La Spagna vieta l’accesso ai social media ai minori di 16 anni

I know it’s necessary for children, social media is cooking their brains, but that’s a sure way to make every teen hate the government and the party that approved this.

Yeah this won’t go over well

In theory I agree, in practice I am afraid that’s gonna make things worse.

“They’ve started singing, Sir.”

Seriously, the whole concept of social media has slowly become a shitshow. I wouldn’t even mind if it was entirely eradicated in its current forms.

Which means age verification systems, which means 0 privacy as all of your online activity is now tied to your real identity. Which is the real reason they’re doing the stuff.

Several thoughts:

1. This is only partly about children. Children are just easier to justify protect in a paternalistic way. 

2. Social media is already becoming irrelevant.  10 years ago, the story was “*oh shit! Social media ate media and politics. We’re in the post-truth, doomscroll era.*” 

Ai is increasingly the source of common knowledge, truth and soon politics. AI’s answer to *”Which party is better”* or *”is climate change real?”* will overshadow social media in 5 years.

3. Governments everywhere fail to do online identification. Frmal proof of identity is something only governments can do properly. Private solutions, as we see over and over, are deficient. 

This need has existed for decades, but no one did the work. That limits every downstream regulation including p*** , gambling, social media, Etc. They only to rely on costly , insecure , unofficial, inadequate forms of identification. This leads to fraud, data leaks, and regulatory ineffectiveness. 

4. The cat and mouse game begins when the regulation goes live. 

“Social” is a rather ambiguous definition, as is “platform” or whatever the legislative language uses.  

Netflix is not social media. Take away comments, the public profile, and whatnot… YouTube becomes “not social media.”

So, maybe a new platform takes the place of ticktock or whatever. Maybe they release a tiktock-youth interface. One way or another, something else will step into that space. 

Many social medias already impose a minimum of 13 years from their users, right? As such, it could be a simple job to start denying anyone who’s under 16 years old from Spanish IP addresses instead.

Obviously there’s a specific group of people making these laws happen worldwide. They benefit from teaching the youth their story and bias in schools