I wonder if this will lead to services improving moderation to get themselves unbanned? They’ve been moaning for years that they do their best when we know they don’t. Maybe YouTube will get much stricter on content in the hope they can get some sort of under-16 product approved?
Under-16s to be banned from social media, Starmer announces
31–40 of 118 posts
Re: Under-16s to be banned from social media, Starmer announces
#32For any Australians who are already living with this, how's it going over there? Would you say the policy has been a success or not?
Worse than useless as it creates precedence to ID everyone online while materially having no impact on U16s relationship with technology.
Re: Under-16s to be banned from social media, Starmer announces
#33I'm very conflicted when it comes to these bans.
1. On one side I understand the spirit, but the demographic that is most victim of socials in my experience are 50 yo+. At family dinners, etc, it's them, not the kids, being unable to not be perma distracted by the phone. Even when they are not distracted they consistently need to take photos or show you something on their phone or start face calling somebody.
2. This unavoidably spreads the requirement for ID verification to the whole population, not just kids de facto further advancing government's control of communications.
3. Social medias should've been regulated at the algorithm level. Or, like in South Korea, they could've implemented hard coded daily time limits of usage of the applications.
4. Youngsters will just migrate to platforms that don't fall under the ban making the enforcement.
5. Bans achieve little but further increase the appeal for these platforms. Instead of investing in education for the youth such as longer school days with more sports or cultural activities the government chooses limitations and provides the wrong incentives.
Re: Under-16s to be banned from social media, Starmer announces
#34> The ban will therefore include platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X. > "We do not intend for messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal to be included in the social media ban." YouTube is a bit of a surprise here, but I guess with Shorts they put themselves in the same category as Tiktok, etc.
Yeah I don't think they've thought that through. YouTube hosts a mountain of educational content, e.g. the Khan Academy. That's now banned in the UK for under 16s.
There is also educational content on other sites
Re: Under-16s to be banned from social media, Starmer announces
#35Honest question: Is this about anything else than forcing all citizens to ID themselves to the government before using digital services?
This specifically doesn't ID anybody. It's not using the upcoming digital ID, it's just going to use the existing age authentication - eg, you just need to show your company is doing some sort of "serious" age verification (not just enter your DOB here) rather than actually checking identity. It's bad, shallow populism, but it's not some nefarious surveillance plan, as much as the yanks are going to paint it that way…
Not painting it any way, just asking. I'm in the EU btw, we're likely heading in the same direction from what it seems.
Re: Under-16s to be banned from social media, Starmer announces
#36Honest question: Is this about anything else than forcing all citizens to ID themselves to the government before using digital services?
Yes, it's about the explicitly stated goal of getting kids to stop being harmed by the products of some of the largest advertising agencies on the planet that have resisted more subtle regulation for decades.
Yes, no doubt there is an obvious first-order reason for this. It's the second order effects that I think folks are rightly worried about, but it's easy to steel man.
Re: Under-16s to be banned from social media, Starmer announces
#37For any Australians who are already living with this, how's it going over there? Would you say the policy has been a success or not?
I dont have a heap of colleagues with kids in the targeted age range (11-16) but those that do said their kids got around it quickly.
Re: Under-16s to be banned from social media, Starmer announces
#38> The ban will therefore include platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X. > "We do not intend for messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal to be included in the social media ban." YouTube is a bit of a surprise here, but I guess with Shorts they put themselves in the same category as Tiktok, etc.
There is this weird attempt to claim YouTube isn't social media from Google and others, but it's literally called "You Tube". It was designed as social media from the start, it's impossible to separate this without changing the name and everything about how it works except the films and series available to pay for.
I guess for me, when the term "social media" was coined, it was about friends, while YouTube was already more parasocial and more like short segments on broadcast TV (with at that time a comment section that seemed to promote nothing worth reading).
Things move on after perceptions have crystalised.
Re: Under-16s to be banned from social media, Starmer announces
#39The press release itself is wildly implausible:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/social-media-to-be-banned...
Native toolkits would use a modal window to make an important announcement. The window would not be resizable and would be dismissed with an “OK” push-button.
The presence of min/max/close buttons on the title bar just shows how out of touch this government is with the modern* world of computing!
The girl is even using a phone. What’s it running? Windows 3.11? macOS 9? FVWM95?
*ie the past four decades of WIMP UIs.
Re: Under-16s to be banned from social media, Starmer announces
#40Honest question: Is this about anything else than forcing all citizens to ID themselves to the government before using digital services?
As a Norwegian teen parent: Seeing all the issues cropping up which is /enabled/ (not saying caused) by social media, you don't need to look for ulterior motives. I believe these bans are honest attempts to fix real problems.
Examples I know about include 12-year-olds selling nudes, teen experimentation with alcohol being replaced with cocaine because cocaine is so easily available (the issue is the scale and how widespread cocaine is getting; not that it never happened before), several cases in Norway of 13-year-olds being recruited by the mafia to throw bombs at houses through the internet, violence etc. is up the roof, kids have 4 hours of sleep since they doomscroll all through the night, results in school are trending downwards, university reports that students are increasingly unable to concentrate...
Are there other solutions than bans to social media? Sure. Could this in theory have been fixed by better parenting? Sure.
But parents don't live in a vacuum. Parents and children alike rely on the culture around them.
Social media is a HUGE shift to society, and neither culture nor parenting practices has sufficiently adopted to handle it yet. Slowing the shift down a bit until norms and culture catches up doesn't seem like a bad idea.