Comment on France seeks to ban social media for children under 15
sunbeam60@feddit.uk 1 week agoThe absolute binary inability for children to access social media shouldn’t be the litmus test for whether we should try.
Some children manage to buy lottery tickets or gamble for real money online. Some manage to buy alcohol even when they’re underage. Some manage to buy cigarettes. Inadequate parents will even sometimes support this.
But we aim to create an environment where that is difficult. And by doing so we shape culture. And culture shapes patterns. My aim isn’t to remove the harm social media perpetrated on children, but to reduce it. All law works like this - speed limits are routinely broken but most drive sensibly.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
sunbeam60@feddit.uk 1 week ago
Well we definitely agree pretty much 100% about social media as it stands today, in terms of its ills.
I don’t know what “regulation” of social media would be without requiring identification of users, though. The vast majority of its ills comes from, as you identify, monetised engagement which promotes bots. Therefore it is in social media companies’ interest to allow bots to play, which enables an undermining of our democracy.
Though we will disagree on what “verification” of users mean in terms of privacy risks.
The EU proposal for age verification has a legal requirement for anonymisation. This means that your “age verification” app simply holds signed verification tokens that it hands over to the service. There is no way for that token to be tied back to an identifiable user.
And there’s a million ways that could be circumvented by the state, agreed, but if the state circumvents its own laws (“must be anonymous”) they are already able to circumvent ISP logs, phone records etc. We have laws for dealing with it.
My point being that you either trust your government, in which case the requirement for anonymity will be upheld, or you don’t, in which case this doesn’t increase your risk surface (as you already believe your government circumvents laws and accesses logs illegally).
fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
How do you stop me (or hypothetical EU based me if you can’t make ZKP tokens from the USA) from making age verified tokens en mass and hand them out to sabotage the system?
sunbeam60@feddit.uk 1 week ago
You don’t own the signing private key so you can’t - mathematically can’t, not opinion can’t