Comment by JohnMakin
3 days ago
We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume.
In the United States, you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using, yet somehow, the same social responsibility seems thrown out the window for parents and the web.
Yes, children are clever - I was one once. If you want to actually protect children and not create the surveillance state nightmare scenario we all know is going to happen (using protecting children as the guise, which is ironic, because often these systems are completely ineffective at doing so anyway) - then give parents strong monitoring and restriction tools and empower them to protect their children. They are in a much better and informed position to do so than a creepy surveillance nanny state.
That is, after all, the primary responsibility of a parent to begin with.
I know this is weird, but I'm in some ways not really sure who is on the side of freedom here. I get your position, but like. The whole idea of the promise of the internet has been destroyed by newsfeeds and mega-corps.
There is almost literally documented examples of Facebook executives twirling their mustaches wondering how they can get kids more addicted. This isn't a few bands with swear words, and in fact, I think that the damage these social media companies are doing is in fact, reducing the independence teens and kids that have that were the fears parents originally had.
I dunno, are you uncertain about your case at all or just like. I just like, can't help but start with fuck these companies. All other arguments are downstream of that. Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.
> I just like, can't help but start with fuck these companies. All other arguments are downstream of that.
The solution would then be to break them up or do things like require adversarial interoperability, rather than ineffective non-sequiturs like requiring them to ID everyone.
The perverse incentive comes from a single company sitting on a network effect. You have to use Facebook because other people use Facebook, so if the algorithm shows you trash and rage bait you can't unilaterally decide to leave without abandoning everyone still there, and the Facebook company gets to show ads to everyone who uses it and therefore wants to maximize everyone's time wasted on Facebook, so the algorithm shows you trash and rage bait.
Now suppose they're not allowed to restrict third party user agents. You get a messaging app and it can send messages to people on Facebook, Twitter, SMS, etc. all in the same interface. It can download the things in "your feed" and then put it in a different order, or filter things out, and again show content from multiple services in the same interface, including RSS. And then that user agent can do things like filter out adult content, if you want it to.
We need to fix the actual problem, which is that the hosting service shouldn't be in control of the user interface to the service.
Indeed "Interoperability" is what would hurt social media giants the most - Cory Doctorow recently held an excellent talk where he stated that back in the early 00s Facebook (and others) used interoperability to offer services that allowed to interact, push and pull to mySpace (the big dog back then) to siphon off their users and content. But once Facebook became the dominant player, they moved to make the exact tactics they used (Interoperability and automation) illegal. Talking about regulatory capture ...
> ineffective non-sequiturs like requiring them to ID everyone.
Is that really a non-sequitur though? Cigarettes are harmful and addictive so their sale is age gated. So too for alcohol. Gambling? Also yes. So wouldn't age gating social media be entirely consistent in that case?
Not that I'm necessarily in favor of it. I agree that various other regulations, particularly interoperability, would likely address at least some of the underlying concerns. But then I think it might not be such a bad idea to have all of the above rather than one or the other.
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> ... start with fuck these companies. Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.
I'm not sure how those two positions connect.
Execs bad, so laws requiring giving those execs everyone's IDs, instead of laws against twirled mustaches?
these are just bad arguments all around, including gov't with this upload id crap. Why aren't we making internet 18+? The only unrefutable answers I get are just downvotes which is ok I guess, sort of validates my point because there's no reason for kids to get unrestricted internet access and downvotes are easy.
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> I just like, can't help but start with fuck these companies. All other arguments are downstream of that. Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.
Wild times when we're seeing highest voted Hacker News commenters call for the nanny state.
If you're thinking these regulations will be limited to singular companies or platforms you don't use, there is no reason to believe that's true.
There was already outrage on Hacker News when Discord voluntarily introduced limited ID checks for certain features. The invitations to bring on the nanny state reverse course very quickly when people realize those regulations might impact the sites they use, too.
A lot of the comments I'm seeing assume that only Facebook or other platforms will be impacted, but there's now way that would be the case.
I don't even care about Discord adding ID verification to unlock certain features. Not going to give them my ID of course, just gonna use it as always. If they later tighten things to the point where it's unusable, sure, I'll quit Discord.
OK, here's another one.
How about taking all these websites that require PII onto their own members-only domain?
This actually should have been in place and well fleshed-out before Google & Microsoft started pushing their "account" nonsense.
>Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.
For me this is a crux, at least in principle. Once online media is so centralized... the from argument freedom is diminished.
There are differences between national government power and international oligopoly but... even that is starting to get complicated.
That said... This still leaves the problem in practice. We get decrees that age-restriction is mandatory. There will be bad compliance implementations. Privacy implications.
Meanwhile a while... how much will we actually gain when it comes to child protection.
You can come up will all sorts of examples proving "Facebook bad" but that doesn't mean these things are fixed when/if regulation actually comes into play.
Those execs were also using the tactics to addict adults, and while they may have targeted teens, the problem is, at its core: humans. So no amount of nannying by either the company nor the government will solve this issue.
Who would be responsible if a child developed alcohol addiction? A nicotine problem? Any other addiction?
Exactly. The same people that should be responsible for giving them unfettered access to an internet that is no longer safe. Even adults have to be wary of getting hooked on scrolling, and while I agree that the onus is on the companies, it has been demonstrated over and over again that they will not be held to account for their behavior.
So the only logical choice left that actually preserves freedom is for parents to get off their ass and keep their child safe. Parent's that don't use filtering and monitoring software with their children should be charged with neglect. They are for sending a kid into the cold without a coat, or letting them go hungry, why is it different sending them onto the internet?
And to your last point: You are dead wrong. No government anywhere in the world has demonstrated that they have the resources, expertise, or technical knowledge to solve this problem. The most famously successful attempt is the Chinese Great Firewall, which is breached routinely by folks. As soon as a government controls what speech you are allowed to consume, the next logical step for them is to restrict what speech you can say, because waging war on what people access will always fail. I mean, Facebook alone already contains tons of content that's against its terms of service, and they have more money than God, so either they actually want that content there, or they are too understaffed to deal with the volume, and the volume problem only ever increases.
So in my view, you are the one against freedom by advocating for the government to control the speech adults can access for the sake of "protecting the children" when the actual people that are socially, morally, and legally culpable for that protection are derelict in their duties.
> Who would be responsible if a child developed alcohol addiction? A nicotine problem? Any other addiction?
The government literally actively prevents people selling all these things to children, rather than permit a free for all and then expect parents to take responsibility for steering their kids away from them.
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> Who would be responsible if a child developed alcohol addiction? A nicotine problem? Any other addiction?
I mean, historically speaking, we blamed the tobacco companies.
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Social media is like tobacco. We went after tobacco for targeting kids, we should do the same to social media. Highly engineered addictive content is not unlike what was done to cigarettes.
Yes, go after Facebook and their kind only, avoid collateral damage to the remaining regular old internet.
No, it isn't. Tobacco is a physical substance that alters users' biochemistry and creates a physical dependence. Social media is information conveyed via a computing device. You can criticize social media for what it is in its own right, without having to engage in these kinds of disingenuous equivocations.
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Heh, thank you.
I appreciate GPs point about giving “parents strong monitoring and restriction tools and empower them to protect their children”. That’s good. That acknowledges that we can and should give parents tools to deal with their kids and not let them fend for themselves (one nuclear family all alone) against the various algorithms, child group pressure, and so on.
But on the whole I’m tired of the road to serfdom framing on anything that regulates corporations.
Yes. Let’s be idealistic for a minute; the Internet was “supposed to” liberate us. Now we have to play Defense every damn day. And the best we have to offer is a false choice between nanny state and tech baron vulturism?
For a second just imagine. An Internet that empowers more than it enslaves. That makes us more equal. It’s difficult but you can try.
Screw over Meta then. Not everybody else.
Meta is the bozo in a panel van with no windows. All The legit porn sites put up Big Blinking Neon Signs.
I actually run an adults only community site and you are correct, I have it in a popup that appears on every "fresh" visit to the site, it's in the giant bold print you agree to when you register, and from a technical end, I send every possible header and other signal to let filtering software know it's an adult only space. If there is a child accessing that site, they are doing so because their parent didn't even attempt to prevent them from doing so. And now I'm having to look into ID verification services that are going to quintuple to costs of hosting this free community for people in a time where community is more important than ever.
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> Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.
why-not-both.jpg
Maximizing corporate freedom leads inevitably to corporate capture of government.
Opposing either government concentration of power alone or corporate concentration of power alone is doomed to failure. Only by opposing both is there any hope of achieving either.
Applying that principle to age-verification, which I think is inevitable: Prefer privacy-preserving decoupled age-verification services, where the service validates minimum age and presents a cryptographic token to the entity requiring age validation. Ideally, discourage entities from collecting hard identification by holding them accountable for data breaches; or since that's politically infeasible, model the service on PCI with fines for poor security.
The motivation for this regime is to prevent distribution services from holding identification data, reducing the information held by any single entity.
> Prefer privacy-preserving decoupled age-verification services, where the service validates minimum age and presents a cryptographic token to the entity requiring age validation.
