I believe we could solve a lot of these problems by making it illegal to advertise to minors.

I'm reminded of the settlement with Facebook where it was illegally allowing racial targeting in ads for housing, which is illegal [1]. If platforms were suddenly liable for allowing or failing to stop the targeting of minors, they'd suddenly have a lot of incentive to figure this out.

The beauty of this is that they already do it. Your profile with FB, Google, etc has a lot of implied demographic information based on your activity because they want to sell audiences with certain demographics.

As an aside, whenever I see "think tank" my first question is "who is funding this?" and I learned something I didn't know previously. In the UK, these bodies often aren't legal charities. Instead they are non-profit companies limited by guarantee [2]. One consequence of that is that they don't have to reveal their funding like a 501(c)(3) would (and, yes, US think tanks are generally 501(c)(3)s).

I didn't see any obvious red flags in the trustees for Foundation for Information Policy Research for what it's worth and it's an almost 30 year old organization.

[1]: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...

[2]: https://www.funded.team/advice/charity-vs-cic-vs-clg

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jraby3 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is by far the best solution and should be the top comment.

Why is the onus on the parents to chase after their kids - screen time is awful and kids get around it.

The social media and porn sites should be penalized and the onus should be on them. Just like when we were kids, the channel couldn't show certain content like nudity and cursing or they'd be fined.

How is it suddenly the obligation of the parent to supervise a million options with horrible interfaces.

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trumpdong 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How would you know if someone was a minor? Facebook knows even if you don't tell them, but I don't.

Would it be combined with the California-style OS age header?

	▲	ndriscoll 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You assume they are a minor unless you have proof otherwise, e.g. billing information. This whole mess comes from advertising economics, which don't need to exist. Nearly no one is buying things online anonymously with crypto currencies. ID verification is simply a non issue in a world where you actually pay for things. So start making the advertising model illegal (which it should be for its price dumping market distorting effects anyway).
	▲	jmyeet 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Google, as one example, uses a bunch of information including profile information and behavioural data in sophiticated ML to imply demographics [1]. This is what I mean when I said they already do it. The suggestion I'm talking about doesn't "solve" the adult content issue. It's more targeted at social media, which I think is the bigger problem. If it's illegal to show minors ads and advertisers can't target minors then you've just removed the economic incentives. Youtube tends to be included in age verification legislation. Personally, I would be happy if you simply limited advertising and (IMHO) you dind't show commetns. Roblox I think is on the right path here, at least in theory. Roblox segments users such that you can only interact with people one segment above or below you. The issue with social media (again, IMHO) is in big part that minors can interact with adults and vice versa. Really you want more of a sandbox so people can't prety on children. [1]: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2580383?hl=en

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EmbarrassedHelp 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Unless you make age verification and age assurance illegal with massive fines that are larger than your proposed fines, that is a terrible idea.