Reminder: whatever you think of teenagers' use of social media (and the reality is a lot different than most people believe), it is impossible for a site to treat teenagers differently than adults without deanonymizing and identifying every single visitor to the site, including adults
It is also impossible for a site to verify a parent/child relationship and verify the parent is the one who has legal decision making authority over the child in order to give permission for the child to use a website.
Over 22 years of a career in social media T&S I have seen every single possible attempted abuse of a "parental authority" doctrine possible, even without it being enshrined into law. Some highlights, or should that be lowlights:
* Noncustodial parent wants access to teen's account to get evidence for the divorce
* Custodial and noncustodial parents in vicious custody battle disagree over whether kid should have an account
* Noncustodial parent wants access to facilitate noncustodial parent abduction
* Parent of queer kid angry that kid is queer, wants to close account so they don't get exposed to all those queer people
* Parent angry that site contains accurate non-abstinence based sex ed, wants to close account so kid can't see it
* Parent of young adult of legal age (18-22ish) mad that kid is exerting independence, wants to close account because of "bad influences"
* Person who is not related to their nemesis wants site to get rid of nemesis, falsely claims to be their parent
Also, how do they define "addictive"?
I was a kid a long time ago, admittedly, but from what I remember from me and my fellow kids, we all found different things 'interesting' (and thus, more likely to be addictive).
Some kids are going to find baseball streams addictive.
Others, gaming streams.
Their definition of addictive is pretty clear (I read the law).
Any form of personalized (or, I think, contextualize — that’s less clear though) recommendation. No consideration of design, objective, evaluation, just personalized = addictive. Nakedly ignorant (or dishonest) definition.
Besides all the vital stuff Rah mentioned, the thing that infuriates me is that if forecloses serious attempts at designing anti-addiction features. Cooldown timers, feed rate limiters, down ranking material likely to trigger a particular overuse — those are would all violate this law.
Designing recommendation to support our “better selves”, for both adults and children, is a fascinating and important problem (that I’ve done some writing on) with a wide design space to explore, and doing it effectively will likely be personalized. Except in New York, apparently.
....So if a kid discovered Weird Al Yankovic, and want to make a Weird Al playlist on Youtube, and it recommended additional Weird Al songs they hadn't yet put on the playlist, that would count as addictive?
Probably. They *might* be able to argue that is a search or explicit topical interest, but as soon as they use viewing history to help inform which Weird Al song to list first, that’s disallowed by my reading.
It was hard enough to verify parental relationship and custody when releasing medical records, and we had methods and resources an online community wouldn't.
Either instead of or in addition to the noncorporeal entity of light and a hum, have you considered ascending into a deity with the Omniscience bonus? It would save a lot of hassles, while also creating some new, exciting ones.
Okay, so it's REALLY hard to verify identity even if you HAVE ACCESS TO THE INFORMATION.
I have a MARx account from my last job. (It's access to the Medicare system to look up Medicare numbers.)
To get this, I had to prove I am who I say I am.
To do this, I have to provide a laundry list of stuff.
Name, Social, DoB, reason I need access, company I work for, and the name of the insurance plan I'm selling.
First 3 are the important ones.
If that matches what they have on file, okay, good to go.
If not, I need last residence, a previous job, chosen at random.
Anything incorrect? Call is made.
I know people that have been refused to be accepted by the system because 1 piece of information is incorrect.
And this IS THE GOVERNMENT WHO HAS ALL THIS INFORMATION.
No company has access to all that.
Even if you could verify the relationship, it's possible, albeit rare, for there to be two genuine court orders giving full decision-making power to different parents. (Example: Saudi Arabia won't recognize US custody orders, US will disregard many Saudi ones.) WTF can the site do then?
Yes! Or the decree has been revised multiple times as the coparenting became more acrimonious and I'm given two versions that contradict! Which is the current one? Now I have to research that?
Also, something that is kinda tied to this; is it really that kids are scrolling more and becoming depressed, or is it because they are depressed that they are scrolling more?
I know when my mental health is doing well, I tend to stay away from social media more than when it's not.
And in fact the actual research shows that social media is beneficial to kids from marginalized groups AND that the correlation between social media use and depression is likely the other way around and it's that depressed kids use social media more, not that social media causes depression!
yes, that's where I saw it - Masnick's thread about the article.
some bozo replied that social media should have a medical warning about leading to sedentariness, like cigarettes and cancer, and i realized even heavy users are very weird about the topic.
(also I laughed, because when i was struggling with burnout around the time of my first POTS remission, social media actually helped me get motivated to be more active. it also helped me learn kitchen skills and expand my palate. never would've tried curries without twitter food pics. 🤣)
With the planet being burned down around their ears, fascists taking over everywhere, no financial future, and adults who understand they're ruining kids' lives and not giving a fuck... it's obviously too much social media, right?
I always wonder how difficult it is for some parents to pay some attention to how their kids socialize online, just reasonable levels of 'hey how's it going' + you know, having enough of a rapport with them that the answer is truthful.
My guess is 'it's really hard for some of them.'
That would be the dormant commerce clause issues that none of the courts have been willing to address yet because it's de novo and there are like 2 dozen other ways it's unconstitutional so no one wants to set precedent!
Plz let’s kill auto play. I don’t have speakers on my desktop (or laptop, they burned out after a windows update) and it’s a big “I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing it, Bob”
I’d argue: auto-play turns users into captive audience, & there’s 1st Am case law on legit restriction of “speech” when listener/viewer is a captive audience. I’d argue compelled speech, too, bc 3rd parties view any sound coming from a person’s phone speakers to align w/ phone owner’s values/etc
