New York Bans 'Addictive Feeds' For Teens (theverge.com) 40
New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) signed two bills into law on Thursday that aim to protect kids and teens from social media harms, making it the latest state to take action as federal proposals still await votes. From a report: One of the bills, the Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act, will require parental consent for social media companies to use "addictive feeds" powered by recommendation algorithms on kids and teens under 18. The other, the New York Child Data Protection Act, would limit data collection on minors without consent and restrict the sale of such information but does not require age verification. That law will take effect in a year.
States across the country have taken the lead on enacting legislation to protect kids on the internet -- and it's one area where both Republicans and Democrats seem to agree. While the approaches differ somewhat by party, policymakers on both sides have signaled urgent interest in similar regulations to protect kids on the internet. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), for example, signed into law in March a bill requiring parents' consent for kids under 16 to hold social media accounts. And in May, Maryland Governor Wes Moore (D) signed a broad privacy bill into law, as well as the Maryland Kids Code banning the use of features meant to keep minors on social media for extended periods, like autoplay or spammy notifications.
States across the country have taken the lead on enacting legislation to protect kids on the internet -- and it's one area where both Republicans and Democrats seem to agree. While the approaches differ somewhat by party, policymakers on both sides have signaled urgent interest in similar regulations to protect kids on the internet. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), for example, signed into law in March a bill requiring parents' consent for kids under 16 to hold social media accounts. And in May, Maryland Governor Wes Moore (D) signed a broad privacy bill into law, as well as the Maryland Kids Code banning the use of features meant to keep minors on social media for extended periods, like autoplay or spammy notifications.
Nuke it all (Score:3)
Kids today are completely unmotivated. In the 80's and 90's TV at least got boring. Today there's really no end of entertainment and kids just won't get off their @sses unless compelled by force (or boredom). There really is nothing good from entertaining children non-stop. I mean, it WILL stop, when this crop of kids fail completely and the world unravels. But it'd be better to step back from this crazy behavior before its too late.
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It was really obvious once when I took some of
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Kids today are completely unmotivated. In the 80's and 90's TV at least got boring. Today there's really no end of entertainment and kids just won't get off their @sses unless compelled by force (or boredom). There really is nothing good from entertaining children non-stop. I mean, it WILL stop, when this crop of kids fail completely and the world unravels. But it'd be better to step back from this crazy behavior before its too late.
Hey, once the kids of today are grown up we'll have the AIs in charge of everything. No world unraveling. Unless there's a nice EMP-like astrophysical event. Then god help those that grew up after the Internet was a thing. If it happens to me I'll be tearing up the back yard for crops and hunkering down. Maybe I'll make it, but I have a funny feeling we've got enough of the world tied up in the fantasy of digital being forever that it's gonna be a shitfest for a few weeks while humanity grinds itself down t
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So infinite entertainment + AI utopia + EMP = Idiocracy? Almost seems likely. But luckily, there's near zero chance AGI gets developed by pure altruists.
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So infinite entertainment + AI utopia + EMP = Idiocracy? Almost seems likely. But luckily, there's near zero chance AGI gets developed by pure altruists.
We don't really even need to worry about AGI. If there's a global level EMP event? There's enough of our world wrapped up in electronics to knock us on our asses pretty thoroughly. I mean, AGI developed by crony capitalists with an eye on furthering their own wealth will take us on a slow, grinding, painful path, but if we were to lose our electronic infrastructure today? We'd be well past Idiocracy. Hell, we're almost to Idiocracy as it is. Take away our electronics and we'd dwindle to a few spotty areas o
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What do kids say today when asked 'what do you want to be when you grow up?'.
+ You-Tuber?
+ Influencer?
+ Meme stock trader?
Re:Nuke it all (Score:4, Insightful)
Being a layabout is part of what's great about childhood. You have the entire rest of your life to slave away making ends meet. What this really just boils down to old farts who are freaked out that kids are spending their time online rather than playing Nintendo (which was what supposedly was going to ruin my generation). Before that it was comic books and rock records.
Kids eventually mature to the point they want to support themselves and find someone else to settle down with, and that's the real motivation to become a productive member of society. Unless the innate human desire to form pair bonds disappears, we've got absolutely nothing to worry about.
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I'm not going to rag on kids these days.
Because whatever is going on it is 100% not the kids fault. Kids are the same as they've been for millennia.
It's fucking insane being a kid these day. Have you see what adults are doing to them? On the one hand they are being pressured to the point of breakdown over academic results (in a totally fucked system) before they reach teenage years and then being sprayed with addictive feeds conjured up by trillion dollar companies designing them use every psychological tri
Re: Nuke it all (Score:2)
Perhaps this time really is different, but every generation says that the next generation is lazy, degenerate, and often immoral.
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Kids today are completely unmotivated. In the 80's and 90's TV at least got boring. Today there's really no end of entertainment and kids just won't get off their @sses unless compelled by force (or boredom). There really is nothing good from entertaining children non-stop. I mean, it WILL stop, when this crop of kids fail completely and the world unravels. But it'd be better to step back from this crazy behavior before its too late.
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
- Socrates, 480-ish BC.
