Ireland ready to restrict social media for children even without EU agreement | Hacker News Reader

Ireland ready to restrict social media for children even without EU agreement

irishtimes.com

6 pointspiltdownman3 comments

On the fence with this. Social media has been show to be extremely damaging to young developing brains, something needs to be done about that. But, the privacy breaches and governmental surveillance this could potentially entail is very worrying.

To be even more specific (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01401...) heavy use of social media by children has been shown to correlate with reduced life satisfaction, but moderate use has no correlation with any effect on children. There isn't even any good research showing causation, just correlation, so prohibitions on children using social media will have absolutely no effect on most children, and for the rest there's a possibly of a benefit but also a possibility that there is no benefit, and a symptom of something larger is no longer visible.

That's a pretty small gain, in exchange for requiring everyone to give in to constant surveillance.

The Irish Minister for Culture, Communications and Sport going on somewhat of a solo-run for column inches, but nonetheless a fair indication of legislative trends in the current anti-BigTech climate. As noted on Reddit, our incumbent political parties have yet to find a bad policy implemented in the UK that they haven't wanted to implement here.

“I made it very clear ... if I didn’t feel there was going to be adequate progress made by the European Union as a collective that I would be bringing proposals to Government on behalf of Ireland,” O'Donovan said.

"That would be very embarrassing for the European institutions, that the chair of the European Council of Communications Ministers would feel he was left with no other option but to bring forward his own proposals in his own member state.”

The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) and Digital Rights Ireland (DRI) have raised concerns about the original DigitalID scheme when it was proposed last year.

Joe O’Brien, executive director of ICCL, said: “These reports suggest the minister wants every adult and child in Ireland over the age of 15 to present a MyGovID whenever they want to post on social media. On what legal basis?

“These digital IDs require a Public Services Card, and child safety cannot be successfully secured through the use of a database that has been found to be illegal.

“This kind of disproportionate response to a very real issue veers into the realm of authoritarianism. We need a much broader public discussion.”

https://www.irishlegal.com/articles/online-safety-plan-veers...

O'Donovan is a regressive political ideologue, former head of his parties Youth Wing, and a man whose arrogance is matched only by his technical ineptitude. He is previously famous for calling for a crackdown on open-source browsers, calling them a gateway to an 'online black market' filled with 'illegal goods such as drugs, weapons and pornography'

https://www.bit-tech.net/news/tech/software/fine-gael-browse...

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