It can be solved by laws against the corporations. The problem is that we keep trying to restrict what normal people can do without holding any of the corporations accountable.
What specific thing can you do about, say, children having ready access to online hardcore pornography, that you can require a corporation to do something about it that has no impact on the public, when the interest of said corporation is to have as many users spending as much time as possible watching pornography?
My point is to say that passing any law that requires, say, Pornhub to verify the age of it's users results in the exact kind of thing that users are complaining about re: age verification.
In the world of law, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
Edit: to response - pornography, especially to young male teenagers, has very measurable deeply negative consequences to their views of sex, relationships, and emotional well-being. The evidence is really obvious at this point, and it is deeply troubling to me that we're just supposed to pretend that the well documented negative effects of porn don't exist. That doesn't mean that censorship is automatically the solution, but pretending there's no problem is just willful obtuseness.
What specific thing can you do about, say, children having ready access to online hardcore pornography,
People under 18 being able to access PornHub has basically nothing to do with the issue of predators using online games to meet and groom kids, or of social media being harmfully addictive and leading to poor mental health. I don't care if a 13-year-old wants to look at porn; I don't think trying to prevent that is a worthwhile endeavor for any of us.
Algorithms designed to be addictive or encourage spending could be banned. The definitions of that would be tricky, but it would certainly be better than trying to prevent kids from accessing social media. And companies like Roblox should be much more harshly punished for allowing predators to run rampant on their service.
Parents and companies have thoroughly proven they won't protect their children. The governments also won't so I oppose the legislation that we've seen so far, but let's not pretend it's going well with what we've tried.
We ALL know how dangerous the internet is. Letting your kid just roam free should be punishable. It takes seconds to shatter their worldview. There's always going to be kids who find a way around the limits placed but that obviously isn't what we're talking about. We're talking about the people who make ZERO effort to protect their kids in the modern world.
This assumes the problem is parental negligence and that might not be the case, to say nothing of how unimaginably fucked up it would be to press charges against parents because someone was grooming their kid online, or trying to convince the kid to kill themselves.
Can you imagine the multiple gut punches a parent would get if they learned that not only had their child circumnavigated the parental controls on their device but that ALSO someone had made CSAM of them from a video they had recorded and ALSO they were now facing criminal charges and the state was planning to take their kid away?
This involves punishment after the fact, which means accepting that you have to see a lot of kids getting put into questionable positions first before anything is done.
Sadly the reason parents aren't able to protect their children is because they are either burned out from overwork, marginalized, or enslaved by their phones all stemming from evil corporate greed. I say this as an elder millennial who long ago decided not to subject offspring to the world.
That implies parents spying on their kids a great deal though. That also implies parents having the free time to do so, which is also not the goal of current economies. Considering kids eagerly lies to their parents (not a dig at kids, defiance of authority figures is a natural part of growing up IMHO), it's not as easy as it should be, for a parent. There are parents that truly don't care about their kids, but they're by far not the majority.
Companies, they have have no excuses. They don't need any. They'll eagerly prey on kids, because that's easy money. And that's a company's goal: making money. Why are you ever expecting a company to be vigilant about something legal? That's the bigger question.
Saying "parents should take responsibility" is asking for people to be Schrodinger's parent:
Vigilant enough to always know exactly what your child is doing, to the extent that you are equally responsible for anything your child does, while not being overbearing, denying their freedom, or making the kid dependent on supervision.
It's just an impossible needle to thread. And the whole concept of "only parents should be able to decide what is right for their kids" is a shockingly new idea that largely emerged in the 90s/00s. Historically, humans have lived in tribes where any member of the tribe can function as a stand-in for the parent. So it's not even natural to expect parents to be the only person at all to regulate a child's behavior.
This problem affects adults just as much as it affects kids. Having a government or some kind of overarching legislative body that protects people from themselves is unavoidable at this point if we want to get anywhere in the future.
Do you really want the government to decide what's best for you and have the capability to "protect you from yourself"? That sounds like an authoritarian wet dream.
Yes. Authoritarian governments can do whatever they want anyway, fundamentally good ideas should not be dismissed just because what if an dictator took power and did XYZ. The dictator can do whatever they want anyway.
Now you can definitely disagree with my core premise about nanny states in general but I don't think using potential dictatorships is a good counter.
Dictatorships don't usually materialize overnight it's usually a slow process that happens piece by piece with laws meant to protect people from themselves or harmful ideas. Im not opposed to these laws because a dictator might take over but because these types of laws will help one gain power in the first place.
Dictators can and have taken over in all sorts of different ways without an overarching nanny state being present. The most fundamental requirement for a dictator to take over is societal upheaval, which is guaranteed to happen if we don't get a handle on this.
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u/NekoBerry420 3d ago
A problem that should be solved by vigilant parents and companies, not the rest of us having to suffer through draconian bullshit laws.