Originally published at: Norway to impose minimum age of 15 for social media - Boing Boing
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It sends quite a strong signal
That might be all it is, but it’s still saying that social media is not healthy for children, and that’s something.
You can’t hold back the kids. You can run down the companies.
There needs to be some follow-through against the platforms, but the avenue there will have to be on making stronger content moderation a condition of operating in the country in question.
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Always been fascinated with political/legal decisions based on an apparently arbitrary age. On one hand, what else is there? On the other: i know 25 year olds who aren’t ‘ready’ for social media and 10 year olds who are. And the same certainly goes for voting, driving, marriage, military service, drinking, and -sigh- gun ownership… [shrug]
(“so what; you’d have a panel of psychologists to certify peoples’ mental preparedness?” perhaps a web-based quiz which tells them to wait a couple of years while the page loads?)
edit for overly tedious clarity: i don’t mean that there are 10 year olds who would be prepared for marriage (that specific example was just for social media access); just that there are large functional age ranges over which an arbitrary singular age (professionally psychologically studied or not) is necessarily assigned for a variety of determined social events. [oy]
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It’s not completely arbitrary. There are developmental milestones that make a person more or less suited to handle social media. Middle grades students are more black-and-white in their thinking, less able to handle nuance. They are very interested in justice, but only insofar as it applies to their own circumstances. They’re vulnerable to misinformation and grooming.
As you say, people develop at different rates, but 15 puts almost all kids firmly into Piaget’s formal operational stage. I’m no expert, but I think it’s a good cutoff.
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sorry, what?
e/
sorry, but these two sentences together like this made it definitly not clear and not everyone knows you long enough as commentator here to know what you meant and what not. just sayin.
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“Children must be protected from harmful content” …in novels, movies, video games, sex education classes, and on and on, as history shows over and over again: ideas is dangerous stuff, especially the newfangled ones.
yes. sometimes they must. and as the complete sentence shows, its about social media, not the internet nor in particular the list that follows in your post.
not broadstroken and unspecified enough.
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“Wah, wah, wah, this new thing is different,” cries the conservative. “It’s not like poetry, songs, stories, dancing, television, video games and all those other things people used to think threatened young minds. All that now seems very silly compared to this new, and obviously dangerous technology–ooga booga! Think of the children!”
I see what you are trying to say, but I don’t agree. I’m not the most elegant writer but I think there is something different about the pervasiveness and effects on social behaviours of social media when compared to previous moral panics.
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Okay, maybe that’s right, but after 2,500 years of this reaction to every new technology being totally wrong, I’m inclined to think we should be extremely skeptical about the latest scare…
The suicide and self-harm rate of kids directy influenced by body shamers and bullies on Instagram and the like obviously don’t matter to you, but they sure as shit matter to me.
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Exactly. Just like with thalidomide.
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What the hell are you talking about? There are SERIOUS discussions we need to be having about kids and the effect that social media is having on them. There is a very probably correlation with negative mental health in kids and teens and social media. This isn’t a knee jerk reaction moral panic over this stuff, REAL children ARE being hurt right now as we speak. Kids have been LITERALLY bullied to death via social media. Maybe YOU don’t give a shit, but quite a lot of us really do. Reasonable people can disagree on what should be done (and if this law is overreach), but dismissing it as just some the dumb old luddites overreacting ain’t that… Do better, dude.
And no, having a discussion on technologies instead of just blinding adopting them because THAT’S PROGRESS seems a far better approach to technology of any kind. It’s not very thoughtful to just assume that all technologies are “good” and anyone resisting it is just a fearful conservative. That’s really laughable if you know anything about the history of technology… some technologies are good, some are bad, and it makes much more sense to think about technologies than to just blind celebrate everything just because it’s “new”.
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The effects of social media depend entirely on how companies choose to moderate it. We’ve already seen Facebook become a medium to promote genocide and Musk decide to go all on in making X a safe space for fascist hatred. At what point do we get to say this isn’t just another knee jerk reaction?
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I’m a little annoyed that this article as well as other news stories that I can find doesn’t say how the law will define what is and is not considered to be “social media.” I don’t think that there’s a universally-accepted definition, and the term means different things to different people. For example, I would personally consider this BBS to be a form of social media but others might disagree.
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Sometimes I see long lists re: social media. facebook, twitter, ig, tiktok, they’re always mentioned; sometimes also threads, bluesky, mastodon, too. Innumerable other shit like snapchat, telegrim, and all that is also included. tumblr is occ classified as social media, since it’s gen’lly used as an interactive blogging platform. tumblr’s not social media to my mind, it’s blogging instead.
It appears that in gen’l, part of the definition of social media is a vast # of users. Another part seems to involve attempting to reach a vast swath of ppl w/whatever one posts, hence all the hacking, disinfo, folks trying to hawk stuff, and ads.
I think of this part of BoingBoing as a BBS, a forum, not social media.
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boingboing is well known for roping in the young ones with reviews of mechanical keyboards, only to corrupt them with promises of never to be realized perfect e-ink readers, focused writing tools, and gender non-conforming unicorn “chasers”.
the youth. the youth. if only they knew what troubles begin. on a bbs.
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That’s how my decadent, degenerate ass got started online. Thank Gawd I was already in my 30s!
It was a thousand years ago, 1998, not long after we got our first machine. Equestrian BBSeses were my gateway, yahoo Arabian horse and Lurcher puppers email/chat groups followed, the [London] Times (until the paywall) & Guardian UK comments sections, then I found a mad London-based site w/forums re: multiple subjects and a chat room, and I was ruined for life.
Next came stumbleupon, Daily Kos (from whomst I was ejected for trebuchet and guillotine memes), BoingBoing, and tumblr, resulting in the sodden, debauched, yet argumentative mess you see before you.
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and we would all be lesser without it 
( and seriously. the reason to keep coming back, for me, is the unique combination of curation and commentariat. i don’t know if that’s “social media” but it certainly is special. you and y’all are the reason. even if there is a painful lack of sea shanties )
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