Europe should regulate Big Tech instead of banning kids from social media, Estonia says
Banning kids from social media won’t work, as they “will find very quickly the ways to go around and to still use social media,” Estonian Education Minister Kristina Kallas said.
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-should-stand-up-to-big-tech-instead-of-imposing-social-media-bans-estonia-says/Open linkView original on piefed.social610
Comments42
I like Estonia
I'm down with an Estonia Age
Estonia is a fascinating country and many times, it feels like they are the only ones able to move forward, while the rest of the EU is busy with debating. This leads to the feeling that Estonia is ahead of its time, while in reality, EU is incapable of moving forward and still lives in a 2010 bubble, hence the incapability of understanding how to handle Big Tech.
bunch of fascists and warmongers
We don't need to ban social networks. We need to ban algorithms on them.
That alone will make social networks bearable and safe for most people.
God, open and fully transparent algorithms with good defaults and the ability to switch between them and fine tune them would go so hard.
Uhhh, being able to import your own algorithm would create an open source library of good algorithms ... that'd be the dream.
In most countries, governments protect citizen rights in 'public' or governmental spaces. Private spaces, like those owned by corporations are subject to far fewer protections.
As the world has grown more developed and more privatized, what is the worth of your rights, if nearly everywhere is now considered a private space and thus not subject to those rights?
I think part of a government's job should be ensuring that 'public' spaces still exist and that they exist in the forms and mediums most relevant to the culture and technology of the day.
The internet needs spaces that our rights are fully present for and that aren't subject to the whims of a private corporation.
Exactly. Websites like Reddit and Facebook have gobbled up a huge part of the internet and are essentially the virtual public space. I got banned from Reddit for bullshit reasons and there is absolutly no recourse. Appeals are just closed without anyone really looking at them. Making a new account is next to impossible.
Outlaw collection, aggregation and sharing of personal data. This will make these harmful spaces unprofitable.
And addictive content showing algorithms
should be looking into whos BACKING THESE bans, : its mostly the tech companies doing this.
They are not banning kids from social media they are extending mass surveillance to control the shit out of people.
100% what the lady said.
Can we please be governed by Estonia?
Based
Mossad doesn’t want that
Based Estonia
Changing behaviour and/or educating the populace is always better than censorship.
This framing makes regulating Big Tech sound reasonable. But the true lokening here is to embrace a federated web.
They want control and that sweet sweet big tech money. Obviously Kristina hasn't been paid enough :P
I think most will agree that „think of the children” is a bs excuse, but if we know this then we shouldn’t debate this but the real reason behind enforcing verification of age, citizenship and people actually being people and not bots.
We’re being overran by LLM bullshit and we’re already overran by political actors astroturfing. We need a way out and that’s the only actionable solution on the table.
Unfortunately, it also conveniently hands tools for suppression of opinions to anyone who might be interested in that...
Given the resurgence of authoritarianism, I'm not sure that's a reasonable trade at all.
That would be a concern always regardless of who is in power. I already outsourced military, police and healthcare to my government, I can deal with them taking care of checking if people online are people.
True, but we needn't hand them even more control in a time where freedom of expression is already under siege. Persecution for things you said is one concern. Lowering the hurdles for things like being "banned" from participating in discourse, automated charges for viewing illicit content (particularly dangerous in case of identity theft) or doxxing by malicious actors are far more volatile.
The primary strategic objectives of a state, regardless of government structure*, are those crucial for its survival: to defend its sovereignty against other states and to maintain coherence within. An organised military and some enforcement of the state monopoly on violence to prevent people from robbing, ruining, killing each other, are the most effective ways to achieve that. Healthcare likewise is an important pillar of stability and survival.
The problem with individual tracking is that it gets into that difficult conflict between infringement of liberties and security objectives. I'm not convinced that the gain in security is worth exacerbating the problem with privacy we already have.
I was always of opinion that if you were going to be surveilled or controlled online by government that’d happen regardless of whether you have a government ID or if your account is ID verified. We gave up privacy and freedom of who we contact the moment our communications moved to government sanctioned internet and telephony providers.
