Lawmakers across the country (United States) are trying to protect kids by age-gating parts of the internet.

  • Hurglet@lemmy.basedcount.com
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    1 year ago

    Everytime i see a bill that includes “child safety” in the title, i know it’s just going to be another attempt at turning the internet into a garden walled, big corpo controlled shithole, with the glowies being able to read any and all messages, and encryption being illegal.

    • GivingEuropeASpook@lemm.eeOP
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      1 year ago

      An internet devoid of unacceptable “deviations” from gender and sexuality too. Given the effort to erase trans and gay people from public spaces, this seems like a parallel effort to destroy their digital ones too.

      • Hurglet@lemmy.basedcount.com
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        1 year ago

        Personally, i am all in for that. I am tired of seeing “look at me im insert mental illness, i must feel validated else ur homophobic”.

        I really don’t give 2 shits if you’re trans or gay or whatever. Just keep it in front of you. No need to put your pronouns in your name, or put a trans flag everywhere.

        But nooo, those people CRAVE attention, which is what i hate.

        Just a rant, sorry

        • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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          1 year ago

          Literally the entire point of pronouns is defeated if people don’t know what pronouns a person uses (and this applies to more than just trans people too), so there is some use for people that put them in their name.

          Beyond that though, even if there’s no need to say or publicly display something, that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t say it, and it definitely doesn’t mean one should be forbidden from saying it. There’s no need for people to tell me about their hobbies, or wear t-shirts or put up bumper stickers with messages on them, or put up religious symbols everywhere. Perhaps I’m tired of seeing messaging for political candidates I don’t like, and wish they’d keep their preferences to themselves, or perhaps I don’t care if people are married, they could just keep it between themselves rather than wear some rings to tell the world about it. But you know what? If I were to support making it illegal to say and show and wear an express such things, especially on the internet where the stakes are even lower, I’d be closer to the leader of something like the Taliban or North Korea, than to a good citizen of a democracy.

          Even if you think saying/displaying/supporting something is “attention seeking”, well, people have a right to do that. To try to restrict that would be to restrict the right to free speech itself, because you cannot communicate with someone without first getting their attention.

        • TORFdot0@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          You seem like a pretty solid poster except for this one pretty bad take. Don’t let dramatic internet discourse and a few attention grabbing media personalities or allies shape your viewpoint for an entire group.

          I know you probably already know this but I don’t want good posters leaving Lemmy because of silly disagreements or pet peeves. There are annoying people pushing toxic discourse on any issue. Generally people will live and let live if you don’t personally attack them. Someone specifying their pronouns isn’t attention seeking behavior (usually) it’s just a courtesy. Your comment is just begging for the kind of responses that will require you to give people the kind of attention you claim to hate giving them.

          • djsoren19@yiffit.net
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            1 year ago

            Hopefully nothing stopping you, and it can avoid some awkward situations. My company forbids us from including them in our email signature block, and there’s been some confusion due to people assuming I’m a woman and using she/her pronouns to refer to me. Even as a cis white guy, I wish my company let us add preferred pronouns to avoid dumb little situations like that.

            • hedgehog@ttrpg.network
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              1 year ago

              Obviously just adding pronouns would be better, but can you add “Mr.” at the beginning of your name in your signature?

            • GivingEuropeASpook@lemm.eeOP
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              1 year ago

              I’m sorry to put you on a spotlight, but your situation is precisely what I was thinking about when I made my comment. Not queer or some woke SJW warrior. You’re just a person trying to live his life, and I have to imagine that a State Law banning you from putting them in anything official or public would be similarly frustrating.

              But the thing is, you’re just collateral damage at best to the GOP, and speaking from experience, at worst the target of ire simply for creating such confusion in other people for merely having an ambiguous name, I assume.

            • Veraxus@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              Sounds like you need to find a new employer. That is a toxic and discriminatory policy that exists exclusively for one reason: because the executives are raging bigots.

              • GivingEuropeASpook@lemm.eeOP
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                1 year ago

                IDK, if she lives in one of these authoritarian right wing regimes in the US, the company might not have a choice.

  • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    These laws aren’t about children, that’s just a talking point to sell laws that tame the potential anonymity of the internet for private profit.

    If American society gave the slightest shit at all about our children, we wouldn’t have literally starved our K-12 system into utter ruin for over half a century to cut the taxes of the corporations and already rich assholes killing the planet and those children’s future on it for private profit. We wouldn’t then say selling public education to for profit industry in the form of charter schools is a solution.

    The United States doesn’t give a shit about its children. Not one tiny bit. Now our beloved economy? We’d throw all our (non-wealthy) kids into a fucking volcano if Wall Street told us it would protect that.

    • Ryantific_theory@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Not to mention, do people really believe that people shouldn’t be allowed to see sexual content until they’re 18? I started looking up titties when I was eleven, and as I understood it, the generation before mine either inherited or stole porn mags and tapes from older brothers/dads or got somebody to buy some for them. Given how useless sex ed was on the actual sex aspect of things, how are teenagers supposed to figure out anything besides anatomical structures?

      The fundamental premise just seems weird to me, why are we trying to hide away pornography like it’s this shameful corruptive thing? I maybe knew a handful of weird kids that listened to the 18 year old restriction (all on extremely religious grounds), so the idea of actually trying to enforce it seems kinda crazy. I don’t know, it just reeks of the idea that masturbation is a sin, but everyone’s so uncomfortable with the notion of teenagers + anything sexual that nobody wants to touch it.

