<
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/08/31/would-the-next-george-floyd-video-survive-metas-new-teen-safety-rules/>
"Earlier this year, one of the smartest internet rights people around, Heather
Burns, suggested the “Darnella Test” regarding any kind of “kid safety” rule
online. It’s named after Darnella Frazier. You might not recognize her name,
but you’ve seen her work. She was the 17-year-old who was walking to the corner
shop when she happened to see Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, in
the process of murdering him. She got out her phone and filmed it, enabling the
world to see that the initial statement from the Minneapolis police — the one
headlined “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction” — was
bullshit.
She won a Pulitzer Prize for the video.
But she was a teen. On social media. So Burns came up with the Darnella test,
to explore whether any particular internet regulation would have prevented
Darnella from documenting the murder of George Floyd:
For any young person who is just going to be walking along the street for a
snack and ends up witnessing something that nobody should ever see because
it should not be happening. For that young person whose only recourse, at
that moment in time, is to document and report.
And as that future Darnella pulls out their phone to document the event:
1. Would they be allowed to have that phone, at all, under xyz regulation?
2. Would they be allowed to have that social media account, at all, under
xyz regulation?
3. Would they be allowed to upload video, or livestream content, under xyz
regulation?
4. Would the video, because of their age-verified account information, be
instantly flagged and/or taken down for violent content?
5. Would the video, as urgent journalistic content in the public interest,
be suppressed and censored based not on the content within it but on the age
of the person who filmed it?
That’s your Darnella test. Run through it as if your life depends on it.
Because it just might.
Thankfully, unlike the various outright bans of social media for teens, the
newly announced Meta settlement with most state AGs does not actually ban kids
from social media. But that doesn’t mean it passes the Darnella test. At the
very least, the settlement will make it much harder for the next Darnella to
document and distribute things that need to be documented and distributed."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
