Comment by miki123211
5 days ago
It's much easier to convince somebody to achieve their goals your way than to not achieve their goals at all.
Politicians don't want to be seen as going soft on child predators and harms to children. That is a career-ending move. Whether the bills they introduce even protect children at all has no bearing on it. PR is PR.
If you're essentially telling somebody that children don't need to be protected, you might feel smug and superior, but you're achieving nothing. You'll be ignored as a conspiracy-theory-loving nutjob.
If, on the other hand, you tell politicians that there are multiple approaches to protecting children, all as effective, with one of them having fewer side-effects to the rest of society, now that's a much easier sell. You sound like somebody who knows their stuff and has a nuanced take.
Nuance is the problem, we have been experiencing death by small degrees thanks to giving lots of small wins to politicians.
Government is these days largely solved, and for politicians that's a horrendous untenable situation, so they have to keep inventing problems to solve.
All they do is stack law on law on law for no discernible public good, with only negative outcomes.
The problem is the framing of the problem. Its not "How to protect kids online". The problem is "how to protect everyones freedoms online". And the only way to do that is to say absolutely not, every single time this shit comes up.
And its disingenuous to say the least, to assume that these tools are only coming for kids on social media. These tools are coming everywhere, to everyone. You just let them in because they played the old "wont someone please think about the children" song and dance. This exact nonsense was how we got the eSafety commissioner, who was brought in with a mandate to scrub the video footage of the christchurch massacre off of the internet. Of course, now they spend a large amount of time and money trying to get all sorts of posts scrubbed off the internet, often in jurisdictions that have free speech mandates.