7 ms·

And this is why things like requiring identification to access the Internet is a bad idea, and the narrative it's wrapped in - "protecting the children" - is re

by squigz 2y ago

And this is why things like requiring identification to access the Internet is a bad idea, and the narrative it's wrapped in - "protecting the children" - is really more about keeping children away from differing viewpoints

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
Kids should have to identify themselves to access the Internet. I echo part of a previous comment from a ways back: > I would not be the person I am today without early unfettered access to an uncensored Internet, and I say that both as a blessing, and a curse. It gave me at once access to early technology that's turned into a prosperous career, while also afflicting me with a lifetime of mental scars of varying severity and intrusive thoughts of things I saw and cannot forget. I struggle to label this trauma, but it's certainly not a good thing I carry. And having reflected on this, yes, it's trauma. It's the dictionary definition of trauma. And crucially, none of this has anything to do with viewpoints. I wish I had found more shit about different viewpoints, and less about animals and people being tortured. But identification as a child doesn't need to stop you from accessing opposing viewpoints, it needs to stop you from accessing... that. And I don't think anyone is going to argue that seeing some of the shit I saw was a growth moment for me or contributed in any way positively to me being a more well rounded person. I think a far more effective actionable path here is disentangling the stranglehold that parents have regarding how their children are raised. We still ascribe very diligently to the Western notion that children effectively "belong" to their parents, and that their parents are the single authority figure that decides how this person is raised. Most of the time that's benign to a bit obnoxious on the part of entitled parents, but it also very very easily ramps up into straight up abuse. The notion that, for example, a heavily Evangelical parent feels entitled to and is endorsed by the system to be able to deny their child knowledge of anything outside their specific sect and it's religious text, and enshrine that as a reasonable choice, is horrendous. This is a whole other person, this child is, and in our current system they are effectively a resident of a totalitarian mini-state until the age of 18 (and given economic challenges, potentially much longer now) that is largely reinforced by our surrounding systems. A child has basic rights, sure, to food, water and shelter, but even the enforcement of those can be inconsistent due to a combination of poor funding and an overall deference to parents that frankly is not deserved. We have reams upon reams of evidence of parents doing inconceivable evils to their children. It is not a given that a parent wants to care for their child and see them succeed. And advanced rights? They're a joke. A child doesn't have the right to consume and learn knowledge their parents find adversarial. They do not have the right to free association, parents destroy relationships their children have all the time, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of neglect, sometimes out of cruelty. Children's desires, identities, and interests are not able to be pursued if their parents disagree with them because there is nowhere a child can go (save for perhaps a Library, relevant to our thread) where they can freely do so, and their economic disadvantages put a hard limit on even that. The notion that parents should have 100% authority to effectively shape other, new people into being whatever they think they should be is frankly unhinged if you think about it for more than a few moments. This isn't a matter of coming to grips with a child different from yourself, and learning who they are, and helping them be the best them that they can be: this authority grants parents the right to determine what a child can be, with ZERO oversight, and no ability for the child themselves to speak on the subject until it's possibly a decade or more too late. It's incredibly frustrating as well because the same Evangelicals who will claim that every woman must be ready to lay down her life to bring a child into the world will then out of the direct other side of their mouths claim that that child, once born, has effectively no rights if said rights are potentially to be utilized against this unquestionable authority wielded by their parents.
- squigz 2y ago
  > But identification as a child doesn't need to stop you from accessing opposing viewpoints, it needs to stop you from accessing... that. The problem is you'll be hard-pressed to have one without the other - not to mention that even if it starts off like that, the system is so easily abused to destroy privacy on the Internet for everyone, not just kids. And by the way, I do actually believe more people need to see graphic violence, and I do believe it helps people grow. We all hear about gun violence and club shootings and the like, but it doesn't drive home the reality of it. Do I think kids should see that? Probably not, but I also don't believe it's inherently going to 'traumatize' all of them - I saw much of the same stuff you did, I'm sure, and I don't count it amongst my trauma.
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    I saw people literally get scalped and flayed alive growing up on the internet and all it did was increase my empathy for people and compel me to pay attention to the violent struggles happening around the world. I'm not saying exposure to such material doesn't risk traumatizing a child or even an adult, or that I am entirely untraumatized by what I've seen, but it still pales in comparison to the violence I faced at home. The problem is that it's like abstinence or prohibition: If such material is legally restricted, when people do encounter these materials, it won't be in a safe environment and the risk for trauma is much greater. To be clear, I do understand that some people fetishize violence, but I believe this risk is also greater if there is not a safe avenue for understanding the darkest sides of humanity.
    - authorfly 2y ago
