Mastodawn

A blanket ban on social media for under-16s is the wrong choice. It's not working in Australia, and it won't work in the UK.

Social media harms don't magically stop affecting people as they get older. Bans are also rarely difficult to circumvent. So by failing to ask the social media companies to bear any cost - cleaning up their act, making them legally responsible for content they actively recommend and promote through their content algorithms - Starmer has failed to tackle the problem.

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LeonianUniverse🏳️‍🌈Jun 15

@JubalBarca I personally believe it is the parent's responsibility to monitor what children are accessing and it shouldn't be on companies or the government to protect children. Parents give their children access by giving them these devices, they should also be aware what is going on until a child is old enough to understand or an adult so that they can know what they are getting themselves in to before they do. I'm not a parent nor do I ever intend on being a parent.

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LeonianUniverse🏳️‍🌈Jun 15

@JubalBarca When I was a kid, my dad didn't place parental controls on our devices or limit us, he simply said, "if your curious about stuff that you find, come to me and we'll talk about it.", I think I turned out pretty well with that in mind, he also said, "If you find stuff and then start acting badly because of what you find, then I'll limit what you can do."

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James Baillie Jun 15

@LeonianUniverse Better parental efforts would be great, but a core problem with this as a solution to all these problems is that a lot of parents are very clearly not capable of doing it effectively. A lot of adults are not capable of protecting *themselves* from online harms: sometimes, too, the adults in a child's life are the actual problem that they need to turn to the internet for help with, rather than vice versa. My experience was not dissimilar to yours, but that's not universal.

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Matthew Daly Jun 15

@JubalBarca @LeonianUniverse I have been kicking around the idea of social media literacy training, possibly a parent/child one, as a better solution to this combined with stricter guidelines about moderation.

Around 2012-ish Channel 4 made this Flash game called Smokescreen that allowed you to see harmful behaviours on social media demonstrated in a safe environment. A more modern equivalent is probably long overdue.

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James Baillie

@matthewbdaly @LeonianUniverse Yeah, I think that would help.

I do still think that the big platforms need to take more responsibility for content though: I think if people have actively signed up to see stuff, that's one thing, but if a platform chooses to algorithmically push content at people or create their own content to push (incl. AI summaries) they should be held responsible for disinformation and harmful content therein.