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.
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.
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?
Except this has nothing to do with social media nor with children nor with addiction.
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.
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.
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.
- totally benign film set in the UK
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.
It would be similar to Radio Free Europe which was broadcast to the former Soviet States.
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.
What made you think that I think so?
I'm not even taking a side here and what they are trying to do is obvious.
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!
People from duma (the russian parlament) also publicly stated it would never use it for anything but children protection.
I personally think the era of free and unrestricted Internet is coming to an end. All the nations in the West are following suit, including Canada with the introduction of C-34.
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.
Can you imagine bringing up cars in this thread?
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. You’ve made an unsubstantiated assertion. I won’t hold my breath waiting for any references to support your ridiculous claim.
Now, there is one big issue for a couple of countries and that's that Russia and China probably don't report on the same level as the UK and Germany though for the UK, not all jurisdictions returned an answer, so the stats are likely higher for the UK. Then again in Russia, you can comment all you want if you avoid the one subject, well, maybe two subjects.
H.L. Mencken
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.
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 used to be "don't give your name to anyone online" and now it's "hand it over when you're told".
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.)
Even as adults, many find Facebook and Twitter in particular to be repugnant, and use them anyway as an addiction. LinkedIn is more the butt of jokes about how everyone is excited by their new future even when they're newly looking for work, but at least they have minigames now.
YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok have a reputation for funelling people into conspiracies, but IDK if that's totally fair or them getting painted with the same brush in a moral panic.
A leaked strategy document from UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer's chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, outlined their "Kill Musk's Twitter" to diminish the platform through advertiser pressure and regulatory action
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.
