Though I think banning it for children is the wrong approach. Ban the addictive and dangerous features for everyone, adults included — no more infinite scroll, and no more feeds showing content from outside social connections.
So, kill all news agencies and reporters I guess? or would there be a carve out for incumbents so they can cement their market share? who controls the approval list?
That alone is a value add people don't realize even as they're losing it: it created a shared reality you and locals inhabited, that you could have a conversation about.
Except this has nothing to do with social media nor with children nor with addiction.
We've had time to witness the damage of a dopamine-doomscroll. I personally know children who've posted too much, and children who've been solicited directly by adults, both to try and meet and for nudes. And we've seen the complete lack of positive action from platforms. Roblox is full of paedophiles and Grok was letting you nudify your classmates just a few months ago. These places aren't suitable for kids.
I don't want a ban on VPNs. That isn't being suggested, just making sure they're also age-checked. But some inconvenience is a price worth considering.
I'd be surprised if the law requires much beyond a vague best effort from service providers, but many already block connections from known server hosts and some even VPNs.
An airtight block is not what's required; stopping social media being mainstream for kids is.
I'm trying to discuss this in good faith but that wasn't even an argument. A bland accusation wearing a tin foil hat.
You could argue the benefit to children in repealing it.
You're trying to frame it as an "inconvenience" and not a blatant attack on the fundamental freedom of expression. I get that social media is bad, but sometimes (often) the cure is worse than the illness.
Sure, whatever. Maybe in some ways.
> I personally know children who've posted too much, and children who've been solicited directly by adults, both to try and meet and for nudes.
... but not in that way.
I personally knew children who'd been solicited directly by adults before there was even an Internet. Including me, if you use the definition of "child" that seems to be popular in this sort of debate (and, by the way, it wasn't a big deal).
We did not shut down the world because of it.
Coders went from being civically active—calling their electeds and showing up to events to defend privacy in the 90s—to being comfortably rich and content with maybe voting in generals. That’s had a direct effect on policy quality.
H.L. Mencken
It used to be "don't give your name to anyone online" and now it's "hand it over when you're told".
People from duma (the russian parlament) also publicly stated it would never use it for anything but children protection.
It would be similar to Radio Free Europe which was broadcast to the former Soviet States.
Companies will be exempt (with remote employees having to identify linking their IP and computer's fingerprint with their real identity), and the next step, after using the law to silencing dissent, will be penalisation.
There is strong, popular will for age gating social media. At the same time, at least in America, there is a deep streak of laziness and nihilism in the tech community that makes it civically useless. When combined, you get politicians getting calls every day to limit social media and little from experts on how.
So you get folks reaching for the first solution on the shelf, and then getting wedded to it. The correct approach is making this the social-media companies’ problem. If they wind up with users under N years old, they get fined. If you want to use social media, you put up with their BS. If not, you’re not affected. Unfortunately, I’ve worked on privacy and technical policy enough to be sceptical that anyone will actually pitch that to their elected. So we get this, instead. (And at the end of the day, I’ll take an imperfect solution over a perfect one that goes nowhere. Though the UK, as usual, seems to have found the worst of the bunch.)
Shortly after the Online Safety Act went into operation, there was politically charged/sensitive/opinionated content on X mysteriously disappearing for UK users but nobody else in the world.
car culture < childhood
This isn't a cynically curated viewpoint. It's some* of what we have and what that cost.
* we also have trespassing culture & stranger-danger culture. we ruined roaming and the childhood development it nurtured.
Can you imagine bringing up cars in this thread?
I believe you. I'm likely older than you, so there were even fewer cars when I was a kid. I'm confident my utopia was even better than yours.
Between then and now we have a gradient of loss. My kids grew up under 24/7 adulting and had nowhere to go.
Yes but this has nothing to do with cars. What are you even protecting kids from anyway?
Nobody is surprised that Russia resorts to this. They are a potemkin dictatorship. But that the UK is also acting as a dictatorship - now that's interesting.
VPN banning is part of the same compulsion for control that made London a global leader (in surveillance of people not suspected of a crime).
ref: https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/articles/2020-08-14/the-t...
I'm not even taking a side here and what they are trying to do is obvious.
Alternatively, the center starts trying to attract right-wing voters by adopting right-wing ideas like anti-immigrant views or "well, we can sacrifice the climate a bit more" positions.
Keir Starmer is from a "left" party but his actions has shown him to be a centrist, Ursula von der Leyen is quite right. Then again, these are European positioning, as someone's said years ago, the European right-wing would be liberal in the US. And with the currently openly racist regime of the USA, even more so!
(Also, it’s worth noting that the Conservatives support the same policy, and Reform support the principle while opposing the means.)