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At the beginning of the article I was like “That does not surprises me at all” but then you start reading: > The increasing normalisation of these technologies
by 01acheru 5y ago
At the beginning of the article I was like “That does not surprises me at all” but then you start reading:
> The increasing normalisation of these technologies on digital platforms, including social media, is bringing dark web functionality to the mainstream
> The Department’s engagement with Meta and other companies with ‘privacy first’ policies reveal a degree of seeming indifference to public safety imperatives, including in relation to children
Come on people, that old “and the children?” trope? Australian government is really embarrassing some times
- codyb 5y agoI was under impression "protecting the children" was one area Facebook had actually tried to do a decent job. Although a lot of their moderation logic is evaded with simple measures such as adding simple watermarks to images/videos.
- throwawayboise 5y agoWell other than all the teenage girls that are depressed or killing themselves because of Instagram. They need to try harder.
- aierou 5y agoThis claim frustrates me in the same way as the claim that 'video games cause violence.'
- yuliyp 5y agoLooking at the data that headline came from makes it much less clear (feel free to ignore the "Facebook Annotation" and focus on just the leaked/later released slide deck that was used to fuel those headlines: https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Teen-Annotated-Research-Deck-1.pdf https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Te... (the headline came from slide 14).
- brnt 5y agoFacebook's business model is to enable predators of every kind; commercial, political, sexual (remember how it all began?). I'm not letting my children, my family, myself anywhere near that cynical cesspit of destruction.
- techdragon 5y agoI basically think of the department of home affairs as the morons that didn't realise 1984 was a warning and have mistaken it for a helpful instruction manual. It's to be expected they want to eliminate any vestige of public rights in the name of safety, the safety of the state they believe they are protecting, not the safety of its citizens. Just look at the way they laud operation ironsides, the FBI turned ANOM into a giant entrapment scheme and was able to arrest no-one due to it being blatantly unconstitutional in the USA, while here in Australia, we have zero protections and the Federal Police round up every single person they can find, trumpeting the wild success of their largest operation ever... handed to them on a silver plater by the US FBI, and such bad police work that it was unable to arrest anyone in the USA... Just disgusting... All of it.
- michaelt 5y ago> the FBI turned ANOM into a giant entrapment scheme They turned it into a giant trap, but entrapment has a specific legal meaning and I'm not sure it applies to the ANOM case.
- shadowgovt 5y agoGiven that this is the same country where a whole bunch of harmless video games can't be played by adults because the government will refrain from giving them a rating, having the Australian government call out Meta really does have that "Worst person you know just made a great point" vibe to it. (https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-know-just-made-a-gr-1825121606/ https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-kno...)
- nostrademons 5y ago1984 was an instruction manual. Orwell based it off of his experiences writing propaganda for the BBC during WW2. At the time his wife was a censor for the Ministry of Information. He was writing about 1940's Britain, not a hypothetical 1984 Britain.
- Jach 5y agoCentral to its story is also its inner "The Book", which is very much an instruction manual in the what and the how.
- Hamuko 5y agohttps://www.macrumors.com/2022/01/17/uk-government-anti-encryption-campaign/ https://www.macrumors.com/2022/01/17/uk-government-anti-encr... What is it with the Commonwealth?
- dane-pgp 5y agoCould it be that the intelligence services of the Five Eyes have all agreed it would be great to undermine encryption, but Canada and New Zealand have left wing / liberal / non-authoritarian governments, and the Democrats in the US don't want to weaken the security of (or campaign contributions from) US technology companies? That just leaves the UK and Australia to push for these awful policies, and pave the way for the other members to adopt them later.
- ironmagma 5y agoCaring about children is actually a really good motivation for people improving the world. I don’t care how many people have abused the notion before, children suffering due to inaction or indifference is a bad thing and people know this intuitively.
- Zak 5y ago"Think of the children; improve the nutrition of school lunches, and fund them so they're free to students" should probably be inside the Overton window. "Think of the children; make sure the government can easily read everyone's text messages" probably shouldn't.
- ironmagma 5y agoThe problem with this line of thought isn’t the motivation though, it’s the lack of attention to the pros weighed against the cons, and how heavy the cons are in relation to the pros. I can’t find a con to protecting the children. But what’s doubtful is whether you actually are protecting the children with this policy.
