What if, instead of trying and failing to kick kids off social media, we focused our attention on the reasons why being online is so often detrimental in the first place?
Pre-fucking-cisely.
Then you’d have a massive “but what about the children?!” censorship situation for everyone.
We already have that, and it has solved absolutely nothing while potentially making online surveillance and privacy issues worse.
The answer isn’t age-gating or ID verification, it’s changing how the sites themselves operate. Get rid of the idea of “driving engagement”, no more stealth ads, and no corpo, media, political party, or lobbyist accounts. Hold influencers and podcasters to the same kind of standards we used to hold journalists to, where they’re required to tell you when the’re shilling for some kind of shady supplement company or political huckster.
You know, the kind of shit any sane species would do with this sort of tech, but when have we ever been sane?
The addictive design of platforms, software and algorithms should be adressed, not the users age.
And the tech companies should be made responsible to design more healthy platforms, etc.
The problem is the design of tech, not the people using it.
Why is everyone forgetting the parents in this shit. They are the ones giving their kids access to this shit, not monitoring and moderating their access to this shit, and letting screens do the job of raising their kids instead of doing it themselves.
The same parents who scream anytime a teacher grades them fairly?
Teachers should be legally allowed to posses a metal gauntlet for backhanding idiot parents across the face.
You are correct, but that does not absolve the companies or the government of any responsibility. It should not be “anything goes” as far as intentionally addictive designs on anything with a screen for the same reason they can’t just put cocaine in Doritos. They still engineer in what they can, but with some guardrails. And even in that case the regulations here in the US leave a lot to be desired.
Saying stop ignoring parental responsibility, doesnt mean ignore everyone elses culpability.
What you say is true but it’s off topic because that’s not the current situation. What we’re actually seeing right now is that parents literally do not want to take their devices away from their kids and they don’t want to supervise their kids. It really is that simple.
This is not a situation where most parents are trying to do the right thing and they can’t do enough and they need an extra hand. This is definitely a situation where many parents aren’t even putting in a good effort.
You know like what if they didn’t give their kid a cell phone. What if they took the cell phone away at 9:00 p.m. Most parents would never dream of doing either of those things.
What you say is true but it’s off topic because that’s not the current situation. What we’re actually seeing right now is that parents literally do not want to take their devices away from their kids and they don’t want to supervise their kids. It really is that simple.
So saying its a parental responsibility is off topic, and what we should focus on is… parental responsibility.
Yeah someone has to be paying for the phones and internet access, both mobile internet and or home internet or if they don’t have a phone yet, the tablet , desktop or laptop with internet access. It’s usually the parents paying for this stuff.
There are parental controls built into the Android builds of all the various mainstream manufacturers. The main exception might be for example small companies selling phones with custom Android OS distributions or people who install their own where parental controls are not built in, but that isn’t what the vast vast majority of people are using let alone installing on their child’s phone.
There are parental control options built into IOS too. They allow parents to setup a variety of controls.
https://families.google/familylink/
https://support.apple.com/en-us/105121
The following article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation cites various research about how a majority of social media use even by people under 13 is often done with parents knowledge and even direct help.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/congress-wants-hand-your-parenting-big-tech
Most Social Media Use By Younger Kids Is Family-Mediated
If lawmakers picture under-13 social media use as a bunch of kids lying about their age and sneaking onto apps behind their parents’ backs, they’ve got it wrong. Serious studies that have looked at this all find the opposite: most under-13 use is out in the open, with parents’ knowledge, and often with their direct help.
A large national study published last year in Academic Pediatrics found that 63.8% of under-13s have a social media account, but only 5.4% of them said they were keeping one secret from their parents. That means roughly 90% of kids under 13 who are on social media aren’t hiding it at all. Their parents know. (For kids aged thirteen and over, the “secret account” number is almost as low, at 6.9%.)
Earlier research in the U.S. found the same pattern. In a well-known study of Facebook use by 10-to-14-year-olds, researchers found that about 70% of parents said they actually helped create their child’s account, and between 82% and 95% knew the account existed. Again, this wasn’t kids sneaking around. It was families making a decision together.
