Ask Lemmy

You also cannot blame parents here. Most of us live in societies where a 13 year old can walk home from school on their own, and if they buy cigarettes, alcohol or visit a strip club then the business owner is in trouble. Business owners should figure out how to provide their products safely.

Home routers have something called parental controls which can help parents block certain websites and platforms at the home network level.

This together with parenting and education of ones children can help, all without sacrificing and giving away our privacy to third party corporations.

At a regional and country level I would suggest a government funded public service similar to a library to index the internet. Similar to how books are classified by age and genres.

These lists can be provided within each home router by defult for easy selection, or made easily available for upload by parents or users into existing routers.

These government funded publicly curated list can help parents offloaded a little of the "curration effort". This can then simply be a setting or toggle in the router setup, applying the proper age appropriate whitelist and blocking everything else that is not on the "approved list". The setup can even help parents classify specific devices on the home network as "child owned" so the list only works for those devices.

This would be the most "privacy respectful" option IMO over things like "age verification" or any other alternatives being suggested by corporate tech firms at the moment.

The tech for this is already here, where we are lacking is:

1. A government funded public curation effort.
2. Goverment funded public education campaigns and education programs.
3. A incentive for router manufacturers to make home router setup as simply and straight forward for non-tech or non power users.

As for power users and tech literate individuals, public lists curated by individuals online already exist. For example Pihole and Adguard lists, these help people block and whitelist websites at the home network level.

I think a good middle ground would be minor regulation and education. Forbid places like Instagram, for example, from recommending beauty ads if a person is consuming content that may indicate that they are insecure about their bodies. Then ensure that teens/young adults know what tricks social media use to garner engagement, be mentally addictive etc so they can make more informed choices.

Do what my parents did: Only let your kids online for a limited time, while being supervised the whole time. If they could do it back before tools that helped existed, it should be super fucking easy in 2026 with all the parental controls everything offers.

But we also need to educate the parents. There seems to be a huge gap in what Xellenials (people specifically born between 1976 & 1985) were taught about the internet that not one other group/generation was, including full on mellenials, gen alpha and gen z.

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.

I think this point is getting buried, but the regulatory change that needs to happen to start with is not the algorithm alone, but Monetization realignment!!

• Shift ad models to reward completion (e.g., pay creators per finished video) rather than scroll depth
• Offer paid tiers where users pay $2-5/month to disable all addictive features (no A/B testing on these users)
• User-controlled ad preferences with revenue sharing
• Behavioral cost transparency

Or others. Basically disincentivize addictive apps. I would also suggest penalizing harshly those that do, as many of these companies make so much off of this that only the harsher enforced penalties will force change (if they don't avoid it through regulatory capture).

Punishing parents for giving their kids access to social media is one way, maybe only dumb phone for kids?

Mandatory education about safety for children on the jobs and the midia is a good one.

I would go as far to forbid children photos on the internet/social media, so AI Porn and Pedophiles would not be interested anymore eventually.

And all of this has to be state policy (not goverment policy), because government changes from time to time.

When you go to a bar, the bouncer checks your ID and determines your age. He will not remember your name. He will not inform the government you are at the bar. He will not write down who you met with or talked to. We as a society trust he will not do these things. You are still anonymous from the perspective of the bouncer.

If humans really truely tried I am sure we could design a transparent system for verifying age or human-ness that we (tech paranoid Lemmings) could trust.

I don't know what that system would look, but I also didn't know how a "cryotographic decentralized digital currency" would work without the backing of a centralized government in 2008.

Everyone here is going to say: "Be a parent."

It's a meaningless platitude.

That is not a policy idea and sounds a whole lot to me like "just recycle, bro" and we can readily look around us and see that expecting individuals to act responsibly is shitty public policy.

I understand the hysteria over providing ID's, but understand, the social media companies already have all of your information as a user. You're sacrificing your privacy and that of your kids by using them to begin with. Providing and ID is just a formality, and an easy one, because it's something that (obviously) only an adult can provide.

This game is only won by not playing to begin with and disallowing any electronics in the home, at least until there is meaningful regulation of algorithmically-elevated content and mandatory human moderation.

Better education especially for digital stuff and stop giving kids phones!!

