How Mark Zuckerberg is flipping the script on kids' safety online

Re:How Mark Zuckerberg is flipping the script on kids' safet... by southernplaces7 on Sunday April 20, 2025 @11:25PM (#43748303)

If I've ever seen a manipulative canard for online censorship and increased surveillance, it's this notion that digital platforms need to actively "protect" kids from accessing supposedly harmful content through ID checks, age verifications and other monitoring tools. Can none of you see that for what it is and all the avenues for bureaucratic/regulatory abuses that it presents?

Aside from Zuckerberg being a scumbag in assorted ways, the politicians and private groups rooting for these sorts of enforcement mechanisms are either foolish or pandering in one cynically grotesque way to absurd moral scares that will do nothing to make the internet much safer, better or more free.

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Re:How Mark Zuckerberg is flipping the script on kids' safet... by jmye on Sunday April 20, 2025 @11:43PM (#43748349)

I get it, really. “For the kids” is almost always bullshit. But Zuckerberg (and originally Sandberg) intentionally targeted kids and intentionally tweaked algorithms to hurt them (e.g. the entire profit motive for Instagram is giving teen girls depression). Forcing them to, for instance, stop the algorithms from targeting kids would be a positive step that wouldn’t present the harms you’re noting (or be as completely pointless), IMO.

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