Most parties in the Danish parliament said they support implementing a 15-year-old minimum age requirement for social media. It is not yet known which social media platforms will be affected.
Most parties in the Danish parliament said they support implementing a 15-year-old minimum age requirement for social media. It is not yet known which social media platforms will be affected.
Regardless of the practicality of enforcing this I think it’s a good idea. Most social media is very predatory and do not contribute in any positive way to a child that’s growing up. I’ve seen what especially TikTok does to a young kids brain, it’s almost like it’s reprogrammed to not have any focus and the addictive part of it makes them always want more TikTok.
Wouldn’t it be better to teach children how to deal with that kind of technology instead of just banning it? Bans similar to drug bans will only make this go underground, allowing the social Media companies to argue there are no children on the platform.
While I can see your point, I don’t think education can stand up to companies with more money than we can conceive that have teams of people making it as addictive as possible and shoehorning in into every aspect of life. If education were enough, nobody would use tobacco, either.
One of the biggest benefits of young people not being on social media sites or having to at least pretend to be somebody else that I see is that their mistakes can be private. Nobody deserves to be publicly shackled to who they were as a 14 year old dipshit.
I agree that education can’t prepare us entirely for social media or for life as a whole, but I see this proposed ban as the easy way out for the government. If social media is a toxic place for children, why and shouldn’t we try to fix it instead of just not allowing children? And if we agree that social media is toxic for children, what makes it ok for adults?
You can’t fix those companies because you can’t fix their incentives.
There’s a ton of things that are acceptable for adults that aren’t for children. I bet you can come up with at least three.
Yeah I don’t think the problem is children on social media. I think it’s social media being entirely unregulated. It exists to steal data, invade privacy, and influence people. That’s entirely nefarious and blocking children from accessing it isn’t going to fix any of that.
It would be nice if we could simply teach kids, but there are things even adults don’t understand. That’s where govt comes in. What the major part of population doesn’t comprehend might be the things from which the govt tries to protect. Then there is a fine line between protecting people and plain breaking basic human rights (like the whole encryption ban fiasco).
Teacher tells a kid to be careful of social media, but the kid’s favourite influencer tells the kid their teacher is lame and they shouldn’t listen to that. Who is the kid going to believe.
Also we don’t let kids into bars until they’re of a certain age. Sure kids are going to still do shenanigans to get in and sometimes they might succeed, but it reduces children getting drunk at bars by significant amount. And even when kids are able to do something they’re prohibited from, they at least know it’s not a normal thing and might understand there’s danger in what they’re doing.
Wouldn’t it be better to forbid these predatory features / dark patterns / addictive design etc. in a general way ? What is bad for young people is not good for older people either. There is a difference between free speech and using manipulation.
Exactly, I wouldn’t even shy from making it banned under 18 years old. Even teenagers are affected mentally and those few years more would make wonders. Just how many teenage girls comitted a suicides because of facebook/instagram.
It’s sounds like a good thing on the surface. But this is the kind of thing parents should be doing, not governments. I don’t know how parents just let their kids doomscroll tiktok and shit all day, why have kids if you arent prepared to raise them?
Parents can’t compete with the resources of these unimaginably monied corporations with teams of people trying to get everybody on their site as much as possible.
Banning things like this sets a dangerous precedent for state control and is easily worked around anyway. The sites should be regulated in other ways, like what content they are exposing to kids and giving guardians more controls over their childrens accounts.
But the real issue is deep rooted societal issues, with a lack of education, care and support for a lot of our youth.
As opposed to corporate control.
That’s an individual solution to a systemic issue.
So all we have to do is fix society? Then yeah, let’s just do that. We can probably finish that off by the end of the year, yeah? Education should only take a week or two at most. Then next year we can finally focus on climate change.
Youre right its too difficult, will take too long, so not lets start at all! Let’s just give up and start requiring ID for everything instead, that will do it!
Just because I don’t think regulating large corporations is a “dangerous precedent” doesn’t mean I think IDs are a decent solution. Your nebulous “deep rooted societal issues” cannot be defined let alone solved. I was mostly making light of that simple solution, not saying complex problems aren’t worth tackling. Anyway, I’m done talking to somebody that puts words in my mouth and tries to make issues into a binary choice devoid of all complexity.
Cute.
I mean sure, parents should be doing it but that doesnt mean the government also can’t. Im firmly against any kind of age verification laws that might come attached with it, but also would argue that social media has no value for kids under 15. It definitely shouldnt be normalized. If its banned some kids will still end up doing it, but if they cant use their own birthday to sign up and they cant post blatant pictures of themselves on their profile and not all of their friends are on it then it becomes a lot less desirable also. These sites never should have been allowing sign ups by children in the first place. Facebook and instagram require you to be 13 at least, which is good but 15 is better.
Social media has been “banned” in that way since forever, as you said, most sites required you to be 13 or whatever and kids just lied about their age then. Kids just wont post pictures, they are still exposed to all that shit on there though. They cannot properly enforce a ban like this without ID verification, which is a fucking disaster.