I know this is weird, but I'm in some ways not really sure who is on the side of freedom here. I get your position, but like. The whole idea of the promise of the internet has been destroyed by newsfeeds and mega-corps.

There is almost literally documented examples of Facebook executives twirling their mustaches wondering how they can get kids more addicted. This isn't a few bands with swear words, and in fact, I think that the damage these social media companies are doing is in fact, reducing the independence teens and kids that have that were the fears parents originally had.

I dunno, are you uncertain about your case at all or just like. I just like, can't help but start with fuck these companies. All other arguments are downstream of that. Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.

> give parents strong monitoring and restriction tools

The problem is that it's bloody hard to actually do this. I'm in a war with my 7yo about youtube; the terms of engagement are, I can block it however I want from the network side, and if he can get around it, he can watch.

Well, after many successful months of DNS block, he discovered proxies. After blocking enough of those to dissuade him, he discovered Firefox DNS-over-HTTPS, making it basically impossible to block him without blocking every Cloudflare IP or something. Would love to be wrong about that, but it seems like even just blocking a site is basically impossible without putting nanny-ware right on his machine; and that's only a bootable Linux USB stick away from being removed unless I lock down the BIOS and all that, and at that point it's not his computer and the rules of engagement have been voided.

For now I'm just using "policy" to stop him, but IMO the tools that parents have are weak unless you just want your kid to be an iPad user and never learn how a computer works at all.

I am a bit confused by that comment. Are parents social responsible to prevent companies from selling alcohol/guns/cigarettes to minors? If a company set up shop in a school and sold those things to minors during school breaks, who has the social responsibility to stop that?

You're understating the US's policy on recklessness. We have "attractive nuisances," which means that if you put a trampoline in your backyard, and a kid passing through sees it, decides to do a sick jump off of it, and breaks their leg, that was partly your fault for having something so awesome that kids would probably like.

It's much easier to give individual users control over their own device than to give a centralized authority control over what happens on everyone's device over the Internet. Local user-controlled toggles are just easier to implement.

All parental moderation mechanisms can and should be implemented as opt-in on-device settings. What governments need to do is pressure companies to implement those on-device settings. And what we can do as open-source developers is beat them to the punch. Each parent will decide whether or not to use them. Some people will, some won't. It's not Bob's responsibility to parent Charlie's children. Bob and Charlie must parent their own children.

To the people arguing that parents are too dumb to control their children's tech usage because they themselves are tech-illiterate: millennia ago, we invented this new thing called fire. Most people were also "too dumb" to keep their children away from the shiny flames. People didn't know what it was or how dangerous it could be. So the tribe leader (who, by the way, gropes your children) proposed a solution: centralize control of all the fire. Only the tribe leader gets to use it to cook. Everyone else just needs to listen to him. Remember, it's all for you and your children's safety.

The speech that worked (mostly) on the children in my life involved the concept of 'cannot unsee', which they seemed to understand. There are some parallels to gun safety here because there are things that even the adults in your life try not to do and it seems perfectly reasonable to expect the same from children.

In fact being held to a standard that adults hold themselves to is frequently seen as a rite of passage. I'm a big girl now and I put on my big girl pants to prove it.

Individual Parents vs Meta Inc (1.66T mkt cap)

May the best legal person win!

This only works if I ban my child from having any friends since they all have unlimited mobile access to the internet.

A monitoring solution might have worked for my case if my parents had monitored my Internet history, if they always made sure to check in on what I thought/felt from what I watched and made sure I felt secure in relying on them to back me up in the worst cases.

But I didn't have emotionally mature parents, and I'm sure so many children growing up now don't either. They're going to read arguments like these and say they're already doing enough. Maybe they truly believe they are, even if they're mistaken. Or maybe they won't read arguments like these at all. Parenting methods are diverse but smartphones are ubiquitous.

So yes, I agree that parents need to be held accountable, but I'm torn on if the legal avenue is feasible compared to the cultural one. Children also need more social support if they can't rely on their parents like in my case, or tech is going to eat them alive. Social solutions/public works are kind of boring compared to technology solutions, but society has been around longer than smartphones.

> We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume.

The mistake in this reasoning is assuming that they are actually interested in protecting the children.

The greatest of uphill battles in today's current climate is trying to push anything in the realm of personal responsibility.

Politicians' whole basis for nearly every campaign is "you're helpless, let us fix it for you."

For the vast majority of problems plaguing society, the answer isn't government, it's for people changing their behavior. Same goes for parenting.

But unfortunately, "you're an adult, figure it out" isn't the greatest campaign slogan (if you want to win).

The difference with guns, tobacco and alcohol is huge: all negatives aside, giving kids what they want makes the life of a parent so much easier. Take it away and many parents will fight. Sugar is in the same game.

"We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume".

We'll try anything, it seems, other than hold internet companies accountable for the society destroying shit they publish.

And it's not jusy children who's lives they are destroying.

