not sure what the english term for them is

US/CA calls them Low Speed Vehicles or LSVs.

They are mostly useless for your average person here, as they can’t (legally) keep up with traffic speeds on the majority of city streets and aren’t allowed on our incredible excess of highways. You still need a full license too.

There is only one domestic manufacturer I believe, which mostly sells them to universities and as golf carts

They want a surefire way to ID everyone. An internet ID is how you properly implement a teenage ban. They also avoid legal liability when countries expect them to show that they are not serving ads and content to children.

This increases the value of their collected data and the value of their adds.

The real way to keep children safe is to ban personal data gathering and making social media unprofitable. The alternative is federated social media. We don’t want incentives to mess with algorithms. We don’t want profiling of people. We don’t want ID theft. We don’t want centralisation.

These age laws are about indemnifying the platforms from any blame when kids are harmed and setting up better identification for their surveillance capitalism through age verification systems.

The alternative would have been actually cracking down on the algorims that drive extremism and paying moderators again (you know, actually making things better). But “banning” teenagers means that next time a kid kills themselves, meta can point out that the kid broke the rules by drawing a mustache on their face to trick the age verification system. Its the kids fault for sneaking in.

That’s a lot of ignorance.

The ban defines social media in an extremely broad way. It’s basically almost every website with a social aspect to it, comments under a news article would apply. Not only does it create a huge issue to have an unclear definition up to the interpretation of whomever will be taking advantage of it, it’s also not a good measure to protect anyone. Kids that are feeling isolated because of, for example, their gender, identity, or looks, and who were using social media anonymously as an escape, are the ones that will struggle.

And what do these bad effects cost? Massive, population-wide ID checks, that will need to be uploaded online, and France is soooo secure with their data breaches every ~3 days. So your ID information is in the wild, which will be heaven for hackers (who will consequently try even more to cause data breaches).

Social media are, in general, horrible. You want to make laws, make laws that extremely strictly ban all the shit that facebook, twitter and youtube and the likes do. Ban toxic algorithms (or algorithms altogether, no one needs anything else than a good search engine), make big platforms responsible for hate speech and actually punish them, and make it a huge, in-depth criminal investigation with extremely harsh punishments when a platform like Facebook is found to hide and protect pedocriminal rings. At the same time, increase education budgets a lot and teach kids how things work instead of letting them be thrown in the jungle with no clue what’s going on.

Also, you think that a 15-years old with no social media experience is going to be safe online? That’s doesn’t make sense. Make a 70 years old suddenly use the internet and they’ll also be lost, it’s not just about age but about technology literacy.

I dont know the French law specifics, but other countries haven’t implemented a law banning children, they’ve implemented a law requiring id for adults. Meta & Co love your id.