6 ms·

How 13 Became the Internet’s Age of Adulthood

35 points by tysone 7y ago

dudul 7y ago
"At 13, kids are still more than a decade from having a fully developed prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain involved in decision-making and impulse control. And yet parents and educators unleash them on the internet at that age" Very first sentences and I can't help but think: well, if this whole "need 10 more years to make real decision and control their impulse" is true, why can they drive at 16 and vote at 18?
- kalleboo 7y ago
  And join the military at 17
  - arethuza 7y ago
    In the UK people can start their application to join the army at 15 years and 7 months and actually join at 16. 18 year olds have even passed selection for the SAS.
    - tomatocracy 7y ago
      And once in the army they can also drive many vehicles at lower ages than in civilian life (17 vs 21 in some cases).
- SkyBelow 7y ago
  The scientific justification behind our current age limits are quite limited and the real reason is more based in tradition. For driving in particular, I wonder to what extent it is based off of being able to hold a job. For voting, I wonder what extent it is related to school graduation. Also, as a side note, generally kids can legally drive at any age as long as it is done on private property and isn't so dangerous it constitutes child endangerment. If you talk to farmers you'll find many stories of kinds driving trucks on the farm when they were under 10. Even more fun, some states don't have age limits for kids driving on public roads as long as it is farm equipment. Those laws might be one tragedy away from being rewritten, but until then it is an interesting thing to consider when discussing the relationship between legal age limits and our scientific understanding of mental maturity.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  >why can they drive at 16 Because it's needed in most places in order to be a functional adult and giving late teenagers the legal means to have useful personal mobility is beneficial to society. States used to allow kids to drive at like 12 and 14 and it really wasn't that big a deal since most of them didn't anyway. It's not like a 12yo needs to drive to work. It's not like most parents would trust their 12yo with a car anyway. >and vote at 18? Because that's the age for the draft and if you're old enough to be drafted (very different from volunteering) then you should have some say in the politicians who are starting the war. Unrelated to these two points, being a functioning adult (or at least enough of one to drive and vote responsibly) has much more to do with having experience trying to be a functional adult and experiencing the consequences if/when you fail at it than it does with whether you're 16 or 21. Obviously the 16yos are gonna have a slightly worse time of it but a normal 16yo is basically the same as a dumb 21yo and we let dumb 21yos do everything. If it were up to me you'd get all the normal adult stuff (drink, smoke, open a bank account with only your name on it, etc.) by 16/17 and then vote at 25 because the people who run government have such an outsize impact on society in the long term that you should probably have some adulting experience before you get to have a say in that kind of thing.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Toss in age of consent, drinking age, etc. It's pretty much a hodgepodge that's the end result of politics, pragmatism, tradition, and (a little bit of) biology. Presumably a unified "age of adulthood" would be more logically justifiable but that's not where modern societies tend to end up.
    - pgeorgi 7y ago
      > Presumably a unified "age of adulthood" would be more logically justifiable but that's not where modern societies tend to end up. It depends. Some things have different consequences than others, and it makes sense to phase them in. If you list them by age, it probably makes more sense. For example, in Germany, assumption of liability is gradual, with criminal liability starting later: - 7 years: limited liability starts (court gets to figure out if the kid could have understood the consequences of their action in each case). traffic related cases remain exempt. - 10: limited liability in traffic starts - 14: limited criminal liability starts (juvenile penal code applies) - 16: limited drinking (beer, wine, no spirits), assumption of sexual self-determination, driving certain vehicles (motorized bicycles), voting at the county level, marriage possible under certain circumstances - 18: treated like an adult: vote, drive, drink, have full legal/criminal liability, except that it can be reduced to juvenile level if a court determines that your development lags behind - 21: end of fall back to juvenile penal code The main issue in the US seems to be that every state and county has its own rules that add to the complexity, but for any single location I don't think it will be much more complex than the above.
- maxfurman 7y ago
  The voting age in the US used to be 21, but some time during the Vietnam era it was rolled back to 18. The argument being, if you're old enough to fight in a war, you're old enough to vote for the politicians who decide whether or not to go to war.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > The voting age in the US used to be 21, but some time during the Vietnam era it was rolled back to 18. Actually, the rollback of voting age (which is a state policy with federal constraints) started in the WWII era, almost immediately after the draft age was reduced from 21 to 18 in 1942, with it almost immediately becoming a national issue and Georgia being the first state to roll back voting age to 18, in 1943, and President Eisenhower endorsing it as desirable across the nation in 1954. The Vietnam era saw the completion of the rollback nationally. > The argument being, if you're old enough to fight in a war [...] No, the argument was if you are old enough to be compelled by the draft to fight in a war...
