Yes it might actually work out ok if a mythical benevolent dictator could manage things with infinite precision and unlimited compassion. I would imagine that has never happened at any reasonable scale.
The Conservative folks seem to phrase this as a desire to “keep government small” - which always seemed a little clunky given the stakes and track record of these governments.
That's because people aren't recognizing me as their benevolent god-emperor yet.
OK, but following this logic, shouldn't we disband the government altogether and have mafias rule us all?
When is it acceptable to hope that something is actually going to work well enough when handed over to the government?
Only if "following this logic" means "extrapolate to an unreasonable extreme." Compare:
1. "Just eat healthy food and you'll be healthy!"
2. "Yes, but [things are complex]"
3. "Following that logic, we should just eat trash."
Now ask yourself which government is currently bombing another country over one man's ego (or due to blackmail by an "ally"), and whether they're on that list, and whether the literal thousands of people killed are just acceptable sacrifices to maintain someone's worldview about 'the good guys'?
Of course, that doesn't mean we can't do better and shouldn't.
But we do need to compare "How things have been for all of human history" to "How we do things now", and see that our modern democracies show immense restraint and a lack of malfeasance, compared to how they've been used in the past.
I feel that people view how the world is today, through such a restricted world view. Where the history of how things were, and the immense and great and incredible progress we've made, is thrown aside because "Oh bad thing happened!", and therefore "The entire West is completely corrupt and everything sucks and we should rip it all down because it's bad".
One only need take a tour around the rest of the world. To compare our militaries to those in non-democratic nations. To how those leaders act, in reality, compared to our leaders. Even the current US admin looks good, comparatively. And yes, I know that's saying a lot.
Are you serious?
During the Vietnam War era, the US dropped over 7.5 million tons of ordnance across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which is more than double the tonnage dropped in all of WW2. In rural parts of Laos and Cambodia, unexploded ordinance is still a daily threat to people. 50 years on.
As for raping and pillaging: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_Vietnam_War
> To compare our militaries to those in non-democratic nations. To how those leaders act, in reality, compared to our leaders. Even the current US admin looks good, comparatively.
When I see comments like this, I want to believe that it's not real but sadly, I suspect you really believe this.
After all, you're trying to find and hold up the worst the US has done, right? So to compare, you need to find the worst in modern militaries. In militaries of all time. That was what I discussed, after all.
I was quite clear. Compare to all of history. Compare to all militaries today.
Instead you grab at part of an action, and hold it up, without making that comparison. Still.
As a Canadian who has had your current ridiculous president state that we should be the 51st state, and belittled us by calling our Prime Ministers "Governors"? Who has talked about unilaterally redrawing borders? As a Canadian who has considered how I may have to one day slaughter Americans crossing our border? How I may have to look my brothers in the eye, and kill them? I still say that the US military has been a shining light for freedom around the world. If I can remain impartial, then surely you can.
I also say that about police officers in the West, including the US.
Are there bad actions taken by police departments? By individual officers? By groups of officers, over the last decades? YES! Yes, most assuredly.
Now compare the overall score with police in totalitarian regimes.
Comparison is vital, important, key, and any finger pointing has to be in context.
And also note, I said "yes we must do better".
But if you think the US military is evil, then you have never seen evil. Ever.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/photos/2006/08/nachtwey_phot...
It takes a lot to get me to want to say something very nasty to a person but you, sir, would deserve it.
Sort of like when military units go out of bounds, or the police?
Back to the point, have you yet made the comparisons I mentioned?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viet_Cong_and_People%27s_Army_...
The opposing party in the Vietnam war was far worse than the US on a moral level, before, during and after the war. And it wasn't a small difference. We're talking about democracy and democratically selecting laws here? Well: the large majority of the population in Vietnam, including in the North, wanted the US to defeat the Vietcong and the Soviets.
The 1954 Geneva Accords, which ended the French war, called for nationwide reunification elections by July 1956. Those elections never happened. Ngo Dinh Diem, the US-backed first president of South Vietnam who was a brutal authoritarian, refused to hold them. The US backed his refusal and kept backing him afterward.
In Eisenhower's 1963 memoir, he wrote that everyone knowledgeable he'd spoken to believed Ho Chi Minh would have taken around 80% percent of the vote if elections had happened.
