I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially when this content is packaged up to them and commodified.
These platforms make more money than the ATO (Australian Tax Office) brings in a year. I think they have the moral obligation and means to create safer spaces- either inside or seperate from their adult platforms; they can reduce or prevent the types of harms when children are exposed to this type of content.
Whether this approach is the best one, or even worth it as it is written in law is definitely something you can argue, but the idea that there isn't a legitimate goal here (keeping children safe), just isn't true. I know not everyone that says this always has good intentions, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be preventing harm upon them.
If you look back at vox pops from when drink-driving laws were introduced, or when seatbelts became mandatory, or when ID requirements were tightened, the arguments for and against were eerily similar. We haven’t changed much in that regard, but now people wear seatbelts, children can’t buy cigarettes as easily as they used to, and drink-driving rates have fallen. I think these are noble goals.
The platform operators have a responsibility to remove garbage from their site. I don’t see how it’s better if adults are the recipients of these alleged harms. And I definitely don’t see how the platform operators are going to clean up their act if — rather than being penalized — they can pretend that the problem has vanished into thin air because a specific category of vulnerable users is now de jure disappeared.
The problem is, currently doing any kind of content filtering, as in making illegal stuff hard to find, and having a moderated semi walled garden, plays right into the noisy fuckers brigade.
If I were to design a TV programme which is aimed at 11-16 year olds, where I just play soft porn every 15 seconds, offer guides on how to do financial scams, and encourage the children to hide away from their parents as they watch. it would be banned instantly, regardless of how much "good" content I put in there.
People would say it's irresponsible to expose kids of that age to such things.
Yet, here we have social media doing just the same.
The reason why we make it illegal to beat kids, sell them smokes, drugs, booze and generally treat them like shit, is because we want well rounded functioning kids who are able to live a long an illustrious life as part of society.
Giving them a device that feeds them war, porn, rage bait, and huge lies, all for the profit of a few hundred people in america seems somewhat misguided.
I'm glad when I was a teenager the adults in my life were less concerned with protecting me from wrongthought. Are modern teenagers more or less credulous consumers of information than adults, I wonder.
Things used to be more scrutinized. e.g. look at the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Hot Coffee controversy and legal fallout over sexual content that existed in the game data files but could only be accessed by modding the game, at which point you could just mod the content in. Porn websites also used to generally put anything explicit behind a credit card barrier, and there was an attempt to require that that the supreme court struck down.
Pretty sure the US has had things such as age ratings for movies, which are enforced when possible, and laws around advertising to children and false advertising for quite some time.
I miss the good ol' days when you could see some cut off breasts alongside the snake oil ads in the papers. People are so stupid these days.
It's not remotely the same thing. Social media apps are highly engineered addiction serotonin-drips.
You had wrongthought because back then there was at least a chance that the material was objective. Today you have Fox News et.al. and scores of highly propagandized feeds spewing nothing but agenda-pushing propaganda.
> when I was a teenager the adults in my life were less concerned with protecting me from wrongthought
V-chip, movie ratings, music ratings, top shelf magazines, raising the age for smokes, the water shed, censorship of tv networks, chat rooms, computer in the living room, primitive walled gardens (AOL et al)
All of the "it was freer in my youth bollocks" is just that. Bollocks. But, I see that you like the idea of a person's social/sexual education being shaped by misanthropes looking to grift a new lifestlye for themselves regardless of the harm it causes others. All for profit and power. Not for betterment of the world.
> Are modern teenagers more or less credulous consumers of information than adults, I wonder.
The first example of something that you see is normally a big opinion former. If you see the local big city constantly portrayed at a lawless hell hole, its going to stick with you. As will the the race baiting, as will the utter bollocks herbal-remedy-cures-cancer 100% of the time shtick. Espeically if you've not got far enough through school to develop research skills, or critical thinking skills.
> All of the "it was freer in my youth bollocks" is just that. Bollocks. But, I see that you like the idea of a person's social/sexual education being shaped by misanthropes looking to grift a new lifestlye for themselves regardless of the harm it causes others. All for profit and power. Not for betterment of the world.
Uh, yeah - I never had to show an ID to use the internet and I could use the internet however I damn well pleased. "All for profit and power" -> No, I learned a lot from the internet, it changed my life in a positive way.
None of the things you mentioned are even remotely the same scope as requiring ID to use parts of the internet. I could still watch mature movies, v-chip was irrelevant in my life, smoking is completely different, etc. etc.
The answer to my question is that teenagers today are obviously less credulous than the adults in their lives and you can see this every time you interact with older adults.
The parts of the internet that are now banned for Australian teenagers are unlikely to change their lives in a positive way and much more likely to lead them into mental illness.
I taught myself programming, drawing, and 3d modeling on the internet. But it was on platforms like SiteDuZero and various forums. Even today, if you go on something like https://bbs.archlinux.org , it's very hard to land on something like the cesspool the homepage of YouTube and X can be.
well i’m sorry some kids (and adults) are idiots who enjoy brain rot, but i would have been pissed as a kid if the adults came for my intellectual communities because some kids are morons
>All of the "it was freer in my youth bollocks" is just that. Bollocks. But, I see that you like the idea of a person's social/sexual education being shaped by misanthropes looking to grift a new lifestlye for themselves regardless of the harm it causes others. All for profit and power. Not for betterment of the world.