My point is that internet is critical infrastructure and ability to exchange ideas on the internet is under siege from state and corporate actor funded troll farms which are now also force multiplied by LLMs. We formed states/governments so that we can act collectively in common interest, including everything from regulating market interactions to societal norms - they are the appropriate tool here since they’re selected mostly democratically.
I don’t want to be so free that I’m only free to be exploited by bullies exercising their freedoms.
Do both!
You can't ban kids without having age verification, which is a threat to all of us.
Unless perhaps kids weren't given access to the same technological tools that adults are.
It's just another lemmyworld bot manufacturing consent. They posted more of this exact comment on their other accounts below. They don't actually care or want to understand any of this
Why not both?
Because digital age verification is a privacy and security nightmare for everyone. It's not the same as showing your drivers licence to get into a night club. It would be more equivalent if the nightclub checked everyone's details, and then also registered those details in a clipboard that they left hanging on the wall next to the night club in partial view of the bouncer.
Arguably even if they could patch all the security and privacy holes in their implementation of age verification, it's still a flawed system, just like age verification when entering a nightclub or buying alcohol. Underage people still get into nightclubs and buy alcohol just by looking older than they are and the same is true for access to social media. Even when the sites are checking everyone, underage people are still getting in. In Australia's implementation it's something like 80% of children are still able to access social media but now the social media sites have access to even more of our personal data.
Social media sites have created unsafe places for minors. It's clear they are unable to control entry of either the minors or predators, so they should be responsible for moderation of their digital spaces and the outcomes of not ensuring that moderation. If they can't meet that requirement then maybe they shouldnt be allowed to operate.
Nah that's a flawed analogy. It's not like them having the clipboard partly visible. It's more akin to them photocopying your ID just to enter the nightclub. Even if the data quickly finds its way into a safe in the boss' office, it's total BS that they have that level of detail stored anywhere. Any serious breach of security will provide attackers with enough information to fully impersonate anyone who has ever visited the club.
... That is still fully separate from the also wholly valid question of, "what if this night club is suddenly deemed illegal?" Suddenly, everyone who legally visited may get a visit from the gestapo.
It doesn't take ANYONE DOING ANYTHING ILLEGAL for such a mindset and set of rules to never the less become very problematic.
People who want to nanny others' behavior to such a degree are ALL Nazi-level pieces of shit, whether or not they understand that fact.
You also can't guarantee that that the bosses safe is actually safe. Is it a safe in his office or in some building in Russia that he sends all the photocopies to by snail mail? Is the safe actually a safe and not just an unlocked filing cabinet in the alley behind the nightclub with a sign on it saying "free ID photocopies"? Are the photocopies also put in folders with a record of all your drink preferences, conversations, conversation metadata and which songs you danced to with all the folders photocopied, submitted to the government for citizen profiling and then sold on the black market for profit by the night club owner?
You're still kinda' missing the point. It doesn't require any of that to never the less be a gross violation of privacy.
All of that is merely icing on the cake as to why this crap is a disgusting invasion of privacy and an untenable removal of freedom to associate.
Even if they had perfect security on the gathered data, it is STILL a disgusting violation.
I said "also", that point is not lost on me.
True, I guess I'm still holding out for that zero knowledge age verification. If I could just give the bouncer a slip that says "this person is old enough to party" they could staple that slip to their nightstand for all I care.
I don't see it technically being impossible to implement like that. Let's hope this age verification kerfuffle either dies down or shows us how you could tackle this without disrespecting all our privacy.
I think the bigger problem is that we are implementing a system that has been proven to be ineffective at solving the problem, yet the world is plowing ahead. All we've achieved is removing the liability for social media site operators. They can run cess pools of misinformation and child predation and wash their hands and say "whelp, the kids shouldn't be there, we have government approved age verification (also until thats proven to be zero knowledge we have even more personal data to use for marketing and sell on the data broker market)."
The new EU age verification app was hacked within 2 minutes. That's why. All this chat control and age verification bullshit combined with AI, is a disaster.
https://cybernews.com/security/eu-age-verification-app-hack/
Social media demonstrably harms adults and society, so yes, both please.
When has abstinence at large worked?
When fascists get to implement it
No age verification!