This is the wrong implementation.
You require sites hosting adult content to send a header indicating what kind of content it is. Then the device can do what it wants with that information. A parent can then configure their child's device not to display it, without needing anybody to have an ID or expecting every government and lowest bidder to be able to implement the associated security correctly.
It doesn't matter what kind of cryptography you invent. They either won't use it to begin with or will shamelessly and with no accountability violate the invariants taken as hard requirements in your theoretical proof. If you have to show your ID to the lowest bidder, you're pwned, so use the system that doesn't have that.
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> Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.
This is a huge self own. I can't believe I'm reading this on a website called "hacker news".
while i'm sympathetic to your position, the truth is that /that/ is where this site is now.
Why? Hackers need something to hack.
But you're right, 'twas a bit much.
>There is almost literally documented examples of Facebook executives twirling their mustaches wondering how they can get kids more addicted.
Then close their business. Age verification just makes their crimes even more annoying.
Yes, please close it!
Ah, oh, decision makers are shareholders themselves and are benefiting from this too.
> I know this is weird, but I'm in some ways not really sure who is on the side of freedom here. I get your position, but like.
No one. You’ll see a few politicians and more individuals stuck to their principles, but anyone with major clout sees the writing on the wall and is simply working to entrench their power.
> Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.
Indeed, what lolberts fail to understand usually is not a choice between government vs “freedom” it’s a choice between the current government and whoever will fill up the power vacuum left by the government.
> I just like, can't help but start with fuck these companies. All other arguments are downstream of that. Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.
How about we reject all institutional nannies?
It is much easier to implement user-controlled on-device settings than any sort of over-the-Internet verification scheme. Parents purchase their children's devices and can adjust those settings before giving it to their kids. This is the crux of the problem, and all other arguments are downstream of this.
My friends kids have access to his home servers. They don’t get to roam on the internet. It’s shocking to think parents might structure their child’s lives.
Don't conflate the Internet with Social Media. Social media is a service, just like FTP. The death of social media will not mean the death of the Internet. There's an argument that reducing social media use, by age verification or other means, will lead to a more free Internet due to reduced power of gatekeepers.
The problem is that internet is used nowadays for democratic purposes. Once you introduce a globally unique personal ID, you will be monitored. And boy, you will be monitored throughoutly. In case of any democratic process that needs to be undertaken in future against government, this very government will take the tools of identification and will knock to the doors of people who try to raise awareness and maybe mutiny. And this is what Orwell wrote about
You sound like someone that would work for the CIA or FBI if they offered you a job. Those are the types of people that I cannot and will not ever trust. I do not respect your opinion.
You don't have to, but hilariously - I would never work for the CIA or FBA (I mean I can't, I think they require a college degree) but the most paranoid conspiracy-theorist libertarian hacker I ever knew did, and said it was the best work of his life. Ironic?
I'm going to move off-grid and become a sovereign citizen.
Centralization and standardization are going to be the topic in the 21st century.
For all the complaining some U.S.-Americans seem to do about the EU approach to these issues, things like the Digital Markets Act aim to fix exactly these types of issues.
> documented examples of Facebook executives twirling their mustaches wondering how they can get kids more addicted
If you genuinely believe that this is about those moustache twirling executives, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Have you ever wondered why and how these systems are being implemented? Have you ever gone why Discord / Twitch / what have you and why now? Have you ever thought that this might be happening because of Nepal and the fears of another Arab spring?
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/15/more-egalitarian-ho...
I think too many people on this platform don't understand what this is about. This is about power. It's not about what's good for you or the children. Or for the constituents. It's about power. Real power. Karp-ian "scare enemies and on occasion kill them" power.
There are many ways in which such a system could be implemented. They could have asked people to use a credit card. Adult entertainment services have been using this as a way to do tacit age verification for a very long time now. Or, they could have made a new zero-knowledge proof system. Or, ideally, they could have told the authorities to get bent. †
Tech is hardly the first industry to face significant (justifiable or unjustifiable) government backlash. I am hesitant to use them as examples as they're a net harm, whereas this is about preventing a societal net harm, but the fossil fuel and tobacco industries fought their governments for decades and straight up changed the political system to suit them. ††
FAANG are richer than they ever were. Even Discord can raise more and deploy more capital than most of the tobacco industry at the time. It's also a righteous cause. A cause most people can get behind (see: privacy as a selling point for Apple and the backlash to Ring). But they're not fighting this. They're leaning into it.
Let's take a look at what Discord asked people for a second, the face scan,
Their specific ask is to try and get depth data by moving the phone back and forth. This is not just "take a selfie" – they're getting the user to move the device laterally to extract facial structure. The "face scan" (how is that defined??) never leaves the device, but that doesn't mean the biometric data isn't extracted and sent to their third-party supplier, k-Id.
There was an article that went viral for spoofing this, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982421 . In the article, the author found by examining the API response the system was sending,
The author assumes that "this [approach] is good for your privacy." It's not. If you give me the depth data for a face, you've given me the fingerprint for that face.
We're anthropomorphising machines. A machine doesn't need pictures; "a bunch of metadata" will do just fine.
We are assuming that the surveillance state will require humans sitting in a shadow-y room going over pictures and videos. It won't. You can just use a bunch of vectors and a large multi-modal model instead. Servers are cheap and never need to eat or sleep.
Certain firms are already doing this for the US Gov, https://x.com/vxunderground/status/2024188446214963351 / https://xcancel.com/vxunderground/status/2024188446214963351
We can assume de facto that Discord is also doing profiling along vectors (presumably behavioral and demographic features) which that author described as,
Discord plugs into games and allows people to share what they're doing with their friends. For example, Discord can automatically share which song a user is listening on Spotify with their friends (who can join in), the game they're playing, whether they're streaming on Twitch etc.
In general, Discord seems to have fairly reliable data about the other applications the user is running. Discord also has data about your voice and now your face.
Is some or all of this data being turned into features that are being fed to this third-party k-ID? https://www.k-id.com/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattgardner1/2024/06/25/k-id-cl...
https://www.techinasia.com/a16z-lightspeed-bet-singapore-par...
k-ID is (at first glance) extracting fairly similar data from Snapchat, Twitch etc. With ID documents added into the mix, this certainly seems like a very interesting global profiling dataset backstopped with government documentation as ground truth.
I'm sure that's totally unrelated. :)
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† like they already have for algorithmic social media and profiling, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley...
Somehow there's tens to hundreds of millions available for crypto causes and algorithmic social media crusades, but there's none for the "existential threat" of age verification.
†† Once again, this is old hat. See also: Turbotax, https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
yep, the ol four horseman of internet censorship lol
if folks actually wanted to protect minors they would age restrict internet ACCESS instead of letting adults personal details get spewed all over the world for bad actors to take advantage of.
> I know this is weird, but I'm in some ways not really sure who is on the side of freedom here.
That’s because “freedom” is complicated and doesn’t precisely map to the interests of any of the major actors. Its largely a war between parties seeking control for different elites for different purposes.
Yes, seeking more control for themselves and completely at the expense of everybody else's loss.
I don't get your point, at least not in relation to the GP post. I agree with GP, parents need to be more accountable. We as parents, and We should all be concerned about future children/generations, should be demanding more regulation to help force the change we need on this topic. We as a society need to treat SM like those other addictive product classes. The fact SM is addicting and execs try to juice it more, is frankly to be expected.
Vilify them all you want, but same has been done with nicotine products, alcohol products, etc. and to GPs point, we SM as a toy for our children to play with. We chose to change the rules (laws, regulations, etc) because capitalists can never be simply trusted to do what's best for anything except their bottom line. That's a fundamental law no different than inertia or gravity in a capitalistic society. That's why regulators exist. Until you regulate it, they will wear their villain badge and rake in the billions. It's easy to be disliked when the topic of your disdain is what makes you filthy rich (in other words, they don't care what you or I think of what they're doing).
not social media, treat the entire internet as fundamentally hazardous to kids because it is, just like cigarettes alcohol and porn. check IDs once when signing the contract that is required for internet access and all these problems go away.
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>I get your position ... There is almost literally documented examples of Facebook executives twirling their mustaches wondering how they can get kids more addicted. This isn't a few bands
Their position was to compare it to alcohol, guns, and tobacco, not bands using naughty words. Alcohol and tobacco definitely enter mustache swirling territory, getting children addicted and funding misinformation on the harms of their product.
> There is almost literally documented examples of…
lol
> Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.
The state can imprison you. Zuck can't.
Yet! ;-)
Nobody is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to use Facebook or whatever other site. I quit using most social media over a decade ago. If you don't want to use it, or you don't want your children to use it, then don't use it.
O yeah? Where’s that guy who couldn’t get a job 6 months ago because he refuses to use LinkedIn.
I am a bit confused by that comment. Are parents social responsible to prevent companies from selling alcohol/guns/cigarettes to minors? If a company set up shop in a school and sold those things to minors during school breaks, who has the social responsibility to stop that?
when I was a kid in the early 90's, my state (and many others) banned cigarette vending machines since there was no way to prevent them being used by minors, unless they were inside a bar, where minors were already not allowed.
