A new law, signed by Republican Governor Mike DeWine in July, is considered as a way to safeguard children’s mental health, citing concerns about the intentionally addictive nature of social media.
Anytime someone’s claim is the protection of children, you should apply a VERY heavy dose of scepticism and scrutiny.
I absolutely agree, but “you need parental consent to have an account” doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
If you take it at face value, which you should really never do when conservatives are involved.
By my estimation, this (and bills like it) are intended to do two things:
- Reduce younger people’s access to points of view outside of the US political mainstream. In particular, Republican politicians seem very convinced that TikTok is turning kids gay/trans/atheist/communist/etc.
- Allow for aggrieved conservatives to extract money via lawsuit from corporations Republican politicians view as hostile to them. Because laws like this will obviously be circumvented, and these laws are written such that the platform is liable in these cases, these laws open them up to potentially millions of lawsuits every time a teenager gets an Instagram account.
Doesn’t COPPA already require this for children under 13? This state bill raises it to under 16.
I guess it comes down to the particulars. Is there something more onerous in the Ohio bill than in COPPA? Because I don’t think I’ve heard of any company seriously getting mad that COPPA is a thing.
You’d think if it was they’d be pointing to that.
As far as I’m concerned “you must have parental consent until 18” is perfectly legitimate, because you can’t really sign contracts or fully legally consent until then.
Protecting children would mean knowing which users are children, which would mean knowing the actual legal identity of every user of the platform. It’s never going to happen.
You don’t think that the data the companies collect and analyse from their users don’t already give them a decent idea? How do you think targeted advertising works?
That data is a very good guess, but not appropriate for legal application.
Yeah for that you’d need some kind of datepicker field marked “birthday”.
Which then wouldn’t be a legally full verification of your age, thus the legislation would probably require some other means. We currently have a similar discussion in the EU regarding porn sites. Verification methods could be showing your id card and your face to a webcam, or showing up at a verification office in person (at least in germany we have this with our national postal service). Of course the porn sites don’t want to implement this. And I cannot really blame them. Nobody would give a random porn site their real identity and it would still be very easy to get porn without verification.
Age verification on social media is very similar.
Really? That’s the basis of the lawsuit? That kids were being protected?
