The Internet Is About to Get a Lot Worse (US focused) ( buttondown.email )

Madison_rogue , 8 months ago

I’m shocked that the first openly gay senator Tammy Baldwin is a co-sponsor for the bill. You bet I’m writing her.

theneverfox , 8 months ago

Not really surprising to me. Gay (and now trans) people have long been accused of grooming and/or queerifying children

The first openly gay senator is probably hyper-aware of this, and I’d guess is probably very hawkish on anything protecting children

The other aspect is congressmen don’t understand shit outside (sometimes) politics or the law. On its surface, this has a very compelling description - hold websites responsible if they let children access NSFW content.

It’s not until you ask how (interpreted by the community as providing identifiable information to “prove” your age) that the first flaw comes up - this provides a way to collect data on online use, as social media is considered potentially NSFW by the nature of user submission

Then you get to the things most people without a technical background wouldn’t see

The second flaw - companies are terrible at securing data. Get ready for every scammer under the sun to be able to find your ID numbers.

The third, this won’t work. As a young teen, I blazed past parental controls, because there’s a ton of porn out there and there’s no way to hold back someone determined to find it. If you want this to work, we need to make a child Internet of known safe content and parental controls to keep you there… But just like finding or stealing a Playboy, the fact it exists means kids are going to be stealing passwords or IDs and probably sharing them. If we instead had sites declare content ratings and locked down at the device level, they need to go through a lot of work or get a secret device - it would give parents powerful tools to actually enforce this through Apple, Google, or Microsoft accounts

And finally, this won’t work because it’s inconvenient. Make password requirements too strict, and users write them down. Make content moderation too strict, and people will find shortcuts. People will find ways around this that will likely both end up in the hands of children, but also probably make everyone less safe