There has been 15 more years of highly motivated psychologists tuning their social media systems to create addiction, time for those who've grown up through this to become adults, foreign interference with democracy etc.

Though I think banning it for children is the wrong approach. Ban the addictive and dangerous features for everyone, adults included — no more infinite scroll, and no more feeds showing content from outside social connections.

Social media got worse.

We've had time to witness the damage of a dopamine-doomscroll. I personally know children who've posted too much, and children who've been solicited directly by adults, both to try and meet and for nudes. And we've seen the complete lack of positive action from platforms. Roblox is full of paedophiles and Grok was letting you nudify your classmates just a few months ago. These places aren't suitable for kids.

I don't want a ban on VPNs. That isn't being suggested, just making sure they're also age-checked. But some inconvenience is a price worth considering.

They've somehow managed to breed several generations who's only criteria for "computing" is "it just works". All consumption, little-to-no understanding of how stuff works. As long as it does what it does, and it's "free", that's all that matters.

> disheartening to see the sentiment around privacy erode like this

Coders went from being civically active—calling their electeds and showing up to events to defend privacy—to being comfortably rich and content with maybe voting in generals. That’s had a direct effect on policy quality.

Us peasants cannot stop this, Canada will roll this out soon also, its being rammed through no matter what people feel.

[dead]

Opposed, yeah right. People don't care back then just as they don't now. Only small groups of technical users like us care.

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

The first law about building technical and legal infrastructure to enable website blocking in Russia in 2012 was passed under the name of children protection. Everything else is an addition.

People from duma (the russian parlament) also publicly stated it would never use it for anything but children protection.

You see, the problem is that all exit points of our VPNs are in Europe. These too can be banned quite easily. Where to will we run next, given that this cancer tends to spread?

You seriously think the government has a clear, honest reasons, as stated?

Companies will be exempt (with remote employees having to identify linking their IP and computer's fingerprint with their real identity), and the next step, after using the law to silencing dissent, will be penalisation.

> But that the UK is also acting as a dictatorship - now that's interesting.

VPN banning is part of the same compulsion for control that made London a global leader (in surveillance of people not suspected of a crime).

ref: https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/articles/2020-08-14/the-t...

> it would be great if they cared as much about the safety of kids in the streets

car culture < childhood

This isn't a cynically curated viewpoint. It's some* of what we have and what that cost.

* we also have trespassing culture & stranger-danger culture. we ruined roaming and the childhood development it nurtured.

Somehow the "center"'s answer to the rise of right-wingers is stupid censorship, instead of fighting ideas with better ideas.

Alternatively, the center starts trying to attract right-wing voters by adopting right-wing ideas like anti-immigrant views or "well, we can sacrifice the climate a bit more" positions.

Keir Starmer is from a "left" party but his actions has shown him to be a centrist, Ursula von der Leyen is quite right. Then again, these are European positioning, as someone's said years ago, the European right-wing would be liberal in the US. And with the currently openly racist regime of the USA, even more so!

How is that happening? In the UK fringe nationalist parties are typically given as much airtime on main stream media as the governing parties. They've also setup their own 'news' stations to further spread propaganda. Any notion that they're being censored in the UK is ludicrous. They're pandered to.