UK to ban Social Media for under 16s .. will we/EU follow suit? Is it enough?

To be honest, I'd say the issues of algorithms and how they are utilised very much so require transparent oversight in general. Everything from how extremism is being pushed to intentionally making a platform addictive. I'm inclined to say all governments tend to be dodging dealing with that issue cause they're nervous to go after the big platforms.

What's the rationale for including youtube, I wouldn't personally classify youtube as a social media platform. I guess it's easy to use the family account on common devices but still surprised it's included.

Same here. It still grates when I see episodes of The Simpsons with stuff removed for no reason.

This isn't something I particularly wanted until recently and even now, I'm unsure. We've seen some truly ugly characters who have amassed vast reserves of technological power and no political will to challenge them or hold them to account.

Modern algorithms give big tech the means to radicalise people while hiding behind the pretence of being platforms and not publishers. That's patently untrue. I don't know if this ban is the best thing to be doing. It probably isn't but something has to give, as you noted above.

Yes very likely on a large scale. Most people aren’t cynical enough about the government’s intentions.

But we're not being forced to give up social media. We'll still be able to. It's kids that won't.

And there's loads of stuff that kids are banned from seeing/doing already.

I think kids shouldn't be allowed access social media. It is bad for them. And I think it's a bit mad that some people here are happy to let Musk and Zuckerberg decide what it is that their children see and get their kids addicted to social media.

It's the same when we talk about age restricted content such as porn. people are happy to let kids have access to everything rather than implement some blocker.

We have someone here going on about grooming gang conspiracies and yet they're happy to see kids get access to porn and have unfiltered access to social media, including access to groomers, because of some gubberment conspiracy in their head.

I'm in favour of blocking access to both social media and porn for kids. Adults should be allowed see whatever legal content they want.

How the blocking is done is important to me. I don't want third party sites to be doing it. And I don't want it on a site by site or app by app basis. I don't trust a third party site with our data. Even if they didn't want to monetise it, we can't be sure they'd hold it securely.

That's why I keep harping on about device level access. I've never owned an iPhone, but apples latest features for child safety are a great move. And we should be legislating on a european parliament level for all major OS manufacturers to implement something similar.

It doesn't know who's picking up the phone. It's set at a user level. So a child could pick up my phone and still go onto my facebook app, assuming I haven't locked it. But any device that belongs to them will be secured.

Here's the apple release on their features. It's not perfect, but it's a good start. I have a feeling it's a reaction to governments around the world legislating about porn and social media access for kids.

https://www.apple.com/child-safety/

And since kids generally have their own tablets and older ones will have their own phones, this would still work pretty well.

And everyone should have their devices secured with a pin, or finger print etc which should prevent a child opening it without your permission.

As I said already, It's not perfect, but it's a great start. And it's far easier than trying to make individual sites/apps implement checks. And it keeps all the data about age on the device so it's not held by a third party.

I am fearing that this will also cover adults, asking for passport copies and some other digital identification, which not everyone is willing to supply into the great world wide web.

I am not against limiting social media to the under age, but against age and ID checks for adults.

I don't think I would agree with you on a lot but this would be one thing.

I remember seeing Starmer on Sky News last September. He was marketing this thing as a way to make it easier for people to pay bills and do life admin. He was talking about how awful it is trying to find old bills and documents. It's absurd that this is the reason for this ID system nobody asked for.

I moved to the UK in 2011. Apparently there was similar controversy over New Labour's intention to introduce ID cards and this is just the latest incarnation.

A lot of things are hidden and pushed through when there is a football world cup happening. It surprises me that they didn't come up with new taxes during the world cup. Voters are distracted.

Otherwise I wouldn't mind. I am surprised that the social media industry doesn't self regulate, like offering something for the under 16 year olds but lacking certain functions, or sexual contents.

But then there is the question, who's using Tick Tock and the likes. It's the young ones. I can easily live without Tick Tock.

I think there are less invasive methods to verify someone is an adult. For example, when a contract is signed. Only adults can sign contracts. therefore issuing a digital certificate at that point would be relatively straight forward. So when buying a home internet contract or a phone contract, you need to verify who you are. The spanner in the works is prepaid phones which I think you don't need an ID for.

Even if it's done online it can involve uploading ID to a government server, which verifies the document is real, and issues a certificate and deletes documents etc afterwards. The certificate isn't tied to any ID on a server, it exists independently on the device. It's only ever used by the device and is never shared with a third party.

These certificates are used on a device level. So until a device is wiped/reset, it's never needed to do it again. And if you need to do it again, then you just upload again. the process should take a minute.

My main concern is storing data or involving a third party. Data can be hacked. Third parties can't be trusted not to try and profit from it. And any certificates that are used, should not be accessible by any site or app that you visit/use.

Still, there needs to be some way. Privacy and security should be the most important parts. And it has to be easy. We have the technology to be able to do this.

The biggest problem is actually doing it. I think investing and building what we need to this is something that should be done on an EU level. If we left it up to individual governments it would be done in a haphazard way with different methods depending on the country. And what we can see from other jurisdictions is that it's far easier for a government to bring in legislation and make the private sector implement it. Just tell facebook that they need to confirm someone is an adult. So we end up providing them with more data. And lets face it, facebook have shown that they can't be trusted with our data.

If we decided to not enforce some types of checks, then it all falls onto adults/parents. And we need legislation to deal with that. Do we fine parents?

The problem isn't whether people want to protect their kids, it's if they have the technical ability to do so. It's very hard to block stuff on devices that kids use. And to do it well takes a lot of effort. I think parents should be involved, but I think it should be easy for them.

If social media sites requite proof of age for Irish people to access it, then a lot will use VPN's. That's what happened with porn sites in the UK. And VPN's are piss easy to install.

any regulation which requires individual sites to police themselves will be easy to bypass and will also be abused by the sites.

The private corporations having access to the data and keeping it in an insecure state or simply mining the data is pretty terrifying TBH. Same issue as the porn site identity verification stuff. Device level protections are probably the ideal tbh.