4 ms·

> Instead, the default should be, that if there is no header or it cannot be parsed, then the content is unsafe. That's something the client should be doing. Y

> Instead, the default should be, that if there is no header or it cannot be parsed, then the content is unsafe. That's something the client should be doing. You can configure your own device (or your kid's) to have whatever default you want. The actual problem is that classifying the entire firehose of user-generated content is precarious and uneconomical, so the default tag is going to be whatever minimizes liability. If untagged implies "unsafe" and "unsafe" minimizes liability then the majority of content will be untagged. If untagged implies "safe" then the majority of content will end up explicitly tagged as unsafe, because tagging it as unsafe minimizes liability. But either way if you disable "unsafe content" you'll end up disabling almost everything, specifically including the huge amount of "safe" content which isn't tagged as safe because accurately classifying it is uneconomical.

bsdetector 5mo ago
If the default wasn't "almost nothing" then you'd be sanctioning exposing some kids to content their parents didn't want them to see. If there's no economic incentive to tag content then it's not valuable content for kids. Ultimately the problem is the provider knows what category the content is and the parent knows what the content policy is. Providers can't say whether it's "safe" or "unsafe", only what standards it complies with. Some parents will have weird policies like "only G-rated movies or any Jim Carey movie" that can't even be delegated in any reasonable way to providers. So the header has "PG-13, US-legal" because it's a movie rated PG-13 and constitutionally-protected legal content in the US, and whatever other markets you want to open up. Providers could even include AI ratings so as to mass-tag their content at low cost, and parents can decide if a particular AI rating is okay. Parental controls could even restrict official ratings to country of origin, so if you approve PG-13 it'll block that content from countries where you can't sue them for lying about it.
- AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
  > If there's no economic incentive to tag content then it's not valuable content for kids. Those two things are completely disjoint. In one case you're measuring the value of the content to the platform and in the other you're measuring the value of the content to the kids. Suppose there is some content that the platform would get $10 in ad revenue to show to kids, would cost $100 to classify, and is worth $1000 to the kids. In the land of spherical cows you could have the users pay the money, but that gets killed by transaction costs, privacy issues with payment systems, and that kids generally don't have money. So the kids lose access to valuable information because the platform isn't willing to spend $100 to make $10. And it's still a problem even if the platform could make as much revenue from showing the content as the user receives value from it. Consider the entire firehose of social media posts on some unspecified site. Classifying it all would cost e.g. a billion dollars. So even if the value of kids having the content was half a billion dollars -- a huge sum equivalent to multiple human lifetimes of labor effort -- to the kids and the platform both, it's not happening because the cost of classifying the content is even larger yet. > Ultimately the problem is the provider knows what category the content is That's the problem though. The provider doesn't know what category the content is. There are Wikipedia pages that contain nudity etc. Who is going to pay someone to read the millions of articles and classify each one? But if they instead just mark the whole site as adult content, the amount of non-adult content kids lose access to is large.
  - bsdetector 5mo ago
    The cost to the content provider can be reduced to zero by the parents, by allowing it in parental controls. So the maximum cost to a provider is capped at convincing parents to disable blocking of the content. That could be an unfathomably large sum for pornhub or negligible for wikipedia. The question then is what's cheaper, paying to have parents enable the content (for instance advertising to make that choice acceptable) or rating the content? If it's the former that's essentially the same value parents place on blocking that content. You're looking at rating content in this default-block scheme as a cost, but really it's a discount. You're paying a smaller amount to rate the content "G - general audience" then convincing parents to allow unrated content.
BobaFloutist 5mo ago
Basically we'll get 99% of websites with headers that amount to "Online Interactions Not Rated by the ESRB"
croon 5mo ago
> But either way if you disable "unsafe content" you'll end up disabling almost everything, specifically including the huge amount of "safe" content which isn't tagged as safe because accurately classifying it is uneconomical. I think that's okay. The need for regulation is incentivizing capitalism in its amoralism to favor your regulated morality. Corporations very much like targetting impressionable kids with content to sell stuff. If that adds a liability cost to moderate and make sure that content is "safe" (whatever that means in your jurisdiction), then isn't that what you would want? I've never let my kids out on youtube, or the internet without either of us parents (yet at least). I hear you can now whitelist channels on youtube premium for child accounts, which sounds exactly like I want, but of course that doesn't scale. While I'd want to curate the entire internet for them until we've instilled enough judgment/their brains have developed enough to do it themselves, it's obviously impossible. Adding a liability risk or moderation cost to target kids seems like a fairly aligned incentive.

