alt Hacker NewsNot commenting on this specific law, but I do believe the premise that children should be exposed to everything is wrong, and that the overall view on humans in this post is naive.
These days, exposing an immature brain to the raw internet is basically just handing the brain and personality over to be molded by large corporations and algorithms.
And humans have never been rational, self-contained actors that self-educate perfectly when exposed to information, converging on an objectively good and constructive worldview. Quite the opposite.
Humans develop in relation to one another, increasingly in relation to algorithms, and sometimes become messed up, and sometimes those mess-ups would have been avoidable had relations or exposure been different.
In fact I would say you as a parent is not doing your job if you are not trying to make sure a 12 year old isn't pulled into, say, an anorexia rabbit hole.
Whether that is best done through making sure exposure doesn't happen, or through exposure and education, will depend on the child and parent (and society) in question. What worked best for a highly rational self-reliant geek teen may simply be a disaster for another human. And what worked for an upper class highly educated family may not work for a poor family with alcoholized parents or working 18 hours a day to make ends meet.
And parents are not perfect -- if all parents were perfect, there also would be no alcoholics and drug addicts or poverty or war. But people are imperfect, and it's natural to make laws to mitigate at least the worst effects of that. (Again, haven't read this specific law proposal, but found the worldview of OP a bit naive.)
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I agree, and I believe too many geeks who are now parents (including the author of the blog post) do not realize that the computers they grew up with, and in particular the Internet they grew up with, is nothing like computers (phones) and the Internet kids have access today.
> believe the premise that children should be exposed to everything is wrong
imo this is what is wrong with modern parenting. the reality does not care about the child's feelings and if it is old enough to have a screen with internet unattended it is old enough for anything
If you are not perfect, then don't have kids then. If you can't take care of them and nurture them with the attention that they need and rightfully deserve.
But, should it be the governments responsibility to decide/control how children are raised, and what they are exposed to?
Maybe in the future, a governing body will try to age lock dissenting opinions with some crafty verbage
I've seen this view applied to things like TikTok and Instagram. Especially with the recent lawsuit. But then when to comes to addressing it most people seem to flip completely and bemoan parenting and internet freedom. It just ends up in a circular pattern of "this is awful, but we shouldn't do anything about it. These companies are poisoning kids, but any attempts to rectify that are infringing on my right to the internet." Makes a lot of conversations around this topic feel entirely pointless.
ok, that is the argument with merit in favour of shielding kids from the internet - now let's consider how does it look like when the locus of responsibility is governments
it's true that kids are vulnerable to certain forms of content on the internet
it's also true that adults are vulnerable to certain forms of content on the internet
it's also true that governments cannot police "harmful content" on the internet effectively, or even meaningfully, if most people can easily surf the internet pseudonymously
it's also very true right now that what's on "social media" is very Sybill-vulnerable, and inordenately so right now with the advent of LLMs
what do you think the playbook will look like once there is some sort of tight OS level system that is enforced across the board to certify or verify information about the user?
do you think this level of coordination to push for identifying the user at all levels that is happening across the world in a matter of weeks is genuine concern for the kids alone?
My view is that this must be left entirely to the parents. The only time a government should be allowed to interfere is when there are child abuse or neglect cases against the parents and the children are put under child protective care.
It is in my view crazy and irresponsible to allow the government override the parents' decisions about what media their children can consume. It is guaranteed that this power will be abused.
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> These days, exposing an immature brain to the raw internet is basically just handing the brain and personality over to be molded by large corporations and algorithms.
You make the case of todays internet being insuitable for young children. But has this been different, ever, maybe apart from the very first days of the internet? While access through phones has reshaped the internet fundamentally, I'd propose that it has always been dangerous. When I was 12, a single wrong click could destroy your machine, or lead to a physical bill being sent to my parents home (which has happened), or lead to most disturbing pictures and videos.
So I think it's not the case that we should allow kids completeley unsupervised access (like it always has been), but it's also naive to think that we can regulate our way out of this (on state or household-level, like it always has been).