Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

On January 20 last year, Antonella Antonella Sicomero, a 10-year-old girl from Sicily, Italy, turned on TikTok with her mobile phone and strangled her neck with a belt in her bathroom, imitating the popular online suffocation challenge (Blackout Challenge). She soon lost consciousness. By the time the family found out, the tragedy was irreparable.

The shocking incident soon triggered a follow-up by Italian and European regulators. On the third day after the tragedy, DPA, the Italian Internet regulator, issued a three-week ultimatum to TikTok: if TikTok cannot verify the age of users, it will ban the operation of services.

Since February last year, TikTok has conducted a comprehensive age check of 12 million users in Italy at that time, deleting 500000 users whose age does not meet the requirements and identifying 140,000 users who lied about their age. TikTok also promised to introduce more technical means for age verification in the future and cancel the account within 48 hours once minors under the age of 13 are found to have opened an account.

However, even if the application is specially developed for minors, there are many loopholes and problems. YouTube Kids is the most successful video application for children in the United States. This is a YouTube selected video platform for children's content, which includes a large number of educational animations, children's songs and learning content, with more than 35 million active users per week.

Although YouTube sets strict censorship requirements for children's content, there are still a lot of inappropriate content. For example, YouTube Kids complaints from American parents in the past few years include car crashes and flames, dangerous movements by characters on the edge of a cliff, ghastly grave scenes, and children playing with razors in the bathroom. These contents, which are normal to adults, may bring psychological shadow to preschoolers and even induce them to imitate dangerous movements.

Inducing children to become addicted to watching videos is also a big reason why YouTube Kids has been criticized. The default setting for this app is to play videos automatically, which means that after the current video playback ends, YouTube Kids will continue to play content recommended by the algorithm. If parents cannot intervene in real time, children will always read the content recommended by the algorithm. Although the issue has been reported in the media since 2017, Google has not adjusted its default settings without regulatory intervention.

Unanimous vote passed regulatory legislation on whether social networking sites should be responsible for such tragedies, what technical measures should they take, and how to effectively avoid similar tragedies and prevent minors from being exposed to inappropriate content on social networks? This has become an urgent issue in the global Internet regulatory legislation.

Once again, California is at the forefront of the United States. Perhaps California is duty-bound to regulate the Internet, because the world's major social networking sites and Internet companies are headquartered in California, and the US headquarters of Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok, and California's Internet legislation has always been at the forefront of American states.

This week, the California Senate passed the California Age-appropriate Design Act (California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act,AB2273) with 33 votes, which clearly defines how social networking sites and Internet platforms should protect minors. The California House of Representatives has approved the bill by a unanimous vote of 60, which will then be sent to California Governor Newsom for signature, but will be implemented in 2024.

It should be emphasized that although Democrats have an overwhelming majority in California, unanimous bills are rare. Because California also has crimson constituencies, Congress has many Republican conservative members, the Republican leader of the Federal House of Representatives is from the agricultural region of central California. Although the two parties are at loggerheads on many agendas, there is a rare consensus on Internet regulation and a sense of urgency to protect minors on the Internet.

It is worth mentioning that this is also the first law in the United States on how social networking sites should protect minors' personal information and online activities. At the level of federal legislation, the Senate legislative panel pushed forward two draft laws in July, clearly stipulating that social networks for minors are not allowed to collect data from users between the ages of 13 and 16 unless they get their users; Internet companies are required to provide a platform for minor users and their guardians to eliminate the hustle and bustle of platform activity data.

In addition, the draft of the Children's Cyber Security Act of the Federal Senate specifically states that social media platforms must give minors the right to choose, allow them to opt out of the algorithm recommendation function, and block a lot of content that is not suitable for minors. However, there is no exact timetable for these bills. California takes the lead in passing relevant legislation this time, which also helps to speed up the pace of legislation at the federal level.

The California law that installs underage digital fences makes it clear that social networks must put their privacy, security and well-being above their own business interests when dealing with underage users. If a social network violates this rule, it will face a fine of up to $7500 per minor user involved.

Specifically, the law requires application and website developers to install "digital fences" for underage users under the age of 18 to analyze the harm their services may cause to underage users. take proactive measures to protect their personal information and web browsing data. The law explicitly mentions the recommendation algorithms commonly used on social networking sites and the function of finding friends, which are intended to improve user stickiness and increase usage time, but for underage users, these functions pose a risk of harassment and affect their physical and mental health.

