Comment by atollk
11 hours ago
I know many people dislike this movement but really, I think it's a good idea. Yes, it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago, but that's gone already anyway. Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me.
I see both children and adults being manipulated by corporations with "algorithms". Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
> but really, I think it's a good idea.
> Yes, it removes the "free" internet
> Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access
Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
The internet I grew up on was all about freedom and resisting the police state. Now the top voted comment (at least at time of me responding) is an open-arms welcoming of the internet police state and voicing support for removal of the free internet?
How did people become so naive to believe that this will benefit them? That the regulations are only going to impact kids who use the “bad sites” and not start reaching for your group chat rooms and your social news sites, too?
Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit, YouTube, and other sites, too? It's right there in the article. Think about how this has to be enforced: The only way to guarantee under-16s are banned from these sites is to force everyone to produce ID. You think it's a good idea to force us all to produce ID to watch YouTube videos or read a post on Reddit? This is what you want?
I'm stunned when people can't reason about a tradeoff between two principles because they assigned infinite weight to one of them.
Police state=bad. Industrial scale drug addiction in kids=also bad. Some compromise must be made.
The slippery slope arguments do nothing. People are trying to solve this problem; trying to scare them with other problems they may have later--which they can solve separately!--is just irrelevant noise.
We're bringing it up because it's not being mentioned and we think it's important.
I that once freedom of speech and freedom to communicate and freedom to decent are gone they are gone for good.
I dislike very much that politicians like Peter Kyle and Jess Philips have tried to shut down dissenting voices by comparing them to paedophiles or saying this is just about access to porn.
I'm really angry about this. I don't want to live in a "nanny state" and will probably end up voting for a party I otherwise dislike just get this crap repealed.
Labour, Tories and Greens don't seem to care about personal freedom. I do and I'm fed having politicians and journalists that don't listen to me.
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Destroying freedom isn't a fucking compromise. If algorithmic feeds are as bad as say, heroin, then the correct response is to regulate or ban them. You're arguing for the Internet version of legalising heroin and installing a physical surveillance state to target the addicts, it's absolute fucking insanity.
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Assigning infinite weight to one factor or consideration is sort of the definition of fanaticism, yes?
The monopoly on violence is trying to solve this problem, that's a bigger problem.
> I'm stunned when people can't reason about a tradeoff between two principles because they assigned infinite weight to one of them.
I couldn't tell if this post was satire at first read.First it complains about not weighting tradeoffs, then it follows up with a demand that we ignore the tradeoffs as noise and just push through with the regulations.
You see the irony, right? You're stunned that people can't weigh tradeoffs, then you switch to dismissing tradeoffs as noise:
> People are trying to solve this problem; trying to scare them with other problems they may have later--which they can solve separately!--is just irrelevant noise.
Considering the second order and higher order consequences of regulations is the entire point.
You're just waving them all away with an assumption that they will be solved in the future.
Trying to shut down discussion about the consequences of government action as noise is scary. We've reached levels of moral panic that people like you are happy to close your eyes to any consequences and insist we let the government take control and do whatever they want right now, without considering the consequences.
It's terrifying that people think this way.
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It's interesting that we suddenly can't regulate anything because of "freedom" and "speech" and it just happens to align perfectly with big tech interests.
The whole freedom and speech shit online is starting to feel like a big lie we have been sold so that big tech can just get richer.
Hey, if it's irrelevant noise then why are you crying about it?
Anyway, to make it the UK's problem even more, I will be doing what I can to eliminate the UK's traffic to as many services as possible. I have no interest in supporting the small island or it's people or their great red coat firewall.
Enjoy your wall.
> Police state=bad. Industrial scale drug addiction in kids=also bad. Some compromise must be made.
False. The whole point of fundamental rights is that they aren’t compromised on based on outcomes.
“Torture is bad, but not being able to get information out of criminals is also bad. Some compromise must be made.” That’s just not how it works, is it?
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Over time it's become harder and harder to deny how bad some aspects of the internet are for people, especially for young people. Whether it's right or wrong it's not shocking that people are more willing than ever to entertain the idea of internet restrictions.
I'd dig deeper on the problem though. More fundamentally, laws like this are based on the fundamental assumption that both children and their parents can't make good decisions and that the state must instead force the right decisions on them.
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“Suddenly”? Remember all the “net neutrality” bullshit years ago that was all about begging the government to regulate the Internet? This has been going on since the early 00s probably. If you’re old enough to remember the 90s and earlier Internet then yes, it’s a strange thing to see, but that ship has sailed, circumnavigated the globe, and been decommissioned.
