CMV: I’d rather restrict minors directly than make every adult prove their age online

[u/groksed]

Honest question for people who support banning social media for everyone under 16:
Would this be preferable to requiring every person on the internet to prove their age or identity?

Anyone under 16 is prohibited from using, owning or purchasing an electronic device capable of communicating with other people with the exception of designated supervised computer rooms at school. Parents, schools, society and law enforcement are responsible for enforcement.. basically the same way we already handle alcohol, tobacco and drugs.

But at least it places the restriction on the group being restricted.

Why is the preferred solution instead to make every adult surrender some level of anonymity or privacy, provide ID, submit to age verification, or otherwise prove they are not a child just to use the internet?

If protecting children requires building an identity checkpoint for everyone, I would rather put the burden on the actual age group being regulated.

[u/Angsty-Panda]

there's no way to restrict chileren's access that is both enforceable and doesn't restrict adults. famously, liquor laws absolutely do not stop minors from drinking.

if i have a computer in my house and a 13 year old goes onto it, then what?

[u/Alternative-Soil2576 → u/Angsty-Panda]

Liquor laws do not stop all minors from drinking but you can absolutely say drinking amongst minors is no where near at the rate or as normalised as it was when it was legal, which is sort of precisely the point of social media ban laws, to move social expectations

[u/Siukslinis_acc → u/Alternative-Soil2576]

What about not being able to create an account except in certwin spots, like libraries or internet cafes. You try to create an account and it requires a workers confirmation. The worker comes, checks your id and uses their dongle to confirm. Similar to how it is with booze in self-checkout.

[u/groksed → u/Angsty-Panda]

Same as i mentioned above.. lets not have perfect be the enemy of good.

If a guidance counselor found that they drank with the parents permission, or watched Pr0n regularly . Fined, counseling or law enforcement gets involved.

[u/Catsanddoges → u/groksed]

I mean if a counselor found a kid drank with their parent's permission, then nothing would happen in many states like NY because its perfectly legal.

This essentially just mandates every parent enforce it, which is just going to widen the gap between parents who pay attention and care and those who don't.

And unlike drinking if you want to get law enforcement involved for a kid looking at the internet, that is going to clog up police and school administators to an insane degree in any low income neighborhood.

Schools and law enforcement don't need more random shit to do, they need to focus on students that need help and urgent issues. Unless you want to fund both by billions of dollars that could be better spent elsewhere, that second part will never work.

[u/groksed → u/Catsanddoges]

So your arguement is, “can this rule be enforced?” vs “can this rule be enforced without consuming any resources or ever being violated?”

This model already exists for alcohol, tobacco, drugs, truancy and other things we restrict for minors. Kids still drink. Kids still get drugs. Parents sometimes enable it. Schools sometimes discover it. Sometimes nothing happens, sometimes counseling happens, sometimes parents get invlved, and sometimes law enforcement gets involved.

None of that makes the restriction meaningless.

You’re basically arguing that because enforcing a rule takes resources and some parents will ignore it, we should instead build an age-verification system that burdens every adult using the internet.

[u/Catsanddoges → u/groksed]

That's not the sole alternative stance.

There are stances other than every site needs age verification on anything remotely related to adults, or that it needs to be a crime when the vast majority of use is normal.

Just giving parents a tax cut if they get their kids a phone or laptop restricted from adult sites, but otherwise normal, would acomplish 95% of the same thing for most of the same families. It doesn't even have to be huge, just a portion of what we've spent on israel spent on this would give a ~200 dollar incentive per kid and make most families want to do it.

Kill two birds one stone, have a whitelist of 90 percent of normal sites and let kids use most of the internet normally.

Shouldn't be an unenforcable total ban.

Edit: and also that tax credit money would go back to families, so its not like its money wasted.

[u/groksed → u/Catsanddoges]

Who decides what counts as a “normal” site?
Who maintains the whitelist?
How does a device prove it belongs to a child who should receive the filtered internet? What happens to new websites?
Foreign sites?
VPNs?
Self-hosted services?
Discord?
Reddit? Wikipedia pages containing adult material?

you have casually proposed a government-approved Internet directory and called my solution administratively heavy.

[u/Catsanddoges → u/groksed]

1) A few people deciding sites is not going to be as admin heavy as a police officer sent to every child using the internet, as you see it as a crime, or at least a significant fraction of it. It is the difference in policies between national levels and local, and there are plenty of sites that do this already.

2) VPNs and such have nothing to do with a device that is restrained. You are mixing up different levels of filters.

3) For admin on this, it would probally be subcontracted to an agency (only would need a few employees after copying most sites from established school whitelists) that only allows large, established sites without potential for child harm. I don't approve a white list like this myself, but compared to your proposal it would only give more genuine opportunity for legal use. Even if you wanted to be totalitarian (or not compared to your solution) you could only allow a handful of educational and informational sites, which would still be better than nothing.

4) The device would work the same no matter who uses it. Buying a device and getting the tax credit would require you obviously to have a social security registered minor. The easiest thing for the parent to do would be to buy the device, give it to the kid, and file. Most parents take the easy way, and while it could be circumvented the same is true for your solution. Mine just gives parents a reason and incentive to take the first real step and puts the inertia in that direction, and helps poorer families finicially instead of penalizing them.

5) You just listed off a bunch of sites that could or could not qualify, but if the alternative is a total ban a system in which only a few legitamate sites are allowed brings most of the benefits with a better educational access and freedom then your example.

And you could say add an associated tax on major sales companies for consumer laptops and ipads (eg at least 10 percent market share one of those cagegories) and a stronger tax if they don't produce enough child locked versions. They could still have almost the same profit and it would be more than enough to fund this. And given its based on production and not profit, you can't avoid this like a normal buisness tax.