I remember logging on to Microsoft Networks, clicking "Adult Chatroom" and saying "Hi adults, my name is <blah> and I am 12" and getting a bunch of very positive, thoughtful replies.
>Espeically if you've not got far enough through school to develop research skills, or critical thinking skills.
Some of the people being banned include these nice kids.
Their founder is now 18, but most of their research and social media people are 14 - 16.
I feel like these kids A, have developed the necessary skills to operate the internet, and B, have a human right to access and report on the information contained within.
>a person's social/sexual education being shaped by misanthropes looking to grift
The grifting misanthropes are in my honest opinion the people trying to prevent kids from accessing information. The "grift" is that kids have political interests and rights to access information and community, especially vulnerable kids, and the grifters want to "return" to a state where parents were the only method via which kids can access information. The internet is there for among other things, censorship resistant access to other people. The cost of this bill, assuming kids don't just keep stepping over the barricade, is going to be tremendous in terms of suicide in LGBT and disabled areas.
It's not so much teenage credulity, or coddling parents. Teen suicide is the easily quantifiable tip of the iceberg when it comes to mental health outcomes. Conspicuously it started trended up after 2008, around the nascence of Facebook and smartphones:
> Following a downward trend until 2007, suicide rates significantly increased 8.2% annually from 2008 to 2022, corresponding to a significant increase in the overall rates between 2001 to 2007 and 2008 to 2022 (3.34 to 5.71 per 1 million; IRR, 1.71)
That's also when the Great Recession happened, giving young people bleak outlooks for their future, outlooks which never really recovered. Nothing was fixed, and things have only gotten worse since then.
Dead end jobs with little to no benefits, no pensions, time off, low pay and few hours count as "employment".
Their parents and grandparents had pensions and could work at one employer for the entirety of their careers with growth opportunities, and could afford homes and healthcare while doing so.
Your hypothesis might be right, but I've provided data, and you're providing opinions. I'm fine with being wrong in my claim, but I didn't earn the downvote when no-one seems to have a clearer hypothesis with better evidence. First, show me that this shift is peculiar to 2008. And then show me that this is what teenagers are killing themselves over.
In the same way it's better that adults are the recipients of the harms of smoking, drinking or gambling. It's still not desirable, but societies have settled upon thresholds for when people have some capacity to take responsibility for their choices.
Not saying those thresholds are always right and should definitely apply in this case, but it surely isn't an alien or non-obvious concept.
There is also the problem that making platforms responsible for policing user-generated content 1) gives them unwanted political power and 2) creates immense barriers to entry in the field, which is also very undesireable.
I have no idea how to define it. I also don’t know if I’m personally convinced one way or another about the harms. Just think the platforms would probably have to be made to make more substantial changes were it the case.
I don't want Mark Zuckerberg, or the government, deciding what's garbage. If they can empower the user to filter this stuff out on their own accord, that's great.
The second problem is that the medium itself is garbage. Algorithmic feeds strongly encourage clickbait and sensationalism. Removing content does nothing to change the dynamic.
Sometimes doing absolutely nothing is the right thing to do. Not everything can be improved through top-down intervention, and many things can only be made worse.
The comment you’re replying to raised the idea of empowering the users. That’s probably the way to look, but the danger is always if we do that using top down enforcement in a way that promulgates more harm, including stifling vibrant and necessary speech.
My very radical opinion is that section 230 of the CDA was our original sin. The Internet was better when it wasn’t divided into a few centrally managed private social media silos. It’s better to have a vibrant, messy, competitive, and very grass roots public square.
Ah yes, the genocides, fascists and blackmail are just delightful parts of that awesome internet that any kind of cooperative governance would simply _ruin_
The genocides would have happened with age verification or not, don't conflate the two.
Ironically, the solution to both the proliferation of genocide and social media causing harm to kids is the same, and it's a solution that helps everyone: legislate the source of the problem, the product itself and what we colloquially call "the algorithm".
Algorithmic optimization and manipulation that causes harm needs to be banned wholesale, across the board, from advertising to social media.
Instead, we get legislation that not only makes it easier to identify everyone as verifiably monetizable users to platforms, it also makes it easier to keep the proles in their place.
> I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially when this content is packaged up to them and commodified.
I hope we can agree that allowing every social media site to devolve into the above is the bigger problem. There can be some places that are adults-only; just like reality though, the world is better when open-by-default, with some places gated to adults-only.
Shifting focus to "Why are we letting some of the most profitable companies the world has ever seen get away with being a cesspit?" lets us keep kids safe by default, doesn't attack E2EE, and doesn't default to the internet becoming a surveillance state.
If we start by getting Facebook and Twitter (et al.) to clean up their acts, we can all work, yell, and vote together, instead of some yelling about their kids being shown unexpected pornography, and others yelling about the internet becoming a surveillance state.
Because both can be real concerns - but a starter solution can get the vast majority of voters on-board, and garner real progress, instead of giving Facebook more data and control, or governments a turn-key dictatorship.
I don't think we've shown that that cleanup is possible.
Whenever platforms have taken even the smallest steps in that direction, the right-wing authoritarian political parties freak out and blackmail them into stopping, or in the case of Musk simply buy them out outright.
