CIRCLE WITH A DOT

You think it’s a coincidence these laws are being proposed all over the world all at once?

Nope.

Giant companies run by surveillance capitalists are spending billions of dollars on lobbying governments all over the world.

See https://tboteproject.com/

The reasons for this lobbying are nefarious.

The bans will entrench existing companies ensuring no small company is able to compete. These massive entrenched companies will be able to afford the identity checking and compliance costs, tiny start ups not so much.

You can see why Facebook lobby so hard in favour of these laws. If their app WhatsApp is defined as the only group messenger allowed for kids by law, that is very nice for them.

Perhaps compliance is actually cheap and easy and small companies can afford it?

Certainly not if they are trying to compete in terms of privacy. They have to turn over their user ID data to a monopolist vetting company by law.

At best: we give the government the power to impose massive costs on any company they decided to add to a list of companies that count as social media. Impose costs and force them to hand over their user data to Palantir and the like.

Even if you trust the current lot of idiots in power to not abuse this whole-internet global tracking data, that is quite a totalitarian system to hand over to the really bad guys when they get elected next time.

Can’t we just have age-proving tokens that prove age not ID?

Nope.

If such tokens exist I’d be pretty tempted to sell them to teenagers myself, and I’m not even trying to get the teenagers into bed.

If the age-proof methods prove who you are, they are dystopian surveillance systems and an advertising corporation’s dream.

If they do not prove who you are, they are sellable on the black markets in exchange for whatever teenagers have that grown ups want.

There is no way you can identify children in order to treat their accounts differently without creating a massive database of all internet users which is an identity-theft honey-pot, and is already leading to constant leaks of user data from terrible companies.

Those companies promising they can do the impossible and age-gate the internet are the very ones profiting from abuse and internet surveillance already.

They are the ones feeding your kids sexist racist right wing propaganda and depression from their algorithms then using the money to bribe politicians to entrench their position.

Not to mention that banning under 18s means identifying every user: A government ID required to access the internet.

How about if I’m posting in a chat for an environmental protest group, or an anti-capitalist group, or against genocide, or in a queer support group in a country with laws against homosexuality? Should they have my Government ID attached as proof of age?

An age-gate is asking for an internet licence and a single unified monitored ID across the whole internet. It’s dystopian surveillance-state authoritarianism. It is not desirable, even if it were possible, which it isn’t given black markets in stolen ID etc.

What is “social media”?

What do you actually want to ban?

Does Github count?

Does an anorexia-support forum count?

Does a queer-support forum count?

Does the schools own homework-submission system count?

Does Whatsapp, which the kids use to talk to family and to bully each other?

How about Telegram that the kids use to talk to their drug dealers?

How is it different?

Are we really saying nobody under 18 can watch youtube, and expecting that to make life better for those kids rather than worse?

How are you going to define ‘social media’ such that you’ll ban the harm you think you see without also banning any chance of support for a person looking to learn to program, or cope with their abusive parents, or seek advice about being anorexic or queer?

Is it really a good idea to attach a label to every child account for all the websites they visit? You want the kids to all have a big “Child” tag on them as they wonder the net? Might that not increase rather than decrease their vulnerability?

Got a bit ranty on a chat thread elsewhere yesterday when some were arguing for social media age-gates and the like.

Summarized here into a blog post.

The Age-Gate Rant

The kids are not okay, and lots of people seem to think it’s the kid’s phones and social media that’s doing it so lets simply ban kids from social media.

Simple!

Only: it doesn’t sound very simple to me.

@rysiek Did Disney ever pay it's staff in Disney Dollars? Wouldn't surprise me. If they didn't then there's probably a law against it, only reason I could think might work. Or unions.

@mastodonmigration @Lazarou ha, yes, well.

Venture capitalists have made lots of money from abused trust, but that's is phase two.

Blue sky might just be entering phase two now. Or they may have a few years more trust to build first.

@Lazarou @mastodonmigration that's how they make money, they build trust and then abuse it.

@dansup @carstenfranke If you're not interested then it is indeed spam, unsolicited commercial email.

Looks like the kind of offers that go out from robots to anyone with a domain getting traffic though, my guess is Brent doesn't really know what Loops is and just makes that offer to anyone getting enough DNS traffic.

@taylorlorenz No owners: Nobody owns the network, it can't be bought or sold, there is no oligarch deciding who can have accounts or what they can say or selling the data or putting their thumb on the scales of some algorithm.

The network is owned in common by us all.