I’m asking for public policy ideas here. A lot of countries are enacting age verification now. But of course this is a privacy nightmare and is ripe for abuse. At the same time though, I also understand why people are concerned with how kids are using social media. These products are designed to be addictive and are known to cause body image issues and so forth. So what’s the middle ground? How can we protect kids from the harms of social media in a way that respects everyone’s privacy?
I must state I lack any experience with parenting, but I have this to add:
Both Android and iOS have parental controls built in, just block whatever you don’t want your kid to access. There are tools out there that parents can install on devices that are basically spyware for their kids. Parents have to actually use the existing tools, at least what is built in with the OS of the device. Make the iPad not an addictive content serving machine, but instead something with hand picked games, or whatever other apps you trust. Even non tech savvy users could enable parental features.
This. Content providers should at most be required to mark inappropriate content with some kind of http header or meta tag to make client-side filtering easier.