Why? If asbestos is killing us we ban it, if hipotericllly some new form of asbestos is more harmful to young people than the rest we ban it too, why put the pressure of that responsibility in already stressed out population. Corporations know this very well, that's why they love when people have the opinion you just shared here.
From what I know, asbestos is bad when it gets airborne. If it's installed correctly, if workers wear PPE when handling it and if there are periodic checks for cracks, leaks and so on, it's safe. From what I've read, at least - I'm not an expert by any means. I've removed asbestos from a few old buildings but wore PPE. It was very uncomfortable to have the masks and suit on. I even threw away the cloth bags I had to my tools in, just to be safe. We disposed of the asbestos as per regulation. I feel safe and would do it again.
So maybe banning asbestos altogether is overkill.
I'd love to be proven wrong. I don't have any financial interest in asbestos besides the few jobs I've done over the years removing it.
The average person interacting with social media doesn't have a bunny suit that protects them from its ills, like you did with asbestos. This is doubly true for children.
Your example thus kind of shows the opposite: dangerous things can be made safe, with a solid understanding of their risks and techniques that are proven to make them safe. We have neither the former nor the the latter for social media.
The bunny suit for a child is the parents, teachers and social workers.
Like I said in another comment - if a parent is working 3 jobs and doesn't have time for their children, change the subsidies given to the parent for having children. Make child care free or really accessible.
A child needs a parent or at least a role model. If you ban social media, the children will still see random crap on the internet, whether it's YouTube videos or content from random sites too small or shady to be regulated. Do you want 100% of the internet regulated or do you want the government to empower the children and their parents? We have the resources, we just haven't allocated them correctly. Otherwise a parent would have time to spend with their children.
I get what you're saying but installing asbestos correctly is much easier than writing an app that could have security implications in C, is more easily detectable where things go wrong and it affects less people if things go wrong.
And the people using asbestos in their homes, or buying homes with asbestos, are endangering themselves. How likely is that an improperly installed or maintained asbestos is going to affect a whole neighborhood?
But the people in each house would suffer from from asbestos in their own house. [0] If I bought a house in such a neighborhood, I'd have it checked from cracks or deterioration. If the results show a risk, I'd inform the neighboring houses, too.
Similar to how if you're using a insecure program written in C, whoever finds the bug should tell you immediately - don't use that program.
[0] You might say that asbestos from 1 house would affect the whole neighborhood but that would be similar to how a smoker smoking in the streets would affect the neighborhood. Second-hand smoking and second-hand asbestos are bad but they're negligible compared to living with a smoker who smokes indoors with the windows closed or smoking yourself.
Parenting has never been the sole answer. We need a general sense of social responsibility to not expose children to risks of harm that they are not developmentally ready to deal with. Companies producing the harmful things have never been able to resist this temptation (see how tobacco companies had strategies to advertise to children while denying they were doing it) so often times regulations are needed.
Yeah, tell that to those parents with 3 jobs and can barely make any time with their kids that they have to keep an eye on even more things, things that weren't even a thing in their childhood or their predecessors.
Wouldn't the correct solution be to empower those parents with subsidies or free child care? If you have to work 3 jobs, parent or not, there is something wrong with how we've structured our society. Banning social media in your example seems like a bandaid put on a person with external and internal bleeding. You'll stop some of the bleeding but the person will still suffer and die.
Yeah, there is almost always better solutions to all problems than the one society goes to, but history has taught us that that a lot of times if we wait for the "better solution" we end up years and even decades without either solution.
But this solution has several negatives that likely make it net negative.
It normalizes age verification online which will likely lead to a less free internet. We could wait for decades until a really privacy-preserving way of age verification will come but what will happen is we'll have to give up our privacy and anonymity to a few large governments and companies.
It opens to door for regulating any kind of communication channels amongst the people. It will start with big social media but it will likely expand to any kind of forums, chats and even open protocols like AT. It will normalize the government interfering in all kinds of online activities.
These may seem distant and abstract to most people but the people in power want or will want to get power over every kind of communication. We should oppose this now, not when it's normalized and has happened for "platforms bigger than X users".
The people should be able to form any kind of group where they communicate freely. If you want to regulate commercial addictive algorithmic content suggestions... OK, maybe, sure. Do it. Don't regulate where people communicate, how they do it, what they talk about and what they share. People who can use the internet, even children, need a way to share their ideas and concerns. They need to be able to belong to whatever community they please.
Did you know the DOJ is starting to use subpoenas to unmask reddit users that criticize ICE? if you really care about free communication that's the kind of stuff you should be worrying about, not shilling for corpos trying to convince your daughter that she looks ugly so she ask her parents to buy more beauty products.
I am worried about this and completely oppose these subpoenas. In an ideal world all communications would be over a censorship/subpoena-resistant protocol and the government wouldn't try to infiltrate or stop any kind of online communication. I wish we can collectively ditch Meta, Google, Twitter, reddit and all the other centralized crap for something better. I don't have accounts there and if I had a company I wouldn't even make a company account there even it would mean I'd lose visibility and potential customers.
I hate those companies with a passion. I know most of us here do even if some of us work there (I don't and will not; I'm not even in IT right now). Yet I see how easily regulations against these centralized platforms will expand to regulations on communication in general, whether it's commercial centralized ones or an FOSS decentralized E2EE ones.
not to sound callous, but that's not good parenting.
my partner and i have reasonably good jobs, but we work 12-14hrs. we make mortgage and have some extra money. we are currently debating whether or not it is financially, morally, or ethically responsible to bring a child into this world and be able to provide them with the attention that they need and deserve.
Formally the same as stating "Everyone should get off the addiction driven drug cartel, but the government shouldn't have a single thing to do with it."
Yes. They don't actually care about the drug part anyway, beyond the excuse it gives them to operate outside their jurisdiction. We already have sane laws to cover the other crimes a "cartel" might do.
To be fair for the literal example prohibition is what creates the drug cartels in the first place so it is more coherent than it sounds at first blush. Enforcement is effectively a subsidy to those who don’t get caught.
For social media it is a whole different problem from it being entangled with protected speech. We don't want 'arrested for spreading misinformation defined as anything which contradicts the offical line' to be a thing.
To my mind greed and will to monopolize resources by virtual scarcity is what create a cartel.
Prohibition might help such a scenario, yes. but gouvernement don't need to regulate with extrem policies like prohibition which indeed often prove counterproductive. Permitting legal sell under certain quality control, honest information and education on known outcomes, regulation on who can produce, sell, buy and use in which proportions.
