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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

#281
post #9

I'm still on the fence about government doing a parent's job here, especially for kids under 13, but I can't stand that no one pushing these bills has come up with an actually reasonable age verification method.

https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/protections/pr...

Private State Tokens enable trust in a user's authenticity to be conveyed from one context to another, to help sites combat fraud and distinguish bots from real humans—without passive tracking.

An issuer website can issue tokens to the web browser of a user who shows that they're trustworthy, for example through continued account usage, by completing a transaction, or by getting an acceptable reCAPTCHA score. A redeemer website can confirm that a user is not fake by checking if they have tokens from an issuer the redeemer trusts, and then redeeming tokens as necessary. Private State Tokens are encrypted, so it isn't possible to identify an individual or connect trusted and untrusted instances to discover user identity.

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

#282

I don’t know where I saw this idea but instead of banning just force these companies to make their feed algorithms open source. It would be much less heavy handed and would freedom increasing instead of decreasing. It would work because There would be enough outrage over seeing nefarious topics being pushed that the companies would refrain.

Is the feed algorithm the only problem that is harming children? Not the concept of a social network in general, the entire point of whose is to publicise lives and keep its users stuck onto their screens for as much time as possible?

The entire fault of social networks is that it is hampering children's development by keeping them online. Trying to improve those services by making the algorithms better will worsen the situation. You want to make children lose the appeal of social media, not increase it!

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

#284
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…

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

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that minors _do_ have first amendment rights, and school restrictions on speech can only apply to instances which disrupt the learning environment.

Yes, they do have First Amendment rights, just not to the same degree as adults. This is the same as other rights — they can't buy guns, vote, etc. either. The point is that it's definitely not a slam dunk case as claimed. I'd love to hear a constitutional lawyer weigh in, if there are any here. I used to be a lawyer, but this was never my specialty.

No way. They're essentially property.

If someone could extralegally ground me with no devices if I say something they don't like (provided that it's speech protected under the First Amendment -- since not all speech is), I essentially have no First Amendment right.

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

#286
Technical implementation looks like a good use case for this, morals/etc aside -

https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/protections/pr...

Private State Tokens enable trust in a user's authenticity to be conveyed from one context to another, to help sites combat fraud and distinguish bots from real humans—without passive tracking.

An issuer website can issue tokens to the web browser of a user who shows that they're trustworthy, for example through continued account usage, by completing a transaction, or by getting an acceptable reCAPTCHA score. A redeemer website can confirm that a user is not fake by checking if they have tokens from an issuer the redeemer trusts, and then redeeming tokens as necessary. Private State Tokens are encrypted, so it isn't possible to identify an individual or connect trusted and untrusted instances to discover user identity.

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

#287
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you asserting that parents should not have the rights to determine this for their own children?

Are you a parent? It's not as easy as saying "no social media" to your kids. In this day and age, it's basically equivalent to saying "you can't have friends". Online is where kids meet, hang out, converse etc. I'd LOVE to go back to the days before phones and social media, where kids played with neighbours and ride their bikes to their friends house, but that's slowly slipping away.

We try pretty hard to get our kids to play with their friends in person (we invite them or give rides to playdates) but what do they do when they meet up? Sit on the couch with their tablets and play virtually in Roblox :-)

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

#288

I remember when I was 10 years old at a computer camp during the summer at a local college. They had me set up my first email account with hotmail. They all asked us to lie about our age. I think even then they had restrictions that you had to be 13 years old. But - that was over 25 years ago. The internet was a much different place.

Might be thinking of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Online_Privacy_Prot...

I remember joining ebay (well, auctionweb - aw.com/ebay, IIRC) and it not even being an issue that I was around 14, we mostly trusted each other, and just mailed money orders around. A different time.

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

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's actually a really simple and elegant penalty - forfeiture of the device used to access the social media. With all seized devices to then be wiped and donated to low income school districts/families. This gets more complex when using something like a school computer, but I think it's a pretty nice solution outside of that. That's going to be a tremendous deterrent, yet also not particularly draconian.

Yep thats what low income families need: more cell phones.

Now they too can get on social media!

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

#290
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what makes a site a social media site? Anywhere you can post interactive content? You do realize that laws like this would apply to sites like HN, Reddit, the comment section of every blog, and every phpBB forum you ever used? It's not just Instagram and Tiktok.

I think a perfectly clear line could be drawn that would separate out phpBB from TikTok very easily. I genuinely don't understand this comment, we shouldn't do it because it's hard or the results might be imperfect?

Any clear line would be gamed pretty quickly I imagine.
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