UK under-16 social media ban may expand to 150 platforms, including YouTube Kids, Lego Play and Spotify. See who it hits and when it starts.
I really hope people understand that it was never about protecting children. They want to track the rest of us.
Fun fact: Meta is funding all of this.
Meta the Creep company
and writing the legislation itself. That crap is not written by our politicians.
If you stop minors from accessing the mainstream public social media sites/platforms, they’ll just accept it obediently and won’t try workarounds. What could be worse than an instagram addiction? The UK is about to find out.
They’ll just remove social media features for those users
No company is going to pass up the opportunity to advertise to kids
Youtube kids already has that stuff removed. Including ads. You can’t even subscribe to a channel.
Oh really, I just assumed it was more of a content filtered mode
I wonder what aspects fall foul of the law then
Per the first paragraph of the article:
The UK under-16 social media ban is about to get much bigger. In fact, new reports say ministers want the rules to cover recommender systems and user-generated content. As a result, YouTube Kids, Lego Play and even Spotify could fall under the ban. Up to 150 platforms could face the new restrictions.
Well they can outright remove personalised recommendations no problem, a flat curated list can be generated pretty easily, they could even employ an editor (lol, lmao even). I’m assuming non personalised recommendations should be fine given the alternative would be overly broad by quite some margin
UGC is going to be an interesting one depending on the rules they expect to enforce on them. Human moderated content is probably the most likely thing that would probably be a deal breaker for them continuing it
My biggest problem with that is the fact that lots of platforms that are popular are pushing AI slop. I like the curation algorithm because in a lot of cases it’s one of the few ways to remove AI music or video from the list.
I don’t think kids should miss out on the discovery features of a service just because they’re kids. I have found that most of the information that would be collected for this shouldn’t require more than a signed in account (where a lot of these services go above and beyond to track you across the internet).
It’s fine to collate data I’m already giving you by using the service and having an account (music I upvoter, channels I subscribe to etc) to provide me with discovery features without the need to know when I had my tonsils removed and who did my first prostate exam.
I feel like this is good in a way. We’re pushing teens off the mainstream internet and letting them find niche spaces like here!
I would agree with you, if knowledge about the Fediverse’s existence were a lot more common than it is. I don’t think that many teens actually have ever heard of alternatives.
I kind of think that it’s more likely to result in expanded VPN use.
In the same way that we pushed teens out of third spaces and forced them to find other ways to socialize (while pretty much eliminating third spaces all together) and now we’re concerned about their online social media use?
