Ask Lemmy

Why only kids? We all need to be protected from social media.

I don't know how to suggest good national policy, but I think social media should have these:

• controls on how far you can doom scroll
• being able to opt out of algorithms by seeing things in time order and from (optionally) only white listed sources and allowing block lists in a variety of ways, etc, etc
• heavy moderation of blatantly illegal content.
• heavily curated advertising (or none at all, users can pay)
• separation of political content (maybe a system of tagging so topics that are not of interested can be hidden......maybe this could be crowd sourced)
• Strict control of data collection
• The ability to delete/be forgotten

I don't know how propaganda or corporate interests can be excluded, but that would be ideal.

Controlling children's access is so insurmountably difficult, I don't even know where to start.

I agree with the under-16 social media ban, but figuring out how and who implements is definitely going to be the hard part. Ideally it would be parents first, but that's been the status quo up to now and it hasn't worked. And as someone who has been "18+" online since I was 10... raising the age limit on the services themselves is only going to work to a certain extent. I'm very curious to see how this plays out.

I don't believe it's something for the government to enforce. Any law that requires a nongovernment agency to collect identification means that identification is at risk of being stollen and means it will be used to track the person. If every person using the internet will have to prove their age everywhere, it's going to be a mess.

Whatever company has the worst security will have all the IDs stollen and used everywhere else. And I'm sure at first, it will be used so that criminals can frame others for their online crimes really easily.

I mean how do you prove the person using the internet is the one in the ID over the internet. It's easy enough to just use the picture on the ID and some "AI" to produce a fake image if they're going to require taking a picture of who's using it or something like that. This won't stop any minors from accessing information they shouldn't. The only way to do that is through education to make them realize they don't want to access that information and then give them the tools to avoid it. Not try to keep it from them. That just makes them want it more and to have to become criminals to do it. And further, if they're committing that minor crime just to do something normal it desensitizes them to more serious crimes because they don't understand the reasoning for them. Which is why making minor stuff that doesn't affect anyone but the offender a crime is always a bad idea.

Yes, but leave them the SMSs

I think kids should be aborted

How? Make it a crime for every manager of the social media companies to let a child in.

fewest possible side effects?

No. That is not a goal when it is about child protection.

Should anyone use social media as it exists today? Is it really social media anymore? Does that mask really cover all the horribleness

I mean, you can't really do it without parents.

But there could be a law that any phone tied to a number a minor possesses is locked down so it can't install the apps. It wouldn't stop web based, but apps seem to be a worse problem for various reasons.

It's not even so much the content that's the problem, it's the delivery mechanism, how it effects dopamine release, and how damaging those changes can be to a developing brain.

Its similar to the lootbox system that was regulated in various countries. Human brains will keep trying the next item in their feed because there's a chance something good shows up. If every post was good it would actually cause less addiction.

But a child has shit tier impulse control. They'll going to keep pulling the proverbial level forever, wading thru shit for the slightest dopamine hit. All the meanwhile still being influenced by what they scroll past.