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Norway is to enforce a strict minimum age limit on social media of fifteen as the government ramped up its campaign against tech companies it says are “pitted against small children's brains”
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- Title
- Norway to increase minimum age limit on social media to 15 to protect children
- Authors
- Miranda Bryant
- Published
- Oct 23 2024
- Word count
- 508 words
Tangential but France wanting to confiscate smartphones at school nationwide reminded me of this:
Back when I was in middle school, my phone and Nintendo DS were occasionally confiscated even when I'd only used them outside of class. We didn't have the manipulative infinite scrolling algorithms back then (or could afford the data for it at any rate) and school faculty still found an excuse to do it for some reason. I was a straight-A student so it wasn't my performance either.
Anyways, I'm still salty about it as an adult. At least there's an actual scientific reason to do it now.
I'm on the education committee at my daughter's school, and the current focus is on technology use. The usual technology policy is about how far the bans go, which is not education at all. How can you learn about something you don't have access to? I think we need to focus on digital literacy - password and security practices, learning to treat people on the other side of the screen in a human way, learning basic skills like word processing, presentations, spreadsheets.
For what it's worth, I'm not opposed to social media ban. Most social media is toxic (or at least has the capacity to be) and little value in digital literacy for school age kids. But that's not the same thing as phone or technology ban.
I think hard tech bans are easier because they don't require much thought or engagement. But this tech is going to be part of our kids lives whether we like it or not. They're not going to reach their majority and magically become wise in its use with no training.
I'm starting to think that one of the reasons tech stuff is so chaotic is that everyone is self taught. I don't mean programming, but things like social media use, being safe online, etc. One result of this is that social norms are all over the place, another is that the population in general, not just teens, is not prepared for the problems that the tech brings.
I doubt that banning it for a certain age group will be effective. We've all watch porn way before we were 18 and evading enforcement of this will be laughably easy.
I've seen more trends of banning smartphones in classes which I am more a fan of. Digital literacy, emotional intelligence and programming are becoming more and more important. We've created entire social ecosystems involving manipulation, attention grabbing, and more.
I can't see a simple ban for kids and young teens work here. In theory I'd be supportive of it. But enforcing it is another matter, and banning may make regulations more difficult.
They're talking about enforcing the requirement through use of the national ID system called BankID (used for digital authentication to all services that require identification - banks, government services, health services etc).
I am personally not a fan, as I want a certain level of privacy online. Requiring BankID would give the social media service a guaranteed verification that the account is connected to me (they probably know already, but eh), and will absolutely lead to me abandoning most, if not all of my social media accounts.
Of course, tech literate people will just VPN to another country or whatever to avoid the ban, but a geo block is enough for 95% of people to comply/not deal with the hassle of avoiding it
I’m also broadly on the “banning stuff doesn’t really work” side of things, but I do wonder if this situation in particular has a couple of extra factors in its favour.
Social media by definition operates on network effects, and it seems like even if the ban is, say, 30% directly effective it’d go a long way to disrupting that. It gives all the parents who were otherwise on the fence a much stronger push to go with their gut, all the kids who are worried a way to save face, and puts a direct roadblock in the way of all those who simply don’t know how to circumvent it.
Suddenly whatever platform isn’t the one place where everyone is anymore - and the pressure to be there or face social ostracism starts to evaporate.