Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids under 16

return2ozma@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 284 points –
Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids under 16
goodmorningamerica.com
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This bill must be funded by VPN services because anyone who thinks teens won’t figure out a workaround has never tried to stop teens from anything. Disobeying is what they do on an evolutionary level.

Also using sites such as "This Person Doesn't Exist" to generate am AI pic of a human could be used for profile pics.

spot-on observation. always follow the money

Banning Social Media FOR KIDS. Is just a quick means to spy on what ADULTS are getting up to on the Internet. Right now if you don't want to ID yourself to go see cat pics/videos on Instagram/TikTok, you can just sign up for an account and go searching for cat pics/videos. With this bill, if you want to go find cat pics/videos on Instagram/TikTok in the state of Florida, you'll have to submit a government ID to verify that you're not a kid, and I'd believe for about as long as I can breathe water that the linking of my real identity/government ID with a social media account will have no negative real world outcomes.

Cybersecurity is something that almost nobody takes seriously. I used to say that nobody takes it seriously until they're hurt by their poor cyber hygiene, but these days the insurance policies pay the same either way so companies/people still do the bare minimum and call it a day.

I'd much rather pay a VPN provider to be out of that jurisdiction than ever give anyone anything that concretely ties my online persona to my actual identity and it's just incredible that lawmakers so fundamentally misunderstand how this all works that they don't know it's that easy.

Is this based on a gov ID? I didn't see that in the article.

How else do you think they'd do age verification? It's the same way they do it for porn sites, you upload you DL/passport/ID to verify your age. The difference here is that now these data broker social media companies now have a hard link to your identity instead of a pretty strong inference, and are able to shore up their advertising profiles in an unprecedented way.

Also trains the next generation to think these kinds of privacy violations are ok, when they are not.

It would also require that social media sites use "reasonable age verification methods" to verify users' ages.

Please no :/

This is where the challenge will be I think. Xitter wants a copy of my ID to validate who I am and what age? No thanks. There's no reason to allow that. No reason they need that. No reason to give them or any social media site the ability to stock pile that info to later be leaked.

That'll end well...

The smarter kids will just go in and change their bday or create a new account that has them old enough. The only way to prevent that is to make them verify ID on every single person logging in from a Florida based ip or is a resident. But, what about those who are traveling from other states, should they also be forced to upload ID? I'm going to say no.

NOBODY should have to to upload any sort of ID to use the internet. The issue began when corporations started getting involved. Fuck Ajit Pai, Ethan Zuckerman and the political world all tied to this. Amazon is trying to force people to upload ID for refunds.. pathetic.

Oh I wholly agree. The point of that was to illustrate what you have to do to enforce it properly. It's the same as trying to force porn sites to ID their users.

As for Amazon, I have not heard anything about this and I recently did a couple of returns with no request for my license. Also, you may not be aware but stores like home depot already require ID to return items and they (with the help of a 3rd party) keep a credit file of sorts on you and uses that determine who has been abusing the return process.

If it's illegal in the state for residents then it will be illegal for those traveling too

I'm not sure you follow. I'm postulating whether or not say facebook would have to lock someones account and force them to upload ID because they happened to have browsed it while inside the state. This would not be looked upon kindly by other states.

They would force ID check from anyone accessing from inside Florida. Once they left Florida they could access freely. A 16 yr old from Georgia on spring breakin Florida would have to age verify until they went home, at which point the verification would no longer be required.

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what a fucking dogshit state. not that social media is good for anyone, but restricting kids from one of their main forms of communication / news / outlet to the world is just designed to be obnoxious.

even best case scenario, active malice aside, these people somehow have zero memory of what it was like to be a kid; having to wake up for school at 6am and do endless homework for no material benefit, and now this

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No one should be banned from equal internet access for any reason. 🤦🤦🤦

See, this is why I hate DeSantis and the right wing. They crow about freedom of speech from one end and shit crap like this out of the other.

For once Florida is doing something good.

At least it would be if they weren't simply doing this to prevent kids from becoming more informed.

Eh… yes and no. On the one hand, kids are undoubtedly addicted to social media, and their screen time should be limited for the sake of their mental health.

On the other hand, this is absolutely not going to limit most kids time on social media. They aren’t idiots, and some of them are (properly) tech savvy. Meaning a bunch of kids are going to find an easy workaround, and spread that info around.

And this is almost certainly going to result in an ID requirement similar to the laws requiring ID for porn sites in certain companies. And unlike PornHub, I don’t trust that Facebook, Twitter, Reddit or the others are going to actually have integrity when it comes to ID laws.

Solution: nobody should be on social media.

Lemmy is social media… any site we communicate through is social media, even old style forums are social media. Hell, even Stack Exchange could be considered social media. Should those be banned?

I didn’t say they should be banned. People just shouldn’t be on them. It’s bad for mental health. It’s like smoking but for your brain.

Eh… social media isn’t harmful on its own in moderation. It’s companies that game the system against their users to feedback loop rage and hate that’s the real issue.

Though the addiction is real af, I do admit that.

