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.
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.
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.
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.