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?
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.
Sure, but recall how this conversation started - we were talking about this specifically in the context of the Fediverse applying age-ID checks. It’s financially non-viable and any attempt to enforce it would force instances to all shut down. Not that it realistically can be enforced.
Fair point. I’m sure if there was a social media ban the fediverse would be a low priority. That said I still don’t see how it would be financially unviable because like I mentioned earlier most instances already have an application process
Because age-ID tools cost money to maintain. And most larger instances do not screen every single application individually. If it could be done financially without age-ID, it would certainly make running the instance a complete chore and cause many to shut down on that basis alone.
And asking people to give them a picture of them in a pub isn’t going to be accepted as a valid age technique legally.