We need to pass laws that can make these executives serve jail time.
You’d quickly see these “impossible to moderate” platforms quickly clean up.
You’d quickly see these “impossible to moderate” platforms quickly clean up.
That said, I'm with you on reducing the abstraction of liability that is the purpose of corporations. I just don't think parents not parenting is the reason to do it. I also don't really think parents should be thrown in prison and families destroyed. The use of violent force in this situation, against the CEOs or the parents, is entirely uncalled for and does more real damage than the "problem".
If someone was selling drugs on the street on the way to school, would we be blaming parents who let their kids walk to school that they should parent better, or would we deal with the drug dealer?
We haven't. It keeps happening. Now what?
This is patently untrue. We are exposed to risk, incl. death, from products and services every day. Nothing can be 100% safe, nor would it be wise to aim for it. The benefits, as they say, often outweigh the cost.
Roblox has tens of millions of daily active users. I'm guessing they would say it is a great way to entertain themselves and to spend time with others, amongst others.
I’ll keep this in mind the next time I pick up some acetylene or muriatic acid.
[1] https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2026/Demlar-Recalls-MoonSoll-an...
[2] https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2026/Tesla-Recalls-Powerwall-2-...
Chainsaws can be used somewhat safely, but they are never totally safe. Chainsaws are inherently dangerous. But if a broken chainsaw that always cuts off your arm makes it to market, yes it will be pulled whether it’s a recall or a lawsuit.
> think "kids committed suicide due to interactions on Roblox" being held equivalently to "kids have been suffocated by this defactive crib"
Psychological harm is notoriously difficult to measure (was it really Roblox or was it bullying?) and is a political football. I’m not sure that it’s a good idea to open that box for a multitude of reasons. (For one thing every website on the internet would immediately face a mountain of lawsuits.)
If a restaurant served food that harmed people we wouldn't say, "it's on the parents." I don't get why so many folks are willing to say that with harms caused by tech companies.
Scale is no excuse either, "at our scale we just can't handle all the content." If anything it makes the problem more pressing to address.
But we do! Acute harm is bad but chronic harm is, apparently, fine.
Isn't that how moralizing about the health benefits of a McDonalds-based diet go?
Is sugar in your country restricted? Or meat? I guess alcohol is, as it's everywhere. But restaurants server many harmful food which is only tolerated because harm comes from time and serving-sizes. But the same can be said for dark patterns in software, they are usually not obvious and in your face, but sneaky enough to fly under the parent's attentions.
What else must we think goes through these executives minds? It's got to be things like "It's not my kids, so I don't care?" or "It's not that bad, people are too sensitive", or "I don't care what happens to kids because I have anti-personality disorder (psychopath) and only care about making money"
1. If a restaurant serves food that harmed people the health department is the avenue used to investigate and punish.
2. If a game company enables endangering children the FBI is the one responsible for investigating it.
etc etc.
I don't understand why people love the nanny state so much. We can't continue to make companies be the police, the stewards of truth, and justice. They demonstrated just recently, during COVID, that this was an absolute disaster. Over the last 30 years we have watched freedom erode because the average American wants to foist all responsibility onto someone else.
The nanny state is wrong which is why the OP is being downvoted.
1. It is the parent's fault for not monitoring their children. It is absolutely a reflection on poor parenting-by-proxy via video games. I don't understand why we continue to absolve parents of responsibility for everything.
2. We have legal avenues with which we have used and continue to use for the investigation of harmful things produced by companies.
3. If we cannot use (2) we should ask why - the answer is almost always follow the money.
4. Corporations should never, under any circumstance, be turned into police via lawfare.
As an example, organized crime thrived in the US at the turn of the century because we didn’t have the legal apparatus to deal with it. Not until the RICO act in 1970 did we finally start to stamp it out.
So exactly what we need are legal avenues to make sure that companies can’t purposefully enable child abuse in order to turn a profit which is exactly what’s happening here. (Regardless of what they claim, the evidence is overwhelming they know but don’t want to dent their income)
I think there is a couple of things at play:
First, negativity bias. I think it's pretty clear that as a society we're not that interested in harm reduction, just biased towards harm reduction of things that violate our value system. So when things happen that do violate our norms, they're presented outside of the background noise. For example, very few people feel compelled to come in and share personal anecdotes of how they lost relatives to a car accident when the topic at hand is vehicles in america. Yet they're the second leading cause of death from unintentional injuries.
Second, these things affect people across the social stratification index. People of privilege experience it. I claim that we also as a society are not very concerned with protecting vulnerable populations. The top 10% of the nations families hold 60% of the wealth, while 1 in 10 Americans live in poverty. We consistently rank lower in social welfare compared to other developed nations. So, further supporting the first point, it's even more outlandish when these things happen to people who are not accustomed to having bad things happen.
Finally, technology consistently outpaces our ability to reason about and structure our society as a whole. It's easier to attempt blanket and ham fisted reactions to these bad things we see without understand the wider implications.
To a lot of people, the easiest and most obvious choice is Authoritarianism, because in there mind there's no other way to stop the pain.
Plus, it's difficult to talk about these things without being callous. "Bad things happened to me, so you should simply give up your right to privacy so we can prevent it from happening further." At face value is difficult to take seriously, but when it involves that cross section of the privileged vulnerable class, it's difficult to have a reasonable argument without being steamrolled.