this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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Pretty much all social media has a minimum age of 13 in their ToS. So what exactly are you suggesting? Raising it by 1 year?
Actually verifying it and punishing the companies if they let underaged people use it. Alcohol stores are also punished when they sell products to children.
This is a terrible idea, and only makes it 10x easier for surveillance capitalism to track, profile, and propagandize the entire population.
This line of reasoning is basically using "won't someone think of the children" fear mongering to hand over the keys to big brother.
I don't see how that follows. Can you elaborate?
If you have to verify children's identity, you have to verify everyone's identity. This is part of KOSA. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/12/kids-online-safety-act-continues-threaten-our-rights-online-year-review-2024
Ah, right. It's possible yes that this would make it easier for them, but my understanding of technology is that it was pretty much possible like 10 years ago to track practically everyone who isn't actively doing a countermeasures against it.
And our reaction shouldn't be, "oh well, might as well get something I want too," but that we should stop this tracking through both technological and legal measures.
I personally think this would help, but there's a lot folks online who scream "free speech" when you start talking about verifying age online. And honestly, I don't know a good solution to balance it
Don't try to balance it, not everything needs to be fixed through policy.
Educate parents and kids about the dangers, and what they can do to stay safe. Encourage parents to delay giving their kids access. Encourage use of tools like AI to detect and warn users of bullying, abuse, and scams online. Encourage setting aside time to get away from tech. Set up honeypot accounts to catch the worst offenders.
Using surveillance or bans to solve this problem is like throwing rocks to try to kill a fly, you're going to do way more harm than good, and you probably won't actually solve your problem.
Raise it by 3. Under 16s shouldn't have access to any social media.