cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/52642833
Denmark’s government has announced a plan to ban social media access for anyone under 15. The Ministry of Digitalization has led the move, allowing some parents to consent for children as young as 13 after assessment.
Archived version: https://archive.is/20251107204816/https://apnews.com/article/denmark-social-media-ban-children-7862d2a8cc590b4969c8931a01adc7f4
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
It wouldn’t be such a bad idea if they were able to remain mindful of the fact that there is no way to tell how old somebody is over the Internet.
The parents can.
How dare you suggest parenting.
Don’t slander me like this. I’m suggesting holding parents liable. 😄
Yes. It’s not complicated. The grown-up way to do it is to have parents or other appropriate people be responsible for ensuring that the children in their care are permitted only to use web browsers that are set to a standardized “child mode” in the configuration, which simply signals to all concerned that the user is under the age limit.
There is no technical barrier to doing it. It isn’t expensive or complicated. There is no need for any more than that one bit of data to be collected by anyone. The determination of age would be done that way. Everything else, including what giant social media corps are allowed to do to children, can be just as they imagine it.
It wouldn’t be such a bad idea if they were able to remain mindful of the fact that there is no way to tell how old somebody is over the Internet.
yet.
I imagine they will force the large social media sites to require “MitID” (Danish eID) if the visitor IP resolves to Denmark. Meaning only kids who learn how to use a VPN gets to use social media.
edit: Seems they mention the eID in the article:
Officials in Denmark didn’t say how such a ban would be enforced in a world where millions of children have easy access to screens. But Stage noted that Denmark has a national electronic ID system — nearly all Danish citizens over age 13 have such an ID — and plans to set up an age-verification app. Several other EU countries are testing such apps.
“We cannot force the tech giants to use our app, but what we can do is force the tech giants to make proper age verification, and if they don’t, we will be able to enforce through the EU commission and make sure that they will be fined up to 6% of their global income.”There is no way to tell how old people are across the Internet. There are, on the other hand, lots of unworkable, unacceptable, anti-democratic totalitarian horror stories about how they want to change that. So long as any semblance of democracy remains it will not work in the long run.
I might be a pessimist but it honestly feels like the question isn’t if we’re gonna end up in that totalitarian horror story but rather how quickly it will come to pass.
