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?
I think we should reframe the question.
How can we protect adults from the harms of not being able to post meaningless bullshit anonymously to online anonymous strangers we never agree with without sacrificing everyones children’s mental stability?
Maybe put childrens rights before adult rights. Adults had fun and got along fine without social media back before the 2000’s. I refuse to believe that we are no longer capable of that. Especially if it means kids get to to go back to using the internet as a resource for homework and playing outside and using their own imaginations. Adults too.
Parental controls have been an effective way for decades. In combination with actually looking over your kids, of course.
yeah, but that would require, you know, parenting, which is something we can’t do.
This is capitalism people. Hire a parent doula. Let them do the busywork of digital parenting like minding internet activity, scheduling playdates, managing ad blockers, paying the Roblox allowance, or whatever largely digital activity your kids are involved with.
Unfortunately a lot of parental controls aren’t that helpful, and they’re more of an afterthought
I agree with parenting in general though
The existing tools also extend poorly to cover adults with developmental disabilities who need a digital shepherd to make sure they’re using the web safely. There’s no substitute to being involved. Also, we should bring back the family computer. My parents had a computer in the public area of the house since I was in elementary school. Even in the age of laptops, we had a shared desktop.
By not allowing parents to outsource the responsibilities of being a parent.
I’ll reply to this random one with that statement. There’s no winning move as a parent.
Problem is being locked out. If your kid is the only one not on social media and all other kids are, your kid will be socially left out.
All kids are on a chat platform you don’t support. What do you? Disallow it and give them a social handicap that might scar them, or allow it and take the risk?
The same goes for allowing images on other platforms. Since GDPR schools seem to care. Yet if it’s a recording that will be put on social media you can explain your 4 year old why they weren’t allowed to participate… It sucks.
I don’t know what the right way forward is. I don’t think this is it. Something is needed though. We should at least signal what we find acceptable as a society. Bog stupid rules which are trivial to circumvent might be good enough, or perhaps some add campaigns like we did with smoking (hehe, if it’s for something we support then adds are good?).
Regardless, the current situation clearly doesn’t work. It would be great if we could find and promote the least invasive solutions.
I feel that communicating your concerns with other parents and their school can help. I feel it can make sense to have some forms of socialization when they are in middle school or high school, but even then you’d want a pretty locked down system, imo.
I feel that not every parent is going to let their kids use technologically to talk to their friends, especially not all the time. That’s not how I grew up and I was fine developmentally speaking. As a parent you can seek out other parents that live by similar philosophy locally for your kids to have as friends as well.
You’d be surprised with what parents let their kids do. My little anecdotal sample size contains mostly highly educated people but most of them don’t place any restrictions on screen time of their kids. They claim they talked to their kids and they have assured them they don’t look at anything they are not supposed to but that’s just not what happens in reality.
What really happens is that the kids with no restrictions will engage with all the predatory bullshit on these platforms, nonstop. I can see this with my own eyes and my kid brings their friends over.
Communication is key but unfortunately the business model of these platforms is based on addiction and children are not equiped to deal with it and parental controls are an essential component.
I believe the parent post is nicely sketching out what a “best” move is. I have seen no better approach myself. At the same time I see what you see. The best approach isn’t all that great. If you’re lucky and find the right people it could work. There’s a lot of luck involved there.
That’s why I do think there should be some regulations indicating what is tolerated. It seems to me parent poster may agree (and thus also woth your take).
Since GDPR you can tell the school you don’t want pictures on platforms you disagree with. You may miss out on seeing the photo’s, you might come across as crazy, but you can (and you should). We were given a choice at the cost of extra paperwork and some limitations.
Even without the addiction problem of these platforms we should nurture and find a good society around us. It’s a valid take to try and find likeminded people.
I don’t think that’s the end of it. Given the state we’re in, the network effect, and the fragile ego of developing kids, I suppose we need a stronger push.
AI enforced age verification or logins which allow you to be followed anywhere is not the solution in my current opinion, it’s a different problem. The problems are the addictive and steering nature of the platforms which seems to be hard to describe in a clear way legally.
I wonder how “these platforms” should be defined and what minimum set of limitations would give us and the children the necessary breathing space.
the minimum would be transparency for the algorithm. If users can see exactly what a social media algorithm is doing with their content feed, they would always have a way to identify and escape dark patterns of addiction.
But this minimum itself would require powers to compel tech companies to give up what they would describe as intellectual property. Which would probably require a digital bill of rights?
