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Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

Denmark's government has authoritarian aims and are one of the primary groups pushing chat control in the EU. I think you are falling for the "think of the children..." fallacy here.

This is a stepping stone towards further control elsewhere, especially once a framework for enforcement is in place (which nobody actually thinks about when emotionally reacting to feel-good ideas like this). How easy would it be to expand ID based age enforcement to tracking ALL online activity and cracking down on "non-approved" speech? No thanks. I'll handle parenting myself.

Also, if you don't care about the age number, and think social media is just objectively bad...why are you on this social media site? Isn't posting here the definition of hypocrisy...given you're supporting what you believe to be worse than cigarettes?

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I don't think HN is a social media site. The goals of a social media site is to keep you engaged for as long as possible with the assistance of various algorithms, dark patterns while your data is sold to businesses so they can have a slice of your attention pie via ads and supported content.

I dont feel as if any of that applies here. In fact HN has gotten further from a social media site by not displaying comment points.

You can argue this, but if you hand over this authority to government, it will not be up to you.

Fundamentally this is an upvote driven social media platform no different from Reddit, which everyone agrees is social media.

If you live in Denmark, get ready to tie your State ID to your HN profile to login and hope that you don't say anything that would make the wrong official (or your employer) upset with you.

As we know from history, well-intentioned government laws have zero unintended consequences, always work perfectly every time, and are very easy to remove once they've been created...

Happen to be a Dane and I fully agree with your sentiment. I happen to agree (I think) that keeping children away from social media on a large scale, to avoid social isolation for those who might opt out of choice, might be overall good for the children. But the means that will likely be required to do so are, like you say, essentially more steps towards mass surveillance. And like you say, laws that can be exploited so easily by a government in bad faith are so dangerous to allow into public law, even in times when exploitation seems unlikely, because they'll likely never be removed (hah) or even amended before it's too late. Like Chat Control (though it seems pretty clear to _me_ that that is set up for abuse to begin with). I'm so embarrassed we're spearheading that abomination.

You mean like a continuously changing front page?

"Old media" was (and is) quite heavily regulated. Not everywhere turned into an East German surveillance state.

The idea that governments are incapable of acting in the interests of their citizens is just a narrative designed to weaken public democratic institutions and hand power to the real authoritarians.

Old media the three networks censored so much and the rise of cable allowed a more open playing field where someone could swear or show an HBO gritty cop show that mirrored reality.

The world of variety shows died for a reason.

Whenever a politician wants you to think of the children, you should be alert. What we see Danish politicians push for is the same we see in England. I don't think Danish politicians are acting on their own, it is much more likely that this is a push from EU.

We see similar attacks on personal freedom with the new GDPR updates: https://noyb.eu/en/eu-commission-about-wreck-core-principles...

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