I don't think it's unreasonable from a conceptual point of view to ban children from social media, but the issue is that the only way to actually implement the ban either involves very intrusive...
I don't think it's unreasonable from a conceptual point of view to ban children from social media, but the issue is that the only way to actually implement the ban either involves very intrusive data collection or being completely ineffectual.
As always I think this is an initiative with a vague layer of good faith but a load of bad incentive, all while ignoring the core problem of these platforms. It's not the act of being online...
As always I think this is an initiative with a vague layer of good faith but a load of bad incentive, all while ignoring the core problem of these platforms. It's not the act of being online talking so much as the proprietary algorithms designed to exploit human psychology and maximize engagement. Not to mention the unfettered data collection.
Any government not going after that and trying to just sweep everything under the rug is at best playing political theater and at worst trying to enable mass surveillance of its citizens.
The issue with going after the algorithms is that your legislation needs to have teeth for that to work. Either rising fines that are a percentage of a businesses' revenue, or banning the service...
The issue with going after the algorithms is that your legislation needs to have teeth for that to work. Either rising fines that are a percentage of a businesses' revenue, or banning the service if it doesn't comply.
But banning it is nearly impossible. The UK already tried it with porn. It just doesn't fucking work, you either need to government to verify the user's age, which the UK didn't even bother to implement, or send your very personal identifiable information to some fuck-off porn site providers somewhere.
The EU is trying it's best with its own implementation of zero knowledge age verification, but we'll have to see how well that'll work.
It doesn't work with some porn sites because there often aren't UK sides to the businesses to target. It however did work with the big porn sites with targeted adverts to the UK. With "social...
It doesn't work with some porn sites because there often aren't UK sides to the businesses to target. It however did work with the big porn sites with targeted adverts to the UK. With "social media" there are huge advertising and other profit segments in every market so you can absolutely force compliance with fines.
The only thing that I'd be worried about when it comes to forcing compliance is the Americans creating a trade-war with the UK over it. But if the rest of europe does the right thing then the UK would hopefully reintegrate into the EU common market.
[edit] Also a lot of "social media" companies did introduce age checks to comply with the legislation - even smaller companies like BlueSky did. So they could absolutely extend those checks to block access completely to anyone under the age of 18. They don't want to but their corporate interests typically don't align with those of their users.
Of course some sites are going to comply and some are not. But the UK government has forced its own citizens to expose their own private data to random companies around the world in order to...
Of course some sites are going to comply and some are not. But the UK government has forced its own citizens to expose their own private data to random companies around the world in order to verify their age, and these include pictures of faces and the matchid IDs, which of course contain a ton more data than just your date of birth.
The main issue is that only some sites will comply, and porn, for the most part, is porn. It doesn't matter wherever you get it on xvideos or pornhub, but if xvideos doesn't force an age check, then people will start going there. But these sites are naturally more unregulated and will contain porn that is even more harmful in what it depicts and how it was created.
Social media companies are more exposed, you are correct, and there is more money to be made, but the ultimate issue is that you can still easily get around this with a VPN.
Yes, hence the "political theater". There aren't that many sites employing addictive algorithms like this, so it's much easier to regulate and enforce than something as ever-present as porn....
Yes, hence the "political theater". There aren't that many sites employing addictive algorithms like this, so it's much easier to regulate and enforce than something as ever-present as porn. That's exclusively going after the big boys. But no one wants or has the power to challenge the trillionaire tech corps.
I'm not even sure of you need strong regulation. Just require transparency as much as possible and audits where they claim its not possible. Truth is often the best disinfectant.
The best idea I've seen so far is a system involving physical tokens which are sold at physical stores. The tokens would grant access to age restricted online content for a limited period of time...
The best idea I've seen so far is a system involving physical tokens which are sold at physical stores.
The tokens would grant access to age restricted online content for a limited period of time before expiring.
The tokens would hold no identifiable information.
Websites would have to have a license to accept a token but would not have to obtain any identifying information from the user.
Stores would have to have a license to sell these tokens and would be required to view a customer's ID to verify their age before selling them a token or risk losing their license.
Purchasing for, giving, or otherwise enabling an under aged person to obtain a token would be against the law.
Is this system perfect? Far from it, but it's better than requiring every age restricted site to verify and store identifying information.
This would essentially make access to age restricted online content function just like access to alcohol. Age is verified but the personal information is not actually stored.
This sounds like it would be really easy to develop a black market for. If the tokens are not tied back to the identity of the person (for privacy), then the token could just be sold. Being...