OG internet was not swarming with multibillion dollar predators ready to exploit every single psychological trick to manipulate you for profit. If you can solve this, i welcome the OG internet to be free and open place to share ideas. Let me know your suggestions.
The mistake is thinking that regulation and removing the free internet is going to harm those corporations you dislike and leave the smaller sites untouched.
The more regulations are added, the harder it is for anyone other than the multibillion dollar corporations to set up the infrastructure needed to comply.
That small forum you visit and the chat space you hang out in have to geo block your entire region because their operator can’t take on the legal risk of accidentally violating one of the laws. You are, however, free to move the group to Facebook and continue your group chat on Discord after submitting to the ID verification process of both sites, however. Those are the sanctioned safe spaces that have teams of lawyers and developers ensuring compliance with the laws.
This is the future many here are inviting. They don’t see it that way because they’re imagining laws that say “Kids can’t use Facebook” but the actual laws are going to be written to say “Social sites that host user generated content must ensure that all users are over the age of…”
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And not just that, these networks are becoming a conduit for all kind of disturbed people to invade the privacy of kids and pollute their world, sometimes convincing them to harm themselves, including suicide. Let's face it, as the internet has become more and more accessible to just about anybody, needing to police the space was bound to become inevitable.
It doesn't surprise me at all. At least in the US, both major political parties fully embrace censorship and a police state. Sure the disagree on the details, but they agree pretty universally on the direction.
I believe this is the outcome of technocracy. Technocrats need power, they need a strong police to enforce their legislation, and they need censorship to maintain a narrative. It's a deeply authoritarian ideology, and it's infected much of the western world.
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Because it’s a lesser evil, at least in the UK, which has a reasonably well functioning government and society.
As much as it pains me, I’d rather have that than the brain rot being forced on young kids. And you can argue all you want about “parental control”, but there are too many parents who don’t care, plus peer pressure is a real thing.
I also think that at that age all the social media sites are a net negative.
> Because it’s a lesser evil, at least in the UK, which has a reasonably well functioning government and society.
You wrote this in jest, right, right?
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>Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
There is certainly an angle where people are fed up with the current state of things.
But generally speaking, the overall HN has been trending towards anti-free-internet and embracing the police state for a long time. I am pretty sure people can run an LLM on HN comments over the years.
> Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
I suspect it's because people of our generation (I'm assuming) grew up with similar experiences to ours and had kids, and want to protect them. To be fair it's worse now than when we were growing up; I can't imagine how awful it must be to grow up in the age of social media.
Why do you think we lost free internet right now? In my opinion we lost it when all corporations switched to mass surveilance. Now we just stop pretending that social media corporations are not responsible for anything.
There are very likely people who's work is to shill... Also here... If not influencing editors of entire sites even. But they are only needed until it becomes full though crime to even think outside of newspeak ;)
> Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit
Reddit is a cesspool and an example of how we're in a post-peak internet like the OP says. If you actually browse Reddit the way the vast majority of people do now (i.e. not Old Reddit that masks the decline), it's crazy engagement-farming patterns everywhere, and not much of a community any more when many comments are hidden by default.
Most people today just like to fire off one-sentence comments; if you seek substantial discussion, you'll often now stand out as a weirdo on the spectrum, and may even draw downvotes and "lol wall of text bro" comments.
Yes, I follow close-knit little subs off the main page. There has been a flow of users away to WhatsApp groups, of all things -- it's that bad.
Let's look at an actual case study of a police state.
I think we can agree that a state-controlled paramilitary force executing a political opponent in broad daylight, on camera, is pretty far along the "police state" spectrum, right? This kind of thing is entirely incompatible with freedom, and should be a wake up call for the civil society to weed out anything that led to that, root and branch.
Enter the execution of Alex Pretti. Days after it happened, it transformed into yet another partisan issue, a topic for discussion, something that can possibly be justified. Effectively, it was normalised on the social and classic media. Media that, in the US, are pretty "free" [].
Negative freedoms are insufficient to stop a police state. What stops the police state is political engagement and regulation, and that requires a more nuanced understanding than just "either free of regulation or embracing the police state".
: …for moneyed interests to control and influence. For all their problems, I'd argue that BBC is substantially freer than say Fox News.
it takes very little effort from those who control the media to turn terminally online cattle for/against anything, because they are almost completely uncritical of their side of the establishment. pander to them 95% of the time, and you can use the remaining 5% to push whatever agenda you like.
among the least controversial things I can give as an example without getting silently downvoted and flagged, would you have ever imagined that particular demographic demanding draconian copyright laws? yet, here we are, copyright is good now.
