I don't think the government that sponsors child rape gangs actually cares about child protection.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6810978a41bbc42489eaf...
The UK's Teen Social Media Ban Is Political Theater, Not Child Safety Policy
91–100 of 156 posts
Re: The UK's Teen Social Media Ban Is Political Theater, Not Child Safety Policy
#92A lot of issues require holding two ideas in your head at once. Age verification chips away at privacy and internet freedom. It likely also reduces harm to some/many/whatever children, even if it’s imperfect and won’t stop everyone. The interesting question is where the right trade off sits. People often end up arguing only one side.
If you can't go into a strip club unless you're 18, why can't the government say you can't go to a strip club website unless you're 18?
The government does government things.
This doesn't seem like something crazy.
Re: The UK's Teen Social Media Ban Is Political Theater, Not Child Safety Policy
#93A lot of issues require holding two ideas in your head at once. Age verification chips away at privacy and internet freedom. It likely also reduces harm to some/many/whatever children, even if it’s imperfect and won’t stop everyone. The interesting question is where the right trade off sits. People often end up arguing only one side.
Massively downplaying it to say "chips away" this takes a sledgehammer to the core of internet privacy. In all cases in the world where this has been done before like China or Russia, freedom is also lost shortly after. Of course people only argue one side, the stakes are losing internet privacy and freedom in the entire world if the west also succumbs to these authoritarian policies. It isn't the government's job to…
China and Russia did not have "freedom" prior to the internet.
Re: The UK's Teen Social Media Ban Is Political Theater, Not Child Safety Policy
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Massively downplaying it to say "chips away" this takes a sledgehammer to the core of internet privacy. In all cases in the world where this has been done before like China or Russia, freedom is also lost shortly after. Of course people only argue one side, the stakes are losing internet privacy and freedom in the entire world if the west also succumbs to these authoritarian policies. It isn't the government's job to…
>China or Russia, freedom is also lost shortly after. This may come as a shock but neither China or Russia had their first encounter with losses of individual freedom in the 1990s. This is what the OP is talking about, this is the kind of shibboleth of online libertarianism that has little to do with real world policy outcomes. You'll find many similar laws concerning child safety in Norway that you find in China, di…
I mean, you're cutting off the qualifier with your selected quote. They are clearly talking about online freedom:
> this takes a sledgehammer to the core of internet privacy. In all cases in the world where this has been done before like China or Russia, freedom is also lost shortly after.
Russia's first online censorship was for truly abhorrent things. It moved on to become a ban on things the government didn't like. The book "The Red Web" does an excellent job detailing how this downward slide took place. It wasn't overnight, but it was a constant effort by those in power to erode privacy and freedom, and the first step was putting in place a basic censorship apparatus.
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/andrei-soldatov/the...
Re: The UK's Teen Social Media Ban Is Political Theater, Not Child Safety Policy
#95A lot of issues require holding two ideas in your head at once. Age verification chips away at privacy and internet freedom. It likely also reduces harm to some/many/whatever children, even if it’s imperfect and won’t stop everyone. The interesting question is where the right trade off sits. People often end up arguing only one side.
If you can't go into a strip club unless you're 18, why can't the government say you can't go to a strip club website unless you're 18? The government does government things. This doesn't seem like something crazy.
We have a solution for that: parental controls. The new feature is that parental controls are enabled by default and cannot be disabled without the phone manufacturer's consent. The upcoming feature is that this also applies to non-adult sites like Facebook and YouTube. It's nothing less than the end of the free, open, and anonymous internet.
Re: The UK's Teen Social Media Ban Is Political Theater, Not Child Safety Policy
#96A lot of issues require holding two ideas in your head at once. Age verification chips away at privacy and internet freedom. It likely also reduces harm to some/many/whatever children, even if it’s imperfect and won’t stop everyone. The interesting question is where the right trade off sits. People often end up arguing only one side.
If you can't go into a strip club unless you're 18, why can't the government say you can't go to a strip club website unless you're 18? The government does government things. This doesn't seem like something crazy.