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Really the prefrontal cortex is used mostly as a rationalization for what society is comfortable with as opposed to guidance. Look at "charged as an adult". Suddenly a 12 year old stabbing someone is mature enough to stand trial when they can't even register on a forum without parental permission. I satirically suggest that any minor tried as an adult should retain all attendant adult status for sake of consistency. Which means that any minor charged as an adult who was acquitted or had their case dismissed should be able to vote against the DA.
  - mc32 7y ago
    Don’t felons lose the right to vote?
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      In some states.
    - mokus 7y ago
      “who was acquitted or had their case dismissed”
      - mc32 7y ago
        I missed that qualifier. Seems a fair trade they get to vote in local elections.
    - efdee 7y ago
      You're not a felon if you got acquitted.
  - onion2k 7y ago
    Suddenly a 12 year old stabbing someone is mature enough to stand trial when they can't even register on a forum without parental permission. Understanding whether or not you should do something that could end someone's life is far simpler than understanding the potential, much less obvious risks of communicating on the internet. Also, the age limit for signing up to things on the web is as much to protect the business running the service as it is to protect children. Whether someone is tried as an adult comes down to whether or not they could reasonably be expected to understand what they're doing is wrong, and in the case of stabbing someone that's really, really easy.
- sjg007 7y ago
  Most states are adopting graduated licensing so that more privileges become available as you get older. I think we will see a trend where the min age will be 18. There will obviously be some hardship provisions for provisional earlier driving but in the long term everyone will move to an 18+ licensing requirement. The minimum 18 age to vote happened b/c of the 26th amendment. FDR had lowered the age of military conscription to 18 but the general age to vote was 21 (it was determined by states at the time).. That lead to a 'Old enough to fight, old enough to die' campaign which petitioned for lowering the voting age to 18, which eventually happened.
  - mc32 7y ago
    Since now it’s a voluntary force I guess that obviates the reasoning. Although I don’t see that getting rolled back. I think it makes sense to roll back driving age until autonomous driving becomes an actual option. Some minor pols are calling for _lowering_ of the voting age, which seems out of place, although no serious pol is pushing for that. One could argue that voting rights ought to coincide with emancipation and being self-sufficient.
    - tialaramex 7y ago
      The rationale for lowering the age is universal suffrage, same argument as giving women the vote, giving those with no property the vote, giving those with no education the vote. Share the responsibility for the terrible decisions. Historically those with the vote have often pretended that they vote wisely and newcomers could not be depended upon to do likewise. There is no evidence for this proposition, Trump appealed perfectly well to retirees, to men, to those who owned country estates, and only lost marginally among the well-educated. If there is wisdom, it's not the domain of the existing electorate. As to why it shouldn't coincide with emancipation, government policy doesn't wait until you're emancipated, everything from whether the air you breathe is toxic to whether you have to do gym class is a matter of government policy, why not give those affected a say?
      - mc32 7y ago
        Because until emancipation your well-being is looked after by others who do have this right. Until you are emancipated, one is essentially selfish (taking in, rather than being contributory and adding value). I.e. you don’t have as much skin in the game. You don’t have to have property to contribute, you don’t have to be a man to contribute. It’s clear those aspects were anachronistic and failed to reflect reality. At the same time a 25 year old who has no desire to move out from a parents or guardians home has less argument to a right to vote than a 16 year old who’s pulling a job, going to school and helping siblings financially or otherwise.
- otakucode 7y ago
  My first thought when such claims are made is "how do they think brain development works?" The brain does not develop except in response to novel intense experience. If we were to shield children from exposure to language until age 5 when the language centers of the brain typically mature, the language centers of their brain would not mature. It is exactly the exposure to those things that they are "not ready for" that cause brains to develop at all. Without such exposure, the brain does not develop. And there are critical periods, as well, where the brain can lose the ability to ever develop certain facilities if not challenged. If you were to put an eyepatch on one eye of an infant at birth, for example, in order to protect them from the challenge of binocular vision until their visual cortex was 'mature' which usually happens 3-6 months after birth, you would guarantee that child would never be capable of mastering binocular vision. The stress over the Internet in particular is doubly troublesome because of the profound and abundant safety of the Internet. Compare it to literally any other way of acquiring information and you'll see it's the only one that protects the viewer from having to directly and physically interact with other people, which removes almost all danger. Of course, 'almost all' is not 'all' and some people will reject even stupendous protection if it means there remains even a single sliver of risk. Those people I think can be dismissed out of hand because they are waiting for an impossible option to be presented to them.
- jmull 7y ago
