> the bill only applies to social media platforms with more that 1M “account holders” (defined as people who access a “social media account,” an undefined term) “operating in Minnesota.”
I'm always baffled by these nonsensical and arbitrary cutoffs. Obviously the proper approach is to define a function, either linear or logarithmic. In this case it's a reverse proportion: if you serve 500000 people in Minnesota, you are allowed to have 50% of Minnesota's youths on the platform, with 900000 people it's 10%, something like that. One could also have the age as a parameter of the relation, again to avoid the stupid cutoffs where the eighteenth birthday suddenly turns a person into an enlightened adult.
Hard zero at 1M also sounds random. I'd say the optimal function would be a reverse geometric progression tied to Minnesota's population and approaching zero teens at infinite Minnesotan accounts—or rather, one teen so there's no bogus fractional value.
The point of the threshold isn’t to tell how many Minnesotan kids can be on a service. It’s to limit the burden of filtering traffic for Minnesota to companies that should be large enough to manage it. A small social network may not have the engineering resources to devote to doing this, or it might be cost prohibitive. This threshold mitigates those complicated arguments to avoid the filtering.
Also, a new social network wouldn’t be as likely to be seen as a “threat” until it got to a certain scale.
(I’m not trying to defend the bill, just what I think the the rationale is for the thresholds used)
I’m baffled that you see a simple easy to understand rule and think we should spice it up with a logarithmic curve.
The goal is simply to say that big social media companies must comply and small niche ones are ok. It is arbitrary. It’s also probably fine. Note it’s not 1M people in Minnesota. It’s 1M users anywhere.
I see that political scientists have entered the thread. Never will the nation have sensible and stable laws if a major consideration in their making is the continued employment of politicians and political scientists, so they can keep adjusting the figures in each law every year.
I'm always baffled by these nonsensical and arbitrary cutoffs. Obviously the proper approach is to define a function, either linear or logarithmic. In this case it's a reverse proportion: if you serve 500000 people in Minnesota, you are allowed to have 50% of Minnesota's youths on the platform, with 900000 people it's 10%, something like that. One could also have the age as a parameter of the relation, again to avoid the stupid cutoffs where the eighteenth birthday suddenly turns a person into an enlightened adult.
Hard zero at 1M also sounds random. I'd say the optimal function would be a reverse geometric progression tied to Minnesota's population and approaching zero teens at infinite Minnesotan accounts—or rather, one teen so there's no bogus fractional value.