Mastodawn

But the idea here is to keep kids safe!

No: the idea is to assign identity to every user and try to monitor and control the internet though corporate means.

That’s the only reason we’re talking seriously about the laws that government and capital are trying to pass.

That lobbying money is not being spent to protect kids.

The Epstine-class oligarchs doing this don’t give a damn about your children’s safety let alone some useless counter productive methods of ensuring it.

I don’t trust the government with totalitarian power nor the companies they would employ to run their age-gate for them, nor the companies currently running social media.

They are the ones running the algorithms that are pushing propaganda at your kids right now.

Show thread

Adam Dalliance 6d ago

Reading algorithmic feeds is a crazy thing to do: abandoning control over your own influences to a robot programmed by advertisers to manipulate you?

Madness.

I will not allow a robot programmed by advertisers and surveillance capitalists to determine what I read.

I don’t read any robo-feeds and don’t recommend anyone else does.

But people do:

Top five highest reaching smart phone apps:

Whatsapp
Facebook
Instagram
Gmail
Youtube

All designed to harvest data from your phone, three of them owned by one creepy billionaire, and most people use them by looking at a robo-feed suggesting to them what to read and watch or filter.

I don’t use any of them.

I watch some Youtube, but not though their app. Uninstalled that from my phone as soon as I got it. It’s an awful downgrade of just playing in a browser page. I subscribe to some channels there in my RSS reader like a boss. Never watch what their recommendation algorithms suggests.

I tell them what I want to watch, I don’t let them tell ME what to watch, and frankly I wish all those videographers would start a peertube instance or something instead of posting their work on a corporate surveillance site.

I say you should avoid that algorithm stuff, it’s crazy manipulative.

But people should be free to do what they want.

I’m free to block Facebook! And I do: and I encourage everyone else to do so too.

Edit your DNS, block their domain names. Do it.

But if governments or corporations have the power to mandate those choices for everyone, it will go badly.

Prohibitions always do.

Show thread

Adam Dalliance 6d ago

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.

Show thread

Adam Dalliance 6d ago

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”

“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”

“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.

Show thread

Adam Dalliance

I see no sign of any recognition from those who would want such a ban that they see any of the collateral damage a successful ban would have on the majority of kids who are not falling for this bullshit. That they are banning any good at all along with the bad.

Under 18s only

I see that the lobbying for these laws are funded by the absolute worst companies on the internet, those who will be entrenched by the legal compliance costs, that will cement themselves as the arbitrators of who is allowed to access the internet.

It’s a gift to Palantir and other surveillance companies. The very people running these algo-feeds are the ones who benefit from IDing every user and stalking them across the internet on their government-approved internet-licence IDs.

I don’t think even a successful ban on social media for kids would actually address the issue of kids being exposed to sexism and misogony or reduce the kids alienation and depression.

A ban can’t help, will make many things worse, won’t address the problem, and will make competing with the worst surveillance capitalists on the planet more difficult.

Going to war with every internet site and advice forum and making internet access harder won’t fix anything, and will have massive collateral damage against everyone seeking support from strangers or trying to learn things their parents won’t teach them.

But I see we are going to do it anyway.

The direction is clear.

Those companies do get what they lobby for, and they are lobbying hard for ID checks on every website, wrapping their desire to enclose the internet commons for themselves in a faux concern for children’s welfare.

And governments wish to monitor and control the internet, so they will pass these laws.

I wonder how many parents have a family group-chat that they’re going to accidentally ban their kids from using, not realizing that ‘social media’ might include Whatsapp? 😆

It won’t fix anything, it will make the situation for kids worse, impose costs and rents and hacks and exploits on all of us, and increase government and corporate power.

Many will lose access to their networks of support and help.

So it goes.

We will build a better more censorship resistant internet. It’s already here really: Briar. Matrix. Nostr. Bitchat. Veilid. Spritely. And the rest.

The laws may push us there faster.

The race will go on.