Email is social media. Zoom is social media. Suicide hotlines are social media. Kids absolutely need social media. Communication is a human right. Taking away the right to communicate means isolating children from support. How’s this supposed to go for depressed, neurodivergent, or queer kids. This law gives abusive parents more control over their victims.

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.

I don’t think kids should be barred from social media, since at its core, social media is just people talking and sharing things with each other.

The problem is not with the medium or generally who is using it, it’s with the rate of consumption, poor parenting and poor moderation.

I also think it is an even larger problem to enforce in the first place, since it will destroy one of the good things about the Internet: anonymity. Seeing as the only way to truly enforce an age restriction is to require ID to be given to verify a user’s identity. I’m not as super hardcore about my privacy like some parts of Lemmy are, but this is one thing I absolutely do not want to see happen.

Nobody should use today’s social media

There is no real need to regulate kids on devices … leave that up to the parents to figure out.

What we need is to regulate every major corporately owned social media company. Regulate and control them like they do for newspapers, magazines or television. Put them under complete regulatory control across the board so that we can regain some normalcy in public perception of reality and politics everywhere.

It’s a pipe dream I know … but in the meantime, no matter what anyone says or does … if social media companies are not regulated, everything and everyone is going to hell in a hand basket.

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.

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.

Absolutely not. Anything you put in is likely going to have privacy issues for both adults and children, and you forget how smart children are. I know we had firewalls and all kinds of shit when I was in school, and I was the person who taught everybody else how to bypass them in like five minutes. There is not a filter in the world you can put up that are going to keep children from the content that they actually want to look at.

Yes. I hope the rest of the world will begin addressing the issue.

There’s a wealth of information linking negative mental health to social media use (hell, read stories about QAnon), and I look at regulating social media among kids the same way we regulate cigarette smoking. Will it be perfect? No. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.

I’d like the age raised fron 16 to 75, I’m 58.

I don’t think anyone should use social media with an engagement algorithm, no matter what age

We can’t regulate half a dozen corporations, prohibiting algorithmic feed and targeted ads, so we will ban millions from using the apps with these features.

I don’t think that kids should be banned from social media. Instead they should be taught how to handle it in an individually and socially healthy way. Namely:

• how to spot misinformation
• how to spot manipulation
• how to protect yourself online
• how to engage constructively with other people
• etc.

This could be taught by parents, school, or even their own peers. But I think that all three should play a role.

I don’t think the government should be banning kids from using certain parts of the internet because of perceived harm. Kids need to explore the internet for themselves in order to learn first-hand about the dangers. I mean, the same argument for social media can be applied for everything on the internet. Search engine results are full of scams, are be banning search engines too? News sites are full of misleading information, lets ban news sites? So the only source of information is now from schools who can also be biased and in some places are just regurgitating government propaganda. In red states, schools are constantly telling LGBT+ kids that they are commiting “sins” and they are “mentally ill”, and they might have very conservative parents with no sympathy. Are we really gonna stop kids from going online and seek support? If kids can’t even be allowed to explore the digital world, how are we also allowing them to explore the physical world, where there are physical dangers?

In an ideal scenario, kids should be allowed to freely explore the internet, but should have parents that they trust to talk to in case they face any danger or harassment, so the parents can help them deal with it.

Eventually, kids are gonna grow up, and a kid with zero online experience their entire life suddenly gaining free access to all of the internet is a recipe for disaster.

Its like not teaching kids sex ed, then when they get old enough, they’ll end up having unprotected sex.

Edit: Not to mention, social media ban is not very enforcible. Even in China, an authoritarian regime, is unable to stop kids from gaming, they just steal their grandparents IDs and play anyways. Do y’all really want a democratic country to suspend civil rights and start privacy intrusions?

Controversial opinion:

In the future we are going to look back on seeing children use iPads that directly connect them to the most sophisticated engagement and manipulation algorithms ever as something as horrid as a child smoking a cigarette, or doing any other drug

Now obviously this is an issue, but many of the suggested solutions are lacking.

Remember: the phones in our pocket are turing complete, any software solution can be undone by another software solution

Hardware flaws baked into chipsets will be inevitably exploited by the worst of humanity

What we need is a LEGAL framework to this issue

We need to see that allowing a full 5g 2.5ghZ portal to the unknown is simply absolutely harmful for a child to get there hands on without parental or educational supervision

I suspect it really should work like regulating a drug, allow more and more unsupervised compute and networking as the child ages

That way kids can still have dumb phones for basic safety and comms.

I suspect laws will be applied like alcohol within the home, to allow for family owned game systems and such

But lapses that lead to actual demonstrated harm such as mental illness leading to bodily harm or violence due to radicalization need to be treated as if a parent just fed their child alcohol without care. Or at least enabled them to it if it’s evident that they didn’t even try

Straight up it’s also a cultural shift 13-16 yr olds gaming at home under parental guidance, but not being bought significant personal compute since it would not be sold to them or for the purpose of giving to them

Usage in school where they get education on information technology and the harms and good it can do all fine and good , but seeing babies with iPads at the mall seen as badly as letting them smoke (and the secondhand smoke from all the brainrot leading to brainrotted adult)