The Vietnamese didn't really care about the Soviets. They are a fiercely independent and proud people with a long history of defending themselves against foreign interlopers and aggressors.
So let me restate your asinine and totally inaccurate conclusion:
The large majority of the population in Vietnam, in both the North and the South, didn't want a foreign power controlling their country and determining their fate. They wanted to run their own country, and have peace.
And yet, the poster you're replying to said no such thing. Not even close. They merely said they wanted help repelling an enemy. You're also using hindsight to frame this conflict, something entirely unfair to the people involved at the time.
The US repeatedly tried to get out of that war. Multiple times. They just kept getting pulled back in.
edit
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Re your response. Were they ordered to rape and pillage by their full chain of command?
Or were they acting illegally, regardless of the outcome?
Would a military in a dictatorship have deemed that "illegal"? What about 200 years ago? 1000?
You seem to be ignoring the concept of comparables. And taking acts that the military itself teaches its own soldiers, was wrong.
It's good to have principles. And good to defend them. But if you ignore what others are saying, and the context of their words, you start to slide into zealoty.
Millions upon millions of people around the world protested the Vietnam War, including millions of people in the US.
On one day alone, an estimated 2+ million Americans participated in anti-war protests. Over 500,000 men were officially categorized as draft dodgers, more than 200,000 charged with violating the Selective Service Act and millions more found a way not to go to Vietnam through deferments and exemptions.
It's both amusing and sad that there are some people (like you) who 50 years later can't see what was apparent to so many people at the time.
> The US repeatedly tried to get out of that war. Multiple times. They just kept getting pulled back in.
That's right. Those pesky Vietnamese villagers just wouldn't let American GIs stop torching their villages, gang-raping their women and children, and executing them. The American military was trying to leave but spreading democracy demanded sacrifice.
I've written about this in other comments over the last couple of years, but the root of all of this is quite simply, foreign interference. We all remember Cambridge Analytica, its interference in democratic elections in the West, and even how it caused a few regimes to topple in the 3rd world. It's machinations and manipulation of curated news stories was quite simplistic and minor compared to where we sit now.
You simply cannot have a high-trust, well functioning democracy, if 99% of the stuff recommended to you is entirely fabricated nonsense. Worse, if it purposely fabricated to create as much social unrest as possible, and doubly worse if it becomes curated to each person and created and generated on demand.
CA managed this by having a sloth of "different archetypes" for its 100 or so altered news stories per topic. If you were a left wing shopkeep, or a right wing car salesperson, or anything else, you'd be slotted into one of these 100 version of the precise same news story, and fed the best lies to make you do as the payee requested.
Modern AI means this can be far more fine tuned. And algorithms can be gamed, just as CA gamed them with support of Facebook's APIs.
So my point here is twofold. First that government moves slow. What we're seeing now, is the result of CA a decade ago. Really, two election cycles, with senatorial and congressional committees and debates during that time.
And second is that things will not continue as they are now. Nothing you, or I, or anyone does will result in an unchanged Internet. From the perspective of lawmakers, and really a lot of the public, the "world wide" Internet is really only used by "The Rest of the World" to attack us. Attack water plants, hospitals, meat packing plants, nuclear reactors, and beyond that, to manipulate our children into thinking Western Democracy is vile and malign in various ways.
Now of course, there's no reason for most of those things to be on the Internet at all. But the manipulation of adults and children in our society just isn't going to wash. In days gone by, you'd see each community with police informants, not the sort in cop movies where the guy was crooked, but instead actual cities who would keep an eye out, and inform if someone planned something against the state. Pretty much every pub had one in the UK, for example.
Heck, when I was a teenager in Canada, one of my friends had a plan to become an officer. Part of this path was reporting on everything he heard at local parties, of an untoward nature. It's how misinformation campaigns used to be curtailed, stopped, dealt with.
Yet suddenly we presume that the average person, and average kid is going to just deal with misinformation. And bizarrely so, compared to misinformation in a pub, we let people get siloed so every single thing they read and see says the same lie.
How can an average person ever stand again absurdities, if from their perspective everything they can see around them says it is true?
