Technology

lt feels like there's two separate issues: whether children should be allowed on social media, and how age verification should be implemented.

Let's take that at face value. There are portions of the internet that children absolutely shouldn't have access to and that varies depending on age. But since this is about social media, let's be realistic here. If it's 'bad' for everyone regardless of age it should in theory just be banned outright? Or is this subjective. Is the fediverse better than Facebook and Instagram for the average teen?

How age verification should be implemented and how it is being "implemented'' are two very different things and the main take away there is thus far it has been implemented by people with no technical knowledge of how such a thing should be implemented, and who have a vested interest in using any such framework for surveillance of the general population. Since we cannot trust them to do one without the other there should be a third option. What's the third option? I have suggestions but people generally don't like them.

It's perfectly reasonable to be concerned about privacy, data collection, and mission creep. Those are legitimate concerns that any age-verification scheme should address. But it doesn't follow that because some verification methods are bad, we should abandon the goal of keeping children off social media.

The fact is I would challenge the people of Lemmy to show me where this has been implemented thus far that they do address privacy concerns (lip service doesn't count). I have yet to see a government entity the world over who has done this properly.

People here do try to address them and brainstorm them here all the time and there are many suggestions but the fact is none of those ideas are being used because the entities implementing them are not doing it for the reasons they say they are and the suggestions directly impact their ability to use such apparatus for their true purpose.

The fact that platforms already prohibit under-13s isn't much of an argument when everyone knows those rules are routinely ignored. If a law is unenforced and ineffective, pointing to its existence doesn't solve the problem.

Why is that law unenforceable and what makes this law particularly more enforceable?

You also seem to assume that age verification necessarily means handing social media companies copies of passports and driving licences. It doesn't have to. There are privacy-preserving approaches where a third party verifies age and only returns a yes/no answer. Whether those systems are good enough is a fair debate, but it's not accurate to suggest that the only option is mass identity collection by Facebook and similar companies.

I am aware that it doesn't have to, but I am also aware that so far it has generally done that, either by providing that information to a third party for verification or by requiring the use of biometric data to do the same. For the same reason I don't want my or my kids ID being uploaded to a cloud service for verification, I also don't want my or my child's face scans being sent to entities that will face no repercussions when they fail to safeguard that information. Doesn't matter if that third party is a government service or not.

I also don't think it's fair to characterise supporters of these measures as advocating government overreach or surveillance. Many parents simply look at the evidence around addictive design, bullying, self-harm content, and compulsive usage among children and conclude that some form of restriction is justified. They may be wrong about the solution, but they're not necessarily indifferent to privacy or civil liberties

They do though either because they are unaware of what such measures actually entail/how enforceable they are, and think that it sounds good so it must be good, or because they are willing to sacrifice their privacy for the sake of the children possibly because they believe there's no other way. I didn't make a statement in favor of such measures without looking into it but lots of people do.

Finally, if we accept that social media companies have failed to make their products safe for children, then regulation becomes the obvious next question. Saying that platforms should design better products doesn't tell us what to do when they don't.

I don't think most social media companies failed so much as they did exactly what they set out to do. They want their products to be addictive and bad for you because they can keep you in that loop using their products if they do and that means they can profit off all the information they already collect about you. And they want to start their users as early and young as possible because that maximizes their ability to gather information and sell ad space.

But further, why is it that laws prohibiting access to social media for those 13 and under are routinely ignored? If they already can't enforce the law they have, what makes this law more enforceable?

Why don't they develope and enforce laws about parental control use? Why not limit the access parents are allowed to give their children to the internet?

Why not educate people as a whole on internet use, parental controls, and social media literacy/ social media data collection?

Why not use anonymized tokens instead of ID verification or facial recognition/biometric data collection?

Why not outlaw addictive algorithms in social media will stop?

This isn't me saying that governments shouldn't make laws to regulate social media or protect their people, including their children. It's me noting that they are going about it the way they are because they have an ulterior motive that cannot be achieved without invasive data collection that violates privacy.