Don’t stop at social media. Put that same limit on religion, too.
Enforcing it is virtually impossible.
How do you do, fellow Norwegian Lemmings? I sure do love being under fifteen, who’s with me, right?
You are correct, but i’d like to expand a bit on how it could be solved.
It requires that all major social networks use BankID for all traffic from Norway.
Bypassing it would require a VPN, which is a simple hurdle.
But the major win here is that parents will enforce this. Parents can point to this law and say that they have to be old enough. As long as enough parents enforce this law and the VPN requirement is there, then it will probably be effective enough
So you need a BankID to open an account on the covered platforms? That seems like a privacy nightmare.
And a 14 year old kid using a VPN is probably not the target audience for a lot of the worst abuse.
Not saying it won’t happen, but a drastic reduction is better than none.
Is it even possible to define “social” media? Media on the internet which allows you to connect with others? So the entire internet then? We always have had e-mail, IRC, newsgroups, IM, forums and later on voice calls, and every “new” platform is just an iteration or amalgamation of those early technologies. (Yeah especially you, discord, you worthless piece of shit)
It is a law that makes sense to me from a human standpoint, but looks impossible to uphold if you think about the practical implications. Everything is social. Pure read-only websites are vastly outnumbered. Even wikipedia allows discussions ffs.
That said, i would very much welcome an entire ban of minors on the internet. And while we’re at it, maybe more so a ban on data-harvesting, intrusive advertising and corporate driven monetisation of user created content. Earlier days of the internet. Ctrl-alt-del that fucker back to 1998 please.
Or you know what, just pull the plug. It was fun while it lasted but let’s not succumb to FOMO. The party has ended and yet we’re still on the dance floor with the lights on, clinging on to the last moments that already passed. There’s beer and someone else’s vomit on our clothes, a bunch of drunks stumbling and yelling racist remarks, your girl is riding some loser on the wet floor and the thick, putrid smell of lost hope and forgotten dreams hangs in the air. There’s no more music, just the drunken ramblings of those that also refuse to leave and some shouting reverberated in the now almost empty venue, and you feel the cold air and the humidity. You realise you haven’t seen your friends around for hours. How did this happen all of a sudden, it was so fun here an hour ago?
It never really was.
Let’s just go home.
Here’s one way to do it. The legislators define a list. Products in the list are social media. The list is referenced in the law.
Ban tools that pretend to be magic?
Just my guess. Butlerian jihad something. Not going to think further, I like this one fuzzy.
E-mail is just electronic mail. IRC is just electronic groupchat. Newsgroups is just an electronic notes board, like they may have on a residential building.
IM is like e-mail or IRC, but with bullshit. Forums are like newsgroups, but with bullshit.
Voice calls are like phone calls, but over ~~ the Web.~~ the Internet.
That said, i would very much welcome an entire ban of minors on the internet.
I’m split over that.
Reading fan fiction hurt me a lot - literature can be harmful, especially when it’s written by late puberty teens about situations they’d want to have, relating to late puberty social dynamics and which characters they’d want to have sex with. It has damage potential for some people.
But also most of the good things I’ve read were over Internet too. I’m already formed by it.
Let’s just go home.
I agree, but some of it was fun. The parts created by real people, using tools for their intended purpose. Webpages - to share hypertext-connected bunches of pages. Forums - to have text discussions separated by subjects. And so on.
It broke when someone really believed you can take the human out of the loop.
But all these tools are only meaningful as an extension of the human. Mail doesn’t make sense if you put a bunch of text generators that would mail each other nonsense, even if it is plausible nonsense.
We the humanity have tested ourselves with enormous computing power and have found out our worth. Here ends the optimistic age, and the pessimistic age starts, which won’t be the first time they change even in the last century.
We have been weighed and found wanting. Isn’t this sobering and beautiful? Only I’d like this to have happened earlier. Like 10 years ago.
How are they going to write a law that bans social media while allowing online school?
Thats my point. You can’t. Everything on the internet is “social” nowadays. The best they can do is something like banning access to services that don’t follow a strict set of rules/laws, for instance regarding data collection or selling etc
Government doing parenting now? Bad idea.
What exactly do you think schools are?
Is it? Not dealing with “the other kids have social media so I can too”!
Governments have always been involved in parenting and the education of kids.
