Child safety bills are reshaping the internet for everyone
theverge.com
Lawmakers across the country (United States) are trying to protect kids by age-gating parts of the internet.
Lawmakers across the country (United States) are trying to protect kids by age-gating parts of the internet.
Everytime i see a bill that includes "child safety" in the title, i know it's just going to be another attempt at turning the internet into a garden walled, big corpo controlled shithole, with the glowies being able to read any and all messages, and encryption being illegal.
An internet devoid of unacceptable "deviations" from gender and sexuality too. Given the effort to erase trans and gay people from public spaces, this seems like a parallel effort to destroy their digital ones too.
These laws aren't about children, that's just a talking point to sell laws that tame the potential anonymity of the internet for private profit.
If American society gave the slightest shit at all about our children, we wouldn't have literally starved our K-12 system into utter ruin for over half a century to cut the taxes of the corporations and already rich assholes killing the planet and those children's future on it for private profit. We wouldn't then say selling public education to for profit industry in the form of charter schools is a solution.
The United States doesn't give a shit about its children. Not one tiny bit. Now our beloved economy? We'd throw all our (non-wealthy) kids into a fucking volcano if Wall Street told us it would protect that.
Not to mention, do people really believe that people shouldn't be allowed to see sexual content until they're 18? I started looking up titties when I was eleven, and as I understood it, the generation before mine either inherited or stole porn mags and tapes from older brothers/dads or got somebody to buy some for them. Given how useless sex ed was on the actual sex aspect of things, how are teenagers supposed to figure out anything besides anatomical structures?
The fundamental premise just seems weird to me, why are we trying to hide away pornography like it's this shameful corruptive thing? I maybe knew a handful of weird kids that listened to the 18 year old restriction (all on extremely religious grounds), so the idea of actually trying to enforce it seems kinda crazy. I don't know, it just reeks of the idea that masturbation is a sin, but everyone's so uncomfortable with the notion of teenagers + anything sexual that nobody wants to touch it.
I just feel like the next couple generations are gonna be weird with the tug of war between book bannings, LGBTQ+ bannings, religion in schools/out of them, and all the other proxy wars being fought using schools as the battle ground. Not to mention all the shootings.
These laws are dangerous, kids are going to sneak a peek at adult things and when they do going to pornhub is far safer than having to avoid strong filters by joining a private discord group full of creepy old guys.
Honestly these laws are a groomers dream, keeping kids naive and then funnelling them in to poorly moderated or purposely immoral porn sharing communities creates actual dangers which aren't present when a teenager sees some videos from the front page of pornhub.
What we actually need to do it have real conversations about things
For that to happen people would have to agree with the basic fact that "teenagers wanting to watch porn is normal", which generally doesn't go well. But ultimately it's such a touchy topic that the people honestly wishing to protect their children cannot even do it effectively. Some don't know how to handle it, many just ignore the matter altogether.
Then we end up with these moral panic-driven measures that at best help no one, or, more cynically, enable the erosion of people's rights and unjustified persecution.
I'm a parent and have plenty control over what my kids can access. Most devices have parental controls, and for everything else there is Pi-hole. I don't need anyone else to do my parenting for me, especially when it means that I, the parent, get treated like a child.
"Oh please, daddy gubment, can I see this website?"
No. Not gonna fly.
What nooo you're supposed to hate trans people enough to sacrifice personal freedoms and liberty!
I love how this "sticking it to big tech" is also funded by big tech. The general goal of someone like Facebook with this legislation is pass a bunch of rules that only large companies like them can comply with, and watch mastodon instances and other attempts to detrown them end in FBI raids and more regulations.
Not to mention none of this will actually protect children. When I was 14 I told an adult online about my life and they helped me make it through some rougher periods until I got to 18. I know the internet is highly imperfect but I think gate keeping kids out of it will just lead to more underground abuse and abuse that they don't find was abuse until they are adults.
The people who wrote this bill want people like you to suffer
Exactly, they don't view children as people, they view them as objects and extensions of their parents/guardians.
and that's really the root of the issue, isn't it?
Yes, I remember how it went when I was a kid. Internet probably is the only reason why I'm not joining army of warmongerers or died in Ukraine.
To be fair it seems some adults need to be protected from some kids, but it is their adult problem.
Think of all the extra info we can sell if we card everyone!
There is no Porn Big Tech big enough to be able to afford this legislation. From the article:
Remember it is part of the GOP's published plan for 2024 and beyond to ban pornography.
Bourgeois governments gonna bourgeois
These laws are made by bad parents or those that want to control someone else's children. It's so easy to just talk to your kids about the dangers of the internet and to put on parental controls on all devices.
Honestly, I don't think that's the case. I think it's more by people who want to virtue signal. They get to talk about how they're "protecting the children" and their opponents (if they dare to oppose it) "don't want to protect the children." I don't believe many of them are doing it out of an actual desire to protect children, even a misguided one.
Oh that's definitely part of it. I also think this is an attempt to scrub the internet of any mention of women freedoms, contraception, abortion, LGBTQ+, etc.
sounds like some fascist culture war garbage that was never meant to protect children from anything because it doesn't
This starts with some ambiguous "protecting the children" from porn argument to eventually requiring everyone to be "verified" with a digital ID before they can set foot on a highly controlled internet (or worse). We're already seeing increasing glimpses of this and it's in the government's and big tech's interest.