If cleaning it isn't possible, getting kids to know it and navigate the filth is required. Same way we teach kids how to interact with people on the street and get a sense of who to trust when they're in trouble and how to avoid trouble in the first place.
I wonder if the next generation will be facing this same sentiment.
For instance TV was basically a drug for the last generation, there was people watching near 8 to 10h of TV a day. It might have been replaced by something else, but I don't think our current generation has this specific issue.
From that POV, currently people in their 30~60s are the more stuck to social networks and raging against fake news all day, while younger generations tend to be on different services with potentially a lot more reduced circle of users.
Do we really know how the generation that is 5~6yo right now will react to our social media landscape ? (put another way, are we fighting the last war ?)
>I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially when this content is packaged up to them and commodified.
The law could instead prohibit scams and violence?
>These platforms make more money than the ATO (Australian Tax Office) brings in a year.
Irrelevant.
>but the idea that there isn't a legitimate goal here (keeping children safe)
Almost every other avenue, including doing nothing, has more merit than that which has been implemented.
>If you look back at vox pops from when drink-driving laws were introduced, or when seatbelts became mandatory, or when ID requirements were tightened, the arguments for and against were eerily similar.
Theres some basic negative freedom implications from those, but they dont intend to ban a class of person from accessing a mundane element of human society.
> I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation
Why not? Why won't you give political agency to young adults? I'm saying this as a kid who grew up in Romania, just after Ceausescu had been executed, so throughout the '90s, I do very well remember all the political news and commentary coming my way (I was a teen), but I can't say that it bothered, not at all, it made me more connected to the adult world and hence more prepared to tackle real life just a little bit later on.
I won't comment on the other stuff, because that would make me bring back memories of watching TV1000 (a Swedish TV satellite channel) late at night on Saturdays, also in the early '90s, I won't say for what but suffice is to say that I turned out ok.
There's hardly any parallel between the type of political content (or corn) that was available on TV in the 90s, and what's found in today's social media. It's not political commentary, it's a constant stream of pure, unfiltered manipulation, lies, brainwashing, prejudice and antisocial behaviour.
Rush Limbaugh started broadcasting in the 80's. Fox News in the 90's. Prior to that you had decades of propaganda against "communists" and anti-war protesters. Prior to that you had blatant lies about what would happen if black people got civil rights. Before that you had blatant lies about women's suffrage. The bullshit has always existed in very large quantities. The common uniting thread for the vast majority of the bullshit is conservative beliefs. They are always doing their most to make the world a worse place for some group or another.
> It's not political commentary, it's a constant stream of pure, unfiltered manipulation, lies, brainwashing, prejudice and antisocial behaviour.
This is exactly what conservative talk radio was like, and it radicalized a bunch of boomers – especially the ones with long car commutes who had limited counter examples. There’s a direct line between the guys joking about eating spotted owls or how feminists were too ugly to worry about rape to the modern environment, or saying that the government was discriminating against white men, but the difference now is scale and variety: now it reaches more people and there are more flavors available so the young woman who would’ve been turned off by Rush instead gets some wellness influencer talking about how birth control causes cancer.
- It's not young adults, it's 15 and under. Personally I would classify 17-20something as young adult (it's a bit subjective isn't it).
- The younger children don't really care about politics honestly. Curious if you have an age that you're ok with only ensuring irl politics for children? I think age to vote is a much bigger concern for me here in terms of civil liberties.
- Parents can still make that choice for their child (unclear how this will work to me yet, to be fair).
- I've become convinced no one really practises 'politics' online. People barely even debate anymore. They argue, they perform activism, they aggitate, its what gets attention (thanks to social media). I'm worried people think this is normal, it's not- political discourse used to be much more productive. I remember when fallacies were actually brought up logically on the internet and people actually cared about the accusation.
- I did explicit rp with adults as 7 year old on MSN chatrooms back in the day :')
Social media is full of extremist and untrue content of all types. Antivax or free birth content are just two small examples of viral content that is untrue and kills people. It has a very negative effect on adults, and adults at least have brains that are fully-developed.
Exposing kids to the firehose of misinformation on social media just poisons their brains. Political agitation is mostly political misinformation. Even among the causes online that I agree with, most of the content online is deeply biased, one-sided or inaccurate.
I don't think we should allow the government to ban political agitation, but I do think its fine to allow the government to ban children using social media
The most dangerous, untrue, and extremist content I've ever seen has come from governments.
Lies upon lies about WMDs and going to war for our freedoms and how we need to "liberate" Libya and fund and arm rebels and insurgents. Millions of people killed, trillions of dollars wasted and stolen.
Someone who is not completely trusting of politicians or pharmaceutical corporations, or who wants to give birth like 99.999% of humanity has, really are so far down the list of "dangerous misinformation" they don't even register.
> I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc.
You mean like the outside world?
What happens when these hot house flowers of yours reach whatever magic age and get dumped into all of that, still with no clue, but with more responsibilities and more to lose?
I haven't noticed a whole lot of governments, or even very many parents, worrying about doing much to actually prepare anybody for adulthood. It's always about protection, never about helping them become competent, independent human beings. Probably because protection is set-and-forget, or at least they think it is... whereas preparation requires actually spending time, and paying attention, and thinking, and communicating. Maybe even having to answer hard questions about your own ideas.
... and since when are kids supposed to be protected from politics? We used to call that "civics class".
