[tyleo]

I don't understand why this is getting downvoted. As another response mentioned, we wouldn't tolerate this in any other industry.

If a restaurant served food that harmed people we wouldn't say, "it's on the parents." I don't get why so many folks are willing to say that with harms caused by tech companies.

Scale is no excuse either, "at our scale we just can't handle all the content." If anything it makes the problem more pressing to address.

[masfuerte]

> If a restaurant served food that harmed people we wouldn't say, "it's on the parents."

But we do! Acute harm is bad but chronic harm is, apparently, fine.

[slightwinder]

> If a restaurant served food that harmed people we wouldn't say

Is sugar in your country restricted? Or meat? I guess alcohol is, as it's everywhere. But restaurants server many harmful food which is only tolerated because harm comes from time and serving-sizes. But the same can be said for dark patterns in software, they are usually not obvious and in your face, but sneaky enough to fly under the parent's attentions.

[crazydoggers]

Are you honestly comparing sugar or meat to child trafficking and abuse? Thats some serious black-and-white fallacy thinking there.

[stuffn]

This sounds good as a sound bite. But barely any investigation cracks it. We don't police companies much because we have entire divisions of law enforcement who are supposed to be doing that job.

1. If a restaurant serves food that harmed people the health department is the avenue used to investigate and punish.

2. If a game company enables endangering children the FBI is the one responsible for investigating it.

etc etc.

I don't understand why people love the nanny state so much. We can't continue to make companies be the police, the stewards of truth, and justice. They demonstrated just recently, during COVID, that this was an absolute disaster. Over the last 30 years we have watched freedom erode because the average American wants to foist all responsibility onto someone else.

The nanny state is wrong which is why the OP is being downvoted.

1. It is the parent's fault for not monitoring their children. It is absolutely a reflection on poor parenting-by-proxy via video games. I don't understand why we continue to absolve parents of responsibility for everything.

2. We have legal avenues with which we have used and continue to use for the investigation of harmful things produced by companies.

3. If we cannot use (2) we should ask why - the answer is almost always follow the money.

4. Corporations should never, under any circumstance, be turned into police via lawfare.

[crazydoggers]

The one catch here is that there are limited legal avenues, and your solution requires a robust legal system and laws which is what we don’t have. At the moment over -worked police departments have to play wack a mole going after every single perpetrator, and they also can’t see everything happening on these systems to police it.

As an example, organized crime thrived in the US at the turn of the century because we didn’t have the legal apparatus to deal with it. Not until the RICO act in 1970 did we finally start to stamp it out.

So exactly what we need are legal avenues to make sure that companies can’t purposefully enable child abuse in order to turn a profit which is exactly what’s happening here. (Regardless of what they claim, the evidence is overwhelming they know but don’t want to dent their income)

[potsandpans]

> I don't understand why people love the nanny state so much. We can't continue to make companies be the police, the stewards of truth, and justice. They demonstrated just recently, during COVID, that this was an absolute disaster. Over the last 30 years we have watched freedom erode because the average American wants to foist all responsibility onto someone else.

I think there is a couple of things at play:

First, negativity bias. I think it's pretty clear that as a society we're not that interested in harm reduction, just biased towards harm reduction of things that violate our value system. So when things happen that do violate our norms, they're presented outside of the background noise. For example, very few people feel compelled to come in and share personal anecdotes of how they lost relatives to a car accident when the topic at hand is vehicles in america. Yet they're the second leading cause of death from unintentional injuries.

Second, these things affect people across the social stratification index. People of privilege experience it. I claim that we also as a society are not very concerned with protecting vulnerable populations. The top 10% of the nations families hold 60% of the wealth, while 1 in 10 Americans live in poverty. We consistently rank lower in social welfare compared to other developed nations. So, further supporting the first point, it's even more outlandish when these things happen to people who are not accustomed to having bad things happen.

Finally, technology consistently outpaces our ability to reason about and structure our society as a whole. It's easier to attempt blanket and ham fisted reactions to these bad things we see without understand the wider implications.

To a lot of people, the easiest and most obvious choice is Authoritarianism, because in there mind there's no other way to stop the pain.

Plus, it's difficult to talk about these things without being callous. "Bad things happened to me, so you should simply give up your right to privacy so we can prevent it from happening further." At face value is difficult to take seriously, but when it involves that cross section of the privileged vulnerable class, it's difficult to have a reasonable argument without being steamrolled.

[crazydoggers]

I've come to the belief that there is a larger than we assume portion of the population that is either complicit in these things, or doesn't think that these types of behaviors are "that bad". (some of the comments here are, sadly, exactly that) It's the only reasonable explanation I can think of why these things are so hard to root out. Some of these people perhaps never had children, which might be part of the disconnect. But if I was the CEO of a company harming children in this way, I'd make it my life mission to stamp it out and find and prosecute the individuals involved.

What else must we think goes through these executives minds? It's got to be things like "It's not my kids, so I don't care?" or "It's not that bad, people are too sensitive", or "I don't care what happens to kids because I have anti-personality disorder (psychopath) and only care about making money"

[fragmede]

> If a restaurant served food that harmed people we wouldn't say, "it's on the parents."

Isn't that how moralizing about the health benefits of a McDonalds-based diet go?

[Analemma_]

Yes, it's absurd how tech considers "but we're too big" to be a legitimate reason for inaction. That would get handcuffs clapped on you in any other industry. What happened to "too big to fail" being a sign of deep corruption requiring immediate action and breaking up companies?

[dylan604]

Really? How many handcuffs were clapped in the Too Big To Fail 2008 financial crisis? Why we think other large corporations with infinite funds would ever face consequences? This forum is funny in how when discussing the failures of tech seem to think it it is isolated from the rest of the corporate world, yet when discussing non-tech corporations are constantly lamenting that the corporate veil of protection is impenetrable.