They said the same thing about your generation when you were a kid, when I was a kid a
Now do adults. (Score:2)
More than a decade after getting rid of the FaceSpace, I got an account again for the sole purpose of interacting with parent groups in my town that did things only through that platform.
All I did was tell it I'm a male in my 30s and I can't open it up without it giving me a feed full of pr0n ads. Can't even fucking check it at work on my personal device it's so bad.
Re: Now do adults. (Score:2)
No need to wait, those already show up in injected ads.
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Basically girls wearing suggestive clothing with questionable links in the posts. Seems to happen when you don't have enough other content to follow and FB just gives generic stuff aimed at men
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Install the Facebook Purity extension on chrome, it acts as a censorship layer (that you define) between you and the Facebook algorithm. I've been using it for years and for the most part I only see the people and pages I explicitly follow except for the brief periods between FB changing their code and the extension maintainer tweaking theirs to match.
https://www.fbpurity.com/ [fbpurity.com]
Adblocker (Score:2)
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I made a fb account to use marketplace 2 weeks ago. I gave it my real name and age and no other data points. All I wanted was marketplace.
During my first meeting with somebody to buy something my account was flagged fraud or something and fb demanded a copy of my drivers license to unlock my account and keep communicating. Like my last massage sent was I'm here, and the last received was omw. Poor guy probably thought I stood him up.
Tell me fb didn't leverage that situation on purpose to get a picture of m
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Yep, the second you do that, Know-Your-buyer (KYC) laws activate and the anal probe comes out. It's why I use only a credit-card and an old PayPal account. I keep saying, all this tracking makes identity theft easier.
Yep: Amazon and Facebook probe deeper, for their own benefit.
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From where I sit, Zuck already did a great job making Facebook non-addictive for middle-aged adults. My feed is full of so much recommended garbage from people and groups I have no interest in following and dumb short format videos, that I rarely ever go on there anymore for more than a few minutes. Usually, it's just a futile attempt to actually find things posted by my actual friends and family, which was what Facebook ostensibly is for. Worse, lately it's also been including posts from people I've unf
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You probably told it your real name, or real phone number, so it knows much more than that.
Unenforceable (Score:2)
These laws could've been written by the social media companies themselves. They sound like PR window-dressing & nothing more.
...and undefined (Score:2)
How do they propose to check that teens have parental consent?
I'm also interested in how they define "addictive". How can you tell whether a feed is addictive or non-addictive?
Big Brother Getting Too Big (Score:2)
Re:Big Brother Getting Too Big (Score:4, Informative)
Social media companies need to stop trying to get kids addicted.
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you can't really get around this. it's not illegal content, it's just how it is presented. the algorithm relies on exactly the same behaviors and triggers than any shopping mall, advertising company, gaming platform or even political campaign. it's ubiquitous, the same techniques are even used to sell unhealthy food that will shorten people's lifespan and that's just a "free choice" and you can't stop that either. at best you can try to mitigate specific extremes, like e.g. trying to restrict it to minors i
Re: Big Brother Getting Too Big (Score:3)
We're all ok with legislating the advertising of alcohol and tobacco products, even though they're legal and buying them is a free choice that one can make. Depending on the country, we're also ok with forbidding the advertisement of certain products when clearly targeted towards children.
There is no fundamental concept that prevents us from legislating social media companies to death because they try to get us (and children) addicted, and they are successful at it.
By the way, we are also ok with the concep
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Social media companies need to stop trying to get kids addicted.
Remind me again who provided the kids with the device to access social media in the first place?
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Political theater (Score:2)
Laws like this give the illusion of "doing something to protect the kids", but most often fail with unintended bad side effects
*shrugs* (Score:1)
For a second I thought they were talking about TikTok.
How many parents? (Score:2)
How many parents are going to tell their tween daughter, she can't look at LOL-cat videos because of the in-feed advertising. Demanding parents take responsibility will not work: For them, that's not a fight worth starting.
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The first phones we gave to our kids - in the mid 2000's - were called Go Phones. They were only capable of voice calling 3 phone numbers programmed in by us parents, which was adequate for safety purposes. No answers here...Just saying...
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There were 3 problems: Firstly, as the technology got cheaper, the price of child-friendly phones didn't drop. Which created the both parts of the second problem. Cheaper phones caused conspicuous consumption of new models, resulting in left-over phones. It was easier to give a child an old, full-featured phone, than a child-friendly phone. Then schools demanded children have internet-capable tablets or laptops, so a smart-phone or a basic phone with hot-spotting, was required.
Watch out... (Score:1)
This is how is starts. Come up with something so egregious that we all agree nobody should be allowed to “say” it (and who would want to say such a thing anyway?) then very slowly move the goal post towards the limits of speech that, well, maybe not everybody agrees with but most do, while gradually availing ourselves of the power and influence of our governments to help with mandates, then policies, laws and lawsuits. Then pretty soon words like fat, and some others that I better not write fo
Protect kids from what? (Score:2)
What, exactly, is the harm this law is trying to alleviate?
If their parents don't care that their children stare at their screens, why should I? Why should the state? What purpose (other than censorship) does this law serve?
If you can ban "addictive" social media, you can ban trans-affirming media. If this law passes constitutional muster, the precedent could be used to pass bans on "gay-propaganda" like Russia did. There are red states in the union, and Republicans have a habit of passing reaction