If your children are being exposed to sexual and violent content in the real world, that is called an "Adverse Childhood Experience" and it is predictive of everything from poor adult earnings to heart disease: https://www.cdc.gov/aces/about/index.html
On the one hand, you have violence and pornography, and also other crude content. There is nothing good about exposing children to these. It does not contribute to their growth or to their maturity as human beings and it is ridiculous to think it could. On the contrary, this content will cause psychological harm, causing distortions in their emotions, in their habituated appetites, in their self-understanding, and their understanding of normal relations. When deviance like that is tolerated, it shifts the Overton window. Children observe this tolerance and roll it into their sense of normality. Individuals suffer. The quality of society degrades substantially.
On the other hand, we have political agitation. This one is more difficult to define and handle, especially in a liberal democratic society. There are examples of obvious political agitation, of course, but children should generally not be exposed to political agitation at all, except as a subject matter at an age appropriate level and in an appropriate pedagogic setting. Children don't have the intellectual or emotional maturity to examine such material in the wild on their own where they would be at the mercy of unscrupulous adult manipulators who couldn't care less about the well-being of children. (Ask yourself what kind of person would want to involve children in their political agitation to begin with.)
So, there's a big difference between common sense things like these and coddling children. We want to prepare children for life, not teach them adaptation to depravity. You throw them into the filth of social and psychological pathology. Neither violence nor pornography should be normalized even in the adult world - it is harmful to the adults who consume it as well - so the idea that we should prepare children for life in some violent and twisted pornland is preposterous. Nobody has to put up with that garbage, and the law should be making sure they don't.
> and since when are kids supposed to be protected from politics? We used to call that "civics class".
The whole "don't talk about politics" is so toxic IMHO.
Sure you might not want to ruin your dinner with the family members you see a single day every year. But otherwise, making it sound like a taboo could be widening the tribalization and anchor the feeling deeper into people's identity. Let the people talk about what they care about, including when that affects who the next president is.
yeah social media is proving itself to be a bad actor like big alcohol, big tobacco. No incentive to do the right thing or improve anything. ripping audiences away from them is the only way they'll understand.
>If you look back at vox pops from when drink-driving laws were introduced, or when seatbelts became mandatory, or when ID requirements were tightened, the arguments for and against were eerily similar.
If you think the arguments are eerily similar, I feel like you haven't really been listening to the arguments against these types of age-verification-for-websites laws.
I mean, there's some similarities, of course. But I think there are some very stark differences.
>I feel like you haven't really been listening to the arguments against these types of age-verification-for-websites laws.
Or maybe I just have a different conclusion to you? Because I do care, I do try to listen to the arguments. I'm no stranger to advocacy for civil liberties, they are important to me. I think all else being equal, freedom should be valued more over harm prevention. So if I'm for these laws, consider that a sign of how bad these sites have become, not how uninformed I am.
> I mean, there's some similarities, of course. But I think there are some very stark differences.
Yep of course it's not a 1:1, I agree. I don't mean to imply that people saying the same arguments today are wrong simply because people in the past were, but it does make me think more about it when I spot the same rhetoric.
Often both sides have very reasonable concerns, as an example, the question isn't "should we have all or no freedom" Either extreme creates issues, yet both sides have valid arguments worth our time considering. We settle somewhere in the middle.
>"Or maybe I just have a different conclusion to you?"
Whatever your conclusion is, it’s sort of beside the point I was making, which is that the many of the arguments about mandated seatbelts (or smoking, alcohol) are meaningfully different than the arguments being made today about age verification for websites.
>“So if I'm for these laws, consider that a sign of how bad these sites have become, not how uninformed I am.”
This is kind of reinforcing what I said in my first comment. Most, if not all, of the arguments against these types of laws aren’t based on the premise that these sites aren’t bad. I haven’t seen anyone saying that TikTok is a societal good. Almost everyone agrees there.
I’m saying that the main arguments are different. I am suggesting that there are more differences between the seatbelt debate and the age-verification-for-websites debate than there are similarities. Which is why I thought your comment of “eerily similar” was off-base.
They are different laws with different contexts but the type of rhetoric and logic used to justify them are very similar, right? I already agreed they are not 1:1 nore was it meant to be. I agree with you there. If there's a more specific point you want to make, I'm keen to hear it!
> the arguments against these types of laws aren’t based on the premise that these sites aren’t bad. I haven’t seen anyone saying that TikTok is a societal good. Almost everyone agrees there.
There's people in this thread talking about jews being behind this ban to ensure zionism continues, using only a social media agitprop post to justify it. We are in the mud at the moment, so I'm sorry but I'm not taking that for granted, people have diverse views.
> I’m saying that the main arguments are different. I am suggesting that there are more differences between the seatbelt debate and the age-verification-for-websites debate than there are similarities.
Let me try explain this figuratively:
A doctor might give free care to someone in a medical emergency on a plane after all they have an ethical responsiblity to do so if they can, but that doesn't mean they're obliged to care about your canker sore.
Now imagine a doctor not treating one or the other because "It's not that serious". It's the extent of the harm or risk that actually indicates how insane or sane that doctor's response is, just as much as the doctors actually response to it is.
