Comment by tasuki
1 day ago
> My stance is that if somebody is a minor, his/her/their parents/tutors/legal guardian are responsible for what they can/cannot do online
As a parent, sure, that is my stance as well. What... what other stances are there even? How would they work?
The steelman argument is that parents are not necessarily up to date on the technology, and cannot reasonably be expected to supervise teenagers 24/7 up to the age of 18. Compare movie ratings or alcohol laws, for example: there's a non-parental obligation on third parties not to provide alcohol to children or let them in to R18 showings.
But the implementation matters, and almost all of these bills internationally are being done in bad faith by coordinated big-money groups against technologically illiterate and reactionary populist governments.
(if we really want to get into an argument, there's what the UK calls "Gillick competence": the ability of children to seek medical treatment without the knowledge and against the will of their parents)
In the UK parents can give children alcohol below the age of 18. parents get to make the final decision at home so I do not think its really comparable.
I would personally favour allowing parents to buy drinks for children below the current limits (18 without a meal, 16 for wine, beer and cider with a meal).
The alternative to this is empowering parents by regulating SIM cards (child safe cards already exist) and allowing parents to control internet connectivity either through the ISP or at the router - far better than regulating general purpose devices. The devices come with sensible defaults that parents can change.
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That steelman still stands on a core assumption that its both the state's responsibility and right to step in and parent on everyone's behalf.
Maybe a majority of people today agree with that, but I know I don't and I never hear that assumption debated directly.
The point of having a state at all is to create a framework where people are set up to succeed.
5 replies →
Then frankly you haven’t seen many debates around age verification as it’s the main thing discussed every time it’s brought up
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> I never hear that assumption debated directly.
The idea of the "nanny state" has been debated a lot, and this seems like a very literal example of that. But once some status quo is firmly entrenched, debate about it tends to die down because the majority of people no longer care enough about it.
The other stance is that most parents are not capable of winning a battle against tech giants for the mind of their children, just as parents were not capable of winning this fight with tobacco and alcohol companies.
The tech giants want this. They drafted the bill. They paid tens of millions of dollars to promote it. Think about that for a minute.
They want it because it absolves them of responsibility for what their app does to kids. They can then just point to the existence of an already working mechanism for parents to intervene. The alternative would be for each app to implement stringent age verification or redesign itself to avoid addictive patterns. Neither option is good for their earnings.
If this had anything to do with reigning in tech giants, it would be done for adults as well, without restricting anyone's rights (well, aside from the people-corporations' of course). The issues are the manipulative algorithmic datafeeds, advertising, and datamining. Age verification does nothing for any of this and only provides the tech giants and governments the means to secure even more control over people.
ignore parent, outsource parenting to gov verification authority
TBH many parents done exactly that by giving phones/tablet already to kids in strollers
The latter is true, but we cannot regulate the vast majority of parents on the basis of the worst.