  Wuddabout driving and voting? Driving: in this case, there's a big cost/benefit balance. On one hand, unleashing 16yo drivers on to the roads is scary AF. On the other, what chaos would ensue if you generally tried to tell teenagers they couldn't go anywhere? You can debate the exact age cutoff, but it's a less-of-two evils calculation. Voting: for various reasons we want to send 18yo kids to fight wars and apparently (in the US at least) our collective sense of fairness, as rudimentary as it is, lead us to at least give them a minor say in the matter. Look up the history of changing the voting age from 21 to 18 in the US. Perhaps it really did help, because we haven't used the draft since a few years after the change.
  - dweekly 7y ago
    After autonomous vehicles are introduced, we should increase the driving age to 21, and lower the drinking age to 16.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > why can they drive at 16 The trend over the last couple decades has been to restrict under 18 driving, so there's that.
- fulafel 7y ago
  18 is more common than 16 as car licence age limit.
- sandworm101 7y ago
  >> why can they drive at 16 and vote at 18? Vote? How about be drafted into the army, carry a gun into battle, and be responsible for all that entails. I have no time for people who claim 18yos don't have properly developed brains. They are young. They are often stupid. They are not ill or mentally defective. I was just reading an article about the "role model" parents associated with youth baseball. It is clear that age is no predictor of decorum or intelligence.
  - derefr 7y ago
    Being drafted was never an age-of-consent or age-of-responsibility thing; it was a “we want as many people as possible, doesn’t matter the age, but the public will riot if we ‘steal their kids’ so we have to figure out the minimum age where forcibly sending their sons and daughters off to war is won’t upset people to the point of rioting.” That’s 18, for some reason.
  - pwinnski 7y ago
    If you have no time for that argument, you have no time for the mainstream neuroscientists. https://mentalhealthdaily.com/2015/02/18/at-what-age-is-the-brain-fully-developed/ https://mentalhealthdaily.com/2015/02/18/at-what-age-is-the-...
judge2020 7y ago
It is a tough problem to solve. Many middle schoolers' lives live on Instagram and snapchat, and getting COPPA to protect 13-15 would only introduce operational problems for the existing users. Twitter already has this problem for when you change your birthday to something that shows you signed up before you were 13, and just recently started getting those accounts un-locked (which means they didn't even immediately delete the data of those used-to-be-12 year olds)[0]. Perhaps the above would depend on the text of the bill, ie. existing 13-15 year olds can continue to use the services without interruption. That would be up to the lawmakers. And, as per the article, lying about the child's age is a norm to get them on the internet as early as 10 or 11. I have a few friends who were fine telling their children to lie about their age to get them on instagram and snapchat. As a service there's not much you can do about this unless you require every sign-up to go through the COPPA parent verification process (where the most popular method is credit card verification), so COPPA being changed to "you can be penalized if they're under 13 even if they say they're over that age" wouldn't be a solution. 0: https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/14/after-year-long-lockout-twitter-is-finally-giving-people-their-accounts-back/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/14/after-year-long-lockout-tw...
- rock_hard 7y ago
  My sister created herself a Facebook account when she was 6. And remembering my childhood self, there is nothing that would have stopped me from getting one. Being a parent now myself also in fact would probably even assist my kids to get whatever accounts they want...better to have it happen under my supervision than in secret. As always, lawmakers are a little out of touch with reality
  - Consultant32452 7y ago
    Lawmakers aren't out of touch with reality. The only reality is they want to be seen as "doing something." That something being effective isn't a very high priority in most cases.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    You, a parent who would provide supervision, are not representative of all parents. As such, the “village” must step in and ensure that children with parents who are not like you are not exploited for the lack of supervision. Also, there’s nothing banning Facebook from offering under-13 children accounts, other than their own lack of options for offering non-tracking/non-advertised accounts for those children.
tomatotomato37 7y ago
Interesting they called the list of internet things children can do "free-range" considering the growing kickback against helicopter parenting; I feel that they just lost a big group of potential allies framing the issue in that manner.
Nelkins 7y ago
See!! Just another example of how the Internet is a Jewish conspiracy!! (This is a joke, I am Jewish).
ourmandave 7y ago
Because Facebook's HQ is in Alabama?
SllX 7y ago
Even in 1998 such destinations as Neopets had graduated age-gated permissions. I was technically in one of the youngest age groupings, but in order to get full access to the website, I either had to get my mother to fax a permission slip in, which sounded like a hassle for both of us, or I could just create an account with an email address and claim I was 18+. So I created my first email address and did that. Wasn’t even a hassle, and bonus: I had an email address now. My mother didn’t even have that yet, and I don’t think she had one of her own till 2006 when I signed her up for Gmail. Whether or not it makes sense for the age gating to be 13 or not, I couldn’t tell you, but whether it is 13 or 30, kids at whatever age we define them to be at will do as they wish one way or another. Given reality on the ground, additional legislation to try to force the reality we want is more likely to have additional costs rather than additional benefits so rather than centering our laws around age, we might want to try and center them around privacy for everyone.

