I am kinda on the fence with that. On one hand, I am wary of control it may give. On the other, we have children watching hardcore p##n and bots and troll farms spreading disinformation.
There is nothing normal about mass consumption of troll farms and bots. The user facing internet is broken and unhealthy, and it’s absolutely mad we pretend like it isn’t. Banning it from children is not a fix.
Middle schoolers passing around deepfakes nudes is pretty messed up, yep, but again I argue: why are they so accessible in the first place? It wouldn’t be a widespread problem as something from the depths of the internet, but it is when it’s a freaking Twitter service.
EDIT: I will admit the later is a sticky issue though, as it’s pretty easy for some random shop in a distant country to set up a deepnude storefront on a website. Even if we kill their ability to market it via ads, little shits around the world will find it and pass it around.
It needs a cultural fix, I suppose. Parents need to teach it as taboo, like they do for creepy IRL behavior, and that + not so trivial accessibility should dampen it.
I have no data to confirm this but I’d wager it’s disproportionately kids using that kind of stuff. I think the vast majority of adults who want to look at some titties or whatever are perfectly happy cranking it to one of the millions of freely available pictures and videos out there.
Hell, last month I had to factory reset some kid’s phone because they downloaded some “undressing app” that obviously turned out to be malware. I’ve helped adults and seniors with their tech before and they do dumb shit too but I’ve never seen one do that.
These kids need sex ed and tech aid. It’s one thing for a teenager to undress Jessica from history class in their mind, but it’s an entirely different one to download some dubious app and provide it with pictures of Jessica for it to effectively produce CSAM
Every child throughout history got up to secret exploring when they were out of their parents control. This happens to good parents and bad parents alike. It’s natural for children to explore the world and be curious about it’s dark corners. While we need parental supervision, we also need societal control. It takes a village to raise a child.
Don’t care. Not my kids and I didn’t volunteer to help raise them. Parenting is hard. Really sucks for them. Glad I didn’t choose that. I have zero fucking sympathy. Why should my privacy be violated because people don’t want to parent?
“Societal control” is probably this most dystopian thing I’ve read today.
Idk, I watched hardcore porn as a teenager and I turned out fine. Didn’t everyone? Masturbating to magazines or PG13 movies somehow seems more perverted than porn.
I think he means children in this case. Like a teenager is literally more than fine looking at the stuff as long as its not some fucked up shit (but that applies to everyone really).
The thing op misses, is the usecase of parental controls. Children should absolutely be guided around the internet, until they grow up to being teenagers.
None of “for the children” initiatives do anything good for them, prevents anything or saves any of them. Also, in most cases politicians who actually rape kids are always exempt.
As a rule of thumb, never trust any “for the children”, “for security” or “against terrorism”. It never is about those things, and even if some of the people involved think it is, it gives the ill intended people great weapons against free speech, privacy, healthy democracy… These slogans are always to target people’s irrationality and stop them from actually having logical thinking about the implications. They used them in the past and continue to do so because they work.
The people spreading misinformation will continue to do so because they sooner or later end up in power, and none of these laws will control the government, only the people. Which in itself should trigger you to not trust it.
Kids will absolutely find a way around that. Pornhub and similar sites are nowhere close to real hardcore stuff which I will bet all my money on will not implement age verification. Kids will just shift to less mainstream websites with little or no moderation like allowing zoophilia. Even if they somehow censured it almost all like CP how long do you think it will take them to download Tor or a free VPN harvesting their data? There will definitely be that one kid in 6th grade who will spread the word. Even we as kids browsed darknet that was only out of curiosity. Install spyware on your kid’s hardware if you want them to have hard time bypassing it until of a proper age either by buying their own hardware or being smarter than their parents.
As for disinformation. My discord accounts are getting banned left and right for bot-like activity even though I only use them to separate identities and are 100% human traffic but without a no longer valid email. Idk how scammers bypass it but they probably steal user accounts.
TLDR;
It solves nothing but empowers bigger threats even without government overreach.
I am kinda on the fence with that. On one hand, I am wary of control it may give. On the other, we have children watching hardcore p##n and bots and troll farms spreading disinformation.
