I don’t think kids should be “forced” to use social media to connect. I was trying to say that the current reality is that kids rely heavily on the internet for social connection, whether we like it or not, and telling kids to “just stop using it” is not going to help those that are struggling.

I think there is a need for better government regulation to make social media a healthier place for both kids and adults, but I’m not yet sure what the best implementation of that should look like. Leaving age verification to private companies has already resulted in damaging data breaches and will continue to do so.

Many people advocate for a social media ban for kids under 16, but the predictably imperfect implementation of that means that some kids can easily bypass facial verification and continue using social media, while others cannot and get excluded. I’m reminded of a quote from this article:

One parent told the Guardian their 15-year-old daughter was “very distressed” because “all her 14 to 15-year-old friends have been age verified as 18 by Snapchat”. Since she had been identified as under 16, they feared “her friends will keep using Snapchat to talk and organise social events and she will be left out”.

We need a way to regulate social media that is both privacy-preserving and also avoids excluding or isolating kids. Maybe some kind of ban for under 16s is the right path, but at a minimum, it needs secure identity verification provided as a service by the government, where your identifying information is never visible to the private companies running the platforms. Because they will fuck it up or abuse it.

Maybe instead of a full ban, we should instead ban advertising targeting youth, and ban algorithmic feeds & suggested content for kids. Make it so teens can only see posts from people they follow, in chronological order, so they eventually run out of new things to see and close the app for the day.