We can sit here and say "yeah it's not that serious" but one patient is dying and another basically fine. Just like those people that thought drink driving wasn't that big of a deal, people think social media "oh yeah that's bad but what you going to do", it's the same shrug and 'oh well' attitude. That's what I think is eerlie similar. Now whether or not that's appropiate or not depends on whether you think the patient is having a heart attack, or just has a sore lip.
I do agree people aren't generally saying TikTok is good, but people are saying TikTok isn't so bad as to regulate age verification. Do you see how these things play into each other?
My takeaway is that jfindper is saying that seatbelt laws had a justification that does not have a parallel with this action regarding social media.
IDK if this is how they would say it, but I think argument for seatbelts is that there is minimum disruption to usage, there is limited revocation of other rights, and the societal benefit is large and pretty unambiguous.
The idea that I have to give up privacy, expose myself to additional risk (by having my identity logged), increase the chances that mentally susceptible people will have more exposure to fraud in order to get a solution that is not clear on how effective it will be makes the parallel a bit academic, if not an out right straw man.
> I think argument for seatbelts is that there is minimum disruption to usage, there is limited revocation of other rights, and the societal benefit is large and pretty unambiguous.
Said like this, it looks to me that it has a parallel with social media.
> The idea that I have to give up privacy
You don't have to, though.
> expose myself to additional risk (by having my identity logged)
It doesn't have to be, we can have privacy-preserving age verification. Now we could discuss the specific implementation, but in general that's feasible.
> increase the chances that mentally susceptible people will have more exposure to fraud
It's not enough to say it: is it actually the case? You can already get phished by trying to access a social network, how does that make it worse? I don't think it's obvious. While the problem with kids and social media is, at this point, very well documented.
> if not an out right straw man.
I, for one, think it's an interesting experiment. All the arguments above could be used against making cigarettes illegal for children. Yet I am very convinced that making cigarettes illegal for children is the right choice.
If we are so concerned about the materials make the platforms moderate them like they used to do. Banning them reeks of favoring the murdoch outlets which are free to spread misinformation
The ban is being enacted by the Australian Labor Party, which the Murdoch media is certainly not friendly with. If it ends up favouring Murdoch, it won’t have been deliberate.
I bet you Sky news gets more views through social media than TV broadcast these days! Many of their hosts are all over X, spreading misinformation. They are downstream from social media now, not seperate from it I suspect.
Murdoch benefits from the political agitation that the landscape of social media provides.
I do agree on making platforms moderate themselves. This legsliation helps do this by creating a discussion about the harms, enforcing a culture of harm (this is not for all ages, not default for everyone). Saying to the companies: "Hey, if you don't want to be regulated, clean up your platform so it's safer". Will that happen? no idea, but if it doesn't, no children is still a good goal (it's how you get there that has the contention).
> I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially when this content is packaged up to them and commodified.
This may be true but it has nothing to do with what the person you are replying to said.
The original comment suggests that the policy is politically motivated. The commenter replied with other reasons for the policy other than political agitation. I think its a valid response.
I also don't buy the implied claim from the original commenter that age-limits are paternalistic/suppressive with regard to political thought/speech. Large tech platforms control political thought/speech on a regular basis, a lot of which is executed by state actors. Even in the absence of devious actors, algorithms are editorial by nature; they are not neutral infrastructure by any means.
No, sorry, it's orthogonal to the poster's comment, which states that, regardless of merit, the purpose of the ban is political. Arguing for or against it is beside the point.
Perhaps the original comment should have been more direct in and just said that Zionists are the ones pushing for these bans. The head of the ADL has made comments about this. A video by Sarah Hurwitz, Obama's speechwriter, went viral recently about how social media needs to be banned for young people because it's hurting the zionist movement.
The head of the ADL is a firehose of stupidity; that does not mean he controls policy. I also reject the pretense that public opinion of Israel would be higher among teens without social media, given their actions over the past few years.
No sorry it wasn't a dig at you: the video was posted by someone who appears on Alex Jones' Infowars, talks jewish conspiracies. I just don't take that stuff seriously, doesn't make it wrong and if there's an argument you want to make I'll listen.
That video was literally posted by hundreds of accounts. I just picked the first one I found in search. And exactly how is "Jennine K" anything like Infowars? Did you even bother to look? Do you want me to find the exact same video from a "reputable" account? Can you address the contents of the video? It's direct and unedited, her exact words.
I assume you are a Zionist, based on your rhetorical techniques.
Zionism is when healthy information choices? I don’t trust infowars, sorry but that’s served me quite well over the years.
I did look, you’re being obtuse again, after all how else would I know it’s from an infowars adjacent account.
You strike me as the type
of person who thinks e-safety commissioner is CIA, they also call me a zionist for doubting that- it’s the goto ad hominem for people embroiled with I/P conflict.
This sort of social media bs and the way it affects political discourse is why social media is so damaging, much of it is just political propaganda.
You are completely untrustworthy. You clearly have an agenda. Nothing I posted has anything to do with Infowars, so you multiple attempts to slander me expose that you are purely agenda driven. This thread is over.
I don't really have an agenda but I have opinions I'm wanting to share & discuss– some of which I'm certainly wrong about. It doesn't feel to me as if you could honestly say the same.
You don't want to believe what I say, you don't think of me as trustworthy. Well I'm not, and you don't have to. You are welcome to your own opinion. That should put me above the likes of many, including infowars and those on sharing that video who believe they know and have a right to say everything. I'm not the one invoking political agitprop here, I would have rather discussed the topic of the submission.
