> there are better ways to solve the stated problem
Call your representatives. There is overwhelming demand for age gating social media (based on, honestly, good evidence). This will be implemented based on who calls in. If the status quo of technical people being hopelessly nihilistic continues, it will be written in the stupidest ways possible.
> based on, honestly, good evidence
Can't say I agree. Notice that the proposed legislation isn't specific to social media. Rather it's explicitly advanced in support of Colorado's data privacy laws as they apply to minors.
There's evidence of lots of different issues, a few age related but most not. Adults certainly aren't immune to adversarial algorithms and dark patterns and the practical need for privacy isn't limited to children. It's more that we only seem to be able to achieve broad consensus to add additional regulations where it concerns children.
It's always written in the most midwit way possible, then, once predicted failure happens it's patched up to be slightly better. That's the default assumption for most of the things.
Of course we could make predatory algorithms illegal. Or just algorithmic timelines/discovery algorithms.
Nah. Can’t stop the money. Let make brain destroying scams and ad spam legal as long as you’re over 18.
TL;DR We need age verification laws to prevent minors from accessing the addictive stream of toxic sludge rather than outlawing its manufacture and distribution.
How exactly would you do this without, you know, violating the first amendment? Algorithmic feeds are nothing without the content. People get toxic sludge because they signal to the algorithm that they like that.
Presumably by outlawing the types of algorithms used with the legislation carefully limited to a particular context rather than anything being authored by an individual. Right to express oneself preserved, government regulates a harmful product, business as usual.
As far as this specific Colorado legislation goes (which is concerned with the ability to comply with their previously passed data privacy law) I think it's not entirely bad but I have two issues with it.
First, it reverses the problem. Services should be sending an age-appropriateness (or even just general content classification) signal to the device for local processing, not the other way around. If you're going to mandate that OS creators do anything it should be to implement a certain baseline level of (interoperable!) functionality as far as parental controls are concerned.
Second, the entire thing should be predicated on some metric such as MAU or revenue or combination thereof not on the exceedingly vague idea of a "free, publicly available code repository".
I definitely agree with those. Age verification laws in general I have lots of beef with because they're so nonsensical.
No, the mania is based on extremely bad/cherry picked evidence. There are at least 6 studies alone (some including meta-analysis) which has found absolutely no link to prove social media is addictive or harmful to children. If anything, they've found the opposite, and one even suggests that calling it addictive might be causing the very problem we're pretending to solve