tech

Instagram and teens: How to keep your kids safe

8 Comments
By BARBARA ORTUTAY and AMANDA SEITZ

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Kids need to learn to walk away from that stuff. Nobody has to use those sites.

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Without new laws that regulate how tech companies use our data and algorithms to push users toward harmful content, there is only so much parents can do, Marachi said.“The companies are not interested in children’s well-being, they’re interested in eyes on the screen and maximizing the number of clicks.” Marachi said. “Period.”

So, FB knows that its products are harming children. And they need government to step in to tell them how to stop it? Otherwise, parents have a 365/24/7 shift against a product in commerce?

Severe.

So, what to do with Facebook? And all similar social media platforms?

Cure via scalpel or an chainsaw? Or give them full license to do whatever they want economically, politically and socially, without limits?

How about a middle ground? How about liability?

Just a handful of statutes:

(1) Social media is not the press. Or journalism. And the laws in place that already serve to protect the press and journalists will not apply to social media. Unless the press or a journalist purposefully teams up in a joint venture with social media . . . then they lose their protections. Full stop.

(2) A jury or a judge shall be allowed a permissible and rebuttal inference that social media is harmful to children. And emotionally or intellectually vulnerable adults.  In other words, a jury may (or not) give that value it deems appropriate from mere circumstantial evidence of harm, no matter how small. And without additional evidence being necessary.  Also, regulators give platforms a list of don'ts per se; but they must meet regularly with regulators and stakeholders.

(3) Failure of a social media platform to provide its algorithms, for anaylsis by litigants and regulators or investigators (upon request) will result in significant sanctions. 

(4) When calculating damages, a jury or judge may permissibly consider that harm already to a child may be considered short, medium or long term (even, perhaps, for the rest of the child's natural life), if the damage is significant, quantifiable, and the result of intentional, knowing, willful, and/or gross negligence.

(5) No mandatory arbitration clauses. Ten year statute of limitations / repose, but cases are prospective and not retrospective. And a jury or judge may award double damages (triple in repeat cases, and quadruple in cases resulting in death), which cannot be discharged by bankruptcy.

There! Clean! No bans or suspensions. No censors. No freedom stomping.  No corporate breakups. Literally, the next day, abusive content towards children stops

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What is is with the moral panic/witch hunt stuff that we get so much of today?

-The patterns that children establish as teenagers stay with them for the rest of their lives.

No, you grow out of your teenage stuff as you mature as an adult.

The primary mechanism for protecting children is parenting, not state censorship.

Indirectly shutting down Web 2.0 services using the Maude Flanders directive is unacceptable. We cannot make our entire world 'child safe', offline or online. What we do need to do is ensure that parents parent children properly and that schools teach them online skills, just as they teach them how to deal with offline bullying (which is much more unpleasant and cannot be avoided with the click of a mouse).

If governments take away internet services from the majority to 'protect' a minority, they are disempowering and censoring their citizens by underhand means.

There are simple mechanisms available on social media platforms to block content - use them. These can be improved, allowing groups of people to crowd source the self-censoring of their feeds so that they never see anything that they do not want to see.

Seperate social media experiences should be made available for pre-teen, teen to the age of majority, and adults. Each require differing levels of parental and provider oversight. For children - whitelisted content, regulation and full parental monitoring. Mediate that for teenagers to majority. Self-censorship and user blocking options for adults.

If social media companies do not wish to do this, they should switch to a distributed topology so that they do not handle any user data. To set up a social media system like this would not be difficult - you can rough it out using e-mail protocols, although that would be very much v.1.0. Users should built their own aspirational advertising profile and share it with services in return for access. They do not need to monitor everything we click on.

It's amusing to see people who never use social media calling for it to be shut down or limited. Millions of people use it every day quite happily. It is part of our lives. People use it as a business platform to earn cash to pay their bills and feed their families. People stay in touch on it, that otherwise would lose contact. The messaging services have replaced e-mail for many people. We should all make the effort to use the options that are there to improve our experience of it.

The internet has been around for a long time. There is NO excuse any more for parents to not know how it works, nor to be unaware of the importance of nurturing and monitoring their children's use of it. It is as basic as feeding your child a healthy diet.

There are unpleasant people online, just as there are offline. We teach kids how to avoid them. Stop blaming the technology for human failings, and teach your children how to use the internet safely.

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What a mess this digital has become, thank god I didnt grow up with ""smart"" phones.....

They are wrecking havoc not just with kids, but adults as well, digital is really messed up societies worldwide & it gets worse by the day

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@GW.

Your response is comparable to how some folk responded to the arrival of moveable type, telegraphy, motor vehicles, radio, women's suffrage, the railways, television, the Welfare State, rock & roll, punk, glam rock, birth control and Elvis shaking his hips.

The problem is not with the tech, it is with the moral panic that humanity greets any change before it beds itself down. Relax, have a cup of tea and worry less. The sky is not falling in. It will all work out fine.

-2 ( +0 / -2 )

Harward MBA Frances Haugen is trying to make a cerear back- stabbing her employer and making up faar-out stories by mixing up Facebook and Instagram, accusing CEO Mark Zuckerberg for "profiteering from young internet addicts"......

Her strategy is to become a new " IT- prophete/fortune-teller and web-guru" by using the internet-analphabet US Senate, led by anti-smoking crusader Richard Blumenthal, to blackmail Facebook and actually trying to create mistrust of the Facebook platform, allegedly being guilty of some local ethnic violence in Ethiopia and Burma.

She made a point of that "I have a Harward MBA" as if that fact would white-wash her far fetched story...

The fact is that Facebook is absolutely the best internet social platform, with exellent, updated algorithms, and the strongest supporter of free speach and civilized opinion sharing GLOBALLY.......period.

We hope that Francis Haugen will never find employment anywhere exept as a dishwhasher in an Ethiopian kindergarden.

Her mission of starting/supporting some form of government control, and internet censorship including som kind of licensing/taxing of Facebook is very transparent, and

Is doomed to fail. Facebook users are not that stupid.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

Is doomed to fail. Facebook users are not that stupid.

I don't think most have any kind of loyalty to facebook whatsoever, they aren't that stupid.

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