      Can I engage you on this as someone who once shared your view? Not to say I believe my view is better now, but maybe you can learn from my experiences. Not everyone has this reaction, because what they have been exposed to shapes how that content will affect them. Specifically people who have been victims of serious assault or even witnessed that can have a much worse, and irreversible reaction to you when seeing things that make those memories come to the fore as recurrent, intrusive thoughts, which then affect their behavior and lives. That is really what the restriction of content should be about if anything: helping people avoid things they want to avoid. The people who have struggled (especially at a young age) with real trauma often come across as distant, quiet or anti-social; sometimes they never were so before. But often, our community where this behavior is more normalized, is where those people come, even if they don't have a primary interest in the community, to feel normal again, while still feeling fearful or full of empathy. You may have trauma, or not, depending on what violence you faced. However, even with violence, people react in wildly different ways, for one, women are much more anxious and cautious after feeling at risk or violated than men, so you really cannot assume that how you feel represents how a woman would (for evolutionary sensible reasons). Meanwhile, men often suppress their emotions (at a truly deep level, killing their relationships). The problem with saying that prohibition necessarily means they will encounter the material in an unsafe environment is that, someone who has been assaulted or abused is already in an unsafe environment, everywhere, in their mind, and for legitimate and rationale reasons. The world is different when you know police will generally not deeply investigate a serious crime, when one has been personally been conducted against you. Seeing content like that, can prolong or make permanent that state of being, which can leave to bad and convoluted consequences later on. It is easier to understand this if you have children or have seen real pain and suffering with someone you love too, that can give you the empathy to understand this reaction. It is hard to understand psychological damage unless you or someone you truly love and have strong empathy with goes through it. Until then, it's hard to understand or imagine at all how other people might be affected by some things. They will not always have your reaction to content which is extreme. I do not agree with prohibition, but do consider that others can have different reactions to you, ones you possibly cannot imagine. Put another way, many times, we label content extreme not because it is extreme for everyone. We label it, because for some group of people, at some point, it could set their own lives back a lot to encounter it, and these people are already suffering more than the average person. It's about helping them avoid more pain. Obviously this does not apply to all content, but for your examples, it does. Do not imagine there are not blue collar workers who have seen close friends suffer similar pain to the fate you mention, haunted by it. Men who would break at the knees at the sight of that kind of video. There are. You brush shoulders with them on the street. We can understand the dark sides of humanity through history and the written word (which I believe should be fully unrestricted), but not everything needs the very human, memory-provoking visual element.
Barrin92 2y ago
I think it's a pretty fundamental mistake to conflate the library with the internet. Even the "dangerous section" of the library is still a curated, by nature of the medium (the printed word), high information, low noise environment. The internet is a commercial, mass media space, in large parts an entropy machine, where you're unlike in the library backroom are always under surveillance, where it's not you actively engaging with books but the internet engaging with you. A library is a repository of knowledge (which is not the same as information or "data") the internet is a dark forest where some pretty eldritch entities are always on the lookout for someone to pounce on. Kids can be free in the library because, as to the title of the thread, there's always a librarian. There's no heroin needles on the tables. You buy the freedom of the library by it being an ordered and protected space.
- elijahwright 2y ago
  Conflation is probably wrong. But librarianship is one of the most hacker-adjacent places I’ve ever worked. I fought pretty damn hard to keep UNIX tooling very directly in the information science curriculum at Indiana - circa 2005 or so. It was in serious danger of getting removed - I was just a graduate student but I got my butt on the right committee where I could articulate the need for tools and textual technologies to stay on the map there. Taking them away from the students would have been doing them a massive disservice.
- gonzobonzo 2y ago
  Good point. One of the things that always strikes me as extremely dishonest about these conversations is when people pretend that libraries aren't curated collections. Usually with the librarians as gatekeepers, sometimes with others.
  - squigz 2y ago
    Out of curiosity, can you link some comments in this thread that suggest people think libraries are not curated collections? It seems to me that most people realize a librarian's role is indeed to curate it.
- 2y ago
andrepd 2y ago
I just want infinite scrolling data mining attention farming algorithms to be forbidden, at the very least for children under 18. Nothing about banning access to the internet.
- squigz 2y ago
  I don't think I said anything about banning access, just restricting it. In any case, I want such things banned too, for everyone - because you can't have it banned for kids without adversely affecting privacy for everyone.
- kstenerud 2y ago
  And that's great, so long as the government remains trustworthy. But then one day you have a government that, say, starts mining the IRS databases to pass that information along to ICE for arrest prospects... Once it's recorded, you not only have to trust the current government, but all future governments as well.
soulofmischief 2y ago
It's protecting the parents at the expense of the children.
- sanderjd 2y ago
  Honestly curious: What does this mean? I'll expand a bit on my perspective to avoid just sealioning here: Where I've come across proposals for policies like actual age verification is in the "social media is bad for kids" milieu. I'm extremely skeptical that these proposals are workable purely technically, but ignoring that, I have some sympathy for the concept. I do think that kids mainlining TikTok and YouTube Shorts and PornHub is really bad. So having cleared my throat, I'm back to wondering about your comment. How, in your view, is this kind of policy "protecting parents at the expense of children"?
  - bobthepanda 2y ago
    I mean there are many reasons that people say that TikTok is bad. If you think TikTok is bad because it promotes unhelpful or malicious advice around body standards, that's one thing. (See: bigorexia getting promoted into the DSM) If you think TikTok is bad because it puts children under a lens, that's another thing. If you think TikTok is bad because it exposes contrarian viewpoints that are not available on your television, like, say, something Gaza related, then that's yet another thing.
    - econ 2y ago
      The worse part of tiktok, like much of the web, is that it clips up your attention span into such tiny chunks that the consumer can NEVER feel the joy of thinking or talking. You can never voyage into someone else's mind deep enough to bee truly terrified or blown away, never see how they are fundamentally different from you nor why. All other complaints are a mere distraction by comparison.
    - sanderjd 2y ago
      This seems like a bit of a non-sequitur, but you also correctly guessed that I think TikTok is bad. But I don't relate to any of the reasons you listed. I think TikTok is bad for two reasons: 1. It is controlled by the government of China, and I don't trust them to avoid influencing Americans with propaganda. 2. It is bad in the same ways as all other social media.