As an engineer, I tend to view solutions in terms of tradeoffs and not absolutes. 20 years ago the free and open internet was great. Now I think we’ve gone too far. And more to the point, I think freedom is protected by regulation, not by handing decisions over to whatever billionaire won a cage match.
This is the gen-x part of my xennial talking, but I can’t help but feel like something has been lost when nothing is transgressive anymore. Some people look back and say how can a gen x’er who fought against censorship be so pro censorship now.
A lot of people say this is dumb because teenagers will figure out a way to bypass it. Good! That’s what teenagers are supposed to do. I think there’s a sort of weird like - there’s something distopian about Elon Musk putting his stamp of approval on using edgy racial slurs on social media. If you’re young and want to make edgy jokes. It’s supposed to be transgressive! It’s _not_ supposed to get Elon Musk’s stamp of approval.
I don’t want to send anyone to jail for bypassing these laws or saying the wrong thing. It’s a hard needle to thread, but we need a code of conduct so people can make a choice to break it. So people can create alternate websites to the big social media companies. We need institutions without so much power so they can be jailbroken. And government is just plainly not the only powerful institution I fear.
> A lot of people say this is dumb because teenagers will figure out a way to bypass it. Good! That’s what teenagers are supposed to do.
So the teenagers bypass it and use other sites while us adults are handing our IDs over just to use basic websites?
How is this good?
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I feel like you only picked the parts from my comment you cited and then decided to ignore the rest. I specifically explained WHY I am in favor of those aspects you question.
Yes, it is what I want. Would it be, in an ideal world? No. But we don't live in that world, we live in reality. You only focus on the positive aspects of the internet and frame it that way. Try this one instead:
Do you not realize that you are being brainwashed by billionaires? Companies abuse your mind, track your behavior, collect your data, all to exploit you. They want to you to become addicted, to waste your entire life consuming their content, to become antisocial and alone.
This is our current reality. So, yes, if the cost is that the goverment knows who I am while browsing to remove all of that from our lives again, it would be what I want.
The internet as it is sucks in no uncertain terms.
While I dislike some of those regulations, I have no will to fight for the status quo.
> Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit, YouTube, and other sites, too?
Consider that I have a profound hatred for both YouTube and Reddit.
Why should I care?
Because we've been conditioned to believe that every good thing harbors a dark and sinister secret, that every attempt at improving our situation contains a fatal flaw.
It's a narrative trope, not real life. Come back to reality. It's what Omelas was trying to convey.
The posters account is 89 days old, it's a shill.
Why shocked? When the internet got popular and the normies started flooding in the culture of the internet changed.
I’m more shocked in how authoritarian so-called “liberals” have gotten in the last 3 decades. I have to specify I’m a “classical” liberal now in order to not appear as if I desire a police state.
> The internet I grew up on was all about freedom and resisting the police state.
I grew up on that internet too (the freedom part). Do you really believe it is the same internet now?
Gone are the days when one could run their own mail server now because Apple or Google or Microsoft can suddenly deem it as "untrustworthy" or "suspicious" (based on some algorithm) and all your email will end up in spam. IRC and newsgroups have been hijacked by centralised Messengers and Social Media firms run by BigTech. They can ban you on these platforms for no reasons, without much recourse, holding your digital life hostage. Last year, I learnt that the much vaunted "free speech" no longer exists online - I have to fight and waste time with everyone - from the moderators to the platform "community managers" - to publish any factual pro-palestine or anti-Israli-right posts because these are being heavily censored on all western platforms (and unfortunately all English language communities are western platforms). Election manipulations by foreign platforms are also another danger every sovereign nations now faces.
> How did people become so naive to believe that this will benefit them?
So I wouldn't say that people are being "naive". We don't want to live in an "echo chamber" controlled by western or Chinese BigTech corporates and their ideas of techno-fascism. Not to mention that we really cannot ignore any more the societal and political impact of some of these platforms - Facebook / Whatsapp are responsible for causing many social unrest around the world and even genocide (How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho... ).
The negative psychological impact of social media addiction is so obvious even in adults. So imagine how much worse it is on kids / teens - it truly would be irresponsible to not regulate it.
> That the regulations are only going to impact kids who use the “bad sites” and not start reaching for your group chat rooms and your social news sites, too?
