We'll try literally anything but regulating big tech.
this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2026
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To accomplish what?
If you're being serious, proper taxation, proper intellectual rights enforcement, age enforcement, appropriate moderation of harmful content, limiting hate speech and promotion of Canadian content / artists similar to other mediums.
The problem here is not parenting, it's not even the idea of social media, but rather the algorithms that amplify the worst behavior and encourage it. These need to be banned for all ages. This is why we have these negative feedback loops causing grown men to draw political opinions on the side of their trucks.
The problem is parents facilitating access to social media. If you kid only has internet access through a filtered device there is no issue.
No different from parents in the early 1900s having to teach their kids about the dangers of electricity, parents of the 2000s need to teach their kids about the dangers of digital living.
People love to cry it’s the parents like parents aren’t generally being worked to the bone just to keep a roof over their kids heads and food on the table they also need to be ever present hawks of everything their kid does but also not be a helicopter parent who sheltered their kids too much etc. it’s an unwinnable game and parents are in the same capitalist meat grinder as the rest of us
It's no different than making sure your aging parents don't get scammed or lose the ability to stay connected with the world. The 25-45 age bracket in Canada is the best equiped to keep their young and old family members from getting their lives trashed by the money machine.
Make tools to make that job easier, don't make thin edge of the wedge laws that help corporate interests restrict and monetize us.
I agree, BUT it needs to be the parents who enforce it by simply not giving them pocket computers.
New laws should always be the last resort, not the go-to "solution".
It's a coordination problem; your child is greatly disadvantaged in many ways by being the only one without a phone. So it needs everyone to fix the problem simultaneously; this isn't really practical without a gov't intervention.
it needs to be the parents who enforce it by simply not giving them pocket computers.
then the local schools insist on using social media apps for information.
Which is why it should be illegal, but enforcement should be light.
It's ridiculous to require websites to validate users ages. That's either a massive security vulnerability waiting to be exploited, or pointlessly easy to bypass.
Instead, we should treat it like "bad parenting" and treated like a form of neglect, with social workers helping parents learn about the harms of social media.
Then, we don't lose our civil liberties and human rights while still "protecting the kids". Let's put the millions of dollars that the age verification middleware was going to charge and put that money towards social workers and mental health counsellors, eh?
But, most of all, we need to make addictive patterns* themselves illegal, and also the dark patterns that trick users into making choices that benefit the platform over their own interests.
* Although I worry that they might make videogames that depend on random chance illegal, too. Loot collection RPGs are only fun because of the random chance at loot, but I worry they'll be caught by "gatcha/loot box regulations" if the laws are written by clueless politicians.
This required more than an upvote.
I'd forcefeed this thread to the simpletons just blindly agreeing to losing our freedom. I didn't choose to be a parent so why should MY freedom be affected? SECURITY is what keeps people safe not the opposite FFS.
Bloody fools, giving up your id to silicon valley, surrendering to them, letting in the trojan horse of ai censorship behind the walls of liberal democracy, to protect the kids. Which it won't protect them to have silicon valley, and every other predator on the internet knowing everything about you. Sweet dreams.
I support this. Of course the ideal circumstance is to regulate tech companies but when Canada tried to institute a digital services tax Trump immediately ended tariff negotiations so I don't think America is interested in having their tech companies regulated.
The harm to people, especially adolescents, is too great in my opinion so this is the next best option.
I'm also not on social media so this doesn't really affect me. I encourage everyone else do the same. If Lemmy ever asked for anything like that I'd stop using it.
What even constitutes as "social media"? If a website has a comments section, is that now blocked? What about Wikis that have a "talk" tab for discussion? Message forums? What about social apps like Discord and IRC? Does YouTube count as social media?
We don't need to ban social media, we need to start really pushing critical think and education.
This is what the OS level age verification is meant to do. It shifts the burden of age verification from the social media companies and websites to someone else.
Or you know, you can let parents take care of their own kids. Stop telling me how to parent my own kids in my own house!
Also obligatory reminder, consumer home routers have had parental controls for years. You can use these functions to whitelist specific websites for your children, while simultaneously block everything not on said whitelist.
On top of this, this is the most privacy respectful option as it means no third party is snooping on what sites your visiting, no one is collecting analytics, and no personal information is made available to said third parties to be hacked and compromised, ultimately protecting you from any identity theft.
On top of this this "same issue" was why TVs have had parental controls for ages. All a parent would need to do is choose to enable and block certain channels behind a passcode/pin for their children. And somehow this solution has worked without being privacy intrusive.
Never!
Also, I still can't figure out why when my 8 year old annoys me and I give them the keys to the car to keep them busy why they always get up to so much trouble.
Parents suck at parenting most of the time. That's why there are rules specific to minors in a lot of things.
Although for the most part they are terrible useless rules, like movie and game ratings which pretty much everyone that I know of ignores
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Idiots
Have some of you never seen a single dystopian scifi film????
???????????
The idea that people on the fediverse would support this blows my mind.
The idea that people on the fediverse would support this blows my mind.
It says most "canadians", not "most canadians on the fediverse". I think most of us who are on here are here for the reason that we know social media is basically poison, but that we also support a free and open/anonymous internet too.
And yet there seems to be a disproportionate number of users here ready to bend over and take the dry dystopian dick of authority in order to avoid policing their own children.
Probably AI/Bots 💀
People are so ignorant asking for Australia’s age verification. That’s basically asking Ottawa to take away their freedom.
I mean the better option would be regulating social media companies and forcing them to change their design to not be as harmful or addictive for all users, but that is a lot harder to do, especially as a small country that isn't host to any of those companies.
A social media ban for kids is not as ideal, but it's enactable now and will curb some harm.
Australian/Canadian here.
I can assure you that kids in Australia are just using VPNs. You need global type of ID system to get around VPNs from a specific place. That didn't turn out well for Discord when they tried to implement global ID.
My solution is government signed Zero Knowledge Proofs for age. Be weary of anyone who says we need to take away your freedoms to protect the children, when there's easy ways of doing it without taking your freedoms.
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