35 points by tysone 7y ago

"At 13, kids are still more than a decade from having a fully developed prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain involved in decision-making and impulse control. And yet parents and educators unleash them on the internet at that age" Very first sentences and I can't help but think: well, if this whole "need 10 more years to make real decision and control their impulse" is true, why can they drive at 16 and vote at 18?

kalleboo 7y ago
And join the military at 17
- arethuza 7y ago
  In the UK people can start their application to join the army at 15 years and 7 months and actually join at 16. 18 year olds have even passed selection for the SAS.
  - tomatocracy 7y ago
    And once in the army they can also drive many vehicles at lower ages than in civilian life (17 vs 21 in some cases).
SkyBelow 7y ago
The scientific justification behind our current age limits are quite limited and the real reason is more based in tradition. For driving in particular, I wonder to what extent it is based off of being able to hold a job. For voting, I wonder what extent it is related to school graduation. Also, as a side note, generally kids can legally drive at any age as long as it is done on private property and isn't so dangerous it constitutes child endangerment. If you talk to farmers you'll find many stories of kinds driving trucks on the farm when they were under 10. Even more fun, some states don't have age limits for kids driving on public roads as long as it is farm equipment. Those laws might be one tragedy away from being rewritten, but until then it is an interesting thing to consider when discussing the relationship between legal age limits and our scientific understanding of mental maturity.
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
>why can they drive at 16 Because it's needed in most places in order to be a functional adult and giving late teenagers the legal means to have useful personal mobility is beneficial to society. States used to allow kids to drive at like 12 and 14 and it really wasn't that big a deal since most of them didn't anyway. It's not like a 12yo needs to drive to work. It's not like most parents would trust their 12yo with a car anyway. >and vote at 18? Because that's the age for the draft and if you're old enough to be drafted (very different from volunteering) then you should have some say in the politicians who are starting the war. Unrelated to these two points, being a functioning adult (or at least enough of one to drive and vote responsibly) has much more to do with having experience trying to be a functional adult and experiencing the consequences if/when you fail at it than it does with whether you're 16 or 21. Obviously the 16yos are gonna have a slightly worse time of it but a normal 16yo is basically the same as a dumb 21yo and we let dumb 21yos do everything. If it were up to me you'd get all the normal adult stuff (drink, smoke, open a bank account with only your name on it, etc.) by 16/17 and then vote at 25 because the people who run government have such an outsize impact on society in the long term that you should probably have some adulting experience before you get to have a say in that kind of thing.
- ghaff 7y ago
  Toss in age of consent, drinking age, etc. It's pretty much a hodgepodge that's the end result of politics, pragmatism, tradition, and (a little bit of) biology. Presumably a unified "age of adulthood" would be more logically justifiable but that's not where modern societies tend to end up.
  - pgeorgi 7y ago
    > Presumably a unified "age of adulthood" would be more logically justifiable but that's not where modern societies tend to end up. It depends. Some things have different consequences than others, and it makes sense to phase them in. If you list them by age, it probably makes more sense. For example, in Germany, assumption of liability is gradual, with criminal liability starting later: - 7 years: limited liability starts (court gets to figure out if the kid could have understood the consequences of their action in each case). traffic related cases remain exempt. - 10: limited liability in traffic starts - 14: limited criminal liability starts (juvenile penal code applies) - 16: limited drinking (beer, wine, no spirits), assumption of sexual self-determination, driving certain vehicles (motorized bicycles), voting at the county level, marriage possible under certain circumstances - 18: treated like an adult: vote, drive, drink, have full legal/criminal liability, except that it can be reduced to juvenile level if a court determines that your development lags behind - 21: end of fall back to juvenile penal code The main issue in the US seems to be that every state and county has its own rules that add to the complexity, but for any single location I don't think it will be much more complex than the above.
