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> Because this is leaning on blaming to UK for everything the US is doing to itself an awful lot.

Hasn't the UK had a culture of surveillance (the famous CCTV cameras) and arresting people over online wrongthink for quite some time though? Who inspired who?

This, it boomeranged.

Browsers already support safe browsing - a service that checks opened urls for fishing, so safety can be provided as a mode of such service (app store can check app url there). Also it doesn't really need to go through government, AFAIK DuckDuckGo and some DNS providers implement such feature independently.

I like this approach but this is a power grab similar to the purchase of Tiktok...

Why assume that the appearance of gullibility isn't the act of pretending to be gullible for gain?

We have dark money in the UK too and linked to the same orgs it just arrives via different channels.

Buffy is a real name?!

The DAAA doesn't criminalize open source. Please stop spreading disinformation.

Well-respected by who?

>(but unintentionally criminalizing open source)

Why do you assume this was unintentional? Because she said so?

I’ll just add that age verification schemes serve no purpose—-and are actively harmful—-unless there is some reasonable policy that’s applied after the enforcement.

The companies pushing age verification make their money monetizing access to children. They are exactly the sorts of groups I’d like to keep my kids away from. Forcing the kids to label themselves as minors just makes them more vulnerable to online exploitation.

> The right people to protect children are those responsible for them - their parents and guardians.

They can only do so much, within the boundaries of their home. It takes a village to raise a child. The policies, thus, should be made village-wide.

No ID checks at clubs, bars, or other adults-only venues.

No school zone speed limits, or protected crossings on streets near schools.

No requirements for railings on public balconies, fencing around public pools, protective covers over drains or other holes in the ground.

Parents/guardians can just supervise.

Sounds great!

reads like you’re espousing a theoretical position from a theoretical perspective

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49205469

> you know, i feel like the "it's the parents' responsibility" comments that turn up on submissions like this often tend towards phrasing like "the parents" rather than "with my children i ..."

if you’ve had kids maybe you’d like to share with the class exactly how you go about doing exactly what you’re describing?

if not, maybe let parents figure out how to parent rather than expecting them to be perfect for everyone else’s benefit.

> Give families tools and information to do so.

The problem is, agreement on those tools is hard to find.

"I want to be able to pen my kid into a digital walled garden, so that they cannot see $bad stuff until the right age"

that seems normal right? nothing contraversial.

The issue is, implementing that is really fucking hard. For mobile phones, largely thats already been done in the UK. You need to opt out of the nanny proxy before you can get porn and reddit.

The issue is, as soon as you get on the wifi, all of those controls disappear. So how do you stop that? if you're an idiot (and the person leading the OSA was an idiot) you do what the UK did. You put in legal tools to "age gate" the internet _at source_ rather than at delivery (like mobile phones)

so yes give people the tool, but if you're not giving techincal guidance, and just saying NO NO NO NO, OSA is what you get.

Said parents and guardians cannot protect their kids all the time - they have their own responsibilities like work. Most kids go to school during the day. The few that aren't grow up in homeschooling systems or cult-like environments, which are their own problem.

I frequently see this rhetoric (parents should look after their kids) from naive people on the internet that clearly don't have kids of their own (or don't have teenagers, or don't live or let their kids live free, etc)

the weird thing about it all is that age is a bad proxy in the first place for a child's level of safety in interacting with online content. Some kids are super mature at 11 and others still need protection at 16. For some reason the world has fixated on "years alive" as a perfect measure of vulnerability and now are doggedly pursuing it.

Even if perfect age verification is implemented, kids will be harmed. Because they are vulnerable while above the arbitrary age limit. So -arguing for age verification is harming children. Won't somebody think of the children?

And the answer comes back to the same point. Parents should mediate this. Online content should advertise its maturity level, and parents should be able to configure devices at setup time for the maturity level they are appropriate for. Then apps should respect that and everyone can be better off without robbing everybody of anonymity or freedom.

This is something where I agree and disagree with both sides.

Parents should have the tools to protect their children, the providers should have those tools in place. But those that are dealing the goods as also heavily invested in trying to maximize engagement and so they do not really work to hard on providing those tools.

You clearly don't have kids. You drop them at school and for maybe 8 hours a day, as a parent you have 0 control over whats happening. Bullying, peer pressure etc. How is that also parent's responsibility?

Parents shouldn't buy smart phone to kids, period. There are 0 reasons kid of say 15 or lower should have one instead of dumb phone (or new commodore one with google maps and whatsapp but no browser or apps), in same way we don't allow cigarettes or alcohol to be given or sold to them. Helicopter control freak parents can go to hell, their mental issues shouldn't be messing their kid's lives. But to claim parents have 100% responsibility could work only if kids spend 100% of the time with them.

Totally disagree. If you want to stop kids from using cell phones and social media, you are not going to achieve that at the family level. It is just not possible because if your peers are on the platforms and are using smart phones, no amount of family level restrictions are going to stop kids from using them. It has to be at the state or higher level so that everyone is prevented from using social media or smart phones at the same time so that is the norm. It has to be alcohol tier regulation if you actually want it to be effective

Every time I see this take I remember the time my step father picked me up by my throat and body slammed me on the floor. I was 12. I've had tinnitus ever since. Children really do need protection from some parents. I'm glad you had a good upbringing, be well.

This is a garbage UI and it looks like it was designed using "dark patterns" to ensure that nobody uses it. Look how many clicks (18 clicks, I counted) one needs to do in the correct sequence without a single mistake, and how many distracting and misleading options are there. It is a sabotage, it is a rebellion. Technically, yes, Apple can claim that they have "safe mode", but in practice it is unusable. Apple clearly doesn't want parents to enable restrictions, for reasons I do not understand, probably they just hate children or people having a family.

Your video actually has the opposite effect: it shows that there are no (easy) ways for parents to protect the children and government regulation is necessary.

The UI should be a single checkbox named "child mode" and small, gray link "configure" that opens the menu from the video. The parent just clicks the checkbox, and sets up a password, a fingerprint or paired device to unlock the mode. That's all. After this only government-approved apps and websites can be opened (parent may edit the white list if they are ok with navigating through a maze of ten thousand menus) and children are perfectly safe. Government may white-list only apps and sites that implement measures for content safety and may not add non-compliant apps.

Also I hate watching vertical videos on a laptop.

Famously these controls basically don’t work.

> I realise UK police are far from perfect

I think most people can see that there are levels to everything and UK police are better than a lot of places whilst still needing to improve.

Where "policing by consent" means "only policing people who won't react violently when we try and prosecute them for breaking the law".

don't think so, mate

Yo this is an excellent use of LLMs...

Is there any connection with the 5rights foundation?

Sorry, I feed stupid to ask, but what does the graph tell us in that particular case?

We need this for everything.

That's super cool!

Worth noting that there's no security in a system that abusively collects your data. That goes for children as well.

> Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.

This makes very little sense. People sometimes appeal to the safety of children cynically, but it's very often sincere, since parents genuinely do worry a lot about their kids.

You can tell people to ignore these appeals, but it won't work, and you'll be leaving better arguments on the table.

> Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom for security.

The immediate reply is the accusational: "why are you trying to trying to prevent safety for kids".

It's a simple next step to accuse you of hiding your own child abuse ring.

This sounds like hype, but it's the normal path here in Australian.

> Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom for security

That argument loses you most of the population in a vote, myself included. Parents may disagree, for a start; I reckon most women (especially outside of tech) read that and mark you down as "creepy man I don't want near kids".

It's also wrong, as there are lots of rules that are in fact designed to protect children. I recommend reading up on the history of child abuse in the Boy Scouts of America (now Scouts BSA), FBI agent Kenneth Lanning's investigation, and the safeguarding and leadership training that scout leaders must take today.

The UK has a system, I think it's called the DBS, which depending on the level of check ranges from "is this person a convicted sex offender?" to "non-crime hate incidents". One can argue a lot about what the correct level should be, no-one has yet convincingly explained to me why specifically "non-crime" actions should be in a secret police record. But I am on board with someone convicted by a court for child sex offences not being allowed to become a schoolteacher.

We should not ignore it, but firmly dismiss it with reason. The recent Illinois law that applies to all Internet-capable operating systems is blatantly unconstitutional. People should not be forced by law to disclose their age (or anything) in order to engage in digital communication. That forced utterance of your own age is compelled speech, a violation of the First Amendment.

