That's not parents issue. That's why we go after people who sell or give drugs to kids. Is a serious offense, we don't wave our hands and say its parents problem and not drugging kids is a popular policy unlike drug enforcement for adults.

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1718627440 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, but that assumes, that there are people out there, selling smartphones to children at scale. First the price for one is way to large for the financial budget of a child, and second that gets even more price-intensive, after the first one got confiscated by the parent.

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mrtksn 8 hours ago | parent [-]

There are literally people out there selling smartphones to children at scale. A smartphone these days can be bought for as cheap as a burger because 2nd hand market exist and its not limited to iPhones.

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1718627440 8 hours ago | parent [-]

And the child can also go and buy a porn magazin, which is likely to be eventually found by the parent, just like the burner phone you suggest. The former is also going to be cheaper.

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mrtksn 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Guess what they check before they sell the kid a porn magazine

	▲	johnnyanmac 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		So you're suggesting resellers require ID's to sell smartphones? I completely agree. Not much difference between a porn magazine and a portal to infinite porn magazines.

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vorpalhex 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Everything is a parents issue.

If you are depending on the police to keep your kid from doing drugs, you have failed as a parent. I promise you, your kid can locate drugs better than the cops can arrest low level dealers.

You as a parent need to teach your kid how to behave (mostly through things like teaching ethics and morals) not by running a safe prison until your kid is 18.

And yes, I am a parent of multiple kids.

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mrtksn 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I agree, however the problem is that large number of parents can't do that and it becomes a societal issue. That's why we are talking about that, otherwise it would have been private family issue.

Drugs, alcohol, teen pregnancy and now social media has become societal issue as enough parents failed to control their kids actions or development.

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wowyouredumb 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I think Darwin had a solution to that.

	▲	DANmode 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We walked away from it.

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1718627440 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> not by running a safe prison until your kid is 18.

And in addition, such an approach, will not lead to a child magically becoming an adult all of a sudden when they turn 18.

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kelseyfrog 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If we want parental behavior to change, we have to change the incentives. Parents must be held criminally liable for exposing their children to social media. Until we change the incentives, 'parents need to parent' is just an empty slogan.

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mindslight 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So sure, we go after anybody who gives or sells devices without basic parental controls directly to kids. So you need to be 18 to buy a phone, which we're 90% of the way to anyway with the way credit cards work.

The fundamental point is that the Internet is not a daycare. All of these attempts to put the burden on sites boil down to changing this dynamic, recasting the Internet as if it should be appropriate to use as a daycare. Today it's big tech and porn. Tomorrow it's any writing that the the religious reich dislikes. Monday it's technical sites as they can help kids bypass restrictions. Tuesday it's international sites being blocked at the ISP-level because they don't bother with any of this crap.

We also need to remember the context here, lest we carry water for big tech's continued abuse. The main reason the surveillance industry is reaching for age verification (ie identity verification) is that harm to children is so far the only regulatory cause of action that has been found to stick. Big tech wants this, so they can continue on with business as usual abusing adults' psyche and personal information. Where what we actually need is to stop their abuse for adults as well - eg data privacy, anti-trust regulation to open up their services to competing clients, and at this point probably straight up regulation of purposely-addictive "algorithmic" feeds.

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Mezzie 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> Big tech wants this, so they can continue on with business as usual abusing adults' psyche and personal information.

I've said before and I'll say again that this approach (strict age gating) also is going to produce a slew of really vulnerable 18 year olds. If I were a sports gambling site, I'd be salivating at getting a fresh crop of 18 year old boys each year who have had zero opportunity to learn how to navigate the Internet and who are legally on the hook for everything they do.

OnlyFans, likewise, is going to work out great! Now the 17 year old girls turning 18 won't have access to things like the social media of former OF performers or access to any communities where sex workers discuss the downsides of their job or how to stay safe.

Have to protect the children, don't you know. That way they can be perfectly pure and innocent when they turn 18 and are ready to be exploited. Like fattening up cattle.

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mindslight 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes! And this dovetails into a point I really should have made as well. The thing about "age verification" (ie identity verification) is that it puts the decision of what kids should access wholly in the hands of corporate attorneys. For example we can easily imagine a "Facebook4Kidz" website that has many of the same terrible dynamics as regular Faceboot, but that Faceboot's attorneys can justify as being legally compliant. As a parent, you would really want to block this too - while all of these proposals for identity verification and site-based-control claim to solve the problem but leave you with no way to do that!

This ties into your comment because as a kid approaches adulthood, as a parent you also want to loosen those restrictions so that they can develop these skills - gradually while under your supervision. Whereas the corporate attorneys will just say that they're strictly off limits, right up until it's then open season as you're pointing out.

	▲	Mezzie 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes! And you want them to learn in a situation where the stakes are lower: at 18, someone can put themselves into a ton of debt or put nudes in the wrong place and just nuke their life in a way that they can't fix for a decade and everyone shrugs and is like 'you're a grown up!' Think of all the kids who back in the day got scammed out of their Neopoints, or lost all of their in game currency in GTA, etc. That's a way, way better way to learn about account security and who to trust than their first experience with scammers involving real money. Is the problem that we're exploiting kids, or is the problem that we're exploiting people? We're not going to be able to protect kids from exploitation in a society/culture that explicitly condones exploitation. If we think exploiting people is fine, actually, as long as they're over 18, then your kids will never be safe, because they will grow up. Even setting aside the obvious examples I listed, binge drinking used to be a huge problem amongst college aged kids. Who's to say that the Internet/social media wouldn't be similar? How many kids are going to flunk out of school because they can't stop watching digital crack and now mom and dad aren't around to stop them? And unlike binge drinking, your body won't eventually revolt against you, and with the addiction consultants The Machine employs, there will always be new content. People grow out of binge drinking because eventually it grows stale and hangovers when you're 35 are far worse than ones when you're 21, but that's not true of social media use. To tie this to other issues, we're already seeing issues with relationship and family formation amongst young people. I'm not sure flash banging them with addictive content when they're in their prime years is the call. If all it took for the Internet to be healthy was holding off until adulthood, we'd expect people who were adults when they started to have a healthy relationship with social media. They very much do not.