@androcat @gabrielesvelto

Once upon a time we had safe spaces for children on the internet. We WELCOMED their interaction on sites like Club Penguin, Nickelodeon, Disney, and dozens of others.

But those spaces were deleted leaving only the 'adult' spaces for kids to explore. They have to lie about their age sometimes to gain access, and saying that shouldn't happen is disingenuous.

@androcat @gabrielesvelto

The goal should be to fix the actual problems, though. If politicians were introducing "protect kids by holding social networking companies accountable" legislation as often as they introduce "protect children by isolating them and introducing more surveillance" legislation, the corpos might have voluntarily created controls or at least better labeling by now.

The video game rating system is an example of an industry policing itself to avoid legislation. That's probably not the way to do social networking. The point is, back when government regulation meant something, just the threat was enough to get companies to do the needful.

That's where we need to be with this. Hold the perpetrators responsible. Saying "this is just how it is" is a little bit defeatist.

Kids need spaces to be themselves away from the eyes of their parents once they reach a certain level of maturity. All that shit is complicated and requires his parenting and a proper educational system to do well.

We have to keep pushing back on surveillance disguised as protecting kids, even if the alternative still sucks. I don't have "the answer". I just know that as an LGBTQIAS2 kid who didn't have access to those spaces (because they didn't exist yet), I was self-hating until my 30s when I finally found them. My awakening was ten years in the making on the Something Awful forums, a website known for infamous "goon meets", "do you have stairs in your house", Photoshop Phriday, Shmorky, tasteless memes, Zack Parsons' liminal horror, and Slenderman. It also had extremely active and diverse forums where I first met out LGBTQIAS2 people and learned that what I thought was normal was anything but. The site itself was not a safe space, but that forum was a lifeline.

@androcat @gabrielesvelto ..does it really need to be said that something can be harmful yet also do some good

Yes there's sure a lot of torment on those nexi but people also have genuine community and friends there, cutting that off is doing massive harm to those that need community and friends the most.

@androcat I think we still all agree that age-verification laws are major bad, though, right?

Maybe they'll only apply to the huge corporate sites, at first, but remember: they're trying to force this crap into our operating systems now, including Linux. "First they blocked kids from accessing the big evil sites, but we didn't care because they were big and evil and kids shouldn't be getting addicted to them anyway."

...and, not to defend Big Tech Social, but some network effects mean some people really depend on them (which is itself a problem, yes).

I mean, there's definitely some discussion to be had here, but... let's be sure we all agree there's a problem, yeah?

@gabrielesvelto

@androcat @gabrielesvelto Um, it's called Mastodon.

Yes, the bans we're talking about on all the harmful things Facebook and the like do would render them completely and permanently unprofitable and would end them and we would be left with prosocial networking like we have here.

The way you get there is not by punishing young people and banning them from participation in the public life and information landscapes these platforms usurped.

@mgorny @gabrielesvelto

You can't be serious. There are legitimate reasons for children to have restricted access to recreational drugs. I'm not convinced that social media is a healthy thing for teens, but I'm willing to concede that we haven't really tried fixing it yet either.