@i47i If governments want to protect children from the harms of #socialMedia, age-based bans are not the solution.

Instead: Take all that funding that would be spent on enforcing the ban and instead invest it in #Fediverse development, hosting, and administration. The primary harms originate from engagement-maximizing algorithms, which the reverse-chronological and followees-only feeds of federated media, by design, do not have. This funding would help destroy the toxic oligarch-owned media through simple competition and an objectively superior product. Give children a better alternative, without all the #enshittification, and they'll migrate of their own accord.

Meanwhile, to deal with coordinated mass inauthentic engagement, and to facilitate effective moderation, governments could invest through partnerships with research universities and known-good manufacturers such as @yubico to produce state-issued zero-knowledge credentials. These credentials could be issued, necessarily in-person, at government offices (such as Service Canada and its provincial and international counterparts, and at embassies for citizens abroad), as well as notaries public and other trusted institutions such as public schools and libraries.

With these, Fediverse instances would have a means to restrict membership to say, unidentifiable but guaranteed-unique individuals known to the government of a given country, and to make it impossible for a person to return after being banned for anti-social conduct, while maintaining mathematical impossibility of determining anything more about a person (besides what they voluntarily reveal through what they post) but that they've never been banned from the instance.

Making it impossible for the instance to identify the individual, or to gain any information from the credential but the fact that they've never been banned, prevents the otherwise inevitable breach of identity documents. It also prevents the otherwise inevitable slide into technofeudal fascism which inherently follows wholesale surveillance and the ensuing censorship, yet still ensures every person has exactly one chance per instance to be a decent human online.

Since there are a limited number of instances with which most will federate, and since all those instances have heavily overlapping pro-social moderation rules, the predatory users will quickly find themselves relegated to the broadly defederated instances full of Nazis and such, and to oligarch-owned social media.

Governments could also get themselves (ministries/departments, agencies, crown/state-owned corporations, elected and appointed officials) onto publicly federated government-only instances (i.e., ones where anyone can read, but only government principals could join or post), making it impossible to convincingly impersonate governments or officials. They could also use arts funding and tax policy to incentivize major cultural leaders (such as celebrities and private media production companies) to get on the fediverse.

Everyone decent having never joined the cesspool fediverse instances, and having migrated away from the oligarch-owned centralized social media, governments can then ban both of those, irrespective of users' age, without adverse consequences.

Taken together, these measures would benefit everyone except foreign influence operators, bot farmers, spammers, and the violently anti-social, while still allowing children safe spaces for community and free expression.

#cdnpoli #auspol #Australia #Canada