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I don't necessarily think it's an ethically bad idea, but "banning all children from all social media" is simply impractical for many reasons, including: - You
by armchairhacker 4y ago
I don't necessarily think it's an ethically bad idea, but "banning all children from all social media" is simply impractical for many reasons, including:
- You essentially have to check some sort of ID and ban VPNs, banning online privacy which is BAD
- The smartest kids are way more tech-savvy than the dumbest adults, so you may end up banning adults too, which is BAD
- What will you do to children who get caught? Jail them? Call their parents, teachers, etc. who may not care? Make them take a "social media rehabilitation" classes? Consider that no matter the penalty, many, many kids will try very hard to work around this, and many parents will actively support them.
Something which would actually work is "banning" children like we ban them from seeing Rated R games and movies. Like:
- Banning children from specific social media sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). This can be done through laws or just activism and lobbying to pressure the sites into banning children themselves
- Encouraging parents to ban children from social media, teaching them how. You cannot call CPS on parents whose children are using social media, unless you think having many, many kids in foster care is a worthy sacrifice
- Creating stronger parental controls (which is also a part of 1 and 2: individual sites can create stronger controls like ID to ban children, and stronger parental controls will help parents)
- Simply discouraging children from using social media, maybe even with incentives
- judge2020 4y ago> - Banning children from specific social media sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). This can be done through laws or just activism and lobbying to pressure the sites into banning children themselves This is already the case, few will deal with the hurdles of COPPA, so most services require you to be 13 to sign up, and the platform has a general requirement to ban anyone they see that lied about their age. (I've known two friends that had a Google account at 11/12 and got banned because they said "im 12" in comments; twitter also had a IIRC 2 year period where, if you changed your DOB and it reveals that you signed up when you were <13, your twitter account was suspended, and they only fixed this by requiring you delete tweets made when you were under 13)
- hackerlight 4y agoThis is ignoring the impact of destroying the network effects. Even if 20% of the kids bypass the laws by accessing social media via VPN, that's no problem, because the negative influence comes from the large network and the fact that all their peers were on social media. If 80% of the cool kids aren't on it anymore, there will be no pressure or desire to participate and engage.
- flerovium 4y agoGNU Taler figured out a way to verify age without revealing ID.