Mastodawn

RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/116240274811219588

One can generalize my thoughts about "junior engineers" to "adolescents" in many cases. Children *are* different from adults, but far less different than popular discourse would have you believe. *Most* of the idea that they are a special class of person whose agency should be tightly controlled by their betters, is a self-soothing fantasy *by* those "betters" about their own deficiencies, not about risks to children.

To wit: "age gating" anything on the Internet is solving the wrong problem.

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Glyph 2d ago

Engagement-maximizing has a whole bunch of problems. It creates a nonconsensual, exploitative feedback loop. It's bad for kids; it's also bad for adults. It does not appear to be meaningfully *differently* bad for kids vs. adults.

It is justifiable to age-restrict things that kids are A) especially vulnerable to (cars) or B) developmentally affected by (alcohol & drugs).

Neither seems to be true for "social media". (Source, vaguely: If Books Could Kill's episode on The Anxious Generation)

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txtx 🇪🇺

@glyph I'd love to see corporate foreign owned social media completely banned across the EU. Ban X, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and anything else with significant market share.

Their insane billionaire owners are pushing hard to wreck our democracies by platforming extremists.

France limits foreign ownership of traditional media, I think this needs expanding to social.

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txtx 🇪🇺2d ago

@glyph Age restrictions for social media are highly popular in Australia and I can see where parents are coming from.

Just because it's also bad for adults doesn't mean it's therefore not bad for children.

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txtx 🇪🇺2d ago

@glyph I don't support age verification (again I'd rather see a broader ban) but I think we're going to get more of it because it is so popular.