Comment by dadoum
5 days ago
Still, I don't want to gate people based on age.
Parents should at least be able to overwrite the age of their child, maybe selectively allow bypasses. My experience with a computer would have been completely different if I was blocked from half of the internet. Especially when I see which kind of content gets blocked.
As a millennial-aged person I saw a fair amount of content I would not want the young people in my life to see, but it's probably not nearly as harmful as the non-age gated content that they will still have access to. There is a lot creepy youtube and tiktok content that isn't off limits but still unhealthy and my younger relatives are fascinated by it.
Not that I want my kids looking at porn or violent content, but I’m far more concerned about man-o-sphere influencers than that other stuff.
I had to Google "man-o-sphere". Is it particularly more dangerous or toxic than other identity-based activist communities? Genuinely curious to know
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The "man-o-sphere" is pornographic. Look at the porn-brained Tate brothers for an example. That is their whole ethos and their souls are rotted out by it. Both are based in dehumanization and contempt for women and draws from the well of insecurity, viciousness, and psychological disorder. Both entrench and deepen psychological disorder and immorality.
I think the basic error is that we're making a concession to obscene content and the sophists in our midst who have spent decades deploying the garbage of moral relativism and fallacious appeals to "freedom" to defend evil. The argument for age verification here is weakened if, instead, the production and distribution of pornography is outlawed.
That you cannot perfectly enforce the law doesn't mean the law has no value or function. The purpose of the law is not undermined by imperfect enforcement, and it isn't exhausted by enforceability. Law is a teacher. Anti-porn laws would still carry psychological and social weight. They are a declaration of what is not tolerated and what is not good and contributes to the stigmatization of bad things. That creates a higher hurdle in people's minds to seek out and engage in such activity and creates shame around such activities that itself dissuades.
I would also add that pornography and drugs have a history of being used in psychological warfare. Oligarchs ruining society? Allow pornography and it will absorb people's attention and cripple them emotionally and rationally to neutralize them. Or consider the recent loosening of drug laws or debate about loosing them - which I do not accept is coincidental - to give people another dulling and numbing agent and an escape. It is in the corrupt interests of an oligarchic elite to corral the herd. The police baton is painful and creates a dangerous indignation and resentment, but pornography and drugs do not.
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Manosphere content is toxic and harmful but the hyperviolence and desensitisation of the former should not be downplayed. That's where the mass shooters evidently come from.
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I was going to name drop one, but then I realized, I wouldn't want others on HN to wind up looking it up. Let's just say, you eventually see snuff films and the like. Not something any child should be exposed to, heck even as an adult, I want nothing to do with such things, but there it was, a random .mp4 someone shared, what do you do? Curiosity killed the innocence.
If you saw a bunch of it and presumably are fine what does it matter then? Sure it might have been uncomfortable for a few days and you may not have understood right away but so what? That's almost every week as a kid. Seeing some titties is probably the least confusing.
Many uncles of friends (or fathers, who knows) had stacks of porn mags we knew where they were as 70s kids. When very young they were icky and after that we took them home. Who cares.
We need to stop this helicopter civilization bullshit.
We're building 1984 to protect from god knows what imaginary harms.
Stop putting plastic wrap around people's freedoms, liberty, and right to privacy.
The harms of smartphones and social media are about as far from imaginary as it could get. The data is screaming at us.
We will look back at handing kids phones with instagram like giving kids cigarettes and think wtf were we doing.
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"We" are building 1984 to make sure "We" stay in power of our EU Animal Farm.
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I have a hunch that the Epstein class is getting increasingly upset about the kids encountering ideas about what ought to be done about the Epstein class, and mostly are keen to see the next generation molded back into good little subservient laborers. It really isn't about the well-being of the kids.
Websites should have an easy way to check whether the connecting device has a child lock turned on. We don’t need to identify the person using the device at all. It should be up to parents to make sure their kids use device that are locked.
Or even better, just let the website return a set of flags (like age_rating=18) in a header and let the user agent decide if it wants to show it, block it, ask for approval, ...
Then the policy lives on the user agent.
This is clearly the right way to do things. Just make devices have a forced choice for their age setting on initial setup, and expose that to apps and websites.