I'm so tired of the constant barrage of shit from all directions. This isn't the beautiful future of humanity I imagined as a kid. No one will look out for us except for us, the actual people that these out of touch rich and powerful high society clowns try to control and keep occupied with stupid culture wars amongst each other, or placate with bread and circus. Enough already ffs.
Pretty sure that's already the case in South Korea, having to use your real identity online in certain cases. We can't let it expand worldwide.
China too. Everything is tied to your phone number
Spoiler Alert: It's not about protecting children, it's about the GOP keeping the gays off of the internet
I haven't read the article but I assume it's an invasion af privacy under the guise of "protecting the children" as usual
It's part of the GOP trying to ban porn. They know they can't ban it due to the 1st amendment, so they're making porn unprofitable for distributors.
Google has recently started telling me that they don't know if I am >18. But I have been using Google for way more than 20 years.
So, Google is incapable of counting to 18? :-)
Maybe they think your parents made this account for you before you were born
If they did that should still be allowed. Despite the fact that I know it's not allowed and against their TOS.
Humanity never changes. Teenage me found the entire idea that I might need "protection from harmful content on the Internet" ridiculous. Now I have been an adult for more than ten years, I still find it ridiculous that people younger than me might need that.
I just think that people should be given access to comprehensive sex ed early enough in life that it's before they end up viewing something like pornography through their own actions.
It will be interesting to see the politicians responses when their porn accounts are hacked and they all have to explain why their ID is associated with profiles that frequent tranny incest porn
Please don't use the t word, it's generally considered a slur.
What is the current PC word?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“It does seem like a very clear backlash to not just tech, but to any sort of movement towards allowing young people to make their own decisions based on the information that they can access,” Jason Kelley, activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), said in an interview earlier this month.
France has proposed similar age verification restrictions on porn in the past, leading its data protection agency, CNIL, to investigate the security of current services on the market, determining that many were “intrusive” and for new, safer models to be developed.
Over the last few years, more than a dozen states, including many that have implemented age verification bills, have passed resolutions identifying porn as a “public health crisis,” arguing that it encourages violence despite little research backing these claims.
“I think progressives had the idea that they wanted to regulate Big Tech without fully appreciating the degree to which they were playing with fire,” Evan Greer, Fight for the Future director, said in an interview with The Verge earlier this month.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued to unravel the language related to pornography and ultimately won in 1997 after the Supreme Court decided that banning the material would infringe on the First Amendment rights of adults.
Without more pushback, age verification bills, just like the ongoing book bans taking place in schools, will continue to fuel the right’s censorship fire all at the expense of speech protected by the First Amendment.
The original article contains 1,875 words, the summary contains 245 words. Saved 87%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
That’s the point, they don’t give two shits about the children.
There should be something to this. A lot of parents keep their children off of the internet, but having young children accessing ‘most’ of the internet is a bad fucking idea
Parents, monitor and limit your kids online. I know it’s hard as fuck, I know other kids will think it’s weird that your kid doesn’t know the new tiktok thing. Do it anyway
I genuinely think that children's ease of access to pornographic content is a serious and unprecedented threat to their well-being. This is why I think it was a mistake to normalise kids having unlimited access to internet-enabled mobile devices, and why I think having the family computer in a public-ish place is smart. It doesn't even necessarily have to result in your kid being socially impacted, if you just limit their time on it but still allow them some autonomy. I had friends growing up where their router shut down automatically overnight so they couldn't use their phones when they should be sleeping, but they were still just as hip and cool as anyone else.
I mean, why? What is the unprecedented threat?
And I think you have a misunderstanding of how isolated teenagers were from sexual content before the internet, magazines weren't exactly hard to get. Even before then, we've literally been making porn in every form of media since we were painting on cave walls.
The ease of access of it now, and the extreme shock value of a lot of what even shows up on homepages of major porn sites is unique compared to the pre-internet days.
Part of allowing people to develop, evolve, and mature their sexuality on their own should involve preventing formative experiences from being based on fantasy.
It's really not. You just weren't exposed to it and think it's new. The only change is the quantity, not the depravity. Marquis de Sade, the origin of the word sadist produced a significant amount of incredibly depraved erotic works back in the 1700's, and he was not unique.
To your second point, should their first exposure be to porn? Of course not, but developing, evolving and maturing is done by exploring, not by sitting in a cave and generating knowledge from scratch, even if you have an equally amateur friend. That's how people get hurt because they have no idea what they're doing. If they want to see what's out there, let them. Trying to ban everyone from sexual content until 18 is a uniquely modern take.
Not to mention, we're far too uncomfortable with the topic to have their first exposure be anything but porn, since sex ed is all drawings and awkward anatomy. And childbirth videos. Since I was a kid myself, all I've seen is moral panic that wants nothing more than to simply shut the blinds and pretend that there's nothing there.
You keep equating all forms of media that might depict sex, nakedness, or even erotica as porn.
It's been a while, but I'm confused. I never said anything like that, but that is essentially the government's point of view. Erotica requires one to be 18 to see, whether written, drawn, or photographed. Depictions of sex and nudity either ban everyone under 17 ( or 17 and under for NC-17 ratings), or expect parents to restrict those under 17 in the case of television as it can't be moderated (for now).
At any rate, I just wanted to respond and clarify despite the better part of a month passing.
Probably because they used mobile internet. At least that what I did.
See. Seeing pornography doesn't make children uncool.
Actual threat to their well-being is content about quantuum physics and astronomy. Both topics can cause existential crisis.