So back to the start? The above, correctly assessed or not, is what the politicians and police and agencies view as happening in the West. And while there are multiple ways to deal with this, their stance is "Why are you afraid of putting your name on your words?".
If we want something other than all the bills being proposed, and all the change coming, we as a tech community need to provide a path to end all anonymity on the internet, in the least privacy reducing way possible. And there are some ways to do so. They've been discussed. But if we don't provide such a method, and drive this conversation, you know who will?
Politicians, with no technical capability at all. The average Joe, scared for his country and family.
Try to fight those two types of people, and you will lose every single time.
So my recommend is, everyone needs to stop bellyaching, suck up to the harsh realities here, and take this massive, unstoppable river, and redirect it by a few degrees so that the best-case is achieved.
It's funny because this is exactly the opposite of what actually happened. Mafias are the reaction to the "unification" of Italy, and they almost all come from the previous governments that existed before unification. Northern Italy conquered the south and defeated all the little states there ... and then levied taxes and did not much else. Specifically they did not provide policing, and very few public services.
And then the remnants of the old governments stepped in, provided public services, security on the streets and "pressured" people into paying a second tax. Now you can say that they were almost-feudal governments and therefore defended and enforced the law of large landowners but that wasn't seen as a problem ... because that's how it had always been.
The reason for their success, their initial success at least, is that, first, when Italy was young, it left citizens to their fate, suppressing dissent, stationing small forces in most of Italy that abused locals, were extremely corrupt and did little else. What is generally blamed for their later reputation is that the mafias started using their power more and more for their own purposes, irrespective of cost, while the mafias also pressured the centralized state to do the opposite.
Especially early on it's very hard to pick "the right" side in the war on mafias. In the beginning people saw the mafias as the good guys, and with good reason. Over time mafias became worse and the central state became better, but honestly, the central state wasn't particularly good for people either (in fact it still can be improved quite a bit)
Or perhaps you’re not actually following the logic but rather an oversimplified characterization of it?
Or are you suggesting these would turn as problematic as zero-privacy surveillance systems in case the government becomes totalitarian?
Conservatives seem to be fine with mafia rule, so long as the don has the correct party affiliation.
> When is it acceptable to hope that something is actually going to work well enough when handed over to the government?
Mob rule doesn't with very well as a defacto government, or oligarchy. Nor food and drug safety or national defense. Some things just have to be tackled by society as a larger group. Ideally as locally as possible, but not so locally that minorities are crushed or rule becomes petty and micromanaged.
Not possible. You can strengthen defenses but you cannot guarantee it can withstand any possible, dynamic and adaptive attack strategies.
So what you say is impossible to do.
A LOT of damage is done that way.
This makes very little sense. People sometimes appeal to the safety of children cynically, but it's very often sincere, since parents genuinely do worry a lot about their kids.
You can tell people to ignore these appeals, but it won't work, and you'll be leaving better arguments on the table.
When a politician is worried about your kids, you should be worried about your rights and freedoms. Not only for your own sake but for your kids too!
What rights and freedoms should I worry about when a politician wants to make sure my child is fed by supporting food stamp programs or free hot lunches at school?
The idea that any attempt to help a child is inherently suspect honestly says something distrubing about your own worldview. You can't imagine someone genuinely caring for a child that isn't there own?
I just said the opposite. I can imagine many people genuinely caring for a child that isn’t their own.
I am skeptical when a politician who does not know my children claims to care about them.
To borrow an LLMism: It’s not cynicism, it’s the reality of history. We the people have been duped many times over. Caveat Emptor.
The “Welfare State” is nothing but modern share cropping from the party of Jim Crow.
Embellished: marriage rates are 33.8% for Black women and 37.8% for Black men, neither of which I would round to 25%.
Uncorrelated: marriage rates dropped sharply among people of all single races on the Census except for Asians. It has dropped more sharply for Black respondents, but anything disproportionately affecting the lower and middle economic classes would disproportionately affect Black families.
Show me some data, and not outdated welfare policies from the 1980s, that supports the "social engineers" causal narrative better than plain deindustrialization. Or deindustrialization combined with good old American racism and mass incarceration. I am willing to change my position on this.
1: https://usafacts.org/articles/state-relationships-marriages-...
