[pizza]

The platform operators have a responsibility to remove garbage from their site. I don’t see how it’s better if adults are the recipients of these alleged harms. And I definitely don’t see how the platform operators are going to clean up their act if — rather than being penalized — they can pretend that the problem has vanished into thin air because a specific category of vulnerable users is now de jure disappeared.

[KaiserPro]

> rather than being penalized

The problem is, currently doing any kind of content filtering, as in making illegal stuff hard to find, and having a moderated semi walled garden, plays right into the noisy fuckers brigade.

If I were to design a TV programme which is aimed at 11-16 year olds, where I just play soft porn every 15 seconds, offer guides on how to do financial scams, and encourage the children to hide away from their parents as they watch. it would be banned instantly, regardless of how much "good" content I put in there.

People would say it's irresponsible to expose kids of that age to such things.

Yet, here we have social media doing just the same.

The reason why we make it illegal to beat kids, sell them smokes, drugs, booze and generally treat them like shit, is because we want well rounded functioning kids who are able to live a long an illustrious life as part of society.

Giving them a device that feeds them war, porn, rage bait, and huge lies, all for the profit of a few hundred people in america seems somewhat misguided.

[whimsicalism]

I'm glad when I was a teenager the adults in my life were less concerned with protecting me from wrongthought. Are modern teenagers more or less credulous consumers of information than adults, I wonder.

[roguecoder]

Where did you grow up? Because America in the 80s was all about shutting teenagers out of violent video games and music with naughty words.

[whimsicalism]

I grew up in DC in the 21st century.

[ndriscoll]

Things used to be more scrutinized. e.g. look at the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Hot Coffee controversy and legal fallout over sexual content that existed in the game data files but could only be accessed by modding the game, at which point you could just mod the content in. Porn websites also used to generally put anything explicit behind a credit card barrier, and there was an attempt to require that that the supreme court struck down.

[heavyset_go]

That was just a handful of loud busybodies, and society was smart enough then to not hand them the legal reins to placate them.

[whimsicalism]

maybe the early aughts, none of this was the case when i was a teen it was basically unencumbered access

[Novosell]

Pretty sure the US has had things such as age ratings for movies, which are enforced when possible, and laws around advertising to children and false advertising for quite some time.

I miss the good ol' days when you could see some cut off breasts alongside the snake oil ads in the papers. People are so stupid these days.

[lkramer]

Try go get a beer as an 18 year old then :)

[whimsicalism]

A beer is almost exclusively a negative thing. Access to youtube…?

[superxpro12]

It's not remotely the same thing. Social media apps are highly engineered addiction serotonin-drips.

You had wrongthought because back then there was at least a chance that the material was objective. Today you have Fox News et.al. and scores of highly propagandized feeds spewing nothing but agenda-pushing propaganda.

It's not the same.

[9dev]

It’s not about wrongthought, but manipulation and deception, blended with advertisements exploiting child psychology, coupled with peer pressure.

[KaiserPro]

> when I was a teenager the adults in my life were less concerned with protecting me from wrongthought

V-chip, movie ratings, music ratings, top shelf magazines, raising the age for smokes, the water shed, censorship of tv networks, chat rooms, computer in the living room, primitive walled gardens (AOL et al)

All of the "it was freer in my youth bollocks" is just that. Bollocks. But, I see that you like the idea of a person's social/sexual education being shaped by misanthropes looking to grift a new lifestlye for themselves regardless of the harm it causes others. All for profit and power. Not for betterment of the world.

> Are modern teenagers more or less credulous consumers of information than adults, I wonder.

The first example of something that you see is normally a big opinion former. If you see the local big city constantly portrayed at a lawless hell hole, its going to stick with you. As will the the race baiting, as will the utter bollocks herbal-remedy-cures-cancer 100% of the time shtick. Espeically if you've not got far enough through school to develop research skills, or critical thinking skills.

[whimsicalism]

> All of the "it was freer in my youth bollocks" is just that. Bollocks. But, I see that you like the idea of a person's social/sexual education being shaped by misanthropes looking to grift a new lifestlye for themselves regardless of the harm it causes others. All for profit and power. Not for betterment of the world.

Uh, yeah - I never had to show an ID to use the internet and I could use the internet however I damn well pleased. "All for profit and power" -> No, I learned a lot from the internet, it changed my life in a positive way.

None of the things you mentioned are even remotely the same scope as requiring ID to use parts of the internet. I could still watch mature movies, v-chip was irrelevant in my life, smoking is completely different, etc. etc.

The answer to my question is that teenagers today are obviously less credulous than the adults in their lives and you can see this every time you interact with older adults.

[poolnoodle]

The parts of the internet that are now banned for Australian teenagers are unlikely to change their lives in a positive way and much more likely to lead them into mental illness.

[whimsicalism]

I taught myself advanced math as a middle schooler and high schooler on youtube, which is now illegal. Could they really not make it more targeted?

[protocolture]

>All of the "it was freer in my youth bollocks" is just that. Bollocks. But, I see that you like the idea of a person's social/sexual education being shaped by misanthropes looking to grift a new lifestlye for themselves regardless of the harm it causes others. All for profit and power. Not for betterment of the world.