I think that there needs to be education against this. Kids should be aware that it is an addictive product. Our schools should have lessons on objectivity, on how to not have there voices hijacked, on speeding away from the noise of the world.

Cutting it off via a face scan just moves the product. They will still get it. Use culture campaigns.

No gov, no org can have control of this it’s too big until they reign in capitalism. This needs to come from people.

Make our kids better spaces that offer them peace and confidence.

@ageedizzle@piefed.ca @asklemmy@lemmy.world
Back when I was 8yo, I got my first PC. I was always a nerdy kid who used to disassembly my own toys in order to see how it works. As expected, this happened upon my first contact with a PC, except I realized I could disassembly it using the keyboard: suddenly, I was tinkering with DHTML and ActiveX (XP+IE6), I was coding. I was just 8yo.

This was largely self-taught (I was always lone wolf who prefered studying rather than socializing, fearing the bullying), but I also got into discussion boards and Orkut comms, with my first searches having been "theory": then I found places about Game Theory, Chaos Theory, and even shady things such as Conspiracy Theory. The latter, a very significant part of my life, teached me dialetics and how to debate abstract, systemic ideas.

If it wasn't for me getting into social media during my early teens, I wouldn't have most of the knowledge I got today. Maybe "ignorance is a bliss" (Cypher), maybe I'd be more socializable, maybe I'd be a socially-normal man living a socially-normal life. I'd hardly become the non-conformist I am today. I'd hardly have left christianity.

As for "adult content", my first contact wasn't using that PC: it was actually broadcasted TV, Brazilian TV programmes such as "Pânico na TV" (a humoristic program, featuring "Paniquetes", dancers in suggestive outfits, and Sabrina Sato, a presenter also in suggestive outfits), "Banheira do Gugu" (TV segment from "Domingo Legal", featured by Gugu Liberato, where there was this pool with naked ppl swimming live), "Pegadinhas do Sílvio Santos" (TV segment featuring pranks, often suggestive situations such as upskirting). All of these were openly broadcasted, regardless the audience age.

Then there was school, colleagues bullying me, and sometimes bullying involved... situations, unpleasant at the moment, but later led me to... nvm. School never got to stop the bullyings, I was even bullied by teachers!

There was family as well, cousins who may had been SA'd me, I don't know, I'm even unable to remember!

Now, 30yo, I see the hypocritical conundrum from society: all of sudden "we need to protect kids". Really!? What's being done for EXTERMINATING school bullying? What's being done for EXTERMINATING SA from the face of Earth?!

Social media can be bad, I can agree, but just banning kids from social media won't protect them from the situations beyond this RGB veil. Hell, there was not a single punishment involving the biggest CSA scandal ever, but "sOcIAL mEdIA bAaD"!

Not to say how it will lead to cognitive dissonance in a world where almost all societal aspects became digital, especially after COVID. I mean, I can't toss my devices and go Luddite: gov compels me to have ID app, jobs compel me to have acc in a bank that'll require me their banking app. This world became irreversibly digital, this is an inflection point in human history. Banning kids from digital may end up doing more harm than good.

Don't let your kids use it at a young age. I didnt get a phone with internet until I was 12.
I didnt get an internet phone plan until I was ~15

And my family could not be called technically advanced. Me right now is working in IT. So it didnt hinder me

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"

Unironically just don't let them on until 16 (ideally) 15 or 14 if we're a bit liberal with it.

Kids younger than that should be limited to whatsapp and texting.

Maybe we sbould even roll out a social media License. It's a pretty damaging thing, but some people push back hard against that because it's like a drug to them. Some adults can't even really be trusted with it.

ZERO amount of government surveillance will ever be enough to substitute for a good parent. However, IF we need the feds, it should absolutely be for dismantling CP rings (those that work forces...) and insane subculture like 09a and school shooter fan sites.

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 hard way? Treat access to the Internet as if about to drive a car or being handed a gun. Along good parenting, responsibility should be taught throughout, and likewise smartphones shouldn't be simply given to children like a Gameboy.

Make platforms responsible for the content that people upload. This will basically make any large scale social media unable to exist without prohibitive moderation costs.

Tracer Tong knew the way. We have to destroy the MKULTRA total control panopticon known as the internet.