TL;DR don't make everyone prove they're an adult (and thus who they are). Put the kids into the daycare if that's what you want the law to be.
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Don't let the kids wander Las Vegas / the adult section of town (the Internet) unsupervised?
Or even better:
Have any website that's intended for children make a Legal Claim that they are rated Child Safe / Friendly so they fall under Advertising Law coverage and/or soliciting a minor.
Then have user agents (browsers) used by children configured to limit them to those places. Or even pay for a special VPN that limits access to those places.
Re: The UK's Teen Social Media Ban Is Political Theater, Not Child Safety Policy
#97A lot of issues require holding two ideas in your head at once. Age verification chips away at privacy and internet freedom. It likely also reduces harm to some/many/whatever children, even if it’s imperfect and won’t stop everyone. The interesting question is where the right trade off sits. People often end up arguing only one side.
> It likely also reduces harm to some/many/whatever children,
While increasing harm to many others. Nobody ever wants to mention that part. It is not a clear "child safety" win. Personally I think it's probably a significant net loss.
Re: The UK's Teen Social Media Ban Is Political Theater, Not Child Safety Policy
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted in your article: “Later this year a ban on mobiles in schools – even for educational use – comes into force.” It’s obvious to most that taking away the laptop while leaving the TikTok will not have the intended effect.
Nationalized social media bans and restricted device usage while in a classroom are different things. Why would TikTok ever belong in the classroom? Of course if even educational use of laptops is restricted then personal mobile devices would also be. They are already banned in my country.
The original article doesn’t care to explore the difference, it doesn’t even acknowledge there is a problem.
If the article was “instead of a national ban, we should look at school-wide ban”, I would be sympathetic.
FWIW, American states are doing exactly this[1], people still complain
[1]: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/09/23/governor-newsom-signs-legi...
Re: The UK's Teen Social Media Ban Is Political Theater, Not Child Safety Policy
#99A lot of issues require holding two ideas in your head at once. Age verification chips away at privacy and internet freedom. It likely also reduces harm to some/many/whatever children, even if it’s imperfect and won’t stop everyone. The interesting question is where the right trade off sits. People often end up arguing only one side.
I don't think facebook needs some kind of age verification scheme at all. They are already fully aware of how old their users are. The kids post photos and messages every birthday. They use these platforms talk with their school friends. The platforms know who the children are. They already target them with ads and algorithmic manipulations accordingly. They don't need our biometric data to know that we're adults, th…
Platforms can't know what the false positive and false negative rates are simply from cases where a user is thought to be a minor and proves otherwise. Even if the law were written better, for example to say that 95% accuracy is acceptable, platforms would still have to verify id from at least a random sampling of thought-to-be-adult users, which doesn't help you if you're one of the ones randomly selected.
We need some kind of verification system that gives no extra information about users to the platforms, but I don't know if there's a true ZK way; it might require government involvement. I think that's fine. Govts could certainly run an age-verification system, give a signed yes or no token back to the user, with some permanently applied jitter per person so that platforms can't use cookies from returning users to figure out their birthday. As long as the government program has strict oversight to ensure it's not saving information about who's visiting what sites, it seems fine, or at least vastly better than entrusting photos of IDs to private 3rd parties.
Re: The UK's Teen Social Media Ban Is Political Theater, Not Child Safety Policy
#100Article mostly cites self-reported studies ie the kids think that the kids are doing alright, which is a different statement from the kids are actually doing alright. Most teachers seeing generational changes are raising five alarm fires around how badly the kids are doing. Actually testing kids is showing a startling reverse Flynn effect [1]. I’m curious what the author has in terms of actual evidence here? [1] http…
> the kids think [...] Most teachers
Random anecdotal claims from population A contradict random anecdotal claims from population B.
> I’m curious what the author has in terms of actual evidence here?
Well, it can't be any worse than you have, in that the paper you link to doesn't show anything about what causes that negative Flynn effect. It does speculate, and social media is not on even on the authors' list of guesses.
Did you have anything relevant?