@robriley Unfortunately, a social media ban is not good.

What this truly means, is requiring every adult using social media to provide official ID to a for-profit third-party company who will inevitably leak it or use it. This is really bad for users' safety. Breaches like this have already happened.

Additionally, it makes every account attached to a legal identity, allowing governments full control and censorship over their critics and opposition. It also endangers the most vulnerable and marginalized groups online, especially people of colour and the LGBTQ+ community. Age Verification leads to horrible outcomes for democracy, and for society as a whole. Moreover, it does not end up protecting the children. This is sadly only used as an excuse to convince people who are misinformed.

I invite you to read more on this topic using this excellent resource prepared by EFF: https://www.eff.org/age

@robriley

Age verification is not a "good idea" for anyone.
It doesn't stop youngsters from accessing ' illegal" sites, they will find a way around it, but what these laws do accomplish is:

- Everyone, including you, will have to upload their official ID on the internet, thus exposing all *your* personal information to hackers via data leaks.

*Your ID* can then be used to do all sorts of fraudulent activities, and *you* will be responsible for untangling the mess -- it will take years , plus you will be forced to pay out all legal fees, not the website or the government.

Additionally, because the government can monitor every keystroke from your computer or other device, you could be penalized for your opinion....not to mention I don't want to live in a dictatorship like North Korea, China, or Russia --censorship is terrible for democracy.

-kids will learn how to become 'hackers' in order to circumvent law so, I ask you how does this improve the life of children or yourself?

@Em0nM4stodon

@robriley @Em0nM4stodon It’s an incredibly myopic position that entirely ignores the root cause of the problem and shifts the blame to kids (who incidentally have little to no representation in Canadian politics and therefore present an excellent vector for introduction of draconian laws).

Whereas the problem lies *entirely* with the business model of attention harvesting with surveillance-based advertising at its base. The latter is not only a dumpster fire of privacy violations but the tools to support it are also profoundly anti-democratic; the whole thing should not be regulated but destroyed outright.

So, no, we should see this drive for age verification for what it is — an attempt to tie every user on the internet to a strong identity, a base for enabling mass-surveillance and mass-censorship.

@robriley @Em0nM4stodon
Instead of victim blaming the kids for being targeted by corpos, addicting them with predatory algorithms, we should blame the actual perpetrators: Meta, X, etc.

It's easy to kick down to an underrepresented group in politics. It's disrespectful and antidemocratic.

Plus, this was never about the children. This is about control. Surveillance. Tools for governments to control who is online. You just need one autocratic government (USA...) to use this to target dissidents

@fiend_unpleasant @Em0nM4stodon

It's not about the kids, it's about tracking every adult on the internet.

Alpha Male Martha Stewart 🍉🌈 These maassive, highly profitable companies should also be doing their part in actually moderating their platforms, or they should no longer have platforms.

Moderated social media on smaller websites is what many of us grew up with, and it is manageable. Facebook, Twitter and Reddit just don’t want to do the job, so they shouldn’t have the privilege of hosting such platforms. This is just an attempt to shielld them from their responsibilities to their users.