The California law has been welcomed by many child protection agencies in the United States. Immediately after the bill was passed, Fairplay, a US child safety protection organization, issued a statement saying, "California's passage of the Age-appropriate Design Act is a huge leap forward in the direction of building their Internet for children and families."

Social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as trade groups that represent their interests, had privately lobbied to block the bill. They argue that the bill will hinder innovation on the Internet, violate the right to freedom of expression under the U.S. Constitution, and do nothing to effectively protect families and children.

NetChoice, which represents the interests of the Internet platform, issued a statement firmly opposing these regulatory laws. "these laws will prevent Peloton from recommending new exercise content to children and Barnes&Noble (American bookstore chain) from recommending continuing reading to middle school students. California has always been a leader in technology development, but these laws will only prevent innovators from leaving California because of over-regulation.

Just as in other countries, underage users in the United States are also widespread on social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat and Youtube. But in theory, not every teenager can register to use these services. The minimum age for registration accepted by most social networking sites in the United States is 13.

In the case of TikTok, for example, users can use a Facebook, Twitter, Google or Apple account when signing up, and when registering separately, they need to enter their date of birth and mobile phone number (or email) and confirm that they have reached the age of 13 before they can register. When Instagram and Facebook sign up for new users, the last step is to enter a birthday. If you are under 13 years old, the platform will directly refuse to register.

But although major social media platforms have set clear registration age requirements and refuse to allow minors under the age of 13 to register independently, they only require users to submit their age voluntarily, which means there are many loopholes to exploit. Platforms such as Instagram admit that minors may misrepresent their age and register to use social networks, and checking the actual age of users is a technical challenge.

The legal basis for the age limit of users in the United States is the Children's Internet Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which was promulgated in 1998. Under the law, Internet companies face stricter regulatory requirements and legal responsibilities to provide services to users under the age of 13. They need to get their parents' consent in advance to set up a "clear and complete" privacy policy to ensure the safety and confidentiality of the children's data collected.

For this reason, most social networking sites in the United States set the minimum age for registration at 13. Minors can only watch some social media filtered health sections that are suitable for minors in the company of their parents. Teenagers between the ages of 13 and 16 also face restrictions on the use of social networking sites. Whether it's Instagram or TikTok, user accounts at this age are private by default, meaning that only users who approve them can see themselves and their private messages.

Some Internet companies also develop separate products for children under the age of 13, such as the children's version of YouTube Kids, which can only be registered by parents, used under parental supervision, and cannot comment (equivalent to no social interaction). After reaching a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in 2019, TikTok launched a healthy content section for the US market under the age of 13, but banned searches for other videos, commented on them, and could not post their own videos.

The regulatory legislation lags behind seriously, but there are serious loopholes in this mechanism. In 2020, Thorn, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting children, conducted a survey on the use of social networking sites among 2002 minors aged 9 to 17 in the United States, including 742 children aged 9 to 12 and 1260 children aged 12 to 17.

The survey found that although social media companies have set clear age limits, most children still use these social apps (either under parental supervision or misstating their age). Among children aged 9-12, the proportion of daily use of social networking sites is Facebook (45 per cent), Instagram (40 per cent), Snapchat (40 per cent), TikTok (41 per cent) and YouTube (78 per cent). Moreover, the survey found that 27% of underage users are actually using dating apps, and the minimum registration age for the latter is 18.

In addition, Thorn conducted an online harassment survey on 1000 minors aged 9-17 years, including 391 children aged 9-12 and 609 adolescents aged 13-17. The results of the survey are even more shocking: 16% of girls between the ages of 9 and 12 have been sexually harassed by adults, and as many as 34% of girls between the ages of 13 and 17 have had similar experiences.

So how do teenagers deal with these online harassment? 83% said they would block and report, and only 37% would tell their parents or relatives and friends. And many of the children interviewed said that even if they blocked and reported harassment, they would be harassed again by changing their accounts.

Among these sexual attempted harassment, Instagram and Snapchat are the most serious, with 26% of similar harassment taking place on these two platforms, followed by TikTok and Facebook Messenger (both 18%). Obviously, picture and video social platforms are the most vulnerable platforms for teenagers to be sexually harassed on the Internet.

