I can’t think of a better solution to the issue of children being so aggressively harmed by the internet. That doesn’t remove any of the problems associated with this.
I can’t think of a better solution to the issue of children being so aggressively harmed by the internet. That doesn’t remove any of the problems associated with this.
Parents taking responsibility for their kids.
I grew up in a neighborhood full of drug dealers. Street sellers, not the classy Walter White kind.
Ironically being on a computer all day kept me out of trouble.
But with these laws in place I guess you might as well start doing stupid ish in real life.
The thing is, those dealers can end up in jail for selling drugs.
More to the point, if a kid walked into a convenience store and the clerk sold them a pack of cigarettes, the clerk wouldn't get off the hook by claiming, "well, the parents are responsible for their kids." I'm also not sure how one would justify holding parents legally liable for crimes they played no role in committing.
I'm not saying that I agree with these laws. They appear to be taking things too far. But that has more to do with there being no clear way to define sites that are only of interest to adults (no gatekeeping needed) and sites that should be restricted to adults.
>I'm also not sure how one would justify holding parents legally liable for crimes they played no role in committing.
This is already a thing.
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2024/charging-parents-for-childs...
Once upon a time they idea that Americans would surrender all of their God Given rights for an illusion of security was considered absurd, but that's where we're at.
I'm glad computers came in and saved you from your otherwise-inevitable life of cartel involvement, but I don't see what this has to do with the en-masse mental poisoning of children? I'm not even talking about politics yet. Cyber-bullying is insane.
Either way, I genuinely don't believe "let's just hope parents... start doing better?" is a solution.
Parents do need to do better.
Work on building self confidence.
My family relentlessly called me stupid and lazy to the point where a cyberbully would of been an upgrade.
You can always turn your phone off.
A lot of God awful parents treat their kids like trash and blame everyone else when Timmy doesn't get into Harvard.
Of all the people I've met with rough upbringings not a single one blamed anything outside of bad parenting.
Being a parent ( especially a step parent) is extremely hard.
100 years ago bad parents blamed dime novels.
50 years ago it was rock music.
I am not sure I understand the simultaneous arguments that being a parent is very hard AND that parents should just do better and help isn’t needed AND this problem has been going on for over a hundred years (it hasn’t - this is the first time we’ve ever had a generation actually turn out dumber).
Could you clarify that, and maybe take into account the fact that this is indeed completely unprecedented?
If you have time, I also would love to hear how “parents should do better” fits into a plan where parents DO do better.
Bad parents are always gonna find an excuse. Honest to God when I think of my childhood if people would’ve just left me alone for 30 minutes, I would’ve had a much easier time.
Turns out you don’t need to get into a great college to make a lot of money. If anything, my screwing around all day with video games has probably led to my great 6 figure career.
There’s absolutely no way to implement age gates all over the internet without fundamentally locking it down. Do you want a future where a website that chronicles the history of slave revolts is denied an operating permit?
This is about controlling the free speech of adults, not anything else.
So if it were a genuine approach from an adult simply looking to protect children, what would it be? As I said at the beginning, I don’t think it’s a good solution, just the only one we have.
Again, please incorporate the fact that children are, for the first time EVER, dumber than their predecessor generation. It is a literally unprecedented step backwards. Who cares if kids can access data about slave revolts if they’re simply too stupid and pacified to do anything with the knowledge? Do you think people who spend all day hearing from their “totally-not-LLM” peers online that everything is scary, they are OWED an easier life, and that the true problems are things like social issues - ignore the climate and starving children, will be the ones to rise up and fix a problem?
We need to calibrate the incentives. Parents can be held accountable for neglect and abuse. Giving your kids phones and letting them use it without supervision is abuse. Enforce it. Denormalize this bullshit.
I have knives in my kitchen. Do I give it to them and let them run around the neighborhood? I could but there are consequences and I would be held accountable for it.
Social media = knives or as some other commenter pointed out, similar to letting your kids play in traffic.
The mere existence of something dangerous is an irrelevant comparison unfortunately. We didn’t invent knives and then immediately see an entire generation get dumber.
You’ll have the burden of needing to explain how any innocuous comparison you make still holds when we’ve never seen that kind of reversal in all of the time we’ve been watching as a society.
So what happens when parents don't?
Too bad?
