Thank you! This is why age of consent laws should be repealed. Parents should be in control over what relations are appropriate for this children.
How much more proof do we need that we're speedrunning the authoritarianism and frankly we're already somewhat authoritarian, it's just pluralism for now. Wait until the elites eat each other and only one dictator is left.
Many parents aren't taking time to be in control, and no amount of legislation will fix that.
This is already the case in the UK. We discovered another sad fact. Parents will suddenly develop the technical literacy to turn parental controls off because it's inconveniencing them, but won't bother to fine grain the control to make it safe for their children.
Apple and android controls aren’t that difficult to understand. Roblox parental controls aren’t that difficult to understand. Could it be simpler by unifying these things under one framework? Sure - I’ve worked with tons of parents who fall under the trap that Roblox is safe because they set iOS parental controls. I feel for them because they aren’t “tech” people and apple conditions them to expect a setting to be universal across the operating system, so it’s quite a shock when they find out their child has been texting with some groomer from Roblox chat.
The parents who are doing that will continue to do that. Improving those controls will help those parents and I agree efforts should be made for them. But for every one of those parents I encounter I get about 4-5 more who don’t bother to set any kind of parental control or filter on their children’s devices. When their 9 year old starts talking about pornhub and I give them resources on setting up parental controls it almost always falls on deaf ears. They simply don’t give a fuck. They can’t be bothered to spend 20 minutes figuring out how to set it up, even if I offer to walk them through it.
It is the new form of parental neglect, the modern version of a latchkey kid
Are we really going to argue “since some parents won’t adequately parent their children, we’re going to create a massive censorship and surveillance apparatus and the Government will tightly control what everyone is allowed to view or talk about online”?
eg consider child-proof packaging and labeling laws for medication, which dramatically reduced child mortality due to accidental drug misuse.
Read about the infamous EU's chat control and lobbying behind it: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/mullvad-vpn-present-and-then
It doesn't take a computer genius to understand the broader implications this has on civil society. If they genuinely lack the insight to comprehend this, then they certainly wouldn’t be using children as a shield.
Hitler and Mussolini, the infamous socialists. What an insane idea. Its only claim to fame seems to be famous American conservatives who want to cleanse the image of the far-right by writing off their ideologies to the other side. It also conveniently lets everyone pretend that totalitarianism could never happen here - it's all just evil communism/socialism, and we're not doing communism here, so just trust us, y'all!
These ideologies have very little in common. While states practicing both have been heavily totalitarian, the means through which they got there, the reasoning for their absolute power and its methods of enforcement, the strength of their grip and their national ideas/goals were completely different. Trying to shove them into one box is beyond reductionism, it borders on good-and-evil storytelling where all the bad guys have a simple, one-line explanation for their badness.
They'd latch on to whatever reason they'd think would stick.
What's left?
There are better solution than blocking IPs.
Anyways, the main point I was making is the filtering should be done on-device at the parents' discretion, if they really wanted to protect their children. We can give them that feature and eliminate an excuse for authoritarian laws at the same time. This doesn't even require legislation, we can just do it if enough people working on operating systems agree.
Ironically enough, that meant when I was working at AWS, I sometimes couldn’t access a site that I was working on for a client when I went into the office for a business trip (I worked remotely).
You realize that a lot of parents support this sort of thing because they are not technically sophisticated enough to control it themselves? Or they simply think that it has no place in polite society? That is why politicians enact these laws, because they are hearing from constituents that they want it.
We can make it so that it's as easy as changing the settings on their child's phone and then setting a password to lock that setting. The technical barrier isn't high.
> Or they simply think that it has no place in polite society?
That doesn't justify giving the government the tools to crush free speech on the Internet, which threatens the very existence of polite society. The current wave of authoritarianism around the world is a direct consequence of undemocratic governance systems on the Internet. In hindsight, it was kind of our fault. Failing to foresee its civilization-scale impact, we did not design the Internet with democratic principles in mind. This eventually resulted in large social media and cloud services platforms with enough users to sway elections, that operate under opaque centralized moderation and curation mechanisms. This became a real problem when smartphones were invented and most of human communication suddenly got moved online: freedom of speech has been de facto damaged for almost two decades now.
But it's a problem that can reverse itself, if we can figure out a way to neutralize the Internet's implicit incentives that encourage the centralization of compute and storage (which is equivalent to the centralization of power when most communication occurs online). And as you might guess, such solutions require a free enough Internet to create and deploy. That's why we must push back against these Internet control laws in the meantime, otherwise governments will simply use these legal tools to suppress attempts to decentralize the Internet, and we'd end up with authoritarian regimes all around the world.
Not to mention these online content censorship laws for kids are wrong in principle because parents are supposed to be in control of how they raise each of their own kids, not the government or other people.
And these laws make authoritarian surveillance and control much easier. It's hard to not see this as the main objective at this point. And even if it isn't, this level of stupidity is harmful.