Comment by potsandpans | Hacker News Reader

Comment by potsandpans | Hacker News Reader

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Accessing information is not a harmful substance or a dangerous activity that requires training.

The problem is that you are drawing the parallels in the first place. These are not the same things. This is precisely what a totalitarian regime espouses: information so dangerous it must be selectively distributed and access must be accounted for. Today it's pornography. Tomorrow LGBTQ materials are labeled as pornography. And soon thereafter you're putting in age verification to access non-state sponsored news, wondering "why is this required? should I be looking at this?"

I have no doubt that these are well-intentioned attempts by concerned citizens and civil servants to preserve some semblance of a decent society. The problem is that it's _always_ coopted. _Always._ Yet we can't seem to help ourselves but clamber towards more consolidation of power in the face of some new hysteria.

Your final point... _these supposed free speech advocates have supported an authoritarian, therefore they have no credibility_, _the only free speech advocates are in silicon valley_, _this is the only defense of free speech_. I have no idea what your point is.

That a few capitalists used free speech as a shield to make more money, we should throw the baby out with the bathwater?

I refuse.

You are putting forward a false equivalence between social networks and accessing information.

Meanwhile actual studies on the topic show that social network actually creates addiction - who could have guessed when they were literally engineered for engagement - and have deleterious effects on health especially for teenagers.

This is not a free speech issue. This is a public health issue. This is the digital equivalent of the tobacco industry we are talking about, not a library.

> This is a public health issue.

Sugary drinks are sold in France without any restrictions. Won't somebody think about kids?

What a terrible and entirely unconvincing argument.

"$unhealthy_thing is not subject to restrictions, therefore $other_unhealthy_thing should also not be"? lol. lmao, even.

Should we let children purchase cigarettes? Alcohol? Cannabis? Cocaine?

The BMI epidemic in America tells me maybe we should ban sugary drinks.

At some point, society draws a line between what it deems acceptable and what it does not. In two generations it is virtually assured that we/our grandchildren will look back on Facebook and TikTok the way we currently look at the tobacco industry. The way I know this is because the CEOs don't let their kids dogfood their products. Famously, Steve Jobs wouldn't let his kids have an iPhone. Mark and Cecilia didn't let their kids use socials.

These are bad products designed to be deliberately addictive, and it turns out they're really only good at making people feel shitty and giving teen girls eating disorders.

> Should we let children purchase cigarettes? Alcohol? Cannabis? Cocaine?

No. An that is illegal in France. Somewhere from 1960 if I recall corectly.

Sugary drinks on other are somehow OK with the french and Macron in particular.

Goodness it's almost as if society is imperfect.

Righ! And the best place to start fixing it a cancerogen France is famous for, which is wine. I guess that will be the second thing the french parliament going to do - banning the sale of wine. Health is very important, I guess everybody is in agreement with that.

The sale of wine to minors is already illegal in the USA, bro.

I'm beginning to get the sense that the old adage about how it's difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding it is applicable to you.

Happy new year.

Yeah in France you can get wine for lunch in the company canteen even. Imagine sitting down with your boss for lunch, opening a bottle of wine lol. But there that flies.

In America you go out with your boss and shoot up the place. Different strokes for different folks.

I'm not American :) And I wasn't looking down on the French practice, in fact I like the more relaxed attitude.

But I did want to point out that wine is kinda sacred there. I worked for a company where the CEO was a teetotaler and he tried to ban it from the canteen and caused a huge riot lol.

Wine is a carcinogen? Does not look like it from this meta-analysis.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10507274/

Nobody would accept that we let criminals and pedophiles run schools.

Meanwhile there is this digital world that children reside in that is a completely lawless anarchy...

Something will have to be done about it one way or another.

Online isn't school. The comparison is offensive.

Your kids don't need to be online like they need to be in school. To suggest that they do is utterly ludicrous.

It's a disgrace.

When parents can't take care of their children the government takes over. Children are the greatest treasure of society and our entire system revolves around teaching and protecting them. The disgrace is giving tech companies one iota of power.

Yes yes, the specter of the boogeyman. Your outrage and arguments are tired.

Global capitalists are bad, governments that prop them up are worst. The only thing worst than that are the useful scared people pleading for these policies evoking this kind of fear and rhetoric.

Great example, no, they are not.

There is a special tax on sugary drinks in France to curb sales and distributors have been banned from schools years ago precisely to limit the health impact.

> You are putting forward a false equivalence...

> This is the digital equivalent of the tobacco industry we are talking about

I reject the counter-equivalence you've offered.

This is not mutually exclusive: I can acknowledge that social media is bad (for everyone) and also advocate for a non-gated free and open internet.

My argument is more sharp: do not pass laws for- and build a censorship infrastructure to- solve an institutional problem. If we must discuss this, then we should first discuss fining and breaking up the companies and criminally prosecuting the executives that did the harm knowingly. This takes more care to understand: how is it we want to shape our commons, and what are the steps that we'll take as citizens to enforce it.

But that can't be packaged into a short quip.

If this is a meaningful debate, then we should avoid sloganeering. Your last sentence is a nice soundbite, but it disregards all nuance. It's exactly the kind of content that creates harm on social networks: optimized for being being catchy and divisive. Something someone can go repeat and remain uninformed. Funnily enough, the construction is also a tell-tale marker of something written by an LLM. (To be clear: I'm not accusing you of writing this with an LLM, just noting how prevalent this rhetorical device is).

That's neither an argument nor more sharp.

You are pretending that the moral value you place on unfettered access to any places on the internet trumps the provable deleterious effects social media as a product have.

The issue with my analogy - it is not a slogan - is not that it's unnuanced. It's that the framing - that social media is actually a product - completely dismantles your point.

I'm sorry but banning for an age category is a perfectly fine and workable solution. I don't see why France should artificially limit itself to suing foreign corporate executives to appease foreign absolutists.

Oh, the _no you_. Response.

You're not sorry. And your argument is not nuanced, it's a blunted half-clever framing. The propaganda has no effect on me. There's no point in arguing further. We are ideologically opposed. Your support for these policies in my mind are worst than the companies doing harm.

I do not respect people begging to be policed. I'll fight you more then I'll fight them, and I look forward to it!

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