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> At her home in western Germany, a woman told a team of visiting researchers from Meta that she did not allow her sons to interact with strangers on the social

> At her home in western Germany, a woman told a team of visiting researchers from Meta that she did not allow her sons to interact with strangers on the social media giant’s virtual reality headsets. Then her teenage son interjected, according to two of the researchers: He frequently encountered strangers, and adults had sexually propositioned his little brother, who was younger than 10, numerous times. It seems to me possible solutions could be a mix of: a) company monitors all conversations (privacy tradeoff) b) validates age c) product not available to kids d) product available to kids, leave up to parents to monitor

gjsman-1000 1y ago
> validates age This is what legislators are generally going for; but it turns out there’s plenty of other stuff on the Internet deserving age restrictions by the same logic. I’m at the point where I know we’re not going back; that battle is already lost. The question is how to implement it in the most privacy preserving manner. I’m also at the point where I believe the harm to children exceeds, and is exceeding, the harm of losing a more open internet. Kids are online now, parental controls are little used and don’t work, that’s our new reality. For anyone who responds this is a “think of the children,” that ignores we have tons of laws thinking about the children, because sometimes you do need to think of the children. One glance at teen’s mental health right now proves that this is one of those times. Telling parents to do better after a decade of trying is not a realistic solution.
- mxkopy 1y ago
  I guarantee that a 20 hour workweek would fix this problem without having to invade anyone’s privacy, but we can’t have that for obvious reasons. My friends with healthy attachments to social media had healthy and present parents. You have to make sure your kid doesn’t want to drop out of society by being too overbearing, and obviously you need to be there to tell them the pitfalls of addiction and superficiality that only experience can reveal. Walking this line every day while your kid is kicking and screaming at you is way harder if you’ve already been kicked and screamed at work for 8 hours, so you just put them on the iPad and hope for the best -> and that’s how we get here. It begins and ends with capitalism’s productivity fetish
  - gjsman-1000 1y ago
    I don’t believe that for a second. If parents only had to work 20 hours… watch half care more about their kids, while the other half gets a second job anyway to buy a boat, or immediately goes into an addiction spiral, their job previously being the time restraint. The jobs that keep us from our hobbies, are also checks on the darker sides of human nature. On that note, even this doesn’t fix the problem; as now the iPad is still an all-or-nothing device, unless the parent knows how to fluently manage multiple endpoints on multiple operating systems - and this is so universal the law can safely consider it handled. I think that’s less likely to work than a genocide-free communist state.
    - mxkopy 1y ago
      For every addiction you enable with more free time there’s an overworked but capable and loving parent on the other side of the equation. That’s why your argument isn’t really a rebuttal but a counterfactual based on an opinion. The reason your argument is wrong is because it’s a restatement of Hobbes, who is a pessimist and can be refuted in many many many ways. Moreover it ignores the very real economic reality that many parents face, which is simply that they have less money or time to provide quality care for their children than they did before, and that’s evidenced by the rising wealth inequality among iPad-owning populations. I do agree that parents can sometimes be unequipped to raise children, but you seem to be saying that decreasing the amount of work they have to do outside of raising children would make it harder for them to raise well and I can’t really agree with that.
- yepitwas 1y ago
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abeppu 1y ago
How about: e) the product records a window on behalf of each customer, and the customer can report an incident like this to both Meta and legal authorities including such a recording. Strangers who sexually proposition kids get removed from the platform and may face legal consequences. The virtual space is like a public physical space where anyone else can report your crimes. If this were a physical space (e.g. a park?) and your pre-teen kids were able to hang out there, the analogs to a-c would all sound crazy. Being carded upon entry to a park, or knowing that everything you say there will be monitored by a central authority would both be really weird. Saying "parents must watch their kids" seems less practical in a VR space where you can't necessarily just keep line-of-sight to your kids.
- andsoitis 1y ago
  this is predicated on customers' identity (and contact info?) to be known and validated, right?
  - asimovfan 1y ago
    i think if there is a crime authorities care enough about, they seem to immediately get to the true identity and contact info of the criminal.
- freejazz 1y ago
  e) is probably not effectively scalable, like the rest of Meta's products which are oases for pedos
  - jjani 1y ago
    I'm flabbergasted whenever I read this argument. It's like saying Amazon's business is not scalable because they need warehouse workers.
    - freejazz 1y ago
      Says more about you than anything else. They have completely different business models, so I don't get the shock, let alone the relation. Facebook can't scale if they have to have human moderation at an amount that would actually prevent the pedos. It's just also facially incorrect - Amazon does hire warehouse workers. Facebook does not hire enough content monitors.

