I’m asking for public policy ideas here. A lot of countries are enacting age verification now. But of course this is a privacy nightmare and is ripe for abuse. At the same time though, I also understand why people are concerned with how kids are using social media. These products are designed to be addictive and are known to cause body image issues and so forth. So what’s the middle ground? How can we protect kids from the harms of social media in a way that respects everyone’s privacy?
Stop. Giving. Them. Phones.
Stop whining. No they don’t need one. NO THEY DON’T.
No.
No they’re not special.
No they’re not too busy. Neither are you.
No iPad either.
Stop. Shut up. No. Phones.
And or old school phones, that can call and text, but not surf the internet. Old smaller flip phones. Because parents will want to be able to communicate because they are worriers in many cases, there is no need for them to use smartphones for this.
I agree, if you limit “phones” to “smart phones and portable computers”. There are reasons to give a kid a small, no internet dumbphone. But yes, don’t give kids unrestricted access to the family PC, and DEFINITELY dont give them their own.
That’s the tack I’m taking. My eldest goes to high school next year and most of his peers are automatically getting a smartphone at that point. He’ll be 13. He can forget it. A dumb phone at a push, for safety. That’s it.
I like “if you want a phone you can buy one”. If the kid’s up to getting and keeping a job long enough to save for a phone and service, good for them, they just proved they should be treated that much more like an adult. If not, then hey. Something to work towards
I had a dumbphone at 14, but back then we just called them phones and I was definitely in the 1% for having it. Wasn’t talking to my parents, bought it and a car to sleep in with drug money. Everyone grows up at a different pace
A dumb phone at a push, for safety.
I think that’s a good compromise.
ban social media metrics and information trading/markets. make it a truly anonymous service like it was in the early 2000s.
if protecting children was the point they would stop corporations from identifying all users and selling their identities/profiles online.
but, protecting the children is NOT the point. the point is control of freedom of speech, or rather who gets to have the freedom of speech.
Most people don’t want social media to be anonymous. They want to be themselves and connect with real people. How exactly is an anonymous tinder supposed to work?
Blind dating
/s
Glory holes
the great thing about the early internet was that you had the choice to expose yourself.
now you don’t even need to be a member to be exposed.
And banning non anonymous social media is supposed to bring the choice back?
ban social media metrics and information trading/markets.
try reading that again.
“make it a truly anonymous service”
Reading what you said?
The German passport allows services to verify age through you NFC reading your passport on your phone and confirmation of validity through intermediates state service. All they see is a confirmation of age requirement met. No name, no age, no address, no face.
Some other countries have similar systems. It’s already a EU directive to be implemented on a broader European level.
This sounds like a much better strategy than the Australian model of simply scanning your face and using AI to guess your age
How would that work online? How would they confirm it’s your passport, and that it’s a real passport that was really scanned (instead of a browser plugin)?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EIDAS
- https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personalausweis_(Deutschland)#eID-Funktion
- Register as a service, with justification why you need to be able to read the fields or properties you say you need
- Upon acceptance, aquire a digital permission certificate
- Set up a server, that handles communication with the ID
- For a request, prove you own the permission cert through a challenge sent by the ID document
- ID document proves through a challenge to the server that it is what it is (a set of produced ID documents use the same private and public keys so they are not personally identifiable / associatable to an individual)
- User enters PIN so that this process can proceed
- Open secured connection between server and ID document
- Server can request/challenge age verification, and the ID document answers with “is met”
At least the Wikipedia page is not detailed/technical on step 8, but if you were to attempt to man-in-the-middle, you could not because you can’t fake identifying as a valid ID document, which is ensured by the challenge and private/public key cryptography.
I’ll need to look into it a bit more, but I’m skeptical that this will work in practice:
How can they confirm that I’m the owner of the passport? How do you prevent them from selling the fields they requested, that have been uniquely linked to you? How do you prevent the government from keeping track of all the services you’re using?
The first factor is you physical passport, the second factor is your pin.
