There are important distinctions politicians and people are glossing over when they talk about banning children from social media. https://open.substack.com/pub/billhulet/p/how-to-disengage-from-propaganda?r=4ot1q2&showWelcomeOnShare=true
There are important distinctions politicians and people are glossing over when they talk about banning children from social media. https://open.substack.com/pub/billhulet/p/how-to-disengage-from-propaganda?r=4ot1q2&showWelcomeOnShare=true
In addition to the points others are making about age-gating the Internet and de-pseudonymizing everyone, it’s worth noting that age verification costs money many smaller sites likely don’t have. So this is also an issue of entrenching the worst ever walled gardens, overnight. And we’ve seen from the Discord fiasco that the verification companies can’t be trusted. The one they had that stored data that got breached (instead of just storing confirmation someone is of age) was a company backed by Peter Thiel – a close friend of Epstein for years after his conviction, and someone Epstein directly influenced on politics).
Also, the current sneaky campaign in the US to specifically attack Section 230 to supposedly stop the evil pornographers… is incredibly dangerous. As the EFF points out, it keeps the Internet accessible to all of us as a communication tool. Without it, any one of us can be frivolously sued at any time for any comments or memes or whatever we post online.
I don’t know what specific campaign against Section 239 you are referring to, but it strikes me that it has pretty much been allowed to gut laws against libel, hate speech, truth-in-advertising, election financing, etc, much to the detriment of our society. It may be the case there could be frivolous lawsuits, but if so, I’d suggest the problem there would be the frivolous lawsuits, which could be dealt with without gutting hundreds of years of regulations that tried to curb the worst excesses of publishing. For example, there are anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) laws that have been passed in various jurisdictions. There is also the Fair Dealing provision in the Copyright Act. Both of which are meant to prevent frivolous lawsuits from harming people.
I don’t think the response to wrong-headed attacks on the Internet is to support the status quo. There are an awful lot of very bad things happening on line, and governments need to reign in the worst abuses. But it has to be done by people who know enough to preserve what is good while limiting the bad.
What I’m talking about isn’t an effort to sensibly amend only the aspects of Section 230 that might be making it harder to prosecute perpetrators of harm. If that can be handled equitably, that would be great. The calls from Washington I’m talking about have been for repealing it. Like this bipartisan bill in particular, which seems to be their latest attempt.
From Wikipedia about potential outcomes of repeal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230