I think we should reframe the question.

How can we protect adults from the harms of not being able to post meaningless bullshit anonymously to online anonymous strangers we never agree with without sacrificing everyones children's mental stability?

Maybe put childrens rights before adult rights. Adults had fun and got along fine without social media back before the 2000's. I refuse to believe that we are no longer capable of that. Especially if it means kids get to to go back to using the internet as a resource for homework and playing outside and using their own imaginations. Adults too.

Stop. Giving. Them. Phones.

Stop whining. No they don't need one. NO THEY DON'T.

No.

No they're not special.

No they're not too busy. Neither are you.

No iPad either.

Stop. Shut up. No. Phones.

You can't, however you frame this issue there's going to be a sacrifice. We have to all digest this.

The best kind of sacrifice you can make though for the best outcome is to limit your child's screen-time, AND ALSO YOUR OWN. Spend more time together, practice what you preach, you are also a child being harmed by social media.

The German passport allows services to verify age through you NFC reading your passport on your phone and confirmation of validity through intermediates state service. All they see is a confirmation of age requirement met. No name, no age, no address, no face.

Some other countries have similar systems. It's already a EU directive to be implemented on a broader European level.

Governments need to setup a digital ID using a trustless authenticator.

Government issues a one-time verified credential (tied to real identity verification, like a passport or SSN check). You get a cryptographic token on your device. When a platform needs to know "is this a real adult citizen?", you present a zero-knowledge proof — yes/no, nothing else. No name, no IP, no persistent identifier the platform can track. The government isn't contacted. The platform learns nothing except the answer to their question.

Parental controls have been an effective way for decades. In combination with actually looking over your kids, of course.

Maybe its time for parents to parent their fucking kids...

By not allowing parents to outsource the responsibilities of being a parent.

Kill the engagement algorithm. Your feed should contain a chronological list of posts made by people you subscribe to. In one stroke you could end the doomscroll - not just for kids, but for everybody. Also, infinite scrolling should be banned.

I cannot emphasize this enough: I do not give a single living fuck what other people's children do on the Internet.

The book The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt had a really clever idea. Create a regulation for operating systems that requires that their parental controls include an option that labels a device as belonging to a kid. When that option is toggled, requests will include some sort of header that labels the request as originating from a kid. Then, place onus (probably through some sort of legislation) on web platforms to restrict what content is shown to kids.

I like to think I'm a tech savvy parent and the amount of tooth gnashing to setup and maintain child accounts is incredible. I'm convinced the foxes guarding the henhouse are using dark patterns to make parents give up.

Why can't I just get a notification on my phone saying "Hey, kiddo wants to have screen time. Approve?"

Hell, I'd love a notification saying "Kiddo started watching Mr. Blah." If I got the notification and I didn't want them watching that, I could block the video, or creator with a click. WHY ARE WE NOT AT THIS LEVEL OF CONVENIENCE?

A LOT of these concerns would go away if phones/tablets/tv's had these simple controls. Move those privacy controls into the home and MAKE them so easy a neanderthal could operate them.

If I have to *.newsocialbook.com into my router, you can bet your damn ass that "LiveLaughLoveMom<3" is going to keep demanding that someone else do it for her.

Burn it with fire?

Honestly there needs to be an honor system in place for the internet.

I think access needs to be granted through some branching moderation. Like one person vouches for two and they can then vouch for two each. If ever one person is found doing wrong, that whole branch gets skewered at the person who vouched for them.

Sure its not perfect but it's a system that doesn't immediately jeopardize your anonymity.

People said the exact same thing about books, radio, TV, movies, video games and music.

You come up with some sort of arbitrary rating system. Any child with intent will find a way around it, and eventually they'll try to find a way to protect their kids from something else.

Just normalize talking about those online irl abuse/exploitation stuff instead of yelling at em nor grounding. And stop victim blaming even some of the professionals do that.

Maybe we should do normalize about talking about other stuff too, to body images in head including "problematic" ones to in some anormal/atypical attraction types to possible self diagnosed but not so loud neurodiversities such as realizing you are might be plural or have too specific kinds of ocd.

Ive seen many abusers online are aiming kiddies online with those stuff and since there are not much help and many stigma surrounding mental health and bs kind of therapists that does victim blaming, they will have either to go online with predators watching em and prey on them for those vulnerabilities thrn thus preds will shift blame to those kids or smth.

Ive seen kids young as 12 or smth in some high risk mental health communities. You can tell someone did not wanted em but predators def do. Basically do not give birth to kids if you cant accept em in any way, if you think your kid becoming dangerous after some time, methinks you are also responsible for some aspects of it if they are under some of age.

By getting rid of shitty corporate social media that makes money by exploiting people.

This is like suggesting that the solution to protecting your kids from tigers roaming the street is to lock them in their rooms. Nah, just rid of the fucking tigers.

Best solution IMO: Don't let them use social media. If they really need to communicate, just buy them a SIM and or let them use your phone and SIM to contact them directly.

And if you must let them use social media, set up parental controls on your router. I suggest NextDNS for this. And basically, monitor everything your child watches or interacts and engages with. If they're using YouTube, check their accounts to see what content they're consuming.

There is no "harms of social media" per se. There are harms of unregulated companies that purposefully create addiction machines that are harmful to everyone, young and old alike. Our collective grandma became an antivaxer at the ripe age of 71, our collective dad became racist not at 13 either.

The answer is that we shouldn't have most social media to begin with and parents need to actually fucking parent their kid's usage. Social media is just the television replacement.

Yeah, don't give them phones.

Better parent supervision is the main way to combat these issues.

Companies should also either ban minors completely or allow parents to set up child accounts linked to their account with expansive parental controls that then can be migrated to full adult account once they reach legal age.

I don't think either will happen because there are so many stupid and lazy parents in America that don't care what their kids do as long as it's not bothering them

Be a parent. If you're going to fuck and have children, you need to be prepared for the responsibilities ahead. Stop trying to automate it by dumping those responsibilities onto others.

Some of it can be accomplished by just setting universal demands for how social media works for all users:

• ban targeted advertising
• make it mandatory for companies to ensure algorithms don't prioritize posts for making users angry, scared or depressed

Stuff like that. These kinds of regulations don't involve ID checks, and could take care of a big chunk of the problem.

Regulate advertising space and personalization algorithms.

Yes, it will kill a large portion of current economy, so maybe do it slowly. But generally speaking you should be able to find what you want on the internet, not what advertisers want you to see.

The government already knows all our ages, right? They issue our IDs after all. Have the government provide a "yes, this person is over 18" service. There are ways of providing signed files/tokens which don't contain personal information.

If the government wants to write a law, then I think it's reasonable they're also responsible to help with a solution.