The problem is, doing the analogous action with the entire internet is a privacy nightmare. You didn't have to tell 7-11 every item you bought at every store in the past 2 years and opt-in to telling them what other stores you go to for the next 5.
There is no digital equivalent of "flash an ID card and be done with it" in the surveillance state era of the internet. Using a CC is the closest we have and even then you're giving data away.
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ISPs and OSs should be the ones providing these tools and make is stupid easy to set up a child's account and have a walled garden for kids to use.
I live in the UK. By default your ISP will block "mature" content and you have to contact them to opt out. iOS, Android, Playstation, Xbox, Switch all have parental controls that are enforced at an account level.
A child with an iPhone, Xbox, and a Windows Laptop won't be able to install discord unless the parent explicitly lets them, or opts out of all the parental controls those platforms have to offer.
The tech is here already, this is not about keeping children safe.
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You must not have kids if you think it's easy to keep children off things that are bad for them.
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There's a law going through in some state that want's to do this, but also put the onus on the OS developers to detect age aligned behavior. How do you do this with Linux? It would kill the open computer and kill ownership over computing.
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Mark Zuckerberg advocates for this, most people entrenched in this argument think it's worse. But I'm all for burning it to the ground so.
I think the argument is more around it being illegal so as to not be forced into playing "the bad guy". It's hard to prevent a level of entitlement and resentment if those less well parented have full access. If nobody is allowed then there's no parental friction at all.
Its unfortunate that the application of this rule is being performed at the software level via ad-hoc age verification as opposed to the device level (e.g. smartphones themselves). However that might require the rigimirole of the state forcibly confiscating smartphones from minors or worrying nepalise outcomes.
I'm saying hold parent's accountable for their children's online behavior and for their protection online, not companies (who want to profit off the kids, perverse incentive) or governments (who can barely be trusted to do this even if this was the only goal). For example if your kid starts making revenge CP of their classmates, and the parent could have reasonably mitigated or known about it, I think the parent absolutely should be held responsible.
Don't punish the rest of the web for crappy parenting and crappy incentives by companies/govts.
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But it's not playing the bad guy. It's playing the good guy.
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Parents can't easily prevent their kids from going to those kinds of stores once they're at the age where the parent doesn't need to keep an eye on them all the time and they can travel about on their own.
The difference though is that parents are generally the ones to give their kids their phones and devices. These devices could send headers to websites saying "I'm a kid" -- but this system doesn't exist, and parents apparently don't use existing parental controls properly or at all.
> These devices could send headers to websites saying "I'm a kid" -- but this system doesn't exist
And there would be ways to work around it. If people find that privacy-preserving age verification is not good enough because "some kids will work around it", then nothing is good enough, period. Some will always work around anything.
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So what’s the alternative? Pretend we don’t live in a digitally connected society and set our kids up for failure when they get one years after their peers?
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Or people who aren't parents are yet again sharing strong opinions that are not based in reality. Plenty of parental controls are deployed, how long they last against a determined child is the real question. Here's a concrete example for you. Spotify has a web browser built in so that you can watch music videos, kids have figured out a way to use that to watch any video on YouTube--a 12 year old told me this. If you search on this subject you'll quickly learn this is well known and is generally being ignored by Spotify. Why not allow parents to disable the in-app web browser / video function?
It's not as easy as you may believe to prevent that type of access.
Well the parents entrust their kids to the school, so they would be the ones responsible for what goes on on their premises. In turn, school computers are famously locked down to the point of being absolutely useless.
That's really a district-by-district / school-by-school thing, some are significantly more locked down than others
The school, in loco parentis.
Companies are legally prohibited from marketing and selling certain products like tobacco and alcohol because they historically tried to.
Parents are legally and socially expected to keep their kids away from tobacco and alcohol. You're breaking legal and social convention if you allow your kids to access dangerous drugs.
Capitalist social media is exactly as dangerous as alcohol and tobacco. Somebody should be held responsible for that, and the legal and social framework we already have for dealing with people who want to get kids addicted to shit works fairly well.
So we should ban social media is what you're saying but not what OC is saying.
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"Capitalist social media is exactly as dangerous as alcohol and tobacco. Somebody should be held responsible for that, and the legal and social framework we already have for dealing with people who want to get kids addicted to shit works fairly well."
They work hand in hand with governments around the world, that's why they get the tax breaks. In return they hand over details about your opinions, social networks and whereabouts, not to mention facial recognition data via Facebook. They aren't remotely capitalist in any real sense since they have a bad business model.
> Capitalist social media is exactly as dangerous as alcohol and tobacco.
Most actual studies done on this topic find very little evidence this is true.
It's a run-of-the-mill moral panic. People breathlessly repeating memes about whatever "kids these days" are up to and how horrible it is, as adults have done for thousands of years.
I expect some emotional attacks in response for questioning the big panic of the day, but before you do so please explore:
[1] Effects of reducing social media use are small and inconsistent: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266656032...
[2] Belief in "Social media addiction" is wholly explained by media framing and not an actual addiction: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-27053-2
[3] No causal link between time spent on social media and mental health harm: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-t...
[4] The Flawed Evidence Behind Jonathan Haidt's Panic Farming: https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide...
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Not responsible for selling to all minors, just theirs.
> give parents strong monitoring and restriction tools
The problem is that it's bloody hard to actually do this. I'm in a war with my 7yo about youtube; the terms of engagement are, I can block it however I want from the network side, and if he can get around it, he can watch.
Well, after many successful months of DNS block, he discovered proxies. After blocking enough of those to dissuade him, he discovered Firefox DNS-over-HTTPS, making it basically impossible to block him without blocking every Cloudflare IP or something. Would love to be wrong about that, but it seems like even just blocking a site is basically impossible without putting nanny-ware right on his machine; and that's only a bootable Linux USB stick away from being removed unless I lock down the BIOS and all that, and at that point it's not his computer and the rules of engagement have been voided.
For now I'm just using "policy" to stop him, but IMO the tools that parents have are weak unless you just want your kid to be an iPad user and never learn how a computer works at all.
As a parent of young children, this is your entire problem:
> the terms of engagement are, I can block it however I want from the network side, and if he can get around it, he can watch.
You're treating this as a technical problem, not a parental rules problem. Your own rules say he's allowed to watch!
You have to set the expectations and enforce it as a parent.
Depends on what the goal is. But yeah I agree if you really don't want them on YouTube (or whatever) and really do want them to tinker with their devices then you're likely going to have to eschew technical measures for more overt ones.
Well, the point of it is to turn learning about network security and TCP/IP into a game that encourages him to dig in deeper than just the typical surface level interaction with a computer. Firefox has just made the job harder for me than I'd like. I have no issue with simply having him turn the thing off, or taking it away. It's moderated, I'm not totally hands off, c'mon.
I think the point is that it's not enforceable.
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I remember when I was a kid that age there were rules and some were technically enforced. But if you found a way around the technical enforcement you were in huge trouble. The equivalent here would he been, if you used a proxy to watch what you weren't meant to, then you lose all screen time indefinitely. Sneaking around parents' rules was absolutely not on.
Sounds like a smart kid, is part of you secretly proud of him for his tenacity?
Is it impractical to keep an eye on what he's doing on his computer, i.e. physically checking in on him from time to time?
How about holding him responsible for his own behavior, to develop respect for the rules you impose? Is it just hopeless, and if so how come? Is it impossible for him to understand why you don't want him watching certain content or why he should care about being worthy of your trust?
I'm not judging here, I'm genuinely curious.
Personally I wouldn't want to expose a child to "the algorithm" ie recommendations. It turns up useful stuff but (IMO) the stream contains an unacceptable concentration of radioactive waste and becomes increasingly concentrated if you click on any of it.
I might suggest explaining this to him, providing a uBlock filter to sanitize the page, and requiring use of said filter.
> is part of you secretly proud of him for his tenacity?
Of course! That's the whole point. The computer's in a highly visible area of the home. The point was to try to get him to learn a little about networks with some built-in motivation, but I didn't expect the arms race to end so easily.
The obvious solution would be TLS interception and protocol whitelisting. Same as corporate IT. Stick the kids' devices on a separate vLAN if you don't want to catch all the other devices in the crossfire.
Still, there's an awful lot of excellent educational content on YouTube. It seems unfortunate to block access to that. Have you considered self hosting an alternative frontend for it?
> TLS interception and protocol whitelisting
Well, that means directly doing things on the endpoint, which I don't want to do. One could work around that with a Linux USB; I could block USB boot, but then I'm just giving him an iPad, right? What's the point?
The goal is the learning exercise that puts Youtube as a reward mechanism for getting around my blocks. I just hoped to not run out of options so quickly.
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Putting controls on the machine you want to restrict is pretty normal. While I agree with your first sentence that it's hard for parents to get proper monitoring tools, the rest of this sounds like a self-imposed problem. If you don't want to mess with the actual machine then run a proxy it has to use.
