I’m asking for public policy ideas here. A lot of countries are enacting age verification now. But of course this is a privacy nightmare and is ripe for abuse. At the same time though, I also understand why people are concerned with how kids are using social media. These products are designed to be addictive and are known to cause body image issues and so forth. So what’s the middle ground? How can we protect kids from the harms of social media in a way that respects everyone’s privacy?
This is a unique idea. I think if we were to have a publically funded curation effort it would need to maintain some structural independence from whatever government was in power, to prevent any potential for abuse. It would be like government funded news agencies, like the BBC or the CBC. These organizations are funded by their respective governments funds but the government can’t tell them what to publish unless It’s violating some law or something (e.g. by doxxing someone). Similarly: the government could fund these block lists but have no say in what websites eventually land on it.
Ideally the process would be as transparent as possible too, but that might have some drawbacks. By explaining in depth why they blocked a website they might be inadvertently drawing attention to that website, which is not always a good thing.