I do believe we should allow for a lot more nuance in our political opinions and avoid most statements that can be made in the constraints of a short comment on social media.
I didn’t take a position on the argument. I pointed out a distinction.
At least that's the anti-AB1043 logic. AB1043 says every phone must have a child safety lock.
The problem is that those laws are NOT designed to protect children, and the people who convince politicians and the public to support them are NOT doing so out of genuine concern to protect children.
The real, underlying reason why they are being pushed for so hard is to destroy privacy and control people which is going to make everyone but the elite less safe, children included.
Especially if and when we get another Nazi Germany type regime and realize that - oh shit, they have 24/7 overview of where every single person in the world is, what they do, what they think, what their worldviews and identities are.
It's impossible for any of this to end well.
We live in a society, you wouldn't be on HN otherwise.
> parents genuinely do worry a lot about their kids
There is direct evidence from trials, in which Meta researchers told executives that features like infinite scroll and others “ are inherently at odds with well-being”
There is no effective fight for freedom if there is no effective understanding of the politics and social forces driving change.
The freedom of the internet in the 90s was in itself a social revolution, not just a technological one.
Fighting for a status quo that didn’t work for children and even for many adults is a losing fight.
Fighting for privacy and against ad tech, and against addictive design features for all users is a far stronger fight.
The internet was a magical thing when it was introduced to society at large. However this is NOT the same era.
If we are fighting for privacy and freedom, then why the heck is ad tech still allowed to be accepted as part of this conversation? If we are talking about freedoms, this is one of the greatest moments to say lets not sacrifice any privacy at all in the first place?
There is no functional and effective defense of our values if people are showing up to argue what they feel like fighting, instead of where the challenges actually are.
The immediate reply is the accusational: "why are you trying to trying to prevent safety for kids".
It's a simple next step to accuse you of hiding your own child abuse ring.
This sounds like hype, but it's the normal path here in Australian.
You don't argue with these people. You summarily dismiss them. You recognize the game they are playing and you refuse to play it.
Call attention to their methods instead: they are exploiting and weaponizing children to push their big tech friendly surveillance agenda.
Whether individuals inside the system are true believers or cynical operators, the response to calling out their methods will be identical:
If they genuinely believe the rhetoric: They will simply double down and say, 'Yes, and protecting the children makes this absolutely necessary.'
If they know it is a manipulation tactic: They will still reply with, 'It is for the children,' because they know it is an impenetrable PR shield that gets them their way.
In either scenario, the bureaucracy is entirely immune to the criticism.
Exposing the game might help persuade third-party observers, but it does absolutely nothing to stop the bureaucratic machine from using that exact same line to steamroll the agenda forward.
Will you allow an argument against this?
I mean, I want to show an example where it is only a problem when someone else is not as convinced as yourself, one way or the other.
>so the way to refute is to ask for proof..
No use. The same proof will not be convincing for everyone. Let us take vaccine. The proof for a Vaccine for X saving Y lives is often the following.
"Before the vaccine there was Y deaths per year from X. But after vaccines there is zero deaths from X".
The implication is that vaccines saved X lives. This could convince most of the people. But someone can ask. Are those kids who are not dying of X (thanks to the vaccine), are dying of something else?
Now the picture is not so clear.
See, same data, different results depending on how deep you want to probe,
That argument loses you most of the population in a vote, myself included. Parents may disagree, for a start; I reckon most women (especially outside of tech) read that and mark you down as "creepy man I don't want near kids".
It's also wrong, as there are lots of rules that are in fact designed to protect children. I recommend reading up on the history of child abuse in the Boy Scouts of America (now Scouts BSA), FBI agent Kenneth Lanning's investigation, and the safeguarding and leadership training that scout leaders must take today.
The UK has a system, I think it's called the DBS, which depending on the level of check ranges from "is this person a convicted sex offender?" to "non-crime hate incidents". One can argue a lot about what the correct level should be, no-one has yet convincingly explained to me why specifically "non-crime" actions should be in a secret police record. But I am on board with someone convicted by a court for child sex offences not being allowed to become a schoolteacher.
