Ask Lemmy

I think we should reframe the question.

How can we protect adults from the harms of not being able to post meaningless bullshit anonymously to online anonymous strangers we never agree with without sacrificing everyones children's mental stability?

Maybe put childrens rights before adult rights. Adults had fun and got along fine without social media back before the 2000's. I refuse to believe that we are no longer capable of that. Especially if it means kids get to to go back to using the internet as a resource for homework and playing outside and using their own imaginations. Adults too.

Parental controls have been an effective way for decades. In combination with actually looking over your kids, of course.

By not allowing parents to outsource the responsibilities of being a parent.

People said the exact same thing about books, radio, TV, movies, video games and music.

You come up with some sort of arbitrary rating system. Any child with intent will find a way around it, and eventually they'll try to find a way to protect their kids from something else.

Kill the engagement algorithm. Your feed should contain a chronological list of posts made by people you subscribe to. In one stroke you could end the doomscroll - not just for kids, but for everybody. Also, infinite scrolling should be banned.

By getting rid of shitty corporate social media that makes money by exploiting people.

This is like suggesting that the solution to protecting your kids from tigers roaming the street is to lock them in their rooms. Nah, just rid of the fucking tigers.

Stop. Giving. Them. Phones.

Stop whining. No they don't need one. NO THEY DON'T.

No.

No they're not special.

No they're not too busy. Neither are you.

No iPad either.

Stop. Shut up. No. Phones.

There is no "harms of social media" per se. There are harms of unregulated companies that purposefully create addiction machines that are harmful to everyone, young and old alike. Our collective grandma became an antivaxer at the ripe age of 71, our collective dad became racist not at 13 either.

Maybe its time for parents to parent their fucking kids...

The government already knows all our ages, right? They issue our IDs after all. Have the government provide a "yes, this person is over 18" service. There are ways of providing signed files/tokens which don't contain personal information.

If the government wants to write a law, then I think it's reasonable they're also responsible to help with a solution.

Regulate advertising space and personalization algorithms.

Yes, it will kill a large portion of current economy, so maybe do it slowly. But generally speaking you should be able to find what you want on the internet, not what advertisers want you to see.

Yeah, don't give them phones.

Parents gotta parent.

I don't know why no one has said it, but get rid of social media as we know it. That's the actual only solution. The harms of social media applies to all ages. It's the capitalist side of social media that is the danger. Put limits on advertising and suddenly the algorithms to keep you engaged/ angry/ addicted are pointless, and suddenly social media isn't as harmful.

The answer is that we shouldn't have most social media to begin with and parents need to actually fucking parent their kid's usage. Social media is just the television replacement.

Be a parent. If you're going to fuck and have children, you need to be prepared for the responsibilities ahead. Stop trying to automate it by dumping those responsibilities onto others.

Best solution IMO: Don't let them use social media. If they really need to communicate, just buy them a SIM and or let them use your phone and SIM to contact them directly.

And if you must let them use social media, set up parental controls on your router. I suggest NextDNS for this. And basically, monitor everything your child watches or interacts and engages with. If they're using YouTube, check their accounts to see what content they're consuming.

The German passport allows services to verify age through you NFC reading your passport on your phone and confirmation of validity through intermediates state service. All they see is a confirmation of age requirement met. No name, no age, no address, no face.

Some other countries have similar systems. It's already a EU directive to be implemented on a broader European level.

I have no answers at this time, but THIS IS THE CORRECT QUESTION

I like to think I'm a tech savvy parent and the amount of tooth gnashing to setup and maintain child accounts is incredible. I'm convinced the foxes guarding the henhouse are using dark patterns to make parents give up.

Why can't I just get a notification on my phone saying "Hey, kiddo wants to have screen time. Approve?"

Hell, I'd love a notification saying "Kiddo started watching Mr. Blah." If I got the notification and I didn't want them watching that, I could block the video, or creator with a click. WHY ARE WE NOT AT THIS LEVEL OF CONVENIENCE?

