The momentum is building for a social media ban for minors in one of the largest economies in the world.
  • stoicEuropean@lemmy.mlEnglish
    15·
    1 day ago

    Im a bit out of the loop on this one. Does anyone know why so many western governments are pushing for some kind of legislation towards age-id-verification? They say it’s to protect the youth, but I don’t buy our governments suddenly turning into altruistic patrons. So… what’s the real reason? What’s the hidden agenda? Data Acquisition? Survaillance? Chat Control?

    • Pommes_für_dein_Balg@feddit.orgEnglish
      10·
      1 day ago

      There’s a political movement that gained steam in the EU to make social media companies responsible for the content they deliver.
      This would have meant they’d have to implement robust age verification on their platforms to comply with EU youth protection laws (including fines per child that could access unsuitable content).
      So they lobbied for delegating the age verification to the OS level instead.
      That way they can continue to push harmful, addictive slop to children without being legally responsible.
      They can just say “we check the age provided by the OS”.

      • gian English
        4·
        1 day ago

        There’s a political movement that gained steam in the EU to make social media companies responsible for the content they deliver.

        Which make sense since the same social media companies want the right to moderate what they want.
        What happen is that the social media companies on one hand say “the network is ours, so we can remove what we don’t want” and on the other hand say “we are not responsible for what the user write” but you cannot have both.

        This would have meant they’d have to implement robust age verification on their platforms to comply with EU youth protection laws (including fines per child that could access unsuitable content).

        Or simply say “look we are not touching anything is published, we are a medium. That content is illegal ? Fine, here the data we have to identify the user and if a judge say so, we will remove it since it is illegal”. Nobody think to accuse or fine a telephone company because a pedo uses a their network to commit crimes.

        So they lobbied for delegating the age verification to the OS level instead. That way they can continue to push harmful, addictive slop to children without being legally responsible. They can just say “we check the age provided by the OS”.

        Maybe, but if the OS say that the user is a minor and they show the content anyway they are responsible.

    • plyth@feddit.orgEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      What’s the hidden agenda?

      Censorship.

      IP addresses already reveal the identity of most people, especially if they log into facebook or google. What the govrnment can’t do is silence the opposition. So far everybody can buy a cheap phone, go to a cafe with wlan and publish on the internet.

      With age verification, every service where people can publish freely is under control of the government. The government can reject the age verification of critical people and they can’t log in anymore and cannot make themselves heard.

    • HrabiaVulpes@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      Adding to what Pommes_fur_dein_Balg said.

      Political movement originally pushed for responsibility of social media platforms over content they show, when such content is moderated by them. For example if you subscribe to crackpot theorists rambling about secret vampire society controlling the world that’s on you, but if social media shows you this content without subscription or annotation that this is misinformation as “recommended”, that is on them and they should be penalized by the law.

      But of course money wins over people and lobbyists managed to re-scope the idea into “systemic age checks”, pushing responsibility from companies onto consumers and topic from misinformation to protection of minors.

      In the end one can either assume it’s a honest advertising agenda to show people more targeted ads (showing twice the amount of toys to kids) or you may form suspicions about why rich and powerful want to know who online is a minor after their precious island got busted.