I don’t see how an age verification could prevent selling verified age. Once they acquire data they could theoretically sell it, illegally, if they ignore law.
The point is, you can share a small subset of fields without others. No need to share your face or passport number.
I’m not sure about whether the authority knows about the request and response at all. I previously thought so, but this description did not mention it, and it doesn’t seem technically required, if both sides can verify public key/cert validity independently, and then communicate with each other.
You can’t, however you frame this issue there’s going to be a sacrifice. We have to all digest this.
The best kind of sacrifice you can make though for the best outcome is to limit your child’s screen-time, AND ALSO YOUR OWN. Spend more time together, practice what you preach, you are also a child being harmed by social media.
I think we should reframe the question.
How can we protect adults from the harms of not being able to post meaningless bullshit anonymously to online anonymous strangers we never agree with without sacrificing everyones children’s mental stability?
Maybe put childrens rights before adult rights. Adults had fun and got along fine without social media back before the 2000’s. I refuse to believe that we are no longer capable of that. Especially if it means kids get to to go back to using the internet as a resource for homework and playing outside and using their own imaginations. Adults too.
Stop using it entirely.
Funny seeing this comment on a social media platform
This isn’t a platform dunce.
Lemmings are so dumb, I love you guys. The fediverse is literally a network of social media platforms, dunce. But hey, let’s pretend you’re right.
Oh no! I said the wrong word! I guess this is a social media network, not a platform, which completely destroys the point of my comment, right? God I wish you people could read
Burn it with fire?
Honestly there needs to be an honor system in place for the internet.
I think access needs to be granted through some branching moderation. Like one person vouches for two and they can then vouch for two each. If ever one person is found doing wrong, that whole branch gets skewered at the person who vouched for them.
Sure its not perfect but it’s a system that doesn’t immediately jeopardize your anonymity.
Lmao, now you’ve created a perfect relationship map for advertising/tracking who knows who.
Thats a unique idea
Governments need to setup a digital ID using a trustless authenticator.
Government issues a one-time verified credential (tied to real identity verification, like a passport or SSN check). You get a cryptographic token on your device. When a platform needs to know “is this a real adult citizen?”, you present a zero-knowledge proof — yes/no, nothing else. No name, no IP, no persistent identifier the platform can track. The government isn’t contacted. The platform learns nothing except the answer to their question.
Can I buy one of these Cryptographic Tokens on the dark web?
You can’t just buy one on the dark web because the credential is tied to a private key — you’d need the actual device or key, not just the token.
A government-issued cryptographic credential lets you prove you’re a real adult citizen without revealing your identity. It eliminates bots and foreign actors, protects children, and preserves privacy — because the government only gets involved once at enrollment, and platforms never see who you are, just a yes/no proof.
(I’m not an expert, so if anyone has input please correct)
EDIT:
The one-time government verification moment is a major privacy chokepoint. Who runs it? How is that database secured? History is not encouraging here – government identity databases get breached, misused, or quietly expanded in scope. “The government only gets involved once” is doing a lot of work
Would be doable in the UK.
All citizens can register for a Government Gateway account to help you manage your tax affairs so it is indelibly attached to your identity.
Once you have registered it wouldn’t be too difficult to add a link that lets you download this key thing you mentioned.
Just normalize talking about those online irl abuse/exploitation stuff instead of yelling at em nor grounding. And stop victim blaming even some of the professionals do that.
Maybe we should do normalize about talking about other stuff too, to body images in head including “problematic” ones to in some anormal/atypical attraction types to possible self diagnosed but not so loud neurodiversities such as realizing you are might be plural or have too specific kinds of ocd.
Ive seen many abusers online are aiming kiddies online with those stuff and since there are not much help and many stigma surrounding mental health and bs kind of therapists that does victim blaming, they will have either to go online with predators watching em and prey on them for those vulnerabilities thrn thus preds will shift blame to those kids or smth.
