I'd seen all the shock websites by age 12. Kids love to prank each other.
None of this is a real harm. The real harms are the government being able to put a muzzle on speech, track who says what, and begin to cordon off areas of thought and expression.
You might think it's a win that this is happening, but you won't be the one in charge and you won't have a say how it's used against you.
I don't think it is a win, I'm not sure how you got that from my comment. There should be enough room for nuance to acknowledge that the internet is uniquely unhealthy for young people. I don't find 'I saw all the bad stuff and look how great I turned out' very compelling.
If empirical research showed that some kind of intervention would be helpful, I'd be in favor of it even if it comes at a cost. But I don't think age-gating will prove effective as an intervention. If anyone needs to be reined in, it is tech companies that exploit attention and gather data, and the age-gating controversy is a costly distraction.
> Shock sites are materially different to the harm kids do to one another
This would be the "fixed" version of your comment. The social media bit is irrelevant.
Kids have always been assholes to other kids. I took the school bus a few times, and the older neighborhood kids tried to chase me down, beat me, and piss on me. That was before the internet.
You can't make up for other parents' bad parenting by trying to invent a system to bubble wrap all the kids. You teach your own kids to be strong in the face of adversity, to grow a thick skin, and to stand up for themselves.
Yeah I grew up in the kinda bad part of town taking the bus every day. I got bullied. I never had someone generate pornographic images of me though.
The internet is just society now. it's not something different. You get privacy in your home, but you don't get to go out into public and say things without it being attributed to your identity. The things you say publicly are intrinsically linked with your public identity. Why should online be any different?
Just because you survived it doesn't mean that it's "not real harm." I am sympathetic to privacy concerns, but the downsides also need to be taken seriously and mitigated where it's possible to do so without critically compromising privacy.
You are cheerleading the erosion of our freedom for a harm that you can't even quantify.
Tax and fine Meta for selling to kids and the social media targeting them will disappear. That is the correct solution, and it is so ridiculously easy to implement.
Instead we have insiders and lobbyists crawling out of the woodwork to suggest we place tracking of everyone's identities onto every internet ingress. That makes these companies even wealthier, but -- much worse -- it gives the government and people in power a new noose to hang us. One that they'll never give up once they obtain it.
We'll have to sign in with social credits by the time I retire, and they'll revoke your access for wrongthink and send minders to your location to reeducate you. Think that's not real? It's happening right now in other countries. It is real, and it's coming if you help them pass the laws.
STOP TRYING TO FORCE ID VERIFICATION OF ONLINE ACTIVITY.
