Comment by stego-tech
11 hours ago
> But kids are under extreme peer pressure
Here's the thing: kids are always going to be under peer pressure, and time and time again we keep falling for the pitfall trap of harming adults under the guise of protecting kids.
When it was the drug scare of the 80s, entire research about the harms of DARE's educational methods were ignored in favor of turning an entire generation of children into police informants on their parents. When it was HIV and STDs in the 90s, we harmed kids by pushing "Abstinence-only" narratives that all but ensured more adults would come down with STDs and HIV as adults due to a lack of suitable education (nevermind the reality that children are often vehicles for new information back into the household, which could've educated their own parents as to the new dangers of STDs if they'd been properly educated). In the 2000s, it was attempts to regulate violent video games instead of literal firearms, which has directly contributed to the mass shooting epidemic in the USA. And now we're turning back to porn again, with the same flawed reasoning.
It's almost like the entire point is to harm adults, not protect children.
There’s some massive hyperbole there. “Turning an entire generation into police informants.” Sure there’s some stories about that happening but it didn’t happen enough to move the needle in terms of things that actively harmed adults.
It was harmful because it was ineffective as a mechanism to help Children not because of some nefarious motives against adults.
The same with abstinence only education. Virtually all of the harm was because it was an ineffective policy to help children, not because of some tiny second order effect on adults because children werent educating parents.
Video game regulation was primarily about adding ratings to games which again only harms adults insomuch as children are a big market so developers are less likely to make mature games.
2 of the 3 examples you gave were definitely ineffective at protecting children, but in terms of harming adults, the effects were so minuscule that if that was the goal, the supporters failed severely.
As far as age checks. We have age checks for brick and mortar stores I’m fine with age checks for websites. You also can’t display pornography in public for kids to see.
There’s nothing about “but it’s on the internet” that makes me think it’s inherently ok to treat it differently.
I think there are probably better ways to do it than this Mississippi law, and a law in a single state will probably prove ineffective in general.