Norway To Increase Minimum Age Limit On Social Media To 15 To Protect Children (theguardian.com) 71
Norway plans to enforce a strict minimum social media age of 15 to protect children from harmful content and the influence of algorithms. The Guardian reports: The Scandinavian country already has a minimum age limit of 13 in place. Despite this, more than half of nine-year-olds, 58% of 10-year-olds and 72% of 11-year-olds are on social media, according to research by the Norwegian media authority. The government has pledged to introduce more safeguards to prevent children from getting around the age restrictions -- including amending the Personal Data Act so that social media users must be 15 years old to agree that the platform can handle their personal data, and developing an age verification barrier for social media.
"It sends quite a strong signal," the prime minister told the newspaper VG on Wednesday. "Children must be protected from harmful content on social media. These are big tech giants pitted against small children's brains. We know that this is an uphill battle, because there are strong forces here, but it is also where politics is needed." While he said he understood that social media could offer lonely children a community, self-expression must not be in the power of algorithms. "On the contrary, it can cause you to become single-minded and pacified, because everything happens so fast on this screen," he added. "It is also about giving parents the security to say no," said Kjersti Toppe, the minister for children and families. "We know that many people really want to say no, but don't feel they can."
"It sends quite a strong signal," the prime minister told the newspaper VG on Wednesday. "Children must be protected from harmful content on social media. These are big tech giants pitted against small children's brains. We know that this is an uphill battle, because there are strong forces here, but it is also where politics is needed." While he said he understood that social media could offer lonely children a community, self-expression must not be in the power of algorithms. "On the contrary, it can cause you to become single-minded and pacified, because everything happens so fast on this screen," he added. "It is also about giving parents the security to say no," said Kjersti Toppe, the minister for children and families. "We know that many people really want to say no, but don't feel they can."
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As for the young, 18 is the age, because 18 is when you can get conscripted, again in the USA.
As for why that hasnt change, well.... the young dont vote.So their voice is stifled by their lack of care. 2020, they saw more 18+ vote because of school shootings 2022, the same. But its still not enough for the pol
Re: Voting age (Score:2)
"As for the young, 18 is the age, because 18 is when you can get conscripted, again in the USA."
By that logic, women shouldn't be able to vote.
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That logic is fundamentally correct. One of the greatest injustices that are remaining is that women get the vote without some of the biggest responsibilities that come with it, while men are forced to shoulder the burden of conscription for both sexes.
This is why egalitarians have been trying to extend draft to women, especially now that women are eligible for combat roles in the military. Current legislation is prima facie discriminatory against men.
But once you remember that egalitarians are basically no
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>But think it through: would you really want to fight alongside soldiers of the opposite sex who don't want to be there?
Yes. This talking point has been permanently debunked as false in Russia-Ukraine war. A refusenik can still hold a line. He can still occupy a chunk of a frontline. He can still be forced into shooting at the advancing enemy, or advancing at the enemy. A large amount of Russian offensive in 2022, and Ukrainian defensive effort in 2024 is on the back of large amounts of refuseniks fillin
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You seem to forget that both Ukrainians and Russians are dealing with this problem. Russians mainly in offensive operations, and Ukrainians in defensive. So far, reasonably successfully, where refuseniks proved to be a useful human resources to have.
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You can join the US army with 16.
Not sure about conscription.
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By that logic, women shouldn't be able to vote.
No. Women should be equally subject to conscription. They are no longer minors. For some reason we still have sex-based discrimination in the US that unjustly shoulders adult men of any age with additional legal burdens.
Re: Voting age (Score:2)
Because rsilvergun doesn't have a young children's brain. His formative years are long past. As are those of most slashdot posters, I suspect.
Addiction is a separate problem which can affect all ages. It cannot be legislated away. At best, treatment can be offered. Social media rehab. I went off cold turkey on facebook and reddit. Slashdot is one of the few places I still post.
The Law We Have Doesn't Work... (Score:5, Interesting)
Umm does this make absolutely no sense to anyone besides me?
Laws tend to end up very broken when even 9 year olds won't follow them. They require, before they can actually be laws, the mandate of the people.
Re:The Law We Have Doesn't Work... (Score:5, Insightful)
We saw with Brazil they do have powers they can leverage against these companies (not so much in the USA, there are some abilities to "protect the children", but its limited due to first amendment).
Anyways, the company simply implements an "age verification" which we all know is just a BS thing, and it takes the companies out of the issues they, in fact, produce with these kids.