Supervision or punishment after the event, even in the United States, which pays attention to minors and privacy protection, the legislative work on the use of social networks by minors is still seriously lagging behind, and the regulatory means are still dominated by ex post punishment, and there are many loopholes in the systematic protection mechanism.

Platforms from Facebook to TikTok to YouTube have committed a number of violations among teenage users and have paid hefty fines or settlements as a result. But these fines are undoubtedly negligible compared to their revenues. These Internet companies are aware of the existence of underage users on their platforms, but are still collecting data on these users for targeted advertising and content recommendations.

Other social networking sites have the same problems in this regard. In 2019, TikTok settled with the Federal Trade Commission, paying a fine of $5.7 million to settle previous violations over the privacy of underage users (the profile photos and information of underage users are not set to private by default). In February 2021, TikTok again agreed to pay $92 million to settle a class action lawsuit that illegally collected information about users of minors.

In 2018, 23 US consumer and child protection agencies jointly sued YouTube to the Federal Trade Commission, arguing that the site's age limit was not perfect and that it illegally collected data on the use of children's users to promote personalized advertisements for YouTube without informing parents and asking for authorization.

Google is also delaying tactics on whether to turn off the default push and autoplay of the children's app YouTube Kids, as it will directly affect the amount of time children use the app. When Google CEO Pichai attended a congressional hearing in early 2021, Representative Lori Trahan, Democrat of Massachusetts, heckled Pichai about the matter. Because her own children are addicted to watching YouTube Kids videos.

In addition to face-to-face pressure on Pichai, the panel on consumer and economic policy of the House of Representatives Supervisory Committee also wrote to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, arguing that autoplay would make children addicted to watching videos. A panel of experts from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the US antitrust regulator, also put forward regulatory opinions on the self-broadcasting function of YouTube Kids. However, it was not until last August that Google quietly introduced a feature that allowed automatic playback to be turned off.

Meta has become the enemy of the whole nation, and in this respect, the Meta social matrix has become the enemy of the United States. Last year, Frances Haugen, a former product manager of Meta's cyber ethics department (Civic Integrity department), caused an uproar when he exposed tens of thousands of pages of documents inside Meta and testified publicly in Congress. Hogan accused the social networking giant of putting his own economic interests above the rights and interests of users, and insisted on not changing the recommendation algorithm in order to pursue network traffic and user stickiness, knowing that it might bring harm and adverse consequences. even push content to minors that they shouldn't have seen. According to Hogan's evidence, Meta's interest algorithm even sends pictures of self-harm to minors and anorexia to anxious girls.

It is precisely because Facebook has so much black history that when Facebook announced plans to develop an Instagram for children under the age of 13 in May last year, it met with unanimous opposition from US regulators and all sectors of society. From the Federal Trade Commission to members of both houses of Congress to various online rights protection agencies, have issued open letters urging Facebook to immediately stop the development of children's version of Instagram. In addition, it is worth mentioning that the attorney general of 44 states in the United States also jointly pressured Zuckerberg to abandon the project by Facebook. A few months later, in September last year, Meta had to suspend the development of a children's version of Instagram.

Facebook definitely has a bad record in collecting and leaking user data in violation of regulations. They were fined $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission in 2019, a record amount of regulatory settlement in the United States. Last year, Facebook was sued by 1.6 million users for scanning users' online photo albums for facial recognition without authorization, and finally agreed to pay $650 million to settle.

More shockingly, from 2016 to 2019, Facebook paid $20 a month for 13-to 25-year-olds to install their own data collection apps through a number of test projects to get a complete picture of big data's use of their mobile network. The complete data of a large number of users are obtained at a very low price. Facebook knew that minors were involved, but he still collected it for three years.

Facebook first illegally collects user data through the VPN app, and after being forced off the shelves by Apple, Facebook bypasses the Apple App Store with the enterprise root certificate and collects online data of teenagers by paying for it. The scandal completely infuriated Apple, revoked the right to develop the enterprise version of Facebook at one point, and was the trigger for the deteriorating relationship between the two companies. Last year, Apple simply added the option to allow users to refuse data tracking in its iOS system update, which had a significant impact on Meta's social advertising. According to Meta CFO David Wehner, Apple's move could cost Meta2022 revenue as much as $10 billion a year. Zheng)

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