Comment by busterarm
1 day ago
The laws not stopping the criminals isn't the point. People are calling on their governments to do something and thus governments are going to do what they are going to do.
It's a mix of what they can do and what they're likely to do. They just have to be able to go back to voters and say they're doing something.
If you think that the fact that they did the wrong thing is an argument for not doing anything, you clearly are blind to politics & history.
And age verification being the wrong solution to the "privacy problem" doesn't remove privacy from lawmakers' crosshairs.
People are calling on governments or Meta is calling on governments to preemptively deflect punishment onto everyone else for their own misdeeds?
Exactly. Voice of the people if very faint, sound of lobby banknotes makes lawmakers listen.
Governments can make effective laws, you know. There are tools that can solve this. Parental controls, separation of peer-to-peer communications from algorithmic feeds. The lawmakers are old, tech-illiterate people. You can tell them that a private Minecraft server is illegal and they will believe it.
It's a shame that non-evil tech-literate people refused to talk to lawmakers about any of this.
People are also calling on parents, governments and tech companies to respect children's privacy. [1]
None of these groups will because they profit too much from disrespecting their privacy. The average child would be far safer if they used the Dark Web. I'm not sure why the "richest country on earth" is engaging in zero-sum behavior, but those are the kinds of contradictions such behavior creates.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/18/key-findi...