For all those that think this is the government overstepping with an unenforceable law, you are not grasping the intent correctly. Declaring that we have democratically decided to have an age limit for social media means that we have laid the groundwork for collective action. This means that suddenly schools, parents, teenagers themselves, etc. all have a reason and a mandate for keeping young people off platforms that we believe to be detrimental to their development and well-being. True democratic culture lies not in bourgeoisie domination (as many Americans like to believe), but rather in mutual trust and cooperation in order to solve common and big problems.
Well.
Anything good I encounter in cultures that interest me is similar to the matching part of the Scandinavian cultures, or so it would seem.
And in this particular case it is so.
But in general I don’t like this optimism of “you don’t understand, it’s different in our land of elves as opposed to your sorry piece of clay with goblins in it”.
Centralized social media, controlled by companies, I’d want to be just banned. These are all harm and no good. But in general - see about optimism.
Exactly!
It’s not about Totalizing Enforcement. What it changes is the cultural norm. Not right away but over time.
An age limit on alcohol never stopped anyone of any age to acquire alcohol, but it sets the societal bar for what’s acceptable. You don’t wanna be the parents that gave your kids alcoholic beverages at 13.
It’s always a little jarring how everyone very readily believes that the Scandinavian countries are the happiest in the world, but won’t believe that the incremental policy changes we implement here have any effect 🤷♂️
As a case study, we did this in 1988 with a smoking law that was incrementally improved with great success. It was controversial at the time, but is now generally regarded as such an obvious policy: no smoking in or around public transport, in bars and restaurants etc…
If anything, it would be far better to ban people above a certain age from social media. I’ve seen far more older people get sucked in by online misinformation and become extreme conspiracy theorists than kids.
It’s not the government’s job to tell adults to not partake in self-harm. Kids don’t know better.
Sorry, but that logic is absolute and total bullshit.
Adults are extremely bad at making decisions in their best interests too. Why does the government have to oppress kids to protect them, but you when the exact same logic is applied to adults, that’s a problem?
It’s all oppression. It’s all wrong. Kids should have autonomy too.
Kids are disadvantaged in a number of ways compared to adults
- the obvious factor is that the prefrontal cortex is not developed. they simply do not have the capacity to make fully informed decisions.
- another factor is the simple lack of experience. when you compare an 8 year old to an adult, that adult has been through a lot of shit in their life. they learned a thing or two and that gives him the ability to sniff out bullshit much more easily than a child. think of it as the bullshit immune system
- kids don’t have the resources that adults do. they typically don’t have access to credit cards so the free things on the internet attract them more easily. websites (really apps these days) prey on this fact.
It’s you who was suggesting adults of certain age should be banned from social media, not me. You don’t get to then say ‘It’s all oppression. It’s all wrong.’ in the next sentence. You’re being a hypocrite.
There’s a good reason we don’t let kids eat sand, hit their friend, drive cars, vote, watch porn, drink alcohol and smoke tobacco. Their brains are undeveloped. They don’t know any better. They’re entitled to autonomy when they’re capable of it.
My point was that anyone sensible would immediately see the problem with my suggestion, and that would perhaps lead them to understand why enforcing the same rule against kids is wrong.
And again, I’m sorry, but your reasoning is weak as fuck. Would you take away the rights of someone with an intellectual disability from watching porn or smoking?
If anything, it would be far better to ban people above a certain age from social media.
Yeah, sure. That screams that you don’t advertise, but rather oppose banning adults and above that all age groups. You are backpedaling and moving the goal posts. It would be much more adult to accept the flaw of your first comment.
Would you take away the rights of someone with an intellectual disability from watching porn or smoking?
That’s a perfectly valid discussion to be had.
But government can take away the means or incentive for self harm. It is just a matter of society agreeing. That will never happen in the USA and Americans are fine. Norway agreed and they are fine.
and Americans are fine.
Right… the land of the free is clearly an example for everyone, the epitome of societal progress.
We shouldn’t blocked the social media, they are pure shit, don’t get me wrong, but we should only educate correctly the people to show them how bad it is
With that logic we should give everyone a nuclear bomb and teach them not to press the button. Let’s see how that works out.
Big tegh companies spend billions on ways to influence your behaviour, making it even difficult for adults to not fall for their traps, let alone kids with still very much underdeveloped brains. Just look at all the stupid things you had done when you were a kid.
With that logic we should give everyone a nuclear bomb
And in here lies the problem of using bad analogies.
My answer was an ideal thing, but it will not happened soon because of the big corporates, they are keeping us for profit. You’re absolutely right that it’s the fault of corporations.
What?! Are you implying the parents should educate their kids better? How dare you!?
