A side thought: what would the world look like if you needed to be 18+ to make a social media account?
Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
Define social media and then imagine a constant argument of semantics where online communities get destroyed and created based on law suites.
I assume practically the same in terms of child safety. Teens will find a way around or a more underground alternative to hang out with each other online.
To your question: More headaches and invasion of privacy for everyone due to enforcement. How do you enforce it other than state issued ID? It would also exclude a lot of people who either don't have that ID or don't have access to it. Then there's the whole question if whether you want the government to know what media you're interacting with. For legal reasons the social media company would need to keep evidence on file of your identification, if not report it. Keeping is regardless of whether it's part of that law, CYA and all.
This should give the dems all they need.
“You do what you need to do in that voting booth, we don’t judge”.
I hope they have some disinfectant wipes at each booth...
We had these kinds of debates when I myself was a minor (in the late 2000s). I would have thought it would be over by now and people would have realized that allowing teenagers to watch porn isn't actually very harmful to them at all. Seems not, humanity doesn't get smarter over time.
Biggest problem is that generic production stuff too often models bad sex, a cartoon version of sex that's not healthy or pleasurable for anyone, let alone unsafe.
The porn landscape has changed quite a bit since the 2000s:
- Accessibility: In those days people had the "family computer" which limited the time you could access porn and had to be extra careful as to not get caught. Nowadays you can see porn on a plethora of devices and can basically see porn 24/7.
- Variety: Nowadays you can find porn for anything and it can get pretty dark. Porn addicts get bored of regular porn and go down a dark rabbit hole. Back in the day you had to make due with what you get or go through a lot of effort to find something you like more.
Mind you I am not saying that porn should be outright banned but there should be barriers in place. Example porn can only use the domain "xxx" so parents can add the filter to the parenting controls of whatever devices. Sure there are ways to circumvent that but it at least takes more effort.
Porn addicts get bored of regular porn and go down a dark rabbit hole.
This has been disproven over and over. The only people who go to the "darker stuff" are people who are already inclined. They just work themselves up to it by going through the regular stuff.
It's the same thing with serial killers, they warm up to it with animals. Which is why someone killing animals is a massive warning sign.
No, I'm not comparing serial killers to porn addicts. I'm comparing the process of warming up to the extreme stuff by first doing the less extreme stuff.
Lol to the "back in the day porn was safer". Back innthe day the worst stuff was openly distributed on normal porn sites. It was actually difficult not to stumble over illegal ot really disturbing stuff when browsing those sites. And don't get me started on the stuff people send you on some irc servers unasked (that was more in the late 90s though).
Even non porn sites could be bad. Like one time I was browsing a non-porn anime site and suddenly landed on a porn site that had me scared the police might kick in my door, despite closing it immediately after it opened.
This, luckily, is a lot better regulated nowadays.
I give you accessibility though. Having a internet connected computer in you pocket 24/7 might make things much worse.
I might have worded my comment poorly. I did not mean to insinuate that it was "safer" but that there is more variety. That is, it is easier to find 18th century toaster porn today than back in the 2000s.
Idk, I think teenagers watching porn is harmful, but preventing them from watching it is more harmful. As a parent, you want your kids to come to you with any questions or problems, and locking down everything breaks every ounce of trust you might have with them.
My state is doing this crap, so I'm installing a VPN on my wifi to a state w/o these stupid laws so my kids can make their own choices.
It was already settled long ago by the Supreme Court, but evangelicals are trying to use private action as a way around it, and I bet they're hoping that one of several current lawsuits makes its way up to our new and corrupt court.
Humanity is smart, those making such laws 1) want the information collected by identifying people, not to forbid porn, 2) just hate autistic people. Because non-autistic teenagers will find something. But then, TBH, autistic ones too.