Social Media ban and age restricted access

[Harrison]

What do you think of the recent rise in governments looking to ban social media for under 16s and the increase in Identification needed to prove you are over 18 on more sites?

Age restrictions and limiting childrens device time

China then Australia, the UK, EU and Canada all started to explore this.

Australia was surprisingly the first to actually initiate it, followed by the UK. I think China hasn't yet brought it into effect, but their restrictions go further than any other with government limits on access to 1 hour per day for under 16s. And curfew hours where no access is allowed at all.

I agree childrens screentime and access to content should be restricted, but Amazon, Android, Windows, iOS etc all have parental controls to set and restrict time limits, apps and content that can be accessed. There is no excuse why a parent hasn't used this to limit their child's access and if they haven't then the parent should be held responsible. I don't think its a government who should be imposing forced restrictions.

Social Media access

We now see a lot of teen social media influencers, and they can make quite a lot of money and get free product endorsements because of it. But is it right?

In the UK we have strict child labour laws. They are only allowed to work a maximum of 2 hours per week day and 4 hours at the weekend, but I think it's a combined weekly limit of 10 hours total. And this is for 14 years and over. No working is allowed below this. But you have children under 14 as influencers. Is this still not technically self employed work?

My god daughter is on Tik Tok and an influencer. She gets free clothes makeup and beauty products sent to her to endorse and showcase. She thinks it's great, but is it child exploitation and very cheap marketing for the companies? There is also no real control over how an influencer advertises or shows a product, unlike the advertising industry which is regulated.

I personally don't think children under 16 should be influencers. And from my god daughters account you can see older men posting comments about how lovely she looks. That should be an instant red flag for parents.

Work requiring social media experience

The issue is many jobs these days require the use of social media as part of the role. If it gets completely banned for under 16s they will not have any exposure or experience of it. Is that actually an issue though? Companies would just have to offer training.

Age restrictions needing photo ID

The UK was the first country to introduce this requirement, with Australia following. I agree and support this if it is for adult sites. It's a simple solution to protect children.

But the UK has taken this too far. You now need to submit a photo ID to listen to music on Spotify! And Spotify has banned children under 13 from accessing the service. So children under 13 are not allowed to listen to music?

There have also been some other sites that have recently been requiring Photo ID to access them. 99% of the time this just makes me go elsewhere/

Governments considering banned VPNs

The most stupid idea recently was the UK government considering banning the use of VPNs. This just shows how little they actually understand the internet or technology. It was because they discovered people were using VPNs to bypass age restrictions to access sites by pretending to be in another country. Their knee jerk reaction was a just ban them. Someone then pointed out that the very ministers wanting to ban them use them to access their government servers from their laptops. I don't think they have given up on the idea though which is worrying!