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

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

#281

Post by Der_Einzige »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #260
owisd wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can take a teen’s phone off them and they can just walk into a store and buy an inexpensive second hand handset and use the WiFi from a local cafe.

And if they do it with their own money, it's their phone. Children prior to 18 are not subhuman. If you're old enough to buy your own phone, you're old enough to decide whether and how to use it.

The idea of treating under 18s like they are human is extremely undesirable in the USA because it among other things opens up a lot of doctors to be held accountable for their participation in the mass mutilation of baby boys. It also holds a whole lot of physically abusive parents to a standard where their children could call CPS and get their parents in legal trouble for corporal punishment.

Of course, these are indeed good things in worlds that don't endorse physical violence as the primary method to enforce control. This is why Finland his tail docking, ear cropping, animal crating, corporal punishment, circumcision, etc bans and why the US South is so ruthless.

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

#282

Post by bdangubic »

bullen wrote: post #267
bdangubic wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my kid and me when I was a kid and my Mom and Dad when they were kids have been creators. you don’t need a fucking phone or “social” media to be a creator, what nonsense!

Ok buddy, calm down... we're talking inside of the frame of reference of social media here. No need to go stone age with pine cones and sticks on me.

Kids need to create.

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

#283

Post by josephg »

SunshineTheCat wrote: post #163
josephg wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all the other kids are on social media all the time, it makes it much harder to keep your kids off it. Would you want to be the one kid in school who’s not online? Would you want that for your kids? Bans like this make much more sense at a community level. Not an individual level.

The idea that it's "hard" therefore we need government to save us is exactly why the program itself will never work. The problem is much deeper than law or government can fix.

You don’t need the government. Just some form of collective action.

I know of plenty of alternative communities & schools in which all the parents agreed to keep their kids away from phones until they were 15 or something. Great! If you try to roll something like this out to state schools, it looks like “the government”. But it’s the same idea.

I don’t understand the hatred and mistrust of government in this thread. The government protects us from lead in our food, from underage drug use, unsafe roads and lots of other stuff. Why not social media too?

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

#284

Post by Glyptodon »

stOneskull wrote: post #255
Glyptodon wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US they'd just make the platforms massively liable and let them worry about how to enforce. No idea what they'll do in another country.

we get to see how it works in australia next month. there's already stories of kids putting on fake mustaches to fool age-of-face recognition, which is one of the methods used. i think it'll get to: "these methods aren't good enough, we'll have to enforce digital id".

Do they make parents liable or no? I'm somewhat curious about that as an option.

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

#285

Post by colechristensen »

cycomanic wrote: post #151
colechristensen wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told. Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing. And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults…

> This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told. The interesting tidbit in the case of social media and smart phones is that they are at least partially pushed by the parents (I've seen plenty of examples of parents demand tha…

"but this time it's different" has also been a universal historical argument

>The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture.

Honestly you could just cut and paste the same arguments about jazz music in the 1920s or rock music in the later 20th century and they'd be indistinguishable. Just replace the mentions of jazz with social media topics and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference whether it was an article today or 100 years ago. "Health professionals" wringing hands about social media and jazz music in hilariously similar terms a century apart to a bunch of old people who are convinced the kids these days are going to shit because of the things they like to pay attention to.

https://daily.jstor.org/when-jazz-was-a-public-health-crisis...

Young people ARE SUPPOSED TO make poor decisions and be stressed out about it.

Middle aged people are supposed to clutch their pearls and wail about how this time it's different and truly awful (but what we did as kids was reasonable)

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

#286

Post by colechristensen »

logifail wrote: post #144
colechristensen wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told. Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing. And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults…

> prohibition breeds desire Sure, but we (as societies) have always had to deal with this. Wherever you are in the world there are things that simply aren't allowed under a certain age, whether that's 15, 16, 18, 21 or whatever. My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car. Me: "Umm. You'll find out. When you get to it."

>My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.

I was driving when I was 5 on the farm, it's not that hard and if you have the attitude that things aren't hard that tends to be true. Don't set your kid up for failure.

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

#287

Post by josephg »

pembrook wrote: post #180
josephg wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all the other kids are on social media all the time, it makes it much harder to keep your kids off it. Would you want to be the one kid in school who’s not online? Would you want that for your kids? Bans like this make much more sense at a community level. Not an individual level.

Bans that don't make sense at an individual level do not suddenly make sense at a community level. This is terrible "we'll make it up on volume" logic. It's also the justification used for some of the dumbest laws in history. Think about what level of enforcement is going to be required for this (National IDs tied to online activity), and then think about the fact that Denmark is one of the main governments pushing c…

> Bans that don't make sense at an individual level do not suddenly make sense at a community level.

Social media itself doesn’t make sense at an individual level. If you’re the only one on a discord server, it’s not much of a party.

Personally I’m happy for some countries trying this. Let’s run the experiment and see how it goes. I too worry about the age verification system. Let’s see if the mental health of young people actually improves and by how much.

Rest assured, if the US couldn’t take collective action in the face of a global pandemic, there’s no way a law like this will come for America.

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

#288

Post by kayodelycaon »

oytis wrote: post #215
trey-jones wrote: post #53

As a parent who gave my oldest child a (very used) smartphone just before she turned 14, I would be in favor of making smartphones illegal under age 15 (or some other number, higher or lower I don't care). I'm pretty sure they're worse than cigarettes for the future of humanity.

I would be pretty happy about social media being banned for everyone if not the immense possibilty for the government to abuse this law to disrupt undesired communication altogether.

What exactly do you mean by “social media”?

There are a lot of communities built around things like Discord and Telegram. IRC existed long before these.

There are many websites that allow you to post pictures and have other people comment on them. DeviantArt pre-dates the vast majority of modern apps.

There are also vast numbers of iterations on forums.

At what point should you prevent people from finding and talking to each other?

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

#289

Post by Nux »

Make it so!

This is making me hopeful and wish to see this implemented in UK (and everywhere) yesterday..

What we can be certain of: there's going to be a hell of "lobbying" against it.

I wouldn't be surprised if Trump himself comes out crying how this is undermining USA commercial and business intetests! :)

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

#290

Post by isaacremuant »

trey-jones wrote: post #53

As a parent who gave my oldest child a (very used) smartphone just before she turned 14, I would be in favor of making smartphones illegal under age 15 (or some other number, higher or lower I don't care). I'm pretty sure they're worse than cigarettes for the future of humanity.

How about you parent your kid instead of trying to get the government to parent everyone else's? What the hell is you and everyone else's problem who want to get into other families' business.

Disgusting intrusiveness and authoritianism.

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