I don’t think this is gonna work. You can’t just ban something like that, you have to provide alternatives, and there aren’t any. There needs to be a Club Penguin-type “kids internet”. Course, dealing with children’s data is “too expensive” (and risky), so that’s not gonna happen.
man if only there were some kinds of open source software which the government could host for children to use
Fuck that. These laws almost always seem like a move BY surveillance capitalism to ID all user traffic, using the state (regulatory capture or bribery) under the guise of “child protection”. If we lived in actual democracies, instead of capitalist plutocracies, the easiest way to universally apply this and preserve civil liberties would be to incorporate a broad age indicator — “adult”, “teen”, and “child” — into every web comms protocol. If it were at the OS / browser level parents could then setup a child or teen account and, unless the child figures out the admin password, they’re stuck with it; every request their device makes to the Internet will include it.
Then every site would only be responsible for checking that value and required to block “child” &/or “teen” from specific services or content… That’s basically how ID’s work when you visit your local alcohol dealer or sex shop - “adult” / “not adult” is all they need to know … Hell, ban all advertising, data capture, use of analytics in content discovery, etc for non-adults. Let children use the internet the way it was before parasites took over. No friction for every user. No requirements for people to hand over their PII to countless corporations (which should be limited as much as possible). No games of whack-a-mole. At the end of the day there will always be workarounds, but it’s the parents responsibility to monitor their children; not the internets, or rest of society.
I don’t think this would solve some of the issues they would need to solve, one of the main issues being bullying which is done by fellow children.
I don’t know that it would even solve the issue of predators as they would find a way on to a children’s only social media site and still be able to get access to kids. I believe it would be even worse as a children’s only one would instil false confidence in parents that’s it’s a safe space and the same can be said for the children themselves, believing everybody is a child on there.
