EXCLUSIVE: EU could announce social media ban for kids in September
Von der Leyen is expected to use her annual State of the Union speech to unveil plans for EU-wide age restrictions on social media
What a disgusting rage bait title.
Please no matter the news do not invite others to give up. You might be totally depleted. You might have fought teeth and nails against problems but if you want to give up let others try.
This is deeply problematic and of course precisely helps those you do agree with.
Do not fall prey to learned helplessness.
If politicians and lobbyists can keep on proposing a law until it goes through, so can we, including the very politicians who do not represent our views.
The situation might be bleak and I can understand the frustration but this kind of title is not helping.
It should be dependent on the sites offering adult material to have an account with a login. All other non-adult sites keep operating as before and kids can peruse freely. If a kid steals a password that’s a kid thing, not a system thing. Nothing is foolproof and people get slapped in the face with shit they don’t want to see all the time. Education and proper implementation is the key, not restriction and censorship.
Adoption is perhaps the impetus needed for common sense to prevail. If everyone keeps spending all their money at a partcular casino, they aren’t going to change a thing. But if everyone stopped coming, you can be damn sure they start looking at what they can reform. Nothing improves if people don’t start to care about the security of their PII. That’s a huge rock.
Yeah. For sure. Nothing is simply black and white anymore. Lots to consider.
While this is obviously bad, I don’t think there’s ever really a total win or loss when it comes to this stuff. It’s a constant fight. They’ll bring shit like this in and it’ll seem hopeless, then someone will bypass it and it’ll go back and forth. Same as ad blocking or DRM or countless other things.
It’d be nice to not have to deal with it in the first place, but we’ll deal with it sooner or later I’m sure.
It’s just more enshttification that wastes everyone’s time.
For one, they want all our data, they want to know all we do online.
For other, they found out children who grew exposed to people’s opinions online grows more critical that kids that grew on they caged propaganda. Not good for their business to have citizens that can actually think.
So your take is that social media is actually good for kids? Any citation for this?
Without access to that the children view of the world gets limited by what their parent’s and their government said. It’s just basic logic .
Anyway if you want to talk in papers,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK594763/
This says that social media have both GOOD and BAD effects on kids and teenagers. Both.
I hate EU. Nothing but bad news from them.
I don’t know where u live but EU brings good things too. Go and ask the Brits who are mourning the departure they voted for 10 years ago. Of course there are a lot of things that could be improved but that is the responsibility of us citizens.
African folks love the kindness of Europeans.
African folks love the kindness of Europeans.
… is a statement which, even if correct, contributes absolutely nothing to the current debate. Feel free to open your own thread about it.
Are you trying to instruct me as an European? The posts above were about good and bad things in the EU and people who wanted to be accepted into it. Don’t close your eyes when convenient.
Yeesh, that smells even worse than what I originally thought. 😬
Whatever buddy you can’t learn anything but others might
You can shove your dogwhistles right out of here. What kind of socialist are you anyway? National?
There is a difference between psyops that make you think EU only does bad things and reality. EU has been the most successful peace project in history. It has lifted millions of people out of poverty too. There will always be political tensions and work to be done. We can never rest on our laurels but if you honestly believe what you wrote, then congrats you’ve been brainwashed by the Epstein class.
As an American, I envy their news
I’ve been trying to capitalize on the commotion about all this in /r/privacy to bring more people to Lemmy. I’ve converted at least one redditor already!
So how is that going to work exactly?
Facebook is easy, you force the company or block it.
But how about, say, Lemmy, or other self hosted places maybe where where people do use their real names? How is any of this supposed to work?
But how about, say, Lemmy, or other self hosted places
Well… how many Lemmy instances are hosted in the EU, Canada, USA, Australia, UK, …? They can be threatened under the full power of the state, unless they req ID checks.
OK, you may say, just use one in Tuvalu! But someone below mentioned it. Govs will not think, gosh darn it! I guess we got foiled by those rascally nerds! Pack it up guys, we lost! No, they will double down. They will create national firewalls. VPN bans. Already the UK, and Utah in the USA are pushing for VPN bans. They will make examples of people, to deter the rest.
It’s very hard to solve political probs with technical methods.
I mean, kids are smart when it comes to technology, some even more than me who got a degree in computer science.
They’ll find an alternative, maybe they’ll to go back to personal websites, or join the fediverse, who knows.
Imma stay optimistic
Diea it make tye Fediverse illegal?
Strange title. Big tech lost huge on this. They want to advertise to your kids. These bans make sense to protect the vulnerable.
