I think these social networks know with a high degree of accuracy how old a given user is. They have a ton of data points about each user, and not all of them collected directly from the user interacting specifically with the site/app.

In high school I became the president of a community outreach club. Prior to that point, I had no social media accounts. At least, nothing we could call social media today. My tech-savvy father taught me the principle of “never tell anyone on the internet who you are, or where you live, or how old you are.” I played games with online people who were likely much older than me, but they all seemingly followed that rule too, even if voice chat gave away my age. Nobody ever asked each other “A/S/L” etc.

The club supervisor however, insisted that I create a Facebook account. “Students don’t communicate over email anymore,” he said, “if you want the club members to know when an event is happening and verifying how many members will be attending, you need to set up a Facebook page for the club, and you need to administer that page.” And it was true… to a point. I was also part of a robotics team that did mostly communicate via email, but we also had a Facebook page so team scouters could form alliances with other teams from neighboring schools. My supervisor and my parents both knew my account (not the credentials) so the account wasn’t an unknown quantity.

In retrospect, neither of those approaches to social media were wrong per se, they were simply solutions to different problems: the problem of being a kid making friends on an internet full of adults, and of needing to reach out to real people and communicating and coordinating and cooperating with them.

To this day, I refuse to “connect” different accounts together so that no streams get crossed. But amoral corporations like Google and Facebook do not care about your privacy or your legal status - they want to know everything about you in order to market and advertise to you more effectively. It’s an arms race of tying humans to accounts, and driving engagement: Age, Sex, Location, What Sites You Visit, What Programs You Run, What You Buy, Where You Read News, all of that is ammunition in the race. I don’t envy parents nowadays, I can’t imagine the scale of the problem where every kid has a smartphone and a dozen different accounts (or some all encompassing Google/FB single-signon) before they even reach high school.

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Glad I could help

Ngl I would love to have at least one social media experience where everyone has to use their real, validated identity.

Probably not financially viable, because ironically, privacy would be chiefly important. It’d have to be a paid service, not use ads or sell data at all, posts and profile visible to nobody by default, connections made by direct in-person/text/email invitation or by mutual introduction…very different from most modern social media. It’d also have to have pretty insane security, and mandatory MFA for every user at least on every session, if not on every page transaction.

Could be technologically viable if we had digital government ID’s like drivers licenses printed on smartcards. But we can’t even get the states to agree on implementing common requirements for official state IDs.

I’d really love to see how it’d play out, in the real world, if it could reach enough of a mass of users to be financially self-sustaining, and what the environment would be like at that point. For the sake of science.

“I said no sugar before bed time!”

I don’t condone any of that. However, platforms such as those are basically a public square for everyone. And with that comes the ability for the fringe to speak too. We don’t have to listen, but they have the ‘right’ to speak. Of course, within the laws.

One idea is that you could follow Romeo-Juliet laws. Programmatically, it’s not difficult to add such a condition to some presumed friend-finding algorithm. Forgive any formatting problems below…

if user.age < 16:
do findFriendsBetweenAges(0, 18)
else if user.age >= 16 and user.age < 18:
do findFriendsBetweenAges(user.age - 2, user.age + 2)
else:
do findFriendsBetweenAges(18, 99)

The problem isn’t the implementation, it’s the concept in the first place. If you’re spinning up a new Lawful Good social media site, you can make it do whatever you want. The problem is how many different states have different laws about how minors can or cannot enter relationships with people of different ages. Then once you stop considering different states, now consider different countries. The internet is accessible to anyone, no matter their age, no matter their location. Writing a website that can handle every possible situation is not impossible, but may be prohibitively expensive.

And of course, I didn’t even talk about people lying about their age on their accounts! How does a website even verify that? To what degree are they liable? You want to upload an ID to make an account?

You choose your age and you can’t update it. And then it literally won’t let you add them or talk to them. Easypeasy.

Yes. Correct. But you have a good idea, that “Kid” account can have their over 18-year-old friends managed exclusively by the parent account. The birthdate on that kid account cannot change, and when they turn 18. The account is automatically no longer managed by the parent account.

This solves for all of those situations. Kids can add kids at will, only the parent can add adults, when the kid becomes 18 they now control their account.

Sound good?