by squigz 2y ago

ToucanLoucan 2y ago

Kids should have to identify themselves to access the Internet. I echo part of a previous comment from a ways back: > I would not be the person I am today without early unfettered access to an uncensored Internet, and I say that both as a blessing, and a curse. It gave me at once access to early technology that's turned into a prosperous career, while also afflicting me with a lifetime of mental scars of varying severity and intrusive thoughts of things I saw and cannot forget. I struggle to label this trauma, but it's certainly not a good thing I carry. And having reflected on this, yes, it's trauma. It's the dictionary definition of trauma. And crucially, none of this has anything to do with viewpoints. I wish I had found more shit about different viewpoints, and less about animals and people being tortured. But identification as a child doesn't need to stop you from accessing opposing viewpoints, it needs to stop you from accessing... that. And I don't think anyone is going to argue that seeing some of the shit I saw was a growth moment for me or contributed in any way positively to me being a more well rounded person. I think a far more effective actionable path here is disentangling the stranglehold that parents have regarding how their children are raised. We still ascribe very diligently to the Western notion that children effectively "belong" to their parents, and that their parents are the single authority figure that decides how this person is raised. Most of the time that's benign to a bit obnoxious on the part of entitled parents, but it also very very easily ramps up into straight up abuse. The notion that, for example, a heavily Evangelical parent feels entitled to and is endorsed by the system to be able to deny their child knowledge of anything outside their specific sect and it's religious text, and enshrine that as a reasonable choice, is horrendous. This is a whole other person, this child is, and in our current system they are effectively a resident of a totalitarian mini-state until the age of 18 (and given economic challenges, potentially much longer now) that is largely reinforced by our surrounding systems. A child has basic rights, sure, to food, water and shelter, but even the enforcement of those can be inconsistent due to a combination of poor funding and an overall deference to parents that frankly is not deserved. We have reams upon reams of evidence of parents doing inconceivable evils to their children. It is not a given that a parent wants to care for their child and see them succeed. And advanced rights? They're a joke. A child doesn't have the right to consume and learn knowledge their parents find adversarial. They do not have the right to free association, parents destroy relationships their children have all the time, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of neglect, sometimes out of cruelty. Children's desires, identities, and interests are not able to be pursued if their parents disagree with them because there is nowhere a child can go (save for perhaps a Library, relevant to our thread) where they can freely do so, and their economic disadvantages put a hard limit on even that. The notion that parents should have 100% authority to effectively shape other, new people into being whatever they think they should be is frankly unhinged if you think about it for more than a few moments. This isn't a matter of coming to grips with a child different from yourself, and learning who they are, and helping them be the best them that they can be: this authority grants parents the right to determine what a child can be, with ZERO oversight, and no ability for the child themselves to speak on the subject until it's possibly a decade or more too late. It's incredibly frustrating as well because the same Evangelicals who will claim that every woman must be ready to lay down her life to bring a child into the world will then out of the direct other side of their mouths claim that that child, once born, has effectively no rights if said rights are potentially to be utilized against this unquestionable authority wielded by their parents.

