I’m asking for public policy ideas here. A lot of countries are enacting age verification now. But of course this is a privacy nightmare and is ripe for abuse. At the same time though, I also understand why people are concerned with how kids are using social media. These products are designed to be addictive and are known to cause body image issues and so forth. So what’s the middle ground? How can we protect kids from the harms of social media in a way that respects everyone’s privacy?
I think this point is getting buried, but the regulatory change that needs to happen to start with is not the algorithm alone, but Monetization realignment!!
Or others. Basically disincentivize addictive apps. I would also suggest penalizing harshly those that do, as many of these companies make so much off of this that only the harsher enforced penalties will force change (if they don’t avoid it through regulatory capture).
These are good ideas but I don’t know if Id necessarily trust big tech companies to comply (for example consider how Google was caught harvesting user data in incognito mode; what these companies say they do and what they do do does not always align). So in order for these reforms to be enforceable I think all these big tech companies would need to become open source