I would highly recommend listening to the If Books Could Kill podcast about the book “The Anxious Generation”. I feel like it’s probably one of their weaker episodes, if I’m honest, because they kind of have a preconceived bias against social media, but I think they basically come around to the conclusion that there is basically no compelling evidence that social media is particularly harmful to young people, in a general sense, and that on the whole, it’s also very useful for young people.
This is just yet more oppression of young people dressed up as if it’s for their best interests.
Oppression of young people is the only one that seems to get worse over time
Oppression?! FFS… can’t even look at 'em the wrong way nowadays and it’s oppression… i guess it’s better than repression!
“Are you 15 or more years old? Y/N”
There, that fixed the problem.
True but would you prefer weak enforcement or strong enforcement?
Strong enforcement would likely involve the government having better records of your browsing habits.My government already knows all of my kinks, I include a list of all the porn I watched each year with my tax return. They don’t ask for that, but I provide it anyway.
IIRC Norway has an actual Nat ID system, so assuming they develop a workable API for it ðis could actually be implemented quite easily.
Preventing kids stealing ðeir parents’ IDs to open accounts anyway will be ð actual challenge.
So then the kids will just use a VPN
could actually be implemented quite easily.
Without any risk for sure…
Is there a reason that you use some character (I’m afraid I don’t know the name of it) wherever you would otherwise use “th”? I can’t guess if it’s some kind of technical issue with federated text, something from a different language you’re incorporating, or one of those “I think we should add x symbol to the language so I’ll use it to draw attention to the effort” deals, like with the people that use the combined !? symbols whenever both are relevant at once.
What ð heck are are you talking about, it looks normal. To me. Maybe ðeres someðing wrong wið your computer.
It’s a thorn, a letter making a th sound. Still in use in Icelandic, I think. In English, it’s archaic at best.
Fun fact, when it fell out of use, the letter Y was used to replace it for a while. So when you see something saying “ye olde”, verbally it’s still “the old”.
I actually always wondered about the y in old texts. Thanks!
I’m probably doing exactly what they want here (e.g. having a conversation about it), but that letter is called “Eth” and was the Old English way of spelling the “th” sound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth
A number of linguistic buffs want to bring it back to the modern English alphabet.
… I’m also one of ðose people ðat uses ð interrobang
Wow, aren’t you a hip cat.
I do what I want
Whats that O with an aeroplane?
It’s the original English letter for
thwhich was more or less deleted from the alphabet when imported printing press types lacked said letter.Before it got universally replaced by
thsome printers usedylike in “ye olde” which is really pronounced “the old”neat, thanks!
If they admit they’re below the age of 15 they should be banned until they reach the mature age.
That’ll get them. No one under 15 has any idea what a VPN is.
How hard up are you for Facebook? Like, there’s a technical solution, sure. But a big part of social media’s addictive quality is ease of access.
Making access annoying absolutely will curb teen use.
downloading and using a vpn is super easy now though???
Sure, but what they’re saying is that even a little bit of friction will make some people give up, and that kills the virality of things like social media
fair
Could also age gate ð VPNs wiðin Norwegian networks. Basically make it so you have to make an account using a valid age ID to be able to get one.
Yeah, cause VPN companies are known for complying with foreign governments…
Ðere is a world of difference between complying wið online censorship and complying wið rules ðat would have a tangible positive impact on childhood mental healþ.
Indeed they are if they want to operate on said countries.
How do they define what a social media is?
Probably networks where users post personal data in conjunction with chat features. Obviously, Wikipedia is not social media in this regard and neither is a mailing list.
And most importantly: How would they enforce that? Kids have been lying about their ages since the dawn of internet.
I don’t think they really need to.
Laws are often just an acknowledgement of a society’s expectation.
“We’ve all decided that kids under 15 using social isn’t great.”
The fact that this law exists makes it infinitely b easier for parents to establish and maintain rules in their household, because peer pressure is minimised.
Yes, some kids will still use social before they’re 15. Perhaps most kids. However, I think harmfully excessive use will be minimised.
Porn sites have age limits, we know this doesn’t mean shit. No middleschooler gets condemned for watching porn.
Would probably require the sites to use Bank ID during signups from Norway.
Bank ID is a national system for confirming identity.
Sounds dystopian as fuck. Also, they can just pretend they’re not from Norway.
Now Meta not only knows your name and where you live and your darkest secrets but your legal ID too — fun!
Not saying you might be right, but this could be solved with a simple API that returns yes/no for the age check, without providing additional information.