bsdetector 5mo ago

If the default wasn't "almost nothing" then you'd be sanctioning exposing some kids to content their parents didn't want them to see. If there's no economic incentive to tag content then it's not valuable content for kids. Ultimately the problem is the provider knows what category the content is and the parent knows what the content policy is. Providers can't say whether it's "safe" or "unsafe", only what standards it complies with. Some parents will have weird policies like "only G-rated movies or any Jim Carey movie" that can't even be delegated in any reasonable way to providers. So the header has "PG-13, US-legal" because it's a movie rated PG-13 and constitutionally-protected legal content in the US, and whatever other markets you want to open up. Providers could even include AI ratings so as to mass-tag their content at low cost, and parents can decide if a particular AI rating is okay. Parental controls could even restrict official ratings to country of origin, so if you approve PG-13 it'll block that content from countries where you can't sue them for lying about it.

AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
> If there's no economic incentive to tag content then it's not valuable content for kids. Those two things are completely disjoint. In one case you're measuring the value of the content to the platform and in the other you're measuring the value of the content to the kids. Suppose there is some content that the platform would get $10 in ad revenue to show to kids, would cost $100 to classify, and is worth $1000 to the kids. In the land of spherical cows you could have the users pay the money, but that gets killed by transaction costs, privacy issues with payment systems, and that kids generally don't have money. So the kids lose access to valuable information because the platform isn't willing to spend $100 to make $10. And it's still a problem even if the platform could make as much revenue from showing the content as the user receives value from it. Consider the entire firehose of social media posts on some unspecified site. Classifying it all would cost e.g. a billion dollars. So even if the value of kids having the content was half a billion dollars -- a huge sum equivalent to multiple human lifetimes of labor effort -- to the kids and the platform both, it's not happening because the cost of classifying the content is even larger yet. > Ultimately the problem is the provider knows what category the content is That's the problem though. The provider doesn't know what category the content is. There are Wikipedia pages that contain nudity etc. Who is going to pay someone to read the millions of articles and classify each one? But if they instead just mark the whole site as adult content, the amount of non-adult content kids lose access to is large.
- bsdetector 5mo ago
  The cost to the content provider can be reduced to zero by the parents, by allowing it in parental controls. So the maximum cost to a provider is capped at convincing parents to disable blocking of the content. That could be an unfathomably large sum for pornhub or negligible for wikipedia. The question then is what's cheaper, paying to have parents enable the content (for instance advertising to make that choice acceptable) or rating the content? If it's the former that's essentially the same value parents place on blocking that content. You're looking at rating content in this default-block scheme as a cost, but really it's a discount. You're paying a smaller amount to rate the content "G - general audience" then convincing parents to allow unrated content.

BobaFloutist 5mo ago

Basically we'll get 99% of websites with headers that amount to "Online Interactions Not Rated by the ESRB"

croon 5mo ago

> But either way if you disable "unsafe content" you'll end up disabling almost everything, specifically including the huge amount of "safe" content which isn't tagged as safe because accurately classifying it is uneconomical. I think that's okay. The need for regulation is incentivizing capitalism in its amoralism to favor your regulated morality. Corporations very much like targetting impressionable kids with content to sell stuff. If that adds a liability cost to moderate and make sure that content is "safe" (whatever that means in your jurisdiction), then isn't that what you would want? I've never let my kids out on youtube, or the internet without either of us parents (yet at least). I hear you can now whitelist channels on youtube premium for child accounts, which sounds exactly like I want, but of course that doesn't scale. While I'd want to curate the entire internet for them until we've instilled enough judgment/their brains have developed enough to do it themselves, it's obviously impossible. Adding a liability risk or moderation cost to target kids seems like a fairly aligned incentive.