Speaking as a parent my current opinion on internet age verification laws is that after the state starts putting the Epstein class in prison en masse then maybe we can start taking anything else they say about protecting children seriously.
@mhoye Probably too much to hope a lawyer brings up Zuckerberg's activity with Epstein during this Meta trial?
@mhoye after the Epstein class, get our sights on those endangering the Earth that our children will inherit. What effective altruism? start with the next generation.
@mhoye I can't say I follow the logic. Expose children to corporate social media because Bill Clinton isn't going to jail?
@mhoye Let alone delegating the parental task of regulating children's online use of devices to the Epstein class: which is what online #ageVerification, in effect, amounts to doing.
Does anyone really believe it's for the children's sake when parenting is delegated by law to producers and publishers of CSAM such as that Nazi oligarch's #genAI and #microblogging conglomerate?
@mhoye Let alone delegating the parental task of regulating children's online use of devices to the Epstein class: which is what online #ageVerification, in effect, amounts to.
@mhoye Seeeriously. I consider unaccountable superrich predators who run sex & snuff trafficking rings without fear to be a far greater threat to my child than (checks) web browsing.
@mhoye this is an argument that has come up but this is the most succinctly put I've seen it
@mhoye To be completely honest. My take here is that creeps like Epstein have been around for 100s of years. Be it in churches or a variety of other institutions.
The mental health of young people (and beyond, to some extent, but let's stick to young people for now), by any objective standard that I am aware of, has taken an incredible plunge since the age of social media.
@Schouten_B Correlation does not imply causation, but every correlation has a cause.
The kids aren't idiots, and they can see that the people who control their world don't care what happens to them. (No, really. Never mind statements about feelings; what's being materially changed to keep them from starving in the dark or dying in insulin comas? Other preventable diseases?)
Disease. SARS-CoV-2 is way bad for your brain.
An increasingly polluted environment, also bad for your brain.
@Schouten_B @mhoye Perhaps you would benefit from broadening your acquaintance.
Social media is far more consequential for adults, especially older adults, than it is for children. Which is probably why the kids are being used as an excuse to set up the machinery to control it; there's an increased awareness that it works well enough to threaten the status quo. (There might even be sufficient awareness of history to remember what the introduction of printing did to political stability.)
“ Social media is far more consequential for adults, especially older adults, than it is for children”
[citation needed]
Respectfully, if you see “social media” as the hot running sewers of Facebook and Twitter, that is not nearly a holistic vision. Private group chats, whatever the service, are what social spaces are for an awful lot of people now. Kids, adults, everyone. And for kids growing up, this is where they’re growing up.
@mhoye @graydon Most studies I'm aware of make a very explicit distinction between fairly closed social media such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal, vs social media with mass reach (in particular the types that allow for 'likes' and 'retweets/toots/etc.').
The latter is what I mean when I say social media. Hard to express exactly but basically any virality driven platform with massive organic reach. Rather than any place where you explicitly setup connections with people you already know.
@mhoye There was a study came out this week, that noted three months of Twitter drags people's opinions substantially to the right.
That's been going on for ages; broadcast TV, radio, newspapers, newsreels; anything you can call "mass media" with a straight face does the same kind of thing. We're eusocial through cultural mediation and a big chunk of culture is what we repeat to each other.
It's more consequential in (especially older) adults because that's where the power to act on belief is.
@mhoye it's part of Epstein's transphobia conspiracy. His same friends like haidt are pushing both