For parents who are genuinely concerned about child safety, you are being used to push an agenda. If we want to solve the digital parenting problem, we have to understand how the problem came to be in the first place and why there isn't a good solution at the moment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578
Of course, it's well-established that human beings are capable of making stuff up, and you can claim to be whatever age, but that's not the point.
That one can get deep really quick.
So it will most likely happen especially because you are certainly right, in part, that no government has ever said no to actions that'd give them more power, let alone ones that are widely supported. But the point of this is that rather than having this as some sort of red-line no, I think it'd be much more pragmatic to try to argue for identity verification regulations that would be most palatable.
[1] - https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54969-eight-in-ten-parents...
Conversations where the root submission talks about failures at social media firms and the evidence of harms, or evidence from trials.
Conversations on the attacks against freedom and privacy.
I see very little hope that an actual rebuttal or alternative to the desire to muzzle tech will be forged, because the two conversation streams seem to rarely intersect.
We are not in the 90s anymore. Tech as most people experience it is not the new new thing, and most parents are tired of tech. A more recent pew survey showed that nearly half of teens think that social media is bad for teens. We know that Meta went ahead with features even after their own internal research told them it was bad for teen mental health.
How in hell, is there any effective response created, if the social pressure parents and children are driving, is being dismissed as a conspiracy?
This should be the time that the business models and incentives that allow loot boxes and addicting design mechanisms should be discussed.
There needs to be an actual solution that addresses the issues users are facing, or else they are simply going to choose to sacrifice freedoms for the hope of gaining some control.
There's also the typical image crafting stuff that drives envy, insecurity, and so on - kids aren't sharing when they eat left overs mashed up in a bowl, but they are sharing when they go eat at an expensive steak restaurant. That bias already significantly affects adults perceptions of others' life/lifestyle, let alone children. And even without 'the algorithm', there's going to be FOMO and the general addictiveness of updates that's going to leave kids as zombies to their phones rather than interacting with each other as much in real life.
So I'm not really sure it's viable to try to 'fix' social media. You can certainly make it better than it currently is, but I think the issue is that we have horrible companies managing a horrible product.
"The government says all children need to be vaccinated in order to be safe"
I'm not saying these arguments are equivalent, but they seem equivalent because they induce the same feeling of loss of agency. And one cannot simply ignore and dismiss something like this.
That's exactly what this is.
They want to build an internet where it is structurally impossible for children to be harmed in any way.
This requires the destruction of the very concept of agency. You can't just do things. You need government approval.
You do have to take enforcement into account when evaluating these laws. Some HNers interpret this as you go to jail for not scanning an ID (which makes sense to programmers because it's a simple if/then), but most of them are actually written as product safety laws, so the government can order you to comply or take your product off the market.
[1] - https://nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20230829-Think-Of-The-Chi...
With proper parental controls there is no signalling.
Without signaling nothing would happen. There's always signaling.
You're doing the slippery slope fallacy by saying "well if there are not terrible laws now that just means there will be terrible laws later." A law against murder doesn't mean there will later be a law against farting.
Come on. Like 80% of my entire post was devoted to pointing out a gradual erosion of rights over time, and I explicitly stated that it's not the case today.
But don't underestimate human adaptability. Slippery slope arguments assume that once a technology introduces a specific risk, society lacks the agency to create counter-measures, new norms, or alternative uses for that technology.
I haven't found that to be the case throughout most of history.
If parents felt in control of technology they wouldn't be calling on governments to regulate it in the first place. I know a lot of tech people like to assume that government wants to control everything and these parents are fake front groups established to manufacture consent, but this is infowars-type conspiracy thinking. Most people are just not that facile with technology and people who have kids are atavistically opposed to anything that could harm their kids.
Tech people's unwillingness to even engage with concerns about harm to children (eg the GP) more or less guarantees more aggressive regulation. IT's a self-defeating position.
Was I exposed to some clearly adult content? Yes. But I didn't find it particularly compelling, the video games I could download and other things I could explore were more interesting.
It is also concerning to me that gen-alpha (or whatever the age bracket is called) people are increasingly being pushed into walled garden, app-based social media platforms instead of actually learning what the Internet really is, and what it's capable of.
It was a mix of being afraid of getting a virus from a porn site, knowing that porn wasn't for my age, and late-night FTA TV airing softcore anyways.