The most practical option would be to just ask your kids directly about the kinds of content they’ve been consuming and why. Dinner table conversations can probably reveal those dark patterns just as well
Wholeheartedly agree that the problem is the addictive and predatory nature of these platforms. I don’t see how that would change under the current perpetual growth economy we all live under
Well said
People said the exact same thing about books, radio, TV, movies, video games and music.
You come up with some sort of arbitrary rating system. Any child with intent will find a way around it, and eventually they’ll try to find a way to protect their kids from something else.
Social media does seem unique though just because of how addictive it is. If you look into the details of how meta targets children and intentionally tries to addict them it paints a pretty sinister picture: https://techoversight.org/2026/01/25/top-report-mdl-jan-25/
Well, with that comment, I think you have your answer.
Counter argument: alcohol, weed, tobacco, cocaine, drinking and driving, speeding, and acid were all so incredibly commonplace that people were confused when they were phased out or delegalised.
Social media is not on the same level as books, radio, tv, movies, video games and music. The sacred sextuple.
Social media is, however, similar to the afforementioned things, in that partaking in the substance or activity regularly gives you illusions that it benefits much more than it really does, whike ultimately just being bad for you and predisposing you to binging.
I think people are ao defensive over social media because A) they’re addicted and of course B) they’re worried kids won’t be educated on political issues, which i think is probably the more pressing issue than privacy. Becauae we already don’t have privacy on mainstream SM
Except when you went outside back then, or to school, you couldn’t take the TV with you. And parents controlled the TV at home
We do actually restrict many of those. And that’s not really an issue, because you either buy those in a physical store that has to check your ID in person if there’s any doubt that it’s legal to sell it to you, or you buy it on an online platform that already has all the info for payment processing. Can’t run hyperviolent content on daytime TV (in my country, anyway) etc.
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.
Thats true for social media, but social media isn’t the only time you want to do age verification.
If you want to see porn or order (legal 😇) drugs for delivery.
And this is just times where the way to “protect kids” is age verification online. There are other times where you want to protect kids too, but doing so is invasive.
Sure, my answer is limited to social media because that is the question that is being asked here.
Ah, I suppose it is.
So I suppose I should direct my grievance at OP for being too narrowminded. There may not be a single solution for protecting the kids, but surely cast a wider net than this.
Also fwiw I think that the profit motive only makes an existing problem worse, it’s not the cause and therefore removing it isn’t the solution. It helps so we should still do it, but we have to be prepared that the job isn’t done.
exactly. im just spitballing but there should be a kid only Neocities website or something that is anonymous with pre-selected prompts you can send to other kids, no DMs or personal pictures allowed. kids and teenagers on instagram/tiktok is like kids of the early 1900s smoking a pack a day. and of course active parenting limiting how much time they spend online. as a kid in the 2000s, our bare bones sites was enough to let us feel involved with the world and still use the internet safely.
Kill the engagement algorithm. Your feed should contain a chronological list of posts made by people you subscribe to. In one stroke you could end the doomscroll - not just for kids, but for everybody. Also, infinite scrolling should be banned.
Your feed should contain a chronological list of posts made by people you subscribe to
Should that be the only way the feed should be organised by law?
in my opinion, yes. the point is to make it less addictive- and this will take away some of the ‘fun’ without isolating kids. social media is entertainment that has been branded and marketed as an essential by the people getting rich off it. i find plenty of good things on youtube without ever signing in - i just search for them. if youtube or whoever wants to use its own ad space to promote channels, i think that is probably ok - provided that the choice is not personalized by an algorithm.
How is this even remotely enforceable?
It will destroy curation. It’s an absurd concept.
I think it’s unrealistic also. I think a better solution is simply to ban endless scrolling. Require them to use pages is enforceable, and remove a proven addicting aspect to social media.
Stop. Giving. Them. Phones.
Stop whining. No they don’t need one. NO THEY DON’T.
No.
No they’re not special.
No they’re not too busy. Neither are you.
No iPad either.
Stop. Shut up. No. Phones.
And or old school phones, that can call and text, but not surf the internet. Old smaller flip phones. Because parents will want to be able to communicate because they are worriers in many cases, there is no need for them to use smartphones for this.
I agree, if you limit “phones” to “smart phones and portable computers”. There are reasons to give a kid a small, no internet dumbphone. But yes, don’t give kids unrestricted access to the family PC, and DEFINITELY dont give them their own.
