Social Media in the News
Where does one stand on all this Social Media in the News? Well, since last December, when the Australians were the first country in the world to ban social media for anyone under the age of 16, hardly a day has gone by without age verification being in the news.
VPN’s designed to hide a user’s online activities seem to be next in line for Age Verification after Porn Website, Alcohol website, betting websites and so on. Will people who hold a driver’s licence be the only ones who are allowed to view a car manufacturer’s website? It seems somewhat self-defeating that you need to prove your age to be allowed to have a VPN, as that effectively means you will have proven who you are as well… and it won’t take too many dots between the VPN account holder and their activity.
Perhaps soon, more time will be spent working out what you are allowed to do than not allowed. It might get to a stage where it is easier to block you have everything and then allow only certain access to certain things based on who you are. Certainly, that is what any security pundit would want.
So – what is really going on here? It can all be simplified. Basically, we can do it. Up until recently, there simply has not been the technology around to allow Age Verification, or pretty much any other sort of verification. You signed up for something and gave a fake name and password – done. There was nothing the service or provider could do about it. But advances in actual technology and what people can do on a website or the Internet in general have allowed coders to program these advanced websites to carry out this work.
Take a simple example, I remember years ago, it was a revolutionary concept that Browsers, your regular Chrome, Safari, Edge or Firefox could store snippets of information from a website. I don’t just mean Cookies, but actual data storage. This super-useful technology would allow people to better create images on the fly, like within Canva.com. Or it would allow you to ‘configure’ something on a website. It was useful and clever. Now, however, this same storage is being used by websites to save your Passport, or upload your driver’s license – to verify who you are. It’s a very typical example of how a piece of tech is being used for purposes that were never thought of or intended.
Instead of making lives easier, perhaps better, it’s just given everyone more means to control us and know about us as individuals.
Back to my original topic about Social Media in the News. Now we can see that it is possible for Social Media companies to verify their users, the authorities are beginning to think this is a good idea and it’s been introduced, first in Australia and later in everyone else.
However, it’s defeating the object or purpose. It’s in reality what used to be called bad law. Yes – it is self-induced by the Social Media companies and their utterly contemptible behaviour towards their users, but it’s also about a herd mentality. A twelve-year-old’s friends are all likely to be on Snapchat so they want to be as well… Take 50% off Snapchat and the other 50% are likely not to bother with it so much.
This is the challenge. How do you ‘nicely’ and without further infringement on a person’s privacy persuade people not to spend so much time on Social Media?
My argument would be to bring the actual services being provided to heel. Endless scrolling, for example, could be banned. We need ot tackle the functionality of these services and root out what it is about them that is harmful. Being able to upload your holiday photos and share them with your friends is a wonderful privilege for any age group. What’s unacceptable is dotting every second image with an Advert and what’s worse is allowing the manipulation of your holiday photos with AI.
These are the areas that need tackling. Restrict bad design, restrict advertising and YES if necessary move to Paid versions of these platforms, if that were done a lot of people would quickly move off the platform.
Finally, a note about policing. Far more policing of inappropriate content needs to take place; if Social Media companies spent a fifth of the time on policing compared with their Ad tools, the internet would be a vastly safer place.
The solution is not to ban people, not to require more people to provide more personal proof of who they are, nor to dictate who can or cannot use a service. The solution is to curtail the mispractices that companies within the social media industry allow.