Youth social media bans should raise privacy concerns for everyone
https://www.wearequeeraf.com/youth-social-media-bans-should-raise-privacy-concerns-for-everyone/Open linkView original on lemmy.todayhttps://www.wearequeeraf.com/youth-social-media-bans-should-raise-privacy-concerns-for-everyone/Open linkView original on lemmy.today
A friend of mine is in a prominent tech position and when I railed off about my privacy concerns about ID laws his response was ‘good, some people online need to be known.’ I was so shook I put the phone down for the rest of the day.
I agree there's a distinction between social media and the surveillance technology that has formed around that social media.
Everyone needs to feel a sense of belonging, and there are some times obstacles of time and distance that keep people in remote locations from "finding their people". I believe this speaks to the issue of a basic need, and whether that leads to toxicity or "bad crowds" is a separate issue entirely.
What should be a subject of targeted discussion is the surveillance economy that has built around some social media platforms. Given the high economic value that this surveillance represents, the public will find it difficult to discuss this subject without heavy lobbying. But, given this value, there's no scenario where society will somehow toss all social media with all surveillance. Hence, there's also a strong suspicion that identifying children and banning them from social media will only contribute and improve the surveillance.
Also, to put on my tin foil hat, while the promise of "AI" has been lauded on every possible channel of communication, there's very little actual impact in the present. When talking heads encourage the public to keep the faith, and simply expand the timeline for when AI can provide real "game changing" effect, I'd offer the simple counter: We'll sooner see the world burn all the water and energy in the world before we see a proper AI product.
That's why I suspect more likely that the data centres that are constructed today are not for the AI of tomorrow, but rather the surveillance economy of today. As we've seen from Israel's occupation of Palestine, proper control of the travel of people and information requires huge collections of data. Those American Flock cameras and all those other data points have to be stored, accessed, and reviewed somewhere and by someone.
One concern is that the "data centre" is not an AI innovation. Similar to the surveillance economy itself, the data centre is not a revolution - it's an evolution of American and Israeli oppression.
The term "social media" has always. Been horribly unspecific
normally this should happen within each family by limiting screen time but I’ve seen cases with families leaving the kid to watch cartoons on tablet without any social interaction at all, majority of those will grow to be cave men adults
So, I understand that any age verification system is data collection. That being said, kids 100% should not be on social media. I think this has been proven time and time again at this point, no?
marginalized kids might only find real community and connection on the internet
Which is one of the things the evil people behind these bills want to stop
So we should ignore what's happening to all of the other kids???
By the way, LGBTQ+ kids aren't immune to propaganda. The brainwashing works on them too.
i never said that. i don't know the balance myself, and social media can have very horrible effects, but my point was that it can also have very good effects, especially for those with less support irl
i think there should be studies and meta studies and deep investigations before anything is done. afaik the research consensus on social media impact on kids and teens is very mixed.
I accept your answers. I have harsh views on social media and I tend to ignore nuance when thinking about it. I feel for marginalized people, I wouldn't want to see them lose the support networks they've developed through the internet.
No, it has not. What on Earth could possibly be wrong with a young person reading our discussions here on Lemmy and expanding their knowledge about all the topics we discuss here, for example? Even participating in it, asking and answering questions about any topic they find interesting? I find it hard to think of a more harmless hobby.
I myself started regularly participating in online communities at the age of 10 (that was more than 20 years ago, when there were not yet even rumors of a product called "iPhone" and I didn't even have my first own desktop computer yet). The vast majority of my joyful memories of my preteen and teen years stem from my participation in online communities. The vast majority of memories I have of pretty much anything else during that time period are negative. Online communities taught me many important things about life that I now use every day and that I probably wouldn't have easily learned elsewhere. They turned me into a more creative person with better communication skills, especially in writing.
So, no, the situation is not that people who want to ban young people from social media have a noble goal that oh-so-unfortunately cannot be achieved without invading everyone's privacy. The situation is that those people have a completely illegitimate (in my mind, outright evil) goal in the first place.
Same. We have to do all that we can to ensure their evil plan fails
There are plenty of reasons why I don't think kids should be on Lemmy, at the very least without supervision. Like, come on — people post porn here regularly.
We now already have a few generations with plenty of members who started watching online porn when they were technically too young for that, and we can now tell that this hasn't harmed them.
Prove it.
You can't prove a negative, that's not how experiments and hypothesis works.
If you're making a claim that early exposure causes harm, you're the one that has to prove it via the following steps:
Congratulations, you have just been taught how to do science
Yet you completely ignored studies like this from the National Library of Medicine
Excerpt:
So we know it behaves like a drug, the study goes into further detail how it affects adolescents — and here you are saying 'no it isn't actually that bad'.
Ask a heroin addict about his quality of life and his answer depends on his last hit.
No, it hasn't. Some types of social media no one should be on. However it's a problem of parenting, support and time. Age gating will do nothing to abate it. More than likely it will only hurt the sort of media and social media that people would like to see. Which is by design and why it is being pushed. The burden imposed is far too heavy for all but those with the most wealth and resources.
Why? Isn't socializing the base of all society? Aren't social media the privileged way people do socialize nowadays? Why should kids be kept at bay? Is it for their safety? But then...
Those are too absurd examples (hopefully no one will consider those ideas seriously) of the real absurdity of the entire debate regarding social media. At least, imho.
If kid's safety was the issue with social media we should change those social media and the way we, the adults, the ones showing the example to kids, are using them. But we're not. Instead, we're making it illegal for kids to use those shitty social media... making them even more enticing to use!
It looks so much like the prohibition (and we all know how well it turned, and what was the real motivation) it would be funny if it was not so sad for the kids having to deal with that hopelessly clueless adults around them.
Problem is not user or socialize, problem is platform. Design to be addictive, keep you on platform for more ad, feed you dopamine and get emotion to keep you hook.
Same argument of protect from alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, ...
That's more or less what I 'm saying: we need to work on those tools, not on filtering who is allowed to use them.
Adults are not that smarter than kids, imvho, they too could very easily be considered 'victims' of those manipulative tools. And maybe they should, watching how they poorly behave while they're pretending to show kids what it means to be a 'responsible adult'.
I got sexually harassed in school and no one ever did anything about it
I accept your reasoning, I have pretty harsh views on social media so I tend to believe everyone is better off without.
I feel for marginalized people, I think it's tragic that they need to rely on internet strangers for support rather than the people in their day to day lives, but that's another topic entirely.
you won't find me anywhere but here, so we very well agree on that question. I just try to consider the issue itself more than what I may or may not think about it ;)
Ok but this is not a solution because they'll find ways around it. Then they'll try to ban vpns and fail.
What do you mean by kid?
Baby goat