This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Meta's has been listening to some concerns after all especially now after some pressure.
These changes very well could help parents moderate their teens. Meta's head of product says these changes address particular 3 concerns in an Npr interview.
Will this be the end of the complaints and concerns geared towards Instagram, probably not.
I’m glad nearly every word in this image is highlighted so I’d know what to read.
(I’m just joshin’)
I'm personally on the fence about this type of stuff. On one hand, yes I 100% agree about actually keeping kids safer online (not like the politicians "Think of the kids!" type of "safety"). On the other I don't want anyone to have to give up privacy by having to confirm their age by sending some form of verification, whether that picture/video of ID with birth date on it or having an AI that will inevitably get so many false positives judge you, just to access a service online.
I'm 100% in the second camp. Facebook having my ID is a much bigger issue than having my kids' profile be public. I as a parent can ensure my kids' profiles are acceptable, or mark them as private myself. I can't ensure Facebook deletes my ID after verifying my identity.
Yes, kids should be safer online, and that starts at home. Educate parents and kids about how to stay safe, that's as far as it should go.
I'm also in the second camp. Plus, censoring the bad words on specific users is a few too many steps closer to don't say gay on the internet. Is ass ok but not fuck? Is sex talk forbidden? All mention of anatomy, including general questions about health? How about they ban anti-capitalist language too? The tiktok language phenomenon shows that users will absolutely just make do getting around communication bans, "unalive" and "le$beans" being the most popular. This type of censorship has already happened on other platforms, and it's all bullshit and useless.
The obvious answer is that Facebook should not be used by anyone, ever. The model is cancer, whatever FB does of value for the user can be accomplished without a social media platform.
Choice becomes much, much harder once you listen to accounts about CSAM. Darknet Diaries has a few episodes on this. Some accounts are stomach churning. You can see reasoning of people pushing for the laws
And I agree. Education would go a long way. Much further than some ID verification.
But, see, education makes people smarter. What if people see through the lies of politicians?!
Both politicians and agencies are drooling at the thought of such laws. Because no one answers one simple aspect the people want answered. Who watches the watchers? Who are they accountable to?
Anything to prevent getting my i.d in a database, i would actually be ok with using an ai to verify my age by my appearance if it really came down to it and I had to choose legally some form of age verification.
...as private as an Instagram account can be, anyway.
Thank god they're filtering out the bad no-no words! Finally teens won't be using naughty and scary words any longer because forbidding words that make us sad and upset is a sensible and smart thing to do! Fuck these shitty networks policing every aspect of speech with a humongous camel dick!
Also, if everything is highlighted, nothing is highlighted. Be more reasonable with your highlights.
As a user of bionic reading, wtf did you do to your text
Yeah, I'm not sure. People are calling it highlighting, but it doesn't fit any reasonable pattern to have been manually highlighted. Is there some sort of bad automated highlighting? Or just someone still learning what highlighting is even used for. Or is it just some sort of style thing?
Wait, There are Teens who don't private their accounts? That's wierd.
They have an account their parents can see and private accounts
the weirder thing is teens using their real identity online at all.
Not really, teenagers naturally want to socialize. It's pretty normal. Is it the best thing? no.
They know their network is harmful to teens for years now, I wonder why NOW they are finally doing something about it?
They are not. They just make it look like they care, but nothing actually changes
This has all happened before and it will all happen again. This is what it looks like when a social media company tries to head off an incoming regulatory push.
How are they going to identify who are teens?
Meta said it was fully expecting many teenagers would try to evade the new measures.
"The more restrictive the experience is, the stronger the theoretical incentive for a teen to try and work around the restriction," Mr Mosseri said.
In response, the company is launching and developing new tools to catch them out.
Instagram already asks for proof of age from teenage users trying to change their listed date of birth to an adult one, and has done since 2022.
Now, as a new measure, if an underage user tries to set up a new Instagram account with an adult date of birth on the same device, the platform will notice and force them to verify their age.
In a statement, the company said it was not sharing all the tools it was using, "because we don't want to give teens an instruction manual".
"So we are working on all these tools, some of them already exist … we need to improve [them] and figure out how to provide protections for those we think are lying about their age," Mr Mosseri said.
The most stubborn category of "age-liars" are underage users who lied about their age at the outset.
But Meta said it was developing AI tools to proactively detect those people by analysing user behaviour, networks and the way they interact with content.
Only took them 14 years, lol
At least it’s a step in the right direction. Especially since they’ve been extremely evil when it comes to teens. Tho I’m sure they’ll figure out how to continue to be evil with these restrictions/guidelines in place.
That's... a good thing. Tzuky? Are you ok?
“If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you jump off too?”
Glad we found the answer to that parental koan.
