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.
Stop allowing children on social media.
The SERIOUS problem with this is how does one validate if a person signing up for social media is a child or not? If you start trying to require some kind of state or federal ID the privacy implications are massive. That's trying to solve a people problem with technology which never ends well.
Maybe parents should be better keeping tabs on their kids and not giving them tablets and phones younger and younger...but who am I.
In high school I became the president of a community outreach club. Prior to that point, I had no social media accounts. At least, nothing we could call social media today. My tech-savvy father taught me the principle of "never tell anyone on the internet who you are, or where you live, or how old you are." I played games with online people who were likely much older than me, but they all seemingly followed that rule too, even if voice chat gave away my age. Nobody ever asked each other "A/S/L" etc.
The club supervisor however, insisted that I create a Facebook account. "Students don't communicate over email anymore," he said, "if you want the club members to know when an event is happening and verifying how many members will be attending, you need to set up a Facebook page for the club, and you need to administer that page." And it was true... to a point. I was also part of a robotics team that did mostly communicate via email, but we also had a Facebook page so team scouters could form alliances with other teams from neighboring schools. My supervisor and my parents both knew my account (not the credentials) so the account wasn't an unknown quantity.
In retrospect, neither of those approaches to social media were wrong per se, they were simply solutions to different problems: the problem of being a kid making friends on an internet full of adults, and of needing to reach out to real people and communicating and coordinating and cooperating with them.
To this day, I refuse to "connect" different accounts together so that no streams get crossed. But amoral corporations like Google and Facebook do not care about your privacy or your legal status - they want to know everything about you in order to market and advertise to you more effectively. It's an arms race of tying humans to accounts, and driving engagement: Age, Sex, Location, What Sites You Visit, What Programs You Run, What You Buy, Where You Read News, all of that is ammunition in the race. I don't envy parents nowadays, I can't imagine the scale of the problem where every kid has a smartphone and a dozen different accounts (or some all encompassing Google/FB single-signon) before they even reach high school.
Ngl I would love to have at least one social media experience where everyone has to use their real, validated identity.
Probably not financially viable, because ironically, privacy would be chiefly important. It’d have to be a paid service, not use ads or sell data at all, posts and profile visible to nobody by default, connections made by direct in-person/text/email invitation or by mutual introduction…very different from most modern social media. It’d also have to have pretty insane security, and mandatory MFA for every user at least on every session, if not on every page transaction.
Could be technologically viable if we had digital government ID’s like drivers licenses printed on smartcards. But we can’t even get the states to agree on implementing common requirements for official state IDs.
I’d really love to see how it’d play out, in the real world, if it could reach enough of a mass of users to be financially self-sustaining, and what the environment would be like at that point. For the sake of science.
Kids under 13 aren't allowed on websites, period, thanks to COPPA passed in 2000. So all those elementary schoolkids signing up for Zoom better have had their parents should fax a copy of their driver's license before attending class.
I mean when I was a kid we were just told not to trust people online - or strangers in the real world - and as a result I made tons of friends on IRC and through video games. I'm glad of that because I didn't have that many friends my own age.
Facebook keeps suggesting a former coworker's daughter to me. I remember when she was born! Creepy AF.
A pedophiles dream
I honestly didn’t realise this sort of thing was happening, and am incredibly disgusted now that I do know.
Facebook being like the Mission Impossible handler for child abusers. “Your next mission, should you choose to accept it,” type bullshit.
"this child will self-destruct..."
"I said no sugar before bed time!"
These social media companies will pander to ANYONE.
Anti vax, or maybe just a simple Christian extremist pushing disinformation? You had a home at Facebook. Hate minorities and think Jews control and are also destroying the world? Twitter got you.
They don’t fucking care about anything except engagement. Although Twitter cares more about the disinformation than the engagement clearly.
I’m sure they will immediately cease and desist.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Social media platforms should fight online grooming by not suggesting children as "friends" by default, the communications watchdog says.
This first draft code of practice published by Ofcom in its role enforcing the Online Safety Act covers activity such as child sexual abuse material (CSAM), grooming and fraud.
The largest platforms are expected to change default settings so children aren't added to suggested friends lists, something that can be exploited by groomers.
They should also ensure children's location information cannot be revealed in their profile or posts and prevent them receiving messages from people not in their contacts list.
The method is already widely used by social media and search engines, according to Professor Alan Woodward of Surrey University.
Asked if Ofcom had the resources it needed, Dame Melanie admitted it was a "really big job" but added "we're absolutely up for the task.
The original article contains 744 words, the summary contains 144 words. Saved 81%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Some years back, I briefly dated someone who liked being on one of the chat-roulette type of apps. She got on via her laptop and my wifi and started chatting with a teen girl. I told her this was problematic for me, an adult male, happening on my internet. I told her she couldn't use the service anymore at my place.
She couldn't understand why I was paranoid about it. Separately, she also thought I was ranting about a conspiracy theory when I told her about the Snowden leaks, so I guess that's no surprise. We lasted only a week.
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?
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?