Meta's has been listening to some concerns after all especially now after some pressure.
These changes very well could help parents moderate their teens. Meta's head of product says these changes address particular 3 concerns in an Npr interview.
Will this be the end of the complaints and concerns geared towards Instagram, probably not.
I'm personally on the fence about this type of stuff. On one hand, yes I 100% agree about actually keeping kids safer online (not like the politicians "Think of the kids!" type of "safety"). On the other I don't want anyone to have to give up privacy by having to confirm their age by sending some form of verification, whether that picture/video of ID with birth date on it or having an AI that will inevitably get so many false positives judge you, just to access a service online.
I'm 100% in the second camp. Facebook having my ID is a much bigger issue than having my kids' profile be public. I as a parent can ensure my kids' profiles are acceptable, or mark them as private myself. I can't ensure Facebook deletes my ID after verifying my identity.
Yes, kids should be safer online, and that starts at home. Educate parents and kids about how to stay safe, that's as far as it should go.
I'm also in the second camp. Plus, censoring the bad words on specific users is a few too many steps closer to don't say gay on the internet. Is ass ok but not fuck? Is sex talk forbidden? All mention of anatomy, including general questions about health? How about they ban anti-capitalist language too? The tiktok language phenomenon shows that users will absolutely just make do getting around communication bans, "unalive" and "le$beans" being the most popular. This type of censorship has already happened on other platforms, and it's all bullshit and useless.
I completely agree. I'm reading a book related to 1984, and all of the thought crime and whatnot it talks about is scarily on-point when it comes to social media censorship. For example, "sex crime" is strictly controlled, and in the same chapter that someone gets taken away for getting pregnant, the MC talks about sexual relationships she has and plans to have. Nobody can talk about love or relationships, yet everyone seems to engage in them, or at least one-night stands. In fact, the word used for "abortion" in that book is "unbirth," which is right there with the term "unalived."
Blocking out a huge part of human culture doesn't help anyone, and it doesn't actually work, because people will find a way. What can work is giving users the tools to hide stuff they don't want to see.
The obvious answer is that Facebook should not be used by anyone, ever. The model is cancer, whatever FB does of value for the user can be accomplished without a social media platform.
Choice becomes much, much harder once you listen to accounts about CSAM. Darknet Diaries has a few episodes on this. Some accounts are stomach churning. You can see reasoning of people pushing for the laws
And I agree. Education would go a long way. Much further than some ID verification.
But, see, education makes people smarter. What if people see through the lies of politicians?!
Both politicians and agencies are drooling at the thought of such laws. Because no one answers one simple aspect the people want answered. Who watches the watchers? Who are they accountable to?
Exactly.
People like easy solutions to complex problems. If you don't see the problems, it's easy to assume they don't exist, but what actually happens is that by banning things, you just push them underground, where they fester. Alcohol prohibition created the mafia, which caused so many more problems than alcohol ever did, and it's still around today. Banning drugs seems to have created, or at least strengthened, the drug cartels. I wouldn't be surprised if strict controls around CSAM actually ends up harming more kids as people who would be casual observers end up getting caught up in the worst of it and end up actually harming children. I'm not saying CSAM should be legal or anything like that, I'm just saying the strict censorship of anything close to it is more likely to push someone who is casually interested to go and find it. The more strictly something is controlled, the more valuable it is for the person who controls it.
In other words, it's the Streisand Effect, but for crime.
No, what we need is better education and better (not more) policing.
Anything to prevent getting my i.d in a database, i would actually be ok with using an ai to verify my age by my appearance if it really came down to it and I had to choose legally some form of age verification.
All this is creeping surveillance, and the end goal is not commercial, it's political.
One commandment parents of many people of my age (28) have failed to imprint is - you shall say "nay" and you shall tell jerks to eat shit and die.
There are many distractions, somehow the computer program processing your unencrypted communications being called "AI" becomes important, somehow the difference between that program and the people controlling it becomes important, somehow them being able to censor you becomes important, and somehow requirements to confirm identity become normal.
I felt hot all-encompassing shame many times in my childhood for not remembering things which were unimportant, but people around would remember those. Only now I understand that something in my childhood was a gift.
Seeing what is happening by most general and vague descriptions might help to judge things more soberly.
I'm in the first camp. Instagram is flooded with spam accounts posting links to illicit Telegram channels where actual CSAM is being distributed. The owner of Telegram was also arrested recently for failing to safeguard his platform from such highly illegal activity. Children having easy and often unrestricted access to social media is probably the reason why things have gotten so bad.
Every major social network should be asking for ID verification, but there should be strict safeguards on how that information is used and stored, with hefty fines for failures to safeguard.