Ive seen kids young as 12 or smth in some high risk mental health communities. You can tell someone did not wanted em but predators def do. Basically do not give birth to kids if you cant accept em in any way, if you think your kid becoming dangerous after some time, methinks you are also responsible for some aspects of it if they are under some of age.
the age verification thing was “obviously” been associated with PALINITR trying to collect private info of potential politicla dissidents. besides DISCORD they almost all enacted the same policy at once. so palinitir is trying to get access to all the potential surveillance data, it has little to do with “privacy/protecting children”
I think this is a bit more conspiracy theorist than anything else. You’re see coincidences and attributing it to a single bad actor. The reality is obviously much more nuanced. There is more and more research showing the psychological damage things like internet porn and social media have on childrens health, thanks to an entire generation being a live test subject. Social media companies have been running unregulated experiments on kids for decades now, and people are seriously noticing the negative impacts. This has resulted in law makers grasping at straws to find a solution. The less tech savvy ones are being ignorant about it and throwing privacy away for the sake of security. But age verification can be done securely with zero knowledge proofs if we spend the time to actually implement in correctly.
Palantir doesn’t need our ID’s to track us anyway. They get way more information without it already.
bad bot
Probably don’t treat social media as a last front for free speech and let it be curated and safe for children.
Parental controls have been an effective way for decades. In combination with actually looking over your kids, of course.
yeah, but that would require, you know, parenting, which is something we can’t do.
This is capitalism people. Hire a parent doula. Let them do the busywork of digital parenting like minding internet activity, scheduling playdates, managing ad blockers, paying the Roblox allowance, or whatever largely digital activity your kids are involved with.
Unfortunately a lot of parental controls aren’t that helpful, and they’re more of an afterthought
I agree with parenting in general though
The existing tools also extend poorly to cover adults with developmental disabilities who need a digital shepherd to make sure they’re using the web safely. There’s no substitute to being involved. Also, we should bring back the family computer. My parents had a computer in the public area of the house since I was in elementary school. Even in the age of laptops, we had a shared desktop.
By not allowing parents to outsource the responsibilities of being a parent.
I’ll reply to this random one with that statement. There’s no winning move as a parent.
Problem is being locked out. If your kid is the only one not on social media and all other kids are, your kid will be socially left out.
All kids are on a chat platform you don’t support. What do you? Disallow it and give them a social handicap that might scar them, or allow it and take the risk?
The same goes for allowing images on other platforms. Since GDPR schools seem to care. Yet if it’s a recording that will be put on social media you can explain your 4 year old why they weren’t allowed to participate… It sucks.
I don’t know what the right way forward is. I don’t think this is it. Something is needed though. We should at least signal what we find acceptable as a society. Bog stupid rules which are trivial to circumvent might be good enough, or perhaps some add campaigns like we did with smoking (hehe, if it’s for something we support then adds are good?).
Regardless, the current situation clearly doesn’t work. It would be great if we could find and promote the least invasive solutions.
I feel that communicating your concerns with other parents and their school can help. I feel it can make sense to have some forms of socialization when they are in middle school or high school, but even then you’d want a pretty locked down system, imo.
I feel that not every parent is going to let their kids use technologically to talk to their friends, especially not all the time. That’s not how I grew up and I was fine developmentally speaking. As a parent you can seek out other parents that live by similar philosophy locally for your kids to have as friends as well.
You’d be surprised with what parents let their kids do. My little anecdotal sample size contains mostly highly educated people but most of them don’t place any restrictions on screen time of their kids. They claim they talked to their kids and they have assured them they don’t look at anything they are not supposed to but that’s just not what happens in reality.
What really happens is that the kids with no restrictions will engage with all the predatory bullshit on these platforms, nonstop. I can see this with my own eyes and my kid brings their friends over.
Communication is key but unfortunately the business model of these platforms is based on addiction and children are not equiped to deal with it and parental controls are an essential component.
I believe the parent post is nicely sketching out what a “best” move is. I have seen no better approach myself. At the same time I see what you see. The best approach isn’t all that great. If you’re lucky and find the right people it could work. There’s a lot of luck involved there.
