Though I think banning it for children is the wrong approach. Ban the addictive and dangerous features for everyone, adults included — no more infinite scroll, and no more feeds showing content from outside social connections.

So, kill all news agencies and reporters I guess? or would there be a carve out for incumbents so they can cement their market share? who controls the approval list?

That alone is a value add people don't realize even as they're losing it: it created a shared reality you and locals inhabited, that you could have a conversation about.

Even if you want expand from social and allow commercial activity on them, it should still only be whoever you actually chose. It's not like Fox News can interrupt a BBC News broadcast on TV, or The New York Times can substitute itself for your normal copy of The Cambridge News: you chose what source you get, not an algorithm. (And there is a specific named editor to blame if some false story gets in that wasn't checked first for actually being true).

Australia did this, now everything is worse with no tangible improvement to "child safety" or protection from brainrot.

Except this has nothing to do with social media nor with children nor with addiction.

We've had time to witness the damage of a dopamine-doomscroll. I personally know children who've posted too much, and children who've been solicited directly by adults, both to try and meet and for nudes. And we've seen the complete lack of positive action from platforms. Roblox is full of paedophiles and Grok was letting you nudify your classmates just a few months ago. These places aren't suitable for kids.

I don't want a ban on VPNs. That isn't being suggested, just making sure they're also age-checked. But some inconvenience is a price worth considering.

These "platform design problems" are features for some adults. If they want to pour their life into being radicalised by a neverending, bias-confirming, slop-filled doom scroll, that's their choice, isn't it? Outright prohibition is far more fraught both politically and technically.

Blocking 100% of kids isn't required to prevent harm. The key is finding the optimum balance.

I have a Facebook account primarily for Market Place under a completely fake name. I very rarely comment on things on Facebook, but it feels good knowing that my real name is not being posted. From a glance, Meta cannot confirm this account is owed by Joe Blogs.

Services that enable circumvention is a natural extension. Yes that means going through the same verification process you do with pornhub with your VPN host.

Completely by-the-by, your school networking experience is notably different from mine. Ours are locked down. Kids don't get access on their own devices. They whitelist domains, Google has educational filters, etc, etc. Could somebody red team their way through it? Maybe. Kids aren't.

And thanks for confirming kids can absolutely get around your locked down network, you're just betting they won't bother. So the actual plan is "trust kids not to circumvent it" for school wifi but "can't trust adults not to circumvent it" for VPNs. Pick a level of trust and stick with it.

I'd be surprised if the law requires much beyond a vague best effort from service providers, but many already block connections from known server hosts and some even VPNs.

An airtight block is not what's required; stopping social media being mainstream for kids is.

I'm trying to discuss this in good faith but that wasn't even an argument. A bland accusation wearing a tin foil hat.

You could argue the benefit to children in repealing it.

You're trying to frame it as an "inconvenience" and not a blatant attack on the fundamental freedom of expression. I get that social media is bad, but sometimes (often) the cure is worse than the illness.

Sure, whatever. Maybe in some ways.

> I personally know children who've posted too much, and children who've been solicited directly by adults, both to try and meet and for nudes.

... but not in that way.

I personally knew children who'd been solicited directly by adults before there was even an Internet. Including me, if you use the definition of "child" that seems to be popular in this sort of debate (and, by the way, it wasn't a big deal).

We did not shut down the world because of it.

Not every country that exists is like that. People aren’t inherently “dumb”. Uneducated, sure.

Coders went from being civically active—calling their electeds and showing up to events to defend privacy in the 90s—to being comfortably rich and content with maybe voting in generals. That’s had a direct effect on policy quality.

- totally benign film set in the UK

H.L. Mencken

People from duma (the russian parlament) also publicly stated it would never use it for anything but children protection.

I personally think the era of free and unrestricted Internet is coming to an end. All the nations in the West are following suit, including Canada with the introduction of C-34.

It used to be "don't give your name to anyone online" and now it's "hand it over when you're told".

It would be similar to Radio Free Europe which was broadcast to the former Soviet States.

Sounds like some kind of utopia to me, given the current circumstances /s

By the way, the level of ban enforcement can also vary from region to region regardless of ISPs (at least that's what I heard from some people), but anyway...

The point is if they start — they can proceed way further than you can imagine now.

So I hope that in the UK and other European countries, by drawing on Russia’s existing experience, people will be able to adapt to these restrictions before they become too severe. Of course, the government could also adopt Russia’s approach right away, but that’s unlikely, as it would provoke far too much resistance from citizens - they aren’t used to that level of restriction. If Europe does indeed continue moving in this direction, everything will happen gradually, just as it did in Russia; no one will roast a frog with a flamethrower - they’ll cook it according to the classic recipe, so to speak.

I just don't understand why some other people in such discussions still think that its only about children and weigh pro and cons when they have an actual example of all these things being implemented.

