I’m asking for public policy ideas here. A lot of countries are enacting age verification now. But of course this is a privacy nightmare and is ripe for abuse. At the same time though, I also understand why people are concerned with how kids are using social media. These products are designed to be addictive and are known to cause body image issues and so forth. So what’s the middle ground? How can we protect kids from the harms of social media in a way that respects everyone’s privacy?
By getting rid of shitty corporate social media that makes money by exploiting people.
This is like suggesting that the solution to protecting your kids from tigers roaming the street is to lock them in their rooms. Nah, just rid of the fucking tigers.
As long as corporate social media is closed source, it would be hard to know if a no-advertising policy is being fully adhered to. A good example of this is the class action lawsuit against Chrome’s incognito mode: for years, Chrome got away with collecting personal browsing data when people browsed in incognito mode despite insisting that they didn’t do that. Something similar might happen with social media. To get around that, there could be a legal requirement for social media to be open source. That might run into issues with intellectual property law though, and the lobbying against it would be so intense that I’m not sure if a law like that would ever pass without massive political will.