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How would a VPN help at all if you still need an ID?
And maybe I’m wrong but I find it hard to believe that kids will purchase black market accounts for this. Aren’t the IDs verified by a gov database? Anyone selling the account would be legally responsible for it and identifiable.
This is different from pirating stuff where no IDs are involved.
They’d sell accounts with other people’s ID? Those will inevitably get leaked. So for example your ID will get leaked and used and you’ll be the one to face the consequences. This is not new at all.
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The VPN works because you can use the service in another country that doesn’t require digital ID.
Ah that makes sense.
Holy shit, is this what people actually believe?
That’s honestly wild.
Literally 1984. Those who will refuse to sell their private info to big capitalist will be limited, thus they will be information restricted.
Not even close. This will fragment the internet and take power away from surveillance capitalists. A huge amount of people will simply disengage from the Epstein class brainwashing. I’m looking forward to it. The internet used to be way more interesting and fun when it was fragmented.
They ruined it now
Maybe more akin to Brave New World, and the “savages” who don’t live in the fucked up society they created.
Just minus the soma holidays
Can we not stay up to date with what is happening without owning a social media account? I think the only thing we are missing is social media trends that change frequently.
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Should be banning endless manipulative opaque algorithmic presentations for everyone.
Yeah. Honestly. For platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, mandate chronological feeds of only people you have followed, paginated at like 30.
And mandate they integrate with interoperability standards like activitypub etc so if they start manipulating feeds then we can just exit stage left without losing contact with people we like.
But… That would force them to provide a great user experience in order to retain users!! That’s an unacceptable burden on the largest companies in the world!!
Require age verification only if you want to get algorithmic recommendations. That way you can still engage in the social internet anonymously as an adult.
The recommendation algorithms give American big tech way too much political sway in Europe and ideally they should be banned entirely, but age verification at least gives the appearance that this is “for the children” and not something with (justifiable) political motivations.
But its not age verification thats actually being implemented. It’s identity verification mislabelled to take advantage of dumb legislation with yet more privacy over reach.
It’s not an age restriction. It’s a mandatory ID for everybody. They know we hate them, and are afraid. Perhaps they should make a law against killer drones instead.
Now to ban it for all the other age groups, too. /s but only kinda
Kinda with you in spirit. How I think about it is… it is harmful for both adults and children. Esp in big-tech co form. FB, IG, TT, X, and w/e. There’s a lot of research about it. But the cure can be worse than the disease. What the EU wants to do is not the right answer to address the immense harms of social media to our world.
Both the US and Canada have similar bills on boil. Both are also terrible ideas.
I would never have believed it possible that almost all politicians of ostensibly democratic countries almost simultaneously agree to prevent young people from having fun, being happy and finding meaning and fulfillment in their lives. How do these people think of themselves as the good guys?
to prevent young people from having fun, being happy and finding meaning and fulfillment in their lives.
Hasn’t virtually every single study ever performed on the subject found a strong, direct link between unhappiness and social media use?
Hasn’t virtually every single study ever performed on the subject found a strong, direct link between unhappiness and social media use?
From what I’ve seen, the answer is it’s complicated. On avg, you’re right, and it prob does cause unhappiness and mental health probs. But there are unique situations where it can be helpful. Ex, people who do not fit norms of thier peers, and find healthy connections with others more like themselves. So it has no single, simple universal answer.
The algos, esp on big tech social media like FB, IG, TT, X, etc, are very much designed to make you unhappy and outraged. Even the data scientists who designed the algos have testified to that fact before the US congress. B/c anger and outrage is the most powerful way to make you engage more. TT’s internal research shows the more you use TT, the more probs you have with cognitive skills like memory formation, empathy, and anxiety.
Ofc, the harms of social media doesn’t mean these bills are the right way to handle that. I believe we have a prob. But this is not the right solution.
To a large degree, yes, but blanket bans on social media use for minors will fail for multiple reasons.
- This has already been the case in Australia, and the latest numbers indicate that a vast majority of youth still access social media via black/grey market account purchasing, VPNs, and other methods.
- The ban doesn’t include some popular platforms like Telegram, which arguably provide a more risky experience, due to it being a popular platform for criminal activities.
- Taking away a huge swath of social platforms from kids without providing any constructive or healthy alternatives will mainly encourage destructive behaviors.
Point 3:
Adults have been making the outside more and more hostile for kids. There’s no more third spaces. So like you said, they’re removing a third space with nothing to replace it with.
