[agentultra]

There are alternatives to ID verification if the goal is protecting children.

You could, for example, make it illegal to target children with targeted advertising campaigns and addictive content. Then throw the executives who authorized such programs in jail. Punish the people causing the harm.

[varenc]

If targeting children with advertising got corporate execs thrown in jail, wouldn't the companies just roll out age verification for users like they do now? How would this rule change their behavior? They have to know who the children are to not target them.

Stronger punishment creates more of an incentive to age verify. Which is basically why it's happening now.

[cloverich]

> They have to know who the children are to not target them.

There is a difference between identifying specific children, and running programs that target children more generally; and / or having research that shows how your product harms children, and failing to do anything to stop it. We can tackle both of those issues without requiring age verification. We're headed down the path of age verification because we know now that not only is social media harmful, it's especially harmful to kids, and has been specifically targeted to them. Those are things that can be fixed, regardless of how you feel about age verification. Its not different than tobacco being not allowed to create advertisements for kids; its the same type of people doing the same types of things in the end.

[barbazoo]

At least then it wouldn't be the government requiring it, is what people may think I imagine.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>Then throw the executives who authorized such programs in jail.

Gee, I wonder if the executives who are suspected of doing such things haven't spent the last 100 years building the infrastructure necessary to avoid charges, let alone jail time? Large corporate legal departments, wink-wink-nudge-nudge command and control hierarchies where nothing incriminating is ever put into writing, voluminous intra-office communications that bury even the circumstantial evidence so deeply no jury could understand it even if the plaintiffs/state could uncover it, etc.

Anyone over the age of 12 that thinks corporate entities can be made to be accountable in a meaningful way is more than naive. They are cognitively defective. Or is it that you realize they can't be held accountable but you'd rather maintain the status quo than contemplate a country which abolished them and enforced that all business was the conducted by sole proprietorships and (small-n) partnerships?

[agentultra]

For a while it was thought that we could never bring back anti-trust.

Sure, there's a lot of corruption right now. Doesn't have to stay that way.

[cubefox]

To avoid your proposed punishment, they will implement things like ... ID verification.

[Perz1val]

Then ones who won't will become the preferred choice

[sunaookami]

Easy solution: Ban all targeted advertising, regardless of age.

[scotty79]

Facebook advertises outright scams and nobody manages to punish them for that.

[downrightmike]

It isn't about the kids, they are just the smoke and mirrors.

[agentultra]

I think this is true, it’s more about enabling a surveillance apparatus with plausible deniability built in.

The funny thing is, just like how politicians have been led to believe that AI data centres create jobs, politicians think this system can be managed responsibly so that only they can get access to its data [0].

[0] https://cybernews.com/security/global-data-leak-exposes-bill...

[davkan]

How about instead of protecting the kids we protect everyone and do something to stop these gargantuan companies from driving engagement at any cost in order to rake ad revenue.

I’ve never met a single person who believed Facebook was a force for good. Why allow it to exist in its current form at all.

If these companies are the new town square then make a real online town square run by the government people can use if they so choose and then break up the monopolies that are destroying the fabric of all the societies on the globe.

We never in a million years should have allowed these companies to establish global scale communications platforms without the ability to properly moderate them with human intervention and that’s not even to speak of the actual nefarious intent they possess to drive engagement and the anti democratic techno feudalist sickening shit we see from their CEOs like Thiel et al.

They are a plague on our species that makes sport betting apps look like childs play.