That’s the tack I’m taking. My eldest goes to high school next year and most of his peers are automatically getting a smartphone at that point. He’ll be 13. He can forget it. A dumb phone at a push, for safety. That’s it.
A dumb phone at a push, for safety.
I think that’s a good compromise.
I like “if you want a phone you can buy one”. If the kid’s up to getting and keeping a job long enough to save for a phone and service, good for them, they just proved they should be treated that much more like an adult. If not, then hey. Something to work towards
I had a dumbphone at 14, but back then we just called them phones and I was definitely in the 1% for having it. Wasn’t talking to my parents, bought it and a car to sleep in with drug money. Everyone grows up at a different pace
There is no “harms of social media” per se. There are harms of unregulated companies that purposefully create addiction machines that are harmful to everyone, young and old alike. Our collective grandma became an antivaxer at the ripe age of 71, our collective dad became racist not at 13 either.
Maybe its time for parents to parent their fucking kids…
The government already knows all our ages, right? They issue our IDs after all. Have the government provide a “yes, this person is over 18” service. There are ways of providing signed files/tokens which don’t contain personal information.
If the government wants to write a law, then I think it’s reasonable they’re also responsible to help with a solution.
In order to provide a “yes, this person is over 18” service for a vendor, the vendor has to know which real name (or other personally identifiable piece of information) to look up, don’t they?
So if you have to provide the vendor with a real name, phone number, ID card number or selfie that identifies the account “[email protected]” with “John Doe/555-4556/X1234567” that eliminates your anonymity, they’ve accomplished surveillance over your personal opinions and whatever other content you share. The real problem isn’t age verification, the problem is they’re trying to eliminate anonymity.
The vendor/site does not need to know a name.
The idea is that people already trust the government with their identifying info. So what the government can do is issue, for example, an opaque “age ID” that is only to be used with an “over 18?” service hosted by the government. Then anyone visiting a website with age-restrictions would provide their age ID, which tells the site nothing about the user. The site checks the “over 18?” service. At no point do arbitrary websites need to collect identifying info.
Now obviously as I’ve described it, there are multiple problems:
- People could easily publish their age ID for anyone to use.
- If people aren’t careful (they aren’t) then they will give too much identifying info away to sites anyway, and then those sites could correlate the age ID with their identity.
One solution is to make the age ID into a “one time password” (OTP). Much like an authenticator app, you could have an app provided by the government which generates a new random OTP on request, and it would expire in a minute or so. Then users provide that instead of a constant age ID. Like before, the site checks the “over 18?” service using the OTP.
It’s still not perfect, but you’ll never solve the “adult buying beer for kids” trick without counterproductive measures. There are probably some additional tricks to make it better, but I don’t want to get too far into it.
EDIT: One more point. Having this “over 18?” service is itself a privacy risk, because it relies heavily on your trust in the government not to conspire with the sites you are visiting or to just log info about all of the age-restricted sites you visit. There are apparently solutions to this problem involving zero-knowledge proofs, but I don’t know quite enough to explain that entirely here.
EDIT2: I got curious and did a little more reading. The zero-knowledge proof idea kinda fails to prevent credential sharing, unless you rely on some kind of hardware cryptographic vault thing. I’m not sure if that ends up being strictly better than the service idea.
Another way you might prevent the govt from logging all of the age-restricted sites you visit is to put the service behind something like Tor to make the requesting site anonymous. But this still doesn’t prevent the govt from just knowing that you visited some age-restricted site at a specific time. Still not ideal.
As far as I know the german e-passport function does provide good way already. You basically use your passport to make a corresponding app only send the information “over ‘certain age’ or under”, technically no information needs to go to the government of when and where you try to vefify your age since it can all be done locally with your passport. The app is also open source if i recall correctly. It would definitely be a better option than any third party age verification but its not really used at all.
But i am not too familar with the actual working procedure of this function so it may not be entirely accurate.
The OTP solution seems like a really good idea actually
There are apparently solutions to this problem involving zero-knowledge proofs
If something like this could work, that would be the best solution in my opinion
People could easily publish their age ID for anyone to use.
Publishing their age ID can result in the age ID getting flagged and recent accounts being disabled. PITA for the user, but be more careful.
If people aren’t careful (they aren’t) then they will give too much identifying info away to sites anyway, and then those sites could correlate the age ID with their identity
I’m not following. The “over 18?” service should not communicate the age ID to the website and the website should not communicate the account or person name to the government? Nothing except the “over 18” service ever sees the age ID.