As a parent blocking websights is a joy, maybe the rule should be to allow guardians more ability to control that. Trying to block some services is not trivial

As a human, I'd love to see the rest of you fools quit that. If HN ever starts to algorithm me I'll be gone too.

I agree with you that parents should be responsible, but your argument is clearly flawed.

> you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using

In the example here, there are 3 things where age verification is required AND parents have responsibility.

It’s not just one or the other.

The same responsibilities are not “thrown out”, they are never acknowledged in the first place.

If you are interested in learning about the other perspective, you can watch some parents’ congressional testimony here https://youtu.be/y8ddg4460xc?si=-yYduYDppF4TQWqD.

The character.ai one is gut wrenching.

It's very easy to lock up alcohol/cigarettes, a child should never have access. Internet usage is more like broadcast media, a child should have regular access.

The positives and negatives of Internet usage are more extreme than broadcast media but less than alcohol/guns. The majority of people lack the skills to properly censor Internet without hovering over the child's shoulder full-time as you would with a gun. Best you can do is keep their PC near you, but it's not enough.

We agree that a creepy surveillance nanny state is not the solution, but training parents to do the censorship seems unattainable. As we do for guns/alcohol/cigarettes, mass education about the dangers is a good baseline.

EDIT: And some might disagree about never having access to alcohol!

parents can be held liable for buying their kids cigarettes but, similarly, tobacco companies are (at least nominally) not supposed to target children in their advertising campaigns and in the design of their products.

It's obviously not a 1/1 comparison here, because providing ID to access the internet is not analogous to providing ID to purchase a pack of Cowboy Killers but we can extrapolate to a certain extent.

(inb4 DAE REGULATING FOR-PROFIT CORPORATIONS == NANNY STATE?!?!?!?!?)

I'm 40. Do I need to get my parents to vouch for me? Who vouches for them?

> then give parents strong monitoring and restriction tools

As written, this sounds very glib. I cannot take this comment seriously without a game theory scenario with multiple actors.

you can’t blame it on parents alone, but the odds are stacked against children and their parents, there are very smart people whose income depends on making sure you never leave your black mirror

the surveillance state is possible, achievable, and a few coordination games away from deployment with backing from a majority who should know better

inertia kills, I dunno

We'll do everything, it seems, other than holding billionairs accountable for what their businesses consume.

The vast majority of parents aren't tech-savvy enough to be able to operate IT parental controls.

Yes, children are clever - I was one once.

A counterargument to your point that children are clever - I was also one once.

don't you have to age verify to get alcohol? We don't leave that up to the parents. Feels like you defeated your own argument with your examples.

The parents themselves weren't raised with the digital literacy required.

This doesn't put the parents off the hooks, if you or anyone can share any resources that are as easily consumable, viral and applicable as the content that is the issue that can reach parents I would be happy to help it spread.

The reality is kids today are facing the most advanced algorithms and even the most competent parents have a high bar to reach.

The solution is simple.

I want to permit whatever the pixels are on a childs screen. Full stop. That hasn't been solved for a reason. Because developing such a gate would work and not allow algorithms to reach kids directly and indirectly.

The alternative is not ideal, but until there's something better, what it will be and that's well proven for the mental health side of things of raising resilient kids who don't become troubled young adults - no need for social media, or touch screens until 10-13.

There are lots of ways to create with technology, and learning to use words (llms) and keyboards seems to increasingly have merit.

> We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume.

It’s not a fair fight. These are multi-billion dollar companies with international reach and decades of investment and research weaponized against us to make us all little addicts.

Additionally, it’s not fair or reasonable to ask parents to screen literally everything their kids do with a screen at all times any more than it was reasonable for your parents to always know what you were watching on TV at all times.

This is bootstraps/caveat emptor by a different name. It’s not “I want someone else to raise my kids.” It’s “the current state of affairs shouldn’t be so hostile that I have to maintain constant digital vigilance over my children.” Hell if you do people then lecture you about how “back in their day they played in the street and into the night” and call you a helicopter parent

Except companies provide wholly inadequate safeguards and tools. They are buggy, inconsistent, easily circumvented, and even at time malicious. Consumers should be better able to hold providers accountable, before we start going after parents.

The only real solution is to keep children off of the internet and any internet connected device until they are older. The problem there is that everything is done on-line now and it is practically impossible to avoid it without penalizing your child.

If social media and its astroturfers want to avoid outright age bans, they need to stop actively exploiting children and accept other forms of regulation, and it needs to come with teeth.

Excellent example of low effort cookie cutter empty rhetoric that would fit perfectly in reddit.

> then give parents strong monitoring and restriction tools and empower them to protect their children.

Because parents don’t abuse massive surveillance tools.

Given that most abuse happens in the family and by parents maybe it’s a bad idea to give them so much power

Do you have kids?

It’s weird that you blame the victim.

The real question is why do we leave it to parents or intrusive surveillance instead of holding companies accountable?

None of this push has anything to do with protecting children. Never has, never will. Stop helping them push the narrative, it's making the problem WAY worse.

