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“…like forcing users to upload copies of their government IDs to access an online service.”
“Some states, like Louisiana, have tailored their bills to ban kids from seeing online porn by forcing everyone, including adults, to verify their age before using the site. Google’s proposal does not oppose age verification on porn and gambling sites.”
That’s terrifying. Signing up for Lemmy would require uploading a government ID. I don’t know the solution to this problem, but I’m not confident this proposal is the right one.
Who fucking cares about porn?
But also the anonymous Internet is important.
Also, do you think the proposal will actually have the intended effect? Do you think COPPA has been successful? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children’s_Online_Privacy_Protection_Act#Criticisms
Children under the age of 13 absolutely have Facebook accounts. Children of all ages have DEFINITELY seen things that no one should see.
I’m not saying this isn’t a topic worth discussing, but further restrictions is not the right answer.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/j6eFNRKEROw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Ban them, exile them all!
Edit: Ok, i may have been a bit too vague with this comment. So i’ll be more specific. ⬇️
Some platforms like Tiktok, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube have been nothing but harmful to youngsters (from all ages), due to their manipulative algorithm and poor content management.
So i do believe there should be a much more stronger restriction in access to those platforms.
Something like, you can register at 16 with your parent’s permission, or something like that.
Now i now that sounds very drastic, but consider this:
1- It has been proven time and time again how social media has done more harm than good to teenagers.
2- I’m only talking about about platforms owned by the big corporations, platforms here on the Fediverse are (from my perspective) much more safer (in the sense that you don’t really see harmful content if you don’t want to).
I’m a teen and I second this opinion.
Something like, you can register at 16 with your parent’s permission
Point is - how do you prove the person is of the “right” age noninvasively? Not like the mainstream social media platforms were already friendly to anonymity, but all the methods I can think of are on a whole another level.
I know, that’s very muddy waters right there.
But again, i only meant that for the big platforms.
I don’t think age verification should be necessary on the Fediverse.
1- It has been proven time and time again how social media has done more harm than good to teenagers.
2- I’m only talking about about platforms owned by the big corporations, platforms here on the Fediverse are (from my perspective) much more safer (in the sense that you don’t really see harmful content if you don’t want to).
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Where has it been proven that its done more harm than good? Have studies been done to actually explore what ‘good’ it has allowed, or is the litmus test for it only about what harm may have been affected on teenagers? Whats your basis for this claim?
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The Fediverse is equally unsafe if you consider your take in an objective manner rather than just play on what you feel moment to moment.
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What’s your take on 4chan?
- Ever since teens had access to social media, there have been studies on the matter, (i’ll admit, that in early years they were pretty scandalous, but now they try to act as more of a guide or recommendation for parents).
Here you got one source (again, of many):
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The Fediverse is mostly handled by moderators and the community (like Reddit used to be), so when there’s an issue regarding ill behaviour, it is usually handled inside that community. (And besides, instances have their own rules too.)
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It’s toxic waste, get the hell out of there. 💀☢️
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Why?
Because a vast majority of teenagers misuse/overuse social media (cyber-bullying, social isolation, phone addiction, and so on…)
How do you know that?
Because i was born in the year 2000 so my perception of teenagers and social media is still recent, also i have a younger sibling, and she has shown me the kind of crap teens are on today.
Screw TikTok man, and also screw “Mr. Beast”.
So your experience defines everyone else’s experience?
How very ‘I was born in the year 2000’ of you.
Everyone’s opinion is equally valid.
But my guess is some may want to read what Gen Z’s think about the topic.
Ok, Boomer.
Ok, Boomer.
Literally says born in 2000 and this is the response. The Internet has made teens dumber.
The irony of this being commented on a social media post is amazing.
There’s a difference between reading-based social media and a feed of overstimulating videos designed to get kids hooked
Not really, i’m 23.
Dunno why you’d assume that they’re a teen
It would be more ironic if the one posting it was a teenager.
“think of the children” is always a poor excuse to strip away citizen freedoms. Usually never actually helps them anyways.
I would usually agree with this statement, but the truth is that social media does way more harm than good when it comes to teenagers.
Is it really the government’s job to police what every teen does on the Internet though? I think that’s for the parents to do.
It is the parents job, but what do you do when the parents don’t do that job?
There’s a lot of things parents should be doing but some don’t. That however is a whole different argument.
That’s my point. A parent should keep a child out of a fire, right? If they don’t, do we as a society let the child burn because it was unlucky enough to have crappy parents?
I’d be perfectly happy with this answer if the only states proposing this “for the children!” nonsense weren’t deep red racist bigot states that want ro police women across state borders.
If red states are doing something I want to do the opposite.
When it comes to the big corporate platforms, yes.
When it comes to the Fediverse, no.
