Lawmakers across the country (United States) are trying to protect kids by age-gating parts of the internet.
These laws are dangerous, kids are going to sneak a peek at adult things and when they do going to pornhub is far safer than having to avoid strong filters by joining a private discord group full of creepy old guys.
Honestly these laws are a groomers dream, keeping kids naive and then funnelling them in to poorly moderated or purposely immoral porn sharing communities creates actual dangers which aren’t present when a teenager sees some videos from the front page of pornhub.
What we actually need to do it have real conversations about things
This starts with some ambiguous “protecting the children” from porn argument to eventually requiring everyone to be “verified” with a digital ID before they can set foot on a highly controlled internet (or worse). We’re already seeing increasing glimpses of this and it’s in the government’s and big tech’s interest.
I’m so tired of the constant barrage of shit from all directions. This isn’t the beautiful future of humanity I imagined as a kid. No one will look out for us except for us, the actual people that these out of touch rich and powerful high society clowns try to control and keep occupied with stupid culture wars amongst each other, or placate with bread and circus. Enough already ffs.
Pretty sure that’s already the case in South Korea, having to use your real identity online in certain cases. We can’t let it expand worldwide.
China too. Everything is tied to your phone number
Spoiler Alert: It’s not about protecting children, it’s about the GOP keeping the gays off of the internet
I haven’t read the article but I assume it’s an invasion af privacy under the guise of “protecting the children” as usual
Everytime i see a bill that includes “child safety” in the title, i know it’s just going to be another attempt at turning the internet into a garden walled, big corpo controlled shithole, with the glowies being able to read any and all messages, and encryption being illegal.
An internet devoid of unacceptable “deviations” from gender and sexuality too. Given the effort to erase trans and gay people from public spaces, this seems like a parallel effort to destroy their digital ones too.
Humanity never changes. Teenage me found the entire idea that I might need “protection from harmful content on the Internet” ridiculous. Now I have been an adult for more than ten years, I still find it ridiculous that people younger than me might need that.
I just think that people should be given access to comprehensive sex ed early enough in life that it’s before they end up viewing something like pornography through their own actions.
I’m a parent and have plenty control over what my kids can access. Most devices have parental controls, and for everything else there is Pi-hole. I don’t need anyone else to do my parenting for me, especially when it means that I, the parent, get treated like a child.
“Oh please, daddy gubment, can I see this website?”
No. Not gonna fly.
What nooo you’re supposed to hate trans people enough to sacrifice personal freedoms and liberty!
And the UK
Fucking idiotic, thick as two short planks bunch of pricks, the lot of them. Cunts.
…politicians I mean, not the children. They’re cool.
Also, it’s never ACTUALLY about parental rights and protecting children. Plenty of parents want their kids to grow up believing that there is nothing inherently sexual about a naked body, or about women, but their perspective and rights never seem to be considered.
Think about how the reactionaries in control of many US states banned Drag Queen story hours and the like from libraries and schools, saying that it should be up to parents if they want their kids to go to them, only to then classify all drag shows as obscene and restricted to 18+.
I love how this “sticking it to big tech” is also funded by big tech. The general goal of someone like Facebook with this legislation is pass a bunch of rules that only large companies like them can comply with, and watch mastodon instances and other attempts to detrown them end in FBI raids and more regulations.
Not to mention none of this will actually protect children. When I was 14 I told an adult online about my life and they helped me make it through some rougher periods until I got to 18. I know the internet is highly imperfect but I think gate keeping kids out of it will just lead to more underground abuse and abuse that they don’t find was abuse until they are adults.
The people who wrote this bill want people like you to suffer
Exactly, they don’t view children as people, they view them as objects and extensions of their parents/guardians.
and that’s really the root of the issue, isn’t it?
Think of all the extra info we can sell if we card everyone!
Bourgeois governments gonna bourgeois
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“It does seem like a very clear backlash to not just tech, but to any sort of movement towards allowing young people to make their own decisions based on the information that they can access,” Jason Kelley, activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), said in an interview earlier this month.
France has proposed similar age verification restrictions on porn in the past, leading its data protection agency, CNIL, to investigate the security of current services on the market, determining that many were “intrusive” and for new, safer models to be developed.
Over the last few years, more than a dozen states, including many that have implemented age verification bills, have passed resolutions identifying porn as a “public health crisis,” arguing that it encourages violence despite little research backing these claims.
“I think progressives had the idea that they wanted to regulate Big Tech without fully appreciating the degree to which they were playing with fire,” Evan Greer, Fight for the Future director, said in an interview with The Verge earlier this month.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued to unravel the language related to pornography and ultimately won in 1997 after the Supreme Court decided that banning the material would infringe on the First Amendment rights of adults.
Without more pushback, age verification bills, just like the ongoing book bans taking place in schools, will continue to fuel the right’s censorship fire all at the expense of speech protected by the First Amendment.
The original article contains 1,875 words, the summary contains 245 words. Saved 87%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
That’s the point, they don’t give two shits about the children.
