The problem is, currently doing any kind of content filtering, as in making illegal stuff hard to find, and having a moderated semi walled garden, plays right into the noisy fuckers brigade.
If I were to design a TV programme which is aimed at 11-16 year olds, where I just play soft porn every 15 seconds, offer guides on how to do financial scams, and encourage the children to hide away from their parents as they watch. it would be banned instantly, regardless of how much "good" content I put in there.
People would say it's irresponsible to expose kids of that age to such things.
Yet, here we have social media doing just the same.
The reason why we make it illegal to beat kids, sell them smokes, drugs, booze and generally treat them like shit, is because we want well rounded functioning kids who are able to live a long an illustrious life as part of society.
Giving them a device that feeds them war, porn, rage bait, and huge lies, all for the profit of a few hundred people in america seems somewhat misguided.
I miss the good ol' days when you could see some cut off breasts alongside the snake oil ads in the papers. People are so stupid these days.
You had wrongthought because back then there was at least a chance that the material was objective. Today you have Fox News et.al. and scores of highly propagandized feeds spewing nothing but agenda-pushing propaganda.
It's not the same.
V-chip, movie ratings, music ratings, top shelf magazines, raising the age for smokes, the water shed, censorship of tv networks, chat rooms, computer in the living room, primitive walled gardens (AOL et al)
All of the "it was freer in my youth bollocks" is just that. Bollocks. But, I see that you like the idea of a person's social/sexual education being shaped by misanthropes looking to grift a new lifestlye for themselves regardless of the harm it causes others. All for profit and power. Not for betterment of the world.
> Are modern teenagers more or less credulous consumers of information than adults, I wonder.
The first example of something that you see is normally a big opinion former. If you see the local big city constantly portrayed at a lawless hell hole, its going to stick with you. As will the the race baiting, as will the utter bollocks herbal-remedy-cures-cancer 100% of the time shtick. Espeically if you've not got far enough through school to develop research skills, or critical thinking skills.
Uh, yeah - I never had to show an ID to use the internet and I could use the internet however I damn well pleased. "All for profit and power" -> No, I learned a lot from the internet, it changed my life in a positive way.
None of the things you mentioned are even remotely the same scope as requiring ID to use parts of the internet. I could still watch mature movies, v-chip was irrelevant in my life, smoking is completely different, etc. etc.
The answer to my question is that teenagers today are obviously less credulous than the adults in their lives and you can see this every time you interact with older adults.
I remember logging on to Microsoft Networks, clicking "Adult Chatroom" and saying "Hi adults, my name is <blah> and I am 12" and getting a bunch of very positive, thoughtful replies.
>Espeically if you've not got far enough through school to develop research skills, or critical thinking skills.
Some of the people being banned include these nice kids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6_News_Australia
Their founder is now 18, but most of their research and social media people are 14 - 16.
I feel like these kids A, have developed the necessary skills to operate the internet, and B, have a human right to access and report on the information contained within.
>a person's social/sexual education being shaped by misanthropes looking to grift
The grifting misanthropes are in my honest opinion the people trying to prevent kids from accessing information. The "grift" is that kids have political interests and rights to access information and community, especially vulnerable kids, and the grifters want to "return" to a state where parents were the only method via which kids can access information. The internet is there for among other things, censorship resistant access to other people. The cost of this bill, assuming kids don't just keep stepping over the barricade, is going to be tremendous in terms of suicide in LGBT and disabled areas.
So tell us, why do you hate kids so much?
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
> Following a downward trend until 2007, suicide rates significantly increased 8.2% annually from 2008 to 2022, corresponding to a significant increase in the overall rates between 2001 to 2007 and 2008 to 2022 (3.34 to 5.71 per 1 million; IRR, 1.71)
US GDP: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP
US unemployment: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...
S&P 500: https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-dat...
US inflation rate: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...
GDP doesn't matter much when your life will be worse than your parents'.
> US unemployment: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...
Dead end jobs with little to no benefits, no pensions, time off, low pay and few hours count as "employment".
Their parents and grandparents had pensions and could work at one employer for the entirety of their careers with growth opportunities, and could afford homes and healthcare while doing so.
That was a big part of the shift in 2008.
> S&P 500: https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-dat...
Doesn't matter to a kid without significant ownership of financial assets.
> US inflation rate: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...
Post the wages vs productivity graph for the last 20 years, it's more applicable to concerns of students and young adults.
Your hypothesis might be right, but I've provided data, and you're providing opinions. I'm fine with being wrong in my claim, but I didn't earn the downvote when no-one seems to have a clearer hypothesis with better evidence. First, show me that this shift is peculiar to 2008. And then show me that this is what teenagers are killing themselves over.
Not saying those thresholds are always right and should definitely apply in this case, but it surely isn't an alien or non-obvious concept.
There is also the problem that making platforms responsible for policing user-generated content 1) gives them unwanted political power and 2) creates immense barriers to entry in the field, which is also very undesireable.
The second problem is that the medium itself is garbage. Algorithmic feeds strongly encourage clickbait and sensationalism. Removing content does nothing to change the dynamic.
The comment you’re replying to raised the idea of empowering the users. That’s probably the way to look, but the danger is always if we do that using top down enforcement in a way that promulgates more harm, including stifling vibrant and necessary speech.
My very radical opinion is that section 230 of the CDA was our original sin. The Internet was better when it wasn’t divided into a few centrally managed private social media silos. It’s better to have a vibrant, messy, competitive, and very grass roots public square.
Ironically, the solution to both the proliferation of genocide and social media causing harm to kids is the same, and it's a solution that helps everyone: legislate the source of the problem, the product itself and what we colloquially call "the algorithm".
Algorithmic optimization and manipulation that causes harm needs to be banned wholesale, across the board, from advertising to social media.
Instead, we get legislation that not only makes it easier to identify everyone as verifiably monetizable users to platforms, it also makes it easier to keep the proles in their place.