My parents told me to be responsible and kind of explained the dangers of the world the best way they could, and it was expected that I'd be grounded and lose computer access if they found me on a porn site. I preferred playing games. I definitely encountered some dark places on the clearnet (and on the darknet as well) and promptly GTFO.
At the school's computer lab they had plenty of content control which I had the most fun trying to bypass them. For what reason? Just so I could.
We can debate if these systems and people existed before (they did), but the reach and scale is different now. My most controversial opinion these days is that not everyone should be allowed to upload to YouTube if it’s public facing. We need basic screening and filtering.
For instance in about 1994 I remember coming across a set of textfiles that were some lengthy manifesto about how the US government had supposedly manufactured AIDS in a lab somewhere. But it never got any traction.
Now we have the unfortunate venn diagram overlap between something like a Tate and a major social media platform, and he can get his message out to millions of angry, horny, unemployed young men...
There was a BBS in my area that ran on a small bank of 14.4 USR modems that had a gold mine of content like that. It was such a fun time.
Based on whose values and criteria? Yours?
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
If some parent thinks that's healthy they can just enter the child's age as 18.
You still fantasize about building mechanisms for restricting information as if the very people you oppose won't use it on you when they get into power; no, as if the very people you oppose aren't _currently_ ascendant or even in office and would delightedly use it against you right this moment. Madness.
When you build a high tech muzzle, remember that it will fit onto your head just as well as it fits those you built it for.
Is that how they’re spelling the r-word now.
Change in behavior can only follow from change in incentives. Parents must be held legally liable if they allow their children access to social media. That means jail time for negligence.
The power imbalance between individual parents and big tech is immense.
How can we be mad at random parents for not defeating the most powerful and rich people in history?
The government has just decided to fall back on "think of the children" as a way to implement more surveillance and control.
Incentives incite action. No action. No incentive.
Incentives play a role, you don't want to encourage wrong behaviors certainly, but they're just one factor in determining what people do or don't do. At best, they nudge. Those nudges aren't likely to overcome stronger forces, or even several weaker ones.
Someone may have a desire or intention to lose weight. But unless they lose the weight they lack incentive.
It's simple: incentives incite action. Don't make it more complicated to win an argument.
Here are just some of the incentives overweight people have to lose weight:
They'll look better, to themselves and others. They'll have more clothing options. They'll feel better. They'll be healthier. They'll have drastically lower odds of many future heath problems. They'll live longer which means they can spend more time being with their loved ones.
Those are all incentives. Everyone who is obese has those incentives, even though different individuals may assign different values to them. Even with all those incentives that hasn't stopped the obesity problem. incentives don't incite action, but they can encourage them.
incentive noun [ C or U ] Something that encourages a person to do something by offering them a reward (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/incentiv...)
You can have a ton of encouragement, but that doesn't mean it will be enough to incite a behavior. What definition of incentive are you using?
It literally says incite "to determination or action". Given that parents aren't actually taking smart phones away, neither determination nor action are present.
I'll grant you the examples you give incite people to desire to change weight just as negative consequences incite parents to desire that "something should be done," but it doesn't incite them to actually do something.
Describing something as incentive because it incites desire without changing behavior is not exactly what I think of when I think of incentives.
Think of being in the position of trying to come up with incentives for a group of people. Would you call your incentives successful if they created a desire in that group without anyone actually doing anything differently?
If I were going to try to come up with incentives for a group of people, I wouldn't try to create a desire in them. I'd try to give them something they already desired as a reward for doing what I wanted them to do. They'll probably never want to do the thing I want them to do. They might hate doing it. If the incentive is high enough though they just might do it anyway. If my incentives weren't enough to sway them, they'd still be incentives, just ones that were inadequate/ineffective. I wouldn't even be surprised if they failed. Incentives fail to cause changes in behavior all the time.
Kids are going to get into stuff you don’t want them to no matter how hard you try to prevent that, short of keeping them in locked padded rooms with no electronics (which would be abuse). Parents are right to want to steer them in the right direction and keep them out of the worst trouble, but that’s as far as it goes.
So really, both sides need to improve here.