Oh, very true! That is something to be very wary of. And the answer to that is to also fight for stronger privacy regulations and prevent government overreach. Not trust the government or the corporates to behave.
Here, you will have to understand and accept that unlike in America, where mistrust of government is inherent in the political structure (the US Presidential system favoured a weak central government because the makers were distrustful of a powerful Federal government) is very much in contrast to other parts of the world. Europeans expect and have more trust in their governments to regulate some aspects of their society, while the rest of the world prefers a "strong" Central government (and thus it is expected that the government will regulate many aspects of society). That is something fundamentally different vis American politics vs the rest of the world, that perhaps befuddles Americans.
In a democracy though, I don't see anything wrong in "trusting" your government more than local or foreign corporates (or even a foreign country - for all the talk about how America stood for "free speech", my experience with American / western owned platforms censoring my political ideas and beliefs has made me increasingly cynical if they ever truly believe in democratic values; so yeah - I guess you could also say that all this is also perhaps a backlash to current western politics).
> Gone are the days when one could run their own mail server now because Apple or Google or Microsoft can suddenly deem it as "untrustworthy" or "suspicious" (based on some algorithm) and all your email will end up in spam.
Someone should tell my mail server that because it happily delivers emails to Apple and Google and Microsoft destinations.
(I will concede that it is much more of a ballache these days than it was 25 years ago but such is the way when capitalism intrudes with adequate legal oversight.)
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> You think it's a good idea to force us all to produce ID to watch YouTube videos or read a post on Reddit? This is what you want?
No, I want more. I want us to not be able to use these sites at all.
The modern internet has become a cesspool. There’s some good stuff here and there but it’s not worth the overly negative downsides. Reddit is mostly bots. YouTube is becoming clickbait slop. Social Media platforms are ruining society.
We need an alternative to the internet. Not long ago, we did not have all these things and it was one of the best times to be alive.
I disagree. I don’t have a huge problem with the UK government monitoring my online presence; I’m reasonably sure my ISP is siphoning all that information to them anyway. That may be problematic for some, but I’m ok with it.
My problem is that this info doesn’t go to the government; it goes to persona and Yoti. We are literally giving government issued IDs to tracking platforms to tell Meta, Google, ByteDance, Reddit who we are.
This isn’t about keeping children safe - if it was the law would be to mandate parental controls on devices. I’d stand behind that law.,
> as drugs
Because war on drugs has been such a successful policy...?
I have no idea how successful the US war on drugs has been and I don't need to, because I am not from the US and the US is not everything there is in the world. Just because one attempt to fight something bad failed, that doesn't mean every attempt ever at fighting anything bad is doomed to fail.
As a means of reducing incidence of drug use, prohibition does in fact work.
I'm not saying the war on drugs has been successful by any means.
But legalization has also been a really disappointing flop. After marijuana was legalized in my state, it has been really disturbing to see usage skyrocket among middle and high schoolers. A lot of people apparently derive their standards of morality from the legal system.
Has actual use increased or is it now just more visible to you?
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Nor arguing and I do appreciate your perspective but that’s so odd: vodka is legal and middle and high schoolers shouldn’t be getting into that either.
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>Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me.
The issue is once the mechanism is in place, the government will surely use that mechanism when it's convenient. You need look no further than the Online Safety Act of 2023, which was sold as a way to protect children but didn't even go a whole week before the government was censoring videos for political reasons.
The end of internet anonymity is a one-way door. Once we're through there will be no going back.
I want you to imagine the sentiment here if it was "Russia set to announce social media ban for under-16s".
I would think to myself "I hope we do the same as well soon."
If the goal is to take away mental manipulation from children, them I am all for it, no matter who does it.
Keeping children off social media, or to a very limited children only social media seems obviously a good thing.
My issue is the UK “free” speech standards seem to be something like free speech as long as its reasonable, doesn’t offend or excite too many people, cast aspersions on those in power etc, in other words not very free at all. And any form of internet registration could be used to tie more people to their posts.
Of course restricting posting some benefit exists as we seen in the US with robust free speech and twitter being overrun with third world posters attempting to influence domestic politics.
Isn’t it already impossible to be anonymous on the internet without flawless opsec? I’m surprised there isn’t a TV Tropes article about it but whenever a character in a show needs to be perfectly anonymous they visit an Internet cafe with a baseball cap and glasses - which while it’s a trope I think it also plays on our cultural understanding that significant diligence is required to maintain anonymity.