I would counter:
Then why are these things okay for adults?
There is nothing normal about mass consumption of troll farms and bots. The user facing internet is broken and unhealthy, and it’s absolutely mad we pretend like it isn’t. Banning it from children is not a fix.
Middle schoolers passing around deepfakes nudes is pretty messed up, yep, but again I argue: why are they so accessible in the first place? It wouldn’t be a widespread problem as something from the depths of the internet, but it is when it’s a freaking Twitter service.
EDIT: I will admit the later is a sticky issue though, as it’s pretty easy for some random shop in a distant country to set up a deepnude storefront on a website. Even if we kill their ability to market it via ads, little shits around the world will find it and pass it around.
It needs a cultural fix, I suppose. Parents need to teach it as taboo, like they do for creepy IRL behavior, and that + not so trivial accessibility should dampen it.
I have no data to confirm this but I’d wager it’s disproportionately kids using that kind of stuff. I think the vast majority of adults who want to look at some titties or whatever are perfectly happy cranking it to one of the millions of freely available pictures and videos out there.
Hell, last month I had to factory reset some kid’s phone because they downloaded some “undressing app” that obviously turned out to be malware. I’ve helped adults and seniors with their tech before and they do dumb shit too but I’ve never seen one do that.
These kids need sex ed and tech aid. It’s one thing for a teenager to undress Jessica from history class in their mind, but it’s an entirely different one to download some dubious app and provide it with pictures of Jessica for it to effectively produce CSAM
Where are the parents those children belong to? Why do we need to parent for them?
Every child throughout history got up to secret exploring when they were out of their parents control. This happens to good parents and bad parents alike. It’s natural for children to explore the world and be curious about it’s dark corners. While we need parental supervision, we also need societal control. It takes a village to raise a child.
Don’t care. Not my kids and I didn’t volunteer to help raise them. Parenting is hard. Really sucks for them. Glad I didn’t choose that. I have zero fucking sympathy. Why should my privacy be violated because people don’t want to parent?
“Societal control” is probably this most dystopian thing I’ve read today.
Are “Stop Signs” dystopic? Don’t answer. It seems you’ve got your mind made up, and that’s cool.
Yeah! We’ve got to add more stop signs because of all the reckless child drivers on the road!
Idk, I watched hardcore porn as a teenager and I turned out fine. Didn’t everyone? Masturbating to magazines or PG13 movies somehow seems more perverted than porn.
I think he means children in this case. Like a teenager is literally more than fine looking at the stuff as long as its not some fucked up shit (but that applies to everyone really).
The thing op misses, is the usecase of parental controls. Children should absolutely be guided around the internet, until they grow up to being teenagers.
None of “for the children” initiatives do anything good for them, prevents anything or saves any of them. Also, in most cases politicians who actually rape kids are always exempt.
As a rule of thumb, never trust any “for the children”, “for security” or “against terrorism”. It never is about those things, and even if some of the people involved think it is, it gives the ill intended people great weapons against free speech, privacy, healthy democracy… These slogans are always to target people’s irrationality and stop them from actually having logical thinking about the implications. They used them in the past and continue to do so because they work.
The people spreading misinformation will continue to do so because they sooner or later end up in power, and none of these laws will control the government, only the people. Which in itself should trigger you to not trust it.
If it was about the children, they would have done something with the Epstein files.
Kids will absolutely find a way around that. Pornhub and similar sites are nowhere close to real hardcore stuff which I will bet all my money on will not implement age verification. Kids will just shift to less mainstream websites with little or no moderation like allowing zoophilia. Even if they somehow censured it almost all like CP how long do you think it will take them to download Tor or a free VPN harvesting their data? There will definitely be that one kid in 6th grade who will spread the word. Even we as kids browsed darknet that was only out of curiosity. Install spyware on your kid’s hardware if you want them to have hard time bypassing it until of a proper age either by buying their own hardware or being smarter than their parents.
As for disinformation. My discord accounts are getting banned left and right for bot-like activity even though I only use them to separate identities and are 100% human traffic but without a no longer valid email. Idk how scammers bypass it but they probably steal user accounts.
TLDR; It solves nothing but empowers bigger threats even without government overreach.