For parents who are genuinely concerned about child safety, you are being used to push an agenda. If we want to solve the digital parenting problem, we have to understand how the problem came to be in the first place and why there isn't a good solution at the moment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578

In the modern discourse and context, 99 times out of 100, indeed they are, and indeed it should be.

Comes down to something I have said for a long while. Anyone that wants power, who is saying it, why are they saying it and why do people believe them.

That one can get deep really quick.

The worse is - we say it's about child safety - but that same rhetoric is actually defending kids to have a smartphone.

You're straw manning most people by trying to insist upon this, as most Americans support a ban on social media for children. [1] That turns into the overwhelming majority if you consider only Americans with children. And the percent of Americans that oppose things like age verification for the usage of social media sites is in the single digits.

So it will most likely happen especially because you are certainly right, in part, that no government has ever said no to actions that'd give them more power, let alone ones that are widely supported. But the point of this is that rather than having this as some sort of red-line no, I think it'd be much more pragmatic to try to argue for identity verification regulations that would be most palatable.

[1] - https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54969-eight-in-ten-parents...

"The government says all children need to show an ID when browsing the internet in order to be safe"

"The government says all children need to be vaccinated in order to be safe"

I'm not saying these arguments are equivalent, but they seem equivalent because they induce the same feeling of loss of agency. And one cannot simply ignore and dismiss something like this.

Note how they always ignore parental controls, and skip straight to deanonymize everyone.

rhetoric all the way down

> Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom

These are NGOs not parents. And "child safety" is often a euphemism. The point is it's hard to argue against child safety. For example, if opaque NGOs demand deanonymization to stop CSAM, I am assuming most people would not want to seem like they are in favor of CSAM. So you need an organized effort to argue in favor of privacy and even then anyone who does it can easily be smeared as a CSAM user. So child safety can backdoor something else.

This but unironically.

Same for the environment and construction. And there’s a correlate for rhetoric too, such as comparing people to Hitler or Stalin.

Sounds like a good way to cede the argument to the opposition and let those that do believe them make up the rules.

> These NGOs have converged upon a unified strategy ...

Not just for the war on anonymity. NGOs, often funded by government money (so missing two third of their name), have unified on other topics.

One example that comes to mind is teaming up to organize the biggest influx of migrants into the EU following the arab spring movements: there have been hidden camera recording NGO employees explaining how to dodge controls, how to answer questions (by lying), and they've been actively helping sneaking people illegally in the EU.

A good question one could ask itself before downvoting me is this: if it's a fact that NGOs are teaming up, worldwide, to lie using the rethoric of "child safety" [1]... On which other topics did NGOs lie?

Or are we to believe all NGOs are good and well-meaning, except those working to end anonymity?

And before I forget: in Africa for example it's fully well known that NGO typical means "DGSE":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate_General_for_Extern...

There are french "doctors" in some of those NGOs who know less about medicine than what I know about medicine by having ex-girlfriends that were doctors.

By squinting one's eye just a little it look like NGO is not that far from a synonym of "shady undercover gov op".

And btw why should any of my taxpayers dollars go to even a single NGO if it's non-governmental?

And another big one: while some of those NGOs have been hard at work passing legislation which as a a result gets people arrested for "hate speech" (or even just for saying "christian prayers in their heads") in the UK, other NGOs are even harder at work making sure that the absolute most horrible of all hate speech cannot ever be criticized "because it's religious".

The double standards are literally insane.

If I was in the UK, I'd GTFO. And not to the EU.

[1] speaking of which, btw, there are serious allegations about NGOs participating in child trafficking, for example in the Haiti SNAFU

“Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you”

Any argument with such blatant oversimplifications is almost certainly lacking in nuance and can be ignored and dismissed.

I get what you’re pointing at: politicians regularly abuse these arguments, but that doesn’t mean it’s 100% of all arguments involving children.

There's an ongoing debate in Australia to ban gambling advertisements. One of the arguments that is supportive of a ban says that children shouldn't be exposed to gambling advertisements during sports broadcasts, as they should be family friendly.

Should that argument be ignored too?

In the inverse, none of the opposition matters until it can solve the problems the universal surveillance approach doesn't even solve anyways. Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.

It's a tradeoff situation and nobody wants to leave it as such to find an answer which serves the best balance. Instead, we are doomed to discuss the absolutes of freedoms vs the absolutes of child safety.

