Start conservatively, and ban only things which are bright-line social media. Then expand if this isn’t enough.

Well we should define it sensibly. It’s not the bigger problem.

Yes. But it’s not easy for parents apparently. Indeed, there’s a coordination problem – while the standard is for kids to have social media, removing social media for one child disconnects them from their peers. So standardising the ban would be needed.

I think we should just ban social media entirely. If people want to stay in touch with each other, it should be through direct messaging (including email); and if people want to publish their opinions to the world let them use blogs; and if people want to discuss topics, let them use forums.

Conveniently, if social media is banned, then we don’t need ID verification.

Routers is not the way. It should be device-side. Children’s phones and computers should blacklist social media, or even whitelist allowed sites IMO. Otherwise they can get around this with data, or public wi-fi.

Oh sorry, I mean, I think we should ban algorithmic feeds (by which I mean anything non-trivial – they usually have “latest unreads” etc. which is fine by me.). Possibly also systems which are both (a) not dedicated to a single topic, and (b) connect at least hundreds of thousands of people, and © have some built-in mechanism to facilitate forwarding content from others to other people directly adjacent to you on the graph (retweeting/reblogging/etc.).

SMS, IRC, BBS, online chat – these all predate what are known as social media and they fit all my desiderata. No non-trivial algorithmic feed, and segregated into generally smaller communities.

Bluesky, twitter (latest-from-friends), Mastodon – I am skeptical of these, even if they have no non-trivial algorithmic feeds. While individuals will typically have less than ten thousand “friends”/“following” per se, the friend graph still forms a network which comprises millions of people. Of course, traditional systems like email are similar, so this would probably be okay if not for reblogging/retweeting/etc., which is basically a human-powered recommender system.

Twitter (under normal usage), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, tumblr – hard no, these fit none of the desiderata, and I think they’re clearly “social media” and also clearly harmful.

YouTube and Reddit I think are acceptable if we ban the non-trivial feeds (i.e. restrict to subscriptions-only, no recommender systems, no “best”, “hot”, etc.)

You’re welcome. We are upset with the USA, not Americans.

Well I don’t see why we would need to ban online chat for kids. That’s not social media in my mind; there’s no algorithmic feed.

im girl and my personality is three of these

Damn I didn’t know it was that high here.

True, I just assumed that your first and second sentenced were in juxtaposition.

Is that bad somehow?

True, though they are better educated, more socialist, and import less American politics. I daresay this causes them to elect better leaders.

That’s valid. My preference is for device-side child locks. For instance, a header that says, “I am a child.” There is much to improve there still. But failing that, if the winds of politics dictate we must have verification – why not ZKP?

Well, that same problem exists with many of the proposed verification models, like credit cards (how can you verify this is my credit card?) , photo ID, etc.

Here’s my proposal: your browser can send a request to a verification body (could be the government directly, let’s say) to respond to the challenge from the website you’re accessing, without sending information about which website is asking for the challenge. The verifier sends a cryptographically-signed approval back. The browser forwards this to the website. To prevent comparisons of timing as a deanonymization method, the browser can wait a random period of time before forwarding the request both ways.

Well, I certainly agree with that, we can improve our electoral system a bit. There are limits on this of course, given there are mathematical proofs that there can’t be any perfect voting scheme (with more than 2 parties).

Still though, 40% of voters being bigots is already an incredibly massive problem, trying to save minorities by changing the voting system, reducing provincial powers (removing the notwithstanding clause), or otherwise carefully balancing things, it all seems like a bandaid at this point.

You say “no,” as though you are disagreeing with me. But did you notice I said this?

Hell, ban them for everyone if you must.

I’m not convinced that ZKP requires an identification number or any such deanonymizing data. If there is a ZKP protocol that implements this that is just one possible implementation.

I’m not entirely convinced the problem is the notwithstanding clause. I think the problem is that anti-trans fearmongering has found a political foothold. I mean honestly at the end of the day, you need a certain threshold of the population to support these kinds of policies for them to get enacted. And once too many people are bigots in a democracy, nothing can protect minorities. Bigotry is the thing we should have prevented.

None of these are good arguments against introducing a ban. Worst argument of all is that “we shouldn’t ban it for 15 year olds because that wouldn’t protect 16 year olds.” Seriously? Is that intentional rage bait?

I think it’s more than clear by now that algorithmic feeds are hazardous, at least without significant effort in research and safeguards which nobody seems to be doing. So yeah, I’d say: definitely ban algorithmic feeds for teenagers. Hell, ban them for everyone if you must.

Gating should be done either by ZKP (zero-knowledge proofs, which don’t expose any information to any party other than “I’m at least x years old” – look this up if this is a new concept to you) or device-side by standardizing and streamlining child safety locks.