Oh, okay. Well in that case then the answer is no, I don't support any of this.
Of course I'm happy to talk about my positions but there is little nuance to my position tbh: I remain entirely unconvinced by the justification for proposed measures and believe that the entire discussion even happening is essentially a framing error. We're all talking about what should be done about this. About what, specifically? And, well, why now?
I grew up on the Internet. I've had essentially unfettered and unmonitored access to it since I was maybe 11 or 12. Me and my cohort of classmates often talked about sites like Rotten or Motherless at the lunch table, and certainly age inappropriate content like on Newgrounds and Lord help us, Ebaum's World.
Now okay, things have changed. (I'm still quite online for better or worse, so please don't get the idea that I don't see that the modern internet has different child safety concerns than the one I grew up on.) But somehow, the rhetoric is exactly the same as always. It's the same damn thing. No matter how the times change, it's the same "protect the children against the evils of sex and pornography!"
Uh huh. I realize not everyone has a universal shared experience, but from my point of view, the problem with kids and inappropriate content isn't just a story of negligent platforms. It is the story of 1. Hormonally unstable kids going through puberty who will often stop at nothing, 2. Platforms that are more or less indifferent and will do whatever gets them money, and 3. People who take on the immense responsibility that parenthood entails then expect the whole of society to take care of them.
I don't know what to tell people, I get that this is a terribly uncomfortable fact, but the number one reason why adolescents get involved with porn and sex is because they explicitly are seeking it out and want to be. It is nothing to do with the porn industries or lack of Internet regulation, it's their goddamn bodies.
It's absolutely true that I had access to content far more disturbing in all metrics than the old playboys under the mattress of yesteryear. I am not claiming this is ideal or that it should be the case. I'm just saying that it happened and the generation that was there is here right now, and we're fine.
But maybe social media is just simply too much. It puts kids at too much risk and they can't handle it. I think we're selling a lot of adolescents very short here without at least giving them a chance to have a bit of freedom, but fine. Let's fix this.
How? It's simple. When you are a kid, the first computer and phone or whatever kids get these days, is given to you by a parent. What we can do is make decent parental controls. We don't even need strong identity verification. We just need to be able to provide a way for apps and sites to voluntarily block children.
This sounds eerily similar to California AB 1043, and it is. I think that California AB 1043 is also bad for many reasons. Firstly, I know this is going to be expanded in many uncomfortable directions; it doesn't take a genius to make basic extrapolations. Secondly, I feel it is poorly written and confusing; what's an app store? Why does the law require all apps to request and store the age bracket information? What is an app? Does GNU sed now need to, by law, request the age bracket information from systemd and store it somewhere? And no, it isn't acceptable to just try to "do what they mean", it's a badly written bill. We shouldn't accept badly written legislation, but apparently in the past couple years or so the situation that had been ongoing for the past 3 decades or so with the Internet suddenly became extremely urgent to fix Right Now (in a couple of years) so we had to rush out shitty legislation that makes no sense.
So while I would love to just have sensible parental controls, nobody is actually really trying to enshrine this into law. It seems like they're mostly concerned about lobbying to push the responsibility elsewhere.
So we won't even just get sensible parental controls. We'll get weird parental control like legislation, having to send a live stream of our faces to sketchy companies who pinky swear to not leak it by accident, enter our credit card information into sites that definitely won't get breached, and scan our goddamn government IDs to access basic chat functionality that we already use today, in some cases. Because we can't get a handle on how to stop the 20% of people in the first 20% of their lives from accessing inappropriate content on devices and internet connections that WE FUCKING GAVE THEM! Before we've even attempted to quantify how harmful unfettered Internet access is to adolescents, or hell, how Helpful it is. (It sure was helpful for one of my friends who was gay and could access resources on the internet when his conservative parents were unhelpful. I suppose everyone is allowed to raise their kids how they like, but I can see the duality of how it's also not always the case that the parents know best.)
To say that I think this is all beyond farcical is a massive understatement. So I do apologize for maybe seeming a bit dismissive about this issue, but personally I already know it's coming from the wrong place and I don't like engaging with things that I know are coming from the wrong place. I'm not saying you or anyone in particular actually has bad intent by any means, just that I don't believe this entire movement at all.