Denmark's government has announced a plan to ban social media access for anyone under 15. The Ministry of Digitalization has led the move, allowing some parents to consent for children as young as 13 after assessment.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/52642833

Denmark’s government has announced a plan to ban social media access for anyone under 15. The Ministry of Digitalization has led the move, allowing some parents to consent for children as young as 13 after assessment.

Archived version: https://archive.is/20251107204816/https://apnews.com/article/denmark-social-media-ban-children-7862d2a8cc590b4969c8931a01adc7f4

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  • anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    It wouldn’t be such a bad idea if they were able to remain mindful of the fact that there is no way to tell how old somebody is over the Internet.

    yet.

    I imagine they will force the large social media sites to require “MitID” (Danish eID) if the visitor IP resolves to Denmark. Meaning only kids who learn how to use a VPN gets to use social media.

    edit: Seems they mention the eID in the article:

    Officials in Denmark didn’t say how such a ban would be enforced in a world where millions of children have easy access to screens. But Stage noted that Denmark has a national electronic ID system — nearly all Danish citizens over age 13 have such an ID — and plans to set up an age-verification app. Several other EU countries are testing such apps.
    “We cannot force the tech giants to use our app, but what we can do is force the tech giants to make proper age verification, and if they don’t, we will be able to enforce through the EU commission and make sure that they will be fined up to 6% of their global income.”

    • General_Effort@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      if the visitor IP resolves to Denmark

      That’s where the trouble starts. IPs don’t resolve to any jurisdiction.

      There are services that will guess your location based on the IP. That works fairly well in Europe because people have done the detective work to figure out where in the world the servers using certain IPs are physically located. Kinda funny.

    • kbal@fedia.io
      8·
      1 day ago

      There is no way to tell how old people are across the Internet. There are, on the other hand, lots of unworkable, unacceptable, anti-democratic totalitarian horror stories about how they want to change that. So long as any semblance of democracy remains it will not work in the long run.

      • anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        6·
        1 day ago

        I might be a pessimist but it honestly feels like the question isn’t if we’re gonna end up in that totalitarian horror story but rather how quickly it will come to pass.