I'd really like to see something like a required parental controls architecture products had to support (but not every device had to force universally). These kind of solutions only goes as far as the problem is a technical one, e.g. a kid on their dad's office computer they weren't supposed to access can still see things they shouldn't, but such is the truth with any pure technical approach to the problem which is not actually fully technically bound.

There is a term for this: a moral panic.

Believe it or not, sometimes the best answer is to do nothing until the crowd moves on to the next panic, as with the “Satanic Panic” in the 1980s. Turns out D&D was not actually a gateway to Satan worship.

I agree with the other commenter who replied to you. I don’t think this comes from actual parents. And the article suggests this latest push is from right-leaning groups whose goals are surveillance and censorship.

That said, I’m a father of 3. I’m a millennial and tech worker. I have the digital literacy to teach my kids about the internet and its horrors in a safe way. Not every parent does, so passing this off as a “parent better” issue doesn’t solve anything either.

I dunno if you can legislate “better parental control ux”, but I’m open to similar ideas so parents can get some support without compromising on privacy.

Why yes, I too want to "protect the children". But that shouldn't require me to upload my ID to a vague 3rd party to prove my age so I can browse reddit or steam.

I believe most online services should have safeguards to protect children because they will actively seek out harmful content and contacts (don't ask me how I know). But these safeguards should not allow for abuse of their users, or accidental info leaks, or sharing of PII to 1st or 3rd parties. There's plenty of ways to do e.g. age or identity verification anonymously and securely, for example.

Big tech companies aside, the broader tech community did not fail to engage on the digital parenting problem. We could've solved this problem long ago before anyone even noticed it, but we're actively being blocked from doing so by the exact same people pushing for mass surveillance. See detailed explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578

Perhaps but we have a problem globally where NGOs can mask nasty politics inside of faux charity.

> Like it or not, there is a large constituency who wants to “protect the children”.

The problem is not that they want to protect children. The problem is that these people are either technically clueless or deceptive which is why they present these surveillance measures as the only reasonable approach.

> By demonizing them and failing to engage with the worries over social media and pornography We have brought it on ourselves.

There is a really good way to do this that solves most concerns: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...

The only real downside to this is that a 0kp cannot be reliably tied to an identity of the person using the device and thus tickets could be proxied/shared around with semi technical tools (and/or an ai agent tasked with creating a proxy). This really isn't solvable without device-level attestation[0], as if a website needs to reliably say "this person is actually this person" then it needs all pieces of data itself.

This could be solved by adding in a still privacy-preserving step like "The device is doing periodic face id scans and matching them to an identity, and constantly renews/re-presents to the age assurance consumer", but that has its own drawbacks[0].

0: Namely, lock in to devices that can do this, and that includes basically guaranteeing a double digit percentage of adult humans would not have access due to their device being old, unsupported, missing the hardware, etc. And with so many humans excluded, you would not have mass adoption. Probably also excludes rooted devices if we bring in attestation of unmodified software.

The only constituency who matters is their parents and guardians. If parenting and guardianship is failing, then help them be better.

Fair play. This should 100% be viewed as a logical extension of that same effluvium. This is not a bug but a feature for them, many of these laws allow companies like Meta to offshore the responsibility of not harming children onto individuals while continuing to melt the brains of anyone unfortunate enough to still have a Facebook or Instagram account.

edit: sp

This is the flow back from the idea of 'information wants to be free'.

In letting things flow to easily the opposition is to have heavy lock down on information. A lot of the time, the opposite of one bad idea is another bad idea.

> Like it or not, there is a large constituency who wants to “protect the children”.

Is there, though? The push is coming from lobbyists who seem to be largely funded by wealthy elites, corporations, and other opaque organizations. One of them seems to be Meta. It doesn’t look like a grassroots effort.

I can't find a single comment here that does that.

One of the lobbyist organizations is backed by the data broker industry (AVPA). And it's well known several privacy rapist corporations (Meta) are also backing these bills. So yes, it absolutely affects us, and that should be obvious.

I'm convinced the pro comments are astroturfing. They've been caught doing it already on Twitter for these bills.

Similarly, I do not understand the willful ignorance and bootlicking attitude of those who want to support coercing others into sharing orivate information.

The reasons are mentioned every single time these laws are brought up, I can only assume you're willfully ignoring the concerns people have:

It's a security black hole, increasing our attack surface astronomically.

