Most parties in the Danish parliament said they support implementing a 15-year-old minimum age requirement for social media. It is not yet known which social media platforms will be affected.
Most parties in the Danish parliament said they support implementing a 15-year-old minimum age requirement for social media. It is not yet known which social media platforms will be affected.
It’s sounds like a good thing on the surface. But this is the kind of thing parents should be doing, not governments. I don’t know how parents just let their kids doomscroll tiktok and shit all day, why have kids if you arent prepared to raise them?
I mean sure, parents should be doing it but that doesnt mean the government also can’t. Im firmly against any kind of age verification laws that might come attached with it, but also would argue that social media has no value for kids under 15. It definitely shouldnt be normalized. If its banned some kids will still end up doing it, but if they cant use their own birthday to sign up and they cant post blatant pictures of themselves on their profile and not all of their friends are on it then it becomes a lot less desirable also. These sites never should have been allowing sign ups by children in the first place. Facebook and instagram require you to be 13 at least, which is good but 15 is better.
Social media has been “banned” in that way since forever, as you said, most sites required you to be 13 or whatever and kids just lied about their age then. Kids just wont post pictures, they are still exposed to all that shit on there though. They cannot properly enforce a ban like this without ID verification, which is a fucking disaster.
The lives of children should never be completely left up to whatever random people happened to birth them, imo. You don’t have to be good parenting material to want children, and you don’t have to want children to make some. They should receive every bit of resources and care the community can reasonably contribute, and that includes keeping harmful things away from them. whether it’s physical or mental harm.
Exactly… so it’s an overall education and support problem. We want good children to make good parents who make good children.
If the parents arent there for the child, then the child will suffer. So the governments should be focusing on education, mental and social support. Not blanket banning of social media. Social media is only a problem because we let it become one through complacency and a lack of proper systems to support our youth.
Can you be more specific about the kind of support you’re suggesting? I think social media is addictive just by the nature of it, even for adults, and I’m not able to imagine a way to combat it short of regulating it away.
There’s no overnight solution, it would take generations, but a lot of issues in society stem from poor upbringings, children who feel alone. Schools should be more than schools, with support programs for children with different learning needs, a place they always have an adult to talk to.
We should be teaching children about addictions and their effects, better educating them on the dangers of social media, not just about creeps, but how algorithms work, the dangers of big corporations and how they would seek to control your life and suck money from you.
Schools should be fun, make kids learn without them realising it. Take them out on trips to places, let them see the world they might not see from their homelife. There should be plenty of extra-curricular activities for children to engage in, get them interested in something, give them places to play sport, hangout and stuff with friends outside of school hours. While social media is addictive, if you give them something else to do, something they are interesting in that’s easily accessible to them, a lot will do that instead.
Children with mental or physical health issues need to be looked after better, with facilities to support them, whether its during school hours or after. Children should be ready for the world as much as possible when they turn into adults, but they should still find that same care and support available after growing up.
The world is fucked and it all starts from the bottom, capitalism has choked every cent out of these systems. Then their fix is to just ban social media? No. That’s to exert control, not to benefit our future generations.
Look, I hate facebook, twitter, tiktok whatever as much as anyone and would love to see them banned outright, but that’s not going to solve anything. New ones would appear. We wouldnt be discussing anything here with a social media ban. We have to try and weed out the dependency on social media, bans wont work.
Parents can’t compete with the resources of these unimaginably monied corporations with teams of people trying to get everybody on their site as much as possible.
Banning things like this sets a dangerous precedent for state control and is easily worked around anyway. The sites should be regulated in other ways, like what content they are exposing to kids and giving guardians more controls over their childrens accounts.
But the real issue is deep rooted societal issues, with a lack of education, care and support for a lot of our youth.
As opposed to corporate control.
That’s an individual solution to a systemic issue.
So all we have to do is fix society? Then yeah, let’s just do that. We can probably finish that off by the end of the year, yeah? Education should only take a week or two at most. Then next year we can finally focus on climate change.
Youre right its too difficult, will take too long, so not lets start at all! Let’s just give up and start requiring ID for everything instead, that will do it!
Just because I don’t think regulating large corporations is a “dangerous precedent” doesn’t mean I think IDs are a decent solution. Your nebulous “deep rooted societal issues” cannot be defined let alone solved. I was mostly making light of that simple solution, not saying complex problems aren’t worth tackling. Anyway, I’m done talking to somebody that puts words in my mouth and tries to make issues into a binary choice devoid of all complexity.
Cute.