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A complementary policy is to not give six year olds publicly funded mandatory chromebooks their parents don’t control. This can reduce the pressure coming from these parents to warp and twist the web till it is safe for a six year old to have free access to an uncontrolled chromebook.

While I agree with your comment at a high level, simply saying it's the parents job k thx bai is not going to cut it. Parents have to have the tools we need to do our jobs. I don't want the government touching it with a 10 foot pole, and no adults should have to give up their freedoms (these kids will be adults some day after all, so even if we're doing it "for the kids" we need to consider the world we're building for them), but the tools available to parents right now are way too inadequate, unless mom and dad are rich enough to buy enterprise-level tooling.

If we don't want to lose our freedoms, we need to offer constructive and realistic solutions that don't involve the government. Simply saying "not my problem" may feel good, but it's going to end up with a government-enforced tech dystopia.

I'm against any kind of age verification legislation, but this is a really bad argument.

It doesn't answer the question of "what do we do about parents that don't do their job properly."

In theory, one could implement age verification by negligent parent imprisonment, in practice, I don't think that would work, and definitely not in all cases.

If we accept the premise that children having unfettered access to the internet is a bad thing (which, again, I don't think we should), there have to be multiple layers to it. Punishment is one, increasing friction and "making honest people honest" is another.

This is the way! It is frightening how eagerly parents want to give up freedom for everyone, in return for not having to care about their offspring and the illusion of 100% safety.

I think the authoritarian trend accelerated during corona. Our western political nobility got a real taste for power, and they have not been able to free themselves from that afrodisiac ever since. Therefore chat control, 1, 2, 3, and when that didn't go as planned... lo and behold... age verification, and that of course needs control over vpn, and encryption, and there we go... chat control slipped in through the back door.

Soon we can no longer criticize china if this keeps up.

You argue against "individualist societies" but then blame "their parents" for not coping with the kinda impossible task of protecting their kids from big tech or the surveillance state.

It is a collective problem with collective solutions.

Sadly, this is how societies eventually tend to become. They need the younger generation to be “properly” raised (definition of “proper” really depends on the society).

If the side effect is that you also end up controlling adults and making them behave “properly,” then that is considered a plus.

Not to be to overly reductive, but you could use the same argument for drugs and weapons.

Expect more of the same then?

I've gotten exactly one response on what that looks like. The parent suggested writing custom moderation rules for his router. He was serious that this was feasible general solution.

"Do you know who's responsible to make sure children are safe online? Their parents."

Parents have the responsibility to do what is necessary to protect their kids

In the case of parents v. so-called "tech" companies, who should win

What happens when the companies are protected from parents by Section 230

Yet platforms should be accountable for the harms they create (in some way it has to be regulated)

I do criticize where individualism and those kinds of societies have gone wrong, but I also think it's going to be very hard for a parent to control that.

As a parent, then, what do you do when a public school district hands every 7 year old a Chromebook and has completely inadequate filtering on it?

That is a thought-terminating cliche. Everyone has some responsibility to everyone else. That's what living in a society means.

If Facebook decided to start showing hardcore porn to people it identifies as being under 14, would you blame the parents for letting the kids use Facebook, and not blame Facebook? If you would blame Facebook, that means you believe Facebook has (at least some) responsibility.

It's not about children. It's about re-introducing Stasi.

Okay. How?

I have a little boy. He does not use computers yet. One day he will. His friends will have YouTube or it’s spiritual successor and everyone in his school will be on TikTok where they’re hammered with whatever brainrot gets the most engagement.

What do you propose, exactly?

I will do everything in my power to keep the tech bros out of my children's life. Yes, that includes being a responsible parent. It also includes societal norms being established. Just as was done for alcohol, nicotine, movies, porn mags ect.

I guarantee you are not as dedicated as me trying to protect my kids, so there will be age gates, and that includes VPNs.

Everyone knows VPNs are only used for getting shit for free, so there is also a pretty powerful corporate interest to lock them down. In the case of the "corporate content provides" vs the "tech bros", the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I'll take a win however it comes.

Mozilla have picked a battle that will kill off Firefox, I am now not longer interested in recommending or using it. I'd bet their user base skews to older people, more likely to be parents.

Elderly undue influence costs victims billions.

I shouldn't have to consider getting a parent an under 18 account to protect them better.

Parents are expected to do more than you can imagine and everyone has an opinion on how they’re supposed to do it, especially in the US. You’re a terrible parent if you can’t keep a 5 year old from ever alerting somebody to their presence, but you’re also a terrible parent if you give them an iPad for a few minutes so they don’t bother people.

This whole thing where parents are expected to do it all themselves is actually a new phenomenon. Historically, across basically every culture, it was up to the community to raise all the kids together. To sacrifice and make compromises together.

Your parents likely didn’t have to deal with YouTube. There were basic laws in place that guarantee the content on broadcast TV fell within certain limits. Was that unacceptable to you as well? It strikes me that you take for granted the fact that you could never have been exposed to Alex Jones as a child. Let’s not pretend your parents knew everything you watched and saw, they just knew it could only be so bad most of the time. Yet you now expect parents to know everything on every screen in front of their kids with no assistance ever as the “attention economy” machine attacks all of us. It’s not a fair fight at all and your response is “parents just solve it yourselves” without a second thought.

I do not agree with all these age verification and surveillance state initiatives we are seeing. I am categorically against them. But your philosophy is harmful and frankly selfish. You live in a community. You have to make compromises.

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How about this: nobody shall be unsafe online or offline, and the state shall guarantee it. That's a foundation you can build law on, instead of hoping every child got lucky with their parents.