Most parties in the Danish parliament said they support implementing a 15-year-old minimum age requirement for social media. It is not yet known which social media platforms will be affected.

  • Jack@slrpnk.net
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    2 days ago

    Wouldn’t it be better to teach children how to deal with that kind of technology instead of just banning it? Bans similar to drug bans will only make this go underground, allowing the social Media companies to argue there are no children on the platform.

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      Teacher tells a kid to be careful of social media, but the kid’s favourite influencer tells the kid their teacher is lame and they shouldn’t listen to that. Who is the kid going to believe.

      Also we don’t let kids into bars until they’re of a certain age. Sure kids are going to still do shenanigans to get in and sometimes they might succeed, but it reduces children getting drunk at bars by significant amount. And even when kids are able to do something they’re prohibited from, they at least know it’s not a normal thing and might understand there’s danger in what they’re doing.

    • zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.dev
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      2 days ago

      While I can see your point, I don’t think education can stand up to companies with more money than we can conceive that have teams of people making it as addictive as possible and shoehorning in into every aspect of life. If education were enough, nobody would use tobacco, either.

      One of the biggest benefits of young people not being on social media sites or having to at least pretend to be somebody else that I see is that their mistakes can be private. Nobody deserves to be publicly shackled to who they were as a 14 year old dipshit.

      • Jack@slrpnk.net
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        2 days ago

        I agree that education can’t prepare us entirely for social media or for life as a whole, but I see this proposed ban as the easy way out for the government. If social media is a toxic place for children, why and shouldn’t we try to fix it instead of just not allowing children? And if we agree that social media is toxic for children, what makes it ok for adults?

        • zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.dev
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          2 days ago

          You can’t fix those companies because you can’t fix their incentives.

          And if we agree…

          There’s a ton of things that are acceptable for adults that aren’t for children. I bet you can come up with at least three.

    • Leon@pawb.social
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      2 days ago

      Yeah I don’t think the problem is children on social media. I think it’s social media being entirely unregulated. It exists to steal data, invade privacy, and influence people. That’s entirely nefarious and blocking children from accessing it isn’t going to fix any of that.

    • dieTasse@feddit.org
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      2 days ago

      It would be nice if we could simply teach kids, but there are things even adults don’t understand. That’s where govt comes in. What the major part of population doesn’t comprehend might be the things from which the govt tries to protect. Then there is a fine line between protecting people and plain breaking basic human rights (like the whole encryption ban fiasco).