Social Media Ban Repository – information labs

Some quotes from various experts on age verification collected by Information Labs as part of their "Is a Ban a Plan?" site.

Problems

A representative sample:

• "there is no such thing as a social media ban for under 16s. There are only digital ID checks for every single one of us." - Silkie Carlo British Civil Rights Advocate, Big Brother Watch
• "to know who is a child, platforms must subject all internet users to age assurance ... [which] rely on personal data... may infringe privacy, wrongly exclude certain groups or lead providers to withdraw services from children" - Sonia Livingstone & Kim R. Sylwander, Digital Futures for Children centre, LSE
• "every available method carries measurable error, and requires either government identity documents or biometric data from every user. Children's data is therefore processed more intensively, not less, which inverts the protective logic" - Travis Gilly & Rene Mattheus, The Real Safety AI Foundation, USA
• "prohibition without education rarely eliminates behaviour; it simply displaces it. Young people will find workarounds or move to less visible platforms, often with fewer safeguards. And those who rely on digital spaces for connection ... may find themselves more cut off, not less." - Kim Samuel, Founder & Chief Architect of the Belonging Forum
• "[A ban] may inadvertently push children to less regulated or riskier parts of the internet." - Nicola Killean, Children and Young People's Commissioner Scotland
• "bans also create free speech nightmares not only for youth... also by creating an authoritarian government speech control that will affect adults" - Christopher Ferguson Professor of Psychology, Stetson University

Alternatives

A representative sample:

• "Tools that operate on the intensive margin—capping time on platforms... target the heavy use most plausibly responsible for the harms ... while preserving the social value of moderate use... both lower the welfare cost of the policy and reduce the private incentive to circumvent it, consistent with teens' own preference for self-limiting applications" - Bursztyn, Duckworth, Jiménez-Durán, Leonard, Milojević, Roth & Sunstein, Universities of Chicago, Pennsylvania, Bocconi, Cologne, Harvard Law School
• Bans "are mostly burdens on users, rather than platforms... The engine of online harms, ie algorithmic prioritisation, remains essentially untouched. The attention-seeking goal ... is not changed" - Jim Killock, Executive Director, Open Rights Group
• "the core issue is not the age of users. The core issue is that many online platforms are designed around maximising engagement... at the expense of users' wellbeing, especially children." - Jessica Galissaire, Senior Policy Researcher, interface (Strengthening the Digital Public Sphere and Platform Regulation programme)
• children and young people get their news online and through apps, so you cut that off... I don't think this justifies a ban. To me, what this justifies is more responsible behavior by social platforms to cut down on their most harmful features." - Victoria Nash, Associate Professor and Senior Policy Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute