Post #2811254

2026-03-17 20:12 UTC

There is support for these laws because people think the only consequence of a ban on a thing is that the thing stops existing. For instance: Heroin is dangerous and addictive? Ban it then. And suddenly you have organized crime and a grey market and criminal gangs shooting each other in the streets while addicts can’t seek help and have to resort to crime to fund their addiction. Their lives more chaotic and criminal than ever. Our streets are littered in needles. Well done everyone. Now we think algorithmic social media may be mind bending? Shall we ban it? For kids? Even if we can’t define it? If you break kids access to the internet you sacrifice all the good that the majority of kids are getting from it for an ineffective solution which won’t fix anything and will mean massive increases in government surveillance and censorship. To data-hordes being hacked and people suffering ID theft. And it won’t help. Misogyny and sexism and depression are older than the internet. Plus of course kids remain better at accessing computers than their parents. You’re going to end up breaking the internet for adults who can’t figure out how to verify while the kids start to use VPNs and stolen IDs to browse 4chan.

Replies (1)

@pre@boing.world 2026-03-17 20:12

None of these surveillance companies trying to break your kid’s brains would exist if we hadn’t made it illegal to reverse engineer their manipulative crappy software and produce compatible none-manipulative clones. But they have been granted legal monopoly, so they can do what they like. If you want a law to protect internet users it isn’t “Force them to consent before you spy on them” or “age-gate chat forums”, No. The real solutions are more like: “Buying and selling data about an individual is illegal and punishable by years in jail and a penalty of 2x yearly profit” or “Advertising must be based on the content of the page context not the tracking of the individual”. If a legal intervention is warranted then we don’t want a system where website operators have to pick between a list of monopoly providers to hand over their data to and force them all to spy on their users to age-check. We want companies to be explicitly allowed to reverse engineer and reproduce other company’s proprietary access methods, to increase competition and end these rentier monopolies that allow them to push their manipulative phone apps. End the DMCA and the similar laws which they campaigned for to prevent competition. It’s those laws which give the corporations the power to push their algorithms and limit alternatives.

Open ##2811255