COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Denmark’s government on Friday announced a political agreement to ban access to social media for anyone aged under 15.
The move, led by the Ministry of Digitalization, would set the age limit for access to social media but give some parents — after a specific assessment — the right to give consent to let their children access social media from age 13.
Such a measure would be among the most sweeping steps yet by a European government to address concerns about the use of social media among teens and younger children.
Now simply provide ID to every website or app that has any social interaction component, after all the only way to protect our children is to submit to a massive invasion of privacy.
What do you mean this runs the risk of hurting marginalised and or abused children who lose an avenue to seek help and guidance to escape or ameliorate their situation?
Stop understanding nuance and prepare for the line our intelligence community wants you to swallow instead.
In all seriousness if social media is too corrosive for young people maybe its time it was banned entirely, the reason for these half measures has little to do with children and their safety and everything to do with removing all privacy and anonymity from online activities.
Yes, this does smell a bit like fixing the wrong problem mixed with a possible trojan horse for compulsory ID-verification (and the dodgy businesses often claiming to provide it). Surely if social media is too corrosive for young people, there are a lot of adults who also won’t be able to cope, so the corrosive bits need to be tackled?
Over here in Australia the government is being told that the equivalent that we are having foisted on us lacks key supporting measures (like an equivalent of GDPR, actual hard and fast laws to penalise the misuse or failure to adequately secure citizens data, etc).
In spite of this and genuine commentary from children’s advocacy groups saying the legislation is not fit for purpose it is being steamrolled through because “won’t somebody think of the children”.
It does make me wonder how many children are going to be cut off from their support networks and escape routes that this might harm, potentially fatally. How much blood of Australia’s youth is our government willing to have on its hands so that our intelligence community (and we are part of five eyes so it doesn’t stay on our shores) can have a shiny new toy?
We should also ban it for people over 65ish. My mom is going down a terrible rabbit hole and gets fooled by AI propaganda constantly.
I would ban it outright (at least the ones that are run by non-EU corporations and don’t have open algorithms), but that probably won’t make the cut.
I might have upvoted that except how do you define “run by”? Who is the fediverse “run by”?
It’s open source and there are no closed / hidden algorithms at all. So all fediverse services would be exempt anyways.
Honestly, probably a good idea, except that it’s just another excuse to farm data and destroy privacy
Dumb idea, banning something for kids just makes it cooler.
Also a dumb idea because we will just get outsmarted by kids evading these bans faster than we make them, and the end result will be wherever kids will go as an alternative (digital or not) will just be more opaque to adults who genuinely care and want the best for kids.
Let’s ban education then.
I mean, that goes against my principles, but make no mistake that would make education cool and edgey with kids like nothing else.
GOOD
It’s not perfect, but it would be a good start.
There’s far, far too much evidence of negative impacts to children and young adults from social media, particularly in terms of mental health.
How can you call this good? While I agree there are problems needing tackling, this proposal does nothing to help young adults and the parental consent option seems very likely to create a have/have-not split in child groups which will also have negative impacts.
It looks rather like the “we must do something, and this is something, so we must do this” fallacy being used to exploit child protection to start compulsory ID checks.
Yeah, as think of the children has not stripped privacy every time it is spoken. /s