Edit: though I suppose the counterargument is that we shouldn’t make it any easier for surveillance states, especially technologically inept ones, to perform dragnet surveillance.
There’s a middle ground between going to cybercafes with sunglasses, and submitting a 4K scan of you gov ID before watching a YouTube video where someone says a bad word.
"Yes, it will lead to mass surveillance but who cares anyway? You can't just argue against that, that's anarchism!"
Do you know how you sound? Stop falling for these tactics, no one is caring for the children while making these laws.
Yes, I sound like someone who cares about our well-being as humans, and I am happy about that.
Do you know how you sound yourself? A conspiracist. If indeed everyone is out to get us and wants to control our brains, then that's f'd up. But you have just as little knowledge about whether that is true as I do.
> Yes, it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago,
social media is not, and never was the "free internet" we all get nostalgic about. maybe the first couple of years was something tangential, but that died very quickly. since then it's been a nightmare-ish hellscape of surveillance, manipulation and hate.
> Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me.
anyone claiming something like that is happening here is just spreading paranoiac FUD via a cheap and lazy straw man. if UK law starts requiring me to provide ID just to read rust crate documentation or connect to the internet then that is an issue. i would be very unhappy about it. but that is not happening here.
let's not be drama queens about it.
> Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
i've asserted for a very long bloody time that major social media platforms, not the internet in general, should require government ID verification of some sort to have an account. would likely make it far easier for the police to prosecute a lot of the nasty shit that only happens on those platforms.
having said that, these platforms are designed to prioritise engagement and angry, toxic and hate-filled people click more. so it's the platform's fault but as ever they're not cleaning up their mess.
if folks on HN wanna blame someone or get angry then get angry at the platforms for letting it get to where we are today. it's their own fucking faults.
>Yes, it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago, but that's gone already anyway.
The "free" internet is there, just the same as before. The proportion of people using it in the way they used to might have changed.
I'm generally in agreement on social media bans for children, but the proposed solution is age verification on all platforms which has a huge amount of problems.
Why can't we just ban the use of smartphones without parental locks for under 16-year-olds instead? That's not perfect but would already be a huge improvement and adults wouldn't be affected by it.
A better measure would be to mandate that social media platforms can only show you content from people you follow, and in chronological order.
That basically kills the business model and would wipe hundreds of billions of $ in capital away
Not that I disagree
Good!
I like this idea, to me the algorithm the most offending part.
But how do you control what a kid can or cannot follow? They can still follow Andrew Tate and his temu versions
At some point you have to allow people to see what they want to see. You don't have to make it so that what they want to see is pushed on them, though, and this is what modern social media does. It pushes stuff just because it's engaging.
The post was edited?!
> it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago
I’m not sure free internet was ever good for us. I didn’t need to see all those beheading videos.
That is pretty much my point. I just wanted to point that out because, next to being controlled by the government, it's the most common argument against stuff like this I see.
I think the bigger issue was when terror attacks started imitating FPS games
This is not about the good of the people. And the sooner you realize that this type of regulation will be used to manipulate you as much as what you fear is happening already the better.
The government is an entity that acts to protect itself. It has and always will fear an open and informed public.
majority of parents are in favour of such a ban, otherwise they wouldn't do it
if social media companies hadn't made social media a total cesspit of disinformation, child grooming and algorithmic manipulation then the outcome might have been different
It's a good idea, as long as this clown show of a government doesn't link it to mandatory digital IDs.
Any reason to think they won't?
Right. A lot of "Internet Freedom" is just dishonest Anarchism. A thought terminating cliche that halts otherwise brilliant people from actually considering the tradeoffs of policies like this.
The whole appeal of Anarchy is that The State always has the potential to become Evil. So, at a (very quick) first pass - eliminating The State kinda seems like it heads off some bad futures.
While some of the HN commentariat may be anarchists, you and I at least are not.
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Strong worded comment but yes, it's exhausting seeing people here of all places arguint against their own rights and the freedom of the internet :/ I guess the fight is already lost. Remember when people literally went to the streets while fighting SOPA, PIPA and ACTA?
From someone that’s been here a decade longer than you: actually insubstantial comments don’t belong here and comments that show how people’s thinking evolve are welcome contributions.
My comment wasn't insubstantial. It's the correct response to the completely unreasonable position of wanting to destroy the Internet.
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> Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
Adopting the drug prohibition model is fine, if what we want is to lavishly enrich the social media cartels, and visit upon the rest of the world needless crime, misery, addiction, and death.
Obviously OP is not