What happens when parents don’t lock the liquor cabinet? When they smoke in front of their kids? When they leave porn laying on the table?
Too bad!
>What happens when parents don’t lock the liquor cabinet? When they smoke in front of their kids? When they leave porn laying on the table?
The state can't control those things, it can control putting an age restriction on certain websites. Unless you are advocating for the complete abolition of all age restrictions throughout society.
You need an ID to access cigarettes and liquor and porn (from a physical store)...
My parents always kept a few bottles of wine in a cabinet in the living room. If 8 year old me wanted wine, I could have drunk a whole bottle while they were away and there was no way they could have stopped me. Yet I didn't drink my parents' wine, nor did I grow up alcoholic.
You could and when you would end up in the hospital your parents would have gotten a visit by people with sticks.
You can let your kid play in traffic. You can let your kid run around with knives. Sure, but when shit hits the fan you'll be luck to pay a hefty fine and lose all social credibility you had. In the worst case you're looking at jail time. Those sort of incentives will tend to smooth these issues out.
Kudos for resisting alcohol as an eight year old. How does that apply to all the kiddos whose lives are impacted by social media? Kind of a "them problem"?
Yes, it is. Kids get screwed up in all kinds of ways that we do nothing about. We could eliminate a lot of harm by prohibiting religious indoctrination, for instance, but that's unlikely to happen.
There is no hard data showing that religion (which one? all of them? from learning the Tao to following the dude who said "Love thy Neighbor"?) is somehow harmful, but we have direct evidence showing this is harming children. What is with people ignoring data and facts because they're scared of something largely innocuous? We get it - you were bored when your parents made you sit in a pew for an hour a week.
How is it more like leaving a liquor cabinet open than not buckling them up with seatbelts?
I'm glad we're discussing parental liability. It seems no one else is advocating for "social media access is criminal neglect," so I appreciate the novelty.
I would love to have this be the argument. Parents would typically agree that giving your kids heroin, for instance, should result in prison time. Yet I doubt they would argue the same for social media! Perhaps there should be discussions about what neglect looks like with regards to internet access and whether or not we need societal boundaries around this, enforced via punishing parents, rather than punishing everyone.
Giving children access to social media should have the same parental neglect charges as giving them heroin.
The current strategy of yelling "parent's should parent" does nothing to influence any sort of result. It's simply ineffective and makes people who say it look like slogan slingers rather than cooperating in any meaningful change.
> Giving children access to social media should have the same parental neglect charges as giving them heroin.
This is probably the most interesting angle of discussion I’ve seen in the past few days on this topic.
An insane overreaction?
We are in the 80s smoking phase. It's still all OK and it's normalized. We're seeing the first blips of trouble on the horizon.
In, say, about a decade this tech bullshit will be regarded as the relentless toxic insanity that it was and we'll be better for it. Social tech CEOs will be lucky to evade prison if I had my way.
It’s not just kids. Adults are having their brains fried on AI generated political videos online right now. The state of the internet is an absolute disaster.
An enormous portion of the world is effectively addicted to a drug.
Solution: Maximize the distance between yourself and the people
Rather than becoming a social outcast I’d rather support any proposed laws that take down the social media companies.
You can definitely drop social media and not become a social outcast. Group threads on Signal are great!
I think he questioned the wisdom of isolating yourself from "people" in general.
On a related note I would like to add that social activity of any online kind is completely useless and can be get rid of immediately and without any adverse side effects whatsoever.
I'm pretty convinced the next generations will view being online as cheap and stupid. Offline is where the real value is.
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Most people want to operate within the boundaries of their society.
A simple G/PG/PG-13/R header for websites would solve 97% of actual issues anyone could care to present. (violence, porn, etc)
Forcing people to identify themselves will not solve skinner boxes, gambling-for-children, focus-degrading slop, etc.
Bluey-themed slot machines are still harmful.
Do… you think kids are accidentally finding porn, thinking it’s for them, and partaking? Why would any teen see a “mature” rating on a website and go elsewhere? This is the kind of response I expect a literal alien from another planet to make.
As an aside, why would a mature rating on a bluey themed gambling machine change anything? I may have a unique perspective on this because I worked at blockbuster for a decade but I PROMISE you parents largely do not care. If you want to solve the problem, hoping parents solve it isn’t… actually a solution of any kind.