First things first: Meta is a terrible company that has spent years making terrible decisions and being terrible at explaining the challenges of social media trust & safety, all while prioritiz…
I think you make some good points here, but just for context, I do think that there is a level of responsibility on the parents here in combination with the companies. There’s plenty of “online literacy” classes that I think would be appropriate for adolescent education. I’m the unfortunate benefactor of needing to master cursive as a class one year and then typing the next year. Schools would be more beneficial if they included teaching kids internet literacy. They can probably drop some of the old stuff. They also don’t teach several other things like financial literacy in many situations (despite heavy capitalist leanings in real life). The education system sucks, but that is not an excuse to let iPad kids control my freedoms, and the root cause for age verification has never been about protecting children in the first place.
I absolutely agree that parents do play a role and have some responsibilities for both their and their childrens internet literacy, as well as for what their children access on the internet. I also agree that companies bear some responsibility (for making their platforms addictive on purpose in order to make money off of people they already know are underaged).
I just really want to put forth other ideas for fixing this problem that don’t involve companies being forced by law to enact ID verification when they can’t be trusted to safeguard such information and it feeds into the information database they already have, which will more than likely be used to violate the privacy of their users.
If the government absolutely must get involved making it illegal to produce and give access to a platform found to be addictive would be a start, but so would media and internet literacy education, both of which are solutions that don’t violate the privacy of minors or adults.
Digital media literacy is part of the education system in Denmark and some other European countries and it’s been beneficial to their populace. I think it could be a good solution.
I think you make some good points here, but just for context, I do think that there is a level of responsibility on the parents here in combination with the companies. There’s plenty of “online literacy” classes that I think would be appropriate for adolescent education. I’m the unfortunate benefactor of needing to master cursive as a class one year and then typing the next year. Schools would be more beneficial if they included teaching kids internet literacy. They can probably drop some of the old stuff. They also don’t teach several other things like financial literacy in many situations (despite heavy capitalist leanings in real life). The education system sucks, but that is not an excuse to let iPad kids control my freedoms, and the root cause for age verification has never been about protecting children in the first place.
I absolutely agree that parents do play a role and have some responsibilities for both their and their childrens internet literacy, as well as for what their children access on the internet. I also agree that companies bear some responsibility (for making their platforms addictive on purpose in order to make money off of people they already know are underaged).
I just really want to put forth other ideas for fixing this problem that don’t involve companies being forced by law to enact ID verification when they can’t be trusted to safeguard such information and it feeds into the information database they already have, which will more than likely be used to violate the privacy of their users.
If the government absolutely must get involved making it illegal to produce and give access to a platform found to be addictive would be a start, but so would media and internet literacy education, both of which are solutions that don’t violate the privacy of minors or adults.
Digital media literacy is part of the education system in Denmark and some other European countries and it’s been beneficial to their populace. I think it could be a good solution.