251–260 of 302 posts
I know many people dislike this movement but really, I think it's a good idea. Yes, it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago, but that's gone already anyway. Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me. I see both children and adults being manipulated by corporations with "algorith…
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/mar/31/meta-... Limited success might be a better term. But if a supposedly blanket ban only stopped 30% of under-16s accounts from accessing social media, that does seem pretty failure-esque.
This is a story about non-compliance. One hopes the Aus government is going to take some sort of enforcement action. If _that_ fails, then you could claim limited success or failure. Presumably you wouldn't call laws against murder a failure because there are murders.
Murder is not popular. Murderers are thankfully rare, and they don’t comply with the laws on murder. The masses do.
When you make popular things illegal, you erode respect for the law and turn people against the government. You can (maybe) get away with this when times are good, but when times are not good you are doubling your problems. There is a spillover into other kinds of criminality as law-abiding people decide that the law may not matter as much as it once did. Ignore this at your own peril.
I teach children. You have no idea how much social media has affected their attention, memory, critical reasoning and social skills: the social repercussions will be felt for decades. And this isn't mentioning exposing easily malleable minds to propaganda paid for by states that see the UK as an enemy, all before their critical reasoning skills, and awareness of their emotions, and how their emotions can be used agai…
I'm not naive to how much of a slippery slope that is, and I don't think the government is pursuing this in good faith. Nonetheless, here we are.
I know many people dislike this movement but really, I think it's a good idea. Yes, it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago, but that's gone already anyway. Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me. I see both children and adults being manipulated by corporations with "algorith…
The issue is once the mechanism is in place, the government will surely use that mechanism when it's convenient. You need look no further than the Online Safety Act of 2023, which was sold as a way to protect children but didn't even go a whole week before the government was censoring videos for political reasons.
The end of internet anonymity is a one-way door. Once we're through there will be no going back.
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> but really, I think it's a good idea. > Yes, it removes the "free" internet > Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state? The internet I grew up on was all about freedom and resisting the police state. Now the top voted comment (at least a…
I'm stunned when people can't reason about a tradeoff between two principles because they assigned infinite weight to one of them. Police state=bad. Industrial scale drug addiction in kids=also bad. Some compromise must be made. The slippery slope arguments do nothing. People are trying to solve this problem; trying to scare them with other problems they may have later--which they can solve separately!--is just irrel…
The whole freedom and speech shit online is starting to feel like a big lie we have been sold so that big tech can just get richer.
A lot of talk about the "why," absolutely nothing about the "how." The "how" is where the problem is.
Sometimes I think legislators think laws are these magic documents which just directly mutate reality.
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Well I needed a good reason to quit social media. This can be it.
He posted, on a social media website.
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Do you agree that parents should be the one protecting their children from this 'propaganda' and internet slop? Whilst I agree that social media can be overwhelmingly negative especially for young people, dont you recon that the risk to privacy and free-nature / increased surveillance of the internet is a greater problem?
Not OP but parental controls have existed for over a decade in these platforms with little to no uptake. Now that the UK has had 3 major riots in the past 24 months exacerbated by foreign social media bots, it is all the more critical to prevent children from falling into the trap. The time for the carrot is over. It's time for the stick. On a separate note, I find it funny that plenty of so called internet freedom s…
"Think of the children" used to shoehorn in the police state. Shudder to think where this will be in 100 years.