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| ▲ | 0x000xca0xfe a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Then the solution could be just like the solution to tobacco addiction: tax social media companies HARD, tax all advertising on social media 10x, 20x, or ban advertising on/for social media outright, ban advertising of kids products, ban showing use of social media in movies not rated 18, ... the problem will vanish just like cigarettes. But no, that's not what governments are doing. They want control and surveillance. | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Taxing or banning advertising alone would fix literally everything that is wrong with the web. | | |
| ▲ | jryle70 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Do you know what happen when advertising is banned? It would go underground -- product placement, contest, merchandises, and so on. Advertising existed as soon as commerce became a thing, probably thousand years ago. It can't be banned. I wouldn't vote for that. Regulation, on the other hand, is fine. How? I don't know. | | | |
| ▲ | SecretDreams 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It would definitely help and I'd support it. I would much rather pay a fixed cost to use the internet and remove all the poisonous crap we're stuck dealing with to "keep the internet free". | |
| ▲ | akoboldfrying a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Taxing may be a good way to restore balance. Banning means goodbye online news, Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Translate, ad-supported games, etc. -- basically everything we've become accustomed to having for free will want a monthly subscription. | | |
| ▲ | account42 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Banning means goodbye online news, Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Translate, ad-supported games, etc. Good. |
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| ▲ | frm88 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is the most sensible solution to this problem I have read on HN in the 2 years I've been here. Think of the positive effects taxation would have: no whack-a-mole for every loophole the industry will find. No single fines after costly court battles that are basically pocket change for Zuckerberg et al. Adherence to polluter-pays-priciple. Make it so that if they stop advertising, the tax expires. Use the tax money for better infrastructue. Make the tax progressive - the more ads, the higher the tax. Added benefit: even adults will be less exposed to addictive material. What would be the cons of this? |
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| ▲ | docjay 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You get robbed and raped at the local park, broken bones riding a bike, permanent disability playing a sport, drown when swimming, disappear on a hike, overdose at a party, “become violent” playing video games, join a cult at a rock concert, rot your brain watching TV, eating disorders from ballet and gymnastics, traumatic brain injury from a trampoline, choke on a marble, fall when rock climbing, crash your car, get Lyme disease camping, get skin cancer playing outside, develop body dysmorphia playing with a Barbie, socially isolated without Facebook, socially dysfunctional with it, and join a gang if you have nothing else to do. Everything, from “anything” to “literally nothing”, has been marched up on stage as the latest thing that’s a danger to children. All of it is true. Existing is dangerous, and that cannot be legislated away. Parents are supposed to be preparing their children for the dangers that life brings with it, not grinding down the tips of forks. Having a healthy fear of skateboarding saved more broken bones than knee pads, so maybe parents should help their children understand that their peer isn’t as cool as they look on Instagram… or they get bombarded with it when they pass the minimum Facebook age and we’re back here in a few years raising the social media age to 35. | |
| ▲ | akersten a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I would guess It's going to take a lot more evidence to get me anywhere near consideration that this is a trade worth making. Again, we know that fast food can be attributed to hundreds of thousands of early deaths per anum, but we regulate that not at all. In fact it's sadly a staple of the average kids diet. Passing laws out of fear is not how any competent legislature should operate. | |
| ▲ | mindslight a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > continuing the status quo with social media is a non starter for humanity. So tell me how we can help kids not get ruined by the internet without a mechanism specifically identifying that they're online What if I told you it's very simple? We work at banning the harmful dynamics of corporate social media for everyone [0], rather than beating around the bush about kids. In fact, trying to avoid this is exactly why Faceboot et al are lobbying for this age verification crap in the first place - to escape the one tiny avenue of liability that has managed to exist, so they can keep kicking the can down the road. Given how wholly top-down these proposals all are, frankly they would be better off being referred to as "give control of what your kids can see to the judgement of corporate attorneys. [0] antitrust enforcement would go a long way here. Faceboot operates on online hosting service, so they should be prohibited from anticompetitively tying the client software used to access it (which necessarily includes "the algorithm"). | | |
| ▲ | SecretDreams 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | I would be completely aligned to this proposal if you think the bought and paid for governments of the world would do it and all the influencers out there selling vulnerable demographics pipedreams would accept it without fuss. There's HUGE demographics of people that would lobby against what you're proposing, sadly. | | |
| ▲ | mindslight 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't think bringing in "bought and paid for" makes sense in the context where we're talking about which policies are even sensible. For example if we do assume that, then this identity verification legislation is exactly what is being bought and paid for, and so there is no reason to examine it. Pragmatically, what I'm saying could hopefully chip away at the surveillance industry's power without a full-on frontal assault. Maybe forcibly breaking up Faceboot and divesting them of their client software is a bit ambitious, but regulation that forces interoperability of third party clients that represent users' interests would seem to be workable. |
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| Algorithmic scroll is factually more harmful, regardless of the amount of harm as long as it's non-zero, because it does affect people. Surveillance on its own doesn't. It just doesn't, everything that you can think of in response is not solely or even significantly caused by surveillance. Instead, limiting surveillance (which in this case is only linked to the issue at hand with what's explicitly a conspiracy theory, so the link is quite tenuous) was originally meant to limit the government's powers as a form of control over the government. Control over the government is just a part of the Enlightenment project of societies being able to shape their destinies equitably, which includes shaping political arrangements. Americans have completely lost the ability to shape their political system (when was the last constitutional amendment passed again?), so instead the discourse turned to fetishising particular tools that might help, but were never the point of having freedom. This is a fallacy. There are straightforward ways to have age verification without descending into a dictatorship. To use an analogy, most European countries have mandatory IDs, some even have digital IDs; many of those counties are freer than the US. Freedom is being able to stop kids from accessing pornhub without fearing a dictatorship because you can just prevent the dictatorship through a million other means. Freedom is not paralysing the political system as technology and progress (and multi-billion dollar megacorporations) march on. Otherwise societies just get superficial "freedoms" (like using slurs in public spaces because "free speech") while their governments, say, run a paramilitary murdering political opponents on the street. |
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| ▲ | jolmg a day ago | parent | next [-] | | On restricting, I really think that's the responsibility of parents. I think the problem here is that Android and iOS don't empower their users (parents) to implement proper parental controls. I imagine apps don't get the access and maybe the parental controls implemented by the OS don't suffice? Maybe because Android and iOS benefit from these kinds of legislation that cement their duopoly. | | |
| ▲ | SoftTalker a day ago | parent [-] | | I agree that none of the current user platforms, i.e. Android, iOS, nor desktop, have adequate parental controls that are easy to use. Parental controls are important but that's not enough. We expect parents to not buy liquor for their kids, and make reasonable efforts to prevent their kids from obtaining it. But we also expect liquor stores to not sell liquor to kids. We should likewise expect that internet content platforms do not deliver inappropriate content to kids. |
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| ▲ | imtringued a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Pornhub is incredibly restrictive about what can be uploaded and about identifying who is uploading the videos and is now also demanding proof of consent from the performers (presumably to avoid revenge porn). If one of the most compliant actors is already "virtually unrestricted" then you just want to censor things you don't like and the censorship of porn is just a pretense for the things you actually want to censor. | |
| ▲ | happymellon a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Based upon this sentiment, it's already too late as 2Girls1Cup already existed and has done it's damage to the current generation who are obviously deviants! How can we even trust these lawmakers when Blue Waffles, Tub Girl and Goatsee already existed??! Unless it hasn't. And while it's grosser than finding a copy of Readers Wives in the park, the "think of the children" angle is overhyped. |
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