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Comment by insurgent_dino | Hacker News Reader

Do you agree that parents should be the one protecting their children from this 'propaganda' and internet slop?

Whilst I agree that social media can be overwhelmingly negative especially for young people, dont you recon that the risk to privacy and free-nature / increased surveillance of the internet is a greater problem?

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I’m a parent, children should be banned from social media and enforcement should include serious fines for parents who don’t monitor their children.

After the first 2-3 fines, people will magically learn to use parental control and the idiocy of age verification will end.

I think they should be "one of" not "the one." You know, it takes a village. And in any event, as others have said, parents have completely refused to participate in the question anyways, so in the real world your statement is not worth the paper it's written on.

Not OP but parental controls have existed for over a decade in these platforms with little to no uptake.

Now that the UK has had 3 major riots in the past 24 months exacerbated by foreign social media bots, it is all the more critical to prevent children from falling into the trap.

The time for the carrot is over. It's time for the stick.

On a separate note, I find it funny that plenty of so called internet freedom supporters are using HN given that it's terms and conditions give YC full ownership of comments in perpetuity.

"Parental controls? What parental controls?", a.k.a. "Parental controls are unusable… and it’s why Congress is stepping in." - https://web.archive.org/web/20231115165553/https://gabrielsi... - 113 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38314224

"Parental controls aren't for parents" - https://beasthacker.com/til/parental-controls-arent-for-pare... - 456 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46464652

"Apple’s Parental Controls Are Broken" - https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-parental-controls-are-br... - 43 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36921602

"Apple parental controls have more holes than Swiss cheese" - https://xcancel.com/MichaelErmer_/status/2012515535326527740 - 3 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46672071

And as a bonus

"Tell HN: Attackers using Google parental controls to prevent account recovery" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056472

Apply the stick to the companies and people doing this, you don't think social media was critical in the UK riots? See how even adults are affected by the thing you're proposing controlling with age limits.

Shouldn't parents be the ones to protect their children from the dangers of heroin, rather than an over-reaching state?

Funny example, because many argue that stopping the war on drugs would solve a lot of problems.

Do you really believe parents can realistically protect their wards from getting hooked to any harmful, addictive drugs? How will they ever know if their kids are experimenting with these drugs? The problem is that the drugs are addictive - all it it needs is for someone to try it a few times to get completely hooked to it. And you don't realise it until it is too late.

IMO everything you said is equally applicable to social media (unless you have complete and total surveillance over your kids)

I was explaining why stopping the circulation of harmful substances, like Heroin, do require government intervention and that parents alone cannot fight it. Your conflation that such drugs are equivalent to addictive social media is something I don't agree with - they are addictive but it's a different type of addiction and the harm is different too (more psychological than physical). That said, I will concede that I mostly agree that "age verification" isn't perhaps the best approach to fight it.

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