Australia was one of the first countries to institute social media bans under a certain age. Reading the reports and commentary from parents there has been fascinating, but not really surprising if you remember what it's like to be a kid.
The most positive thing I read was that the kids are spending less time on social media in front of adults (like at the dinner table) because they're not supposed to be on social media.
But most of the parents in the article I read believed their kids had circumvented the ban somehow. Their problem now was that the kids' social media use was entirely hidden from them and they had no way to monitor it or even bring it up with their kids. The kids didn't want to admit to using social media at all.
None of this should be very surprising for any of us who remember back into childhood. Circumventing the restrictions was a game with its own reward. I had friends who were finding ways to get around the school's internet controls for the fun of doing it, not because it blocked any sites they wanted to use.
I was definitely that kid. I remember discovering that my district's web filter had a default password (something like "changethis123"), by watching one substitute with exceptionally poor typing skills. Problem was, substitutes' accounts were disabled frequently, and any one account only really had a lifetime of a week or two, before someone in the IT department realized that 300 devices were connecting to the network with the same credentials.
But the staff lists were public, and I had the default password. So I set up a script to turn the lists of names of teachers, librarians, janitors, etc. into usernames, and then tried to login with all of them. Turns out, most support staff, especially custodians, hadn't changed their passwords. (I'm guessing their jobs didn't involve much computer use). With a list of a couple dozen working accounts, I'd mete out 1 or 2 at a time to my friends, and we had teacher-level access for the rest of our time there. Don't remember using it for much, maybe showing my friends a youtube video during lunch or something.
This demonstrates why forcing people to use E-mail addresses as user IDs is a stupid, stupid policy.
Usernames are almost always quasi public knowledge, even when they're not email addresses. The problem here was the existence of a default password, not the fact that you could figure out usernames.
The upside of well-crafted social media bans for kids under a certain age is that you can use them to apply financial pain to social media companies for failing to prevent kids from signing up.
Applying stiff financial penalties for allowing kids to sign up for social media sites is another way of saying that you want to have to provide your ID to log in to social sites.
Reddit, YouTube, Discord, and even Hacker News qualify as social sites. I don't know about you, but I don't want to have to start providing ID to log in to everything.
If you think these imaginary laws would only apply to Facebook and TikTok, you must have missed all of the discussion where they've been extended to many more sites with social features. Goodbye privacy!
> If you think these imaginary laws would only apply to Facebook and TikTok
We can literally write "these laws apply only apply to Facebook and TikTok" into the laws.
Or base it on sites that have advertising. Products/services that are targeted to minors shouldn't be permitted to have advertisements anyway.
I don't find "We've done a bad job with X so we should abandon X rather than attempting to do X better" to be a compelling argument on its own.
> We can literally write "these laws apply only apply to Facebook and TikTok" into the laws.
I don’t find it useful to imagine laws like this. This isn’t what happens in real law making.
I’m talking about real, actual laws that are getting passed.
It’s not going to be perfectly targeted at websites you don’t use while leaving everything you like free, open, and privacy preserving.
It’s really important that we’re being realistic and honest about this. Inviting bad laws into the internet with fantasies about how they’ll be carefully scoped and limited to other websites is not realistic.
The DMA designated gatekeepers seems to be pretty well-targeted as a real law that's currently on the books.
It applies solely to Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft.
Going by that list, YouTube and GitHub would be impacted. They have social features and primarily host user-generated content.
Imagining that these laws will be precisely written to avoid any services you like is a dangerous fallacy. That's how people rationalize bad laws.
Remember when all of the surveillance laws were only going to target the terrorists? Look how far that drifted.
What would be the point? If the goal is to "protect the children", then banning only 2 companies from providing social media to kids will do nothing after at most a few years - kids will just move on to the new social media that is not yet banned.
Of course, this says nothing about the many kids who will be hurt by being denied access to social media, such as the many gay or trans kids living in conservative families that found some solace in online communities that would accept the real selves they otherwise have to hide.
> What would be the point?
Ideal scenario? Meta decides it's not worth operating in my country, geoblocks us, and pulls their apps from the app stores.
I'm sympathetic to the people who get real value from meta platforms, but on balance, I see meta as a massively negative force, and their business model and leadership make it effectively un-fixable.
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