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Florida Passes Sweeping Bill to Keep Young People Off Social Media
- rawgabbit 3y agoThe measure — which Gov. Ron DeSantis said he would “be wrestling with” over the weekend and has not yet signed …………..The new rules in Florida, passed on Thursday, would require social networks to both prevent people under 16 from signing up for accounts and terminate accounts that a platform knew or believed belonged to underage users. It would apply to apps and sites with certain features, most likely including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- echelon 3y agoThis flies in the face of plenty of constitutional rights. It'll be interesting to see this hold up in court. edit: Based on these downvotes, I am *** SO DISAPPOINTED ** in modern hacker culture. This is not the hacker culture I grew up with. The one that welcomed youth and let them cut their teeth on the internet. There's a growing element of censorship on both the right and the left that is wholly discouraging and dangerous. We must not lose our freedoms of speech, of access, of ideas, and of free thinking. I AM SO DISAPPOINTED IN Y'ALL. This is antithetical to everything I know at a bone-deep level. Get this desire to control and to censor out of your minds. Free thinking leads to a mind unbound by physics, uncaged by dictators. Censorship in all of its forms leads to polarization and lionization of evil thoughts and deeds. Do not succumb to this.
- FredPret 3y agoSurely it can be treated the same as liquor and cigarettes?
- pavlov 3y agoIs speech the same as a substance sold over the counter? Religious speech can be dangerous, addictive, and is regularly inflicted upon minors who have no choice. Is a ban appropriate?
- remarkEon 3y agoThere's a constitutional right for minors to access social media?
- coolspot 3y agoYes, direct quote from the founding fathers: “The right of young people to access TikTok shall not be infringed”.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoThe government here is both stopping citizens from reading others opinions and publishing their own, that would seem to be a first amendment slam dunk.
- remarkEon 3y agoHuh? Is Florida prohibiting its citizens from writing opinions in this? I thought the bill was about an age minimum for using an internet product.
- LegionMammal978 3y agoIt's simultaneously a restriction on what kinds of content you're allowed to distribute to other people if you happen to be operating an internet product.
- lolinder 3y agoThat type of restriction has a lot of existing precedent when we're talking about distributing content to children under the age of 16.
- remarkEon 3y ago“Mr. Chief Justice and may it please the Court: TikTok et al have a constitutional right to target minors with their social media internet products” Yeah good luck with that.
- 3y ago
- xboxnolifes 3y agoIs this not similar to the current COPPA regulations that makes having <13 y/o users burdening to the point of prohibiting them on many websites? Or is this significantly different because it technically doesn't ban them, just makes it practically impossible for social media to have them, so the business does the banning?
- LegionMammal978 3y agoEDIT: I was complaining about the bill's provisions against distributing "material harmful to minors", unaware of existing obscenity laws that permit states to restrict it.
- lolinder 3y agoSmall but significant correction: the three parts of the test you lay out are joined by an AND, not an OR. So websites are restricted from distributing material that "appeals to the prurient interest" AND "depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct" AND "lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors". If the website is not substantially composed of material that meets all three tests then the bill does not require age verification.
- LegionMammal978 3y agoAh, thank you. I've updated my comment. Still, I maintain that it creates a new restriction, since some kinds of erotic writing would meet all three bars, meaning that websites are required under the bill to either place an age bar, or moderate all user-generated text everywhere for such content.
- lolinder 3y agoThat's also where the "substantial portion" requirement comes in, which is defined to be 33.3%. That won't affect most sites with user-generated content—even Tumblr wouldn't be required to verify ages to view.
- throwawa14223 3y agoI'm curious which rights you would consider this violating?
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoOff the top of my head the commerce clause and the first amendment since social media is all about publishing things.
- SamuelAdams 3y agoThe first amendment does not apply to private companies. They can censor, alter, or remove any content they disagree with. This applies to adults and minors for virtually all platforms. https://www.freedomforum.org/free-speech-on-social-media/ https://www.freedomforum.org/free-speech-on-social-media/
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoOf course, but here the government is denying access, not a company.
- maxglute 3y agoI don't know, pushing kids off platforms is probably good way to get them to start hacking together solutions to fill niche. Getting around barriers / obstacles not the worst thing to incentivize around.
- earthwalker99 3y agoI have never spoken to a person in real life who I could even imagine disagreeing with this, but I am expecting a supermajority of media and internet voices to create a very different impression.
- throwawa14223 3y agoIt seems fairly non-controversial given what appear to be the negative impacts of social media on young people.
- DaveExeter 3y agoYou genuinely cannot see the meta-problem with this?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoWhen there is billions of $ on the line people turn their brains off. The amount of money involved is so large that all decisions become tainted.
