• ouch@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    I don’t think there is a technical way to implement this without privacy issues and potential for future misuse and scope creep.

    Government doing parenting instead of the parents never works.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      I mean, yeah. But also, this isn’t really any different from kids not being allowed to drink alcohol before a specific age, movies and video games having age minima, etc etc.

      And I would surmise the same reasoning applies: On average, someone so young has neither the mental development nor the life experience to be able to judge well what they are doing with their own information and how to judge/process the information they get shown.

      Of course, this should happen in conjunction with actual education, like I at least had for alcohol and stuff. But it’s an entirely normal thing if it happens as part of a multi-step process (and I am not australian enough to judge how well those things work out in australia in general).

      • ouch@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        But it IS different. If you compare to alcohol for example, age checks are performed in shops. No record of those is made or available to anyone. There is no centralized infrastructure related to age checks that could be abused in the future to track everyone who buys alhocol.

        • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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          6 days ago

          Yeah but if you think about to, from a law perspective that’s an implementation detail. Sure, from our perspective it’s a really important one, but from the perspective of a lawmaker it’s about whether it should be done, not how it’ll be done in execution (different branches of state, basically).

          • ouch@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            You are correct that from juridical point of view the difference does not seem great.

            Hopefully politicians listen to experts of different fields.

  • Chick3nDinn3r@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    What the government should be doing is mandating that a social media/drugs literacy course is taught in schools. Kids should fundamentally understand that things are not black or white, good or bad; things are grey. They have upsides and downsides; risks and rewards. Kids should be taught that Social media is a great way to connect with your friends, but you are also susceptible to being influenced/manipulated/addicted in X, Y, Z ways.

    • Moghie@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      100% agree. I think it’s a good space for libraries to enter too. Internet literacy, media literacy and critical thinking skills are sorely needed to be taught today.

    • viking@infosec.pub
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      6 days ago

      As if those drug literacy courses helped anyone. We were taught about it aged 12 or something, when nobody really had a clue what drugs are. Around the age where it matters, it was all but forgotten.

    • kava@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      i don’t think the always thrown around “more education” is an effective answer to everything

      you can educate kids up and down about the harms of smoking- if smoking is advertised as cool in popular media, there are cigarettes with colorful and fruity flavors, and it’s easy for the kids to obtain then they will inevitably smoke cigarettes. everybody has known smoking causes cancer for a half century know.

      if you don’t want kids smoking, then you must act with force to restrict something. whether it’s the restriction on subliminal advertising, the ban on colorful cigarettes, or prohibition of selling to underage smokers- you need some sort of ban.

      i firmly believe in the near future we will view social media as we know it similar to how we see smoking. addictive little dopamine hits that will over time change the structure of your brain. we look back at the 50s and think it was crazy how they smoked cigarettes on airplanes, drank whiskey at work, and everyone bathed in lead and asbestos. they’re going to look back at our time period and see us similarly

      so if I were to say “should kids be using social media?” I wholeheartedly believe they should not be using it until their brains are developed. much like I don’t think kids should be smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, or smoking weed

      but the ultimate question is- what are the potential harms of a government ban and are those potential harms worth it?

      that’s where I am conflicted. a minor not being able to buy cigarettes is something that I don’t really think hurts society very much.

      but a ban on a minor accessing certain online spaces… how do you accomplish that? well, you will need to track people’s identities online somehow. this is the part where I think maybe the harms of kids using social media is not worth giving the government power to monitor and regulate social media websites.

    • s08nlql9@lemm.ee
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      6 days ago

      thats a lot of work for the government dude, let them take the easy path

  • VerticaGG@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    7 days ago

    Is anyone talking about the fact that it’s the predatory, short-term-quarterly-gains oriented behavior of the platforms themselves which is in fact rampaging though democracies, massively affecting and survielling Adult’s behaviors on a loop of ragebait-induced dopamine/seratonin manipulation?

    Because Kids are going to connect with one another, on whichever the next platform is that’s not banned. What’s more, the institutions they attend will inevitably ask them to do so as…things like Youtube arent exactly 100% avoidable.

    Pretty pathetic to clamp down on Youth Liberty in a society that has basically none, when centrally-hosted platforms owned by corporate behemoths are all-but-physically trampling the landscape like some kind of fucked up gentrification-glorifying-voiceline-repeating Megazord

    • derpgon@programming.dev
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      7 days ago

      It is easier to enforce access than to enforce ethical algorithm. Sadly, it is not perfect, but it is better than allowing it.

