Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids under 16
A Florida bill that would prohibit kids under 16 from signing up for most social media platforms has passed the state House of Representatives.
This bill must be funded by VPN services because anyone who thinks teens won’t figure out a workaround has never tried to stop teens from anything. Disobeying is what they do on an evolutionary level.
Also using sites such as "This Person Doesn't Exist" to generate am AI pic of a human could be used for profile pics.
You can make an instagram account fine with bing dall-e too.
Good, the kids could use the tech experience
They also may have run the numbers and decided that social media teaches more kids to accept people regardless of race, gender, sexuality or neurotypicality than it trains to be far-right xenophobic dogshit.
I can't really think of any other reason they'd do this. They don't do anything unless it's in their self interest.
spot-on observation. always follow the money
Banning Social Media FOR KIDS. Is just a quick means to spy on what ADULTS are getting up to on the Internet. Right now if you don't want to ID yourself to go see cat pics/videos on Instagram/TikTok, you can just sign up for an account and go searching for cat pics/videos. With this bill, if you want to go find cat pics/videos on Instagram/TikTok in the state of Florida, you'll have to submit a government ID to verify that you're not a kid, and I'd believe for about as long as I can breathe water that the linking of my real identity/government ID with a social media account will have no negative real world outcomes.
Cybersecurity is something that almost nobody takes seriously. I used to say that nobody takes it seriously until they're hurt by their poor cyber hygiene, but these days the insurance policies pay the same either way so companies/people still do the bare minimum and call it a day.
I'd much rather pay a VPN provider to be out of that jurisdiction than ever give anyone anything that concretely ties my online persona to my actual identity and it's just incredible that lawmakers so fundamentally misunderstand how this all works that they don't know it's that easy.
Is this based on a gov ID? I didn't see that in the article.
How else do you think they'd do age verification? It's the same way they do it for porn sites, you upload you DL/passport/ID to verify your age. The difference here is that now these data broker social media companies now have a hard link to your identity instead of a pretty strong inference, and are able to shore up their advertising profiles in an unprecedented way.
Also trains the next generation to think these kinds of privacy violations are ok, when they are not.
Sounds totally enforceable!
It would also require that social media sites use "reasonable age verification methods" to verify users' ages.
Please no :/
This is where the challenge will be I think. Xitter wants a copy of my ID to validate who I am and what age? No thanks. There's no reason to allow that. No reason they need that. No reason to give them or any social media site the ability to stock pile that info to later be leaked.
This is very obviously unenforceable
At least not without major violations to privacy.
It's a feature
Yep. It's a direct violation of freedom of speech fair one thing.
Sure it is. Platforms could for example close online sign ups and make people go to a physical location to open an account. Just like with banks. This of course will not pass but the issue is not that you can't enforce age limit. Banks do it. Online banks also do it. The issue is that enforcing this would kill the platforms.
That'll end well...
The smarter kids will just go in and change their bday or create a new account that has them old enough. The only way to prevent that is to make them verify ID on every single person logging in from a Florida based ip or is a resident. But, what about those who are traveling from other states, should they also be forced to upload ID? I'm going to say no.
what a fucking dogshit state. not that social media is good for anyone, but restricting kids from one of their main forms of communication / news / outlet to the world is just designed to be obnoxious.
even best case scenario, active malice aside, these people somehow have zero memory of what it was like to be a kid; having to wake up for school at 6am and do endless homework for no material benefit, and now this
Question: How old are you?
Social media wasn't known until I was 16(?) and I'm a millennial. So no these people did not grow up with social media as most politicians are older than me.
It's insane you think kids today need social media like they need exercise, fun and oxygen.
I would suggest that it didn't happen in its most well known form until we were older (MySpace launched just after I graduated high school), but it did exist. Communities and message boards were a thing before MySpace and Facebook.
Kids today do need a sense of community. And we have enshittified the outside so much that they aren't likely to get that spending time in public. How far will this spread? Social media isn't just Instagram, or xitter, or the like. It's also things like steam, or video game forums, or anything with a chat feature. Kids make meaningful connections with others this way. Not all social media is bad.
How many afterschool clubs still exist? How many group activities are catered around school (but not school) these days that aren't sports? Where is the place that is for kids in our communities?
No one should be banned from equal internet access for any reason. 🤦🤦🤦
See, this is why I hate DeSantis and the right wing. They crow about freedom of speech from one end and shit crap like this out of the other.
It's because they're lying.
I'm sure you know that the words that come out of their mouth are worthless because of actions like this but for some reason, millions of people politely accept it.
They're never going to admit out loud "We just use freedom of speech to shame people out of deplatforming far-right extremists, we don't actually believe in it" or "We know the second amendment will never be used to overthrow a tyrant and we fully intend to be tyrants. We support it because it brings in $16 million a year in bribes and gains us millions of supporters who will tolerate literally anything except domestic abusers not having guns".
Every abuser has an excuse and it's never "I just really enjoy abusing people".
Correct. Correct ...
For once Florida is doing something good.
At least it would be if they weren't simply doing this to prevent kids from becoming more informed.
Eh… yes and no. On the one hand, kids are undoubtedly addicted to social media, and their screen time should be limited for the sake of their mental health.
On the other hand, this is absolutely not going to limit most kids time on social media. They aren’t idiots, and some of them are (properly) tech savvy. Meaning a bunch of kids are going to find an easy workaround, and spread that info around.
And this is almost certainly going to result in an ID requirement similar to the laws requiring ID for porn sites in certain companies. And unlike PornHub, I don’t trust that Facebook, Twitter, Reddit or the others are going to actually have integrity when it comes to ID laws.
I'd agree if the ban extended to news articles online.
It doesn't.
Wow, broken clock and all that.
Stopped clock, a broken clock may never be right.
A stopped clock is right specifically twice a day. Any broken clock is right eventually. the only way a clock can be never right is if it works properly and is only desynchronized.
A stopped clock could be stopped because it's broken
Can't go on the Internet, can't go in public restrooms... Land of freedom.
What is Gaetz going to do?
Nothing will change. The adult filters didn't work 30+ years ago and they don't work now.
I see at least 2 ways around this depending on how it's implemented.
Or
This is just one more waste of time that will be struck down by a court assuming it makes into law.
He could try dating a little older. 17 for example
Bah they’ll just do it in secret instead of openly.
Ah yes, just what Florida needs: even more closeted everything.
Well, it's about 15 years too late, but I guess better to have this discussion now than never.
Internet too dangerous. Florida, just ban it entirely, just to be extra safe.
First Amendment violation
How?
Why don't they just tax the websites you access? VPNs would go crazy
I can get behind the spirit of the bill, but I wouldn’t hold my breath when it comes to enforcement.
The spirit behind the bill is "We need more control over the children so we can indoctrinate them ourselves!"
And to stifle their voices
Or just let them discover random fucking propaganda on their own and bad examples on social media and become an Andrew Tate jr by the age of 17 or some extremist little fucker, or just be an indecent human being if you don't want such an extreme example.
This bill will do jack shit, but so are the parents who put smartphones in their kids hands as early as possible and let them browse the internet unsupervised.
Just to be clear I do not agree with the bill in this form and the whole "provide an ID" bullshit, but I really don't think young children should be allowed on social media.
When it comes to Florida, sounds about right.
why
Waiting to see how these apps do the malicious compliance thing. Because I think that's probably what's going to happen.
Make no mistake, the purpose of this bill is to try to stop kids from organizing protests and other political acts