this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2026
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Wao, you really believe this too, don't you? Kids are smart enough to circumvent most barriers you put around them. No amount of government bullshit is going to keep them from doing something they are laser focused on doing. Now, parenting does have a chance to keep them from harm (a CHANCE) if the parents put on the effort and are raising their kids with values.
You have to be a special type of moron to believe tour own post, honestly.
Even the parents that have degrees and jobs in tech have trouble keeping ahead of all this stuff, because there is far more money and manpower put behind making these products as abusive as possible. Sure, I'd like everyone to be as knowledgeable as us on the subject, but that's not practical. Social signaling has a place for broader society even if it ends up hitting people it won't affect.
Parents are only one side of the equation, with the other being the social media companies themselves. These laws make it so they have to stop offering their services to children, just like I would expect laws to prevent a corner store from selling tobacco or alcohol to minors.
I get that, and it would be a fair assessment if it wasn't because the real problem here is that parents are not parenting, plain and simple. This is yet another part of this that the social media and tech companies are using to their advantage. They get people hooked, that we agree on. Then they lobby for all this surveillance and forced identifications that uses... (Drumroll) companies owned by the same tech giants, in partnership with the other giants. Now they have made it illegal to not provide them with your data and identity, while removing many underage individuals from the equation. Win-win for them, as their liability drops, and now they can serve more ads directed at each individual, effectively increasing the price advertisers are willing to pay, increasing their revenue. There is absolutely no way to keep children out of any platform without full identification, its that simple. Then the same governments that are pushing this have access to all this data as well, which makes them basically all-knowing about every single person in the population.
There is no universe in which any of this is a good thing. Look at the whole picture, and it's not the UL, it's every country in the world doing this, at different levels, with varying level of success and oppression.
These are only some of the many reasons why I will never agree with something like this.
The answer is convincing people that the major social media services available now are bad for everyone regardless of age. For some reason this type of understanding tends to start with the most vulnerable people affected, until we finally admit its bad for everyone. These laws only punish those who use social media and those who provide it as a service, which should reduce social media use in general to a degree, so I'm for it.
Ideally for me, social media wouldn't exist in the way it does today. If we did have it at all, it would be extremely localized as a means to connect neighbors to one another. Something that would benefit society in some way.