squigz 2y ago
> But identification as a child doesn't need to stop you from accessing opposing viewpoints, it needs to stop you from accessing... that. The problem is you'll be hard-pressed to have one without the other - not to mention that even if it starts off like that, the system is so easily abused to destroy privacy on the Internet for everyone, not just kids. And by the way, I do actually believe more people need to see graphic violence, and I do believe it helps people grow. We all hear about gun violence and club shootings and the like, but it doesn't drive home the reality of it. Do I think kids should see that? Probably not, but I also don't believe it's inherently going to 'traumatize' all of them - I saw much of the same stuff you did, I'm sure, and I don't count it amongst my trauma.
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  I saw people literally get scalped and flayed alive growing up on the internet and all it did was increase my empathy for people and compel me to pay attention to the violent struggles happening around the world. I'm not saying exposure to such material doesn't risk traumatizing a child or even an adult, or that I am entirely untraumatized by what I've seen, but it still pales in comparison to the violence I faced at home. The problem is that it's like abstinence or prohibition: If such material is legally restricted, when people do encounter these materials, it won't be in a safe environment and the risk for trauma is much greater. To be clear, I do understand that some people fetishize violence, but I believe this risk is also greater if there is not a safe avenue for understanding the darkest sides of humanity.
  - authorfly 2y ago
    Can I engage you on this as someone who once shared your view? Not to say I believe my view is better now, but maybe you can learn from my experiences. Not everyone has this reaction, because what they have been exposed to shapes how that content will affect them. Specifically people who have been victims of serious assault or even witnessed that can have a much worse, and irreversible reaction to you when seeing things that make those memories come to the fore as recurrent, intrusive thoughts, which then affect their behavior and lives. That is really what the restriction of content should be about if anything: helping people avoid things they want to avoid. The people who have struggled (especially at a young age) with real trauma often come across as distant, quiet or anti-social; sometimes they never were so before. But often, our community where this behavior is more normalized, is where those people come, even if they don't have a primary interest in the community, to feel normal again, while still feeling fearful or full of empathy. You may have trauma, or not, depending on what violence you faced. However, even with violence, people react in wildly different ways, for one, women are much more anxious and cautious after feeling at risk or violated than men, so you really cannot assume that how you feel represents how a woman would (for evolutionary sensible reasons). Meanwhile, men often suppress their emotions (at a truly deep level, killing their relationships). The problem with saying that prohibition necessarily means they will encounter the material in an unsafe environment is that, someone who has been assaulted or abused is already in an unsafe environment, everywhere, in their mind, and for legitimate and rationale reasons. The world is different when you know police will generally not deeply investigate a serious crime, when one has been personally been conducted against you. Seeing content like that, can prolong or make permanent that state of being, which can leave to bad and convoluted consequences later on. It is easier to understand this if you have children or have seen real pain and suffering with someone you love too, that can give you the empathy to understand this reaction. It is hard to understand psychological damage unless you or someone you truly love and have strong empathy with goes through it. Until then, it's hard to understand or imagine at all how other people might be affected by some things. They will not always have your reaction to content which is extreme. I do not agree with prohibition, but do consider that others can have different reactions to you, ones you possibly cannot imagine. Put another way, many times, we label content extreme not because it is extreme for everyone. We label it, because for some group of people, at some point, it could set their own lives back a lot to encounter it, and these people are already suffering more than the average person. It's about helping them avoid more pain. Obviously this does not apply to all content, but for your examples, it does. Do not imagine there are not blue collar workers who have seen close friends suffer similar pain to the fate you mention, haunted by it. Men who would break at the knees at the sight of that kind of video. There are. You brush shoulders with them on the street. We can understand the dark sides of humanity through history and the written word (which I believe should be fully unrestricted), but not everything needs the very human, memory-provoking visual element.