A 2022 study by the UK’s media regulator Ofcom points in the same direction, finding that up to two-thirds of social media users below the age of thirteen had direct help from a parent or guardian getting onto the platform.
The typical under-13 social media user is not a sneaky kid. It’s a family making a decision together.
The typical under-13 social media user is not a sneaky kid. It’s a family making a decision together.
Yep… Theres an idiot in my family that gave their grandkids unrestricted, flagship phones, with full social media account access, at 7 years old.
And no, they are not too old to understand technology. They perfectly understand technology, the internet, and everything else. They are just stupid.
Its on the grandparents for doing it. its on the parents for not taking the fuckin phones away. and its also on social media companies for being algorithmic predators.
Oh it’s never the parents’ fault, they’re Parents.
The parents are also suffering from the negative medical effects of algorithms designed to manipulate and addict. You’re asking why a victim of drug abuse isn’t a more responsible parent.
But without the addictive design the users don’t spend enough time to see all the ads and tracking required to reach the target growth. Somebody think of the shareholders /s
It’s interesting because I was talking to my psychologist about this last week.
Mental illness runs in my extended family specifically my best friend is a functional alcoholic. He grew up the son of a functional alcoholic.
We all agree that alcoholism is an addiction, just like gambling, social media, etc.
The problem is that as a society we are addressing the specific addiction. AA for alcoholics. For gambling the government has programs you can admit yourself to.
What I was postulating to my psychologist is the real problem is some people have un underlying susceptibility to addiction. My experience with addicted people is regardless of good or bad if you remove an addiction they will replace with an unhealthy obsession on something else. Alcohol will be replaced with something else because the problem is the person has an imbalance they can’t do something in moderation. I’ve seen this time and time again.
Plus factor in comorbidities like ADHD and you have a stew going.
My point being, yes you’re correct tech is a problem, but it’s 100% the people too in some cases it’s just without the social media their addiction may have been benign so not visible. “Oh look at Mary with her beanie baby collection.” Or “oh look at Jack he really is a go getter running his 10k rain or shine every day.”
I guess the difference between addictive tech like social media and stuff like alcohol is the scale.
Alcohol is more a problem of an individual and its nearest people.
Big tech is a threat to democracy and the cohesion of society.
Clearly the next step is to require ID in the OS /s
The fallback argument for the social media ban is that it’s better than nothing. But with results like these, it may be worse than nothing, given it potentially creates new problems. Children will remain online with arguably less supervision and support, new privacy and digital security vulnerabilities seem to have appeared and the worst aspects of social media lay largely unaddressed.
I wish more people understood this. Changing something can mean you’ve caused harm unintentionally, even if you haven’t identified it yet. Too many people seem to have the thought process “We have to do something! This is something. Let’s do this.” without ever considering the harm they might do.
A 30% reduction of kids being exposed to these harmful platforms is a good thing and I’m glad to see it.
Also, all laws are imperfect, and expecting 100% efficacy is moronic.
As a parent who dont like id requirements but who also wants my children away from social media, this is my take:
Social tech does not require a tech solution, but instead a social solution, because social media is a social problem. My children has restricted access, no accounts etc. But that helps little when all the other parents believe social media to be fine. A law clearly sets a social norm, which apparently 30 % of parents understand.
Right, but the politicians didn’t sell the law at 30% efficiency. They sold it at something like 95% efficiency. So they lied and they haven’t solved anything.
Maybe they could have used all of that money to run campaigns to help convince parents to properly supervise their children. Maybe that would have done more than this 30% figure.
Or maybe, instead of creating privacy-infringing laws or blaming parents, we actually dismantle the tech companies who created them and imprison their leaders. We all know corporate social media is cancer, that’s why we’re on Lemmy. So let’s fucking do something about the cancer instead targeting the victims or worse, exploiting the situation to expand the surveillance state.
You don’t think they’d happily target Lemmy if it were larger? It’s still “social media” to them
Seriously. Murders still happen so lets legalize murder.
Such place exists. It’s called middle east.
For whom exactly is it legal there though?
