4 ms·

That's not parents issue. That's why we go after people who sell or give drugs to kids. Is a serious offense, we don't wave our hands and say its parents proble

• vorpalhex 2mo ago
  Everything is a parents issue. If you are depending on the police to keep your kid from doing drugs, you have failed as a parent. I promise you, your kid can locate drugs better than the cops can arrest low level dealers. You as a parent need to teach your kid how to behave (mostly through things like teaching ethics and morals) not by running a safe prison until your kid is 18. And yes, I am a parent of multiple kids.
  • 1718627440 2mo ago
    > not by running a safe prison until your kid is 18. And in addition, such an approach, will not lead to a child magically becoming an adult all of a sudden when they turn 18.
  • mrtksn 2mo ago
    I agree, however the problem is that large number of parents can't do that and it becomes a societal issue. That's why we are talking about that, otherwise it would have been private family issue. Drugs, alcohol, teen pregnancy and now social media has become societal issue as enough parents failed to control their kids actions or development.
    • wowyouredumb 2mo ago
      I think Darwin had a solution to that.
      • DANmode 2mo ago
        We walked away from it.
  • kelseyfrog 2mo ago
    If we want parental behavior to change, we have to change the incentives. Parents must be held criminally liable for exposing their children to social media. Until we change the incentives, 'parents need to parent' is just an empty slogan.
• 1718627440 2mo ago
  Yeah, but that assumes, that there are people out there, selling smartphones to children at scale. First the price for one is way to large for the financial budget of a child, and second that gets even more price-intensive, after the first one got confiscated by the parent.
  • mrtksn 2mo ago
    There are literally people out there selling smartphones to children at scale. A smartphone these days can be bought for as cheap as a burger because 2nd hand market exist and its not limited to iPhones.
    • 1718627440 2mo ago
      And the child can also go and buy a porn magazin, which is likely to be eventually found by the parent, just like the burner phone you suggest. The former is also going to be cheaper.
      • mrtksn 2mo ago
        Guess what they check before they sell the kid a porn magazine
        • johnnyanmac 2mo ago
          So you're suggesting resellers require ID's to sell smartphones? I completely agree. Not much difference between a porn magazine and a portal to infinite porn magazines.
          • 1718627440 2mo ago
            Yeah, that would be my expectation as well.
• mindslight 2mo ago
  So sure, we go after anybody who gives or sells devices without basic parental controls directly to kids. So you need to be 18 to buy a phone, which we're 90% of the way to anyway with the way credit cards work. The fundamental point is that the Internet is not a daycare. All of these attempts to put the burden on sites boil down to changing this dynamic, recasting the Internet as if it should be appropriate to use as a daycare. Today it's big tech and porn. Tomorrow it's any writing that the the religious reich dislikes. Monday it's technical sites as they can help kids bypass restrictions. Tuesday it's international sites being blocked at the ISP-level because they don't bother with any of this crap. We also need to remember the context here, lest we carry water for big tech's continued abuse. The main reason the surveillance industry is reaching for age verification (ie identity verification) is that harm to children is so far the only regulatory cause of action that has been found to stick. Big tech wants this, so they can continue on with business as usual abusing adults' psyche and personal information. Where what we actually need is to stop their abuse for adults as well - eg data privacy, anti-trust regulation to open up their services to competing clients, and at this point probably straight up regulation of purposely-addictive "algorithmic" feeds.
  • Mezzie 2mo ago
    > Big tech wants this, so they can continue on with business as usual abusing adults' psyche and personal information. I've said before and I'll say again that this approach (strict age gating) also is going to produce a slew of really vulnerable 18 year olds. If I were a sports gambling site, I'd be salivating at getting a fresh crop of 18 year old boys each year who have had zero opportunity to learn how to navigate the Internet and who are legally on the hook for everything they do. OnlyFans, likewise, is going to work out great! Now the 17 year old girls turning 18 won't have access to things like the social media of former OF performers or access to any communities where sex workers discuss the downsides of their job or how to stay safe. Have to protect the children, don't you know. That way they can be perfectly pure and innocent when they turn 18 and are ready to be exploited. Like fattening up cattle.
    • mindslight 2mo ago
      Yes! And this dovetails into a point I really should have made as well. The thing about "age verification" (ie identity verification) is that it puts the decision of what kids should access wholly in the hands of corporate attorneys. For example we can easily imagine a "Facebook4Kidz" website that has many of the same terrible dynamics as regular Faceboot, but that Faceboot's attorneys can justify as being legally compliant. As a parent, you would really want to block this too - while all of these proposals for identity verification and site-based-control claim to solve the problem but leave you with no way to do that! This ties into your comment because as a kid approaches adulthood, as a parent you also want to loosen those restrictions so that they can develop these skills - gradually while under your supervision. Whereas the corporate attorneys will just say that they're strictly off limits, right up until it's then open season as you're pointing out.