There are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof which can do exactly what you just proposed. I’m not sure it’s a foolproof answer, but it is designed to exactly deal with that identity conundrum as well as others.
In cryptography, a zero-knowledge proof (also known as a ZK proof or ZKP) is a protocol in which one party (the prover) can convince another party (the verifier) that some given statement is true, without conveying to the verifier any information beyond the mere fact of that statement’s truth.
Regulate advertising space and personalization algorithms.
Yes, it will kill a large portion of current economy, so maybe do it slowly. But generally speaking you should be able to find what you want on the internet, not what advertisers want you to see.
This is it. We regulate drugs, so likewise the addictive algorithm needs regulation, but no lawmakers want to go after the oligarchs.
It’s a vaguely similar situation to immigration. If the US really wanted to stop illegal immigration they could take care of the vast majority of it immediately with harsh penalties for any employer caught with illegal employees, but no one wants to actually keep immigrants out because that would be admitting to the fact that they’re crucial to the economy.
Yeah, don’t give them phones.
This is the solution in my home… Seems to work pretty well…
Past a certain age this may start to become socially isolating for the children
It’s true, at some point it becomes a necessity. I don’t know what to do about teens today, I haven’t gotten there yet.
There is not much in this world I care about less.
As a former teen that - due to other reasons - was socially pretty isolated, at this age acceptance from your peers is everything.
How many generations grew up without smart phones? Basically all of them. Why did it suddenly change that they are now “socially isolated” because they don’t have smart phones?
It’s actually proven that children and teens benefit from quality over quantity of their friendships. They don’t need to have surface level relationships with everyone they meet. They just need a few really good friends they interact with in real life.
I’m relatively young so I can attest to the fact that, even when I was in high-school, not having a phone would put you at a social disadvantage. Thats how kids kept in touch out of school hours and coordinated social events. It’s not ideal but thats how things work now.
I’m also young. I had smart phones ans social media in highschool. The “disadvantage” no longer exists if parents make a coordonated effort to get their kids off smart phones. You don’t need everyone, just a large enough group. I highly recommend The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
I agree that if you can get enough parents onboard with the no cell phone rule then it’s not a problem. But there’s a bit of a coordination problem there so that might not be achievable in all circumstances
@Bazoogle @ageedizzle I’m ok with my kid interacting with his friends on his phone, I’m not ok with mindlessly watching YouTube or playing pay-to-play mobile games
So, he just needs a cell phone? Seems like they don’t need a smart phone. Regular cell phones are still an option
i.e. a “dumb phone”
Best solution IMO: Don’t let them use social media. If they really need to communicate, just buy them a SIM and or let them use your phone and SIM to contact them directly.
And if you must let them use social media, set up parental controls on your router. I suggest NextDNS for this. And basically, monitor everything your child watches or interacts and engages with. If they’re using YouTube, check their accounts to see what content they’re consuming.
They *will* get around it. It’s better to actually talk to them
Kids these days have access to the internet way too early. When I wanted to use the internet up until 14 I could either go buy my own computer (with what job lol) or I could use the family computer in the living room. Now 11 year olds are shit posting to 18+ subreddits it’s disgusting. And it’s all the parents fault. No govt regulation will fix this, you have to discipline your kids!
They should revive the “Family Computer” thing in families once again. Way better than handing them their own devices
Parents gotta parent.
This comment does a good job explaining why this is not as simple as it may seem.
The answer is that we shouldn’t have most social media to begin with and parents need to actually fucking parent their kid’s usage. Social media is just the television replacement.
It is by nature very different from television. Television is purely entertainment, and is one sided. It’s also only available when you are at home in front of a TV.
Social media is two way, you engage with it directly. You are now comparing yourself to the perceived lives of those around you. For most adults, this is fine. It had proven to have a very negative impact on developing children/teens, especially young girls. Not to mention it is now always with you, always in your pocket. You have access to it 24/7, which is nothing like TV.
TV has been around for a century and has not shown massive negative consequences on mental health. Social media and smart phones has been around for ~15 years and has ruined a generation. It is definitely not just the television replacement
I meant by the television as it’s used to distract/occupy kids so the parents can just not parent. Not that it’s got the same issues as television, it’s just the replacement for keeping kids distracted so people can just not be parents to their crotch spawn.
