@serapath @mhoye I don’t see this as in any way related to “total surveillance”. Anyone who wants to surveil you has far more tools at their disposal already. And the government has been literally ingesting and storing the entirety of the internet for decades; that’s a vastly larger and almost completely orthogonal fight.
This is a fight over platforms showing kids stuff that makes them have serious mental problems, where parents have – for better or worse – the upper hand in legislation due to the enormous harms from modern algorithmic platforms, and I see roughly 3 possible outcomes:
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Section 230 gets rolled back and major platforms turn off user generated content altogether, all minor platforms get caught in the crossfire and have to shut down entirely, and the internet becomes an unrecognizable disney-scape.
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Some kind of age verification done by platforms themselves using deeply invasive and privacy-destroying things like scanning faces and uploading ID to 3rd parties. This is in Utah and Texas presently and is somewhat of a disaster.
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OS vendors embed a small, fairly benign, device-owner-controlled 1-or-2-bit signal of age-bucketing in a device attestation channel. Platforms respect it and inhibit various algorithmic functions / mask off a portion of user-generated content, the internet gets a bit less free-and-open, maybe smaller websites also do self-censorship based on the signal’s presence (marking themselves 18+), but enough of the platforms’ harms are mitigated that parents ease off the throttle.
None of these 3 futures is great for kids in abusive homes, or queer kids looking for community, or dozens of other cases I care deeply about.
But I also don’t feel like I can really tell parents not to care about their kids getting eating disorders or becoming nazis or committing suicide or whatever. Even if I did make that argument, they outnumber and outmass me politically.
So that’s the actual world I expect to occupy. And of those 3 futures, I think the 3rd is the overwhelmingly superior option.