At this point why not just emancipate him. Hook him up with an easy remote job, put a lock on his bedroom and hand him the keys, and make him start paying rent. Because I’m having trouble figuring out what part of society you’re preparing him for at this stage. Respectfully.
Well, what jobs are even going to exist in 15 years??
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Whats so hard about taking the iPad out of they're hands? or laptop or whatever, once you catch them on sites they shouldnt be on?
You missed the point. I take it away all the time! The goal is to teach him about networking, by forcing him to learn it to work around the limitations.
You're understating the US's policy on recklessness. We have "attractive nuisances," which means that if you put a trampoline in your backyard, and a kid passing through sees it, decides to do a sick jump off of it, and breaks their leg, that was partly your fault for having something so awesome that kids would probably like.
> which means that if you put a trampoline in your backyard, and a kid passing through sees it, decides to do a sick jump off of it, and breaks their leg, that was partly your fault for having something so awesome that kids would probably like.
That's not exactly accurate. The two key parts of the attractive nuisance law are a failure to secure something combined with the victim being too young to understand the risks.
So if you put a trampoline in your front yard, that's an easy attractive nuisance case.
If you put a pool in your back yard with a fence and a locked gate, it would be much harder to argue that it was an attractive nuisance.
If a 17 year old kid comes along and breaks into your back yard by hopping a 6-foot tall fence, you'd also have a hard time knowing they didn't understand that their activities came with some risk. Most cases are about very young children, though there are exceptions
>put a trampoline in your front yard
This is exactly what one of our neighbors did when I was growing up.
All the kids loved it.
There just weren't very many lawsuits back then like there are now after the number of attorneys proliferated so much.
To be as safe as they could, the parents put the trampoline in a pit where the bouncing surface was at ground level.
If you drove by, you wouldn't even be able to see it, or have any idea that it was there.
Unless there was somebody bouncing at the time.
You should have seen the look on peoples' faces when they drove down our street and saw that for the first time :)
It would not be quite that simple. The trampoline (or pool, or whatever) would have to be visible, in a place children were likely to be, not protected by any reasonable amount of care, and the kid would have to be young enough to not know any better.
The legal doctrine is also not specific to the US, of course.
And that law is incredibly and hideously stupid, as it's a heckler's veto on having cool stuff.
The Internet is basically the final frontier where this harmful law doesn't reach, though the Karens are really trying to expand their power there.
A monitoring solution might have worked for my case if my parents had monitored my Internet history, if they always made sure to check in on what I thought/felt from what I watched and made sure I felt secure in relying on them to back me up in the worst cases.
But I didn't have emotionally mature parents, and I'm sure so many children growing up now don't either. They're going to read arguments like these and say they're already doing enough. Maybe they truly believe they are, even if they're mistaken. Or maybe they won't read arguments like these at all. Parenting methods are diverse but smartphones are ubiquitous.
So yes, I agree that parents need to be held accountable, but I'm torn on if the legal avenue is feasible compared to the cultural one. Children also need more social support if they can't rely on their parents like in my case, or tech is going to eat them alive. Social solutions/public works are kind of boring compared to technology solutions, but society has been around longer than smartphones.
Should the state have force your parents to give you up for adoption? That's the social support the state can offer.
This is the real point that needs to be made.
You can argue that many parents are less than ideal parents, but that is not sufficient to justify having the state step in. You also have to show that the state is less bad.
Decades of data on the foster system strongly suggests otherwise. The state, by any objective measure, is terrible at raising children.
I don't think it would have helped, given the outcomes for foster children are near universally worse except in the most extreme cases of abuse. I did threaten to call CPS but I was, of course, berated for it and threatened that I would be taken away, so that shut me up. Since I was never assaulted I doubt it would have reached the standard for foster care anyway, yet the consequences still endure to this day.
I was told over and over by in hindsight unqualified persons that emotional abuse wasn't real abuse, so after a few years I was disinclined to seek help.
If I had had even one person that supported me unconditionally instead of none at all, even if that person wasn't a parent, I'm fairly certain I would have turned out differently. That was just a matter of luck, and I came out empty-handed. I never felt comfortable talking about what I was exposed to online with anyone, and that only hurt me further, but I was a child and couldn't see another option.
So the only options are no support or give you up for adoption? No middle ground is possible?
As a parent, I think you’re understating how difficult it is to provide a specific amount of internet access (and no more) to a motivated kid. Kids research and trade parental control exploits, and schools issue devices with weak controls whether parents like it or not. I’m way at the extreme end of trying to control access (other than parents who don’t allow any device usage at all) and it has been one loophole after another.
This only works if I ban my child from having any friends since they all have unlimited mobile access to the internet.
Sorry, I know it's a hard line for parents to tread and it's really easy to criticize parenting decisions other people are making, but the "everyone else is doing it so I have to" always seems as lazy to me today, as it probably did to my parents when I said it to them as a teenager.
Is it more important to prevent your son from being weaponized and turned into a little ball of hate and anger, and your daughter from spending her teen years depressed and encouraged to develop eating disorders, or to make sure they can binge the same influencers as their "friends"?
We used to teach kids to be themselves and stand up for what they believe in and their own authenticity and uniqueness even in the face of bullying. That having less or other doesn’t mean your value is lesser or that you should be left out. Now we teach them… conform at all costs so you never have to risk being bullied or lonely?
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The number of times I objected to my parents rules because my friends didn’t have those rules and the response was: “I’m not their parent.”
Is it more important to prevent your child from <...>, or to not be seen as an adversarial monster?
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Could your child not just call or text their friends? Or is the real expectation to not have to intervene at all about their preferred platform?
Only if all the other kids are not on social media. When I was in school, birthday parties and such were organised on facebook. If you were not on facebook, you weren't invited.
If everyone was banned from facebook we would have organised them via text messages or email. That's the main point of social media age restrictions, individually banning kids is too punishing on those kids so parents and teachers don't try. Doing it across the whole population is much better.
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I think the idea is for the child see their friends in person... not call, text, or internet.
So even if their own child has no phone at all, they have access to the internet through other children's unlimited mobile access.
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I'm saying they'll use their friend's devices.
Yes if they do bad things like drunk, have sex and do drugs.
I would start with banning cellphones.
My greatest fear for my future young adult children is that they're on their cell phone all day and never have time to get in trouble with their friends, so there's that. Yes, Let's start with banning the cell phones.
this is the biggest problem, so many parents are head-in-the-sand when it comes to things that can damage a child’s mind like screen time, yet no matter how much you protect them if it’s not a shared effort it all goes out the window, then the kid becomes incentivized to spend more time with friends just for the access, and can develop a sense that maybe mom and dad are just wrong because why aren’t so-and-so’s parents so strict?
because their parents didn’t read the research or don’t care about the opportunity cost because it can’t be that big of a deal or it would not be allowed or legal right? at least not until their kid gets into a jam or shows behavioral issues, but even then they don’t evaluate, they often just fall prey to the next monthly subscription to cancel out the effects of the first: medication
Do you believe the research shows that screens in and of themselves are so powerfully damaging that being exposed for, what, a few hours a week at a friend’s house will cause them to require psychiatric medication?
So many questions. Are you campaigning against billboards in your city? Do you avoid taking your kids to any business that has digital signage? I assume you completely abstain from all types of movies and TV? What about radio or books?
What are you, personally, doing on HN?
Fascinating.
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As somebody who is entirely for restrictions on internet / social media, I think you're missing the bigger picture here. First, you assume that parents have the technical knowhow to restrict their kids from specific sites. My parents used a lot of different tools when I was a kid, but between figuring out passwords, putting my fingerprint onto my mom's phone, and spoofing mac addresses, I always found a way around the restrictions so I could stay up later.
But let's assume the majority of parents can actually do this. The problem with social media is not an individual one! We've fallen into a Nash Equilibrium, a game theory trap where we all defect and use our phones. If you don't have a phone or social media nowadays you will have much more trouble socializing than those who do, even though everyone would be better off if nobody used phones. As a teenager, you don't want to be the only one without a phone or social media. And so I truly do think the only solution is with higher level coordination.
Now, it's possible that the government isn't the right organization to enforce this coordination. Unfortunately, we don't really have any other forms of community that work for this. People already get mad at HOA's for making them trim their lawn; imagine an HOA for blocking social media! I do think the idea of a community doing this would be great though, assuming (obviously) that it was easy to move on and out of, as well as local. This would also help adults!
So to be honest, I don't think parents have the individual power to fix this, even with their kids.
It's much easier to give individual users control over their own device than to give a centralized authority control over what happens on everyone's device over the Internet. Local user-controlled toggles are just easier to implement.
All parental moderation mechanisms can and should be implemented as opt-in on-device settings. What governments need to do is pressure companies to implement those on-device settings. And what we can do as open-source developers is beat them to the punch. Each parent will decide whether or not to use them. Some people will, some won't. It's not Bob's responsibility to parent Charlie's children. Bob and Charlie must parent their own children.
