Yes. But it will be interesting to see if anyone else is implicated once they examine Andrew’s online accounts

Assuming he hasn’t destroyed the evidence, this could potentially lead to more arrests once police search his laptop and read his texts messages and emails.

Thats a unique idea

I should have been more clear. I mean banning advertising in general would not be realistic, so a ban on targeted advertising is a more realistic alternative

Fair point. I’m sure if there was a social media ban the fediverse would be a low priority. That said I still don’t see how it would be financially unviable because like I mentioned earlier most instances already have an application process

That seems like it would be very difficult to enforce

The ban target advertising would definitely be a more realistic solution than banning advertisements in general (which some people are advocating for here). I really am not a fan of ads and would love if they were banned, but I understand that it’s not politically realistic due to what a large role they play in our economy.

You don’t need to ban literally any website that could be classified as social media to have the desired effect. You just need to ban the big ones: TikTok, Instagram etc. Because these are the sites that are creating the most harm (through addiction, body image issues, etc.). There are diminishing returns blocking anything beyond that. Kids aren’t getting addicted to gardening forums or developing anorexia because they spent too much time on tech support IRC channels.

This is a unique idea. I think if we were to have a publically funded curation effort it would need to maintain some structural independence from whatever government was in power, to prevent any potential for abuse. It would be like government funded news agencies, like the BBC or the CBC. These organizations are funded by their respective governments funds but the government can’t tell them what to publish unless It’s violating some law or something (e.g. by doxxing someone). Similarly: the government could fund these block lists but have no say in what websites eventually land on it.

Ideally the process would be as transparent as possible too, but that might have some drawbacks. By explaining in depth why they blocked a website they might be inadvertently drawing attention to that website, which is not always a good thing.

This sounds interesting. Please elaborate

Again I’m not advocating for this, but it wouldn’t be super difficult to block noncompliant severs from the mainstream internet. We do that all the time with torrent sites for example. Its true that technically savvy users could still find their way around this but these measures would still block the majority of users and create an incentive for server owners to comply

The same way they chase 100s of different pot shops and liquor stores to make sure they aren’t selling to anyone under 18

Those are good ideas. I think another (somewhat radical, unlikely to be implemented) idea would be mandating that these services use open source code, so we can see exactly what shenanigans they’re up to.

It’s not scalable for hobbiest run social media like lemmy. It would probably put a cap on how many people could sign up on some of the big instances, which could have the effect of more instances being created and the fediverse becoming even more decentralized so the load could be shared.

In ideal world, yes. But unless this is done collectively then any one kid who does this may feel socially isolated

Yeah and honestly it would probably be good for the fediverse if the big instances broke up into smaller ones. It would make things even more decentralized

Ideally we would need to find a system for collectively deciding to not give kids phones, so no one kid is socially penalized for not having a phone

These are good ideas but I don’t know if Id necessarily trust big tech companies to comply (for example consider how Google was caught harvesting user data in incognito mode; what these companies say they do and what they do do does not always align). So in order for these reforms to be enforceable I think all these big tech companies would need to become open source

Thats an interesting idea. Smart phones sales could be restricted to minors, similar to nicotine products.

And yeah, with the AI any photos posted to social media seem like a major privacy breach

I agree but many of the harms of social media don’t really manifest until the child hits puberty anyway, so not getting a phone until age 12 isn’t really going to help with that