      I just feel like the next couple generations are gonna be weird with the tug of war between book bannings, LGBTQ+ bannings, religion in schools/out of them, and all the other proxy wars being fought using schools as the battle ground. Not to mention all the shootings.

  • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    These laws are dangerous, kids are going to sneak a peek at adult things and when they do going to pornhub is far safer than having to avoid strong filters by joining a private discord group full of creepy old guys.

    Honestly these laws are a groomers dream, keeping kids naive and then funnelling them in to poorly moderated or purposely immoral porn sharing communities creates actual dangers which aren’t present when a teenager sees some videos from the front page of pornhub.

    What we actually need to do it have real conversations about things

  • Veraxus@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I’m a parent and have plenty control over what my kids can access. Most devices have parental controls, and for everything else there is Pi-hole. I don’t need anyone else to do my parenting for me, especially when it means that I, the parent, get treated like a child.

    “Oh please, daddy gubment, can I see this website?”

    No. Not gonna fly.

    • GivingEuropeASpook@lemm.eeOP
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      1 year ago

      What nooo you’re supposed to hate trans people enough to sacrifice personal freedoms and liberty!

  • skymtf@pricefield.org
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    1 year ago

    I love how this “sticking it to big tech” is also funded by big tech. The general goal of someone like Facebook with this legislation is pass a bunch of rules that only large companies like them can comply with, and watch mastodon instances and other attempts to detrown them end in FBI raids and more regulations.

    • skymtf@pricefield.org
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      1 year ago

      Not to mention none of this will actually protect children. When I was 14 I told an adult online about my life and they helped me make it through some rougher periods until I got to 18. I know the internet is highly imperfect but I think gate keeping kids out of it will just lead to more underground abuse and abuse that they don’t find was abuse until they are adults.

    • SCB@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There is no Porn Big Tech big enough to be able to afford this legislation. From the article:

      As recently as May, only a quarter of people trying to access Ford’s site even clicked the link to verify their age and only 9 percent of those users completed the process. Ford said it costs his company around $1.50 per person to verify their age, and there’s no promise that those who follow through will buy anything. Pornhub’s response has been far more aggressive, blocking all traffic from some of these restrictive states rather than paying the extra cost.

      Remember it is part of the GOP’s published plan for 2024 and beyond to ban pornography.

  • nutsack@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    sounds like some fascist culture war garbage that was never meant to protect children from anything because it doesn’t

  • archchan@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    This starts with some ambiguous “protecting the children” from porn argument to eventually requiring everyone to be “verified” with a digital ID before they can set foot on a highly controlled internet (or worse). We’re already seeing increasing glimpses of this and it’s in the government’s and big tech’s interest.

    I’m so tired of the constant barrage of shit from all directions. This isn’t the beautiful future of humanity I imagined as a kid. No one will look out for us except for us, the actual people that these out of touch rich and powerful high society clowns try to control and keep occupied with stupid culture wars amongst each other, or placate with bread and circus. Enough already ffs.

    • GivingEuropeASpook@lemm.eeOP
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      1 year ago

      Also, it’s never ACTUALLY about parental rights and protecting children. Plenty of parents want their kids to grow up believing that there is nothing inherently sexual about a naked body, or about women, but their perspective and rights never seem to be considered.

      Think about how the reactionaries in control of many US states banned Drag Queen story hours and the like from libraries and schools, saying that it should be up to parents if they want their kids to go to them, only to then classify all drag shows as obscene and restricted to 18+.

    • SCB@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Honestly man as a dad of 3, this applies to the children too.

      I love them, but they are indeed

      Fucking idiotic, thick as two short planks bunch of pricks, the lot of them. Cunts.

  • Rawdogg@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I haven’t read the article but I assume it’s an invasion af privacy under the guise of “protecting the children” as usual

    • SCB@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s part of the GOP trying to ban porn. They know they can’t ban it due to the 1st amendment, so they’re making porn unprofitable for distributors.

  • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Spoiler Alert: It’s not about protecting children, it’s about the GOP keeping the gays off of the internet

  • NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Google has recently started telling me that they don’t know if I am >18. But I have been using Google for way more than 20 years.

    So, Google is incapable of counting to 18? :-)

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    Humanity never changes. Teenage me found the entire idea that I might need “protection from harmful content on the Internet” ridiculous. Now I have been an adult for more than ten years, I still find it ridiculous that people younger than me might need that.

  • MacGuffin94@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It will be interesting to see the politicians responses when their porn accounts are hacked and they all have to explain why their ID is associated with profiles that frequent tranny incest porn

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    “It does seem like a very clear backlash to not just tech, but to any sort of movement towards allowing young people to make their own decisions based on the information that they can access,” Jason Kelley, activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), said in an interview earlier this month.

    France has proposed similar age verification restrictions on porn in the past, leading its data protection agency, CNIL, to investigate the security of current services on the market, determining that many were “intrusive” and for new, safer models to be developed.

    Over the last few years, more than a dozen states, including many that have implemented age verification bills, have passed resolutions identifying porn as a “public health crisis,” arguing that it encourages violence despite little research backing these claims.

    “I think progressives had the idea that they wanted to regulate Big Tech without fully appreciating the degree to which they were playing with fire,” Evan Greer, Fight for the Future director, said in an interview with The Verge earlier this month.

    The American Civil Liberties Union sued to unravel the language related to pornography and ultimately won in 1997 after the Supreme Court decided that banning the material would infringe on the First Amendment rights of adults.

    Without more pushback, age verification bills, just like the ongoing book bans taking place in schools, will continue to fuel the right’s censorship fire all at the expense of speech protected by the First Amendment.


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