Sollten wir soziale Medien für unter 16-Jährige verbieten? Irische Teenager teilen ihre Gedanken

Only if they ban over 65s. Social media in oldies (eg MAGA,) has done more harm to society than anything else in recent years.

The parent in me screams yes, but I feel like it’s wrong, I think it’ll be a case where its just until your 16 then that entire generation onward will have a digital ID that is normalised and then we are slowly stripping freedom away for generations beyond.

as someone who is literally 16 I feel like banning social media is unreasonable as people would 100% find alternatives or some other way to do what they’re doing OR instead of this the alternative would be everyone getting into drugs and sex instead of social media.

Personally the pros of being able to communicate with people all over the world and make new friends along with the friends I still keep irl outweigh the potential cons with LOTS of different support avenues to go down if it negatively affects you. It’s people and their parents responsibility to keep you safe in the world, the government can only provide access to safety they can’t use the internet for you and locking social media is a cheap way out.

Also, most people would not be willing to verify in general adults included and it would definitely be a factor in killing people’s privacy overall.

But chat control is gonna do that anyways so I’m just expecting the worst eitherway.

I think it should be banned in general tbh

If they do ban social media for our youth, the government need to implement alternative ways to allow youths to spend their time. Facilities such has public indoor pools, gyms, more ACCESSIBLE libraries (not ones in the city that you have to take unreliable bus eireean for).

Absolutely. It’s fucked. First the under 16s then the rest. With AI and Russia etc etc, we can’t afford to have such a confused, distracted apathetic and easily controlled society. It needs a complete overhaul

Digital ID is a Tony Blair fetish. Constant surveillance.
It’s not about protecting kids. They could make a law that banned under 16s from owning smart phones but it’s not about the kids.

Should probably ban adults too from Facebook groups

Regulations need to target the companies and algorithms themselves, not introducing arbitrary age limits that any kid with 2 and a half brain cells can circumvent.

Only if they do it like they did in Oz, if its done the way they are floating it now in Lenister house, it will be a sloppy, invasive data theft disaster which wont protect kids, just remove adults freedoms.

Oz drafted their law right & so well Social Media companies had to implement nearly immediately & did so fully without hassle or subjecting adult users to a bevy of invasive privacy destroying & extra data collection methods. So much so that some Tech companies are tryna sue them into repeal.

Yes if they follow Oz, no if they do something stupid.

There are 2 legitimate routes to do this, parents be 100% reponsible for their childrens behaviour, its already mostly true of pre Internet situations anyways, these issues now largely arise from govs. not keeping legislation up to date in parents policing their own childrens behaviour, after all they are the party with the vested interest & the ones entirely responisible for their own childrens immediate wellbeing & development.

The other way & the 1 i think is most straight forward is simply lean into all the Tech companies already overly invasive data harvesting & surveillance practices. They already always know who you are & what you say & do online. All thats needed is a legal court ordered warrant in functioning democracies to breach your privacy & dob you into the cops. Which is fine provided there is a culture of effort justified by genuine legal cause for govs. or police to get your data & not be just casually surveilled & live under a microscope. Its easy to get the Tech companies to just ban all the accounts they’re fairly sure are under 16 & have the handful of outliers appeal & prove otherwise.

What I fear is the fact that they try imposing unwealdy, sloppily implemented, overly invasive, poorly protected systems that put us all to massive inconvenience just so they can say they’re protecting kids but make it easier for them to retaliate against political opponents, criticism or just general private abuse by civil servants or cops sitting on too much info who get salty about an Ex or paranoid about a cheating spouse etc. Its already bad enough to have rando tech employee 101 etc. with that power, i’d rather not also have people who have real world power to be able to marry that knowledge with the power to easily act on it.

this is probably going to get downvoted to hell but as a 19 year old I am glad I had access to social media and the internet as a kid because I would have been so isolated otherwise as a kid growing up in the sticks with minimal friends in school and parents who didn’t help much either. I have internet friends from back when I was 14-15 that I am still in touch with to this day and I am glad I got the opportunity to know.

Idk, maybe the parents should do some parenting for a change. When I was a teen social media was already a thing, my parents had no clue what’s the story was, but they contacted my school and even the local university to understand how it worked and from there they kept a closer look on my activity and always warned me of talking to strangers online and all that jazz.

Today’s equivalent would be help them manage time spent, unrealistic pressure and expectations, not oversharing and doxing yourself and unlike in the past, mobile devices has plenty of child locks as well as home routers has many ways to setup a separate wifi login/password for kids to access the internet with proper filters for ads and adult content. If parents don’t know how to do any of it we have literally tech companies begging to use their LLMs, make some good use of it.

This whole BS of age verification has nothing to do with “protect the children”, no government cares about them. This is surveillance because they saw first hand what happen in other countries and how they mobilized to remove corrupt leader from power.