For those currently doing all the bombing, of course! 😉
Yeah, I suppose anything is legal for those fuckers these days
Don’t you know? Nothing is worth doing unless it solves all problems at once right away
Key point: “Ultimately, the fundamental problem with age-gating is that it fails to address any of the root problems with our current online landscape – that is, the extractive business models and pernicious design features of mainstream tech companies. We all exist in a highly commercialised information ecosystem, rife with algorithmically amplified misinformation, scams, harmful content and AI slop. Children are particularly vulnerable to these issues but the reality is that it impacts everyone, even if you’re blissfully absent from Facebook or Instagram.”
They don’t wanna solve the root problem, they just want to make the big tech companies happy as well as the people who is sayiing shit about social media happy, Age verification is their stupid answer to which translates to “We don’t give a flying shit about kids”
It wasn’t designed to address online problems, it’s purpose was to placate the mainstream media.
With a 70% non-compliance rate, that isn’t entirely surprising.
Platforms are even less likely to implement real reforms that the author alludes to.
Similar thing happened where I live with porn. Recently passed a law requiring ID. Instead of complying, I just started going to different websites. No way am I giving up my identity to a sketchy porn site, no matter what the law says.
I still think it’s a step in the right direction. Once you make it illegal for children to use social media, you can start going after the platforms for knowingly manipulating children.
Or we can just go after the platforms for knowingly manipulating everyone. And for their invasive data collection. This is probably one reason why Meta spent more on lobbying (primarily for age verification) than Boeing and Lockheed Martin did on lobbying last year. Once the kids are identified, no one gives a shit about the adults so the problem (for them) just fades away.
… people have a tendency to underestimate how prone they are to manipulation. We should amend our constitutions to include freedom of thought as a fundamental human right.
You know what they say. Prohibition, works every time.
Prohibition is effective, it’s just that it doesn’t work for easy to manufacture compounds such as alcohol or marijuana. Every known human culture has independently discovered alcohol, and marijuana is a weed that is ready to smoke in its natural form.
As far as social media goes, my country has reached a point where TikTok and Facebook are preinstalled on every phone. If a parent buys their kid a phone and removes them, they will reinstall themselves after an automatic update. When you take into consideration the “streamlined” registration process, one can argue this is a means to target prepubescent children.
…I guess an 8 year old could download a VPN and steal their parents identification, but I feel like some form of prohibition would help.
So you not only create a grey market you immediately inculcate the children into it.
Prohibition is generally ineffective in anything that doesn’t involve violating someone else’s rights.
If we’re talking about getting rid of slopware I’m all for it. But this law. And other laws like it are an incredibly thinley veiled attempt to silence dissent by tying peoples online comments to their employment and subsequently housing and healthcare.
And I will never believe that this is done out concern for children.
The pre installed apps is the problem, make that illegal instead.
They’re propaganda laws. Internet censorship laws. Palestinian genocide started trending on social media and suddenly all the countries out in the west wanted to start banning/controlling social media. Plus the earlier push to ban TikTok by Facebook to try to ladder pull the market from competitors
I’ve talked to heaps of parents and heaps of kids about this. What I think is interesting is that people face-to-face seems to be generally supportive of the law. They say that social media is problematic, and that the law helps by discouraging its use. A few different kids have said that they it helps them break an addition. Other kids say they don’t care, because it hasn’t blocked them. So mostly positive or neutral responses when face-to-face.
But every time I see this mentioned on the internet, it’s very negative. There are always heaps of comments saying that it is a failure, and could never work, and that the government is stupid; and there are often other comments saying it is a part of a secret plan for the government to track us or whatever. In any case, mostly negative views - with just a sprinkling of fairly neutral views such as “it hasn’t been active for very long. Lets wait and see.”
I just think that’s interesting. I guess my real-world social circles don’t totally match my internet social circles.
Kids will often just repeat what they’ve heard to adults.
But the largest problems to these laws is the way they affected minority groups. If followed, the law would disproportionately affect disabled and queer teens who may suddenly be unable to access help and community.
I suspect there’s some selection bias in the kids you’re speaking to.
A blind spot i know i have is that i grew up without social media and the internet as it exists now, when i was a teen the internet was a place to spend some time playing goofy games on newgrounds or neopets, maybe downloading some movies or music from Limewire or Kazaaar.
