Kids under 13 aren’t allowed on any of those platforms already.
Young teens shouldn’t be in voice chats or text chats with adults they don’t know on the Internet. If they wanna play online with remote family or close friends then there are many alternatives for video or voice comms with people you directly have in your contacts, without having to use a social media platform like Discord that expose you to wider risk.
All of these platforms only have their minimum age set at 13 due to regulation by the COPPA act in the US, and I remember the resistance and naysayers back when that was being created. However it’s been a net good, as experts said it would be - and forced the massive tech companies to architect for child accounts and parental approval and implement stricter content filtering and segregation for young teens, or simply block any kids under 13 from making accounts if they decided their platform had too much adult content and would be hard to segregate - great.
Since then, many different studies and relevant experts have found corporate social media is very bad for most people, way worse than initially believed - and incredibly bad for kids. So, time to raise the age bar again. The law proposed is not proscriptive or draconian - it doesn’t mandate a particular technology to be used, it just says the providers must show they have “reasonable steps in place”, similar to COPPA before it.
Good.
Kids under 13 aren’t allowed on any of those platforms already.
Young teens shouldn’t be in voice chats or text chats with adults they don’t know on the Internet. If they wanna play online with remote family or close friends then there are many alternatives for video or voice comms with people you directly have in your contacts, without having to use a social media platform like Discord that expose you to wider risk.
All of these platforms only have their minimum age set at 13 due to regulation by the COPPA act in the US, and I remember the resistance and naysayers back when that was being created. However it’s been a net good, as experts said it would be - and forced the massive tech companies to architect for child accounts and parental approval and implement stricter content filtering and segregation for young teens, or simply block any kids under 13 from making accounts if they decided their platform had too much adult content and would be hard to segregate - great.
Since then, many different studies and relevant experts have found corporate social media is very bad for most people, way worse than initially believed - and incredibly bad for kids. So, time to raise the age bar again. The law proposed is not proscriptive or draconian - it doesn’t mandate a particular technology to be used, it just says the providers must show they have “reasonable steps in place”, similar to COPPA before it.