To the people arguing that parents are too dumb to control their children's tech usage because they themselves are tech-illiterate: millennia ago, we invented this new thing called fire. Most people were also "too dumb" to keep their children away from the shiny flames. People didn't know what it was or how dangerous it could be. So the tribe leader (who, by the way, gropes your children) proposed a solution: centralize control of all the fire. Only the tribe leader gets to use it to cook. Everyone else just needs to listen to him. Remember, it's all for you and your children's safety.
> we invented this new thing called fire [...] So the tribe leader (who, by the way, gropes your children) proposed a solution: centralize control of all the fire
Of all the things, a "save-the-children prolegomena to the Prometheus myth" certainly wasn't on my bingo card today. So thank you for that, but I'm not aware of any reports of fire-keeping in the way you've described. Societies and religions do have sacred traditions related to fire (like Zoroastrians) but that doesn't come with restrictions on practical use AFAIK.
I'll spell it out for you since you can't read between the lines. It's not actually about fire-keeping in tribes to protect children. It's about certain people (governments, corporations, organizations) wanting control over the Internet and everyone's digital communications. They don't want a free marketplace of ideas and uncensored channels of communication because their propaganda narratives would not survive.
The tribe leader refers to certain rich and powerful folks that have infiltrated governments and are running some of the largest businesses.
The fire refers to instant communication over the Internet. This relatively new technology has the potential to paralyze old power structures and reshape civilization. It's understandable why governments et al are panicking. They know their authority will wane under global free speech unless they do something.
Am I the only one that is repeatedly amused at how many smart people are just caving to making this about parents/children at all?
We've literally watched things unfold in real time out in the open in the last year I don't know how much more obvious it could be that child-protections are the bad-faith excuse the powers that be are using here. Combined with their control of broadcasting/social media, it's the very thing they're pushing narratives in lockstep over. All this to effectively tie online identities to real people. Quick and easy digital profiles/analytics on anyone, full reads on chat history assessments of idealogies/political affiliations/online activities at scale, that's all this ever was and I _know_ hackernews is smart enough to see that writing on the wall. Ofc porn sites were targeted first with legislation like this, pornography has always been a low-hanging fruit to run a smear campaign on political/idealogical dissidents. It wasn't enough, they want all platform activity in the datasets.
I can't help but feel like the longer we debate the merits of good parenting, the faster we're just going to speedrun losing the plot entirely. I think it goes without saying that no shit good parenting should be at play, but this is hardly even about that and I don't know why people take the time of day. It's become reddit-caliber discussion and everyone's just chasing the high of talking about how _they_ would parent in any given scenario, and such discussion does literally nothing to assess/respond to the realities in front of us. In case I'm not being clear, talking about how correct-parenting should be used in lieu of online verification laws is going to do literally nothing to stop this type of legislation from continually taking over. It's not like these discussions and ideas are going to get distilled into the dissent on the congressional floors that vote on these laws. It is in it's own way a slice of culture war that has permeated into the nerd-sphere.
I make this argument to neutralize the "protect the children" excuse and also delegitimize the age verification "solution" by pointing out that on-device settings are more effective and easier to implement yet rarely discussed.
There are some parents genuinely concerned with parenting. We should give them the tools to do that and thereby removing them from the discourse, then we can focus on the bad faith people that want more control. I think there are still enough well-meaning people in governments that if we popularize on-device settings, it will prevent age verification in at least a handful of countries, and that's good enough to keep the spark of the free Internet going until we figure out a more permanent solution.
> It's not like these discussions and ideas are going to get distilled into the dissent on the congressional floors that vote on these laws.
You think the idea of parents, not governments, being responsible for parenting doesn't translate well to voters? In the country founded on the idea of freedom from overreaching governance and personal responsibility?
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Individual Parents vs Meta Inc (1.66T mkt cap)
May the best legal person win!
Its more like age verification corporations, identity verification corporations, the child "safety" organizations that were lobbying for Chat Control versus individuals who want to protect their privacy.
The parents themselves weren't raised with the digital literacy required.
This doesn't put the parents off the hooks, if you or anyone can share any resources that are as easily consumable, viral and applicable as the content that is the issue that can reach parents I would be happy to help it spread.
The reality is kids today are facing the most advanced algorithms and even the most competent parents have a high bar to reach.
The solution is simple.
I want to permit whatever the pixels are on a childs screen. Full stop. That hasn't been solved for a reason. Because developing such a gate would work and not allow algorithms to reach kids directly and indirectly.
The alternative is not ideal, but until there's something better, what it will be and that's well proven for the mental health side of things of raising resilient kids who don't become troubled young adults - no need for social media, or touch screens until 10-13.
There are lots of ways to create with technology, and learning to use words (llms) and keyboards seems to increasingly have merit.
> "The parents themselves weren't raised with the digital literacy required."
At this point, that isn't true anymore. There was social media when the parents were school aged. The world didn't start when you were 10 and the Internet is a half century old.
I thought the same thing until someone asked me how many of them have been able to overcome digital addiction and set a path ahead that's healthy.
Being literate in something isn't just knowing how to use it, but how to manage it's use for one's self and for others.
Once you see the importance of it, knowing where/how to start to manage what kids are exposed to that is age or developmentally appropriate for them is entirely a different skill to meet and manage the digtial literacy of another human, especially a child.
> We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume.
The mistake in this reasoning is assuming that they are actually interested in protecting the children.
This.
The world is becoming increasingly more uncertain geopolitically. We have incipient (and actual) wars coming, and near term potential for societal disruption from technological unemployment. Meanwhile social media has all but completely undermined broadcast media as a means of social control.
This isn't about protecting children. It's about preventing a repeated of the Arab Spring in western countries later this decade.
"Think of the children" is the oldest trick in the book, and should always be met with skepticism.
The Arab Spring was caused by a tripling of food prices. I somehow doubt something similar will happen in the west. As for the rest, ignoring the population's concerns (by suppressing social media) is the best way to cause political violence. So I see blocking the governments desires to shape political discourse as saving the politicians from themselves.
GP isn't interested in protecting children either. Punishing parents harder does nothing to improve the lives of children — in fact it makes them much worse, because now they are addicted to Facebook and their parents are in jail. It just makes certain people feel morally righteous that someone got punished.
If you are interested in learning about the other perspective, you can watch some parents’ congressional testimony here https://youtu.be/y8ddg4460xc?si=-yYduYDppF4TQWqD.
The character.ai one is gut wrenching.
"We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume".
We'll try anything, it seems, other than hold internet companies accountable for the society destroying shit they publish.
And it's not jusy children who's lives they are destroying.
ITT are a lot* of tech workers who made their money as a cog in the system poisoning the internet that future generations would have to swim in. I wonder if toxic waste companies also tell the parents it's strictly on them to keep their kids out of the lakes that are poisoned, but once flowed cleanly?
We live in a shared world with shared responsibilities. If you are working on a product, or ever did work on a product, that made the internet worse rather than better, you have a shared responsibility to right that wrong. And parents do have to protect their kids, but they can't do it alone with how systematically children are targeted today by predatory tech companies.
Age verification tech companies are lobbying heavily for governments to legally require their services. The proposed "solutions" are about funneling money into the hands of other tech companies and shady groups, while violating user privacy.
If anything, we should be banning the collection of any age related information to access social media and more mature content. We need companies to respect privacy, rather than legislation even more privacy violations.
If anything, we should be preventing young people from being exposed to the version of the internet that currently exists until the tech companies that made it this way offer a solution. I am all ears if you have an alternative that big tech can implement to ensure this is the case while they are given the task of cleaning up the mess they've made?
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> then give parents strong monitoring and restriction tools and empower them to protect their children.
Because parents don’t abuse massive surveillance tools.
Given that most abuse happens in the family and by parents maybe it’s a bad idea to give them so much power
So we should trust the governments of the world? The same governments that don't seem to be doing anything about a large group of people that visited a specific island to abuse minors?
Where did I say that?
Exactly, nowhere.
If I‘m contra B, it doesn’t mean I pro A
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Children are clever. I think the deeper issue is that very few parents care enough to actually articulate the danger to their kids.
As a kid, my dad sat me down and explained how porn could destroy my life. It's not hard to get people to act in their own self interest once they know what's destructive for them.
The problem is that most parents don't even understand just how damaging social media is.
> then give parents strong monitoring and restriction tools and empower them to protect their children
I think this is the right way to solve the problem.
For example, I think websites should have a header or something that indicates a recommended age level, and what kinds of more mature content and interactions it has, so that filters can use that without having to use heuristics.
I agree with you that parents should be responsible, but your argument is clearly flawed.
> you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using
In the example here, there are 3 things where age verification is required AND parents have responsibility.
It’s not just one or the other.
The same responsibilities are not “thrown out”, they are never acknowledged in the first place.
>We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable
The government took over most parenting functions, one at a time, until the actual parent does or is capable of doing very little parenting at all. If the government doesn't like the fact that it has become the parent of these children, perhaps it shouldn't have undermined the actual parents these last 80 years. At the very least, it should refrain from usurping ever more of the parental role (not that there is much left to take).
