I’m an anarchist and an anti-capitalist, and usually appeal to the choices that have the best outcomes.

The government and every corporation having a direct personal dossier with my information in it is very specifically against my beliefs.

I think that social media should be designed like the fediverse. Organized around communities and those communities should be obligated to moderate themselves. Meta literally does not moderate any of its platforms. They know that Facebook and Instagram are full of misinformation, pedophiles, scam artists, and they do not care. The websites are designed to harvest money and data. They are not actually designed to create sustainable healthy social communities. There should be laws mandating routine auditing of the entire moderation ecosystem at social media platforms. If child safety is our concern then it should be the law that social media platforms have to actually deal with threats to child safety and make their platforms usable for children.

I don’t understand why there exists seemingly a widespread interest in protecting Facebook and TikTok? Why? I dont think the fediverse is bad for you. I wouldn’t come here if I believed that. The idea of social media itself being harmful is just a liberal misdirection right? Its all just to distract from the fact that Mark Zuckerberg has more power than most nations and is functionally beholden to no laws. He is entirely ambivalent to these laws because they make really no difference to his bottom line. Kids will still use his platforms. And the platforms themselves are entkrely unaffected. Perhaps even emboldened. Its an “adults only space” after all, which basically let’s them fuck off on all moderation of any kind. After all, all their users are adults now right. So why would they need to moderate? They’re already starting to do this. And kids are still going to access the sites anyway. So they just get access to a worse platform with even less protections for its users and designed even more aggressively to harvest their money and data.

I just see literally not a single positive in a law like this. I don’t get why the answer is to functionally inconvenience every single person and overnight destroy any semblance of human privacy. For nothing. For a net 0 gain. It’s all to protect the policies and actions of meta and TikTok and Snapchat and so on.

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Wouldn’t this just wind up being a de facto ban on the platform we’re using right now? How could Lemmy implement an age verification system? If social media platforms that dont comply with age verification are banned, then by default there goes most of the fediverse.

Why would you not just want social media to be better regulated by the law? You can’t seriously believe that your children are going to have no access to social media, even with an age ban, unless you intend to lock them in a room and home school them till they’re 18.

I appreciate what youre trying to say, but please do not glaze West Germany or western liberal democracy lmao.

If I’m understanding correctly he was a general. He was powerful enough to merely be court martialed. I doubt the same mercy extended very often to individual soldiers who refused orders.

The majority of influencers are not in the same geographical regions as their fans. Content is not as regional as it once was. The TikTok algorithm is based on time spent viewing something, and things like search terms and engagement, more than it is about where you are geographically.

The same can be said for Instagram. How you connect with other users on instagram is by following them. It will recommend you new users based on who the people you follow also follow. Where you are does not have really anything to do with how you would engage with your fellow peers. They’ll mostly be asking you directly what your handle is and then following you. Your geography would mostly impact what kinds of new content the algorithm will feed you without any prior data, drawing instead from content that is popular with where you are from and what age you said you are and what gender you said you are.

I think a lot of people in this thread are misunderstanding how people use social media in general. Activating a VPN and creating an account somewhere else will not fundamentally alter how you use the platform. It just adds a very simple very easily accessible bypass measure to using it.

I personally expect that the platforms will make whatever concessions the government is asking for so they dont have to do this. Because teenagers make up such a large part of their userbase that it would be a massive hit financially to lose out on it. But the ban itself would be ineffective in ultimately preventing teenagers from accessing those platforms.

This added context is extremely helpful.

Porn is comparable because of its implementation and circumvention strategy, not because of its substance.

Drinking rates are decreasing, yes, but i disagree that it has anything to do with carding. It has been illegal for minors to drink since… at least the 60s? Earlier? Lol

Free VPNs are abundant and teenagers using instagram are almost certainly entirely unconcerned with their data being stolen. A market gap will come to exist for better free VPNs, advertising revenue being the driving factor.

I dont think that the majority of teenagers on Instagram / Facebook / TikTok are using discord or even aware of what it is. Some of them are definitely but I dont see those platforms as being interchangeable or serving the same functions whatsoever.

You could present literally the same arguments for why teenagers would never drink alcohol. Its against the law for them to purchase right, so its an inconvenience to access, so clearly they would all abandon it as all their friends become unable to access it as well. You could make the same argument for most kinds of bans. There are actually very few things for which imposing barriers to access has ever eliminated its use. Porn is an obvious example as well. Porn bans are essentially meaningless to consumers. They are so trivial to bypass as to be functionally non-existent. The only thing that imposed bans have done is make it difficult for companies to profit off of it. I am essentially ambivalent about that, but it’s a literal direct parallel in this case.