The whole point of age limitation is related to protecting the company, not the kids.
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Not even the real reason (Score:2)
The real reason is to ultimately remove student cell phones from schools and to do that they need to slowly raise the age for 'addictive' apps to 18.
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How is this supposed to be enforced?
And is there something special about the age of 15?
(where I come from you weren.t legally allowed to leave school, or drive a motor vehicle, until age 15. And I think there is something special about the age of 15 in the Hispanic culture...)
Re:The Law We Have Doesn't Work... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Law We Have Doesn't Work... (Score:5, Interesting)
The difference in "rebelliousness" between northern Europe vs the USA is that our "Become ungovernable" memes tend to show people or animals disobeying signs, whereas in the USA they show aggressive violent behaviour, often involving guns.
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It's also why we tend to get really screwed by islamic migrants. Highest trust societies we have are specifically calibrated to trust strangers to follow common rules. So people from some of the lowest trust societies see this as an excellent opportunity to abuse the naive suckers. Because that's what you do to strangers in low trust cultures.
And then everybody sees that they're being abused and trust erodes, until it's a low trust society among tribal lines.
This level of very high trust requires high degre
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It's also why we tend to get really screwed by islamic migrants.
Stopped reading right there, you xenophobic fuckwit.
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Why do all these Swedes form so many gangs that rape and murder in every Swedish city nowadays? How did that happen in a high trust society?
Remember, when far left degenerates scream words than end is "ic" and "ist" when they hear arguments, it's not because they have a comment on what you just said. It's because they are offended that you dared to notice reality.
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It's hilarious that my karma is permanently "excellent", in spite of the fact that I now have a couple of your types who just dump their five moderation points to moderate my latest posts (often nested very deep in a specific discussion) "-1 troll" with hilarious reliability.
Because that's all you have. No argument, only heckler's veto.
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Surely a few executions will set an example for the rest. Oh wait, this is Norway and not America.
Re: The Law We Have Doesn't Work... (Score:2)
... about the age of 15 ...
It's when girls recognize social scripts/dynamics and decide they're not going to play the do-nothing 10 year-old. It's also when, regardless of "think of the children" laws, we expect her to have adult needs.
Re:The Law We Have Doesn't Work... (Score:4, Insightful)
And is there something special about the age of 15?
Yes, it's around the time that children's executive functions are believed to be sufficiently well-developed so that they can more or less self-regulate, avoid impulsive behaviour/resist impulsive urges, & be better at planning, monitoring, & reflecting on their actions, & to be able to adapt readily to complex novel tasks & situations. However, humans don't typically reach full cognitive maturity until their late 20s to early 30s.
Re: The Law We Have Doesn't Work... (Score:2)
Cognitive development proceeds well into your 50s. It does slow significantly, but if we're looking for full cognitive development, we should generally be looking at people getting ready to retire.
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Re: The Law We Have Doesn't Work... (Score:2)
You said (and I quote):
"humans don't typically reach full cognitive maturity until their late 20s to early 30s"
Maybe you've reached cognitive decline and you've started to forget things you said.
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Tell me you haven't studied developmental psychology without telling me you haven't studied developmental psychology.
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You are mixing up reasoning based on knowledge with reasoning based on rational thinking.
A ten year old can be a perfect rational human.
He just usually does not have a computer science and physics education.
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You are mixing up reasoning based on knowledge with reasoning based on rational thinking. A ten year old can be a perfect rational human. He just usually does not have a computer science and physics education.
I'm not mixing up anything. The parts of the brain required for executive functions simply haven't finished growing yet.
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The parts of the brain required for executive functions simply haven't finished growing yet.
They have. No idea where you got your idea from.
There once was a myth: the brain does not recover from injuries. Some stupid German Professor said: "look, the skull has this size, and there is no way that new cells can grow in it, because the size of the scull is the limiting factor."
That was "medical knowledge" till roughly 1990, all over the world. And it is wrong. We know that now.
Same with your idea.
The brain is
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15 is the age of criminal responsibility in Norway. Not sure if it's related to this decision.
Re: The Parents We Have, Aren’t Parenting. (Score:2)
One culture's good parenting is another's child abuse.