I remember logging on to Microsoft Networks, clicking "Adult Chatroom" and saying "Hi adults, my name is <blah> and I am 12" and getting a bunch of very positive, thoughtful replies.

>Espeically if you've not got far enough through school to develop research skills, or critical thinking skills.

Some of the people being banned include these nice kids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6_News_Australia

Their founder is now 18, but most of their research and social media people are 14 - 16.

I feel like these kids A, have developed the necessary skills to operate the internet, and B, have a human right to access and report on the information contained within.

>a person's social/sexual education being shaped by misanthropes looking to grift

The grifting misanthropes are in my honest opinion the people trying to prevent kids from accessing information. The "grift" is that kids have political interests and rights to access information and community, especially vulnerable kids, and the grifters want to "return" to a state where parents were the only method via which kids can access information. The internet is there for among other things, censorship resistant access to other people. The cost of this bill, assuming kids don't just keep stepping over the barricade, is going to be tremendous in terms of suicide in LGBT and disabled areas.

So tell us, why do you hate kids so much?

[aeonfox]

It's not so much teenage credulity, or coddling parents. Teen suicide is the easily quantifiable tip of the iceberg when it comes to mental health outcomes. Conspicuously it started trended up after 2008, around the nascence of Facebook and smartphones:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

> Following a downward trend until 2007, suicide rates significantly increased 8.2% annually from 2008 to 2022, corresponding to a significant increase in the overall rates between 2001 to 2007 and 2008 to 2022 (3.34 to 5.71 per 1 million; IRR, 1.71)

[heavyset_go]

That's also when the Great Recession happened, giving young people bleak outlooks for their future, outlooks which never really recovered. Nothing was fixed, and things have only gotten worse since then.

[aeonfox]

The data doesn't bear that out. I remember the GFC well because my whole industry imploded during it. It certainly did recover by every measure.

US GDP: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP

US unemployment: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...

S&P 500: https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-dat...

US inflation rate: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...

[heavyset_go]

> US GDP: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP

GDP doesn't matter much when your life will be worse than your parents'.

> US unemployment: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...

Dead end jobs with little to no benefits, no pensions, time off, low pay and few hours count as "employment".

Their parents and grandparents had pensions and could work at one employer for the entirety of their careers with growth opportunities, and could afford homes and healthcare while doing so.

That was a big part of the shift in 2008.

> S&P 500: https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-dat...

Doesn't matter to a kid without significant ownership of financial assets.

> US inflation rate: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...

Post the wages vs productivity graph for the last 20 years, it's more applicable to concerns of students and young adults.

[roguecoder]

In America, we haven't made it illegal to assault children. We should, but we haven't.

[anonymous_sorry]

In the same way it's better that adults are the recipients of the harms of smoking, drinking or gambling. It's still not desirable, but societies have settled upon thresholds for when people have some capacity to take responsibility for their choices.

Not saying those thresholds are always right and should definitely apply in this case, but it surely isn't an alien or non-obvious concept.

[ricardobeat]

Adults love 'garbage'. How do you define that?

There is also the problem that making platforms responsible for policing user-generated content 1) gives them unwanted political power and 2) creates immense barriers to entry in the field, which is also very undesireable.

[pizza]

I have no idea how to define it. I also don’t know if I’m personally convinced one way or another about the harms. Just think the platforms would probably have to be made to make more substantial changes were it the case.

[AlexandrB]

I don't want Mark Zuckerberg, or the government, deciding what's garbage. If they can empower the user to filter this stuff out on their own accord, that's great.

The second problem is that the medium itself is garbage. Algorithmic feeds strongly encourage clickbait and sensationalism. Removing content does nothing to change the dynamic.

[dlisboa]

So, do absolutely nothing is your plan?

[frumplestlatz]

Sometimes doing absolutely nothing is the right thing to do. Not everything can be improved through top-down intervention, and many things can only be made worse.

The comment you’re replying to raised the idea of empowering the users. That’s probably the way to look, but the danger is always if we do that using top down enforcement in a way that promulgates more harm, including stifling vibrant and necessary speech.

My very radical opinion is that section 230 of the CDA was our original sin. The Internet was better when it wasn’t divided into a few centrally managed private social media silos. It’s better to have a vibrant, messy, competitive, and very grass roots public square.

[behringer]

Yes. The internet is awesome and the government will destroy it.

[roguecoder]

Ah yes, the genocides, fascists and blackmail are just delightful parts of that awesome internet that any kind of cooperative governance would simply _ruin_

[behringer]

genocides are happening online? That's pretty remarkable.

[kazen44]

no, but incentives to commit genocide are spread through social media. [0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide

[heavyset_go]

The genocides would have happened with age verification or not, don't conflate the two.

Ironically, the solution to both the proliferation of genocide and social media causing harm to kids is the same, and it's a solution that helps everyone: legislate the source of the problem, the product itself and what we colloquially call "the algorithm".

Algorithmic optimization and manipulation that causes harm needs to be banned wholesale, across the board, from advertising to social media.

Instead, we get legislation that not only makes it easier to identify everyone as verifiably monetizable users to platforms, it also makes it easier to keep the proles in their place.