- Zak 5y agoI don't believe this is realistic, but what if the policy could reduce online child grooming to near-zero? Would it be worth outlawing secure communication? I think that it would not.
- ironmagma 5y agoWell, those children are people, and outlawing secure communication is bad for people. So I would argue the calculus is still incomplete the way it's presented.
- candiodari 5y ago> I can’t find a con to protecting the children. But what’s doubtful is whether you actually are protecting the children with this policy. This is the result of government taking over the protection of specific children: https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article238206754.html https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article23820... If the government has any intention to protect children, and intention at all, this is where they'd start. These kids really need it, and the government has all the control they could possibly want or need to do it. They not only utterly fail, they regularly cut funding to what little efforts exist to help these children. So no, government does the opposite. Therefore their intention cannot be to protect children. So what OTHER effects does this have? Well it greatly increases the government's ability to directly interfere in the lives of citizens. Which they, not seeing any irony, use to send more kids to their foster care -> juvie -> prison carrousel. In fact that this enables them to do more of that, is one of the main reasons to do this. Seriously. When there are studies that show that, as a kid (on average, discarding extremes), you're better off abused at home than "taken care of" by the state. On average, you're better off without government help. For example: https://sci-hub.se/10.1257/aer.97.5.1583 https://sci-hub.se/10.1257/aer.97.5.1583 (I do not deny that there are situations where state help is necessary. However, anyone that knows anything about the foster system knows that they don't help in such situations. These situations are too difficult/too much violence to deal with/no expected positive result/... and explicitly target kids with small or nonexistent problems because they're paid per child, based on the care provided. So 24/7 care for a problem-free toddler is where the financial incentives are for them. This even applies to medical problems: child has cancer? You're entirely safe from youth services. Why? Because caring for that child is too expensive ... the EXACT opposite you'd want to see them do, but, of course, financially it makes total sense. Ironically this means effectively random (poor) kids go to foster care, then juvie, then back home, because it's a financial disaster for foster care, institutional or otherwise, to take them back, so suddenly there's "no more need" for care. It's a financial disaster for the parents too, of course) In fact there are studies that show that social workers REFUSING help to children (in reality to parents and schools) works very therapeutically, and actually fixes problems, by (amongst other things) creating a great need for the problem to get solved, rather than taking away the child, which of course takes away the problem without solving it, doing incredible permanent damage to kids in the process. So, in THEORY they do this to protect children. In PRACTICE they do this to damage children, and to do more damage to more children.
- seneca 5y ago> Come on people, that old “and the children?” trope? Australian government is really embarrassing some times There's criticism of the "think of the children" trope because it's used to defend bad ideas using an emotional argument. The bad part is the smoke screen for bad ideas, not the defending children part. Putting a particular emphasis on the privacy of minors seems like a good idea.
- Rebelgecko 5y agoThis is the same country whose prime minister tried to ban encryption because "the laws of mathematics are very commendable" but should nevertheless be subservient to the laws of Australia
- FredPret 5y agoWhat a way to solve for X! Do it by decree. What a moron. This is what you get in a political system dominated by lawyers.
- Barrin92 5y agoI mean, he's right though. People who constantly bring up this "you can't ban math " meme make about as much sense as someone trying to argue you can't impose a speed limit because of the laws of physics. Australia is sovereign and it controls the communication in its territory is the point.
- FredPret 5y agoWell, if they want to ban the communication of certain numbers and collapse their online economy that’s their problem. But what these idiots frequently ask for is a backdoor key to encryption that only the government can use. It’s frustrating to see weapons-grade technical ignorance in our leaders when we have an increasingly technical society.
- bee_rider 5y agoSpeak for yourself, I'm moving somewhere with a higher refractive index so my kids can play in the street more safely.
- joe_the_user 5y agoCome on people, that old “and the children?” trope? Australian government is really embarrassing some times Oh I tend to flag those arguments as BS but you can never count them out. The problem is aside from the perfunctory, the strained and straight-up-false claims, there are a few places and context where children do need protection and some people quite determined to victimized them - and naturally people strongly emotionally invest where the protection is needed. And that creates a degree leverage that can be even when an audience is sophisticated - look at the many people defending Apple's neural hash absurdity here (risks re-litigating it but sure). Oh, and the way "think of children" is every censor and snoop's cry tend to detract from useful ways of protecting children (most of which don't have to with lots more electronic surveillance).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]