361–370 of 720 posts
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Minors dont get full constitutional protections. I think they should have more rights than they do, but the first amendment is already more limited for minors than for adults. Tinker v. Des Moines has repeatedly been chipped away (e.g. Bethel School District v. Frasier). Minors cant produce pornography. Minors have their freedom of association and expression limited by employment laws. Minors speech is not free at ho…
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Except that some people born after that date will still acquire them, get addicted, and then what? Prosecute them like drug possession? It's infantilizing and dumb. Grown adults should be allowed to smoke tobacco if they so wish and smoking rates are already way down due to marketing and alternatives. Noone needs to be prosecuted.
You don't need to prosecute any buyers at all though. All you need to do is make it illegal to sell in shops, and illegal to import. There will be a black market, sure, but how many people are going to go through the trouble and expense to source black market tobacco? Not that many. And everyone benefits because universal healthcare means everyone shares the cost of the health effects that are avoided.
i don't know why people are cheering for this? the government shouldn't take the place of the parents. I think the real reason is they don't like how tiktok is creating activists out of the next generation of voters. we should demand better from big tech but banning does nothing to improve platforms. so many adults here were on forums, 4chan, mmos, ventrilo growing up, even Facebook which was useful keeping in touch…
All those things were horrible for us. I can't imagine the nightmare of combining that with the use of my real name. Like yeah, I want a free for all, but how bad does something have to be before we say no way?
Except that they weren't. My life would actually be substantially worse now without most of those apps / websites. I was just another loser growing up in a rural trailer park with no real prospects before I got interested in programming and taught myself employable skills in those online forums and chat apps. It's insane to me that anyone could call themselves a part of a "hacker" community and complain about kids having access to information and wanting legislation to restrict it.
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I'm in favor of kids not using social media, but not of the government forcing this on people nor spinning up whatever absurd regulatory regime is required. And the chance of actually enforcing it is zero anyway. It's no more realistic to expect this to work than to expect all parents to do it as you say. It's just wasted money plus personal intrusion that won't achieve anything.
Several governments have already effectively banned sites like Pornhub by creating regimes where people have to mail their ID to a central clearinghouse (which creates a huge chilling effect.) The article talks about “reasonable age verification measures” and so saying it’s unenforceable seems a little bit premature. Also, you can bet those measures won’t be in any way reasonable once the Florida legislature gets thr…
I think the government should invest in giving parents the tools to control their child’s online access. Tools such as DNS blocklists, open source traffic filtering software which parents could set up in their home, etc.
I might be the only one here in favor of this, and wanting to see a federal rollout. It is not reasonable to expect parents to spontaneously agree on a strategy for keeping kids off social media- and that kind of coordination is what it would take, because the kids + social media companies have more than enough time to coordinate workarounds. Have the law put the social media companies on the parents side, or these k…
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>Social media is addictive and socially toxic, on the whole it erodes the very fabric of a society. It's interesting how every generation seems to decry new forms of media as eroding the fabric of society. They said it about video games, television, music, movies, etc. I'm sure we're right this time, though.
… we’ve been right. Television, music, video games, movies, etc., have decimated social capital and communication in the western world. It is not uncommon to “hang out” with people who are your “friends” without ever interacting with them in any meaningful way because everyone is focused on, e.g., a television. That’s assuming everyone isn’t too busy playing video games to leave their houses. Whether you agree or not…
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Restricting social media use is tantamount to brainwashing? I don't see the connection. As for restricting access to "opposing" (opposition to what?) viewpoints, what children can be exposed to has long been restricted. But since there isn't a syllabus for what children will be presented on social media, I don't see the viewpoint restriction angle either. In fact, that position is illogical to the point that it raise…
> opposition to what? This is coming from the state that is trying to ban books based on some backwards concern of a white kid feeling bad. (for the record I am white). I don't care what side of politics you are on... you know what opposition I am talking about. Whether you are for or against it. > not people concerned with it have an agenda to expose kids to "viewpoints" that their parents would disapprove of. Yes!…
I feel like I can almost guarantee that this bill has nothing to do with protecting children and has more to do with brainwashing children and restricting their access to opposing viewpoints, especially given this is Florida. That being said, I am not strictly opposed to a bill like this. But 16 is way too old. I feel like likely somewhere within the 10 to 13 range since most don't allow for under 13 anyways would be…
> what is the point of the bill? This is a valid question for pretty much all legislation. It serves by allowing the congress critters to toot their horns as doing something for those that only pay attention to news bites while doing no harm by doing nothing
This makes me think of how, as a child, every site asked “are you over 13”, and I diligently clicked “yes”. Some more clever sites asked for my birth year… forcing me to do the arduous work of taking the current year and subtracting 14. Though I suppose the real plan here is to pass the law and then have the government selectively prosecute social media companies for having users under 16.
A small transaction would cover 99% of cases (e.g., pay a dollar that's immediately refunded). It would stop kids from casually creating accounts. The kids who can do this are already precocious enough to bypass any other verification steps you could come up with. Maybe if they use a profile pic that you algorithmically determine is someone underage, you could do some additional checks. The smart ones would learn not…