‘…internally the government was aware of a lack of evidence to support the ban before they passed the legislation anyway’
Terrific job, gov.
Our government is usually technologically inept.
The first online census (2016) crashed the system because they didn’t allow enough capacity. Anyone with half a brain could have told them that most people were going to try to use it during one particular time – after dinner (especially since the paper census is supposed to count everyone on that particular night). Instead, they decided to rate it for only 1 million form submissions per hour, despite estimating that two-thirds of Australians would fill it out online. At one person per family, that’s around 4 million online submissions. Now factor in that the eastern states have most of the population (and are all in the same time zone at that time of year) and, predictably, the site went down after dinner on census night.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-09/abs-website-inaccessible-on-census-night/7711652
I don’t know. There’s some joy in saying I told you so, to people who had the hubris to try and stop teenagers from being teenagers.
We will simply pass laws requiring them to be adults! Easy!
What if, instead of trying and failing to kick kids off social media, we focused our attention on the reasons why being online is so often detrimental in the first place?
Pre-fucking-cisely.
Then you’d have a massive “but what about the children?!” censorship situation for everyone.
We already have that, and it has solved absolutely nothing while potentially making online surveillance and privacy issues worse.
The answer isn’t age-gating or ID verification, it’s changing how the sites themselves operate. Get rid of the idea of “driving engagement”, no more stealth ads, and no corpo, media, political party, or lobbyist accounts. Hold influencers and podcasters to the same kind of standards we used to hold journalists to, where they’re required to tell you when the’re shilling for some kind of shady supplement company or political huckster.
You know, the kind of shit any sane species would do with this sort of tech, but when have we ever been sane?
Key point: “Ultimately, the fundamental problem with age-gating is that it fails to address any of the root problems with our current online landscape – that is, the extractive business models and pernicious design features of mainstream tech companies. We all exist in a highly commercialised information ecosystem, rife with algorithmically amplified misinformation, scams, harmful content and AI slop. Children are particularly vulnerable to these issues but the reality is that it impacts everyone, even if you’re blissfully absent from Facebook or Instagram.”
They don’t wanna solve the root problem, they just want to make the big tech companies happy as well as the people who is sayiing shit about social media happy, Age verification is their stupid answer to which translates to “We don’t give a flying shit about kids”
It wasn’t designed to address online problems, it’s purpose was to placate the mainstream media.
Speak for yourself. I find quite a bit of joy in “I told you so”.
The fallback argument for the social media ban is that it’s better than nothing. But with results like these, it may be worse than nothing, given it potentially creates new problems. Children will remain online with arguably less supervision and support, new privacy and digital security vulnerabilities seem to have appeared and the worst aspects of social media lay largely unaddressed.
I wish more people understood this. Changing something can mean you’ve caused harm unintentionally, even if you haven’t identified it yet. Too many people seem to have the thought process “We have to do something! This is something. Let’s do this.” without ever considering the harm they might do.
This and the porn thing have been massively invasive in terms of privacy. It’s so transparently just building a database of facial data. It doesn’t even make an attempt to comprehensively block everything on the internet, or realistically enforce compliance.
I’ve talked to heaps of parents and heaps of kids about this. What I think is interesting is that people face-to-face seems to be generally supportive of the law. They say that social media is problematic, and that the law helps by discouraging its use. A few different kids have said that they it helps them break an addition. Other kids say they don’t care, because it hasn’t blocked them. So mostly positive or neutral responses when face-to-face.
But every time I see this mentioned on the internet, it’s very negative. There are always heaps of comments saying that it is a failure, and could never work, and that the government is stupid; and there are often other comments saying it is a part of a secret plan for the government to track us or whatever. In any case, mostly negative views - with just a sprinkling of fairly neutral views such as “it hasn’t been active for very long. Lets wait and see.”
I just think that’s interesting. I guess my real-world social circles don’t totally match my internet social circles.
Or, the internet, the same medium upon which the noisome roots of social media depend, has some induced self-selection bias for increasing connectivity. It’s basically behaving like a weird superorganism and advocating for conditions to make it grow. At, I might add, the expense of the host species.
