I’m asking for public policy ideas here. A lot of countries are enacting age verification now. But of course this is a privacy nightmare and is ripe for abuse. At the same time though, I also understand why people are concerned with how kids are using social media. These products are designed to be addictive and are known to cause body image issues and so forth. So what’s the middle ground? How can we protect kids from the harms of social media in a way that respects everyone’s privacy?
I’m not necessarily advocating for ID verification, but to answer your question: most instances require an application to join anyway, so this could simply be tacked ontop.
From what I understand aussie.zone already does something like this. To join, apparently they require a picture of you at a bar with a beer to prove that you’re over 18. Not a perfect method but procedurally not that different from checking IDs.
How is it enforced on them? How can many even afford it?
This doesn’t scale at all. Also, I’m not sure why aussie.zone is doing that because Australia’s social media requirements specifically only apply to large websites.
And even if it did, there’s no way that if aussie.zone was looked into over compliance that such a method would be considered acceptable by the regulators.
It’s not scalable for hobbiest run social media like lemmy. It would probably put a cap on how many people could sign up on some of the big instances, which could have the effect of more instances being created and the fediverse becoming even more decentralized so the load could be shared.
And how on earth would a regulator chase hundreds of different instances hosted all over the world to force them to implement age-ID?
The same way they chase 100s of different pot shops and liquor stores to make sure they aren’t selling to anyone under 18
Those pot shops and liquor stores have actual physical presence on a high street in the same country. A small server run out of someone’s bedroom in Finland and who they have no idea who they are is completely different.
Again I’m not advocating for this, but it wouldn’t be super difficult to block noncompliant severs from the mainstream internet. We do that all the time with torrent sites for example. Its true that technically savvy users could still find their way around this but these measures would still block the majority of users and create an incentive for server owners to comply
There’s tens of thousands of sites out there under the description of “user-to-user communication service” with mixed content. If you set the conditions that every single one of them must provide age-ID tools for adult content access (aussie-zone’s improvised solutions will certainly not be legally viable) the level of continued enforcement would be utterly ridiculous. It would be even worse if your country implemented a social-media minimum age requirement and declared that all sites thet enable user-to-user interaction also come under it. OSA in the UK, which does the former (requiring sites to age-gate adult content), attempts to do this - has been active since July of last year and barely scratched the surface.
You don’t need to ban literally any website that could be classified as social media to have the desired effect. You just need to ban the big ones: TikTok, Instagram etc. Because these are the sites that are creating the most harm (through addiction, body image issues, etc.). There are diminishing returns blocking anything beyond that. Kids aren’t getting addicted to gardening forums or developing anorexia because they spent too much time on tech support IRC channels.