> 1: "I get the feeling this has nothing to do with preventing harms"
> 2: "heres the harms and why I think we should prevent them"
Not trying to be rude here colordrops but I think you're being a too obtuse here, especially when the original person's comment was basically just "I don't trust them" (which is totally fair), I would rather engage in a good faith discussion of our opinions.
the Weimar Republic (a democracy) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic] certainly never directly voted to make Hitler a dictator - they voted him in, and he used the mechanisms of the state against itself (and crisises, both real and imagined) to seize power completely and become the official Dictator (Fuhrer means ‘leader’ in German). Here is a write up [https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/go-in-depth/germany-...].
When the USSR collapsed, there was a temporary fledging democracy that started to form - that was then hijacked by Putin and twisted to support his now obvious Dictatorship.
In the US, while one can certainly argue ‘they knew what they were voting for’, the Trump voters I knew vehemently denied what is now the obvious plan re: economic policies, starting new wars/crises, etc. that are now the norm.
The current actual behavior of the US gov’t seems to align quite well with historical norms on this front, and continue to escalate. If ‘the people give them the power’ means ‘it’s legal’ (aka it is within a law the people’s agents have voted on and made official), or was voted on by the people, it’s clear the vast majority of high profile behavior of the gov’t lately doesn’t care about it.
If anything, Democracies seem to be inherently ‘dumb’ when it comes to these types of situations.
The idea that democracy either created hitler or wasn't able to stop his rise via democratic action at all is often spruiked in anarchist communist circles, while it's true hitler wasn't voted in the literal sense, neither is Australia's Prime Minister. That doesn't make the PM undemocratic, it's just its own democractic institution inside the party. There's actually nothing in the Australian consitution about PMs.
It doesn't mean you couldn't unelect the party democratically and thus the leader. The public can unelect them from power by voting out the Nazi party of which Hitler was leader (through again, a vote). So this is a case of what I'm saying actually being relevent – if people voted against the nazi party, hitler would not have risen to power. He only gained that power because the democratic institutions, the people let him. This is a case for more and better democracy, of valuing that institution. I've encountered Trump voters who were actually bernie bros and accelerationists - they voted for trump as a fu to the establishment. I think the have a moral responsibility to not vote on those urges and whims. I think this that's bad, even if I can feel the sentiment sometimes, and I think that sort of "democracy bad" is actually a harmful to discourse and simply not true.
We need to bolster democracy for the people, not call it toothless while invoking communism and fascism. I don't ultimately blame Trump for his rise to power, I blame the people for being fickle and perfectionists. Democracy is precarious and precious, not a perfect ultimate catch all. The people need to foster it otherwise the rising tide of populism and fascism will drown it.
It would be a lot clearer to everyone if you said what you think.
I don't think it's extreme to believe that democracy is the best tool to fight authoritarianism. That's why people like Trump deride democratic institutions and those important to it's function.
You asked for examples where democracies degraded to authoritarianism. I provided 3 recent ones, and yes the US is clearly currently in an authoritarian gov’t.
Your response is to… assert they didn’t happen, and to do nothing different? While being completely unsure of what I’m saying when it sure seems pretty clear?
You've not understood what I said at all. I didn't ask for examples, I asked what you thought I was missing. Turns out I wasn't missing these things at all, we just disagree on the lessons learned there within. Fair enough, we can disagree, but to say I am denying it happened and not to do any different when my entire point was that we need to be MORE democratic, not less – by valuing democracy and not allowing people to tear it down, exactly what I am trying to do now.
Democratic institutions only have as much power as they're given.
I return to you "Have you not been paying attention?"
Trump didn't rise to power because of democracy, it was in spite of it, Trump literally tried to overturn the election results and still subverts the people's choice by continuing to spread that lie. He talks of jailing his opponents, plays dirty, doesn't respect the rules or democratic institutions. He is the antithesis of democracy and the people (using democracy) voted him in. The people failed themselves and their own people but they did so not as first order goals.
Spartacist uprising, mensheviks vs bolsheviks, etc- people didn't turn away from democracy because democracy itself failed them, they turned away from democracy because they had some idealist world they wanted to get to– by force (i.e not democratic). This is what motivated communist uprises and hitler's brownshirts to subvert the election. Note that this says nothing as to whether they are correct or not in their worldview. Hitler shares this type of thinking and he took advantage of it – just like Trump destroys the media "fake news" or makes voting harder, if we, the people, didn't allow it, we would prevent it one way or another. The problem with Trump or Hitler isn't that they're "too democratic", it's that they subverted the process debasing it in turn.
There is power in the collectve. Unions got this via bloodshed so that they need not bleed more. If we devalue unions because some unions are bad we just live in a world in which capital get to rule and bloodshed returns. It's a regression. It's not the right strategy, we need to work together despite our differences in solidarity despite the fact democracy sometimes leads to imperfect outcomes, all in order to prevent dictators, ensuring they govern with mandate and consent, not authoritarian force.
It's not one single institution like "Congress". Democracy isn't just voting it requires free and fair elections which require free and fair political discourse which requires transparency, and mass media that informs doesn't distorts, etc. If we don't value these the next step isn't voting on it democratically, it's violence to enforce totalitarianism. In some ways, we're already there. Lets not inadvertently enable it.