That’s why I do think there should be some regulations indicating what is tolerated. It seems to me parent poster may agree (and thus also woth your take).
Since GDPR you can tell the school you don’t want pictures on platforms you disagree with. You may miss out on seeing the photo’s, you might come across as crazy, but you can (and you should). We were given a choice at the cost of extra paperwork and some limitations.
Even without the addiction problem of these platforms we should nurture and find a good society around us. It’s a valid take to try and find likeminded people.
I don’t think that’s the end of it. Given the state we’re in, the network effect, and the fragile ego of developing kids, I suppose we need a stronger push.
AI enforced age verification or logins which allow you to be followed anywhere is not the solution in my current opinion, it’s a different problem. The problems are the addictive and steering nature of the platforms which seems to be hard to describe in a clear way legally.
I wonder how “these platforms” should be defined and what minimum set of limitations would give us and the children the necessary breathing space.
the minimum would be transparency for the algorithm. If users can see exactly what a social media algorithm is doing with their content feed, they would always have a way to identify and escape dark patterns of addiction.
But this minimum itself would require powers to compel tech companies to give up what they would describe as intellectual property. Which would probably require a digital bill of rights?
The most practical option would be to just ask your kids directly about the kinds of content they’ve been consuming and why. Dinner table conversations can probably reveal those dark patterns just as well
Wholeheartedly agree that the problem is the addictive and predatory nature of these platforms. I don’t see how that would change under the current perpetual growth economy we all live under
Well said
People said the exact same thing about books, radio, TV, movies, video games and music.
You come up with some sort of arbitrary rating system. Any child with intent will find a way around it, and eventually they’ll try to find a way to protect their kids from something else.
Social media does seem unique though just because of how addictive it is. If you look into the details of how meta targets children and intentionally tries to addict them it paints a pretty sinister picture: https://techoversight.org/2026/01/25/top-report-mdl-jan-25/
Well, with that comment, I think you have your answer.
Counter argument: alcohol, weed, tobacco, cocaine, drinking and driving, speeding, and acid were all so incredibly commonplace that people were confused when they were phased out or delegalised.
Social media is not on the same level as books, radio, tv, movies, video games and music. The sacred sextuple.
Social media is, however, similar to the afforementioned things, in that partaking in the substance or activity regularly gives you illusions that it benefits much more than it really does, whike ultimately just being bad for you and predisposing you to binging.
I think people are ao defensive over social media because A) they’re addicted and of course B) they’re worried kids won’t be educated on political issues, which i think is probably the more pressing issue than privacy. Becauae we already don’t have privacy on mainstream SM
Except when you went outside back then, or to school, you couldn’t take the TV with you. And parents controlled the TV at home
We do actually restrict many of those. And that’s not really an issue, because you either buy those in a physical store that has to check your ID in person if there’s any doubt that it’s legal to sell it to you, or you buy it on an online platform that already has all the info for payment processing. Can’t run hyperviolent content on daytime TV (in my country, anyway) etc.
Kill the engagement algorithm. Your feed should contain a chronological list of posts made by people you subscribe to. In one stroke you could end the doomscroll - not just for kids, but for everybody. Also, infinite scrolling should be banned.
Your feed should contain a chronological list of posts made by people you subscribe to
Should that be the only way the feed should be organised by law?
in my opinion, yes. the point is to make it less addictive- and this will take away some of the ‘fun’ without isolating kids. social media is entertainment that has been branded and marketed as an essential by the people getting rich off it. i find plenty of good things on youtube without ever signing in - i just search for them. if youtube or whoever wants to use its own ad space to promote channels, i think that is probably ok - provided that the choice is not personalized by an algorithm.
How is this even remotely enforceable?
It will destroy curation. It’s an absurd concept.
I think it’s unrealistic also. I think a better solution is simply to ban endless scrolling. Require them to use pages is enforceable, and remove a proven addicting aspect to social media.