This is the "Christian moms need Congress to regulate Cable TV" problem all over again. Don't let them watch TV if you oppose what is on it. It's not HBO's responsibility to raise your child, it's yours.
Anonymity, the right to move privately and be private online is much bigger than parents who are frustrated with out of control capitalism.
Besides, this only benefits the big corporations. They of course will happily back anything that absolves them of their sins.
We don't need to make parents the enemy of our online privacy. We just need parents to reject the idea that they have to give up their identity and the identity of their children to every shitty social media company and shady website on the internet to "protect" them.
We just need parents to reject the idea that they have to give up their identity and the identity of their children
OK, but (as I have asked many times before) what is your alternative, beter proposal? People intuitively understand the idea of checking ID to prevent sales of alcohol to minors, keep teens out of adult spaces and so on, because virtually every adult remembers being a teenager and not being allowed to do certain things due to not being old enough. That makes checking identity an easy sell to people.
What is your better idea that is similarly easy to sell? Because if you don't have one,people will fall back on the mediocre idea of ID checks. I feel like anyone working in the tech field should understand that the best technological solution does not always win out.
How about laws that prevent social media websites from pushing harmful content users didn't ask for? How about forcing them to abandon the practices and dark patterns that result in those platforms being addictive? How about putting executives behind bars when their algorithms are shown to cause mental health and body image issues in children? These platforms know that what they're doing is hurting people, but they don't care because they're profiting from it. These companies intentionally designed systems that are harmful and user-hostile. They've got algorithms that seek out and target people's vulnerabilities. They ignored repeated warnings from their own researchers, and actively concealed evidence of the harms they were causing. We don't have to let them do it. Not to children or anyone else. Facebook isn't going to die off if they go back to showing people only things their friends and family post. It might even get more popular. They might make fewer billions though and that's unthinkable to them.
There are a lot of things that can be done, but the government isn't interested because actually solving the problems social media causes isn't going to give them the power they're actually after and it could cause them the bribe money they get from these companies.
So, what actual rules do you want to make in service of these desirable outcomes? They have to be clear and straightforward enough that they can't be just gotten around with clever lawyers or argued past the point of meaninglessness by shills posing as philosophers. I do not like the idea of everyone having to show ID online (or even much in real life), but I can see why it's popular because it's very easy to explain and understand.
Not saying these are impossible questions to answer or get right in a law, just that there are more things to think about than which component you decide to show data inside.
The law would define a social media platform. Maybe something like: The term “social media platform” means a website or internet medium that— (A) permits a person to become a registered user, establish an account, or create a profile for the purpose of allowing users to create, share, and view user-generated content through such an account or profile; (B) enables 1 or more users to generate content that can be viewed by other users of the medium; and (C) primarily serves as a medium for users to interact with content generated by other users of the medium. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?def_id=42...]
If your SaaS app met that definition of a social media platform it would be illegal for you to show content in an infinite scroll window. Because your application targeted business users who paid for the service, people would be less likely to sue you. Maybe it'd be worth it to you to include infinite scroll anyway. Companies knowingly break the law all the time after calculating that even on the off chance they get caught the fines they'd face will probably be less than the profit they'd make. The larger your platform got, the less worth it breaking the law could become and of course if the public felt the fines were so low as to be ineffective, the law could be amended to increase the fines.
The law could even allow some platforms to include harmful content like infinite scrolling if certain conditions are met. For example, platforms could be allowed to include infinite scrolling if they require a credit card to sign up, and they display a warning explaining that the platform uses infinite scrolling which has been determined to be harmful by promoting addictive and compulsive behaviors, and it provides an option to disable that feature. Still, it's probably better to widely ban those kinds of practices that serve no purpose other than driving engagement/addictive behavior. We can just decide as a society that we value people's mental health more than maximizing tech billionaire profits.
You may not be aware of this, but Meta has been actively spending millions of dollars to redirect the rage against their algorithms and addictive harms, especially against children, and one of their strategies to try and help avoid liability is to put the onus on the federal government to pass ID legislation, to literally make it easier for Meta and similar companies to age gate most content under simple blanket policies. The way that they are doing this is by funding otherwise very small "parents rights organizations" with money and connections they otherwise wouldn't have. What does Meta gain from this? Less liability and lower cost in content moderation. What do the parents rights groups get? "Check ID laws".