      • VerticaGG@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        6 days ago

        Well we agree but it’s only as much better as it is effective…because when it’s not it’s giving the impression of doing something while in reality it’s legitimizing the stripping of the autonomy.

  • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 days ago

    This is technically feasible, and bussiness don’t need to know your id. If anonymous government certificates are issued.

    But I’m morally against it. We need to both educate on the dangers of internet and truly control harmful platforms.

    But just locking it is bad for ociety. What happens with kids in shitty families that find in social media (not Facebook, think prime time Tumblr) a way to scape and find that there are people out there not as shitty as their family. Now they are just completely locked to their shitty family until it’s too late.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      7 days ago

      I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it, we need better terms than “social media.” Tumblr, Reddit, and Lemmy I don’t think should be in the same group as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Social media that uses your real life information should be separate from basically forums that use an online persona.

      I don’t know what this legislation says, but I agree with you. It should be limited to restricting the “personal social media,” not glorified internet forums.

    • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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      7 days ago

      I think that the chances of a kid from a broken home finding an exploiter online is much more likely than that kid finding a helpful, supportive community.

      • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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        6 days ago

        Those kids already have exploiters; their parents. The right to communication should be granted to all, and especially the most vulnerable.

        • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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          6 days ago

          They have schools, churches, neighbors, other family, etc etc. There are plenty of organized groups online looking for kids to exploit.

          You’re assuming that they’ll find good people online. If they don’t they’ll end up much worse than when they started.

            • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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              6 days ago

              I live in New York City. Old timers here remember when 42nd Street was called ‘the Minnesota Strip.’ It got that name because thousands of young people [some as young as 12] would jump on buses and come to New York to live the dream. They’d be met by pimps who routinely patrolled the bus terminal and quickly gathered up as many as they could.

  • Juigi@lemm.ee
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    7 days ago

    What they consider as “social media”? Is it every site where you can communicate with others?

    This seems fucked if its so.

    • Ihnivid@feddit.org
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      7 days ago

      While specific platforms haven’t been named in the law, the rules are expected to apply to the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, per the Prime Minister. Sites used for education, including YouTube, would be exempt, as are messaging apps like WhatsApp.

      • VerticaGG@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        7 days ago

        Youtube: offers Shorts and aggressively markets them at any demo that responds well to Tik Tok, competing for a more toxic comments section with years of experience.

        WhatsApp: all the group chats and online bullying that you banned facebook to get away from, 1:1, day of the ban.

        Should we identify society root causes and address those? 🤔No. No, it’s the kids who are wrong /s

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          7 days ago

          It’s the parents who are wrong.

          Parents shouldn’t allow their kids to use social media until they can handle it. Some kids don’t have issues, whereas others end up experiencing severe depression largely as a result of too much or too little social media exposure. Parents should be the ones responsible here, both for deciding the age and for culpability if they knowingly contribute to problems by either intentionally over or under exposing their children to social media.

          But at no point should the government be deciding things like ages, because enforcement would necessitate privacy violations of either the parents (if they need to allow an underage account) of the children. Screw that, let the parents decide and hold them accountable for any abuse.

          • Lifter@discuss.tchncs.de
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            6 days ago

            You are arguing against yourself. In the first paragraph you say that the parents should keep kids from social media.

            In the second, you say that it would be a violation of privacy if parents would keep kids from social media.

            Kids need policing, it’s going to need to be done by the parents no matter what the laws are. Personally, I don’t think the laws matter much in this regard.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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              6 days ago

              In the first paragraph you say that the parents should keep kids from social media.

              Not necessarily. It’s up to the parents to know what their kids can handle.

              Keeping kids off social media doesn’t have to be a privacy violation. If you don’t trust your kids to follow the rules, don’t give them access to devices they could use to violate them. If I give my kids access to a device, it’s because I trust them with that device. I don’t put any parental controls on it, either I trust them or they don’t get the device. It’s none of my business what they do with devices I trust them to have.

              Kids need discipline and trust, not policing. If they break the rules, discipline them (take devices away and whatnot), but don’t surveil them.

              And yeah, the laws don’t matter as written because good parents will help their kids circumvent bad laws. My problem is with the government thinking it has a say in how I raise my children. The government should only step in if there’s abuse, but other than that, they should stick to advising parents by providing high quality research to parents.

          • VerticaGG@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            6 days ago

            I basically agree, with the caveat that Youth Liberation requires buy in from all the adult influences in the Youth’s life and all that follows…yeah otherwise no notes