On the bright side, young people are learning about circumventing government censorship.
Very true, but that may make things worse down the line. Once they realize that kids are circumventing their restrictions, they won’t think, “Hmm, maybe a blanket ban of social media for minors wasn’t a great idea.” They’re just going to double down and say that there needs to be more hardcore restrictions on all internet/computer activity. More sensorship, more data harvesting, mandatory governement spyware in all devices.
Essentially the Great Firewall in China. Many governments have already expressed interest in modeling national internet access after China.
I wonder how much more effective the Australian ban will be when peer countries follow suite and erodes network effect.
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Youtube is a massive problem for boys. There may be a couple of educational things on there but it’s adjacent to awful recommended content.
I would debate the value of the “educational” content as well. We certainly aren’t getting smarter through the internet. Read a book, find a mentor, stay in school.
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Youtube as a platform is trash (in my opinion). Not to say there aren’t some gems in there.
I’m not familiar with the channels you mentioned but trust your judgment. I would love to see a platform curated with high quality content.
“Hey mom and dad can I use ‘historyTube’” “Absolutely!”
Easy.
The analogies don’t really hold. Traditional Broadcasters have some standards. Jackass is Disney compared to the back alley swamp that is YouTube.
Think about the experience of going into a library or bookstore vs. YouTube, the content mix is not comparable.
The algorithms, content scale, and access is another world.
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The Australian ban, and proposed bans in other countries (generally I only looked at a couple) aren’t targeting things like Nebula though, focus is on large scale user to user platforms.
I just checked out YouTube front page in a fresh browser and it’s several tiers below Romantasy in my opinion. You may have a more personalized experience, but the front door of Youtube is… nauseating.
The medium matters as well, the audio, visuals, length, like a sleezy, hyper active content casino.
Anyway, I cheer for any friction added to these tech companies because they are doing so much harm, so anything to slow them down.
But I do get the concerns around IDs and privacy (I personally wouldn’t provide any). I think regulatory capture concerns are real as well. My preference would be on targeting the recommendation systems, and also making the platforms liable for content they are broadcasting.
We certainly aren’t getting smarter through the internet.
Speak for yourself. I am, without a doubt.
If that is so, which I do not know, the only logical explanation is that people who are already unhappy, for unrelated reasons, are more likely to need to find at least some happiness in their lives by participating in online communities.
because these are not democratic countries, these countries are the same that gave birth to fascism and pushed for years for the surveillance state you so fondly complain about in china, the same countries that kill people based on metadata, this is the logical conclusion. as always, ewwwrope is filled to the brim with the flowery phrases of rhetoric and not actual praxis on any meaningful thing that could imply the wellbeing of their citizens.
you’re shocked that the countries that love to bomb children abroad also dont like children at home?
also the epstein stuff.
Most people support these social media age gates:
this poll is for canada, not the eu, but I couldn’t find good polling for the EU.
For sure. Reddit doesn’t start “testing” it just for sport.
Where have I seen such worldwide concerted action among all governments and corporations. Ah yes, when China “leaked” a virus.
Did they save lives?
or
Did they put us in house arrest?
The fuck? What are you even trying to say here? Are you upset about the existence of a pandemic response?
They turned authoritarian without batting an eye. Worldwide. That’s what they really showed themselves to be. Cancelled freedom and privacy, destroyed local business and handicapped the developing children of that time. And will continue to do these things.
And yes it was unnecessary. I know you want to read into this and say I was against “a pandemic response”, but not “that” pandemic response…
And they put people in house arrest, because… ? I just saw tanks being transported on public-roads today. So the reason couldn’t be to covertly move weapons: that goes on in public, in broad daylight and that transit sits alongside vans delivering ice-creams to convenience stores. So, the big cabal wanted to put people under house arrest… to do what?
Pick up a book. Pandemics aren’t new and neither is the orchestrated response to them by governing bodies. History can be a good reference.
So they used medieval techniques got it.
Well they didn’t, but concerning your teensy little pee brain of yours, could as well have.
I know they did the same in 1919, that’s barely 20th century. And an entire century of medical progress early.
Maybe you can clarify what your point here actually is?
op seems to think that pandemic response is tradition based, rather than science based.
tradition as like in 1919 where people were told to put a rag on the face, ritualistic hand washing etc, and rushed novel vaccines with bacteria. Everyone died anyway.
Yeah I picked up the history book
They saved lifes.
Glad to have cleared that up for you 👍
Oh boy, you’re one of THOSE dumbs.
