Summary
A YouGov poll revealed that 77% of Germans support banning social media for those under 16, similar to a new Australian law.
The survey found that 82% believe social media harms young people, citing harmful content and addiction.
In Australia, the law fines platforms up to AUD 49.5 million (€30.5M) for allowing under-16s to create accounts, with enforcement trials set before implementation next year. Critics
This sounds good on paper until you realize that what is considered “social media” is up to whoever happens to hold that position. Even ignoring the fact that it’s unenforceable anyway, unless you require a real ID, wish is just straight up worse for all sorts of reasons.
The idea is nice, but actually putting it into law without opening the door to censorship and other side effects is just not plausible.
Edit: also, Everytime you read about a poll like this, ask yourself: what was the question they asked? Did it provide any context? Did it require any understanding of the actual underlying issues and laws? Or was it some variation of “think of the children”?
I think the question was; “how can we protect the kids when obviously their parents have failed?”
Parent here. Having an extra reason to explain why my son won’t be doing something that some of his friends are is helpful.
Censoring social media?
Sounds like another benefit!
It’s not censorship. Social media isn’t the street. It’s mostly private companies and when you post something it’s like saying something inside the building of a private company and not on the street.
The law is about regulating the companies and who can access these spaces.
Lots of countries have a similar law for work. You have age restriction and speech limits by law.
And yes, you can ask for a physical ID and even mandate an in person account opening. Or, you built a national account and social media must use it to allow access.
Most of the people where I live are in favor of this and even until majority including smartphones.
It is possible to verify age using a real ID without sharing other details from that ID with a social media company with apps like https://www.yivi.app/en/
The politicians in charge of making the laws often lack the understanding needed to make privacy respecting laws. So it’s possible, it’s just not happening. They also listen to actual experts ready to little, but do listen to lobbyists.
This also doesn’t address the censorship side of the problems.
Just for a random example, literally the first thing I thought of: let’s say there’s a youth movement to affect climate change, or some other issue. They organize general protests, boycotts on “bad companies” and are starting to get somewhere (politically and affecting the bottom lines of these companies). This is coordinated using some online communication platform, think Reddit, lemmy or whatever (Facebook, whatever). Those that want it to “go away” can just include that in the list of sites that fall under thes “youth protection” laws.
Then there’s laws like that being extended it abused to do things that weren’t originally intended, which is also hard to safeguard against. Future legislation might extend the age range from 16 to 18, then to 21. With the list of blocked sites also growing conveniently alongside, and boom you got a nice censorship platform. Not saying that will happen, but making sure it can’t is what’s hard.
You’re right. I’m not arguing that this whole thing is a good idea. I just pointed out that it would be possible to implement without sharing real IDs with the social media platforms. It would not be unenforceable as the top comment said.
yeah no way I’m trusting a corpo like that with my data thanks
Which corporation are you talking about? The app i linked is open source and originally developed by SIDN. You can verify what details it shares. In a case like this that should only be “the person logging in 16 year or older”
No it’s not. It’s literally impossible, that’s the issue.
Of course you can. All you need is a trusted 3rd party (the organization who issued your ID, probably your government) to verify your identity and sign a statement that you are over 16 years old. Then you present that statement to the social media company and you’ve done it.
First off, how can you possibly trust any 3rd party with that information and whatever you’re browsing. Secondly, as soon as you show a statement to this company, that is privacy invasive right there. Also how do you know they’re securely processing this and deleting it when they’re done? This is where is becomes insecure and creates a surveillance state.
By using an identifier like a session token the verifier never has to know what website you’re visiting. You show the social media company a message containing this season token, an assertion that you are over 16 years old and a signature. You don’t need it to delete or securely process that data, as the only thing it knows is that you’re over 16 and it’s required to verify this for all users.
Session tokens are valid because they come from the service themselves, that’s how they know they’re good.
That doesn’t work here because if there’s no identifying information in this token from a 3rd party service (the ID verification service), then it is useless because it can simply be reused by everyone.
So you’d have to create a unique one for each site, which would involve the login website and verification service to link to each other, which is extremely privacy violating.
If it is NOT unique (ex: anonymous person request verification for site A), then that service can reuse that verification token and break it. So identifying the sites together is required for this to work and is a massive issue.
The solution is simple on-device parental controls and have the browser flag this. Yes it can be cheated just like “are you 18+?” prompts, and that’s how it should be.
It’s also important to point out that you’re saying social media. ID verification would not stop there, it would then be used for sites like porn, which nonsense laws have already passed for this without proper solutions. Which the government should have zero business seeing what legal porn you watch, nor is there anything wrong with porn that it should be banned.