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This is actually even worse. I'm reminded of this recent video:
https://x.com/yashar/status/18... [x.com]
And the comments are a good demonstration of how we project our views to see something completely different in exactly the same speech:
Some see spanking as sexual and this being signs of incestuous pedophilia. Some see the idea of man in the house setting rules at all as oppressive. Some see this as totalitarian government overreach. Some see this as normal behavior. Some see it as an insufficient behavioral inte
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When under 14, while strictly speaking they are breaking the law, they can not be hold accountable for it.
So you could try to make the parents accountable?
How would that work?
Spy on social media, find my account like "Enkiduu", figure I am 9 year old, figure my real name, figure who my parents are, sue my parents?
Good luck with that.
Smoking in the high school bathroom (Score:2)
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Nah. We just enact a law that makes obeying dumb laws cool.
Brillant!
Re: Smoking in the high school bathroom (Score:2)
Rebelliousness is not a universally esteemed trait. It is often held in high regard in America, but that didn't make its way to many parts of Europe, with England, parts of Iberia, and especially France being the notable exceptions.
Can't work (Score:2)
They aren't going to force minID at every login or even every so often, because they use social media themselves and can't be bothered.
With ID only at registration parents will just do it for the kids.
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In America, that might be the case. Not in Northern Europe, as indicated elsewhere in the thread.
Also note that Nordic countries already have strong central IAM mechanisms - every resident has a national ID, provisioned by the banks but linked to a central authority, so we do have mechanisms in place for ensuring that an adult at least has to be involved. While the scenario you indicated COULD happen, it’s far less likely here if social media choose to leverage those mechanisms.
How dare they! (Score:1)
Those well-known evil right wingers of, er, Norway, lol!
Reminds me a bit of the whole Sweden "nope, not gonna lock down for covid" thing.
I can't help asking, as I did then - so, is this {thing} still hideously evil when they do it?
Re: How dare they! (Score:3)
There's confusion from America's unusual use of "right" and "left" as political descriptors. COVID lockdowns are objectively right wing (statist, authoritarian). Letting people go about their lives is objectively liberal. But everyone in America is traditionally sort of right wing, even the "liberals". And the word "liberal" in America has almost nothing to do with how the word is used pretty much anywhere else.
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>objectively right wing (statist, authoritarian)
Communists and socialists are right wing since when?
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Little-c communists span the gamut from anarchists to Stalinists in terms of how libertarian they are. Same things for socialists. Socialism/communism != statism. They are distinct axis of belief, just like you can have highly libertarian anarcho-capitalists or highly statist fascists.
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Ah, you're one of the "rEaL cOmMuNiSm has never been tried, I saw actual real communism in my dreams!" types
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I'm not talking about states, I'm talking about the political tenancies of real actual people. Whether or not those tenancies are practical to form a state around is another matter.
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That is what I said above. You are talking about something that exists only in your imagination.
Whereas we were talking about something that actually exists in real life where people can observe it.
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That is what I said above. You are talking about something that exists only in your imagination.
Whereas we were talking about something that actually exists in real life where people can observe it.
You said "Communists and socialists are right wing since when?" I was just pointing out that while communist governments have historically been more on the authoritarian side, communist and socialist people run the gamut from extreme libertarian to extreme authoritarian and everything in between.
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Well, on /. It seems "liberal" is used as an insult.
No idea how something that literally means free or freedom can be used as an insult?
Re: How dare they! (Score:2)
I mean, so is "right-wing". There's lots of people talking over each other's heads.
This is a sad statement on modern parenting. (Score:2)
"It is also about giving parents the security to say no," said Kjersti Toppe, the minister for children and families. "We know that many people really want to say no, but don't feel they can."
Why? No, seriously. Why can't parents just say, "No?" Hell, "No," was the default response forty years ago to any inquiry, sometimes even before you finished the question.. And while I get that that may have traumatized some folks that are now parents, that doesn't mean you throw out the entire concept of what the word means. You can, with a softly spoken, 'No,' and a calm and rational explanation, get children to understand that sometimes that word is not just denial, but has a reasonable explanation. Kids
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did not RTFA, maybe norway will jail parents that hand their kids phones as a babysitter.
Proposal for Scandinavian Social Media (Score:2)
Instead of banning kids from stuff like Facebook, the Nordic (and Baltic?) States should craft their own one.
The kids will circumvent such regulations anyway.
Together you countries have enough resources and enough people to make it from taxes.
It could be add free, no algorithms, no silly content.
You can implement family relations, and if a kid gets a new friend/or even sends or receives a friend request, the parents get a notification, can approve it or cancel it.
Point is: school teachers want a medium to h