What is likely is that tools for circumventing in simpler faster ways will develop. Installing a VPN is already a single click operation. You dont have to do anything else. Teenagers are not going to abandon social media. Maybe you havent encountered many in the past 2 decades, but social media use is and has been near universal among them since social media came to exist. Like you’re nuts if you think they’re actually going to stop using it haha I dont know what else to say. But yeah maybe youre right. Making stuff against the law totally eliminates it because everyone is so lazy and incompetent they won’t expend any effort to overcome trivial barriers to access things they have built their entire lives around lol

It would absolutely be more effective to use legislation to address the root causes of excessive alcohol consumption than to make blanket bans. I’m not saying that the bans won’t do anything, but they are absolutely not effective on a broad scale. There are so many circumventions that are trivially easy to access that it renders the ban more of a general barrier for entry than an actual prevention of access. Its moreso “how hard are you willing to work to get it” than “you cannot access this”. So harmful alcohol consumption becomes a matter of effort. Addiction is frequently characterized by massive efforts to access substances. Its one of the hallmarks. I’m not arguing for teenage alcohol consumption, just pointing out that it’s only ever been a trivial block and we are very socially aware that it is circumventable and frequently is circumvented by minors.

And alcohol is a physical object that must be acquired. Social media access is not.

You can circumvent this ban from any device at any time. It’s like porn bans. It’s now just a matter of effort. Install VPN, click click done. Youre now able to browse freely as a minor. And again, now youre lying about your age. So all age protections are gone, and you are free to engage with the same content as before but with less actual protections in place. Youve taken an undesirable situation and rendered it into a subversive one, one that requires circumvention by design, and will therefore make the relationship between the user and the platform a dishonest one. This has a lot of consequences. It makes it a lot harder to actually check the age of people using their platforms, cause everyone underage will lie. You won’t be able to prevent them from engaging with grown adults in profoundly harmful ways, for example.

Alcohol and tobacco are (mostly) harmful in all circumstances, yes. Social media is not harmful in all circumstances. Human socialization can be a good thing, but it is impossible for those substances to be good things (except possibly in extremely niche circumstances). If social media platforms were designed to be good for people, then they wouldnt cause the same harm. If they had legal requirements to be moderated, to not spread misinformation, to not promote unhealthy and damaging habits, to stop the spread of hatred and bullying, then they would be significantly less harmful for teenagers and also everyone of all ages. These things would actually make social media better for teenagers. Completely useless age verification actually makes social media WORSE for teenagers. Teenagers are never not going to use social media. Sorry thats just the truth. Entire fields of technology and software design have been developed by teenagers seeking to circumvent age bans throughout history. These bans dont even require any kind of new innovation. They just need to setup a basic VPN. Trivial.

1. Will not work. None of these kinds of bans has ever worked. Is it not a common trope that teenagers can and do drink to excess despite not being legally allowed to purchase alcohol? Are we under some misguided belief that age verification procedures in this manner can or ever have worked effectively to reduce harm on minors?

2. Will have large unintended consequences far beyond social media access for teenagers.

3. Will actually make the internet less safe for teenagers, as they will now be lying about their age and circumventing the systems in place, which renders all existing protections for them ineffective.

4. Is pointlessly age targeted legislation as social media is also bad for adults as well. Its bad because of business practices and lack of ethical considerations in gigantic monolithic international social media corporations. If your end goal is making the internet safer for teenagers, your end result will actually end up being making the internet safer for everyone.

I’m so glad the foss and self hosting communities have grown so large since covid. SaaS is evil incarnate and I will happily switch to foss alternatives whenever possible.

Providing the general public with convincing text generation has been an absolute unmitigated disaster for humanity.

Yuuuup. The state and capitalists collude against the working class. Neither one nor the other can ever be trusted to put the interests of workers first, though they will each make empty promises to do so. Then they will privilege the ruling class every time.

I despise that I have to use this OS at work. I would never run windows on my own computer again. Its just insanity. Next they’ll require a credit card to make a Microsoft account.

Of course she deserved better treatment. So did Sophie Scholl. It’s just very odd to act like this is not a believable thing that Israel, famed mass murderers of children, would do.

Israel hasn’t devolved, the state was founded on acts of colonialist genocide. This is what the state of Israel has always been.

Where did i say it was okay? It is abhorrent. I said that if they were going to invent a story about her graphic torture, this abuse is comparatively minor compared with other accounts from Israeli prisons.

Idk why this is treated as though its so inconceivable. Greta is hated by conservatives around the world. Most countries have already condemned Israel. They only care what Trump’s regime thinks. Their prisons are notorious centers of physical emotional and sexual torture. This is relatively mild treatment in comparison to many of the accounts I’ve read. It’s still awful, but if they were going to invent a story about how vile the Israeli prison guards were, this wouldnt be noteworthy in any way. Barely even scratches the surface of the things that happen in those prisons.

Makes sense. Crazy what they can get away with.