You yourself seem to be insulated from this phenomena, maybe you're unaware that it is occurring. Maybe it wouldn't change your opinions even if you were aware.
>If you want to actually protect children
What if I don't want to protect children (other than my own) at all? Why would you want to be these children's parents (you suggest you or at least others want to "protect" them), which strongly implies that you will act in your capacity as government, but then get all grumpy that other people are wanting to protect children by acting in their capacity of government?
We should stop pretending these age-verification rollouts are about protecting children, because they aren't and never have been.
Even if the world was full of responsible parents, there are still people and groups that want to establish a surveillance state. These systems are focused on monitoring and tracking online activity / limiting access to those who are willing to sacrifice their own personal sovereignty for access to services.
There is most definitely a cult that is obsessed with the book of revelation and seeing Biblical prophecy fulfilled, and if that isn't readily obvious to folks at this juncture in time, I'm not sure what it will take. I guess they'll have to roll out the mark of the beast before people will be willing to admit it.
It's funny, all the bible wankers screamed about "the mark of the beast" over things like RealID. Now we have fascists setting up surveillance and censorship tools to tie speech and movement to centralized ID...and they're lining up to lick boots.
You should need to show ID and prove you're over 18 to enter a church. At least we know they're actually harmful to children.
The people pushing this are the same ones who are always screaming about "fascists". Also, your ideas in your post are anti-liberal and anti-constitutional (in the US).
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“One day I’ll own that boot…”
> We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume.
It’s not a fair fight. These are multi-billion dollar companies with international reach and decades of investment and research weaponized against us to make us all little addicts.
Additionally, it’s not fair or reasonable to ask parents to screen literally everything their kids do with a screen at all times any more than it was reasonable for your parents to always know what you were watching on TV at all times.
This is bootstraps/caveat emptor by a different name. It’s not “I want someone else to raise my kids.” It’s “the current state of affairs shouldn’t be so hostile that I have to maintain constant digital vigilance over my children.” Hell if you do people then lecture you about how “back in their day they played in the street and into the night” and call you a helicopter parent
You are screwed but not for the reason you claim. Its because you don't take any accountability for yourself. There is/was no hope for someone who does that at any point in human history. Is it fair? Nope...but it also doesn't mean you have 0 autonomy.
> You are screwed but not for the reason you claim. Its because you don't take any accountability for yourself.
That was an incredibly rude personal attack and completely unwarranted. You cannot talk to people like that here.
I won’t be discussing this with you further. Have a good rest of your week.
So when people try to take accountability in a democratic government, by changing the law to what they want through democratic means that suddenly is having no accountability for one's self?
Good lord, Silicon Valley must have lead pipes.
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As a parent blocking websights is a joy, maybe the rule should be to allow guardians more ability to control that. Trying to block some services is not trivial
As a human, I'd love to see the rest of you fools quit that. If HN ever starts to algorithm me I'll be gone too.
And as a bonus you can block your boomer parent's access to cnn and msnbc (or whatever its called now) and perhaps fox. It will make Thankgiving a lot more pleasant for all.
PS Mom, I don't know why cnn doesn't work anymore. ;)
If they live under my roof, it's my rules. Turn about is fair play.
As for news, the art of discovering what in your subjective reality exists in the objective reality is something I don't expect well ever get gud at.
I'm not Americans but isn't Fox the worst one out of those?
> holding parents accountable for what their children consume
There is a local dive bar down the street. I haven't expressly told my kids that entering and ordering an alcoholic drink is forbidden. In fact, that place has a hamburger stand out front on weekends and I wouldn't discourage my kids from trying it out if they were out exploring. I still expect that the bartender would check their ID before pulling a pint for them.
It takes a village to raise a child. There are no panopticons for sale the next isle over from car seats. We are doing our best with very limited tooling from the client to across the network (of which the tremendously incompetent schools make a mockery with an endless parade of new services and cross dependencies). It will take a whole of society effort to lower risks.
also there's a huge argument to be made that surveilling your kids is really really bad for their development
Yes, my spouse and I were very conscious of this. My kids are now at an age where some of the just-in-case tracking chafes and they ditch trackers and turn off location on their watch. Its a normal renegotiation that occurs as they pass through various maturity thresholds. The older of them has thusfar rejected phones and watches and uses Omarchy on an old Thinkpad.
That same argument doesn't hold water on the internet. Its a communication medium. Its like a flow of information. You don't enter or leave physically spaces. the information flows to you where ever you are. trying to apply the same kinds of laws to the internet is a recipe for disaster because you are effecting everyone at the same time.
Yes, afaik authentication is performed by applications at L7 and as such flows via Internet protocols like anything else.
All kinds of laws are applied to services provided via Internet. For example, once upon a time people said collecting sales tax was an insurmountable problem and a disaster for ecommerce. Time passes and what do you know, people figured out ways to comply with laws.
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It's very easy to lock up alcohol/cigarettes, a child should never have access. Internet usage is more like broadcast media, a child should have regular access.
The positives and negatives of Internet usage are more extreme than broadcast media but less than alcohol/guns. The majority of people lack the skills to properly censor Internet without hovering over the child's shoulder full-time as you would with a gun. Best you can do is keep their PC near you, but it's not enough.
We agree that a creepy surveillance nanny state is not the solution, but training parents to do the censorship seems unattainable. As we do for guns/alcohol/cigarettes, mass education about the dangers is a good baseline.
EDIT: And some might disagree about never having access to alcohol!
Devices such as phones come with an option when you start the device asking simply is this for a child or an adult. Your router generally these days comes with a parental filter option on start up too. Heck we have chatgpt that can guide a parent through setting up a system if they want something more custom.
If people want to push, they should just push to make these set up options more ubiquitous, obvious and standardized. And perhaps fund some advertising for these features.
Router parental filters are accountability sinks. They don't actually work, and they can't because we spent the last 20 years redesigning network protocols to prevent middle boxes from tampering with connections.
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This is where Apple, Microsoft and Android need to step up. Indeed they already have in many ways with things being better than they used to be.
There needs to be a strict (as in MDM level) parental control system.
Furthermore there needs to be a "School Mode" which allows the devices to be used educationally but not as a distraction. This would work far better than a ban.
I dunno man. IMHO, kids should not have access to devices of any kind until the brain develops. Im not sure what that number is, but lets say its 15. At that point, we as parents need to be role models and let kids make mistakes. There is this whole idea that if you focus too much on security, you open the door for increased risk. I feel this applies to this situation[0].
When I was a kid, when I reached a certain age, 13 I think, there was nothing my parents good could do to stop me from learning from my own mistakes. I think using blanket laws and tech to curb internet behavior is just going to backfire.
[0]: https://news.clemson.edu/the-safer-you-feel-the-less-safely-...
Microsoft has done a good job with Microsoft accounts and Microsoft Family Safety. It's about as user-friendly as you'll get outside of Apple, though the speed could be improved. And this only covers PCs, Android 's system is less good.
Even with this, the problem requires more than pushing a button. Time, thought, and adjustment are needed. Like home maintenance, its necessary but not everyone can do it without help.
Getting AI assistance is good advice.
They could provide all the tools in the world. Unless there’s legislation change to what children are allowed to consume legally, everyone will largely ignore it.
Ironically, the government that is pushing this only set a drinking age just a couple of years ago (as in the last 10 years). In case you believed this was actually about kids.
The speech that worked (mostly) on the children in my life involved the concept of 'cannot unsee', which they seemed to understand. There are some parallels to gun safety here because there are things that even the adults in your life try not to do and it seems perfectly reasonable to expect the same from children.
In fact being held to a standard that adults hold themselves to is frequently seen as a rite of passage. I'm a big girl now and I put on my big girl pants to prove it.
parents can be held liable for buying their kids cigarettes but, similarly, tobacco companies are (at least nominally) not supposed to target children in their advertising campaigns and in the design of their products.
It's obviously not a 1/1 comparison here, because providing ID to access the internet is not analogous to providing ID to purchase a pack of Cowboy Killers but we can extrapolate to a certain extent.
(inb4 DAE REGULATING FOR-PROFIT CORPORATIONS == NANNY STATE?!?!?!?!?)
None of this push has anything to do with protecting children. Never has, never will. Stop helping them push the narrative, it's making the problem WAY worse.
The thing is, what are the parents to do beyond restricting things? You find out some creep has been talking to Junior; do you talk to your local police department, state agency, or to the feds?
We've never properly acted upon reports of predators grooming children by investigating them, charging them, holding trials, and handing down sentences on any sort of large scale. There's a patchwork of LEOs that have to handle things and they have to do it right. Once the packets are sent over state lines, we have to involve the feds, and that's another layer.
Previously, I would have said it's up to platforms like Discord to organize internal resources to make sure that the proper authorities received reports, because it felt like there were instances of people being reported and nothing happening on the platform's side. Now, given recent developments, I'm not sure we can count upon authorities to actually do the job.
