12 I think? Or 15?
I saw a TikTok ad saying 13-15 year olds can have private accounts. I thought instagram was 16 without looking.
Weâre fucked because there is no one in the government or business or wherever that canât be bought. Weâre too late to regulate because itâs convinced most parents that itâs all ok as itâs a convenient babysitter while they are busy doomscrolling themselves. There needs to be convincing education across the board to convince adults to pass it down. But I do agree with banning/age restrictions but only if itâs done right, which it wonât be.
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Instagram is 16, I know because I keep getting the adverts on NowTV. 16 seems too young imo. The adverts say that teenagers under 16 canât make changes without parental consent, but honestly it should be 18. 16 youâre still a child.
Tbh, youâre still at child at 18.
so from your responses you KNOW that the social media companies themselves have a minimum age (regardless of whether you got the numbers right or not). clearly the companies are aware that kids shouldnât have access to their brain rot platforms. i donât think itâs much to expect them to actually enforce those minimums.
the government putting this into law means that parents need to actually police this themselves to an extent and it means the companies have to proactively figure out a way of trying to enforce it. kids being able to circumvent those restrictions doesnât make the restrictions pointless
naturally this all falls down when it turns out the government is sending our childrenâs data to palantir again
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My 14 year old has never shown the slightest interest in the socials, but he spends a lot of time on Roblox. Now Iâm thinking I need to police that, but without giving the impression I donât trust him, which I do âŚ
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My 7 year old has played Skate and Pal World (on a private server with my mate and his kid in Aus) thatâs as far as Iâm going with it. Roblox or whatever that shit is can fuck off
Itâs not very difficult to lock down Roblox pretty well. My kids can only play games on there that we approve, and only interact with people who we approve, canât receive invites or friend requests, or stuff or pay for anything really without one of us checking first. They have a parent dashboard that works pretty well.
Weâve been through all this really recently as my daughter is going to high school in September and will be getting herself there so has a new phone. We ended up with the HMD Fusion which is designed to be a first phone and comes so restricted that itâs basically useless until you start giving permissions for stuff.
I get it though, the problem is parents who just give their kids a phone and open the door to the full horrors of the internet.
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@jon9981 the issue is that they can join a game that doesnât adhere to any pre set rules. in theory when these are reported or discovered by Roblox they will take the games down and punish the developers but that can take time. custom servers are a wild west where anything can happen without visibility also
They canât. They can only join games that we approve. Mine are forever trapped in dress to impress without any kind of chat function, which is probably why they arenât really bothered about Roblox tbh. They are also running it on geriatric Kindle Fires so itâs about 5 frames per minute which probably doesnât do much to encourage them.
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How do you know the games you approve dont have dodgy rules? Iâm not trying to poke holes here, roblox is well known to be a nightmare from a technical security standpoint
this for example is from an independent developer for roblox -
you can do absolutely anything with your own games, publish them and itll take ages for roblox to vet it or do anything if itâs reported
Makes me think back to the hours spent on MSN chat rooms when I was 14. Some of those fellow âteenagersâ I was talking to almost definitely were old blokes. Luckily these were pre webcam days.
It is interesting though how the âoldâ internet was much more open, but had less danger for users. Whereas now, itâs a lot more dangerous, not just with creeps, but scams, data protection, extreme porn easily available, racist rhetoric normalised, screen time addiction etc, yet everyoneâs still treating it like itâs 2004.
Itâs a shame, but the old internet is long gone
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Ah, the old days when you could watch Saddam Hussein swinging from a rope on bloominâ YouTube, wild times.
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I remember watching a QuickTime video of a man get his head cut off on the school libraryâs (only) computer. It was such a formative moment I still remember it 25 years later.
I watched Charlie Kirk get his head blown off in 4k before breakfast and didnât flinch
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I watched something about how pre-internet our âmainstreamâ news was half an hour at 6 oâclock and 9/10 oâclock chunks and we were done with it. A newspaper only had so many pages to read and take in. Your work didnât follow you home in your pocket with constant emails and texts.
If someone wanted to reach you there had to be a valid reason for the effort. Your time truly was yours in a way it will never be again. Things you forget.
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I logged into x to check my vetted list and in 5 mins I saw some bird get lobbed off a bridge with no bungee cord, some bird in Asia lynched, Bonnie blue get fucked and pissed on while pregnant and some black dude with a 2ft cock pop up multiple times.
This is with me trying to vet out all this shit.
Fuck know what goes on in these telegram things and Roblox.
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This was a much better arrangement.
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Do these new measures actually do anything? Knee jerk reactions banning it under a certain age rather than hit the companies who wonât actually do anything to monitor their own apps content and purposely continue to make it as addictive and harmful because thatâs good for the data farming
They banned guns back in the nineties after dunblane, all they did was take handguns out of the hands of legitimate license holders. They did no real Reform of the licensing laws other than telling you what types of guns you couldnât have. There have still been mass shootings in the UK since then including full family murders and each one, with maybe the exception of Raul Mout were legally held firearms. It had no effect on shootings by organised and gang crime.
There was Hungerford and then Dunblane in a pretty short period of time both with a class of weapons that were mostly developed for killing people. I canât see any good reason to allow people to own them. As to what effect it had or didnât have thatâs pure speculation but on balance banning them was almost certainly the right call.
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honestly if i read those paragraphs online iâd assume you were a bot. wtf. the government bans a bunch of stuff that kids shouldnât have. why are adults arguing for kids to have unrestricted access to social media? itâs not an overreach
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