The internet needs new spaces that are more decentralized and less in bed with governments.
We already lost our freedom when we agreed to move from IRC to Discord, from phpBB to Reddit, etc.
The teenagers who are blocked from mainstream social media will deliver us new free online spaces that are better than what they're blocked from.
Big companies will benefit the most from these regulations. It's just good ol regulatory capture. They will have the most resources to comply with the laws. They have a captive audience that will be more willing to give up their personal info when asked — keep in mind Facebook and instagram is widely used for business. It is your small time forum admin who would rather shut down his hobbyist online community that never made him any money anyway than to ask for IDs. We have already seen stories of websites shutting down due to existing UK regulations. Curiously, all small, personal operations, not the kind of corporate social media they tell you the laws are meant to target.
Then either freedom wins again or freedom-loving individuals move to Soviet-style samizdat, “lying flat”, and clever subversion. And the world continues turning as usual.
Which actual genocide would you be talking about?
I really don’t think people should water out words like that over what is essentially tiny political differences.
I really don’t think people should minimize actual historical and current events for political purposes. Knee jerk "bad things are inconvenient, therefore they did not happened" denial is how we got here.
> essentially tiny political differences
The political differences between actual fascism that is on the rise, its actual opposition and those in between are large. Not small. Also, in more recent events there were pogroms in Belfast now. Elon Musk personally contributed to their incitement.
Facebook has said it agrees with a report that found it had failed to prevent its platform being used to "incite offline violence" in Myanmar. The independent report, commissioned by Facebook, said the platform had created an "enabling environment" for the proliferation of human rights abuse. It comes after widespread violence against the Rohingya minority which the UN has said may amount to genocide.
Seriously, do people not look at history or at least the world around them when they make such claims? Genocides have happened before we had internet, or TV, or radio, or any modern technology people attribute genocides to. Hatred and violence are parts of human nature and trying to blame it on technology is just us trying not to make ourselves look bad.
> Genocides have happened before we had internet, or TV, or radio, or any modern technology people attribute genocides to.
Genocides became more frequent every since we have technology. Technology facilitates genocides. Both by creating actual means of killing (industrial killing in WWII) and by creating conditions for distribution of "work". Radio specifically was instrumental in Rwanda.
Haven’t seen any Amish committing genocides, have you?
All they need to do is popularize the idea of "if your website doesn't do X, it'll place lower on google" and people will do anything.
My websites still don't have cookie banners and the police still hasn't come to my house. And the websites uses cookies like every other website always did.
Much like the GDPR notices that a small industry of 'compliance' product companies sold seemingly to everyone as necessary, they aren't if you're only using cookies for functional reasons and not tracking people. Unfortunately that leads to lower margins for advertisers and we can't have that.
It is foolish to assume we can innovate our way around the law as opposed to talking with lawmakers to oppose the law before it gets on the books.
No algorithmic recommendation.
No mixing between known users (friends, followers etc.), recommended users (swipe feed) and advertised content.
No publication of user content. It's social media, not global media.
I posit that these points will be enough to curtail most of social media ills. Don't allow recommendation of slop and there will be a similar reduction in production. There will still be the village idiot that shares slop content, but their reach is limited since they have to actively persuade people to their message, rather than be recommended for being psychologically stimulating.
Mandating age verification and the inevitable implementation requirements are bad for freedom.
Behaviour changes and innovations will mitigate some of the negatives, but bad things are bad.
theres a place for group chats and tight communities but we also need global spaces where you can reach anyone. you cant promote your new album or start organizing a union or share some really good pics with the world if all you have is individual servers.
https://www.bmj.com/content/393/bmj-2026-363695
> Conclusions: Despite the intent of the Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024 to delay access to social media platforms and reduce the potential for online harms, little evidence was found of immediate substantive reductions in reported social media use by adolescents under 16 years.
We are training teenagers that laws are stupid and can be circumvented easily and without consequences. As well as continuing to subject them to the harms of social media, only now without any means of monitoring them or holding the social media companies responsible.
Unless you expect the teenagers to run underground mesh radio networks and risk FCC's hammer (real jailtime), it's just wishful thinking.