curled

Why are you continuously moving the goalposts? As I said I don’t believe there’s a good solution, but I do support the idea behind it.

In an ideal, hypothetical world, the age check could be an anonymous government system where they can’t see what site is requesting the age check, and the site can’t see the real identity of the user: this would provide enough privacy and reliability. Unfortunately I don’t believe such a system can be made.

Yes? Instead of creating a whole set of laws tailor made to whatever techbros come up with next?

Ah please, it’s just a specifically egregiously example that I’m guessing most fediverse users would know about. The problem is hardly limited to discord, you can find similar activity on Instagram for example.

Parents

Yes, but also the kids who are being groomed are more often than not already in a vulnerable situation. Given that you are indeed familiar with the discord situation I don’t need to explain this any further I hope.

Awareness

I’m not sure I’m following, awareness by who? Kids who want attention? Groomers looking for kids to manipulate? The absent parents?

Moderation

Might help, but how do you enforce a moderator? Just look at R*ddit where spez himself moderated a jailbait sub.

Greed

Now this here I’ll agree would help, but it still doesn’t prevent those who are actively grooming from getting what they want.

Because it’s not sustainable. It’s very easy to just start something new whenever the law catches up. And as you said, the law shouldn’t be too restrictive, lest you lose the whole reason for having a social platform. Striking that balance for every niche and edge case would be a gargantuan task, even disregarding the technical requirements for something like that.

Well to entertain the offtopic games point, yes it’s a 3d game, but it also isn’t. It completely depends on what you’re actually doing inside Roblox. You can play extremely challenging parkour games, or literally just stand around in some lobby. To add onto that, it’s often played on tablets and phones, where all controls are condensed into left and right thumb controls.

And even giving that point to you that yes, some games are good for development, it isn’t at all related to the social media ban. I picked roblox specifically because of the chat function it has, and changed, to dodge the Australian age limit for social media.

An easier example would be discord, where, because of its more private nature, grooming has gone absolutely wild (youtube link). In these cases restricting their accounts to just DM’s would already help a ton, but having nuanced solutions like that for every platform that serves minors is nearly impossible I think.

Idk about 16 and never added my opinion about it as I’m no expert on any of this, I just read the occasional study here and there.

Banning infinite scroll is an interesting idea that I hadn’t heard before and feels like it would help with the addictiveness, but it wouldn’t help for platforms like discord where grooming is a rampant problem.

Yes, I threw Roblox in there because until just weeks ago it was primarily used as a social platform, at least by the few dozen kids I work with regularly. Cherry picking the fact that “games” increase hand-eye coordination is completely disregarding what type of game is being played, and is besides the point I was making.

As for a failure to imagine a solution, hosting a platform that

• has appeal to kids
• shouldn’t be monetized
• actually verifies the age of its users

is MUCH harder than what you make it seem like, especially if we want to preserve the privacy that they deserve. Should it be run by the government for something like eID? Should it be run by a bunch of volunteers like lemmy, disregarding the age check? Neither of these sound very attractive to me.

Also, comparing “ban social media use” to “destroy our freedom” is completely unhinged imo. As I said before I do think there should be a space for kids to talk to other kids, but I just don’t see a way for this to be realistically achievable online.

At the risk of sounding like an old man yelling at a cloud, this space for me was based in “real life” (not online) and here I found friends for life

Edit: funny to see you’re the one downvoting me, isn’t this a productive discussion?

I agree with all of those, but they point towards adolescents, where people are gaining adulthood.

For kids under say, 14 years old, you can simply look at children in your direct vicinity and observe the impact of abundant use of things like Youtube, Roblox and others (sorry I’m not hip with it), where it is impacting their motor and cooperative skills, as well as their confidence.

Saying that the platforms used by minors are an important aspect of their social life feels incredulous to me, given that spending time together IRL is such a big factor in learning how to converse with people with differing opinions, without being shielded from them by some engagement-optimizing algorithm.

Where I live, all of that, combined with the enormous pressure social media puts on these kids to always have to take others’ cameras in mind, with the ads showing them all sorts of bs, makes me feel like I wouldn’t have made it out of childhood like I have done.

Of course there are positives too, as you pointed out. Having an easily accessible network of peers could be a great help with questions you’d never ask anyone in your direct vicinity. Except that no platform where kids gather is actually safe, and easily transforms into grooming platforms.

So yea, a ban is definitely a ham-fisted approach, but in my opinion, given the already sketchy situation surrounding the privacy for such an age check, I personally can’t think of a better solution or middle ground to keep the positives of social media. Maybe force the platforms to abandon their current algorithms?

Sorry if it’s hard to read, i tried to proofread but I’m on mobile.

How so? It’s pretty much a fact now that social media use is extremely addictive and bad for children’s development.

I don’t know what age limit I’d set but Australia set it at 16 which most people seemed to agree with as reasonable.