gjsman-1000 1y ago

> validates age This is what legislators are generally going for; but it turns out there’s plenty of other stuff on the Internet deserving age restrictions by the same logic. I’m at the point where I know we’re not going back; that battle is already lost. The question is how to implement it in the most privacy preserving manner. I’m also at the point where I believe the harm to children exceeds, and is exceeding, the harm of losing a more open internet. Kids are online now, parental controls are little used and don’t work, that’s our new reality. For anyone who responds this is a “think of the children,” that ignores we have tons of laws thinking about the children, because sometimes you do need to think of the children. One glance at teen’s mental health right now proves that this is one of those times. Telling parents to do better after a decade of trying is not a realistic solution.

mxkopy 1y ago
I guarantee that a 20 hour workweek would fix this problem without having to invade anyone’s privacy, but we can’t have that for obvious reasons. My friends with healthy attachments to social media had healthy and present parents. You have to make sure your kid doesn’t want to drop out of society by being too overbearing, and obviously you need to be there to tell them the pitfalls of addiction and superficiality that only experience can reveal. Walking this line every day while your kid is kicking and screaming at you is way harder if you’ve already been kicked and screamed at work for 8 hours, so you just put them on the iPad and hope for the best -> and that’s how we get here. It begins and ends with capitalism’s productivity fetish
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  I don’t believe that for a second. If parents only had to work 20 hours… watch half care more about their kids, while the other half gets a second job anyway to buy a boat, or immediately goes into an addiction spiral, their job previously being the time restraint. The jobs that keep us from our hobbies, are also checks on the darker sides of human nature. On that note, even this doesn’t fix the problem; as now the iPad is still an all-or-nothing device, unless the parent knows how to fluently manage multiple endpoints on multiple operating systems - and this is so universal the law can safely consider it handled. I think that’s less likely to work than a genocide-free communist state.
  - mxkopy 1y ago
    For every addiction you enable with more free time there’s an overworked but capable and loving parent on the other side of the equation. That’s why your argument isn’t really a rebuttal but a counterfactual based on an opinion. The reason your argument is wrong is because it’s a restatement of Hobbes, who is a pessimist and can be refuted in many many many ways. Moreover it ignores the very real economic reality that many parents face, which is simply that they have less money or time to provide quality care for their children than they did before, and that’s evidenced by the rising wealth inequality among iPad-owning populations. I do agree that parents can sometimes be unequipped to raise children, but you seem to be saying that decreasing the amount of work they have to do outside of raising children would make it harder for them to raise well and I can’t really agree with that.
yepitwas 1y ago
[dead]

abeppu 1y ago

How about: e) the product records a window on behalf of each customer, and the customer can report an incident like this to both Meta and legal authorities including such a recording. Strangers who sexually proposition kids get removed from the platform and may face legal consequences. The virtual space is like a public physical space where anyone else can report your crimes. If this were a physical space (e.g. a park?) and your pre-teen kids were able to hang out there, the analogs to a-c would all sound crazy. Being carded upon entry to a park, or knowing that everything you say there will be monitored by a central authority would both be really weird. Saying "parents must watch their kids" seems less practical in a VR space where you can't necessarily just keep line-of-sight to your kids.

andsoitis 1y ago
this is predicated on customers' identity (and contact info?) to be known and validated, right?
- asimovfan 1y ago
  i think if there is a crime authorities care enough about, they seem to immediately get to the true identity and contact info of the criminal.
freejazz 1y ago
e) is probably not effectively scalable, like the rest of Meta's products which are oases for pedos
- jjani 1y ago
  I'm flabbergasted whenever I read this argument. It's like saying Amazon's business is not scalable because they need warehouse workers.
  - freejazz 1y ago
    Says more about you than anything else. They have completely different business models, so I don't get the shock, let alone the relation. Facebook can't scale if they have to have human moderation at an amount that would actually prevent the pedos. It's just also facially incorrect - Amazon does hire warehouse workers. Facebook does not hire enough content monitors.