Comment by runarberg
3 days ago
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.
> I am not gonna blame parents while businesses are allowed to target children with ads about the newest mobile game.
Those kids shouldn't even have a mobile device to play said game. That's where the parents can, and should, make a difference: don't let your kid even have a smartphone in the first place.
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>Children are very easy to influence, and this is exploited heavily by the tech industry, who shower children with advertising
The parents' job is to say no. If they're letting themselves be influenced too, that's bad parenting.
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> "to target children with ads about the newest mobile game"
They aren't. The target for those games are middle aged, "middle class" women. Especially childless women. You just don't realize that the loud sounds and bright colors appeal to another demographic other than children. Usually those games are terrible for (as in the children don't like them) children. Its because those are usually pay to win games and adults can just out-spend them (and the adults are often terrible winners).
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.