Explain in detail how the thing works, including how one part causes another part to move. You might quickly find that you do
not understand it as well as you thought you did. Psychologists call it the “illusion of explanatory depth”.
Unless people really think through how they would explain something, they will often overestimate their understanding of it.
I wish that politicians would run that exercise before floating policy ideas like banning social media platforms from accepting younger users.
The ban sounds like it could be a good idea. There is at least some evidence, albeit highly contested, about social media’s harms to youth mental health.
But how would a ban actually work? Explain it in detail. Are you still sure it is a good idea?
Australia wants to penalise social media companies if users younger than 16 can access those platforms.
Last week, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said he was open to following Australia in setting a minimum age for accessing social media. Opposition leader Chris Hipkins also said he was “open to a discussion” about it.
If Twitter, or Facebook, or WhatsApp, or TikTok, wanted to confirm that you were 16 or older, how could you prove it?
The simplest way would be real identity verification using a driver’s licence, passport, or other government-issued identity document that has your date of birth. You do not need a government-issued identity document to vote in New Zealand, but you would need one to use Twitter.
Many social media users currently operate under pseudonyms that protect their identity in case their employer, relatives, or government does not like the things that they say.
If social media companies were required to verify your age, they would have to maintain records proving that they had done so.
Those records would risk being hacked for identity theft. They could also be subject to subpoena or production orders, at the government’s request. Even if police are forbidden to request that information when the legislation is passed, a future government might wish to untie its own hands.
At least some supporters of New Zealand’s current governing coalition were sceptical about the Labour government’s anti-disinformation project. A future version of it could demand the identities of pseudonymous accounts – and social media companies that required to maintain those records could be required to produce them.
Let’s try it another way.
Rather than giving the platform your ID, you’d have to sign up with the government’s RealMe digital identity tool.
RealMe could be asked to supply a one-time code verifying that the person logged into RealMe is over the minimum age. The user could supply the code to the platform, who would then verify the code with RealMe.
RealMe would not know which social media user account was linked to the one-time code, and the platform would not know which real identity was linked to the verification code.
That version might finally force me to get a RealMe account, which I have successfully avoided thus far.
For another view: Kiwi kids deserve no harm, not harm reduction – Dr Samantha Marsh
But every person under the age limit could find a friend over the age limit to do the account verification for them – since users can have multiple accounts.
Avoiding that would require giving the platform a copy of your identity documents, and we are back to square one. Alternatively, it could require frequent re-verification challenges for users that would be rather burdensome.
You could view it as bringing the Know Your Customer regulations facing financial institutions over to social media platforms.
Social media platforms would probably have to restrict against Virtual Private Networks for accessing their services. A VPN user appearing to be in the United States might be an Australian fifteen-year-old.
Worse, governments might see the death of internet anonymity as a feature of the policy, rather than a problem with it.
Those governments should worry more about other governments.
There is persistent and reasonable concern that TikTok is too strongly linked to the Chinese government. A user’s identity can be guessed at reasonably well already through location data. But does it seem like a good idea to require every TikTok user to give TikTok a copy of their passport or driver’s licence?
A foreign government, a decade from now, could confront a Member of Parliament with the dodgier bits of their viewing history, along with the receipts linking it to their identification. Would good things come from that?
There is a simpler solution. One that does work in practice, and that I have used.
Each of us can use Google Family Link to control which apps can be used on our kids’ Android phones, and to set time limits on them.
Perhaps the government could encourage some public service announcements explaining, in detail, how to use them – for those who have not yet figured it out.