You seem profoundly confused about cause and effect, and even the meaning of your own prior words.
These things are all happening because enough people are turning into greedy short sighted idiots and overwhelmed/disengaged folks with no balls.
None of this is about ‘power in democratic institutions’ - they have plenty, which is why they are being turned into powering the authoritarianism. Same as in those prior examples.
‘Why doesn’t anyone do anything?!?’ they say, as they refuse to do anything, or allow anyone sane to do anything either.
Because the obvious thing - stand up and use the existing tools to do what needs to be done - requires effort and risk.
And the only ones willing to do that are the greedy or insane.
It's possible we just see things different, I'm not sure why you're so keen to say I'm "profoundly confused"- entirely possible we just have different perceptions no? Lets be more charitable.
I agree things have deteriorated, I agree the state is centralising it's power and becoming more authoritarian that's true. I agree that through democracy authoritarianism can rise, and does.
What I don't agree is that this by it's nature is because people value democracy, it's the opposite. Upholding democratic institutions might include a citizen doing their part to understand the policy, it might be the ICE agent or brownshirt, it might be judges refusing subverting traditions and spirit of law simply because it's not currently being enforced (much of democratic power is procedural and traditional, not by actual force). If people don't value it, it erodes and disappears.
> None of this is about ‘power in democratic institutions’ - they have plenty, which is why they are being turned into powering the authoritarianism
I think we might just both have a superficial disagreement with each other, when I say 'democratic institutions only have the power given to them' I mean to say the power of democracy is derived from the people, therefor if the state decides for the people (authoritarianism) and the people reject this but the state retains that power, well- that is treason not democracy. This is what made Hitler a dictator, he wasn't really into democracy, even though he subverted it, and he also used it to get into power. I'm not sure we actually disagree we might just have different framing. I consider this a failing of the people, yet you consider it a failing of the system (I assume). Both are valid I think.
To me, if people decide through democracy to elect a dictator that shows a reluctance of the population to care about democracy or institutional norms. That's why this stuff happens during broader social & economic downturns. If people want to elect a person who wants to spend the entire GDP on producing paperclips, well I can't really fault them- that is democracy, the only other choice is authoritarianism isn't it?
> ‘Why doesn’t anyone do anything?!?’ they say, as they refuse to do anything, or allow anyone sane to do anything either.
Yep, I agree with this. We do need to be smarter and work together. We do have freedom, including the freedom to harm ourselves. People need to respect that and be more responsible, be more virtuous. If not, we get the government we deserve but not the one we might need.
If your answer is ‘people need to be better’ while they are actively being manipulated and controlled by a bad actor in a position of authority over them (one that was manipulating them to get elected in the first place!), while said actor clearly is getting no negative consequences, my answer is ‘that clearly doesn’t seem to usually happen’ and ‘how do you expect that to occur once they are in power’?
Notably, Brazil seems to have dealt with Bolsanaro - but that was because the gov’t in power actually recognized the danger and put him in jail in a timely fashion, and stopped him from continuing to do what he was doing.
Something, notably, that none of the other examples I gave were able to do (despite some attempts).
The only other way out, based on historical precedent, is blood. A lot of it. But hey, I’d love to be wrong!
Maybe if we keep ragebaiting on social media about every fault of the opposition while refusing/unable to actually do anything about it - or even rally together for any meaningful course of action - victory will be ours! (/s)
Yeah you raise a good counterpoint, what you say is the other side of what I'm saying and totally valid. People can be manipulated, people need to put effort in to be virtuous- it's not always our default state. To not have a parent is to be responsible for yourself. It's better because you have responsibility and can decide for yourself, but it's worse because... well, you also have responsiblity.
My point isn't to blame the people for the fault of a few at the top, it's the give people the ability to recognise they have the power to prevent it. That does mean being more morally capable but it doesn't mean having all responsibility. So yeah we can talk about how social media owned by billionaires creates more extremism and harm, we can talk about how the commodification of politics reduces it to entertainment via perverse incentives. People aren't monoliths, no man an island, etc, etc. It's actually why I support this social media ban in the first place.
Instead of creating a working tree of text or the binary of shapefile, it creates a working tree with the geometry features. You can kart diff and commit features, not text or binary. You can then export those features from kart into a database or working file where you can commit or checkout from.
I’m an Australian who values privacy and civil liberties more than most I meet.
While I yearn for the more authentic and sincere days of the internet I grew up on, I recognize very quickly by visiting x or facebook how much it isn’t that, and hasn’t been for a long time.
I think this bill is a good thing and I support it.
"I’m an Australian who values privacy and civil liberties more than most I meet."
Same here. Early on, if I found a site interesting I'd often follow its links to other sites and so on down into places that the Establishment would deem unacceptable but I'd not worry too much about it.
Nowadays, I just assume authorities of all types are hovering over every mouse click I make. Not only is this horrible but it also robbs one of one's autonomy.
It won't be long before we're handing info that was once commonplace in textbooks around in secret.
I’m an Australian who values privacy and civil liberties more than most I meet, and that's why I think this bill is horrible, is full of unintended consequences, and will be worked around by kids who care to do it.
Aren't privacy and civil liberties fundamentally at odds with centralized government issued ID checks? How can you claim to value the former while supporting a plan to require the latter?
