[100ms]

Like most I've been listening to this same old argument for nearly 30 years. Old enough now to know it doesn't have to be perfect, it doesn't have to even be 50% effective to mark a substantial improvement, a significant chunk of young people won't even need a technical restriction beyond being told the behaviour is against the law because it's bad for them.

But keep goading with "it's technically impossible" and watch what's left of the Internet turn into a government licensing fest, because it is entirely technically possible. Imagine how much cleaner and shiny the nation's pipes would be if we simply throttled any ciphertext flow that couldn't be matched to an Ofcom license holder. They'd never do that. No country in the world has done that, right?

[jrmg]

The ‘technically impossible’ arguments always frustrate me. I used to buy into them to - but over time I’ve come to realise that the people making these arguments are not speaking the same language as lawmakers - or most of the rest of society.

It’s ‘technically impossible’ to stop convenience stores selling alcohol or pornography to minors, or to make people to adhere to contracts. Non-engineers don’t care what’s technically possible, they care what’s legally possible, or societally possible.

It’s the same thing when techies try to decipher what _exactly_ a law does and look for loopholes, when to the rest of society the standard is ‘whatever a reasonable person thinks it does’.

You need to make the argument about why the proposed thing is bad for society for it to be taken seriously.

[skmurphy]

I don't care if it's trivial to implement and impossible to bypass: it's an effort to eliminate anonymous Internet browsing/commenting because everyone over 16 has to submit ID as well. Its the end of free speech on the part of the Internet the UK controls.

[TheOtherHobbes]

A cynic might wonder if this is the real aim.

Context: the government has objectively become increasingly authoritarian, with the partial elimination of jury trials, the criminalisation of peaceful protest, the use of anti-terror sentencing laws for activities that are clearly not terrorist, and other actions which set up ideal conditions for an oppressive dictatorship.

It's hard to take the idea that this is about concern for teens seriously when the PM bypassed civil service vetting norms to make a known friend of Epstein ambassador to the US.

[pesus]

I'll believe this is actually about protecting children when they do anything to address the myriad of other issues young people today are facing. So far that doesn't seem to be happening.

Funnily, I'm also not seeing any talk about holding the social media companies themselves accountable for any of the damage they've done to society.

[dogwalker5000]

At what cost though? Everyone will now need to submit real ID to access social media. Smaller social media sites will probably just shutdown since it’s unlikely they can afford the whole verification process.

[100ms]

The same was true of food safety. Aunt Tracey might not be able to sell cupcakes from her home any more (made in the oven next to where the cat likes to sleep because of the heat), but we centralised things enough that when BSE and Salmonella outbreaks happen, which nowadays is extremely rare, we know how and why almost immediately. If the cost of ridding ourselves of animal torture, terrorism and child pornography is a few hundred fewer Mastodon instances I could most certainly live with that

[Palomides]

what a wild comparison, millions (billions?) of humans have died from food-borne disease, and yet we do in fact still let people very casually sell food to the public (even unpasteurized milk in the US)

[100ms]

I can't speak for elsewhere, but in the UK she can still sell her cupcakes, she just needs about 3 different kinds of license and one council inspection to do it. I imagine that is fairly normal across the EU

[AngryData]

That is a weird analogy because so much of modern food borne illnesses we deal with today are because of the fact that we centralized food production so any contamination effects hundreds or more people at a time which necessitated strict safety regulations. If you ate Aunt Tracey's stuff and got sick, maybe a handful of people at most get sick, if you eat Aunt Tracey's Original Recipe Cupcake™, thousands of people could get sick.

[pesus]

This is a social media ban. It's not going to fix any of the issues you're talking about, and there are far greater risks and costs. I say this as someone who despises social media, too.

[buzer]

Kids (or more specially teens) will just find a site that doesn't require the verification. There will be some and you better hope it's not one run by intelligence agency in unfriendly country.

It would be way better to just reduce the harms in general by e.g. regulating algorithms. Those are things that you can do when people are using platform that you still have some control over.

[dyauspitr]

If anything it’s makes the discussion from parents to the kids so much easier. Why can’t I use it? Because it’s illegal. When will this happen in the US? We need it yesterday.

[Aeolun]

> it doesn't have to even be 50% effective to mark a substantial improvement

It is not even 10% effective, and rightly so. It’s so absurdly easy to work around that the whole thing is silly. If the kids can’t be on Instagram they’ll find an equally welcoming place like Roblox to hang out.

You aren’t going to stop kids from being kids, and you probably shouldn’t try.

Note how we’re trusting all these US companies with their safety because any of these companies in the EU would immediately be regulated out of existence?

[100ms]

You're just repeating the "it's technically imperfect" argument again.

[Aeolun]

No, I'm repeating the "The net effect is negative for more people than it's positive for." argument again.

You are saying that "Anything we do is better than nothing." Which I might agree with in certain situations, but this here is the wrong solution to the wrong problem.

[kelseyfrog]

Psychologists call this black or white thinking - in this case, either something works perfectly or it's useless.

Next to impossible to get a person who believes this that they're engaging in a cognitive distortion though. I tried the same thing you're doing, once. I gave up. They will die on this hill and then wonder why they lost long after everyone else had moved on.

It's possible to make effective arguments in line with their values. They simply don't want to be helped.

[selcuka]

> Psychologists call this black or white thinking

The same can be told for your thinking. You (and several other posters) lumped several arguments into the same Nirvana fallacy [1]:

1. It's not 100% effective

2. It's only 50% effective

3. It is not even 10% effective

These are very different from each other. The first one may actually mean what you described (either something works perfectly or it's useless) but the others must be discussed separately.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

[kelseyfrog]

ok, then what's the minimum efficacy such that you'll consider it viable?

[selcuka]

Again, it's not a black or white issue. There is no universal constant threshold where it suddenly becomes viable. If you ask my personal opinion, I would say:

- If it's not even 10% effective, don't waste any resources. Replace it with another method.

- If it's 10% - 50% effective, improve it.

- If it's >50% effective, it's probably fine, leave it.

My point it that there can be many other shades of grey here. It's not fair to lump all opponents of the current implementation into the same basket.