(Also, why write about banning kids from social media? Kids are only banned from adtech, which is at best quasi-social and shouldn't be indicated with a term that fits platforms in the fediverse, which are truly social in every aspect. Words matter...)

[Huge tangent incoming]

Personally, I'm even more offended by legislation requiring age verification on operating systems. It does a pretty good job of illustrating just how technologically inept the people with the power to write legislation can be. It's why we were putting teenagers in jail for playing with phones in the 80s, or why people were receiving terrifying legal demands from companies that don't sell products or services but just collect patents and write threatening demand letters in the 2000s and 2010s, and why farmers can't repair their farming equipment (or why anybody can't repair most anything these days without being real ghetto about it) or (depending on the brand; purchase wisely) you can't buy a cheap ink cartridge without harvesting a chip off of the old one and manufacturers can get away with selling 3mL of ink in a big fancy shell for $55 a pop, and […] (I could do this all day, but I'll spare you lol).

I definitely lost my own point there, but basically: it makes me uncomfortable to have somebody deciding what a $1000+ box I just bought will and won't do for me, and you can be sure that as soon as they can get away with changing that age field into actual third-party verification, they will, and that is an extremely unsettling future (as if the present wasn't already unsettling enough).

Nah.

Sal Rahman (@manlycoffee@techhub.social)

@NicelyManifest@mastodon.social most of us are concerned about the downstream privacy impact being much worse than what "harm" that social media has on young people. Not to mention, even then, another pushback to callout is that people much older are also not better off, so how do we address those?

TechHub (techhub.social)

You pretty much nailed it why I don't like age-based bans on social media.

I read up on Estonia's Digital ID Infrastructure.

If I were to compare it to British Columbia's (the province that I reside in) BCID system, I'm definitely leaning towards Estonia's model.

Both BCID and Estonia collect the same mounts of PII, but Estonia provides more transparency and control, where as BCID is a lot more opaque.

I'm not entirely against age-based bans, and I'd imagine Estonia would be a lot more competent for rolling out age restrictions.

I just don't have confidence that Canada can pull it off.

And even if we had a competent infrastructure, why 16? When it comes to social media, how "harmful" it is, age doesn't have any bearing.

16 is arbitrary, and if anything, it's just a tool to minimize liability.

It's same mindset of pro-lifers: caring about a human while in the womb (or at least expecting others to care), but throwing all due care out the window once the human is born.

…for better or worse; They do have internet-based voting there

Electronic voting in Estonia - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

None of this has anything to do with protecting children. Politicians have been using that line to have their way forever, and they get away with it because it's a different set of parents each time and humanity collectively has a short memory (which is why it's currently 1939 again in the ol' US of A).

They would rather let corporations profit off our data than protect us by regulating them.

They will still know you have children. They will still know your children's ages. They will still know your children's preferences for everything you buy them.

When your kids age out, they will still have no privacy.

They will have no skills for dealing with or interacting with others.

But the tech giants will be rich.

But society also needs addressing - we have about 80% of people in Cardiff walking with visible device. Often head- and smart-phone. Cannot even tell them not to cross to avoid an approaching car as they cannot hear me.

Herd-justified anti-social habits.

I think its a trap the argument,
you have to choose: ban or regulation.
I think both are needed.

¿What is the psicological and social imperative to a kid for needing social media? Kids have other far more important imperatives: their rights to play, to socialize, health, education and healthy family and enviroment... not social media of #bigtech

Also, social media needs to be regulated, heavily. Socials #bigtechs creates adiction and anxiety for everyone.

Yeah, a better wording would have been "must" rather than "should"