Canada, too. For the last two years, Canada has entrusted sensitive statistical information to Microsoft. We should be treating MS with the same skepticism we currently reserve for Huawei.

I love German legowordmakingkraft.

Well, I guess i am going to be regularly updating the metadata on my most recent selfie.

Yep. You pirate one movie, you face criminal charges. You pirate the entire corpus of images on the internet, you got Forbes Person of the Year.

intensifenshittification

Anyone who wants to own what they create and doesn’t want their work stolen for some startup’s plagiarism engine. Anyone who is interested in privacy. Anyone who wants a consistent user experience. Anyone who wants to be exempt from sinister targeted advertising. Anyone who is worried about censorship.

Well that’s ok, Donny LOVES fraud.

It’s a cycle to move the window on acceptable discourse. This is at least the third time Grok has been configured to say something outrageous: holocaust denial, white genocide, now Mechahitler. When people react with outrage, they dial it back a little (but not all the way back). Repeat.

Trump does the same thing: go too far, backtrack partially, go even further, backtrack partially. Each time, the transgression is a little less shocking.

Grok is working as intended.

Yeah. Grok is working as intended.

Rookie numbers! Let’s pump them up!

To match their tech bro hypers, the should be wrong at least 90% of the time.

Lol. Like corporate social media isn’t creepy.

Almost every kid has felt that they were missing out on something because of parental rules at some point. The kids who had no rules were not necessarily the lucky ones, since good parenting always involves setting boundaries. i’m really not making the “in my time” argument because if we fixed the problems with social media i would have no problem letting my kids use something i didn’t have access to. to me it’s about balancing risks: make it safer, then let kids use it! after all, op is opening the door by making this post. she is directly responding to the expressed desire of her kids and trying to find a safe way to let her daughters access the tools they think they need.

For my part, i don’t consider forums social media. I may be in the minority, but im not as worried about stranger danger or cyber bullying as much as corporate control over content and privacy. i have never used snapchat, but i assume part of their revenue stream involves advertising and selling private data. maybe snapchat is very responsible about these things, but there is no oversight. take facebook, for example: a whistleblower just alleged that facebook targeted teen girls with weight loss and beauty products when it detected that the girls were feeling bad about themselves (say, when they had deleted a bunch of selfies). these exploitative and predatory decisions (to target an individual) are not approved by an ethics board. they are not subject to scrutiny. the only time we become aware of them is when some executive gets laid off and has a sudden crisis of conscience/lucrative book deal. maybe a ban on individualized ads and content feeds for young people would be enough to fix big problems. forums mostly don’t suffer from those problems.

You are right. But if things have changed, they can change again. Many countries are in the process of banning smart phones in schools and are legislating age minimums for social media. In such environments, access to social media becomes much less important. I think a better long-term approach would be to mitigate the risks of social media, and the fediverse is already addressing some of the big problems like corporate control of information and algorithmic curation of content. I like the idea of social media, but i hate the (prevalent) implementation.

True, using a defederated mastodon server as a group chat is “off label”, but i think it could work. I am not a fediverse expert, though.

With her friends, presumably. Why would she want strangers or mere acquaintances on her group chat?

There are more and more kids who aren’t allowed on social media because of its multifarious harms. Don’t forget that 20 years ago, no kids had social media. By all accounts, kids were doing fine back then. Also, OP said that her eldest daughter, at least, has a friend group, so your concern about their social isolation is probably misplaced.