What is Gaetz going to do?

Nothing will change. The adult filters didn't work 30+ years ago and they don't work now.

I see at least 2 ways around this depending on how it's implemented.

  1. Either update age info to be "old enough"

Or

  1. Use a vpn that has you accessing it from anywhere but Florida.

This is just one more waste of time that will be struck down by a court assuming it makes into law.

The companies could use geolocation to comply. That's how the sportsbooks do it anyway.

Please read my comment again. Unless someone is sharing their GPS, all they have to go on is the ip address. This is why a lot of people vpn into other countries to watch things on Netflix that aren't available where they are.

This also brings up another point. For reasons unknown, sometimes my cell phone ip address comes back as a Florida ip. If I happened to access it via an ip that geolocates to Florida they would have force me to verify my ID to keep using it. That opens them up to potentially having way more verifications to process and a much larger attack surface for identity theft not to mention the millions of people and their representatives that will be extremely pissed off.

I get what you are saying. My point about the sportsbook apps is that they won't even let you login without allowing location services and verifying you are in a state that allows betting. I was just trying to highlight there are already systems in place to make VPNs a non-starter.

I agree with you on the identity verification. I really don't trust the sites this bill is aimed at to do any of this right or not have poor security. It's a big cluster waiting to happen.

That's more than simple geo location. That's a whole other ball of wax and it only magnifies how ridiculous this shit is.

He could try dating a little older. 17 for example

Can't go on the Internet, can't go in public restrooms... Land of freedom.

Wow, broken clock and all that.

Stopped clock, a broken clock may never be right.

A stopped clock is right specifically twice a day. Any broken clock is right eventually. the only way a clock can be never right is if it works properly and is only desynchronized.

If you rip the hands off a clock, it is broken, and it will never be right.

Hmmm, this presents an interesting philosophical line of questioning: is the "clock" the user interface, or the underlying mechanism? I can easily replace the hands of they're ripped off, so long as the mechanism keeps time then I'd say the clock isn't broken in any meaningful way.

That's not true. e.g. If a clock loses time as soon as it is started (given power, wound), a time x. Then every day it will be wrong. Now, after n days it will come back around to being correct again. But, if n >> the life of the clock, then no, it will never be correct.

I can think of a few other scenarios where it's also true that it will never be correct.

But, if n >> the life of the clock, then no, it will never be correct.

After the life of the clock, it will be stopped, and thus right twice per day.

As you said, it may take a very long time to lap the clock, but once you stop drawing distinctions between "never" and "sufficiently infrequent", you get into the question of acceptable precision. Most people would consider an analog, two-handed clock to be "correct" so long as it is accurate to the minute. That means the threshold of tolerance for a "slow" clock would be the loss of at least one minute per 12 hour period to remain "incorrect". That means you'll lap the clock, and it will be correct, every 720 cycles, or about once a year.

If it loses time faster, you'll lap it faster. If it loses time slower, it will spend more consecutive cycles as "correct" within acceptable tolerance. It's possible to devise a mechanism which alternates between running fast and slow to ensure that it is actually never correct, but that would have to be built as an accessory mechanism on top of a functioning desynchronized clock in order to ensure that it's really never.

I'm convinced, the accuracy of the clock matters. Your point that within one minute is on time is fair and as you said converges quickly. Definitely quicker than the life cycle of a regular clock. I'm a convert now.

Oh, uh, I'm not sure what protocol is in this situation. We're in uncharted Internet-discussion territory here.

A stopped clock could be stopped because it's broken

Bah they’ll just do it in secret instead of openly.

Ah yes, just what Florida needs: even more closeted everything.

Well, it's about 15 years too late, but I guess better to have this discussion now than never.

Internet too dangerous. Florida, just ban it entirely, just to be extra safe.

Why don't they just tax the websites you access? VPNs would go crazy

Waiting to see how these apps do the malicious compliance thing. Because I think that's probably what's going to happen.

I can get behind the spirit of the bill, but I wouldn’t hold my breath when it comes to enforcement.

The spirit behind the bill is "We need more control over the children so we can indoctrinate them ourselves!"

Or just let them discover random fucking propaganda on their own and bad examples on social media and become an Andrew Tate jr by the age of 17 or some extremist little fucker, or just be an indecent human being if you don't want such an extreme example.

This bill will do jack shit, but so are the parents who put smartphones in their kids hands as early as possible and let them browse the internet unsupervised.

Just to be clear I do not agree with the bill in this form and the whole "provide an ID" bullshit, but I really don't think young children should be allowed on social media.

Florida has been banning books talking about racism and LGBT people from school library. I guarantee to you, this is not about preventing anyone from becoming extremist fuckers.

I know you are right and they are just using the "save our children" sentiment to manipulate people. On the other hand I just really-really hate social media and the younger generation should be better off without it.

What really should happen is a very thorough widespread PSA campaign across all media including social media itself to educate parents about the risks of social media and how to set up filters so that children don't get to access just about anything on the internet.

Make no mistake, the purpose of this bill is to try to stop kids from organizing protests and other political acts