ITT are a lot* of tech workers who made their money as a cog in the system poisoning the internet that future generations would have to swim in. I wonder if toxic waste companies also tell the parents it's strictly on them to keep their kids out of the lakes that are poisoned, but once flowed cleanly?

We live in a shared world with shared responsibilities. If you are working on a product, or ever did work on a product, that made the internet worse rather than better, you have a shared responsibility to right that wrong. And parents do have to protect their kids, but they can't do it alone with how systematically children are targeted today by predatory tech companies.

We should stop pretending these age-verification rollouts are about protecting children, because they aren't and never have been.

Even if the world was full of responsible parents, there are still people and groups that want to establish a surveillance state. These systems are focused on monitoring and tracking online activity / limiting access to those who are willing to sacrifice their own personal sovereignty for access to services.

There is most definitely a cult that is obsessed with the book of revelation and seeing Biblical prophecy fulfilled, and if that isn't readily obvious to folks at this juncture in time, I'm not sure what it will take. I guess they'll have to roll out the mark of the beast before people will be willing to admit it.

>> In the United States, you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using, yet somehow, the same social responsibility seems thrown out the window for parents and the web.

So anyone can walk into a shop and purchase these things unrestricted? It's not the responsibility of the seller too?

>We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable

The government took over most parenting functions, one at a time, until the actual parent does or is capable of doing very little parenting at all. If the government doesn't like the fact that it has become the parent of these children, perhaps it shouldn't have undermined the actual parents these last 80 years. At the very least, it should refrain from usurping ever more of the parental role (not that there is much left to take).

You yourself seem to be insulated from this phenomena, maybe you're unaware that it is occurring. Maybe it wouldn't change your opinions even if you were aware.

>If you want to actually protect children

What if I don't want to protect children (other than my own) at all? Why would you want to be these children's parents (you suggest you or at least others want to "protect" them), which strongly implies that you will act in your capacity as government, but then get all grumpy that other people are wanting to protect children by acting in their capacity of government?

The expectations on parents in USA are at their historical high. What are you talking on about in here. The expectation that parents will perfectly supervise them at every moment of their life till their adulthood is a.) new b.) at its historical max.

> holding parents accountable for what their children consume

There is a local dive bar down the street. I haven't expressly told my kids that entering and ordering an alcoholic drink is forbidden. In fact, that place has a hamburger stand out front on weekends and I wouldn't discourage my kids from trying it out if they were out exploring. I still expect that the bartender would check their ID before pulling a pint for them.

It takes a village to raise a child. There are no panopticons for sale the next isle over from car seats. We are doing our best with very limited tooling from the client to across the network (of which the tremendously incompetent schools make a mockery with an endless parade of new services and cross dependencies). It will take a whole of society effort to lower risks.

We live in a technofeudalist society now, we're all at the whims of the tech corps

> We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume.

The way to keep kids from eating (yummy) lead-based paint chips was not holding parents accountable to what their kids ate, but banning lead-based paint.

This tired argument again. It doesn’t work. It’s like keeping your kid from buying alcohol but all their friends are allowed to buy it. The whole age demographic has to be locked out of the ecosystem.

its like the food industry blaming parents, sugar like apps/games are designed to be addictive to the point they are act like a drug, stop the drug dealer, not the consumer.

The thing is, what are the parents to do beyond restricting things? You find out some creep has been talking to Junior; do you talk to your local police department, state agency, or to the feds?

We've never properly acted upon reports of predators grooming children by investigating them, charging them, holding trials, and handing down sentences on any sort of large scale. There's a patchwork of LEOs that have to handle things and they have to do it right. Once the packets are sent over state lines, we have to involve the feds, and that's another layer.

Previously, I would have said it's up to platforms like Discord to organize internal resources to make sure that the proper authorities received reports, because it felt like there were instances of people being reported and nothing happening on the platform's side. Now, given recent developments, I'm not sure we can count upon authorities to actually do the job.

Blaming parents is a bit unwarranted, when on the other end we have business interests driven by perverse incentives of predating on children’s gullibility for their own profit.

When you say “We‘ll try everything” that is simply not true, in particular what we do not try is strict consumer protection laws which prohibits targeting children. Europe used to have such laws in the 1980s and the 1990s, but by the mid-1990s authorities had all but stopped enforcing them.

We have tried consumer protection, and we know it works, but we are not trying it now. And I think there is exactly one reason for that, the tech lobby has an outsized influence on western legislators and regulators, and the tech industry does not want to be regulated.

> We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume.

You've missed the point. No legislator or politician cares about what the parents are doing.

What they care about is gaining greater control of people's data to then coerce them endlessly (with the assitance of technology) into acting as they would liike. To do that, they need all that info.

"The children" is the sugar on the pill of de-anonymised internet.

[dead]

Ah, the abstinence theory of protection. How it continues to rear its ugly head.

Why this utter drivel is the top comment is beyond me, unbelievable.

A physical realm that is safe for children to explore in their own is clearly preferable to one where it’s transgressive to let a child go outside without an escort.

It is plausible that the same applies to the digital realm.