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Beestie | 2 months ago

So lemme guess - in order to prove one's age, one needs to obtain a digital ID and use said ID to gain access to the internet thereby creating a perfect system to monitor one's internet activity.

Gotta hand it to them - "protecting the children" is a pretty good pretext.

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SpaceManNabs|2 months ago

Interesting to see these kinds of comments more in this thread compared to the one from yesterday.

The one from yesterday was discussing how australia is banning social media for anyone under 16. Most comments were supportive because they hate social media.

A few comments were discussing how it is just a way to propagate more KYC.

idle_zealot|2 months ago

It's way easier to justify banning social media entirely than banning it for under-sixteens. Paradoxically it infringes on freedom less, as it bans a type of business model for being too harmful rather than restricting people's rights to view and share information.

torified|2 months ago

As an Australian it's so irritating how enthusiastic people are to give up their privacy and freedom of speech, and also force everyone to hand over personal information to private companies, on the flimsiest of pretexts from our perpetually technologically incompetent government.

After the number of data breaches we've seen, they want to do this, and in the least privacy-preserving way possible.

Why not set up a government api where a site can get a yes/no answer about age using tokens, so the site itself gets no information but if the age is ok? Nope, we'll just pick a few sites and force everyone to give them their data, what could go wrong?

And if you actually look at the suicide statistics, there's no epidemic of suicides going on...

https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/populat...

It's just lazy parents who can't be bothered parenting looking for a quick fix. I want to hand my phone to little tommy and turn my brain off.

What's even more galling is that the quick fix with so many obvious negatives won't even fix anything. As a kid I had unlimited time to get around any blocks. It's so dumb.

4chan is perfectly fine, but reddit must be stopped! Just to be clear I don't think either should be blocked.

Make the entire internet 18+ only and put the parents who let kids on the net in jail, I don't care.

to11mtm|2 months ago

I think the separation is in how 'algorithmic engagement' in social media is at least as dangerous as stuff that even the US still has banned in other forms of media [0].

Especially because it's gotten so bad. At first it was just 'making things popular in your network more visible'. But now it's to where when I use something like Facebook there is more 'algorithm spam' than anything actually happening with my friends. It's become something where the primary purpose is 'driving views' rather than communicating. [1]

A VPN is a bit different; it's a tool, and I will note one that depending on the specific definition has legitimate (or at least morally/ethically legitimate) uses.

[0] - e.x. unless it has been reversed in the last decade or two, in the US you still can't cut from a kid's cartoon right into a commercial for a toy/game related to said cartoon. I mean FFS that was a rule that got put in before 'attention hacking' was even a term.

[1] - TBH I'd love if we could get back to Myspace or maybe even early Facebook type social media. There's a lot of excitement lost when an algorithm feeds you shit versus a friend sharing it, and it was a lot less noise...

ImJamal|2 months ago

There is a difference between a concept (banning social media for kids) and the actual implementation (requiring ID to visit sites or whatever they are going to do).

iamacyborg|2 months ago

Posts about the UK tend to draw quite a lot of weird astroturfing from the ultra free speech crowd.