Young people already work, pay taxes, and live with the consequences of political decisions.
They deserve a voice. Send a message of support to the Senator from your province or territory!
So they want to restrict young people’s access to the internet but also expand their voting rights?
Most of the social media bans I’ve seen have been for those under the age of 16.
And people under 16 often do need to talk to others. Social media can be a massive cesspit, but there are uses for it and they can be critical for some.
Well I don’t see why we would need to ban online chat for kids. That’s not social media in my mind; there’s no algorithmic feed.
Then we currently have a failure to communicate. Please define what is and what is not social media online. Are older PHP forums social media or not? Those were the first social media I did online and continued to be the main way I did any internet socializing for many years.
Oh sorry, I mean, I think we should ban algorithmic feeds (by which I mean anything non-trivial – they usually have “latest unreads” etc. which is fine by me.). Possibly also systems which are both (a) not dedicated to a single topic, and (b) connect at least hundreds of thousands of people, and © have some built-in mechanism to facilitate forwarding content from others to other people directly adjacent to you on the graph (retweeting/reblogging/etc.).
SMS, IRC, BBS, online chat – these all predate what are known as social media and they fit all my desiderata. No non-trivial algorithmic feed, and segregated into generally smaller communities.
Bluesky, twitter (latest-from-friends), Mastodon – I am skeptical of these, even if they have no non-trivial algorithmic feeds. While individuals will typically have less than ten thousand “friends”/“following” per se, the friend graph still forms a network which comprises millions of people. Of course, traditional systems like email are similar, so this would probably be okay if not for reblogging/retweeting/etc., which is basically a human-powered recommender system.
Twitter (under normal usage), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, tumblr – hard no, these fit none of the desiderata, and I think they’re clearly “social media” and also clearly harmful.
YouTube and Reddit I think are acceptable if we ban the non-trivial feeds (i.e. restrict to subscriptions-only, no recommender systems, no “best”, “hot”, etc.)
That’s fair. I have to admit, to me social media was mostly about talking to others. I didn’t get into TikTok or Instagram because I didn’t see that option other than to watch short form videos, which is not something I like.
Well I think we shouldn’t ban talking to other people in general. In my mind the harmful effects of social media is not what comes from chatting with specific people you are friends with.
The senate is not a monolith.
They seem to be as far as stupidity goes.
I don’t think this is a good idea. It just adds noise to the process. Granted, there’s nothing magic about 18 years that makes someone mature but it’s our age of majority.
If anything I’d like to limit the franchise to people who understand what they’re voting for l but there isn’t a just way to do that.
I don’t accept the idea that more people voting is necessarily better. I feel the same about mandatory voting rules like Australia has.
This might discourage politicians from trampling on young people’s rights.