maxfurman 7y ago
The voting age in the US used to be 21, but some time during the Vietnam era it was rolled back to 18. The argument being, if you're old enough to fight in a war, you're old enough to vote for the politicians who decide whether or not to go to war.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > The voting age in the US used to be 21, but some time during the Vietnam era it was rolled back to 18. Actually, the rollback of voting age (which is a state policy with federal constraints) started in the WWII era, almost immediately after the draft age was reduced from 21 to 18 in 1942, with it almost immediately becoming a national issue and Georgia being the first state to roll back voting age to 18, in 1943, and President Eisenhower endorsing it as desirable across the nation in 1954. The Vietnam era saw the completion of the rollback nationally. > The argument being, if you're old enough to fight in a war [...] No, the argument was if you are old enough to be compelled by the draft to fight in a war...
Nasrudith 7y ago
Really the prefrontal cortex is used mostly as a rationalization for what society is comfortable with as opposed to guidance. Look at "charged as an adult". Suddenly a 12 year old stabbing someone is mature enough to stand trial when they can't even register on a forum without parental permission. I satirically suggest that any minor tried as an adult should retain all attendant adult status for sake of consistency. Which means that any minor charged as an adult who was acquitted or had their case dismissed should be able to vote against the DA.
- mc32 7y ago
  Don’t felons lose the right to vote?
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    In some states.
  - mokus 7y ago
    “who was acquitted or had their case dismissed”
    - mc32 7y ago
      I missed that qualifier. Seems a fair trade they get to vote in local elections.
  - efdee 7y ago
    You're not a felon if you got acquitted.
- onion2k 7y ago
  Suddenly a 12 year old stabbing someone is mature enough to stand trial when they can't even register on a forum without parental permission. Understanding whether or not you should do something that could end someone's life is far simpler than understanding the potential, much less obvious risks of communicating on the internet. Also, the age limit for signing up to things on the web is as much to protect the business running the service as it is to protect children. Whether someone is tried as an adult comes down to whether or not they could reasonably be expected to understand what they're doing is wrong, and in the case of stabbing someone that's really, really easy.
sjg007 7y ago
Most states are adopting graduated licensing so that more privileges become available as you get older. I think we will see a trend where the min age will be 18. There will obviously be some hardship provisions for provisional earlier driving but in the long term everyone will move to an 18+ licensing requirement. The minimum 18 age to vote happened b/c of the 26th amendment. FDR had lowered the age of military conscription to 18 but the general age to vote was 21 (it was determined by states at the time).. That lead to a 'Old enough to fight, old enough to die' campaign which petitioned for lowering the voting age to 18, which eventually happened.
- mc32 7y ago
  Since now it’s a voluntary force I guess that obviates the reasoning. Although I don’t see that getting rolled back. I think it makes sense to roll back driving age until autonomous driving becomes an actual option. Some minor pols are calling for _lowering_ of the voting age, which seems out of place, although no serious pol is pushing for that. One could argue that voting rights ought to coincide with emancipation and being self-sufficient.
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    The rationale for lowering the age is universal suffrage, same argument as giving women the vote, giving those with no property the vote, giving those with no education the vote. Share the responsibility for the terrible decisions. Historically those with the vote have often pretended that they vote wisely and newcomers could not be depended upon to do likewise. There is no evidence for this proposition, Trump appealed perfectly well to retirees, to men, to those who owned country estates, and only lost marginally among the well-educated. If there is wisdom, it's not the domain of the existing electorate. As to why it shouldn't coincide with emancipation, government policy doesn't wait until you're emancipated, everything from whether the air you breathe is toxic to whether you have to do gym class is a matter of government policy, why not give those affected a say?
