Ask Lemmy

Just education in general

This is a deeply unpopular take, but here goes.

There's loads of comments here saying "parents gotta parent", which of course is absolutely true.

The problem is, it's difficult to maintain a "no social" policy with your kid if every other kid in their peer group is engaging together on social media.

If there are government mandated age verification checks on social media, then even if they're trivial to bypass, at least it allows parents to stand together with other parents.

My position is, age verification isn't perfect, but it's better than nothing. I guess we'll see what teachers say about the current measures in the coming months.

Here's some ideas, in no particular order or combination:

• Police stings, "how to catch a predator" style offense
• Actually investigate and convict pedophiles(US issue)
• Ban the use of real names and PII information. Sign up for FaceSpace? Cool here's a randomly generated username. If you try to dox yourself or others you're banned
• Ban social media? Like websites tailored to have you post about yourself, selfies, etc. Lemmy definitely leans towards being social media, but I don't see it as social media.
• Force companies to actually develop, use, and improve parental controls

On the last point, let's use Steam as an example. I as a parent should be able to make a "child" account, with its own username, password, and maybe separate email. And then on that child account I should be able to blacklist all features by default and only whitelist what I want. Like only allow the child account to have access to the "Library" view. So when the account is signed into directly it can only see "Library" unless I enter a PIN or password to authenticate being an adult. I can buy games for that child account and/or add the child account to my family share and whitelist games 1-by-1 for my child to have access to.

YouTube is also a good example. I should be able to create a child YouTube account and only allow ABC YouTube channel for that account to have access to. Or tie it to a child Google account and I can restrict everything on an android tablet down to each individual app.

As a tech geek and now parent of a child, the parental controls are lacking HARD for pretty much every service and platform out there. My children are still too young to understand this stuff, but I already know the best thing I can do for my children are:

• Teach them Internet safety as early as possible(no real names, no posting addresses, people WILL target you and want to rape/traffick/exploit you)
• Explain the psychology around social media, peer pressure, advertisements, etc
• No personal device(smart phone, computer) for them until middle school(10-12 years old) at the earliest
• Take an active effort in using the Internet with them in appropriate ways as young as possible

Notice I didn't say "no Internet" until X age. I think restricting the Internet from your child entirely until some arbitrary age will be more negative than positive. It's like not teaching your child how to swim because you're afraid they'll drown, but then they're 18 and you tell them to jump into the ocean because YOU'RE ready while they're not.

In not in favor of providing ID for anything. If a service requires it, I won’t use that service. Also, I can’t think of a verification system like this that hasn’t been bypassed or exploited, so it’s largely an exercise in futility.

However, a compelling argument is to use your phone’s biometrics to perform a challenge and verification. Basically, your device acts as your ID so sites never have it. I think this way better than all websites to keep a copy of the identity.

I don't have an answer, but I've been wondering the same thing. It's easy to say parents should be more mindful of what their kids are doing, and in an ideal world I'd agree, but when you're a big company or a government who has to deal with potentially hundreds of millions of people, Murphy's law demands you plan for the absolute worst case.

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

Probably don't treat social media as a last front for free speech and let it be curated and safe for children.