, are you so sure about yourself that you think they are all wrong?

Even over the age 15, they have to be restricted.

What are the benefits, with excessive use at least?

I don't buy it. The most relevant critique is see is that it's hard to control the age of your users without removing anonymous accounts thus limiting privacy. Well, it's a hard problem but it doesn't feel impossible to solve.

To me there is no question that children should grow up protected from harmful substances. You don't want kids to smoke, scrolling algo feeds is not better. There is enough interesting internet out there without social media!

I don't think it will ever disappear, but it certainly plays a less outsized role now than it used to, and it's not exactly an industry I see huge growth in.

What we define as "social media" I think is important. I don't really consider things like TikTok to be "social media" even if there is both a social component and a media component, since the social part is much smaller in comparison to the media part. People aren't communicating on TikTok (I think), which is what people concerned about "being left out by their peers" would be referring to. This type of "social" media probably is not dying, but I think is likely stagnant or will become stagnant in growth, while traditional "social media" continues to regress over the next decade.

> Imagine if your company used slack but you weren’t on it.

Ah, bliss...