That's enough motivation for both groups, it's very simple.
Now where do you get into "conspiracy theory" territory? Well thetr are also other groups that want online ID for their own purposes, and they are more than happy to help fund these groups to get something they also want.
All of this is very easy to provide backing links for with a simple Google search, if you're interested.
How should online services be regulated to mitigate algorithmic harms? To get something over the line politically, it needs to be simple enough that it can be articulated in a few sentences.
That would be a good conversation to have!
Instead what is happening is moneyed interests are inputting hundreds of millions of dollars into organizations that otherwise wouldn't have it, which is giving an "unnatural" amount of political influence to those groups, which is changing our country, and not just on this issue. They're literally doing it just to keep their money, and ID checks let them keep it without actually reducing the harms.
These are NGOs not parents. And "child safety" is often a euphemism. The point is it's hard to argue against child safety. For example, if opaque NGOs demand deanonymization to stop CSAM, I am assuming most people would not want to seem like they are in favor of CSAM. So you need an organized effort to argue in favor of privacy and even then anyone who does it can easily be smeared as a CSAM user. So child safety can backdoor something else.
Either you participate and help drive privacy preserving methods to solve the problems, or someone else will solve it in a way less desirable to you.
You just posted the answer:
> Especially when there are very obvious and tangible harms from modern social media.
The addictive and manipulative dark patterns of the big techs are harmful and should be banned straight up for everyone. No need to spare the children and let adults get abused. No need to verify age at all.
So why don't we just ban it? Because that'd eat into profits so much it could actually kill their business models.
All this "children" bullshit is just them trying to preserve their business models. It's them saying "year we're harmful and addictive and gambling tier but look we're adult only now". This is why Meta's among the corporations lobbying for this stuff.
Manipulation stops working when the other party is aware of it. Bring their manipulation out into the light.
Not just for the war on anonymity. NGOs, often funded by government money (so missing two third of their name), have unified on other topics.
One example that comes to mind is teaming up to organize the biggest influx of migrants into the EU following the arab spring movements: there have been hidden camera recording NGO employees explaining how to dodge controls, how to answer questions (by lying), and they've been actively helping sneaking people illegally in the EU.
A good question one could ask itself before downvoting me is this: if it's a fact that NGOs are teaming up, worldwide, to lie using the rethoric of "child safety" [1]... On which other topics did NGOs lie?
Or are we to believe all NGOs are good and well-meaning, except those working to end anonymity?
And before I forget: in Africa for example it's fully well known that NGO typical means "DGSE":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate_General_for_Extern...
There are french "doctors" in some of those NGOs who know less about medicine than what I know about medicine by having ex-girlfriends that were doctors.
By squinting one's eye just a little it look like NGO is not that far from a synonym of "shady undercover gov op".
And btw why should any of my taxpayers dollars go to even a single NGO if it's non-governmental?
And another big one: while some of those NGOs have been hard at work passing legislation which as a a result gets people arrested for "hate speech" (or even just for saying "christian prayers in their heads") in the UK, other NGOs are even harder at work making sure that the absolute most horrible of all hate speech cannot ever be criticized "because it's religious".
The double standards are literally insane.
If I was in the UK, I'd GTFO. And not to the EU.
[1] speaking of which, btw, there are serious allegations about NGOs participating in child trafficking, for example in the Haiti SNAFU
Where would you go?
Any argument with such blatant oversimplifications is almost certainly lacking in nuance and can be ignored and dismissed.
I get what you’re pointing at: politicians regularly abuse these arguments, but that doesn’t mean it’s 100% of all arguments involving children.
Then watch as they accuse you of supporting pedophilia.
Should that argument be ignored too?
It's a tradeoff situation and nobody wants to leave it as such to find an answer which serves the best balance. Instead, we are doomed to discuss the absolutes of freedoms vs the absolutes of child safety.
I'd really like to see something like a required parental controls architecture products had to support (but not every device had to force universally). These kind of solutions only goes as far as the problem is a technical one, e.g. a kid on their dad's office computer they weren't supposed to access can still see things they shouldn't, but such is the truth with any pure technical approach to the problem which is not actually fully technically bound.