You say that like it's a bad thing. Not everyone thinks so.
I'm all for age restrictions for certain kinds of social media, but age verification is a system of surveillance and the death of online privacy.
Don't confuse social media with social networks. Social media is media - they select what you watch, like a TV channel, but personalized for each user. You might get a narrow choice from several options they selected. Social networks are just tools for communication.
I used the word "algorithm" so I'm going to preemptively point out that it means something in relation to social media that's more specific than what it means in computer science.
We presumably all hate Alex Jones. Does that mean the goverment saying "Alex Jones is banned from communicating publically" is good policy? Even if we agree the direct outcome is good (which I do), the principle of "the governement can silence people it doesn't like" is profoundly dangerous. In such a case I would argue we should all resist such a policy, even if we like the outcome (Alex Jones being silenced) because the principle (the majority can use the governement to silence a minority) is terrible. This isn't even accounting for the messy second order effects, e.g. radicalising Alex Jones supporters.
I think that applies to social media too. I don't like social media. However even more than that I'm scared of people using the government to limit what other people what they can and can't do for "their own good". This isn't a principle I think we can get behind. I think it's a principle that has motivated a lot of misguided acts in the past (e.g. criminalisation of drugs, sex work, taking the kids of first nations people in Australia, ...).
Nothing is absolute. There is a spectrum without an obvious optimal point. The recent neonazi rally in the UK did a lot of damage that could have easily been prevented.
Why does most of Europe have such a higher standard of living?
Putting aside the slew of problems with Kantianism, the main issue here is one of epistemology. You think social media is destroying society. Some people think a departure from traditional family values is destroying society. You might be pretty sure you're right, but they're pretty sure they're right too.
I'd argue it's better we all just agree these questions are ambiguous and should in principle be outside of the power of the state to mediate. Especially since people are free to not use social media if they don't want to, or to have traditional families if they do want to. Otherwise we're all just fighting to impose our vision on everyone else. And even if you are right - that social media is destroying society - these policies aren't going to stop social media. Even if they could in theory, they will in practive be shoddily designed and implemented and have lots of other messy consequences (e.g. requiring me to upload photos of my face to use things, trusting that companies forced to handle that data will not only not misuse that data, but also be unhackable).
> Why does most of Europe have such a higher standard of living? I'm not sure that's true, but even if it is the answer is much more complicated than that they have proactive goverments.
Murder is legal, then, and there's no point having a state at all.
And FWIW if the killing was consensual (i.e. euthenasia) then I think it should be legal.
Personally I find the lack of social media use to be a downside. I never used Facebook and I do occasionally think that I missed out on a lot of stuff because of it.
Seriously it is a sacrifice fallacy that we will actually gain anything by giving up anominity.
This black and white thinking that anything bad for things you dislike is frankly just incredibly spiteful and stupid.
[1] https://yivi.app
All the platform gets to know a person 18+ is visiting their platform. In their data analysis, they could add such information to the rest of their data analysis such as IP, but this wouldn't be within scope (illegal in EU). Just worth it to mention in case a platform gets compromised.
So:
Username Bob, age 18+ (verified), from IPv4 1.2.3.4, visited PronHub, at 2 AM, with browser XYZ.
vs
Username Bob, from IPv4 1.2.3.4, visited PronHub, at 2 AM, with browser XYZ.
If Bob isn't logged in, they have to auth every time they visit.
And this is going to happen due to nefarious actors. LLMs (AI), as well as state actors in countries behind the other fence of Iron Curtsin in the New Cold War.
This may protect my privacy towards pronhub if I am not logged in. But not my privacy against the third party where I need to be logged in and who likely knows my real identity.
I'm all for shutting down Facebook entirely and jailing their executives, but i don't think age verification is an appropriate answer. It's already common at least here in France for Facebook to request user ID cards (wtf) and that has not at all stopped harassment, nazism, fake news, etc...
E.g. I think something pretty uncontroversial would be a goal of blocking kids from the likes of TikTok & Instagram between 22:00 and 08:00.[1] But if I'm an adult, that's a different matter. Ok, so how do I prove I'm an adult, without society turning into a surveillance state, or surveillance capitalism?
Next up: wouldn't it be nice if e.g. someone over the age of 30 couldn't initiate chats (including comments on posts) with 13 year olds? For hobby exceptions (e.g. joining a computer or chess club) it would make sense to either have parental approval, or some moderation requirements for parental approval exempt groups.
[1] I'm here not saying that this is the biggest problem, but it should at least be uncontroversial.
That being said, the methods are really bad. Are they efficient? No. Kids can still access discord despite age verification. And some kids can still max out their parent's credit card despite not being old enough to own a bank account.
Do those methods produce other net negatives? Yes. Standardizing digital identity leads us one step closer to dystopian nightmares from sci-fi books.
Are there better alternatives? Yes. Jail the CEOs. And if your government is too corrupt for that, they could at the very least raise awareness. Governments didn't have to mandate fingerprint readers on cigarettes to fight smoking. They found other ways and there are less kids smoking now than in the previous generation. Also, they could still jail the tobacco CEOs who lied publicly (and under oath) for decades.
Any time someone builds a social network, they'll be equally liable for any danger for kids that result? De facto making social networks illegal?
Or is a moral/legal social network possible? If so, then it seems we're talking about two different things: 1. jail the CEOs of these companies… for… something (it's unclear to me. Not that I disagree, but you've not made the case). 2. How can we make social networks "a good"?
Surely you can't mean banning all social networks, because HN is a kind of social network.
What is an evil "kind" of social network? "I know it when I see it"?
I'm not sure that's step one. But at least it's a good selling point to say we can do something very quickly about that problem, and almost everybody agrees (except for a few tech bros and every government on the planet). Step one is taking back control: empowering alternatives, providing free psychological services for the people who've been harmed by Facebook & such, seizing all the money they have defrauded via tax evasion (double irish sandwich), etc...
And if society wants to put people on trial, don't forget to put the engineers up there. The CEOs/managers may give orders but the engineers also have personal responsibility. They knew what they were doing (a few spoke out), and they certainly make sure their own kids don't use their own products. Technology is not neutral, and following orders is not an excuse for cruelty (see also, Nuremberg trials).
> De facto making social networks illegal?
I think there's a margin for interpretation, though i'm neither a lawyer nor a judge. A few criteria which may already be illegal, to determine whether a social network is evil:
- leading and using research on attention/addiction to keep people hooked
- having platform-controlled advertisement (an incentive to keep people captive)
- having posts on "your" feed not determined by your own subscriptions, but by an opaque algorithm where the platform decides what you see
- mandating a civil identity to join the social network (sometimes even requiring users to submit an ID card), which was promoted 15 years ago as an anti-harassment measure but actually had the exact opposite effect
That's just a few criteria that came to mind. We can probably find more. HN, a mailing list or a forum fills exactly 0 of these criteria.
> What is an evil "kind" of social network? "I know it when I see it"?
I'm not sure. But i'm sure we as a society need to think about it, because the neo-fascist tech-bros running those social networks certainly have.
On the face of it living in a police state is safe, and secure, and actually increases your freedom to just live your life without pain. And if these systems were never abused that might be true. But sadly, the reality is that every time these things are implemented they end up being used against the citizens. So they're always a terrible idea.