
A Third of TikTok’s U.S. Users May Be 14 or Under, Raising Safety Questions - fortran77
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/technology/tiktok-underage-users-ftc.html
======
37r7rudjduj
>Yet the concerns are that some under-13 users may lie to get around the age
restrictions, and that the platform is not obtaining the required consent from
those users’ guardians. <

I'm not really sure I see how this is a uniquely TikTok problem or why it's
really news anymore from the angle the author is approaching the problem. I
get it, I'm a millennial, we grew up with tv and parents telling us the
internet is full of molesters (and there's a lot of those, don't get me
wrong). But the social landscape children are /already/ operating in is so
saturated with digital media that the idea the genie can be put away or wholly
regulated at this point seems rediculous.

I've got a 14 year old half-brother who I try to chat with often since I know
he wishes we were closer. From time to time he shares the sorts of things him
and his friends do online with me and it's so far beyond what's in this story
that it's hard to view the article's concerns as anything but quaint. By 11
tons of children are already on discord, snap, insta, tiktok, and whatever
novelty app is trending at their school, many even start sooner. This is
unretricted usage because, just like my generation when we were kids, Zoomers
know that the golden rule of the internet is "Of course I'm 18" and when
that's not enough most can come up with a scheme to spoof parental permission
anyway.

I get that we're talking about age ranges where children are at wildly
different points in their social development and that some do benefit from
simply being told "no stay out", but if the goal is actually to provide useful
protections for the children on these platforms then we need systems that
provide escape hatches for people who get in too deep and not just walls to
keep them out. What's more, strong enough walls mostly just encourages
migration to new apps where monitoring is harder because no one but the kids
is aware the scene has moved. I'm all for responsible app design but we can't
attack this in the same way past generations have tried to, we already know a
nontrivial amount of children will outmaneuver us and so we should incorporate
that into the plan.