Back in the day you would beat up that person.
> The thing is, what are the parents to do beyond restricting things?
Well, I can't speak for parents (as in all parents). I can, however, tell you what we did.
When two of my kids were young we gave them iPods. The idea was to load a few fun educational applications (I had written and published around 10 at the time). Very soon they asked for Clash of Clans to play for a couple of hours on Saturdays. We said that was OK provided they stuck to that rule.
Fast forward to maybe a couple of months later. After repeated warnings that they were not sticking to the plan and promises to do so, I found them playing CoC under the blankets at 11 PM, when they were supposed to be sleeping and had school the next day.
I did not react and gave no indication of having witnessed that.
A couple of days later I asked each of them to their room and asked them to place their top ten favorite toys on the floor.
I then produced a pair of huge garbage bags and we put the toys in them, one bag for each of the kids.
I also asked for their iPods.
No anger, no scolding, just a conversation at a normal tone.
I asked them to grab the bags and follow me.
We went outside, I opened the garbage bin and told them to throw away their toys. It got emotional very quickly. I also gave them the iPods and told them to toss them into the bin.
After the crying subsided I explained that trust is one of the most delicate things in the world and that this was a consequence of them attempting to deceive us by secretly playing CoC when they knew the rules. This was followed by daily talks around the dinner table to explain just how harmful and addictive this stuff could be, how it made them behave and how important it was to honor promises.
Another week later I asked them to come into the garage with me and showed them that I had rescued their favorite toys from the garbage bin. The iPods were gone forever. And now there was a new rule: They could earn one toy per month by bringing top grades from school, helping around the house, keeping their rooms clean and organized and, in general, being well behaved.
That was followed by ten months of absolutely perfect kids learning about earning something they cherished every month. Of course, the behavior and dedication to their school work persisted well beyond having earned their last toy. Lots of talks, going out to do things and positive feedback of course.
They never got the iPods back. They never got social media accounts. They did not get smart phones until much older.
To this day, now well into university, they thank me for having taken away their iPods.
So, again, I don't know about parents in the aggregate, but I don't think being a good parent is difficult.
You are not there to be an all-enabling friend, you are there to guide a new human through life and into adulthood. You are there to teach them everything and, as I still tell them all the time, aim for them to be better than you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99j0zLuNhi8
This reads like something I'd find on /r/LinkedInLunatics, all the way down to the one-sentence/thought-per-line formatting.
My parents took the same approach and it helped, but I will anecdotally point out that kids have played video games under covers for a while, even when I was young, I remember getting in trouble for playing this spyro game n' watch clone from mcdonalds at night, or gameboy with one of those lamps that plugged into the serial port. When I become a parent, I think I'd feel understanding of something like this, but would likely still only give them access to hardware like cell-enabled apple watches or DSes. The issue I take with modern games like CoC is that they are psychologically engineered to be mentally harmful, and push you to spend real money on fake things. I've seen many peers who were engaged in CoC as kids get into online gambling and sports gambling recently, it doesn't sit right.
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The issue with any parent's narrative, including yours, is that it's one-sided. We'd need the story told by the children-turned-adults to make any fair judgement. Some people are going to say what their family wants them to hear and only open up to professionals or a neutral third party.
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> I explained that trust is one of the most delicate things in the world
> lies to own children about throwing their toys away
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>> In the United States, you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using, yet somehow, the same social responsibility seems thrown out the window for parents and the web.
So anyone can walk into a shop and purchase these things unrestricted? It's not the responsibility of the seller too?
Tobacco, yes you can order pipe tobacco and cigars online sent to your house without ID.
Guns yes, you can buy a schmidt-rubin cartridge rifle or black powder revolver sent straight to your home from an online (even interstate) vendor no ID or background check, perfectly legal.
Alcohol yes, you can order wine straight to your house without ID.
These are all somewhat less known "loopholes" but not really turned out to be a problem despite no meaningful controls on the seller. You probably didn't even know about these loopholes, actually -- that's how little of a problem it's been.
You can expect the individual to compensate for a poorly structured society all you want.
> you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using
You can only expect so much from individual responsibility. At some point you need to structure society to compensate for the inevitable failures that occur.
> They are in a much better and informed position to do so than a creepy surveillance nanny state.
I'd rather live in a nanny state than ever trust american parenting. We've demonstrated a million times over that that doesn't work and produces even more fucked up people and abused children.
If your goal is to "save the children", then sure, we can discuss this... if your goal, as a government, is to have everyone get some digital ID and tie their online identities to their real names, then you do just that.
The expectations on parents in USA are at their historical high. What are you talking on about in here. The expectation that parents will perfectly supervise them at every moment of their life till their adulthood is a.) new b.) at its historical max.
If we expect Parents to treat Social Media like other unhealthy, dangerous, and highly addictive products, then that can never start with "just expect ignorant parents to all magically start doing something difficult, for no real reason".
It starts by banning kids from the internet, entirely. It starts with putting age restrictions on who can buy internet connected devices. It starts by arresting parents and teachers who hand pre-literacy kids an always-online iPad. It starts with an overwhelming propaganda campaign: Posters, Commercials, After-School Specials, D.A.R.E. officers, red ribbon week.
Then, ultimately, it still finishes with an age-gated internet where every adult is required to upload their extremely valuable personal information to for-profit companies, for free (With the added weight of being forced to agree to extreme ToS, like arbitration agreements).
So what do we do? I agree that the age of entry to the internet should match other vices (currently 21+ in the US, although really that should probably be 18+)...
It will never be acceptable for a single country's police state to extend across international borders, so... we just ban all of the UK and Australia from every web service until they get withdrawals and promise to stay nice? That could be a start.
But this whole situation in like 'freedom of speech' once you start picking and choosing what counts as "acceptable" speech, then suddenly you lose everything. You literally can't make everyone happy, because everything subjective is open to contradiction - and because there are freaks in the world who will never be satisfied by anything less than a complete global ban of everything.
Who gets a say? Do the Amish get to tell us what we are allowed to do? Where do you draw the line? You can't. Completely open is the only acceptable choice. But I still vote we start publicly mocking the parents who give their kids an ipad, and treat them like they just gave that kid a cigarette. Because seriously, they're ruining that kid.
I've already thought about it from the US's perspective and here's my path forward.
If government does not want kids to have access to the naughty bits of the internet but thinks there's something worth sharing with children then the government should provide a public internet for kids and THATS the site that will ask for a login known to belong to a kid. We already do public schooling with public funding and we do not let rando adults sit in classrooms with kids and they get a school id. Boot <18's off the public internet AT THE SOURCE when internet connectivity is PURCHASED / CONTRACTED FOR with a valid adult id / proof of age, but allow them vpn access into whatever the government thinks the child should have access to, like the schools page, I would say online encyclopedias or wikipedia type things but I'm not sure if government wants children to read about the variety of so many different things on this planet we're sorta trapped on and lets face it, restricting communications of the kids to points outside the control of parents is exactly what the government is complaining about, the government does not want kids to have free access to information.
Think of a phone or tablet that can only access the network through either a proxy or vpn but otherwise locked down. It certainly seems like it doesn't require much programming, heck have trump vibe code it for all I care.
I mean yeah, parents could just teach their kids the tough stuff because thats how it used to work anyways, well that and the libraries and schools but those can be pruned of bad books and bad teachers at the request of government anyways right? The kids could also be interviewed periodically by government to inventory what topics they have discussed with their parents to weed out the 't' or 'g' words.
I mean yeah I don't see a place for facebook in that intranet but isn't that sort of the point, we all know big social media will be incentivised to promote engagement with less regard for safety, so why do kids need facebook anyways? The instagrams and ticktalks are worse although maybe government should make a child friendly ticktalk type school social network, call it trumps school for kids for all I care, folks in power right now and a significant part of the US believe that trump knows whats good for kids right?
I mean obviously the libraries have to be REALLY REALLY cleaned up but thats just a detail. But why are parents forcing internet wierdos onto their kids with these smartphones / porno studios in their pockets? What do they think chester the molester on ticktalk is gonna have the kid upload their id? even if he does, do we really want that? c'mon man
> We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume.
The way to keep kids from eating (yummy) lead-based paint chips was not holding parents accountable to what their kids ate, but banning lead-based paint.
The richest brightest minds of our generation all being motivated towards one addictive goal, and we'll just put the responsibility on the parents...I think society can collectively do better.
I'm 40. Do I need to get my parents to vouch for me? Who vouches for them?
> then give parents strong monitoring and restriction tools
As written, this sounds very glib. I cannot take this comment seriously without a game theory scenario with multiple actors.
The difference with guns, tobacco and alcohol is huge: all negatives aside, giving kids what they want makes the life of a parent so much easier. Take it away and many parents will fight. Sugar is in the same game.
This tired argument again. It doesn’t work. It’s like keeping your kid from buying alcohol but all their friends are allowed to buy it. The whole age demographic has to be locked out of the ecosystem.
