00:00New York just finalized a law that would help protect minors online, but parents should be
00:05aware that this is not a fix-all. The Safer Kids Act is meant to go into effect in January
00:10and it
00:10would effectively make it illegal for large social media platforms to give kids algorithmic feeds and
00:17also to send them notifications between midnight and 6 a.m. However, this law may be pretty vulnerable
00:23considering that other states like Arkansas and California have attempted to do very similar
00:27things and ultimately ended up blocked by courts. We also know from looking at the world stage that
00:32other countries who have attempted to curb kids online activity have often seen that their
00:37legislation is not as effective as planned. A survey from Australia found that after they tried to ban
00:42all minors from social media, a full quarter of parents reported that their kids were actually
00:47on unregulated sites, meaning that they were on the wild west of the internet and places where
00:52potentially even more dangerous content could be. Also, when Britain implemented age-gating on
00:57certain sites, they found that there was a 1,200% increase in VPN use in the country and that
01:0240%
01:03of kids aged 11 to 17 had gotten around certain verification walls. So the moral of the story
01:09here is that parents just simply cannot, as much as they might want to, rely on lawmakers to solve this
01:15problem. As challenging as it is to raise a kid in the digital age, there have to be more
01:20grassroots community-oriented solutions because ultimately most of the laws are not as effective
01:26as many of their proponents might wish.
Comments