    - mc32 7y ago
      Because until emancipation your well-being is looked after by others who do have this right. Until you are emancipated, one is essentially selfish (taking in, rather than being contributory and adding value). I.e. you don’t have as much skin in the game. You don’t have to have property to contribute, you don’t have to be a man to contribute. It’s clear those aspects were anachronistic and failed to reflect reality. At the same time a 25 year old who has no desire to move out from a parents or guardians home has less argument to a right to vote than a 16 year old who’s pulling a job, going to school and helping siblings financially or otherwise.
otakucode 7y ago
My first thought when such claims are made is "how do they think brain development works?" The brain does not develop except in response to novel intense experience. If we were to shield children from exposure to language until age 5 when the language centers of the brain typically mature, the language centers of their brain would not mature. It is exactly the exposure to those things that they are "not ready for" that cause brains to develop at all. Without such exposure, the brain does not develop. And there are critical periods, as well, where the brain can lose the ability to ever develop certain facilities if not challenged. If you were to put an eyepatch on one eye of an infant at birth, for example, in order to protect them from the challenge of binocular vision until their visual cortex was 'mature' which usually happens 3-6 months after birth, you would guarantee that child would never be capable of mastering binocular vision. The stress over the Internet in particular is doubly troublesome because of the profound and abundant safety of the Internet. Compare it to literally any other way of acquiring information and you'll see it's the only one that protects the viewer from having to directly and physically interact with other people, which removes almost all danger. Of course, 'almost all' is not 'all' and some people will reject even stupendous protection if it means there remains even a single sliver of risk. Those people I think can be dismissed out of hand because they are waiting for an impossible option to be presented to them.
jmull 7y ago
Wuddabout driving and voting? Driving: in this case, there's a big cost/benefit balance. On one hand, unleashing 16yo drivers on to the roads is scary AF. On the other, what chaos would ensue if you generally tried to tell teenagers they couldn't go anywhere? You can debate the exact age cutoff, but it's a less-of-two evils calculation. Voting: for various reasons we want to send 18yo kids to fight wars and apparently (in the US at least) our collective sense of fairness, as rudimentary as it is, lead us to at least give them a minor say in the matter. Look up the history of changing the voting age from 21 to 18 in the US. Perhaps it really did help, because we haven't used the draft since a few years after the change.
- dweekly 7y ago
  After autonomous vehicles are introduced, we should increase the driving age to 21, and lower the drinking age to 16.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> why can they drive at 16 The trend over the last couple decades has been to restrict under 18 driving, so there's that.
fulafel 7y ago
18 is more common than 16 as car licence age limit.
sandworm101 7y ago
>> why can they drive at 16 and vote at 18? Vote? How about be drafted into the army, carry a gun into battle, and be responsible for all that entails. I have no time for people who claim 18yos don't have properly developed brains. They are young. They are often stupid. They are not ill or mentally defective. I was just reading an article about the "role model" parents associated with youth baseball. It is clear that age is no predictor of decorum or intelligence.
- derefr 7y ago
  Being drafted was never an age-of-consent or age-of-responsibility thing; it was a “we want as many people as possible, doesn’t matter the age, but the public will riot if we ‘steal their kids’ so we have to figure out the minimum age where forcibly sending their sons and daughters off to war is won’t upset people to the point of rioting.” That’s 18, for some reason.
- pwinnski 7y ago
  If you have no time for that argument, you have no time for the mainstream neuroscientists. https://mentalhealthdaily.com/2015/02/18/at-what-age-is-the-brain-fully-developed/ https://mentalhealthdaily.com/2015/02/18/at-what-age-is-the-...