Insane that they didn't even try this simple solution first. Yeah people will get around it, but they'll get around any solution.
That’s what the California law does.
I hesitate to comment on these because hundreds of comments have already said it and I don't have anything new to add.
- The age-gate should just be a setting on the device: either over 18 or under 18. Websites/apps should at most only be legally required to respect the device's assertions.
- Devices should be controllable by parents: let the parents decide whether the child should be age-restricted or not.
- Devices should have profiles so that you can let your kids use your own phone/laptop without messing up your stuff or getting into things they shouldn't.
Historically parents have been allowed to rent R-rated movies for their kids with nudity and sex and violence even if the video store isn't supposed to rent it out to the kids directly. That was always considered okay. If I think my 16-year old is mature enough to watch some porn, that should be the parents' decision.
That’s pretty close to the California law.
You are imagining that a solution for you will be deemed a solution for the political powers pushing for this. Or that being age-verified is the main danger of having age-verification.
That would be nice!
But if there isn't a safe market driven solution to age-verification, which provides anonymous, unsurveiled, age-attested site access, with no ability for the government to individual monitor, deny or revoke, then that is exactly what is going to get pushed on all of us.
You don't defeat an enemy by not needing the manacles they are very motivated to force on everyone..
Increasingly: We adopt zero knowledge proofs, and other decentralized open-sourced hard-security technologies, and resolve seemingly-small, but not-going-away practical issues like age & porn, or empower and "trust" every weak politician, interest group and stranger on the internet to not use our lack of awareness and defense against us.
Add AI to the mix, and the risk/damage of passivity becomes extreme.
I do. I’m going to take a wild guess that you are an old head like me, male, and lived your youth in the wonderful internet free of commercialisation of human interaction, free to roam and find new cool things and people, a wonderful library of Alexandria to learn and spend time in.
Discuss what the experience was/is to zoomers and younger, especially girls. Did you try to play a silly online game with your friends while being constantly harassed by 3-4 adult men? How many times someone offered you money (in form of “lootboxes”) to get nude pictures of you when you were severely underage? Or was on every site you visited an algorithm pushing on your face content about how you should embrace anorexia, start gambling on what Trump says on TV, use drugs, or simply do a suicide?
Hey fellow unc’s, we really need to stop nostalgising on the computer childhood of our youth and listen to the kids (as well as a bunch of research on the topic) and face the fact that the internet of the friendly geeks and nerds of the yesterday does not exist anymore. Things have to change, if we want to have any kind of working society left whatsoever.
I completely agree with you, but what this shows is a momentous change in the landscape of the internet, facilitated by mass marketing, data collection, commercialisation and even financialisation of digital game assets.
This is a huge shift that cannot be rectified by simple age filters.
Being realistic about the problem requires being realistic about ill-conceived solutions with conspicuous benefits for commercial actors.
Besides an array of largely static, non-interactive websites, there is no hard line between content that is suitable for young eyes and not.
A bit further up there's a really nice comment about how those studies are just garbage.
you said listen to the kids, but if you actually ask kids they will tell you they want a way to block predators and bullies. they want to restrict interactions with specific people or groups on their own terms because thats where all the real harm comes from. they do not want whole sites or categories of content to be blocked.
and even if you think kids dont understand it enough to make that choice for themselves you should let parents do it. if a family thinks their kids can have unlimited access the government should let them.
thats where the california bill comes in as the only reasonable option. it gives families a choice instead of forcing restrictions on everyone and theres no privacy problem because its using self reported age data that stays on device. and i know you might ask what about kids who secretly buy a unrestricted phone with their own money. i think at that point they deserve to have it.
Unfortunate fact is that many victims consider predators manipulating them ”friends”. That’s how grooming works. We have discussed the safety of online spaces for 20-30 years now, always hearing the whatever okatform ”doing their utmost for the protection of children bla bla bla” and nothing changes. Meta, Snapchat and various games like Roblox could wipe this issue out of existent today if they wanted to. They won’t.
The fact is that we as a society have so far put the convenience and entertainment of adults before well-being of children and others, who are in the most weakest position.