Comment by Andrew_nenakhov
4 hours ago
In Russia, they claimed that new measures to block websites are necessary to protect the children online. Of course, they immediately used these new capabilities to block opposition websites and sources critical of the government.
Now, seeing many European governments tirelessly push for these new measures to protect the children, I'm pretty sure that the children are finally going to be safe online.
It is really disheartening to see the sentiment around privacy erode like this. Fifteen or even ten years ago this would have been unanimously and vehemently opposed, but now it is somehow up for debate?
There has been 15 more years of highly motivated psychologists tuning their social media systems to create addiction, time for those who've grown up through this to become adults, foreign interference with democracy etc.
Though I think banning it for children is the wrong approach. Ban the addictive and dangerous features for everyone, adults included — no more infinite scroll, and no more feeds showing content from outside social connections.
> no more feeds showing content from outside social connections
So, kill all news agencies and reporters I guess? or would there be a carve out for incumbents so they can cement their market share? who controls the approval list?
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Ban infinite scroll? Sounds like a slippery slope and also hard to enforce. I don't even know how you would craft such a law.
This is far more to do with different people having different definitions for what constitutes a genocide with one very well funded minority group having a large stake in their version being the accepted one.
> tuning their social media systems to create addiction
Except this has nothing to do with social media nor with children nor with addiction.
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Social media got worse.
We've had time to witness the damage of a dopamine-doomscroll. I personally know children who've posted too much, and children who've been solicited directly by adults, both to try and meet and for nudes. And we've seen the complete lack of positive action from platforms. Roblox is full of paedophiles and Grok was letting you nudify your classmates just a few months ago. These places aren't suitable for kids.
I don't want a ban on VPNs. That isn't being suggested, just making sure they're also age-checked. But some inconvenience is a price worth considering.
I love how every harm you listed, is a platform design problem, and your fix touches none of it. A kid bypassing VPN age checks can still doomscroll and Roblox all day on a school wifi with no VPN at all. The only thing you've actually accomplished is stripping privacy and security from every adult who isn't a child abuser, to feel like you did something about the ones who are.
Requiring ID (which is what age gating is) for VPNs is absurd. Given that SSH can act as a proxy service, are you going to require all ssh connections out of the country to be age verified?
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Maybe they should get the pedos out of the government instead of a foolish attempt at restricting and harming everyone else? It's not ever going to protect or make children safer. It never was.
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You want age checking, you want ids .
> But some inconvenience is a price worth considering.
You're trying to frame it as an "inconvenience" and not a blatant attack on the fundamental freedom of expression. I get that social media is bad, but sometimes (often) the cure is worse than the illness.
> Social media got worse.
Sure, whatever. Maybe in some ways.
> I personally know children who've posted too much, and children who've been solicited directly by adults, both to try and meet and for nudes.
... but not in that way.
I personally knew children who'd been solicited directly by adults before there was even an Internet. Including me, if you use the definition of "child" that seems to be popular in this sort of debate (and, by the way, it wasn't a big deal).
We did not shut down the world because of it.
They've somehow managed to breed several generations who's only criteria for "computing" is "it just works". All consumption, little-to-no understanding of how stuff works. As long as it does what it does, and it's "free", that's all that matters.
More like the dumb people keep breeding and the magic rocks keep showing pretty colors
> disheartening to see the sentiment around privacy erode like this
Coders went from being civically active—calling their electeds and showing up to events to defend privacy in the 90s—to being comfortably rich and content with maybe voting in generals. That’s had a direct effect on policy quality.
Us peasants cannot stop this, Canada will roll this out soon also, its being rammed through no matter what people feel.
In terms of political power, programmers are more like yeomen than peasants. Yeomen have power due to their essential skills because if a good fraction of them stopped working the system would collapse. (Whereas if peasants stop working, they just starve.) If a sufficient number of programmers said "We're not going to implement or support privacy-invading systems" the government would have to back down.
[dead]
Opposed, yeah right. People don't care back then just as they don't now. Only small groups of technical users like us care.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."
H.L. Mencken
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
If you are talking about the recent blockades of VPNs, the Russians made it pretty clear that they did not want western information sources inside the country. I am not sure it was ever in the guise of protecting the children
The first law about building technical and legal infrastructure to enable website blocking in Russia in 2012 was passed under the name of children protection. Everything else is an addition.
People from duma (the russian parlament) also publicly stated it would never use it for anything but children protection.
Certainly that could be the case. But I was specifically referring to the recent VPN crackdown
All these children laws end up as putting the onus on the adult to expose themself to whomever.
It used to be "don't give your name to anyone online" and now it's "hand it over when you're told".
The only (probably) good thing here is that one can at least try to apply Russian experience at circumventing the censorship, where it's currently way more severe, up to the point when entire companies have their workflows disrupted because remote workers can't connect through the VPN (which is blocked). Maybe that will help.
You see, the problem is that all exit points of our VPNs are in Europe. These too can be banned quite easily. Where to will we run next, given that this cancer tends to spread?