I have no idea how i would have gone growing up with this insidiously tailored and hyper addictive environment, honestly it feels like giving every kid their first hit of heroin in high school and sending them on their way.So i get why kids might be both ‘thank you’ and ‘fuck you’ in equal measure, but just like heroin there will be plenty that never recover, and it all could just be resolved by reigning in the social media companies.
Or, the internet, the same medium upon which the noisome roots of social media depend, has some induced self-selection bias for increasing connectivity. It’s basically behaving like a weird superorganism and advocating for conditions to make it grow. At, I might add, the expense of the host species.
This and the porn thing have been massively invasive in terms of privacy. It’s so transparently just building a database of facial data. It doesn’t even make an attempt to comprehensively block everything on the internet, or realistically enforce compliance.
Censorship is never the answer. Teaching values and the corresponding ethics and morals that come with it is closer to the answer. A world where you burn down shit just to get a job as a firefighter makes this path a bit more difficult and harder to follow.
Censorship is never the answer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Formally banning certain forms of vulgar and bigoted expression establish a code of conduct for the community, even if they aren’t strictly enforced.
Teaching values and the corresponding ethics and morals that come with it is closer to the answer.
Morality is as much about proactive and affirmative pursuit of justice as internalized codes of conduct.
If there is no social consequence for immoral behavior, there is no reason to believe the act is immoral.
Censorship was never their intention. So they couldn’t give any less fucks. They just want to control us.
“Just Say No” would work if the Liberals would just stop saying Yes.
Dear reader of the above OP - this is the liberal thread. If you want a socialist thread, please scroll down.
I get it. You don’t want my kind here. I’ve heard that call made throughout history.
WHAAAAT?!?! Educating people is better than telling them what to do?
Right it’s going to take longer than a few months to enforce properly and undo the damage and protect new generations from its negative effects.
At least it’s a start.
Or maybe it’s never going to work because you can’t enforce it properly because the parents don’t want it to be enforced. And the damage you’re talking about is not backed up by as good science as you think it would be if you were going to pass a law such as this.
But many people are of the mindset that oh my God. Oh my God we have to do something and this is something and therefore it’s better than nothing, and they’re wrong. If you don’t have a good plan, that doesn’t make your bad plan reasonable.
So your solution is to do nothing until there is a good plan. What is a good plan? How do we measure if something is a good plan before implementing it? Especially on the scale of moderating the internet… And what would your good plan be?
Children are the reponsability of parents. Enforcing parents control on device like it is in europe by exemple if far more useful than giving this responsibility to platform that have no financial interest of doing it. Also u can reasonably make internet education course the same way some do about drugs or sex.
Unfortunately, I think parents have by and large failed to parent this aspect of a child’s life. Do we continue to trust parents when they are so clearly failing? I suppose education is the long term answer but I rather just remove the ability for kids to access such harmful content.
But gouvernement isnt in mesure to apply this in any way. It wouldnt make it better for anybody. Do we have to learn parrent to control their kids action ? i thought they know but you got a point that a lot dont.
This is new territory. It’s going to take some trial and error to figure it out.
Nothing can be tested and improved upon until it’s rolled out.
There is no “start” it has been an absolute failure.
Get ready for even more surveillance, censorship and restrictions. That’s all they know about how to fix problems - bandaids to hide symptoms instead of addressing the root cause of issues.
Perhaps this was always the plan. Introduce a law for “protecting children” knowing it won’t work as it stands, so then it will be easier to introduce even more surveillance and restrictions to fix the current law,
All in the name of protecting children. How can you be against it? /s
What? There is emence amounts of joy in “I told you so”. The majority of people warned them this was a stupid idea and now you want to piss on the good feeling of smug correct calling of the clearly failure idea? Fuck off.
I have never seen “immense” spelled that way!
Support public education about the risks of social media, and better parental control software ! That is the only way to actually fix this mess.
Just because we agree with the news doesn’t make it correct.
The ban was brought about in December 2025. It’s clearly far too early to draw any conclusions about the impact.
If we are going to cherry pick data let’s make sure to cherry-pick data from both sides: https://yougov.com/articles/54334-new-yougov-research-shows-cautious-optimism-as-australians-assess-impact-of-under-16-social-media-ban
