Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

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I don't get why you conflate privacy and resistance to censorship.

I think privacy is essential for freedom.

I'm also fine with lots of censorship, on publicly accessible websites.

I don't want my children watching beheading videos, or being exposed to extremists like (as an example of many) Andrew Tate. And people like Andrew Tate are actively pushed by YouTube, TikTok, etc. I don't want my children to be exposed to what I personally feel are extremist Christians in America, who infest children's channels.

I think anyone advocating against censorship is incredibly naive to how impossible it's become for parents. Right now it's a binary choice:

1. No internet for your children

2, Risk potential, massive, life-altering, harm as parental controls are useless, half-hearted or non-existent. Even someone like Sony or Apple make it almost impossible to have a choice in what your children can access. It's truly bewildering.

And I think you should have identify yourself. You should be liable for what you post to the internet, and if a company has published your material but doesn't know who you are, THEY should be liable for the material published.

Safe harbor laws and anonymous accounts should never have been allowed to co-exist. It should have been one or the other. It's a preposterous situation we're in.

Voluntary “censorship” (not being shown visceral media you don’t ask) and censorship for children are very important.

Bad “censorship” is involuntarily denying or hiding from adults what they want to see. IMO, that power tends to get abused, so it should only be applied in specific, exceptional circumstances (and probably always temporarily, if only because information tends to leak, so there should be a longer fix that makes it unnecessary).

I agree with you that children should be protected from beheading and extremism; also, you should be able to easily avoid that yourself. I disagree in that, IMO, anonymous accounts and “free” websites should exist and be accessible to adults. I believe that trusted locked-down websites should also exist, which require ID and block visceral media; and bypassing the ID requirement or filter (as a client) or not properly enforcing it (as a server operator) should be illegal. Granting children access to unlocked sites should also be illegal (like giving children alcohol, except parents are allowed to grant their own children access).

I thought it was easy: watch videos with your kid, don't allow them to doomscroll or be raised by the "featured"/"front page" algorithms.

You can't be with your child 100% of the time. They are spending significant time with others, e.g. in school. Those people you can't control.

Doomscrolling or porn is just too "appealing" to children, like sugar. Children don't have their minds fully developed to be able to say "no" to them.

If in school everybody has a smartphone and does doomscrolling, your children will do as well. Or they'll be ostracised.

A hangout for 11-16 year olds often seems to devolve into a bunch of kids all watching their own phones. It's really depressing to watch, though they do seem to play as well.

We have had several arguments about no social media and we're only 1 out of 6-ish years in to the too naïve to look after yourself on the internet phase, and the eldest already figured out how to download some chat app I'd never even heard of without permission.

How to show you're clearly not a parent in one sentence.

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