Last year, social media earned over $11 billion in the US alone from advertising targeted at minors. It's terrible, yes. But should that lead us to ban adolescence or the toxic businesses of toxic people? We cannot trivialize the fact of eradicating minors from the virtual public sphere, from the communication and information of our time. Should they be the ones affected by the measures we take?
Our world is no longer divided solely between private and public space. Now it is divided between private space, public space, and virtual or digital space. They all exist simultaneously, they cannot be segregated, and all must be democratic spaces. It is no fallacy to say that the internet and public space share similarities: would we propose locking minors under 16 at home to prevent them from acquiring inappropriate knowledge? Doing so would be, at least for now, a crime. Instead, what we do with minors is guide them from simpler to more complex spaces. In a democracy, the authorities' responsibility to make the streets safer can in no way consist of imposing permanent and selective curfews. Would we, then, consider it a good idea to require facial recognition for everyone to enter bars or stroll down La Rambla? Because it's clear that the enthusiasm for verifying minors' ages makes us forget that this implies verifying everyone's age to exclude anyone who is underage. How can we be happy that our virtual space, which belongs to everyone, is a space of a state of exception? And there's more: if childhood and adolescence are when we learn the most skills, we risk leaving behind a backward and maladjusted generation.
Giving in to the demand for a ban, then, is weak on the powerful and brutal on the weak, it's politically motivated, and it doesn't solve the problem of the mountain of garbage that continues to impact minors and all of us. Racist and/or sexist garbage, which fosters toxic relationships and criminal abuse within couples, such as Temptation Island and other television programs, will remain accessible to teenagers. Do we love it more that teenagers watch more TV?
In Pedro Sánchez's announcement, there are things we can salvage, although they were expressed with a disturbing mix of misunderstood technical data and impractical purposes. For example, the president demanded "that the algorithm cannot be manipulated." But it is the algorithm that manipulates us. What we must demand, then, is that the algorithms of the big tech They shouldn't manipulate things in a specific direction that we consider destructive, nor should they promote unverified, toxic content, etc. Where we do agree with Sánchez is on the need to consider criminal liability for the executives of these companies. We have a recipe This is very easy to apply: whoever is paid to prioritize a message using an algorithm should be held responsible for the content. The enemy, therefore, is not the children.
