I have absolutely no idea how this would even work, unless you needed a bank account to access social media! 🤷
But, assuming this is agreed and they manage to pull it off, how would it impact your approach to content creation? Do you have a clearly defined target audience and make content geared towards them, or are you pulling a Field of Dreams, where you build it and they will come?
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Not sure how this could work, how do you confirm the age of users? And what would stop the kids from just simply using their parent's devices / accounts? And the people who will be least happy about this will be parents I think. So many of them leave their children unsupervised with phones and tablets because it's easy this way to keep the kids entertained. Are they going to bother with setting up necessary links for the kids' accounts to confirm their age?
In an ideal world it would be more about parents spending more time with their kids, teaching them and keeping in check what they watch and do like they (hopefully) used to with us? At least I couldn't just switch on the telly and watch whatever I wanted... But that world is long gone.
It will be hard for creators who might be streaming a variety of games, from horror or shooters to cozy indie games which might be perfectly suitable for youngsters as well while the previous categories not.
As a father of 7, I can assure you that social media FULLY damages people under 16, the bullying, harassment, photos, and videos, have all happened to my kids (except the baby ofc). Social media is poison to underage kids. I will explain why.
My work is Senior It Engineer, I run a team of 12. Our job most of the time is basic company assets and integration/upkeep, but we also have the unpleasant job of dealing with irate parents and workers whose kids have done upsetting things online.
The sheer amount of people over 25 i.e. parents in this area, that have ZERO clue how to use technology or activate coded parental controls is staggering. I would say 90% of parents in my county have no idea what their kids are doing online because they don't understand how to stop them.
To this end kids are also obsessed with being "ONLINE FAMOUS" and will do anything for their views, not because they are bad kids, but because they don't understand the damage, what their antics are doing, can cause, this is down to the parents lack of understanding in technology.
Now this aside, to make my point. Social media for me is just a tool to post videos, I talk to my kids on WhatsApp but, this level of a ban would not affect me at all because I rely on YouTube 99% of the time anyway, and with EO content, because of it's Teen rating, I mark it as "not safe for kids". Twitch/YouTube are video/streaming platforms and for me not "social media" - Even TikTok I wouldn't classify as "social media" - That's Facebook/Twitter etc.
Hope this wasn't too long but as a parent, the dangers of social media for children are all too real. (Hopefully i don't come across angry here lol)
As an IT person myself I'm also shocked how much people have no idea how to use the technology they need for their day-to-day jobs. And that's people working in front of computers, not those who do manual labour or similar. Computers got a huge part in our lives now but I feel like basic education about how to use them and the internet safely and responsibly somehow got missed.
In Hungary when I was in high school they introduced a "computer user's license" and apparently you were meant to have this if you wanted to get any job with computer work involved (it was basic Office, Windows and internet browsing knowledge, nothing fancy.) Ofc by the time I graduated this piece of paper was good for only one thing.... no one actually asked for it for a job.
As a tour guide I saw many parents going around and visitor attractions, having the kids with a tablet playing whatever they clicked on Youtube to keep them entertained because apparently a 900 years old castle is boring... It made me so upset. This is why I mentioned in my reply above that parents really need to keep a watch at what their kids are doing online.... but like you said if they have no idea themselves about modern technology... then we have trouble.
20 years ago you got bullied in school if your parents didn't have a car or you were wearing second-hand clothes (we didn't have school uniform) I can only imagine what's going on in schools these days. Not having the newest expensive phone is probably the smallest thing...
This honestly wouldn't bother me, and I feel may make social media less toxic as some of the worst offenders of leaving horrible comments online are kids, when I focused on fortnite content a few years ago it was annoying dealing with them, since moving to a new niche its far less toxic and way easier to moderate, its kind of like how kids are at school I guess they can be horrible and don't realise yet that their words can have an impact on the people they are saying them to as they have yet to grow up and experience the real world and lack empathy.
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