Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul
"say inappropriate things" ? Well thats really vague.
|
Indeed, although many laws are deliberately vague as it is impossible to absolutely clarify what is allowed and what isn’t. An example would be ‘possession of an offensive weapon’, well we are all guilty of that, I assume we all have kitchen knives. The object is not offensive in itself, it’s how we act with it - if I have a wheel brace in the boot of my car, that’s fine, take it out and run around town waving it menacingly - that’s another matter.
You can’t absolutely define ‘inappropriate things’, what you could do, in theory, is have every single social media post moderated and checked by a human, who makes a judgement call or whether or not this is ‘appropriate’
before it is available to view, not retrospectively.
In practice though the sheer scale makes this impossible, care to guess how many social media posts are made each day? It’s in the billions! You could employ the entire population of the planet, moderating them and you still wouldn’t be able to keep up.*
In an earlier post I did mention ‘collective punishment’ which I think was misinterpreted as assuming I was talking about punishing all under-16s. My bad, I wasn’t clear enough.
What I meant to say is OK ban social media for under 16s, how do you do that?
Well, you obviously have to age check, and that often requires handing over information to a third party to verify your age.
Now I have no social media presence, don’t really require or want one, but if I did, would I be happy handing over details to some random company to prove that I’m not 14? Absolutely not, so I might well go to considerable lengths to bypass said age restrictions. If I, as an adult can easily do this, and I promise you, it’s not difficult, knowledge of how to do it will go round schools and under 16s like wildfire.
And that’s what I meant,
everybody is punished, everybody has to risk their data with some organisation which, I suspect, put in the lowest tender bid for the job, and might well have all the security resilience of a damp piece of tissue paper! Or actively break the law and work around it!
At best, it achieves very little of worth, and worse, you have set up a wonderful trove of personal information, just waiting to be hacked.
* and yes I am aware that if the entire population of Earth is employed in moderating messages then they won’t be sending messages, so it’s a sort of negative feedback loop. Look it’s just hyperbolae, yes?