This sounds like it would be really easy to develop a black market for. If the tokens are not tied back to the identity of the person (for privacy), then the token could just be sold. Being illegal is not a strong deterrent if the means of detection is basically zero. A better system would be this same token system but rather than buying from a store, have it be tied to your phone's secure element. A government office could verify an ID to a phone, anonymous short-lived tokens are generated against that identity, and the tokens are tied to biometrics. Safe, private, and secure.
Like I said, it would essentially be just like access to alcohol :) My concern with this is that it could be a price gate. If the tokens are their own physical thing then they could conceivably be...
This sounds like it would be really easy to develop a black market for.
Like I said, it would essentially be just like access to alcohol :)
A better system would be this same token system but rather than buying from a store, have it be tied to your phone's secure element.
My concern with this is that it could be a price gate. If the tokens are their own physical thing then they could conceivably be just a paper card with a scratch-off to reveal a QR code or something. Requiring a phone with a secure element means people who can't afford one are out of luck. Though to be honest, I'm not up to date with secure elements in phones. Do only higher end phones have them or have they made their way into even budget phones now?
Also, having the token on a phone doesn't really remove the possibility for a black market, only abstracts it. If phones with secure elements are inexpensive enough to not exclude less wealthy people then the reality is that a black market could just swap cheap phones instead of the tokens.
There really isn't a perfect solution for this. Either you're giving up privacy or you're making it easier to circumvent the age gate. All we can do is try to find a middle ground that's acceptable enough.
Every iPhone since 2014 has had a Secure Enclave. The Android market is much more fragmented, and I am less familiar with it. But I think Google pay requires a secure element. So any phone that...
Every iPhone since 2014 has had a Secure Enclave. The Android market is much more fragmented, and I am less familiar with it. But I think Google pay requires a secure element. So any phone that supports Google pay should have a secure element.
I'm pretty sure secure elements are cheap at this point. Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0 to be available; Microsoft wouldn't make that move unless it was easily ubiquitous else they would be skewering...
I'm pretty sure secure elements are cheap at this point. Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0 to be available; Microsoft wouldn't make that move unless it was easily ubiquitous else they would be skewering their own market share.
Also, having the token on a phone doesn't really remove the possibility for a black market, only abstracts it.
The way this would work is that your phone/laptop/whatever's secure element would hold a signed verification that you are Tom Scott born 1980 and whenever an age challenge comes up, the secure element would require a biometric check from the known Tom Scott before releasing a token verifying that Tom Scott is 18+. There can't be a widespread black market here because even if Tom Scott sold his phone to someone hoping to pretend to be Tom Scott, the secure element wouldn't release a token without a valid biometric check.
Physical tokens is just adding a human element to the above and leaking tokens into an unsecured medium of exchange. It makes no sense aside from not requiring a phone, but the countries debating these checks are already moved into near-universal ownership of phones so I'm not seeing this to be a huge problem.
Speaking as someone living in the UK who occasionally wishes to access legally-required-to-be-age-gated adult content I can assure you that there's no need for an "or" in that sentence.
very intrusive data collection or being completely ineffectual.
Speaking as someone living in the UK who occasionally wishes to access legally-required-to-be-age-gated adult content I can assure you that there's no need for an "or" in that sentence.
They should instead identify functionality that is harmful and require platforms to remove it. People probably won’t try as hard to get around a block for algorithmic feeds and would just resign...
They should instead identify functionality that is harmful and require platforms to remove it. People probably won’t try as hard to get around a block for algorithmic feeds and would just resign themselves to a chronological version of X or whatever. Hell, some people would turn on their VPNs to point to the UK if they did this.
Honestly, a complete social media ban for anyone sub-99 seems reasonable to me. But when you move from broad goal to implementation, it all gets very messy. How do you know the age of the person...
Honestly, a complete social media ban for anyone sub-99 seems reasonable to me. But when you move from broad goal to implementation, it all gets very messy. How do you know the age of the person behind the device? What information do you need to gather to make that happen? How do you regulate new phones to ensure the age of their user is tracked? What about a VPN? What if a site in a foreign country doesn't track people the way you want them to? I'm not going to say that the goal isn't worthy, but I will say there'll be a lot of side-effects corrosive to any degree of personal anonymity on the internet.
The most likely challenger to the current Prime Minister from within his own party, Andy Burnham, concurs (via X): Also, the teaching union NNASUWT is lobbying the government ban all young people...
The most likely challenger to the current Prime Minister from within his own party, Andy Burnham, concurs (via X):
I find myself agreeing with a lot of what Kemi Badenoch is saying about children and social media. It seems to me parents would welcome a cross-party consensus around much bolder action.