Barrin92 2y ago

I think it's a pretty fundamental mistake to conflate the library with the internet. Even the "dangerous section" of the library is still a curated, by nature of the medium (the printed word), high information, low noise environment. The internet is a commercial, mass media space, in large parts an entropy machine, where you're unlike in the library backroom are always under surveillance, where it's not you actively engaging with books but the internet engaging with you. A library is a repository of knowledge (which is not the same as information or "data") the internet is a dark forest where some pretty eldritch entities are always on the lookout for someone to pounce on. Kids can be free in the library because, as to the title of the thread, there's always a librarian. There's no heroin needles on the tables. You buy the freedom of the library by it being an ordered and protected space.

elijahwright 2y ago
Conflation is probably wrong. But librarianship is one of the most hacker-adjacent places I’ve ever worked. I fought pretty damn hard to keep UNIX tooling very directly in the information science curriculum at Indiana - circa 2005 or so. It was in serious danger of getting removed - I was just a graduate student but I got my butt on the right committee where I could articulate the need for tools and textual technologies to stay on the map there. Taking them away from the students would have been doing them a massive disservice.
gonzobonzo 2y ago
Good point. One of the things that always strikes me as extremely dishonest about these conversations is when people pretend that libraries aren't curated collections. Usually with the librarians as gatekeepers, sometimes with others.
- squigz 2y ago
  Out of curiosity, can you link some comments in this thread that suggest people think libraries are not curated collections? It seems to me that most people realize a librarian's role is indeed to curate it.
2y ago

andrepd 2y ago

I just want infinite scrolling data mining attention farming algorithms to be forbidden, at the very least for children under 18. Nothing about banning access to the internet.

squigz 2y ago
I don't think I said anything about banning access, just restricting it. In any case, I want such things banned too, for everyone - because you can't have it banned for kids without adversely affecting privacy for everyone.
kstenerud 2y ago
And that's great, so long as the government remains trustworthy. But then one day you have a government that, say, starts mining the IRS databases to pass that information along to ICE for arrest prospects... Once it's recorded, you not only have to trust the current government, but all future governments as well.

soulofmischief 2y ago

It's protecting the parents at the expense of the children.

sanderjd 2y ago
Honestly curious: What does this mean? I'll expand a bit on my perspective to avoid just sealioning here: Where I've come across proposals for policies like actual age verification is in the "social media is bad for kids" milieu. I'm extremely skeptical that these proposals are workable purely technically, but ignoring that, I have some sympathy for the concept. I do think that kids mainlining TikTok and YouTube Shorts and PornHub is really bad. So having cleared my throat, I'm back to wondering about your comment. How, in your view, is this kind of policy "protecting parents at the expense of children"?
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  I mean there are many reasons that people say that TikTok is bad. If you think TikTok is bad because it promotes unhelpful or malicious advice around body standards, that's one thing. (See: bigorexia getting promoted into the DSM) If you think TikTok is bad because it puts children under a lens, that's another thing. If you think TikTok is bad because it exposes contrarian viewpoints that are not available on your television, like, say, something Gaza related, then that's yet another thing.
  - econ 2y ago
    The worse part of tiktok, like much of the web, is that it clips up your attention span into such tiny chunks that the consumer can NEVER feel the joy of thinking or talking. You can never voyage into someone else's mind deep enough to bee truly terrified or blown away, never see how they are fundamentally different from you nor why. All other complaints are a mere distraction by comparison.
  - sanderjd 2y ago
    This seems like a bit of a non-sequitur, but you also correctly guessed that I think TikTok is bad. But I don't relate to any of the reasons you listed. I think TikTok is bad for two reasons: 1. It is controlled by the government of China, and I don't trust them to avoid influencing Americans with propaganda. 2. It is bad in the same ways as all other social media.