Australia’s first-of-its-kind legislation that restricts young people from using popular social media sites came into effect Wednesday, and other countries are considering following suit, but an expert says a similar blanket ban for youth isn’t likely to work in Canada.
  • masterspace@lemmy.caEnglish
    31·
    2 days ago

    I claim it is a corporate problem because of things such as Meta detecting when a teen girl deleted a selfie and then showing her beauty ads.

    Yeah, that’s real evil and fucked up, but the reality is that even before doing that, Facebook / Instagram was still leading to a noticeable increase in the suicide rate of teen girls.

    Also these kids are going to get older, go on social media, and then have the same problems. But because they are older it seems like people don’t care about them anymore.

    That’s like saying that you should let teens smoke cigarettes because they’ll get older and get exposed to them anyways. There’s inherent benefit in delaying exposure to harm, especially when your brain is developing and changing so much.

    Also social media is really useful for minorities, such as queer people, to find community and support which is especially important if they happen to have bad parents or live in an unsupportive area.

    I do get that and am very sympathetic to that use case. However, on balance, it still fucks up more kids then it saves. I think the appropriate middle ground is device / account based age verification without requiring IDs and documents. Then it at least leaves the door open for an older brother or concerned community member to get a kid who needs an outlet an unlocked phone, while still more broadly discouraging it’s use and denormalizing it.