Most of the harms related to teens accessing these sites come from the engagement-at-all-costs models that drive algorithmic content presentation. This, in turn, is driven by the need to fund these sites with advertising.
A ban on all advertising (in any medium) targeting under 16s would probably do a much better job.
@neil Daily Mail? If so, it was just them taking a break from stories about either the royal family or the dambusters raid.
@neil I mean, they've already blocked teenagers from getting help and knowledge from the Internet that may support them at their most vulnerable time around subjects such as depression and their sexuality.
Why not go further and remove any method of social connection from them.
Unfortunately my MP has jumped on the "think of the children" bandwagon, without actually thinking of what the children need.
@neil that would be interesting, as I refuse to participate in age verification. 🤔
@neil I feel that you get a very different question deepening on how you phrase it.
As you say - "ask every adult to go through age verification for every messaging service" is far less likely to be supported than "protect kids from bad internet thing".
And as always, I would rather see more education, and perhaps social media somehow encouraged to be better somehow, than bans which leave 16 years olds totally unprepared for reality.
@neil as someone broadly in favour of this but also who spent his teenage life on Queer Youth Network I’d appreciate discussing this with you (or someone who follows you who is interested and knowledgeable in public policy) to probe the space a bit and encounter new arguments for and against
@Buster Let's have a chat some point!
@neil this survey presupposes that those under sixteen are not "people", i think.
@neil as a parent to teens (who also fall into other minority groups) I am getting increasingly tired of this government trying to control how I raise them.
I'm doing my best, with what I have, for the specific individuals in my care. The government haven't a clue what that actually looks like or why, but they keep trying to interfere and constrain. And they keep telling me it's for my children's welfare when I can see the blatant direct damage.
@neil maybe instead of "social media ban under xx yo"
We should go for a shorted version aka: "media ban."
Wouldn't it work better just to ban everything?
Internet
Phones
Newspapers
TV
/S
I am unconvinced that, as a matter of policy, banning under 16s from social media is sensible / appropriate anyway, even if these flaws were addressed.
@neil It’s worrying to me that we only hear about the harm it’s doing and not that it also gives marginalised groups ways of connecting and supporting each other 😞
@neil Funnily enough my son (12) is heavily in favour, whilst I’m entirely unconvinced - talk about weird family dynamics 😁
(FWIW he doesn’t have social media, but he’s annoyed that his friends spend so much time on it.)
@neil
Like has been said before nothing is as motivated as a kid who's being stopped from doing what they want. An alternative (even less visible and managed) way will be found.
Pushing the interactions into dark sites is potentially higher risk.
Still agree that social media as a thing is out of control. Manage how they operate and not how it's used.
Early days Twitter/Facebook/Myspace/Google+ were great as the user curated. Not anymore. This is the issue.
Most of the harms related to teens accessing these sites come from the engagement-at-all-costs models that drive algorithmic content presentation. This, in turn, is driven by the need to fund these sites with advertising.
A ban on all advertising (in any medium) targeting under 16s would probably do a much better job.
@david_chisnall @neil ban commercial social media for everybody. Nothng with ads, nothing with pay to play, donation only.
I would be in favour of a complete and unconditional ban on profiling-based ads. Ads that are selected based on the content that they are placed next to are okay (not great, but less harmful), ads based on any information about the target other than ‘they are a person reading this article’? Nope.
One might also need to be clear about what constitutes an "ad".
Personally, I enjoy seeing people here posting about their own small businesses / things that they have made. Marketing, but advertising? I don't know.
I don’t think any posts here are based on profiles of the users. I have almost zero information about the audience for any post here. That would be fine under my proposed ban. It is similar to an ad in a newspaper: the ad reaches the kind of person who reads that newspaper, but I have no fine-grained control.
And, almost as importantly, I can’t limit who sees the ad. One of the big problems with these platforms is that they can give two people completely different ads for the same target, with contradictory information. If I put an ad in a Mastodon post, anyone can boost it and anyone can see it. If it’s something divisive aimed at the biases of a narrow set of people, it will be visible to a load of people with the opposite biases. In contrast, on Facebook I can buy an ad with pride flags that targets gay people and an ad with homophobic messaging that targets far-right people, and neither sees the other unless someone goes to the trouble of screenshotting it and then shares it and the algorithm doesn’t suppress it in the other group.
> ban commercial social media for everybody. Nothng with ads, nothing with pay to play, donation only.
I am very sceptical of this. It entrenches power in favour of rich people / companies, and those with other sources of income.
On a related topic, a visitor left a copy of The Daily Telegraph here over Christmas and oh my... No wonder some people hold such perverse, uncaring worldviews.
@neil it's so poorly thought trough as a strategy one wonders if they really are that thick or is this not for the stated purpose
@neil Thoughts...
a) For a lot of kids I suspect some of these services are their main point of social interaction with their peers and (distant) family members - I'm assuming there's no intent as part of this to provide alternative social spaces for kids (e.g. youth clubs)
