UK could jail social media bosses who breach child safety rules

I feel frustrated when I see governments succesfully eroding away people's right to privacy by making bad faith arguments against technology. There's a thin line between an online community providing support and one indirectly exposing new people to toxic information. But to the general public, these support groups could even seem to be promoting unhealthy behaviors based on misunderstood dark humor and memes.

I would suggest people who have struggled with an eating disorder to NOT do this, Twitter right now just shows posts under the tag "proana" without any oversight or warning message, unlike Tumblr and Reddit that do. Proana is a shortened from pro-anorexia. Proana groups range from being a genuine support group to treating the eating disorder like a "lifestyle" and denying that it's a medical issue.

One of the hallmarks of "gen z" humor is the entire notion of post-ironic humor, the thing that makes a joke humorous is that it breaks every traditional expectation of a joke.

It's a very unique problem, that has existed essentially since the beginning days of the internet, before myspace and yahoo groups [1]. Medical professionals all agree that these communities foster unhealthy behavior but most don't support outright bans because there is value in helping struggling individuals not feel isolated.

Elon Musk, directly, has the power to implement something like a warning screen and links to help. Holding him personally accountable for the consequences of an individual being harmed because of someone else's posted content would signal he should have known and is indirectly responsible for morbid outcomes. The only reaction will be severe censorship, which would leave struggling individuals feeling even more isolated. Photoshoped pictures and memes lead to body dysmporhia and can agruably be considered mentally abusive, reddit's "r/fatpeoplehate" is an practical, banned, example. But dark humor and memes also help people cope and manage their thoughts as they work through recovery.

It's disheartening to see how these policies being pushed foward simplify a very complex issue to a black and white decision that ultimately harms the group they are supposed to help. This bill is very dystopian, I hope it doesn't pass.

1. * https://web.archive.org/web/20090408031344/http://artsandsci...

Shade, Leslie Regan (2003), "Weborexics: The Ethical Issues Surrounding Pro-Ana Websites" (PDF), ACM Sigcas, Association for Computing Machinery, 33 (4)

* I would avoid this as well if eating disorders/proana language is a sensitive topic.

UK is slowly turning into Nazi country.