Well, yes. If your friends can all go 'round to David's house, where David's parents hand each child a case of beer and send them on their way, any attempt by the other parents to prohibit underage drinking is going to be ineffective. But most parents don't do that. (I've actually never heard of it.) So social solutions involving parent consensus clearly do work here.
"But it's behavioural!" I hear you cry. "What's stopping children from going out, buying a cheap unlocked smartphone / visiting their public library / hacking the parental control system, and going on the internet anyway?" And that's an excellent objection! But, what's stopping children from playing in traffic?
Yeah but it’s illegal for the parents to give the other kids beer with serious criminal repercussions. That’s why most people make sure it doesn’t happen, not just some social sense of reponsibility. You would need something similar for smartphones/social media.
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Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it isn't common. Parents take different approaches. I had some friends parents who preferred we did it in their house where they could maintain some level of safety than us drinking recklessly in field. Others thought providing some beers was better than us buying the cheapest vodka available. And I'm sure other parents wouldn't have liked this approach if they knew about it.
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Blaming parents is a bit unwarranted, when on the other end we have business interests driven by perverse incentives of predating on children’s gullibility for their own profit.
When you say “We‘ll try everything” that is simply not true, in particular what we do not try is strict consumer protection laws which prohibits targeting children. Europe used to have such laws in the 1980s and the 1990s, but by the mid-1990s authorities had all but stopped enforcing them.
We have tried consumer protection, and we know it works, but we are not trying it now. And I think there is exactly one reason for that, the tech lobby has an outsized influence on western legislators and regulators, and the tech industry does not want to be regulated.
It is literally the parents responsibility. You want to blame someone else. Raising a kid doesn't mean letting society raise them you have to make tough choices.
If parents can't handle that they can give them up to the state.
I am not gonna blame parents while businesses are allowed to target children with ads about the newest mobile game. Children are very easy to influence, and this is exploited heavily by the tech industry, who shower children with advertising. This is predatory behavior, which the legislator and the regulator of western governments (including Europe) has allowed to proliferate.
We cannot expect every parent to be able to protect their children when they are being predated on by dozens of multi-million dollar companies, and the state is on the side of the companies.
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It is literally a platform's responsibility to make sure they are being used responsibly, as well?
Imagine a gun range that was well aware that their grounds were being used in nefarious ways. We'd shut it down. A hospital that just blindly gave out pain killers to anyone that asked. We'd shut it down.
Does this mean that a zero tolerance policy is what should be used to shut things down? I don't think so. We have some agency to control things, though.
Should we allow kids to get cigarettes? Cocaine? Should all parents "just" be better parents and problem solved?
The greatest of uphill battles in today's current climate is trying to push anything in the realm of personal responsibility.
Politicians' whole basis for nearly every campaign is "you're helpless, let us fix it for you."
For the vast majority of problems plaguing society, the answer isn't government, it's for people changing their behavior. Same goes for parenting.
But unfortunately, "you're an adult, figure it out" isn't the greatest campaign slogan (if you want to win).
It wasn’t always this way: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country”
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you can’t blame it on parents alone, but the odds are stacked against children and their parents, there are very smart people whose income depends on making sure you never leave your black mirror
the surveillance state is possible, achievable, and a few coordination games away from deployment with backing from a majority who should know better
inertia kills, I dunno
We'll do everything, it seems, other than holding billionairs accountable for what their businesses consume.
Yes, children are clever - I was one once.
A counterargument to your point that children are clever - I was also one once.
Except companies provide wholly inadequate safeguards and tools. They are buggy, inconsistent, easily circumvented, and even at time malicious. Consumers should be better able to hold providers accountable, before we start going after parents.
The only real solution is to keep children off of the internet and any internet connected device until they are older. The problem there is that everything is done on-line now and it is practically impossible to avoid it without penalizing your child.
If social media and its astroturfers want to avoid outright age bans, they need to stop actively exploiting children and accept other forms of regulation, and it needs to come with teeth.
How easy is it for kids to bypass Parental Controls on iOS devices?
Social engineering is the most effective strategy, because iOS screen time controls are so buggy that eventually parents throw up their hands in exasperation and enable broader access than they would otherwise choose.
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When everything is turned off by default, iOS Screentime is very effective. It also has effective tools for to grant certain exceptions, facilitated by Messages. It also distinguishes between "daytime" and "downtime" for the purpose of certain apps and app attributes, like the contact list. For example, we have ourselves, grandparents and the neighbors as "all the time" contacts but their friends as daytime only. They don't retain their devices at night but it is possible for them to pull them from the charging cabinet.
> Except companies provide wholly inadequate safeguards and tools. They are buggy, inconsistent, easily circumvented, and even at time malicious. Consumers should be better able to hold providers accountable, before we start going after parents.
We could mandate that companies that market the products actually have to deliver effective solutions.
Cue blog posts about section 230 and how it’s impossible to do hard things and parents should be held accountable not companies, meager fines, captured bureaucrats, libertarians, and on and on…
Yes, but how on earth is their malicious compliance at providing parental controls a good reason to go for the surveillance state that hurts absolutely everyone?
Social media operators love the surveillance state idea. That's why they aren't pushing against this.
I even cancelled YT Premium because their "made for kids" system interfered with being able to use my paid adult account. I urge other people to do the same when the solutions offered are insufficient.
Step 0 is physical device access. Kids shouldn't have tablets or smartphones or personal laptops before age 16.
16 is a bit steep but I do generally agree with your sentiment. I wish there were more educational home computers like there were back in the day like the BBC micro. I have a startup idea to make something like that (mostly as a dumping ground for my plethora of OS-software and computer education ideas) but don't currently have the resources and have doubts on how successful something like that would even be in this day and age. I'm only 18ish (Not giving my actual age for privacy reasons but it's within a 5 year margin) and feel like my peers would rather be locked to platforms and consume than learn to create and actually use computers despite there being a very obvious need (I once had a 20 year old look at me like I had 2 heads for asking them to move something into a folder)
> Kids shouldn't have tablets or smartphones or personal laptops before age 16.
If you make such a restriction, they'll secretly buy some cheap "unrestricted" device like some Raspberry Pi (just like earlier generations bought their secret "boob magazines").
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This is the craziest thing I’ve heard in a while. They shouldn’t have connected game systems either?
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I hope they do pass a law like that, because it'd give my kids a gigantic advantage over the kids who had no access modern technology and the free flow of information until the age of 16. If you want to leave your kids completely unable to find any kind of gainful employment in the AI era, be my guest.
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I bet not many of us would be here now if we hadn't had our own computers before age 16.
Today's young people are already technologically retarded (in the literal sense) and barely know how to use Microsoft Word or navigate with a file explorer, this would make the problem significantly worse.
The vast majority of parents aren't tech-savvy enough to be able to operate IT parental controls.
What is your proposed recourse for me as a parent if your kid shows my kid gore videos?
What is your recourse if his kid gives yours a bottle of whisky?
Young kids carrying whisky on the school grounds isn’t really a threat where I live.
But to answer your question directly - kids having whisky and I can go after whoever sold/provided it to them using existing legal means if I think it serious enough.
Excellent example of low effort cookie cutter empty rhetoric that would fit perfectly in reddit.
We live in a technofeudalist society now, we're all at the whims of the tech corps
age verification doesn't work in favor of a tech corp like facebook as they will see some users leave, some because they don't have the age required and some because they don't want to do the verification
its like the food industry blaming parents, sugar like apps/games are designed to be addictive to the point they are act like a drug, stop the drug dealer, not the consumer.
don't you have to age verify to get alcohol? We don't leave that up to the parents. Feels like you defeated your own argument with your examples.
The internet is not an object, its a communication medium. That is an apples to organges argument, it doesn't wash.
incorrect. Same principle at play, you want access to something, that thing is age restricted, the vendor of the thing wants you to provide proof of age.
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What? Are there billion dollar companies with huge staffs who are constantly trying to figure out how to sneak my child a gun all the time, at school, wherever they go?
I'd say this comparison is good -- we as a society have decided that people who provide alcohol, guns, and cigarettes are responsible if children are provided them. You don't get to say 'hey, you didn't watch your child, they wandered into my shop, I sold to them 2 liters of vodka and a shotgun'.
Do you have kids?
It’s weird that you blame the victim.
The real question is why do we leave it to parents or intrusive surveillance instead of holding companies accountable?
> We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume.
You've missed the point. No legislator or politician cares about what the parents are doing.
What they care about is gaining greater control of people's data to then coerce them endlessly (with the assitance of technology) into acting as they would liike. To do that, they need all that info.
"The children" is the sugar on the pill of de-anonymised internet.
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Ah, the abstinence theory of protection. How it continues to rear its ugly head.
Why this utter drivel is the top comment is beyond me, unbelievable.
That is not what the post you are replying to is advocating for at all - try reading it one more time without so much hostility
Can you offer some rebuttal to give some credence to your point?
A physical realm that is safe for children to explore in their own is clearly preferable to one where it’s transgressive to let a child go outside without an escort.
It is plausible that the same applies to the digital realm.