SeanBurlington ๐ ๐๏ธBanning kids from social media seems wildly unpopular on social mastodon
and wildly popular among parents in the UK
It's a weird disconnect
mag@sean where are you hearing that it's popular with UK parents? I can't really find anything on parents' general reactions online.
@mag loads of surveys, plus parents I know
This for example
https://yougov.com/en-gb/daily-results/20251202-12c49-2
I have mixed feelings - I think "something must be done"
and under 16 ban is not what I'd do
I lean towards thinking it is at least something and maybe it will lead to something better - but it's going to have some bad side effects.
This law will cost lives - and so does the status quo - it is a mess.
@mag what frustrates me is that I don't see much by way of solutions put forward.
There is a lot of "no, this law is a bad thing"
which will do no good given the level of support it has
I also see a lot of stuff about "parent should just say no" and "use parental controls" from people who clearly don't have kids - have forgotten what it was like to be a kid, and have not attempted to use the deliberately awful parental controls.
@sean it's easier to complain about problems than to come up with solutions, that's for sure
I like the Open Rights Group's take on a solution, which is essentially to regulate social media such that the incentives that cause it to be harmful dissipate: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/starmers-social-media-ban-fails-to-address-root-causes-of-online-harms/
would definitely take a lot longer to implement than setting an age limit, especially since the latter gets to delegate age verification to unregulated third-parties
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