It causes undue compliance costs for websites to meet basic security standards.

It does not reliably prevent the determined teenager from bypassing these restrictions, e.g. with a vpn, but imposes enormous costs on allegedly a nontarget demograpgic (e.g. everyone else). Small benefit with a large cost is a bad policy.

The problem is entirely manufactured by bureaucrats, the public is concerned with gas prices and making ends meet. The parents that are concerned about their child's internet access can and do take the appropriate precautions because child controls already exist.

Whatever justification is given, the end result is mass surveillance, with the expected consequences in reduction of personal and social liberties. This is nothing to scoff at.

You are measuring only the inconvenience you have directly experienced. Not the impact on wider society.

Whistle blowers, journalists, religious apostates, people unsure about their sexuality all rely on annonimity on the internet.

I can't find the Times article but government officials have clearly stated that this isn't about protecting children, it's about controlling political discourse online. They are now floating the idea of forcing YouTube to give "trusted" public service news sources prominence. Again to control the discourse. That includes the BBC, which I personally have completely lost trust in.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/plans-for-prominence-of-t...

If you really believe the UK is a privacy-friendly and anonimity-friendly country then you have definitely been brainwashed. I can't think of a first-world country that's worse than the UK in this.

What country have you been living in? The UK is most certainly at war with anonymity: one of the highest CCTV countries in the world, key disclosure, OSA, KYC means yes you do need to scan your passport/ID now for any financial institution, Apple stopping full device encryption, the only thing left is ID cards and we will have no anonymity at all.

Yeah buddy, asking for a backdoor to all my private files on iCloud is just a noble attempt to protect children. What else are you selling?

1984 was based in London and the UK.

Yeah we definitely have. Here's me and another dev opposing AB 1856 (would have criminalized open source in the name of age assurance): https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/hearings/279266#t=10...

And here's like ~120 of us who showed up to oppose AB 2023 (the 3D printer spyware bill). It was incredible. https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/hearings/279741#t=19...

I think the easiest way to get involved is to become an EFF member. They'll keep you up to date on all the censorship and surveillance bills. Then you can contact your legislator, sent letters to the CA legislature committees, or show up to the hearings in Sacramento.

What you don’t realize is most people want this. The social media bans across Western Europe, and Australia are heavily supported by the vast majority of the population.

It is a great example of how difficult it is to anticipate the N-th order effects of things. 79 years ago the transistor was invented, in less than a century it ended up being the back back of a global surveillance system. Not many people could have foreseen this.

Cheaper computer technology has been great for the average persons uses but it cuts both ways. It also means much cheaper surveillance. I suspect that governmental/corporate surveillance now costs less than 1% of their spending, something that simple couldn't have been done even a few decades back.

I do wonder what the world would have been like is say computer technology peaked at 486 level performance/memory. Much of what we have today simply could not have happened in terms of surveillance and social media damages. Alas, this is the world we didn't get.

The question I would really like the "people" pushing so hard for surveillance to ask themselves is:

How would the Nazi Germany and Hitler gone if they had this system in place, telling them who and where every single Jewish, gay, gypsy, disabled, or just ideologically opposed to them person was, 24/7?

What about other insane rulers? What do you think they would - or rather, will - do with these systems?

That's not what this is about at all. Its British NGOs lobbying US states to pass state-level digital-ID laws. The end goal seems to be to make anonymous posting on the internet illegal. Its more about mass censorship than surveillance.

Someone I used to associate with was always really switched on with these things. Many things he said in the past that sounded a bit extreme or conspiratorial, turned out to be the real deal years later. Always interesting in retrospect.

The one thing he always said is, they have always been watching and know who is who, what these things do is allow it to be entered into the court of law. Now they can act on these things.

My theory is that the establishment sees the oncoming economic crisis and is desperately trying to plan for managing the fallout. They don’t like Flock or its backers, but they feel they have no choice. Same as why Palantir is gradually being rehabilitated in the mainstream press.

You’ll also notice that Anduril is quickly being accepted now that we’re expending munitions faster than our replacement rate.

Pro-Flock bots come out in droves in the replies to any Xitter post that’s even mildly negative towards them too. It’s not the least bit subtle.

