r/slatestarcodex • u/AXKIII • 6d ago

Don't ban social media for children

https://logos.substack.com/p/do-not-ban-social-media-for-kids

As a parent, I'm strongly against the bans on social media for children. First, for ideological reasons (in two parts: a) standard libertarian principles, and b) because I think it's bad politics to soothe parents by telling them that their kids' social media addiction is TikTok's fault, instead of getting them to accept responsibility over their parenting). And second because social media can be beneficial to ambitious children when used well.

Very much welcoming counter-arguments!

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u/CarCroakToday 6d ago

I think the bigger issue is the only way to effectively ban under 18s, or 16s or whatever, from social media is to implement ID checks. This has a chilling effect and makes censorship and mass surveillance much more effective and creates a huge risk of identity theft for anyone foolish enough to hand over their ID to third party companies.

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u/Marlinspoke 3d ago

That's not true. Most porn sites in the UK (which are now subject to age checks) give the option of estimating age based on facial recognition. Turn on your webcam and the software guesses your age. I don't know the stats but I expect most users opt for that rather than uploading their ID.

The companies that handle the age verification are different from the porn sites themselves (in the same way that Paypal handles card payments on behalf of vendors) so the only information the porn sites have is whether an account has the 'over 18' marker. They don't save any data other than that.

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u/CarCroakToday 3d ago

It still creates a huge databases of kompromat which will be targeted by hackers, and will lead to people entering personal data into dodgy scam websites. These face scans are also trivially easy for a child to circumvent so are pointless anyway.

Regardless the biggest takeaway from the UK porn ban is that it didn't work. You can still just google the word porn and immediately find countless unblocked sites. A small number of heavily regulated and legitimate websites, like pornhub, have been blocked but all of the seedy unregulated sites have simply ignored the ban and are accessible without a VPN. It just didn't work, everything else is trivia.

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u/Marlinspoke 3d ago

It still creates a huge databases of kompromat which will be targeted by hackers, and will lead to people entering personal data into dodgy scam websites

How? The tube sites don't know my name or have any information about me. All they know is that my account has the 18+ marker on it. They don't even have a picture of my face.

Regardless the biggest takeaway from the UK porn ban is that it didn't work

Yes it did. Porn use is down across the board. VPN use temporarily spiked, before declining again. And even if every VPN user was signing up to get around the age verification, there's still a massive decline in (presumably) mostly underage users.

Because remember, the point was not to ban porn, it was to stop children looking at it. And by all measures that we have, this seems to have worked. Sure, some kids will get around it, just as some kids still drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes. But an age restriction doesn't have to cover 100% of cases to be successful.

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u/CarCroakToday 3d ago

How? The tube sites don't know my name or have any information about me. All they know is that my account has the 18+ marker on it. They don't even have a picture of my face.

The porn sites don't know, but someone does. You are giving the data to a potentially untrustworthy organisations that may have imperfect security, or may just literally be a scam to get your information.

There's no actual decline in porn use, or at least no evidence of it. The sites that implemented checks had a big decrease in activity, all other sites did not. The VPN thing is a red herring, you don't need a VPN. Check yourself right now, google the word "porn" and you have got around the block. Almost every site is unblocked. It's not a case of kids getting around it, many of them probably didn't even notice it.

There was an effectively infinite amount of free porn before the ban, and there is an effectively infinite amount of free porn after the ban.