A blind spot i know i have is that i grew up without social media and the internet as it exists now, when i was a teen the internet was a place to spend some time playing goofy games on newgrounds or neopets, maybe downloading some movies or music from Limewire or Kazaaar.
I have no idea how i would have gone growing up with this insidiously tailored and hyper addictive environment, honestly it feels like giving every kid their first hit of heroin in high school and sending them on their way.So i get why kids might be both ‘thank you’ and ‘fuck you’ in equal measure, but just like heroin there will be plenty that never recover, and it all could just be resolved by reigning in the social media companies.
Censorship is never the answer. Teaching values and the corresponding ethics and morals that come with it is closer to the answer. A world where you burn down shit just to get a job as a firefighter makes this path a bit more difficult and harder to follow.
Censorship was never their intention. So they couldn’t give any less fucks. They just want to control us.
Censorship is never the answer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Formally banning certain forms of vulgar and bigoted expression establish a code of conduct for the community, even if they aren’t strictly enforced.
Teaching values and the corresponding ethics and morals that come with it is closer to the answer.
Morality is as much about proactive and affirmative pursuit of justice as internalized codes of conduct.
If there is no social consequence for immoral behavior, there is no reason to believe the act is immoral.
“Just Say No” would work if the Liberals would just stop saying Yes.
Dear reader of the above OP - this is the liberal thread. If you want a socialist thread, please scroll down.
I get it. You don’t want my kind here. I’ve heard that call made throughout history.
WHAAAAT?!?! Educating people is better than telling them what to do?
AI companies support the age verification laws because they want to ban kids from talking to anyone on the internet except their robot pedophiles
IMO It’s not a question if they remain on, but how much time they spend on it. She’s focusing on the wrong metric.
A 30% reduction of kids being exposed to these harmful platforms is a good thing and I’m glad to see it.
Also, all laws are imperfect, and expecting 100% efficacy is moronic.
Right, but the politicians didn’t sell the law at 30% efficiency. They sold it at something like 95% efficiency. So they lied and they haven’t solved anything.
Maybe they could have used all of that money to run campaigns to help convince parents to properly supervise their children. Maybe that would have done more than this 30% figure.
Or maybe, instead of creating privacy-infringing laws or blaming parents, we actually dismantle the tech companies who created them and imprison their leaders. We all know corporate social media is cancer, that’s why we’re on Lemmy. So let’s fucking do something about the cancer instead targeting the victims or worse, exploiting the situation to expand the surveillance state.
This is nanny-state-ing, because webbrowsers and the web in general have lacking mechanisms for parental controls. Or to discover and control information in general.
Also, ID-requirements are just asking for abuse and data leaks.
Seriously. Murders still happen so lets legalize murder.
Such place exists. It’s called middle east.
For whom exactly is it legal there though?
For those currently doing all the bombing, of course! 😉
Yeah, I suppose anything is legal for those fuckers these days
Right it’s going to take longer than a few months to enforce properly and undo the damage and protect new generations from its negative effects.
At least it’s a start.
Or maybe it’s never going to work because you can’t enforce it properly because the parents don’t want it to be enforced. And the damage you’re talking about is not backed up by as good science as you think it would be if you were going to pass a law such as this.
But many people are of the mindset that oh my God. Oh my God we have to do something and this is something and therefore it’s better than nothing, and they’re wrong. If you don’t have a good plan, that doesn’t make your bad plan reasonable.
So your solution is to do nothing until there is a good plan. What is a good plan? How do we measure if something is a good plan before implementing it? Especially on the scale of moderating the internet… And what would your good plan be?
This is new territory. It’s going to take some trial and error to figure it out.
Nothing can be tested and improved upon until it’s rolled out.
There is no “start” it has been an absolute failure.
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What? There is emence amounts of joy in “I told you so”. The majority of people warned them this was a stupid idea and now you want to piss on the good feeling of smug correct calling of the clearly failure idea? Fuck off.
I have never seen “immense” spelled that way!
