Stop suggesting children as friends, social media firms told
Stop suggesting children as friends, social media firms told
Suggesting children as friends by default on social media platforms can enable grooming, warns Ofcom.
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Accounts under 18 shouldn’t be able to befriend accounts over 18, and vice versa. Once you turn 18, you lose all your kiddy friends like some kind of Logan’s Run
I get what you're saying but how do you implement that? When I was 17 I was dating a girl who had just turned 19. Facebook wasn't a thing then but should I not have been able to be her MySpace friend?
One idea is that you could follow Romeo-Juliet laws. Programmatically, it's not difficult to add such a condition to some presumed friend-finding algorithm. Forgive any formatting problems below...
if user.age < 16:
do findFriendsBetweenAges(0, 18)
else if user.age >= 16 and user.age < 18:
do findFriendsBetweenAges(user.age - 2, user.age + 2)
else:
do findFriendsBetweenAges(18, 99)The problem isn't the implementation, it's the concept in the first place. If you're spinning up a new Lawful Good social media site, you can make it do whatever you want. The problem is how many different states have different laws about how minors can or cannot enter relationships with people of different ages. Then once you stop considering different states, now consider different countries. The internet is accessible to anyone, no matter their age, no matter their location. Writing a website that can handle every possible situation is not impossible, but may be prohibitively expensive.
And of course, I didn't even talk about people lying about their age on their accounts! How does a website even verify that? To what degree are they liable? You want to upload an ID to make an account?
100 year olds are fucked.
You choose your age and you can’t update it. And then it literally won’t let you add them or talk to them. Easypeasy.
That would've blocked that guy and her girlfriend from contacting each other
So if I was 17 I couldn't be Facebook friends with my 19 year old cousin? Or my grandma? It would be helpful if social media sites would actually let a custodial parent with a validated user profile set up a Facebook or whatever account for their children etc. it's a pipe dream because of laws in varying countries, and child predators. But it would be nice.
Yes. Correct. But you have a good idea, that “Kid” account can have their over 18-year-old friends managed exclusively by the parent account. The birthdate on that kid account cannot change, and when they turn 18. The account is automatically no longer managed by the parent account.
This solves for all of those situations. Kids can add kids at will, only the parent can add adults, when the kid becomes 18 they now control their account.
Sound good?
It does sound good. It's not a bad idea, but have you considered certain problematic situations that may get worse when you introduce a feature like this? For instance, an abusive parent could use such a "parent-child account" to control their victim's online activity, prevent them from accessing contraception or abortion services, restrict access to LGBT material and communities, etc. This leads to one of two things: a victim unable to navigate the internet on their own (in conjunction with other restrictive and abusive practices levied by the adult), or the victim creating their own hidden account without that oversight, (needing to lie about their age to make that happen, in order to access resources they may need).
At the end of the day, we're still talking about technological solutions to human problems, and it's just the wrong tool for the job. Maybe "wrong" is too harsh, but regardless, it's not ideal.
I’ve got nothing for that situation. What’s your solution? We can’t very well ask people to verify their identity. Or… I mean… maybe this is a totally different type of paid service that is TOTALLY tied to your real self?
Everything just points to dismantling social networking, which also means forums, bulletin boards, and every other method of communicating with people.
I don't have a solution, I'm not that clever lol. Though I also think dismantling social networking is an overreaction, like humans understand object permanence, we know we can talk to people when they're not in the same room as us. The internet, social media, are just technological extensions of that ability. I'm not pointing out flaws in good ideas because I want to sink them, I'm pointing them out because someone may yet have a solution to that downstream problem, which would strengthen the idea even further.
I mean here's an idea to combat abusive relationships, one that's not reliant on any technology: make social media platforms mandatory reporters. I'm sure there's flaws in this idea too, but it may be somewhere to start if we're trying to tackle the issue of minors being harassed or abused on the internet.
Mandated reporters may include paid or unpaid people who have assumed full or intermittent responsibility for the care of a child, dependent adult, or elder.
You mean like… a parent or guardian? Hehehe. All this comes back to holding the parent or legal guardian legally responsible for bad things that happen to a child when those things are within their control.
I’m 100% for giving the parents of the kid in this article a misdemeanor neglect charge. They literally have one job: put forth a reasonable amount of effort to make sure nothing bad happens to the kid. And I’m pretty sure ongoing sex pic trading is something that isn’t hard to catch if you lock the phone down even a little bit.