271–280 of 750 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, it's more than that. I _want_ to protect kids' right to be part of the human connectome. The "protect the kids" (by disallowing them their freedom of thought on the internet) is just naked ageism.
So do you want 5 year olds driving on the highway and 8 year olds doing shots of tequila or are you ageist? Or perhaps protecting kids isn’t really ageism at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For a start, child are parents responsibility, and the state should stay out of that as much as reasonably possible. Yes That's why stores let kids buy alcohol and tobacco, of course, because no responsible parent would let them buy that, right? That's why any kid can go watch any movie in the cinema right? Yes it's the parents responsibilities. Do you think a middle class single mother has the resources to keep th…
It's weird that none of your arguments or proposals hold accountable the responsible parties. You want to force us to compromise when we were minding our own goddamn business .
If parents suck at parenting, they will suffer.
If porn companies distribute porn to minors, which is illegal in many places such as the US, they will not suffer. Unless you start holding them accountable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So do you want 5 year olds driving on the highway and 8 year olds doing shots of tequila or are you ageist? Or perhaps protecting kids isn’t really ageism at all.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We can argue the merits of restricting children’s access to the internet, or certain books, or alcohol, or pornography, or whatever else. We can debate the merits of those various restrictions based on the benefits and costs to both the children and society at large.
But it is not ageism to attempt to protect children. It is not ageism even of the restriction is a bad idea. To claim it is ageism is an emotional appeal (“ageism bad!”), not a logical one.
Im completely OK with verifying someone's age before distributing age-restricted services to them. That's what an age restricted service is, and obviously we shouldnt let porn companies distribute porn to minors (its already illegal most place). Just dont use porn, facebook, online gambling etc. if you dont want to share your identity. I can see why it's unfortunate but the idea posited that that it's somehow illegal…
There was porn before most everything on the web. Porn is also speech / art.
Anonymous access should be available for any website that wants to share their content on the Internet provided they have the rights to that content.
States that seek to limit that could make a legal argument that they have the right to limit access, but in the end it’s infringing speech. Worse, it’s unenforceable.
And yes, I would make the same arguments for people posting hateful shit or misinformation.
> If you love your family, you must stop online age verification. > If you want the best for your children, you must stop online age verification. > Your children are being targeted. The infrastructure being built under the cover of child safety is designed to enslave them for the rest of their lives. Jumped the shark on that one, and really off-color. I'm less inclined to listen to guy, not because of his actual poi…
Ironic that he's relying on the same ridiculous "think of the children" rhetoric that's being used to promote age verification. Really says a thing or two about online discourse in our day and age.
It seems reasonable to me to hold porn companies responsible for distributing porn to minors.
> Every website. Every platform. Every app. Every service. Your children will never know what it was like to think freely online. They will never explore ideas anonymously. They will never question authority without it being logged in their permanent profile. They will never speak freely without fear that every word will be used...
No. Nobody's proposing you need to verify your identity to read articles on the New York Times or Wikipedia or political blogs. And nobody is proposing you need to verify your identity to leave comments on a news article or blog post. And any proposed law around that would run into massive first-amendment constitutional hurdles. It would be struck down easily.
There's always going to be a spectrum of websites that range from open and anonymous (like news and political discussion) to strongly identity-verified (like online banking). I don't like online age verification for particular sites, but at the same time I think it's completely misleading to see it as this slippery slope to a world where anonymous speech no longer exists.
We can have reasoned arguments around how people's usage of sites is tracked and how to prevent that, without making this about free speech and "the hill to die on".
Would you vote for that? Prove who you are to visit this website? Would you do it to access Hacker News? Your newspaper?
Didn’t think so.
Humans are inherently social, and social networks are based on trust. Trust is primarily a function of reputation, peer pressure, and legal consequences. Reputation requires tying behavior to a stable identity. Peer pressure only works when you’re not anonymous. For there to be legal consequences for bad behavior, we must identify bad actors. I don’t see why anyone would want to remove any of this. To protect some freelance journalists in Iran?
Also I don’t think that the “pro privacy” activists really understand the scale and severity of harm being done to children through the internet. I as a programmer who makes my living on the internet, would gladly support the shutting down of the whole internet if it would save the life of a single precious child.
Age verification can be achieved without destroying anonymity and privacy online using anonymous credential systems, but it has to be designed that way from the ground up, and no one pushing age verification is interested in preserving privacy.
The destruction of privacy is the whole point.
I have a fair bit of fatalism on this one. Saw it with the UK laws. It just gets rammed through. Whether it’s ignorance, malice, hidden force, a desire for surveillance state, genuine concern for children - doesn’t matter, the forces in favour are substantially more and seemingly motivated to try over and over until it sticks. Much like brexit or for that matter trump reelection I just don’t have much faith in wisdom…
Contacting my representatives is about as effective as making a silent wish. Whenever I've done it, I'll either get no response, or a boilerplate reply which basically says "I'm doing this, go fuck yourself". Then I'll be added to their spam list. The truth is that my reps don't represent me and they're going to do what they want regardless. After all, I'm not the one backing the truck of money up to their front door…
Took forever to get a response and likely achieved little, but to their credit the response wasn't entirely canned and did at least give the impression that they understood what I'm saying