Trial finds age assurance can be done, as social media ban deadline looms
Trial finds age assurance can be done, as social media ban deadline looms
A company contracted by the government to assess technologies for verifying the ages of online users says it can be done privately, robustly and effectively.
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Whole thing is a moral panic. No good evidence exists of harms, but nobody needs evidence to believe what they want to.
You could like ban algorithmic endless feeds if that was bad, you could enforce content moderation standards if bad content was the issue. But no, this is just surveillance state expansion and traditional media handwringing being cheerfully assisted by the feckless "think of the children" crowd.
I think the harms are real. They're not exclusive to children.
There are three categories of harm:
- Radicalization, as the algorithm deliberately feeds you bad takes from your political opponents and good takes from your political allies, to keep you engaged.
- Overstimulation, the YouTube Kids channel Cocomelon is way too addictive for kids. This isn't exclusive to social media, and YouTube Kids apparently has an exemption.
- Addiction, social media eats into hours upon hours in kid's days. Time they could spend with their family/friends or processing their emotions, instead they're being numbed out on their phone.
I think we should ban algorithmic recommendations (or strictly limit them), ban the practices of Cocomelon, and ... I'm not sure what we can do about the addiction thing (humans are super prone to addiction). I'd also ban smart-phones in schools, kids should only be allowed flip-phones/brick-phones.
Produce studies and I swear to god if it's that one where they say kids are scroiling Instagram for 9 hours a day when they report using it as a messenging application I will reach through the screen and strangle you.
Legislation should not be based on vibes ffs. I think Mark Zuckerburg should be hung in a public square and skinned alive for the evil he has wrought with shit like aiding genocide but there is not sufficient evidence that social media, which covers everything from usenet to lemmy to Instagram to youtube, causes harms warranting age based bans. This is a world where we allow coca cola and factory farming, "it's probably bad for some people some of the time" is clearly not the bar for criminalisation.
Produce studies saying to say it's not harmful, or be quiet. Social media is too new, and all the psychologists that know the implications are working for the social media companies to make it more addictive. We don't know whether social media is harmful, but there is ample anecdotal evidence of the three issues I raised. I should not I haven't actually looked for any evidence because who can be bothered using Google for a Lemmy (Reddit) argument.
In my experience, the type of engagement that social media encourages is not healthy in any way, and this is not on the level of books or movies (some video games fall into the same category though).
Or let's just go with privacy laws. Any information on engagement with their platforms should be depersonalized before use in content recommendation and ads. Users should need to manually select the criteria of content they want to see, rather than TikTok deciding they're autistic or something and doing that automatically. In practice though this'd probably just means there'd only be the trending page, but as long as it's useless (and we'd need to rely on human recommendations) then all's fine.
Produce studies saying to say it’s not harmful, or be quiet.
My dude, that is not how epistemology works. You cannot prove a negative empirically.
You can't prove it, but you can evidence it. And in some cases you can prove it (we've proven vaccines don't cause Autism, for example).
Although this whole "produce studies" approach is such BS. The "do your own research" slogan is what got us anti-vaxxers (plus, and I can't stress this enough, I really can't be bothered). Expert consensus is how we should approach it. The experts know how to read the studies.
When you get to university take a couple of electives in philosophy, including philosophy of science.
Can't be bothered.