- xboxnolifes 3y agoHow many of those people are 16 or younger?
- true_religion 3y agoAlso I think due to COPPA, no under 13s are on Instagram or others with independent accounts. So this bill only targets 13, 14 and 15 year olds.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lefstathiou 3y agoTop of my wish list is a time limit on time spent playing video games for under 18yo’s, to be imposed on and enforced by consoles and platform providers (eg Steam, iOS).
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoThis will only result in kids going nuts when they turn 18 without time to ease into their adult freedoms. I hope my son learns how to budget his time before he turns 18. But ya, there are guard rails that will progressively get weaker as he ages so he can ease into it.
- thegrim33 3y agoDoesn't China already do something similar with limiting game play for children? Instead of speculating about the result there's potentially data about the result that can be looked at. (Of course that's if the data coming from there can be trusted.)
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoIt’s only for online games, so I don’t think it’s very comparable to a blanket playtime limit on video gaming.
- thegrim33 3y agoOk, it's not perfectly 1 to 1, but you think there's nothing that can be learned from the results of banning online games for children with regards to banning video games in general for children?
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoFor one, banning online games is much easier (if your accounts are appropriately verified), and because of piracy, China’s gaming industry evolved into a mostly freemium model that demands addicting its young and adult customers to the game. This is really different from little johnny playing super Mario Wonder on their Switch, how would you even implement that?
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]
- yibg 3y ago“ Requires social media platforms to use reasonable age verification methods to verify the ages of account holders and disclose specified policies and provide specified resources, measures and disclaimers.” Problem here is what is considered “reasonable”? And how to do so without privacy issues.
- lolinder 3y agoThe actual text of the bill lays out exactly what is "reasonable"—any website affected by the terms of this bill must offer an anonymous age verification option, with very specific requirements including that they not retain PII after verification is complete: > A third party conducting age verification pursuant to ss. 501.1736 and 501.1737: > (a) May not retain personal identifying information used to verify age once the age of an account holder or a person seeking an account has been verified. https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/1/BillText/er/PDF https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/1/BillText/er/PDF
- kohbo 3y agoIt will be less than a decade until there is news of a massive data breach where one of the affected companies improperly stored PII.
- lolinder 3y agoWhile I don't discount the possibility of a service screwing this up (I've been in the industry long enough to know that they will), the bill at least tries to address this by requiring that there be zero retention of age-identifying PII once the age has been verified.
- guiambros 3y agoThat's the problem with age verification. As it stands, someone, somewhere, will certainly retain the information. Either because they want to intentionally track users (irrespective of the law saying otherwise), or unintentionally ("Oops, I thought this S3 bucket would be deleted automatically"). And, as always, the law will skew towards appearance of compliance rather than enforcement (GDPR-style), so if this goes through, you'll soon be asked to upload your driver's license to any random website.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago> by requiring social media companies to verify the ages of all users before giving them accounts. This is not nearly so much about children as it is about de-anonymizing all internet use.
- lolinder 3y agoThe bill specifically requires that an anonymous age verification method be provided, and lays out some pretty solid requirements on what the third-party age verification provider must do, including not retaining any PII after the user's age has been verified [0]. [0] https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/1/BillText/er/PDF https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/1/BillText/er/PDF
- add-sub-mul-div 3y agoLots of things claim to be anonymous and secure but aren't. There's no excuse to fall for this claim.
- lolinder 3y agoThe bill doesn't say "the service must claim to be anonymous and secure", the bill says that the service must actually not retain age-verifying information. Yes, services might break the law and retain the information longer than they're legally allowed to, but under this bill that's a violation of the law, not merely false advertising.
- Talanes 3y agoFalse advertising is a crime too, and obviously you don't think people take that seriously, so why should this crime be any different?
- add-sub-mul-div 3y agoThe idea of $19 check coming to me in a class action lawsuit settlement eight years from now doesn't do much to make me trust that my data won't be leaked through either carelessness, intention, or obfuscation. (The latter being my term for the way our data is already "anonymously" traded among ad tech companies daily behind the scenes.)
- bigfryo 3y ago[flagged]
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoWhy can't young people get opinions from their own thinking and their friends and the community directly w/o social media? It's not like social media is some unique escape from the echo chamber.
- wnevets 3y agoWhatever happened to the less government and personal responsibility?
- maxglute 3y agoBan seems harsh, is there a compromised social media that would appease people behind this, i.e. age gate interactions to +/- 1 years until 16. Posts automatically expire. Get AI to block sexting. Seperate kids social media from adult social media. What do these parents want? Their kids to goto sunday school?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20240223214515if_/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/23/business/florida-social-media-youths.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240223214515if_/https://www.ny...
- A_lurker 3y ago[flagged]