| Well, yes. If your friends can all go 'round to David's house, where David's parents hand each child a case of beer and send them on their way, any attempt by the other parents to prohibit underage drinking is going to be ineffective. But most parents don't do that. (I've actually never heard of it.) So social solutions involving parent consensus clearly do work here. "But it's behavioural!" I hear you cry. "What's stopping children from going out, buying a cheap unlocked smartphone / visiting their public library / hacking the parental control system, and going on the internet anyway?" And that's an excellent objection! But, what's stopping children from playing in traffic? |
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| ▲ | dyauspitr 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yeah but it’s illegal for the parents to give the other kids beer with serious criminal repercussions. That’s why most people make sure it doesn’t happen, not just some social sense of reponsibility. You would need something similar for smartphones/social media. | | |
| ▲ | b40d-48b2-979e 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That’s why most people make sure it doesn’t happen
Were you not invited to parties in high school? My experience growing up (and my experience being a neighbor to people with teenage children even now) says otherwise. | | |
| ▲ | Sohcahtoa82 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Were you not invited to parties in high school? Did you forget what web site you're on? | |
| ▲ | dyauspitr 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Every high school and college freshman party I’ve been to involves some serious planning to find alcohol. It’s always hit or miss and not easy. |
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| ▲ | wizzwizz4 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The US generally has strict anti-alcohol laws, with exceptions for legally-recognised familial relationships (e.g. children, spouses). The UK doesn't: its laws are restricted to "the relevant premises" (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/17/part/7/crosshea...) and "in public" (https://www.gov.uk/alcohol-young-people-law – can't find the actual law right now); but still, the behaviour I described does not occur in the UK often enough for me to have heard of it. I have, however, heard about similar behaviour from the US, where "we all go out late at night and become alcoholics" seems to be a culturally-acceptable form of teenage rebellion. People, for the most part, have no respect for the law. They usually haven't even read the law. They have respect for what they consider appropriate or inappropriate behaviour. (Knowingly breaking the law is, in most instances, considered an inappropriate behaviour – except copyright law, which people only care about if there are immediately-visible enforcement mechanisms. Basically everyone is fine with copying things from Google Images into their PowerPoint presentations… but I digress.) Most people would object to murder, even if the law didn't forbid it. This distinction is important. Is there a law that says "children must not play in traffic"? Probably! Haven't the foggiest idea which it would be, though. That law (if it exists) is not why children don't play in traffic. The law against giving alcohol to children (if it exists) is not why we don't give alcohol to children. We can establish similar social norms for deliberately-addictive, deceptive, dangerous computer systems, such as modern corporate social media. | | |
| ▲ | ndriscoll 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | We can establish social norms, but companies have a tendency to ignore those norms if it makes them money and it isn't illegal (maybe not all or even most companies, but if it's profitable, some company will do it and expand into that niche). So it makes sense to make it illegal for those companies to provide services to children, and then establish a social norm that parents won't create an account for their children/bypass the checks that companies need to do. Just like with alcohol: it is illegal for stores to sell it to minors, and they must check ID; we don't just let them shrug and say a 14 year old looked 21, and at least in the US, that would be a criminal offense. It's then socially unacceptable (and maybe also illegal) for a parent to buy a ton of alcohol so their kid can host a rager for all of their friends. Drawing out the alcohol analogy further, you can actually buy alcohol on Amazon, subject to an ID check. I'm not sure why no one bats an eye at this, but somehow e.g. porn or other adult-only services are different. It's long been an established, reasonable stance that it is both the parent's responsibility and decision to allow or deny certain things, and it's also illegal for businesses to completely undermine the parent's ability to act as that gatekeeper for their kids. | | |
| ▲ | wizzwizz4 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > So it makes sense to make it illegal for those companies to provide services to children I'm in favour of this, so long as the restriction is narrow. Children shouldn't be on Facebook, but they should be able to participate in the RuneScape forums under a pseudonym, or contribute to Wikipedia (provided they understand the "no, nothing can be deleted ever" nature of the edit history). However, most of the things we'd want to prohibit for children, aren't actually good for anyone. It would be much easier, in one sense, to blanket-ban the bad guys: no new accounts may be created on services like Facebook or Discord, unless they change their ways. |
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| ▲ | basisword 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it isn't common. Parents take different approaches. I had some friends parents who preferred we did it in their house where they could maintain some level of safety than us drinking recklessly in field. Others thought providing some beers was better than us buying the cheapest vodka available. And I'm sure other parents wouldn't have liked this approach if they knew about it. | | |
| ▲ | wizzwizz4 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm familiar with the "semi-supervised drinking inside" approach. "Provide beer so they don't drink cheap vodka" isn't an approach I'd heard of; it's close enough to my Poe's-law straw position to weaken my argument. |
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