Also, the teaching union NNASUWT is lobbying the government ban all young people from social media platforms (via Telegraph).
I realise that views on social media for children are mixed on Tildes but I'd support a complete ban for under-16s too.
I would be happy with it just being a checkbox, like it currently is for under-13s. That way I don't have to be the Bad Guy when I tell Kid they're not allowed on the socials. "Sorry kiddo, it's...
I would be happy with it just being a checkbox, like it currently is for under-13s.
That way I don't have to be the Bad Guy when I tell Kid they're not allowed on the socials. "Sorry kiddo, it's the law, just like how you have to go to school."
That's assuming they will be interested when the time comes anyway, most of the current teenagers I know do not care about traditional social media in the first place - The Kids tend to use private discord and whatsapp groups and sometimes instagram, they're not on facebook or twitter or whatever. (btw, Meta are v worried about this trend)
Then I can enforce it myself because until Kid is an adult I will have admin privileges over their internet devices. But I also hope we can have a proper conversation about it anyway.
To me, the value would be fragmenting the landscape for that age group. Would banning social media impact a site like Tildes or hobby specific sites? While it's a dated case today, my time as part...
To me, the value would be fragmenting the landscape for that age group. Would banning social media impact a site like Tildes or hobby specific sites?
While it's a dated case today, my time as part of random communities online meant that I still needed to the physical world for friends. Social media wasn't all encompassing then, and to me, that seems like the main goal.
I don't think it's unreasonable from a conceptual point of view to ban children from social media, but the issue is that the only way to actually implement the ban either involves very intrusive data collection or being completely ineffectual.
As always I think this is an initiative with a vague layer of good faith but a load of bad incentive, all while ignoring the core problem of these platforms. It's not the act of being online talking so much as the proprietary algorithms designed to exploit human psychology and maximize engagement. Not to mention the unfettered data collection.
Any government not going after that and trying to just sweep everything under the rug is at best playing political theater and at worst trying to enable mass surveillance of its citizens.
The issue with going after the algorithms is that your legislation needs to have teeth for that to work. Either rising fines that are a percentage of a businesses' revenue, or banning the service if it doesn't comply.
But banning it is nearly impossible. The UK already tried it with porn. It just doesn't fucking work, you either need to government to verify the user's age, which the UK didn't even bother to implement, or send your very personal identifiable information to some fuck-off porn site providers somewhere.
The EU is trying it's best with its own implementation of zero knowledge age verification, but we'll have to see how well that'll work.
It doesn't work with some porn sites because there often aren't UK sides to the businesses to target. It however did work with the big porn sites with targeted adverts to the UK. With "social media" there are huge advertising and other profit segments in every market so you can absolutely force compliance with fines.
The only thing that I'd be worried about when it comes to forcing compliance is the Americans creating a trade-war with the UK over it. But if the rest of europe does the right thing then the UK would hopefully reintegrate into the EU common market.
[edit] Also a lot of "social media" companies did introduce age checks to comply with the legislation - even smaller companies like BlueSky did. So they could absolutely extend those checks to block access completely to anyone under the age of 18. They don't want to but their corporate interests typically don't align with those of their users.
Of course some sites are going to comply and some are not. But the UK government has forced its own citizens to expose their own private data to random companies around the world in order to verify their age, and these include pictures of faces and the matchid IDs, which of course contain a ton more data than just your date of birth.
The main issue is that only some sites will comply, and porn, for the most part, is porn. It doesn't matter wherever you get it on xvideos or pornhub, but if xvideos doesn't force an age check, then people will start going there. But these sites are naturally more unregulated and will contain porn that is even more harmful in what it depicts and how it was created.
Social media companies are more exposed, you are correct, and there is more money to be made, but the ultimate issue is that you can still easily get around this with a VPN.
Yes, hence the "political theater". There aren't that many sites employing addictive algorithms like this, so it's much easier to regulate and enforce than something as ever-present as porn. That's exclusively going after the big boys. But no one wants or has the power to challenge the trillionaire tech corps.
I'm not even sure of you need strong regulation. Just require transparency as much as possible and audits where they claim its not possible. Truth is often the best disinfectant.
The best idea I've seen so far is a system involving physical tokens which are sold at physical stores.
The tokens would grant access to age restricted online content for a limited period of time before expiring.
The tokens would hold no identifiable information.
Websites would have to have a license to accept a token but would not have to obtain any identifying information from the user.
Stores would have to have a license to sell these tokens and would be required to view a customer's ID to verify their age before selling them a token or risk losing their license.
Purchasing for, giving, or otherwise enabling an under aged person to obtain a token would be against the law.
