Comment by ars
3 days ago
Why is it weird? Social media has existed for around the same amount of time for all western countries, and people have noticed the harm at around the same time everywhere.
Why do you require some special interest? Ordinary people are seeing the harm and demanding help. Tech companies did themselves no favors by locking down phones and accounts to the point that it's impossible for parents to police and/or check their kids phones.
So now that parents have been blocked from parenting, who else is going to do it?
I've yet to meet an ordinary person who supports any of this, though they might agree if vaguely prompted about it without detail. They certainly aren't lobbying their politicians about it. This is top down, not bottom up.
> So now that parents have been blocked from parenting, who else is going to do it?
I'm a parent. Nobody has been blocked from parenting by tech companies.
A majority of the parents I know are extremely concerned about the internet and social media and want tech companies to provide them with better parental controls. True, no one I know has lobbied for age verification specifically, but given how much politicians and tech companies want it, it's unsurprising that they're working hard redirect this parental concern towards their preferred solutions.
We are in different circles, because everyone in my circle is desperate for a solution to unrestricted phone use by kids.
> I'm a parent. Nobody has been blocked from parenting by tech companies.
What age? Because they absolutely have. Wait till your kid has instragram and snapchat and WhatsApp and they can talk to random adults, or get bullied and you have no way to know. Wait till they lock their phone, and you have no way to check it. Wait till they get addicted to content that basically blocks them from doing any part of normal life and all they want to do all day is sit and watch a phone.
It's really bad out there. This is the first generation to test as less intelligent than their parents. Read some of the articles on how kids are cheating with AI, and it's not just that AI is available, I think the kids simply can't do the work, and that's because they spend most of their time on the phone.
This doesn't bode well for the future, and something to restrict kids from phone is desperately needed. What it should look like, I'm not sure. I don't care about proving a specific ID for anything, just an age range is enough: Either your above 18, or what's your age when under 18, nothing more is needed.
Then apps can tailor themselves accordingly.
Your kid also will have to deal with all of that as an adult so prepare them to deal with it instead of sheltering them. Either trust the kid to make their own decisions because you have prepared them or only give the kid the device under the agreement that it can be inspected and take it away if the agreement is broken. It's also perfectly possible to enforce device time limits without any technical means. If the kids school undermines your values regarding tech use then find a better school. None of this requires an age verification panopticon. None of this even requires support from the device vendors for parental controls. All it requires is a backbone and, yes, effort.
> Because they absolutely have. Wait till your kid has instragram and snapchat and WhatsApp and they can talk to random adults
Why would they be allowed or even able to download Snapchat or WhatsApp if this is a concern?
> Wait till they lock their phone, and you have no way to check it.
OK, then their phone is taken away.
This is totally bizarre to me. You're talking about a world where parents have totally given up parenting already. There's nothing tech companies are going to be able to do to help.
It's not about the kids.
It's so Facebook can prove to advertisers the views are not bots/AI.
> Tech companies did themselves no favors by locking down phones and accounts to the point that it's impossible for parents to police and/or check their kids phones.
How is it impossible? Worst case, parents can make the kids unlock the device and take it away if the kid does not comply. Not that such extreme measures should ever be needed if there aren't significant pre-existing parenting failures.
And at some age the parent's job should be to make sure the kid can act responsibly on its own rather than micromanaging every possible danger.
>people have noticed the harm at around the same time
the harm being us proles being able to communicate and organize. they don't give a fuck about kids, algorithmic feeds, or Russian/Chinese/other villains of the week disseminating propaganda to other bots in Facebook comments. they care exclusively about regaining some degree of control over the flow of information.
consider this: how many people in Europe would be against the ongoing replacement migration if it was still 1999 and 95% of people were still getting news exclusively from the TV and papers, where most incidents of cultural enrichment would never ever be mentioned? and on the other end of the spectrum, consider this: would the BLM protests of 2020 have the same scale and impact if there was no medium for people to spread the video and organize?
TLDR: Arab spring good, American/European spring bad.