One solution is that United States radically supports free speech and provides Starlink access to Europeans as a humanitarian act.
It would be similar to Radio Free Europe which was broadcast to the former Soviet States.
Change the protocols, I guess? Move to some kind of self-hosted or community-run infrastructure? Because to block all of that (EDIT: to block that reliably, I mean), you will have to block the entire EU network sector, and we're likely not in "V for Vendetta" or full-blown 1984 scenario for this to be possible.
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Run to the Kremlin, with torches in your hands.
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You seriously think the government has a clear, honest reasons, as stated?
Companies will be exempt (with remote employees having to identify linking their IP and computer's fingerprint with their real identity), and the next step, after using the law to silencing dissent, will be penalisation.
Also the UK arrests people for online posts more than Russia, China or Belarus. It seems clear the gov wants to control all forms of speech and if they could control speech at home they would too further, I have little doubt if they could control your thoughts they would too. They’d be more than delighted to have people wear shock collars that shock wearers as they stray from received though patterns.
> seeing many European governments tirelessly push for these new measures to protect the children, I'm pretty sure that the children are finally going to be safe online
There is strong, popular will for age gating social media. At the same time, at least in America, there is a deep streak of laziness and nihilism in the tech community that makes it civically useless. When combined, you get politicians getting calls every day to limit social media and little from experts on how.
So you get folks reaching for the first solution on the shelf, and then getting wedded to it. The correct approach is making this the social-media companies’ problem. If they wind up with users under N years old, they get fined. If you want to use social media, you put up with their BS. If not, you’re not affected. Unfortunately, I’ve worked on privacy and technical policy enough to be sceptical that anyone will actually pitch that to their elected. So we get this, instead. (And at the end of the day, I’ll take an imperfect solution over a perfect one that goes nowhere. Though the UK, as usual, seems to have found the worst of the bunch.)
That's already happening in the UK too.
Shortly after the Online Safety Act went into operation, there was politically charged/sensitive/opinionated content on X mysteriously disappearing for UK users but nobody else in the world.
Yeah. The children are just the excuse. They hate us for our freedome.
Nobody is surprised that Russia resorts to this. They are a potemkin dictatorship. But that the UK is also acting as a dictatorship - now that's interesting.
> But that the UK is also acting as a dictatorship - now that's interesting.
VPN banning is part of the same compulsion for control that made London a global leader (in surveillance of people not suspected of a crime).
ref: https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/articles/2020-08-14/the-t...
it would be great if they cared as much about the safety of kids in the streets
> it would be great if they cared as much about the safety of kids in the streets
car culture < childhood
This isn't a cynically curated viewpoint. It's some* of what we have and what that cost.
* we also have trespassing culture & stranger-danger culture. we ruined roaming and the childhood development it nurtured.
You think there wernt cars when I was a kid? I lived in the subs. Kid utopia!
Can you imagine bringing up cars in this thread?
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Non-nationalist parties that have been in power in Europe for so long are shitting their pants at the growing rise of nationalist parties and are absolutely planning to censor the shit out of them.
I'm not even taking a side here and what they are trying to do is obvious.
Somehow the "center"'s answer to the rise of right-wingers is stupid censorship, instead of fighting ideas with better ideas.
Alternatively, the center starts trying to attract right-wing voters by adopting right-wing ideas like anti-immigrant views or "well, we can sacrifice the climate a bit more" positions.
Keir Starmer is from a "left" party but his actions has shown him to be a centrist, Ursula von der Leyen is quite right. Then again, these are European positioning, as someone's said years ago, the European right-wing would be liberal in the US. And with the currently openly racist regime of the USA, even more so!
They will establish censorship laws to try to stem the tide only to be surprised Pikachu face when inevitably at some point in the future one of these right wingers will win and then use all these things against them. No one ever learns.
How is that happening? In the UK fringe nationalist parties are typically given as much airtime on main stream media as the governing parties. They've also setup their own 'news' stations to further spread propaganda. Any notion that they're being censored in the UK is ludicrous. They're pandered to.
This isn't an axis from freedom to control, with the country sitting at an identifiable point. All of these things are happening, antagonistically, at the same time. Right wing people set up a television station, government cracks down on the internet, courts protect people's rights to express philosophical beliefs, police record "non-crime hate incidents" for things written online. It's all chaotic.
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It's easy to blame the governments in this - and some of their decisions are idiotic - but most of the blame should go on the tech companies. The fact they think "our ToS says you have to be over 13" or a popup asking "are you over 18" is sufficient while they make billions is a disgrace. They're the reason the governments are sinking to these levels. It's not like they haven't been given every opportunity to do the sensible thing over decades.
I also do not believe that this is primarily aimed at ptotecting children. I think the goal is to counteract the bot-farms that spread disinformation, instigate violence, and so on. Which Russia, by the way, pioneered and scaled up to make a material difference in elections in the West. It is a real problem for which no effective solution has been found.