A LOT of these concerns would go away if phones/tablets/tv's had these simple controls. Move those privacy controls into the home and MAKE them so easy a neanderthal could operate them.

If I have to *.newsocialbook.com into my router, you can bet your damn ass that "LiveLaughLoveMom<3" is going to keep demanding that someone else do it for her.

By making it so that social media can’t harm anyone, not just kids.

Some of it can be accomplished by just setting universal demands for how social media works for all users:

• ban targeted advertising
• make it mandatory for companies to ensure algorithms don't prioritize posts for making users angry, scared or depressed

Stuff like that. These kinds of regulations don't involve ID checks, and could take care of a big chunk of the problem.

The book The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt had a really clever idea. Create a regulation for operating systems that requires that their parental controls include an option that labels a device as belonging to a kid. When that option is toggled, requests will include some sort of header that labels the request as originating from a kid. Then, place onus (probably through some sort of legislation) on web platforms to restrict what content is shown to kids.

The good news: approaches have already been developed to mostly allow this. The bad news: incompetent or lazy or corrupt people try to NOT implement these, and doomers always show up to loudly say that everything sucks and we should all just live in despair.

Nothing is perfect, but implementing the stuff mentioned below would be a big improvement to balancing privacy and security compared to virtually all previous human history. It involves the government implementing a few things and citizens having new ID-type-things that are not like photo IDs.

If these systems are set up correctly, a person can digitally prove that they are 18 years or older, but without providing ANY other information. Not there name or photo or anything other than 'yup. I'm 18+. Let me do my thing.'

Here are three critical tools to leverage, and do a bit of research on:

Verifiable Credential (VC)

• What it is: A digitally signed attestation about you, issued by a trusted entity (e.g. a country government).
  Example: a university issues you a credential saying “PositiveNoise earned a Master’s degree in 2008.”

• Structure: Typically uses the W3C Verifiable Credentials standard — it’s a JSON document signed cryptographically by the issuer.

• Key idea: You hold it (not them). You can present it later to anyone (“verifier”) to prove something about yourself, and the verifier can confirm the signature without calling the issuer.

Analogy: A digital version of a stamped diploma or driver’s license, but one that lives in your own encrypted wallet rather than a government database.

Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP)

• What it is: A cryptographic technique that lets you prove a statement is true without revealing the underlying data.
  Example: Prove “I am over 18” without showing your exact birthdate.

• In relation to VCs: VCs can include data that can be selectively revealed or proven via ZKPs, so you never have to expose full documents.

Analogy: Showing only the needed part of your ID through a frosted window, but mathematically guaranteed.

Digital ID Wallet

• What it is: The software or hardware container where you store and manage your Verifiable Credentials.
  Think of it like a crypto wallet, but instead of coins, it holds identity proofs (e.g., driver’s license, student ID, health certificate).

• In relation to the others:

  • It stores your VCs (the signed attestations).

  • It lets you create ZK proofs on demand when sharing data.

  • It maintains control and consent: you decide when and what to share.

Analogy: A private digital passport holder that can generate “proof slips” without handing over the whole passport.

Same as always, better parenting.

My three boys don’t have filters on the internet, instead of blocking them from the world, I raised them in it.

ban social media metrics and information trading/markets. make it a truly anonymous service like it was in the early 2000s.

if protecting children was the point they would stop corporations from identifying all users and selling their identities/profiles online.

but, protecting the children is NOT the point. the point is control of freedom of speech, or rather who gets to have the freedom of speech.

Better parent supervision is the main way to combat these issues.

Companies should also either ban minors completely or allow parents to set up child accounts linked to their account with expansive parental controls that then can be migrated to full adult account once they reach legal age.

I don't think either will happen because there are so many stupid and lazy parents in America that don't care what their kids do as long as it's not bothering them

Make chronological feeds mandatory. Accounts you follow shall not be filtered nor censored and posts of accounts you have not followed should not be shown. Algorithmic feeds are allowed but should be opt-in inside the settings.

And also schools teaching and parents parenting.