When she was in fifth grade, Scarlett Goddard Strahan started to worry about getting wrinkles.
By the time she turned 10, Scarlett and her friends were spending hours on TikTok and YouTube watching influencers tout products for achieving today’s beauty aesthetic: a dewy, “glowy,” flawless complexion. Scarlett developed an elaborate skin care routine with facial cleansers, mists, hydrating masks and moisturizers.
One night, Scarlett’s skin began to burn intensely and erupted in blisters. Heavy use of adult-strength products had wreaked havoc on her skin. Months later, patches of tiny bumps remain on Scarlett’s face, and her cheeks turn red in the sun.
“I didn’t want to get wrinkles and look old,” says Scarlett, who recently turned 11. “If I had known my life would be so affected by this, I never would have put these things on my face.”
The skin care obsession offers a window into the role social media plays in the lives of today’s youth and how it shapes the ideals and insecurities of girls in particular. Girls are experiencing high levels of sadness and hopelessness. Whether social media exposure causes or simply correlates with mental health problems is up for debate. But to older teens and young adults, it’s clear: Extended time on social media has been bad for them, period.
This is the danger of allowing unregulated media, entertainment and advertisement towards children. She didn’t come up with these ideas on her own. She was actively pursued and encouraged to do this by YouTube children entertainers and advertisers. They did it for profit and will do it again, then blame parents and governments for letting them do it.
Never before have businesses had this much direct access to children. They see it as a great market. They are easy to manipulate, uniformed and highly sensitive. These are the reasons we limited who, when and what could be advertised to them in the past. It was much easier with TV.
Which is also a problem because we can’t have adult spaces either. Every time someone tries, they get shut down or all attempts to keep kids out are fruitless. At this point I think everyone would benefit from robust ways of enforcing age limits online.
Personally I think this needs to be at the device level. You can register a device as: child, teen, adult. Every website can query the device age group. The device age is set by a process that verifies ID through a trusted party. Only that party knows your identity, everyone else simply knows your age group. Child and teen devices would be tied to an adult account and only they could override or update the classification (or a valid adult ID works too).
Then it would put liability on the parent for allowing their kids access to adult content. Websites not checking for this info that abuse it can be shut down.
No, the people targeting children in the adverts and entertainment should face criminal prosecution.
They know they’re targeting children, they want to target children and they already use methods to attempt to get over what protections are in place.
Google have expressly told advertiser, that they can target children is they go after unknown users.
The only people watching most of the content are children and the mentally handicapped. Most adults would find it too annoying. The people creating it know this. Prime drinks are an example of this, the groups associated with it regularly discuss topic and use humour that inappropriate for children and often plays with sexist, racist and intolerant themes. They wanted to sell alcoholic drinks with their branding, but realised there was no market for it because most of their viewers are under 12.
Nope.
I don’t want anyone verifying my identity for any reason other than government or financial business, where there is a legitimate reason to do so. There is absolutely no reason some random-ass company needs access of any sort to my demographic information, when I am a legal adult doing things well within my rights to do. Especially if this thing was automated to feed that data without my consent or knowledge, as you are suggesting. Absolutely fuck all of that. Plus that would mean there’s a central query database of all the sites you’ve ever accessed for any reason, and that’s fucking scary, even if you aren’t doing anything wrong.
This wouldn’t work any better than any other privacy-leaky method anyway. People hand down phones to their kids a lot without factory resetting them. And stolen IDs/identity theft are a thing. And you don’t think that central identity bank would be prime target #1 for hackers? If the last decade has taught us anything, it’s that companies WILL NOT protect your data properly, and they WILL NOT suffer consequences of any sort when (not if, when) there is a breach.
At the end of the day, ensuring someone else’s kids don’t have access to something said parent doesn’t want them to access…? Not my problem, and absolutely not a good enough reason to violate my privacy that thoroughly.
You act like these companies don’t already have your identity anyway. Google, Apple, Microsoft. They know exactly who you are. The idea is that those mega corps who already handle identity information are in a better position to be a 3rd party witness to other, less trustworthy websites to say ‘yes this person is an adult’. So you don’t have to give that random website any personal info.
I’d have suggested the government fulfill this role, but people would freak out way more about that.
It’s absolutely affecting you though. Basically every where online is now ‘family friendly’ because it’s impossible to create adult spaces online. You can’t keep the kids out no matter what you do. And that’s bringing everything down to the lowest common denominator and trying to cram the entire gamut of human interactions down into a single, heavily censored experience. It’s why censorship has gotten completely out of control. Something needs to change or we’ll app be stuck with PG spaces for 10 year olds forever.
Sure, they might know my identity. But very importantly, they aren’t every single random company out there whose website I happen to briefly access for whatever reason. They don’t need to know anything about me, and they shouldn’t.
I can’t do anything about big tech companies knowing things about me, tho I do try to limit it when I can, but not literally everyone needs to know who I am just because I want to access their content. That’s absolutely absurd.
It definitely isn’t impacting me in the slightest. Idk what you do with your time, but I don’t really want my platforms to be unmoderated cesspools, and the places I do choose to exist or use are in line with what I want, so… meh. It’s literally not an issue I have.
Breweries and bars in my area are often kid-friendly with toys and everything, and I just don’t go to those places. I do the same with online spaces. They aren’t meant for me if they aren’t what I’m looking for, so I don’t go. There’s plenty of places that are for me, though, and I go to those places on and offline.
No. Let’s not start requiring people to register computers like they are guns or something.