Is this system perfect? Far from it, but it's better than requiring every age restricted site to verify and store identifying information.
This would essentially make access to age restricted online content function just like access to alcohol. Age is verified but the personal information is not actually stored.
This sounds like it would be really easy to develop a black market for. If the tokens are not tied back to the identity of the person (for privacy), then the token could just be sold. Being illegal is not a strong deterrent if the means of detection is basically zero. A better system would be this same token system but rather than buying from a store, have it be tied to your phone's secure element. A government office could verify an ID to a phone, anonymous short-lived tokens are generated against that identity, and the tokens are tied to biometrics. Safe, private, and secure.
Like I said, it would essentially be just like access to alcohol :)
My concern with this is that it could be a price gate. If the tokens are their own physical thing then they could conceivably be just a paper card with a scratch-off to reveal a QR code or something. Requiring a phone with a secure element means people who can't afford one are out of luck. Though to be honest, I'm not up to date with secure elements in phones. Do only higher end phones have them or have they made their way into even budget phones now?
Also, having the token on a phone doesn't really remove the possibility for a black market, only abstracts it. If phones with secure elements are inexpensive enough to not exclude less wealthy people then the reality is that a black market could just swap cheap phones instead of the tokens.
There really isn't a perfect solution for this. Either you're giving up privacy or you're making it easier to circumvent the age gate. All we can do is try to find a middle ground that's acceptable enough.
Every iPhone since 2014 has had a Secure Enclave. The Android market is much more fragmented, and I am less familiar with it. But I think Google pay requires a secure element. So any phone that supports Google pay should have a secure element.
I'm pretty sure secure elements are cheap at this point. Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0 to be available; Microsoft wouldn't make that move unless it was easily ubiquitous else they would be skewering their own market share.
The way this would work is that your phone/laptop/whatever's secure element would hold a signed verification that you are Tom Scott born 1980 and whenever an age challenge comes up, the secure element would require a biometric check from the known Tom Scott before releasing a token verifying that Tom Scott is 18+. There can't be a widespread black market here because even if Tom Scott sold his phone to someone hoping to pretend to be Tom Scott, the secure element wouldn't release a token without a valid biometric check.
Physical tokens is just adding a human element to the above and leaking tokens into an unsecured medium of exchange. It makes no sense aside from not requiring a phone, but the countries debating these checks are already moved into near-universal ownership of phones so I'm not seeing this to be a huge problem.
Speaking as someone living in the UK who occasionally wishes to access legally-required-to-be-age-gated adult content I can assure you that there's no need for an "or" in that sentence.
They should instead identify functionality that is harmful and require platforms to remove it. People probably won’t try as hard to get around a block for algorithmic feeds and would just resign themselves to a chronological version of X or whatever. Hell, some people would turn on their VPNs to point to the UK if they did this.
Honestly, a complete social media ban for anyone sub-99 seems reasonable to me. But when you move from broad goal to implementation, it all gets very messy. How do you know the age of the person behind the device? What information do you need to gather to make that happen? How do you regulate new phones to ensure the age of their user is tracked? What about a VPN? What if a site in a foreign country doesn't track people the way you want them to? I'm not going to say that the goal isn't worthy, but I will say there'll be a lot of side-effects corrosive to any degree of personal anonymity on the internet.
banning MPs from social media would probably massively increase the quality of discourse in the house of commons lol
The most likely challenger to the current Prime Minister from within his own party, Andy Burnham, concurs (via X):
Also, the teaching union NNASUWT is lobbying the government ban all young people from social media platforms (via Telegraph).
I realise that views on social media for children are mixed on Tildes but I'd support a complete ban for under-16s too.
The biggest concern I have is how that would be implemented in concern to privacy of everyone.
I would be happy with it just being a checkbox, like it currently is for under-13s.
That way I don't have to be the Bad Guy when I tell Kid they're not allowed on the socials. "Sorry kiddo, it's the law, just like how you have to go to school."
That's assuming they will be interested when the time comes anyway, most of the current teenagers I know do not care about traditional social media in the first place - The Kids tend to use private discord and whatsapp groups and sometimes instagram, they're not on facebook or twitter or whatever. (btw, Meta are v worried about this trend)
Then I can enforce it myself because until Kid is an adult I will have admin privileges over their internet devices. But I also hope we can have a proper conversation about it anyway.
To me, the value would be fragmenting the landscape for that age group. Would banning social media impact a site like Tildes or hobby specific sites?
While it's a dated case today, my time as part of random communities online meant that I still needed to the physical world for friends. Social media wasn't all encompassing then, and to me, that seems like the main goal.