If you got to write legislation to "protect young people online" and it will be passed and enacted in good faith what, if anything, would you propose?

@futurebird do i have to keep the united states or does my legislation get to achieve the compassionate society it prevents

If you got to write legislation to "protect young people online" and it will be passed and enacted in good faith what, if anything, would you propose?

If you got to write legislation to "protect young people online" and it will be passed and enacted in good faith what, if anything, would you propose?

Here are mine:
1. Funding to develop and deploy CS curriculum for K-12, learn about passwords, online safety etc.
2. A program to help schools set up their own social media with student-run moderation. (Student councils set the rules)
3. Funding to monitor, track down and investigate people who target young people online.
4. Update child labor laws to better cover "family channels"
5. Investigate the issue of online "influencers" and grooming. I don't know the best way to address this one.

@futurebird one of the few things KY got right is formally banning phones in schools. Doesn’t change their online behavior *outside* of schools, but it does force them to have a period of no screen time and to have to cope with that.

Alternative pitch that actually addresses online content: begin formally controlling addictive design in social media and gaming. Any other addictive thing (gambling, substances) is legally controlled, but not digital concepts. Seems like a temporary loophole.

@guitargabe

"One of the few things KY got right is formally banning phones in schools."

Honestly, as a teacher, I feel this is a sledgehammer solution. Basically it's more work to teach young people how to have a phone on their person and use it in a polite and socially acceptable way. My students all have phones and they keep them in their bag. We have rules and enforce them. But if my classes were larger I could see how this would be a problem.

But the real problem is that class size IMO.

@guitargabe

"One of the few things KY got right is formally banning phones in schools."

Honestly, as a teacher, I feel this is a sledgehammer solution. Basically it's more work to teach young people how to have a phone on their person and use it in a polite and socially acceptable way. My students all have phones and they keep them in their bag. We have rules and enforce them. But if my classes were larger I could see how this would be a problem.

But the real problem is that class size IMO.

@guitargabe

Also, I just think it's a safety issue. If a student needs to use a phone during the day because of an emergency it should be easy.

Having worked in a school with a "no phones" policy I felt that the whole system of checking phones in and out was almost worse that keeping up with the rules we have at my current school where they may have phones, but if they get 3 strikes we talk to their parents about if they are ready to have a phone at school.

@futurebird I mean, I 100% agree with this, but I don’t think KY is going to rapidly change their education funding any time soon, and class sizes here are nuts (my wife teaches, her sister teaches, I’m occasionally in classrooms for music ed stuff). Until now, teachers have had to, as individuals, enforce phone policies that were not backed by state or district policies. Now there is a clear ban, which takes that losing fight away from the overworked teachers.

Here are mine:
1. Funding to develop and deploy CS curriculum for K-12, learn about passwords, online safety etc.
2. A program to help schools set up their own social media with student-run moderation. (Student councils set the rules)
3. Funding to monitor, track down and investigate people who target young people online.
4. Update child labor laws to better cover "family channels"
5. Investigate the issue of online "influencers" and grooming. I don't know the best way to address this one.

@futurebird I don’t buy the safety thing, though. That’s what the office phone has always been for, every individual kid doesn’t need to keep their finger on the pulse of the world

Here are mine:
1. Funding to develop and deploy CS curriculum for K-12, learn about passwords, online safety etc.
2. A program to help schools set up their own social media with student-run moderation. (Student councils set the rules)
3. Funding to monitor, track down and investigate people who target young people online.
4. Update child labor laws to better cover "family channels"
5. Investigate the issue of online "influencers" and grooming. I don't know the best way to address this one.

@futurebird

Sounds sensible.

My first suggestion was some unified Infrastructure so sites can apply for a child-safe certificate. Matching filter-plugins for common browsers and search engines.

But this aleady seems to exist (KinderServer, Jusprog).

A wider, more international whitelist might still make sense.

@futurebird For point 2, I remember that my high school actually tried that at one point, it was basically a "private facebook instance" (this being back when facebook wasn't nearly as visibly awful as it is today). As pretty much everyone but the administration could foresee, nobody used it outside of the classes that occasionally did assignments through it...

@becomethewaifu @futurebird Yeah, I think the idea of social media that's obviously monitored by a school authority and connected to your school identity is pretty much a non-starter.

Bad in the same way I kept yelling at people during the grat Mastodon Migration that NO you you should not be telling employees (esp journalists!) to get their employers to setup instances and use those.

@futurebird one of the few things KY got right is formally banning phones in schools. Doesn’t change their online behavior *outside* of schools, but it does force them to have a period of no screen time and to have to cope with that.

Alternative pitch that actually addresses online content: begin formally controlling addictive design in social media and gaming. Any other addictive thing (gambling, substances) is legally controlled, but not digital concepts. Seems like a temporary loophole.

@futurebird Provide the tools to allow users or their parents to control access for particular devices. We have had the technology to remotely control access to devices for years, every company that provides devices has some security on them to monitor and control usage. If the government ensured that everyone had access to this technology in an easy to use form then it seems that would solve the problem.

I am not sure exactly what this would look like. My preferred solution would be a fork of a free OS like grapheneOS with a government curated allow list of sites, but pushing this problem to the network operators could be an easier solution, and allow the bill payer to choose the access levels of individual devices at the point of purchase.

@guitargabe @futurebird Um, no, that is absolutely wrong, abusive, and anti-child-safety.