This might be off-topic but on-topic about child safety... but I'm surprised people are being myopic about age verification. Age verification should be banned, but people ignore that nowadays most widely used online services already ask for your age and act accordingly: twitter, youtube, google in general, any online marketplace. They already got so much data on their users and optimize their algorithms for those groups in an opaque way.
So yeah, age verification should be taken down, as well as the datamining these companies do and the opaque tunning of their algorithms. It baffles me: people are concerned about their children's DMs but are not concerned about what companies serves them and what they do with their data.
There are a variety of ways (see "Verifiable Credentials") that ages can be verified without handing over any data other than "Is old enough" to social media services.
> Age verification obliviates anonymity on the internet.
How so?
Please explain in detail, because there are already schemes such as "verifiable credentials" which allow people to prove they are of age without handing over ID to online services.
Slippery slope can be argumental if you provide the actual argumental reasoning for it as I was thought it could be used as deductive argumentation (though that does not say much). On itself it is a fallacy.
I don't see how verifiable credentials with zero knowledge proofs provide that however.
The Party doesn't care about the Proles, only the members of the Outer Party.
I think that it's rather funny that people like to appeal to 1984 as if the only point of Mr. Orwell was that surveillance is bad, missing the entire point about stuff like the control of the language or the idea that the only self-justification of the (Inner) Party is power for the sake of power (see also: The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism).
I'd even go as far as to say that if "telescreens are horrible" is the only thing that someone takes away from 1984, they've frankly missed the point.
Monitoring children's DMs is the responsibility of the parents, not megacorps. If a parent wants to install a keylogger or screen recorder on their child's PC, that's their decision. But Google should not be able to. Neither should... literally anyone else except maybe an employer on a work-provided device.
> Monitoring children's DMs is the responsibility of the parents, not megacorps
Absolutely. But what responsibilities do megacorps have? Right now, everyone seems to avoid this question, and make do with megacorps not being responsible. This means: "we'll allow megacorps to be as they are and not take any responsibilities for the effects they cause to society". Instead of them taking responsibilities, we're collecting everyone's data and calling it a day by banning children from social networks... and this is because there are many interests involved (not related to child development and safety).
Human operators were not required of The Bell Telephone Company by law. Bell switched to mechanical switching stations as soon as doing so was economically advantageous.
(Reconsider my post. I'm arguing for no regulation.)
I'd say that at minimum social networks need to be required to show how their algorithm works and allow users control over their data. They must be able to know why a content was served to them. Nowadays social networks are so pervasive in society, affecting it and molding it to unknown interests, that this is the bare minimum for a free society.
Ideally, users should be able to modify the algorithm, so they can get just what they want, while simultaneously maximizing free speech. If something isn't illegal, it shouldn't be hidden or removed.
They should have a responsibility of transparency, accountability and empathy towards users. They should work for the user and in the interests of the user. But multiple constraints make this impossible in practice.
Why? Plenty of children benefit from talking to other people. Some children need careful monitoring, and some children shouldn't be allowed to use DMs, but it's not universal and should be up to the parents.
What kind of application is not targeted at both teens and adults?
Youtube, twitter, bluesky, whatsapp? Every app with a social aspect will be used by teens. And no, tiktok is not "only for teens" or "specially targeted at teens", nowadays everyone uses it and creates content on it.
To support GP‘s point: I have Claude connected to a database and wanted it to drop a table.
Claude is trained to refuse this, despite the scenario being completely safe since I own both parts! I think this is the “LLMs should just do what the user says” perspective.
Of course this breaks down when you have an adversarial relationship between LLM operator and person interacting with it (though arguably there is no safe way to support this scenario due to jailbreak concerns).
South America is a big place, and there are a lot of countries. The situation isn't this simple. For example, Argentina is historically the most anti-US country of all South America, yet it's government and their supporters celebrated the US attack calling everyone who opposed it "communists" (all this while the government allows Chinese goods to be massively imported). Argentina's government will be trying to make a block of countries that are us-friendly (and be their leader of course).
Also, adding context, argentine elites are pro-us, but not as much as Brazil's elites and their supporters (who wear the US flag in protests)
From a universal perspective, there is no such thing as "basic morality". Only what the most recent cultural norms of the largest (or strongest) group of people say.
So yeah, age verification should be taken down, as well as the datamining these companies do and the opaque tunning of their algorithms. It baffles me: people are concerned about their children's DMs but are not concerned about what companies serves them and what they do with their data.
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