And this is the problem with any age verification online… there’s always some lurking privacy invasion. It’s for your own good.
The enforcing part is where this is likely to get shitty. Once they establish this as a law they maybe will try and sue companies that don’t provide an age check on their websites. Now if that is possible I am not sure, seeing as many of those are having HQs in Ireland or Netherlands due to tax reasons.
But if that is successful it would mean they actually have to check everyone’s age by some means, which means collecting IDs. Which definitely is bad news for users, we all know that data won’t be securely stored or deleted.
Not sure how else this could go down.
Since Leisure Suit Larry at least. ;) Since alcohol sales were restricted to adults? Since… ?
I know I have been surfing the hub ever since I was 13
Just like everyone on the internet.
Yeah I want to know if YouTube and any website with comments (eg all news sites) are social media
It will just be the ones they don’t get kickbacks from.
What about Ecommerse site where you can interact with other buyers, talk to the seller and reply to people’s reviews? Isnt that a social media?
Governmental overreach. Good luck trying to enforce this shit.
Social media isn’t bad inherently. Addictive algorithms, violation of user privacy, etc. is bad.
Kids should be taught how to make use of social media for good. I was bullied quite a lot as a kid. Social media is what kinda brought me out of it.
Social media told 13 year old me, that it is alright to be gay. Social media is what made me interested in politics. A huge part of who I am today is because of the nice people I met online. Fuck the government for trying to take it away from others like me.
Social media isn’t bad inherently. Addictive algorithms, violation of user privacy, etc. is bad.
Cigarettes aren’t bad for you. It’s just the burning tar and the nicotine.
comparing substances to social media is fucking stupid and you should feel bad.
And here you are, spewing bullshit analogies on social media…
Message boards aren’t social media.
But social media don’t have to burn tar. They chose to because this way they can get more money, but it’s not an inherent part of the system, it’s an exploitation of it for profit, and can be separated
This. ^
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While all of that may be true, it doesn’t necessarily negate the adverse affects social media can also have on young people.
I think you got lucky and found a community that accepted and welcomed you. But a lot of kids aren’t as fortunate, and their experiences with social media are a lot more sinister. Children are more exposed to predators and harassment now than ever before.
I dunno that a full “ban until ___ years old” policy is the cure, either. But it’s a start.
I don’t understand why the knee jerk reaction for everything is just “ban it”.
You want to reduce the exposure of children to predators? Moderate the platforms. We can agree that Reddit n Lemmy’s moderation is a lot better than Instagram’s moderation. Why don’t we start with that???
The biggest way predators do their predatoring is by sliding into ur DMs. You could restrict this by requiring approval for all such new DMs by a parent’s account or something. There r just so many ways that social media can be made safer for kids.
Social media is a digital townsquare. Sure, there r some malicious actors lurking about. Does that mean that kids should just be banned from this townsquare? No. The townsquare should be made safer for kids. There must be some hand-holding for kids in the beginning so that they can learn how to make the best use of this infrastructure in the future.
There is little evidence for this claim. As far as I recall, evidence actually shows that things like bullying, harassment and child sexual exploitation are dropping.
That ship has long sailed. Most teens will find a way and the ones that don’t will be social rejects.
Social media is fundamentally a part of our social fabric. There’s no going back on that. Instead, collectively we should promote healthier social networks not prohibit them. Norway is fucking stupid here.
Also, wtf are Norvegian parents doing with their infinite oil money they don’t have time to care for their teens?
We don’t have to accept corporations selling ads that target young people and using algorithms to take advantage of them.
And Norwegian parents are doing what many are doing; caring for their kids to the best of their abilities. That oil money has provided good social services and these teens do have access to healthcare, including mental, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t teenagers still. They necessarily require some independence. That’s growing up, so you can’t just parent around every problem. Hence restricting some things, like cigarettes and alcohol for example.
I don’t see this much differently. It is a hazardous drug that warrants some consideration. Enforcement is fraught but that doesn’t mean we should just sit on our hands and accept it as is.
prohibition simply doesn’t work. Especialy with social constructs. Try telling teens that they shouldn’t listen to a specific music genre lol
There are million other better ways to handle and this law just seems like a bunch of populist drivel:
Therefore, the next step will be to push forward an age verification solution specifically for social media.
So, now because some parents suck at parenting I should provide my ID to Instagram? How incredibly dumb is that?
As a parent myself I’m so tired of shitty parents ruining it for everyone. Just talk with your kids, it’s really not that hard.