Rambling
I’m not super against the idea of age verification online. I’m against the idea of these companies having my ID. A better (but still very imperfect) solution would be to have the government itself provide a login that would simply send a true/false back to the service you’re trying to access.
But even this has problems, beyond just privacy ones. There’s many who don’t have ID, who can’t get ID, and even more who don’t have ID that would be recognized in the local jurisdiction (whether it be from a foreign national, or someone in the USA with a Driver’s License from New Mexico).
Anyways, the practice of age verification itself I don’t have a problem with, but any implementation I can conceive is full of glaring issues that render it impossible without us forfeiting our rights to anonymity and/or surrendering our data to an untrustworthy source and or just being plain unreliable to attempt to use.
Yeah Louisiana implemented a government portal that does exactly what you claim through the driver’s license app. Their database was hacked a little under a year ago with basically all private citizen information stolen.
If you set up a system to use these mechanisms the data WILL BE stolen or mishandled.
deleted by creator
This idea scares me as well. State would have it so much easier to track what adult content you are visiting. Not a fan, even though I personally only do pretty tame stuff.
I think we need to keep children off the internet but there’s not really a way to do that other than having parents be more responsible. I think public shaming could work wonders in this area
for fuck’s sake why does this get upvotes here
For teenage me the Internet was the only escape from the horribleness and stress of my offline life. Probably for many current teenagers too (if you are one of them: trust me, life will get better as an adult). There is no way I will ever support “keeping children off the Internet” and not just because it requires adults too to verify their age, also because it is a bad idea in the first place. Teenagers might not always make great decisions about everything, but this is also true of adults.
I completely get where you’re coming from and this is something I think about a lot. There are so many people I know (myself included) who have benefited as kids from being able to access the internet and find a community, but overall the data I’ve seen shows a net negative in terms of social outcomes. And to be completely honest I just think that a lot of spaces on the internet suffer from having too many adolescents around.
I don’t want to enforce a law or something but I think we just need to be more socially aware of the kinds of spaces that kids have access to
As a teenager I found it utterly stupid when adults thought they knew better than me what was good for me, and I decided I didn’t ever want to be one of those adults. I have not (yet?) become one of them even though my teenage years are long over.
Today’s Internet is a lot “safer” (locked down) anyway than it used to be. Posts I made as a teenager and even preteen to online forums can still be found through search engines even now today. Compare that to interactions on today’s social media sites that are mostly not indexed by search engines, mostly forgotten after a short time and it is easy to delete them (or even one’s entire account).
I don’t think social media is the problem. It’s the fact that something like 60% of children aged 7-14 have watched Andrew Tate. There’s just so much more shit out there nowadays than there was in the past. I don’t care if kids see a dead body or porn on the internet, I care that there are some people with sinister ideologies who are doing serious damage to impressionable children. And it’s just an endless of stream of content that caters to our worst instincts in a way that is not healthy for development as a human. This shit is like a drug for constant dopamine.
When I was a kid I swore not to be someone who acted like I do now, but yknow what? I didn’t have near as much knowledge or experience. I thought I knew everything back then but the reality is that, yeah, sometimes adults do know better. I’m a big advocate for more freedoms for adolescents because I genuinely believe they are treated like shit in society but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still some lines that you have to draw
They probably had a privileged childhood, not that I didn’t too, but in some things the internet was the only out for me and helped me a lot, so I’ll agree with you. I do see their point about the exploitative nature of the current landscape but that’s a systemic problem that won’t be solved by banning children from accessing the internet
Of course. I spent most of my time then on IRC or on text-based forums. TikTok or Snapchat or whatever today’s kids use all the time weren’t things, I have literally never had an account on either of them. I think recommendation algorithms are a bad thing and we should try to build platforms that don’t have them; this is independent of users’ ages though.
I agree the issue is systemic and those issues need to be solved first. The main problem is that kids are not learning how to socialize as much as they used to and you can see this reflected in data about the number of friends and romantic partners going down. The most important thing that we need to do is rebuild local communities and have places where people can meet, have events, and spend times getting to know new people
Let their parents do it.
But didin’t Google already track your age?
I remember that in 2014 Google erased my first Gmail account because i was -15 and that didin’t aligned with their new “policies”.
You were negative 15? You were still nutrients in the soil thay made the food your parents ate to make you?
YouTube in the UK already refuses to show some videos if their data gathering & marketing system didn’t know enough about you to guess your age.
This is why I vote Democrat. The idiots back shit like this and we shame the shit out of them until they stop because of the obvious overreach, but the “Parental Rights!” “Small Government!” (Louisiana) crowd fucking eats it up and runs with it without any forethought or sense of hypocrisy before it’s even an actual law.
As if teenagers would actually go on a service that forces them to upload a government ID.
