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Florida's DeSantis signs law restricting social media for people under 16

reuters.com

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Re: Florida's DeSantis signs law restricting social media for people under 16

#571

Post by fragmede »

skhunted wrote: post #554
callalex wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just pointing out the absurdity of your hyperbolic comparison to heroin.

It wasn’t absurd. It established that pretty much everyone agrees that government intervention is sometimes needed to protect people from their impulses. The idea that everyone (especially kids) can simply exercise self control when it comes things as addicting as social media is absurd.

> It established that pretty much everyone agrees that government intervention is sometimes needed to protect people from their impulses.

Wait, do... do people actually buy that reason for the War on Drugs?

Re: Florida's DeSantis signs law restricting social media for people under 16

#573

Post by autoexec »

ricardobeat wrote: post #446
wvenable wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might feel that way but what's the real difference between TikTok and watching TV? Society has always restricted children's access to specific content but now we're restricting children's access to specific mediums regardless of the content itself. Why is TikTok or YouTube shorts not a valid way to consume media? It's a bit like arguing graphic novels are acceptable to children but short comics are not.

The difference is massive . Your weird neighbour who has a feet fetish would never get to be a TV star, but he can amass 50k followers on TikTok, and request feet pics via private messages to them. Including underage children. Now multiply that by ten thousand. TV, by nature of being a group effort and holding a sliver of a monopoly for your attention, had a natural content filter (based on societal standards, for ba…

The greater risk isn't weird fetishists but the social media companies themselves who push products designed to be addictive, manipulative, and exploitive in ways that TV can't be (although it's increasingly trying to catch up)

Re: Florida's DeSantis signs law restricting social media for people under 16

#574

Post by duped »

EasyMark wrote: post #542
LVB wrote: post #360

Let the experiment take place, I say. Just like Oregon’s now-repealed drug use decriminalization bill. It didn’t achieve its intended goals, but there is now a mass of data about what assumptions were wrong, implementation issues, etc. IMO there is real value in letting states put such changes into play to get beyond the debate and actually test the hypotheses.

Hopefully the courts cut this down in the cradle. It's clearly an attack on 1st amendment rights and state laws can't supersede the 1st amendment. Whether your kid is online on social media or not is the responsibility of parents. Conservatives rail against the "nanny state" and then pull this junk? I'm glad it will most likely be shot down in court quickly and decisively. Laws like this are toes in the water to see…

[flagged]

Re: Florida's DeSantis signs law restricting social media for people under 16

#575

Post by stale2002 »

itishappy wrote: post #205
jl6 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you’re going to allow babies to vote, we have to draw the line somewhere. It’s also not true that a 17 year old is disenfranchised for 4 years - they can engage with the political process as an adult as soon as they turn 18. Presidential elections aren’t the only feature of democracy. They aren’t even the only vote.

Right, and drawing arbitrary lines is guaranteed to step on toes. In some ways, the fairest way is to draw it at the extreme (I'm not suggesting this is best, just that it sidesteps this particular issue). Children are humans, they're affected by political pressures same as the rest (and they'll experience these pressure for longer than most of us). We're also already choosing not to restrict voting based on assumed…

> Why? There's arguments both ways, what's the reasoning?

The reason is loki's fallacy is a fallacy for a reason.

For legal purposes we simply have to pick a line.

But regardless if the exact location of that line is arbitrary, it is still useful none the less.

There is no real issue with having an arbitrary line, if it is impractical to not have an arbitrary line, and useful none the less.

To give more obvious examples, we can take the drinking age, or the age of consent. Those line are arbitrary, but are still useful none the less.

Re: Florida's DeSantis signs law restricting social media for people under 16

#576

Post by autoexec »

somethingreen wrote: post #334
dangus wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I’m really unclear about is whether providers are required to use an actual ID to age verify. Does anyone know? The bill summary on the Florida senate webpage says: > Such commercial entities must verify, using either an anonymous or standard age verification method, that the age of a person attempting to access the material harmful to minors satisfies the bill’s age requirements. It sounds to me like “anonymous…

Anonymous verification could be something like OAuth. Government run or certified probably. You'd need to provide an ID to OAuth provider once, but the actual service requesting verification would get as little as your age and email.

> Anonymous verification could be something like OAuth. You'd need to provide an ID to OAuth provider once

That doesn't sound very anonymous to me

Re: Florida's DeSantis signs law restricting social media for people under 16

#577

Post by windexh8er »

toss1 wrote: post #521
d0gsg0w00f wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laws are often just social signals in writing. A law indicates that a large group agrees that something is bad. Often times people find it easier to just agree with a law rather than navigate the mental gray area around behaviors that aren't black and white.

>>A law indicates that a large group agrees that something is bad. No, it only indicates that a potentially very small group who has gained power agrees that something is bad. This is especially true in a system that does not require runoff elections (or an Instant Runoff voting system) so that the winner must gain a majority of votes, or where various forms of voter suppression, skewing, or not playing by the rules…

Exactly this. It's unfortunate that in the United States today, my initial reaction to new law is: "what money is behind this". It's not the standard that laws are being made for protecting citizens, but instead a minority of the wealthy with vested interests in playing unfairly through their capital and relationships.

Re: Florida's DeSantis signs law restricting social media for people under 16

#578

Post by fragmede »

autoexec wrote: post #570
alectroem wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the OP was saying that having minors agree to a social media sites terms and conditions is them entering a contract. So if you're against minors entering contracts, its logically consistent to also be against holding minors to a websites terms.

> I think the OP was saying that having minors agree to a social media sites terms and conditions is them entering a contract. So if you're against minors entering contracts, its logically consistent to also be against holding minors to a websites terms. In which case we should ban children from using game consoles, computers, cell phones, ISPs, TVs, or anything that else that comes with a ToS/AUP/T&C

Since when can children agree to legal contracts? don't you have to be 18 to get a cellphone plan or sign a contract with an ISP?

Re: Florida's DeSantis signs law restricting social media for people under 16

#579

Post by sangnoir »

sangnoir wrote: post #278
userabchn wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe America just has a uniquely depressive social media environment? Perhaps America is a bigger target than other countries for foreign influence operations that seek to cause division and depression using social media.

Perhaps America was a uniquely divided society from the very beginning? Either that, or foreign influence operations have been a multigenerational affairs - which year or decade could one say America was not divided?

To double down: chattel slavery, the expansion west by conquest, a civil war, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Jim Crow and Japanese internment camps are not the ingredients of a cohesive society. The fault lines in American society were not imposed from the outside. There was never a point when the US was egalitarian in practice.

Re: Florida's DeSantis signs law restricting social media for people under 16

#580

Post by TheAlchemist »

This may be one of the rare instances where regulation is not a bad thing.

Social media, especially the recent evolution with shorts, reels and tik-tok, are destroying young minds (and older too).

I'm pretty sure there are millions of people who try to limit their consumption of social media, without any luck - it's just too addictive. If one was able to make a decision - to completely ban for example tik-tok (like make it disappear forever) my feeling is that many people would decide yes. As this is obviously not possible, we all struggle with the overall negative impact.

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