[37r7rudjduj]

>Yet the concerns are that some under-13 users may lie to get around the age restrictions, and that the platform is not obtaining the required consent from those users’ guardians. <

I'm not really sure I see how this is a uniquely TikTok problem or why it's really news anymore from the angle the author is approaching the problem. I get it, I'm a millennial, we grew up with tv and parents telling us the internet is full of molesters (and there's a lot of those, don't get me wrong). But the social landscape children are /already/ operating in is so saturated with digital media that the idea the genie can be put away or wholly regulated at this point seems rediculous.

I've got a 14 year old half-brother who I try to chat with often since I know he wishes we were closer. From time to time he shares the sorts of things him and his friends do online with me and it's so far beyond what's in this story that it's hard to view the article's concerns as anything but quaint. By 11 tons of children are already on discord, snap, insta, tiktok, and whatever novelty app is trending at their school, many even start sooner. This is unretricted usage because, just like my generation when we were kids, Zoomers know that the golden rule of the internet is "Of course I'm 18" and when that's not enough most can come up with a scheme to spoof parental permission anyway.

I get that we're talking about age ranges where children are at wildly different points in their social development and that some do benefit from simply being told "no stay out", but if the goal is actually to provide useful protections for the children on these platforms then we need systems that provide escape hatches for people who get in too deep and not just walls to keep them out. What's more, strong enough walls mostly just encourages migration to new apps where monitoring is harder because no one but the kids is aware the scene has moved. I'm all for responsible app design but we can't attack this in the same way past generations have tried to, we already know a nontrivial amount of children will outmaneuver us and so we should incorporate that into the plan.