Yes, that's right. Now the only reliable protocols to communicate with my friends in Russia seem to be e-mail ones like SMTP, because everything else constantly gets interrupted if not blocked completely. The only thing we can hope for here is that sooner or later, that hell will finally end; we just need to do what we do.

> I just don't understand why some other people in such discussions still think that its only about children and weigh pro and cons when they have an actual example of all these things being implemented.

Maybe I'm being kind of rude, but to me that seems just like... for the lack of better words, it seems like they're in denial. In a psychological sense, I mean.

There's a larger phenomenon than simple denial at work. Infantilization of adults is a necessary component of fascism. We are told, implicitly, that we are all the children of the state. Those who accept that message -- and there will always be some -- will embrace the protection promised by authoritarianism.

The actual children are, as always, just along for the ride.

1: https://torontosun.com/news/world/russian-execution-squads-h...

Companies will be exempt (with remote employees having to identify linking their IP and computer's fingerprint with their real identity), and the next step, after using the law to silencing dissent, will be penalisation.

What made you think that I think so?

Now could you, please, show to me where exactly was I saying something positive about governments?

From my personal point of view and from my own experience, you have to look for positives if it's possible. The fact that you're still alive is already a positive, even if you're underground taking cover from bombshells and thinking that you may die tomorrow. If you're not looking for positive, you will loose your will to live and, eventually, you will die. Maybe that's making me look too optimistic, but for me that's literally the matter of survival. Sorry if my position was not clear from the beginning.

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. You’ve made an unsubstantiated assertion. I won’t hold my breath waiting for any references to support your ridiculous claim.

Now, there is one big issue for a couple of countries and that's that Russia and China probably don't report on the same level as the UK and Germany though for the UK, not all jurisdictions returned an answer, so the stats are likely higher for the UK. Then again in Russia, you can comment all you want if you avoid the one subject, well, maybe two subjects.

There is strong, popular will for age gating social media. At the same time, at least in America, there is a deep streak of laziness and nihilism in the tech community that makes it civically useless. When combined, you get politicians getting calls every day to limit social media and little from experts on how.

So you get folks reaching for the first solution on the shelf, and then getting wedded to it. The correct approach is making this the social-media companies’ problem. If they wind up with users under N years old, they get fined. If you want to use social media, you put up with their BS. If not, you’re not affected. Unfortunately, I’ve worked on privacy and technical policy enough to be sceptical that anyone will actually pitch that to their elected. So we get this, instead. (And at the end of the day, I’ll take an imperfect solution over a perfect one that goes nowhere. Though the UK, as usual, seems to have found the worst of the bunch.)

Shortly after the Online Safety Act went into operation, there was politically charged/sensitive/opinionated content on X mysteriously disappearing for UK users but nobody else in the world.

Nobody is surprised that Russia resorts to this. They are a potemkin dictatorship. But that the UK is also acting as a dictatorship - now that's interesting.

VPN banning is part of the same compulsion for control that made London a global leader (in surveillance of people not suspected of a crime).

ref: https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/articles/2020-08-14/the-t...

car culture < childhood

This isn't a cynically curated viewpoint. It's some* of what we have and what that cost.

* we also have trespassing culture & stranger-danger culture. we ruined roaming and the childhood development it nurtured.

Can you imagine bringing up cars in this thread?

I believe you. I'm likely older than you, so there were even fewer cars when I was a kid. I'm confident my utopia was even better than yours.

Between then and now we have a gradient of loss. My kids grew up under 24/7 adulting and had nowhere to go.

Yes but this has nothing to do with cars. What are you even protecting kids from anyway?

> Yes but this has nothing to do with cars. What are you even protecting kids from anyway?

It has everything to do with cars. Once my kids cross the yard, in all directions are the risk from cars, the risk of trespassing charges and that's about it.

In a few generations, kids went from countless square miles of free roam area to the few sq ft of their own property.

ref: https://old.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/v8cyi7/map_compar...

> What are you even protecting kids from anyway?

Their reality is their reality. I didn't create it.

I'm not even taking a side here and what they are trying to do is obvious.

Alternatively, the center starts trying to attract right-wing voters by adopting right-wing ideas like anti-immigrant views or "well, we can sacrifice the climate a bit more" positions.

Keir Starmer is from a "left" party but his actions has shown him to be a centrist, Ursula von der Leyen is quite right. Then again, these are European positioning, as someone's said years ago, the European right-wing would be liberal in the US. And with the currently openly racist regime of the USA, even more so!

(Also, it’s worth noting that the Conservatives support the same policy, and Reform support the principle while opposing the means.)

A leaked strategy document from UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer's chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, outlined their "Kill Musk's Twitter" to diminish the platform through advertiser pressure and regulatory action

Even as adults, many find Facebook and Twitter in particular to be repugnant, and use them anyway as an addiction. LinkedIn is more the butt of jokes about how everyone is excited by their new future even when they're newly looking for work, but at least they have minigames now.

YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok have a reputation for funelling people into conspiracies, but IDK if that's totally fair or them getting painted with the same brush in a moral panic.