It’s time to grow a spine
Listen to Steve read this post below (9 min audio)
To celebrate the moment, Meta came out with this cracker: “It will send messages to all accounts it ‘understands’ to be under 16, but would not say how it was determining which accounts may be under 16…”
I laughed.
Meta knows how old every single user is. Their entire business is surveillance. There isn’t a parent, school, government, friend, or organisation on Earth that knows as much about a person as Meta knows about its users. And Age? Well, that is one of the easiest things to infer.
I could think of hundreds of ways Meta can cross reference data for age verification, (Scroll past for the rub if you wish). But here’s 5 very simple categories to demonstrate how clearly they’ve obfuscated the situation to make it sound “harder” than it is.
Content: “Happy 13th Birthday Timmy, love grandma” (the most common Facebook message), friends’ birthday posts, messages, stickers, reading level of posts/comments, emoji density and style patterns, typing speed and error patterns, content interests (cartoons, games, teen influencers), low financial activity, homework/assignment queries…
Connections: Follower/friend networks matching teen demographics, parents’ posts of kids, sporting groups, kids’ associations, school and class membership groups with age boundaries, hashtags linked to school or teen events, accounts being tagged by known age-declared minors, Bluetooth proximity to kids’ devices — smartwatches, tablets, school laptops with class info, access to school portals…
Geolocation: Location of the phone, classrooms with clear ages, room of the house the phone lives in (understood via real estate websites), events, parties, sports the phone goes to… never in adult workspaces/offices during the day, classroom-level Wi-Fi/Bluetooth signals…
Time stamps: Non-usage during class hours, bed and waking times. When the phone is at the above locations… Non-usage during class hours, bed and waking times. When the phone is at the above locations…
Visuals, Ambient inputs, Biometrics: Classroom audio patterns (bells & chatter), facial age estimation, skin texture, bone structure cues, braces, acne stages, baby teeth, walking gait, phone height detection in room (lower height → child), hand and finger proportions to device, voice pitch and changes to it, youth slang (6-7), growth-stage AI analysis…
I’m sure you can think of a few more. But a simple triangulation of any 3 of these tracking features would easily uncover age.
To Tech, and Protect!
The under-16 ban is good for kids. The jury is in on how damaging social media is to developing brains, cognitive ability and social interactions. (ironic I know) But we must not confuse Tech with Social Media.
Tech is good. Tech is emancipating. Tech is educational.
Put simply, technology improves living standards, especially when coupled with thoughtful regulation. A mixed economy – the foundation of what the western world was built on, and why it dominated for so long.
Social media, however, is rarely used in ways that enhance teen development.
There are so many positive ways kids can use tech that have nothing to do with social media: coding, art, music, writing, video editing, language learning, AI tutors, debates, reading, research — and even building games, making animations, crafting podcasts, exploring science apps, or designing 3D projects…
The message I want to leave you with is simple, but vital:
Don’t accept the world as tech giants would prefer it. Their incentives are the same as every large corporation since the dawn of capitalism: profit.
And like the industrialists of yesteryear, they’ll fight any regulation that “civilises” their technology if it reduces profitability.
They’ll try to make you think it’s not possible — that only they understand the tech, that they’re much smarter than you. Neither is true. The only thing we need to understand is the world we actually want to live in.
Hint, it’s not one where kids are addicted to screens, and their imagination is sucked out of them by an algorithmic nipple.
Capitalism Done Right!
We keep capitalism healthy, (or reinvigorate it in this case) by shaping technology for participation, opportunity and fair competition. It’s the soil where new ideas and small businesses sprout. It’s how living standards rise and how our collective wealth grows. A strong middle class only thrives when no single digital “invasive species” is allowed to dominate the ecosystem and quietly steal our time, our independence, and our ability to think for ourselves.
And if you get the sense something isn’t right — whether it’s your kids getting hooked on social-media brain-rot, an Uber driver being underpaid, or Google search drowning in ads — trust your instincts.
We can and should shape tech to be more human-centric and protective of people, so power isn’t so concentrated.
This matters now more than ever, because we’re standing on the edge of the next era. An AI and Humanoid Robot revolution. And if we don’t push back with the tools we already have, it’ll be much harder to civilise the next generation of innovators.
Keep Thinking,
Steve.
** Get me into do an AI keynote at your next event. I’ll use this as my testimonial!