In the days before electronics were endemic, physically checking a photo ID didn't run afoul of that as long as the person checking didn't record the serial number. But that's no longer the world we live in.
I don't understand why you think this bill and that phenomenon (the fact that Xitter or Facebook aren't like the old days of the internet) are connected, can you explain why you think this, please?
Sure no worries, I can see why that's not immediately obvious to everyone.
I think people see laws and institutions encroaching on the internet as removing the 'wild west' aspect that existed on the internet in the early days. I have personally felt and have heard others express, a keen sense of nostalgia for that era. To many, more developed = less wild west.
People think of this legislation as increasing the complexity by going further away from that the more simple model. "Oh great, now I have to sign in to Google to view this" sort of thing.
I too get annoyed at small stuff like how you can't quote search all of google anymore. Things are more complex and just... different. Social media used to be a simple feed of people who you followed and not much else. The thing is, I believe the fact it's more big and complex, the fact it's the primary place many people interact- is actually why we need to legislate it.
Again, I agree with what you're saying, but fail to see how that is affected by this bill.
The bill isn't legislating against Meta, or Google, or any of the big tech companies that are making the internet a worse place. If anything, the bill entrenches their place in the whole system by using their logins to identify minors.
I see nothing in this bill that will encourage the internet to be friendlier, or more creative, or less enshittified, or in any way "better". What are you seeing that I'm not?
Are you sure you value privacy and civil liberties then if you fall for "Think of the Children" bollocks instead of wanting to throw politicians down wells to protect children from living in a dystopia?
Look inward, focus on yourself. Don't be sorry about it. If that means rest, or doing 'nothing' all day looking out a window or in nature don't feel bad it.
This reminds me of an article that talks about how sensory consciousness comes too late for conscious responses and how that might be 'rescued' by some yet to be proven quantum effects.
I've linked it below, but here's a snippet from it that talks about the ms delay:
Neural correlates of conscious perception occur 150–500 ms after impingement on our sense organs, apparently too late for causal efficacy in seemingly conscious perceptions and willful actions, often initiated or completed within 100 ms after sensory impingement. Velmans (1991, 2000) listed a number of examples: analysis of sensory inputs and their emotional content, phonological, and semantic analysis of heard speech and preparation of one's own spoken words and sentences, learning and formation of memories, and choice, planning and execution of voluntary acts. Consequently, the subjective feeling of conscious control of these behaviors is deemed illusory (Dennett, 1991; Wegner, 2002).
In speech, evoked potentials (EPs) indicating conscious word recognition occur about 400 ms after auditory input, however semantic meaning is appreciated (and response initiated) after only 200 ms. As Velmans points out, only two phonemes are heard by 200 ms, and an average of 87 words share their first two phonemes. Even when contextual effects are considered, semantic processing and initiation of response occur before conscious recognition (Van Petten et al., 1999).
Gray (2004) observes that in tennis “The speed of the ball after a serve is so great, and the distance over which it has to travel so short, that the player who receives the serve must strike it back before he has had time consciously to see the ball leave the server's racket. Conscious awareness comes too late to affect his stroke.” McCrone (1999): “[for] tennis players … facing a fast serve … even if awareness were actually instant, it would still not be fast enough ….” Nonetheless tennis players claim to see the ball consciously before they attempt to return it.
I think it's much more likely that we're measuring the wrong thing than it is that quantum effects allow us to react faster than our neutral circuitry.
Mickey Mouse is massive. Mickey has been the face of Disney and is sold on and in many products each year. Kids know who he is and adults know who he is. He does seem antiquated now, especially to older adults but I don't see them getting rid of him anytime soon.
Disney doesn't have many characters with that much lasting appeal between age demographics, it links the older generation of Disney with the new.
The version of Mickey Mouse that would become public domain in 2024 bears very little visual similarity to subsequent versions. Still recognizable, but definitely not the same. Only the initial works from that year will be public domain.
You won't be able to recreate Disneyland with this public domain entrance.
Someone will just fill the void left by this vendor and no harm will be removed. It wont be a net positive at all. In the end, all there will be is another person ruined.
I don't think it's right to punish a pub for all problems caused by alcohol intoxication, but I do think punishing a pub for serving alcohol negligently is okay.
My understanding is one of the main reasons methamphetamines are so widely used and sold is because meth is cheap and easy to make compared to safer possible alternatives. That indicates to me that this seems like a market that needs regulation, not prohibition.
I'm not saying meth should be legal, I'm saying the drug market can be regulated to reduce harm. If that regulation means disallowing certain substances that do cause excessive harm, that's a good thing too.
These platforms make more money than the ATO (Australian Tax Office) brings in a year. I think they have the moral obligation and means to create safer spaces- either inside or seperate from their adult platforms; they can reduce or prevent the types of harms when children are exposed to this type of content.
Whether this approach is the best one, or even worth it as it is written in law is definitely something you can argue, but the idea that there isn't a legitimate goal here (keeping children safe), just isn't true. I know not everyone that says this always has good intentions, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be preventing harm upon them.
If you look back at vox pops from when drink-driving laws were introduced, or when seatbelts became mandatory, or when ID requirements were tightened, the arguments for and against were eerily similar. We haven’t changed much in that regard, but now people wear seatbelts, children can’t buy cigarettes as easily as they used to, and drink-driving rates have fallen. I think these are noble goals.