judge2020 7y ago

It is a tough problem to solve. Many middle schoolers' lives live on Instagram and snapchat, and getting COPPA to protect 13-15 would only introduce operational problems for the existing users. Twitter already has this problem for when you change your birthday to something that shows you signed up before you were 13, and just recently started getting those accounts un-locked (which means they didn't even immediately delete the data of those used-to-be-12 year olds)[0]. Perhaps the above would depend on the text of the bill, ie. existing 13-15 year olds can continue to use the services without interruption. That would be up to the lawmakers. And, as per the article, lying about the child's age is a norm to get them on the internet as early as 10 or 11. I have a few friends who were fine telling their children to lie about their age to get them on instagram and snapchat. As a service there's not much you can do about this unless you require every sign-up to go through the COPPA parent verification process (where the most popular method is credit card verification), so COPPA being changed to "you can be penalized if they're under 13 even if they say they're over that age" wouldn't be a solution. 0: https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/14/after-year-long-lockout-twitter-is-finally-giving-people-their-accounts-back/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/14/after-year-long-lockout-tw...

rock_hard 7y ago
My sister created herself a Facebook account when she was 6. And remembering my childhood self, there is nothing that would have stopped me from getting one. Being a parent now myself also in fact would probably even assist my kids to get whatever accounts they want...better to have it happen under my supervision than in secret. As always, lawmakers are a little out of touch with reality
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  Lawmakers aren't out of touch with reality. The only reality is they want to be seen as "doing something." That something being effective isn't a very high priority in most cases.
- falcolas 7y ago
  You, a parent who would provide supervision, are not representative of all parents. As such, the “village” must step in and ensure that children with parents who are not like you are not exploited for the lack of supervision. Also, there’s nothing banning Facebook from offering under-13 children accounts, other than their own lack of options for offering non-tracking/non-advertised accounts for those children.

tomatotomato37 7y ago

Interesting they called the list of internet things children can do "free-range" considering the growing kickback against helicopter parenting; I feel that they just lost a big group of potential allies framing the issue in that manner.

Nelkins 7y ago

See!! Just another example of how the Internet is a Jewish conspiracy!! (This is a joke, I am Jewish).

ourmandave 7y ago

Because Facebook's HQ is in Alabama?

SllX 7y ago

Even in 1998 such destinations as Neopets had graduated age-gated permissions. I was technically in one of the youngest age groupings, but in order to get full access to the website, I either had to get my mother to fax a permission slip in, which sounded like a hassle for both of us, or I could just create an account with an email address and claim I was 18+. So I created my first email address and did that. Wasn’t even a hassle, and bonus: I had an email address now. My mother didn’t even have that yet, and I don’t think she had one of her own till 2006 when I signed her up for Gmail. Whether or not it makes sense for the age gating to be 13 or not, I couldn’t tell you, but whether it is 13 or 30, kids at whatever age we define them to be at will do as they wish one way or another. Given reality on the ground, additional legislation to try to force the reality we want is more likely to have additional costs rather than additional benefits so rather than centering our laws around age, we might want to try and center them around privacy for everyone.