Interesting. Not going to debate much further with you, but I’m always a bit envious when I run into other parents who claim they have 100% control over their kids. I don’t. My child is grown now, but I absolutely did not. They were their own person, that no matter how much I talked to them had their own life and struggles.
And prohibition does work in some cases. See, cigarettes. Smoking has been in the fall for a long time especially among the young.
But I’m glad your kid will never have any problems ever and if they do that you admit it could have been solved by you talking to them.
I’m really confused by this perspective and your comparsion to cigarettes is completely inadequette — you can’t compare substances to social constructs.
If parents can’t influence their kids how is goverment powered prohibition supposed to do that?
List one social construct that is successfully prohibited by a governing body and actually provides societal value. The only thing comes to mind is porn and take a look how fucking twisted countries where porn is supressed are. This is some north korea level of stupidity.
This law is unprecedented and usually I’d say it should be approached with great care but clearly it’s just populist virtue signaling because it’s simply stupid and is backed by zero scientific or intelectual basis.
I agree that it is unprecedented and should be handled thoughtfully. Nevertheless a corporate website is not a social construct. There is no talk of banning socialization. Maybe you thought they meant social networks in the traditional sense (social group connections) but they are referring to websites. So cigarettes is a perfectly suitable analogy, which is why I can understand your dismissal.
So let me just clarify. Norwegian parents are bad, even though kids here are doing pretty well when compared globally. Regulating how young people interact with the world never works and is bad. So, underage drinking should be allowed, smoking, driving at 8, no age of consent? And parents can just talk to their kids to fix all the problems that happen, including psychological manipulation for financial gain? And anybody that has issues or is taken advantage of just has bad parents? Those who think society has a role to play are just virtue signaling?
And prohibition does work in some cases. See, cigarettes. Smoking has been in the fall for a long time especially among the young.
Prohibition only feeds black markets.
Except it doesn’t, like with their smoking example.
Or, for another. There are age requirements for buying alcohol. Based on your comments, there must be a massive thriving black market for selling moonshine to kids, yet I’ve seen zero evidence of such a thing.
I really dislike this sort of daddy over reach but it seems like this is the only way to make corpos get real about enforcement.
This would result needing to provide ID to use normie social media?
How would this even work globally and on places like fediverse tho?
How would this even work globally and on places like fediverse tho?
it wouldn’t work. I’m betting 100$ right now that nothing will come of this law it’s purely populist virtue signaling.
Well the devil is in the detail. However, what appears is being mooted is it will only affect big social media corporations. A Lemmy instance is hardly big business. Not that I’m discounting creeping regulation moving into the fediverse.
It’s impossible to specifically target Facebook and Snapchat without also affecting Lemmy and YouTube comments.
They’re all social media with minor UI differences.
It really isn’t, you just go the way the recent EU laws have gone and write them such that only large services (with over x million users or similar) are under obligation to comply and implement age gates and the like.
Is it even possible to define “social” media? Media on the internet which allows you to connect with others? So the entire internet then? We always have had e-mail, IRC, newsgroups, IM, forums and later on voice calls, and every “new” platform is just an iteration or amalgamation of those early technologies. (Yeah especially you, discord, you worthless piece of shit)
It is a law that makes sense to me from a human standpoint, but looks impossible to uphold if you think about the practical implications. Everything is social. Pure read-only websites are vastly outnumbered. Even wikipedia allows discussions ffs.
That said, i would very much welcome an entire ban of minors on the internet. And while we’re at it, maybe more so a ban on data-harvesting, intrusive advertising and corporate driven monetisation of user created content. Earlier days of the internet. Ctrl-alt-del that fucker back to 1998 please.
Or you know what, just pull the plug. It was fun while it lasted but let’s not succumb to FOMO. The party has ended and yet we’re still on the dance floor with the lights on, clinging on to the last moments that already passed. There’s beer and someone else’s vomit on our clothes, a bunch of drunks stumbling and yelling racist remarks, your girl is riding some loser on the wet floor and the thick, putrid smell of lost hope and forgotten dreams hangs in the air. There’s no more music, just the drunken ramblings of those that also refuse to leave and some shouting reverberated in the now almost empty venue, and you feel the cold air and the humidity. You realise you haven’t seen your friends around for hours. How did this happen all of a sudden, it was so fun here an hour ago? It never really was. Let’s just go home.
You can if you specify plataforms that sell ads.
You may use it only until you are 15. Alternately, you may choose any 15-year window in your life. Choose wisely.
The wisest choice is no period at all
