Facebook keeps suggesting a former coworker’s daughter to me. I remember when she was born! Creepy AF.
Stop suggesting children as friends, social media firms told
Submitted 1 year ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67358369
Comments
DarkMessiah@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I honestly didn’t realise this sort of thing was happening, and am sort of disgusted now that I do know.
Facebook being like the Mission Impossible handler for child abusers. “Your next mission, should you choose to accept it,” type bullshit.
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
“this child will self-destruct…”
saltesc@lemmy.world 1 year ago
“I said no sugar before bed time!”
Fades@lemmy.world 1 year ago
These social media companies will pander to ANYONE.
Anti vax, or maybe just a simple Christian extremist pushing disinformation? You had a home at Facebook. Hate minorities and think Jews control and are also destroying the world? Twitter got you.
They don’t fucking care about anything except engagement. Although Twitter cares more about the disinformation than the engagement clearly.
terminhell@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
I don’t condone any of that. However, platforms such as those are basically a public square for everyone. And with that comes the ability for the fringe to speak too. We don’t have to listen, but they have the ‘right’ to speak. Of course, within the laws.
tsonfeir@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Accounts under 18 shouldn’t be able to befriend accounts over 18, and vice versa. Once you turn 18, you lose all your kiddy friends like some kind of Running Man
raptir@lemdro.id 1 year ago
I get what you’re saying but how do you implement that? When I was 17 I was dating a girl who had just turned 19. Facebook wasn’t a thing then but should I not have been able to be her MySpace friend?
HarkMahlberg@kbin.social 1 year ago
One idea is that you could follow Romeo-Juliet laws Programmatically, it's not difficult to add such a condition to some presumed friend-finding algorithm. Forgive any formatting problems below...
if user.age < 16:
do findFriendsBetweenAges(0, 18)
else if user.age >= 16 and user.age < 18:
do findFriendsBetweenAges(user.age - 2, user.age + 2)
else:
do findFriendsBetweenAges(18, 99)The problem isn't the implementation, it's the concept in the first place. If you're spinning up a new Lawful Good social media site, you can make it do whatever you want. The problem is how many different states have different laws about how minors can or cannot enter relationships with people of different ages. Then once you stop considering different states, now consider different countries. The internet is accessible to anyone, no matter their age, no matter their location. Writing a website that can handle every possible situation is not impossible, but may be prohibitively expensive.
tsonfeir@lemm.ee 1 year ago
You choose your age and you can’t update it. And then it literally won’t let you add them or talk to them. Easypeasy.
funkajunk@lemm.ee 1 year ago
atrielienz@lemmy.world 1 year ago
So if I was 17 I couldn’t be Facebook friends with my 19 year old cousin? Or my grandma? It would be helpful if social media sites would actually let a custodial parent with a validated user profile set up a Facebook or whatever account for their children etc. it’s a pipe dream because of laws in varying countries, and child predators. But it would be nice.
tsonfeir@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Yes. Correct. But you have a good idea, that “Kid” account can have it over 18-year-old friends managed exclusively by the parent account. The birthdate on that kid account cannot change, and when they turn 18. The account is automatically no longer managed by the parent account.
This solves for all of those situations. Kids can add kids at will, only the parent can add adults, when the kid becomes 18 they now control their account.
Sound good?
Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I’m sure they will immediately cease and desist.
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 1 year ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Social media platforms should fight online grooming by not suggesting children as “friends” by default, the communications watchdog says.
This first draft code of practice published by Ofcom in its role enforcing the Online Safety Act covers activity such as child sexual abuse material (CSAM), grooming and fraud.
The largest platforms are expected to change default settings so children aren’t added to suggested friends lists, something that can be exploited by groomers.
They should also ensure children’s location information cannot be revealed in their profile or posts and prevent them receiving messages from people not in their contacts list.
The method is already widely used by social media and search engines, according to Professor Alan Woodward of Surrey University.
Asked if Ofcom had the resources it needed, Dame Melanie admitted it was a “really big job” but added "we’re absolutely up for the task.
The original article contains 744 words, the summary contains 144 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
Some years back, I briefly dated someone who liked being on one of the chat-roulette type of apps. She got on via her laptop and my wifi and started chatting with a teen girl. I told her this was problematic for me, an adult male, happening on my internet. I told her she couldn’t use the service anymore at my place.
She couldn’t understand why I was paranoid about it. Separately, she also thought I was ranting about a conspiracy theory when I told her about the Snowden leaks, so I guess that’s no surprise. We lasted only a week.
Ghyste@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Stop allowing children on social media.
0110010001100010@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The SERIOUS problem with this is how does one validate if a person signing up for social media is a child or not? If you start trying to require some kind of state or federal ID the privacy implications are massive. That’s trying to solve a people problem with technology which never ends well.
Maybe parents should be better keeping tabs on their kids and not giving them tablets and phones younger and younger…but who am I.
HarkMahlberg@kbin.social 1 year ago
In high school I became the president of a community outreach club. Prior to that point, I had no social media accounts. At least, nothing we could call social media today. My tech-savvy father taught me the principle of "never tell anyone on the internet who you are, or where you live, or how old you are." I played games with online people who were likely much older than me, but they all seemingly followed that rule too, even if voice chat gave away my age. Nobody ever asked each other "A/S/L" etc.
The club supervisor however, insisted that I create a Facebook account. "Students don't communicate over email anymore," he said, "if you want the club members to know when an event is happening and verifying how many members will be attending, you need to set up a Facebook page for the club, and you need to administer that page." And it was true... to a point. I was also part of a robotics team that did mostly communicate via email, but we also had a Facebook page so team scouters could form alliances with other teams from neighboring schools. My supervisor and my parents both knew my account (not the credentials) so the account wasn't an unknown quantity.
In retrospect, neither of those approaches to social media were wrong per se, they were simply solutions to different problems: the problem of being a kid making friends on an internet full of adults, and of needing to reach out to real people and communicating and coordinating and cooperating with them.
To this day, I refuse to "connect" different accounts together so that no streams get crossed. But amoral corporations like Google and Facebook do not care about your privacy or your legal status - they want to know everything about you in order to market and advertise to you more effectively. It's an arms race of tying humans to accounts: Age, Sex, Location, What Sites You Visit, What Programs You Run, What You Buy, Where You Read News, all of that is ammunition in the race. I don't envy parents nowadays, I can't imagine the scale of the problem where every kid has a smartphone and a dozen different accounts (or some all encompassing Google/FB single-signon) before they even reach high school.
jeffw@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You’re 0110010001100010@lemmy.world
Glad I could help
jasondj@ttrpg.network 1 year ago
Ngl I would love to have at least one social media experience where everyone has to use their real, validated identity.
Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social 1 year ago
Kids under 13 aren't allowed on websites, period, thanks to COPPA passed in 2000. So all those elementary schoolkids signing up for Zoom better have had their parents should fax a copy of their driver's license before attending class.
FishFace@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I mean when I was a kid we were just told not to trust people online - or strangers in the real world - and as a result I made tons of friends on IRC and through video games. I’m glad of that because I didn’t have that many friends my own age.