Your argument seems to be that the issue is more nuanced than anyone else is saying, which is cool and all but then it sits with you to identify what the nuances you want to talk about are. Pointing out that someone else has identified different tradeoffs than you have is something of a given since that is the case with almost any pairing of people.
Otherwise, as Bertolt Brecht said, the government might simply dissolve the people and elect a different one.
This may come as a shock but neither China or Russia had their first encounter with losses of individual freedom in the 1990s. This is what the OP is talking about, this is the kind of shibboleth of online libertarianism that has little to do with real world policy outcomes. You'll find many similar laws concerning child safety in Norway that you find in China, different political systems and cultures can value the same things, even implement similar laws, without converging on the same political system.
In most countries on earth protecting children is a collective job, not a parents private business. A functioning and safe social fabric is a condition for successful families.
Just worth mentioning one data point. In the US 50% of young men (aged 18-49) now participate in online betting or gambling, likely as a consequence of the saturation of ads on social media and gaming platforms. Good luck with your parental responsibility when an entire country operates like this.
> this takes a sledgehammer to the core of internet privacy. In all cases in the world where this has been done before like China or Russia, freedom is also lost shortly after.
Russia's first online censorship was for truly abhorrent things. It moved on to become a ban on things the government didn't like. The book "The Red Web" does an excellent job detailing how this downward slide took place. It wasn't overnight, but it was a constant effort by those in power to erode privacy and freedom, and the first step was putting in place a basic censorship apparatus.
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/andrei-soldatov/the...
yes because Russia is a dictatorship. These recent age limits on social media have had broad public support and are widely supported by parents. Not having your kid grow up on a combination of porn, gambling and body dysphoria and their data exfiltrated by a US mega-corporation isn't the dawn of internet censorship. What about the privacy of children and the ability to grow up outside of the morass of commercial surveillance platforms?
Having your kids grow up free from that crap doesn't make you China, it makes you ca 1990s Denmark. Japan and China both have strict gun control laws, but Japan's a democracy. People are free to live by different values than Americans, just screaming red scares isn't going to convince anyone.
Who said that it does? I think you're kind of missing the point here, and it seems rather intentional to be honest.
> their data exfiltrated by a US mega-corporation isn't the dawn of internet censorship
Instead, all adults must submit their PII to those same "US mega-corporations" to verify that they are adults. You realize that the social media companies absolutely love this, right? They support this.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/uk-to-require...
> People are free to live by different values than Americans
Has nothing to do with being American. I don't even get how you got to that?
> Japan and China both have strict gun control laws, but Japan's a democracy
Ok? They also both enjoy sunsets and long walks on the beach.
The proles are allowed to amuse themselves to death.
"Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, began closing teen accounts from 4 December last year. It said anyone mistakenly kicked off could use government ID or provide a video selfie to prove their age."
So the bulk is done as you say but they still need* an age verification system for when they over-stepped.
* need here is because of the way the laws were written AFAIK.
We need some kind of verification system that gives no extra information about users to the platforms, but I don't know if there's a true ZK way; it might require government involvement. I think that's fine. Govts could certainly run an age-verification system, give a signed yes or no token back to the user, with some permanently applied jitter per person so that platforms can't use cookies from returning users to figure out their birthday. As long as the government program has strict oversight to ensure it's not saving information about who's visiting what sites, it seems fine, or at least vastly better than entrusting photos of IDs to private 3rd parties.
The government does government things.
This doesn't seem like something crazy.
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Don't let the kids wander Las Vegas / the adult section of town (the Internet) unsupervised?
Or even better:
Have any website that's intended for children make a Legal Claim that they are rated Child Safe / Friendly so they fall under Advertising Law coverage and/or soliciting a minor.
Then have user agents (browsers) used by children configured to limit them to those places. Or even pay for a special VPN that limits access to those places.
While increasing harm to many others. Nobody ever wants to mention that part. It is not a clear "child safety" win. Personally I think it's probably a significant net loss.
Wealthier people who can afford to have one parent stay home or have babysitters or nannies who will actually supervise the kid can do a much better job monitoring and redirecting than when both parents work long hours and have no money.
So poorer kids are going to spend more time scrolling brain rot, which may lead to worse academic performance and concentration problems. They’re also more likely to get sucked into any number of garbage social media propagated cults, wacko ideologies, and dumb fads.
For the record I’m not a fan of the way this stuff is being pushed. At the same time, I feel like a lot of people are totally out of touch on a lot of the reasons why some people support this.
The time can be amortized. Parental controls don't have to be set up in one sitting. Take the phone away for 2-3 weeks (during summer break if there is one), spend 20 minutes (almost) every day adding parental controls, and give the phone back after everything has been set up. Allowlist websites and password-block app downloads. Child needs the phone on weekdays? Instead add parental controls once or twice a week, across 4-6 weeks.
The parents are already shelling out for a smartphone (because dumb phones are getting harder to buy, because peer pressure, because advertising, because some schools assign smartphone-based tasks, but nevertheless). The money aspect of elitism is a sunk cost. The next obstacle is the technical literacy aspect of elitism. What the parents need is the knowledge to use parental controls and the understanding that parental usage of parental controls should be almost not optional. I know most parents won't seek all of that knowledge on their own because lack of knowledge begets lack of enthusiasm, so this is where the government should be stepping in. (Also, the government should mandate that all stock Android/iOS devices have parental control features without necessarily mandating that the manufacturers or sellers turn those controls on before sale.) Have schools send emails and snail mails with big bold scary letters in English and Spanish: This Will Affect Your Child's Grades. Please Put Parental Controls On Your Child's Devices. Come To Our PTA Meetings About Parental Controls And Watch The Recordings If You Can't Attend.
Government makes everyone poorer through their terrible policies -> parents need to work more to stay above water -> nanny state must grow to take care of kids -> terrible government policies entrench. Nope, don't want it
If only 50% of parents enforce the rules suddenly half your class isn't there and it doesn't become such a big deal to be missing out and it's less appealing for the kids who are allowed still.
I'd prefer it to be voluntarily organised like https://www.waituntil8th.org/ but even a bad solution is going to have a major improvement on society even if social media is less private due to the ID issue. It's not like you don't share everything with these companies anyhow. I'm pretty confident that if you are a regular user of any large social network today they could identify you 100% of the time already even without your ID.