I saw this article, which made me think about it…

Kids under 16 to be banned from social media after Senate passes world-first laws

Seeing what kind of brainrot kids are watching, makes me think it’s a good idea. I wouldn’t say all content is bad, but most kids will get hooked on trash content that is intentionally designed to grab their attention.

What would be an effective way to enforce a restriction with the fewest possible side effects? And who should be the one enforcing that restriction in your opinion?

  • cRazi_man@lemm.ee
    2·
    4 hours ago

    Why only kids? We all need to be protected from social media.

    I don’t know how to suggest good national policy, but I think social media should have these:

    • controls on how far you can doom scroll
    • being able to opt out of algorithms by seeing things in time order and from (optionally) only white listed sources and allowing block lists in a variety of ways, etc, etc
    • heavy moderation of blatantly illegal content.
    • heavily curated advertising (or none at all, users can pay)
    • separation of political content (maybe a system of tagging so topics that are not of interested can be hidden…maybe this could be crowd sourced)
    • Strict control of data collection
    • The ability to delete/be forgotten

    I don’t know how propaganda or corporate interests can be excluded, but that would be ideal.

    Controlling children’s access is so insurmountably difficult, I don’t even know where to start.