Drew Harwell, Douglas MacMillan, and Aaron Schaffer from the Washington Post also wrote a shameful article on this topic on August 4th (the title changed, along with an image of a woman who was harassed to something else). No counterpoint. Total submarine article.

Noticed the same with some media publishing anti-work-from-home articles recently.

"We need the plebs to want to mock people who work from home, to reduce the reticence in coming back to work in the office"

"We need our commercial property values to go back up"

Edited to add:

"Our managers need to _feel_ as if they're actually managing people"

Follow the money. That also shows which media sources you should never trust

That sounds like a great solution for when your child is in your house using your wifi.

I will go back to DOS before I hand over this information. I already have my setup for it when this comes down the line.

Can also just lie about your age, "I am as old as the fjords, as young as a newborn lamb" - Thor - GTA Vice City radio ;)

I think it's more they may copy the idea. Kinda like the US version of The Office.

The goal behind these efforts, fundamentally, is to make it impossible to organize efforts to dissent against whatever comes next. We still have the tools for mass organization but we lack unifying charismatic leaders who could use them in time.

Delay the legislation whenever possible, call your Congress critter and make their lives a tiny bit worse. Deny them at every level of government including local and state assemblies where you have a bigger voice. Defend your communities by actually showing up to city council meetings. That kinda stuff...

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/prot...

It is imbalance of power at play.

They can keep floating this stuff and we have to put in a thousand times as much energy to shoot it down. We get worn down quicker than they can. It only has to work once for them, we have to keep pushing back.

My very pessimistic take is one out of Taoism. If you wish for them to fail, let them grow. Eventually the weight of the whole system collapses itself, the question is just on what time frame.

The way out is to go through. I don't like this framing but it seems to be the most accurate.

> Used to push surveillance meanwhile actual harm against children goes ignored.

Worse, these laws will actually create new harms to children who will be forced to give their identity to websites and identity services that will exploit them and fail to protect that data.

What do you think about California AB1043?

Epstein is real, the “grooming gangs” are not, unless you’re talking about Jimmy Saville.

applies no matter what words you substitute for Liberty and Safety.

The funny thing about this quote in context was that Ben Franklin was using it to argue for MORE state power, not less. Remember, Ben was the guy that would steal private letters and publish them in his newspaper.

Yeah, the US is getting the worst version. We can't have federal digital ID because "mark of the beast" but you have to show ID to watch porn so a bunch of private ID verification gatekeepers have shown up.

You won't make your website respect the child safety header?

Does it already have porn on it or Wil you add a bunch to become noncompliant?

It did, but moderation is based on outrage, and a bunch of nonsense outrage porn will always get to the top.

There is Ashton Kutcher. And it's conceivable to me that some wannabe-Palantir private companies might back these ideas.

Why? So we can have a government sanctioned credit score of sorts?

The government has a monopoly on violence and companies do not.

This isn’t a “gotcha”. Many here take exceptional steps against this kind of thing and also advocate for restrictions on what kind of data corporations can collect.

Privacy doomerism is a form of complicity.

Corporations can't arrest and jail me. The most they can do is file a lawsuit.

Because most here works in said corporations.

Governments and Companies have different motivations.

Governments want control, Companies want money. Control typically comes from a reduction in rights, freedoms, money. When you fail to give those up "naturally" violence, worsened living conditions and abuse are the tools used.

More the reason to be defensive about it and fighting back corpo and government.

"I'm surprised how much people hate this thing when this other thing, which they also hate, is even worse"?

The corporations aren't going to throw you in jail if you cross state lines to get an abortion. The US government is already doing this when they get that data.

I disagree with you. Plans to eliminate anonymity have been discussed for years in elite circles, at Davos and similar events, and it’s most often framed in the context of social control (eliminating dissent or foreign influence).

Larry Ellison on surveillance: “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

This is not new and it’s not about kids. This is the culmination of years of planning that began after the Arab Spring, when elites began to get concerned about how the Internet could be leveraged for domestic regime change.

Always a good day when HN guideline quotes are downvoted to the bottom of a thread.

> the modern internet is a harmful experience for young minds

Because of the goal of advertising revenue as the ultimate driver as to build an addictive permanent scroll of slop on tiktok or instagram, and the desire of social media companies to build walled gardens where someone's entire online experience stays in their "app.". As you say, this affects young and old alike.