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“(Social media) is the invasion of the idiots.”
— author and philosopher Emberto Eco
While Ottawa, Manitoba and many other jurisdictions introduce laws to ban children from using social media, the social media companies are demonstrating they have lost control over who uses their platforms and what they are posting.
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The Macro
Another week, another raft of governments introducing vague laws to ban children from using social media.
In Canada, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew was on the cutting edge of the global campaign to ban children from social media when he promised to introduce legislation to ban children from using social media, with a focus on eliminating access to platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube from public classrooms.
It did not take long for Ottawa to respond. Just last week, the federal Liberal government tabled C-34, Safe Social Media Act. Like Kinew’s yet-to-be-tabled bill, the federal legislation seeks to protect children from child sexual exploitation, cyberbullying and other threats that may promote self-harm and mental health issues.
Similar efforts are underway all over the world. Australia is acknowledged as the forerunner of this kind of public policy but in the past year or so, Indonesia, Brazil and — just this week — the United Kingdom joined the list of nations seeking to keep children away from toxic social-media content.
Before applauding political leaders for their apparent courage on this issue, there are some important caveats that must be considered.
First, nobody knows exactly how a ban will work. Most legislation includes demands social-media companies do more to verify the age of their users. However, in Australia it has been shown that age-verification mechanisms are incredibly imprecise, allowing children to employ multiple workarounds. As such, the legislation that has been tabled does not describe a specific method for accomplishing its goal.
More importantly, however, is an inconvenient truth that has not been discussed in any great detail in the rush to introduce child-protecting legislation: we only need to take measures to ban children from using social media because social media has lost control over its content.
It is easy to focus our concerns on the effects toxic social-media content has on children, but many adults are just as vulnerable. Anyone who has a professional identity that takes them into the public arena — like journalists, for example — can attest to the abusive, offensive and outright vulgar nature of the broader social-media community. If you’re a woman living a professional life in a reasonably public context, the bullying and abuse is a million times worse.
All of which begs the question: how in the world can we expect social-media companies to ensure only age-appropriate people use their platforms when they cannot stop abusive and toxic content in the first place?
To wit, a recent example of the pathetic efforts of social-media companies to control content.
Meta, the parent company that operates a broad array of social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads — recently decided to purge accounts belonging to a Queer event-planning company that had posted advertisements for “Bi Bi Baby,” a dance party for bisexual people and supporters. When the event planners inquired with Meta about why all of their accounts had been expunged, Meta said the content promoted “human exploitation” and was considered in violation of the company’s content standards.
Meta has not said much about this or other similar incidents where seemingly innocuous LGBTTQ+ content has been flagged while vile anti-LGBTTQ+ content is allowed to proliferate online. Journalistic investigations have connected stories from around the world and found Meta’s standard-checking algorithms regularly identify and disable accounts that focus on sexual health, sex worker advocacy and LGBTTQ+ issues.
The fact that these kinds of accounts would be flagged, while genuinely toxic content thrives online, is frustrating for a lot of people who use social media. Anyone who uses Instagram, for example, knows that it contains huge troves of homophobic and racist content. And that it serves as a gateway platform for adult entertainers to connect users to OnlyFans and other platforms offering pornography of all shapes, sizes and tastes.
Can Meta say with any certainty the women offering adult images and videos are not being exploited to do so? Or, what about the deep fakers who are stealing the faces of real women to create violent and sexually explicit images? Ottawa police recently arrested and charged two men who created dozens of disturbing images using photos of real women taken from social-media accounts.
Are social media companies that punish the innocent but do little to police the abusers, haters and exploiters in any position to create tools to protect children?
Obviously, they can’t protect children. Which means the proposed laws that seek to force platforms to protect children have great intentions but doomed prospects.
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