The kids are not okay, and lots of people seem to think it’s the kid’s phones and social media that’s doing it so lets simply ban kids from social media.

Simple!

Only: it doesn’t sound very simple to me.

What is Social Media

What is “social media”?

What do you actually want to ban?

Does Github count?

Does an anorexia-support forum count?

Does a queer-support forum count?

Does the schools own homework-submission system count?

Does Whatsapp, which the kids use to talk to family and to bully each other?

How about Telegram that the kids use to talk to their drug dealers?

How is it different?

Are we really saying nobody under 18 can watch youtube, and expecting that to make life better for those kids rather than worse?

How are you going to define ‘social media’ such that you’ll ban the harm you think you see without also banning any chance of support for a person looking to learn to program, or cope with their abusive parents, or seek advice about being anorexic or queer?

Is it really a good idea to attach a label to every child account for all the websites they visit? You want the kids to all have a big “Child” tag on them as they wonder the net? Might that not increase rather than decrease their vulnerability?

Internet Posting Licence

Not to mention that banning under 18s means identifying every user: A government ID required to access the internet.

How about if I’m posting in a chat for an environmental protest group, or an anti-capitalist group, or against genocide, or in a queer support group in a country with laws against homosexuality? Should they have my Government ID attached as proof of age?

An age-gate is asking for an internet licence and a single unified monitored ID across the whole internet. It’s dystopian surveillance-state authoritarianism. It is not desirable, even if it were possible, which it isn’t given black markets in stolen ID etc.

Can’t we just have age-proving tokens that prove age not ID?

Nope.

If such tokens exist I’d be pretty tempted to sell them to teenagers myself, and I’m not even trying to get the teenagers into bed.

If the age-proof methods prove who you are, they are dystopian surveillance systems and an advertising corporation’s dream.

If they do not prove who you are, they are sellable on the black markets in exchange for whatever teenagers have that grown ups want.

There is no way you can identify children in order to treat their accounts differently without creating a massive database of all internet users which is an identity-theft honey-pot, and is already leading to constant leaks of user data from terrible companies.

Those companies promising they can do the impossible and age-gate the internet are the very ones profiting from abuse and internet surveillance already.

They are the ones feeding your kids sexist racist right wing propaganda and depression from their algorithms then using the money to bribe politicians to entrench their position.

Lobbying

You think it’s a coincidence these laws are being proposed all over the world all at once?

Nope.

Giant companies run by surveillance capitalists are spending billions of dollars on lobbying governments all over the world.

See https://tboteproject.com/

The reasons for this lobbying are nefarious.

The bans will entrench existing companies ensuring no small company is able to compete. These massive entrenched companies will be able to afford the identity checking and compliance costs, tiny start ups not so much.

You can see why Facebook lobby so hard in favour of these laws. If their app WhatsApp is defined as the only group messenger allowed for kids by law, that is very nice for them.

Perhaps compliance is actually cheap and easy and small companies can afford it?

Certainly not if they are trying to compete in terms of privacy. They have to turn over their user ID data to a monopolist vetting company by law.

At best: we give the government the power to impose massive costs on any company they decided to add to a list of companies that count as social media. Impose costs and force them to hand over their user data to Palantir and the like.

Even if you trust the current lot of idiots in power to not abuse this whole-internet global tracking data, that is quite a totalitarian system to hand over to the really bad guys when they get elected next time.

But the idea here is to keep kids safe!

No: the idea is to assign identity to every user and try to monitor and control the internet though corporate means.

That’s the only reason we’re talking seriously about the laws that government and capital are trying to pass.

That lobbying money is not being spent to protect kids.

The Epstine-class oligarchs doing this don’t give a damn about your children’s safety let alone some useless counter productive methods of ensuring it.

I don’t trust the government with totalitarian power nor the companies they would employ to run their age-gate for them, nor the companies currently running social media.

They are the ones running the algorithms that are pushing propaganda at your kids right now.

Algorithms

Reading algorithmic feeds is a crazy thing to do: abandoning control over your own influences to a robot programmed by advertisers to manipulate you?

Madness.

I will not allow a robot programmed by advertisers and surveillance capitalists to determine what I read.

I don’t read any robo-feeds and don’t recommend anyone else does.

But people do:

Top five highest reaching smart phone apps:

• Whatsapp
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Gmail
• Youtube

All designed to harvest data from your phone, three of them owned by one creepy billionaire, and most people use them by looking at a robo-feed suggesting to them what to read and watch or filter.

I don’t use any of them.

I watch some Youtube, but not though their app. Uninstalled that from my phone as soon as I got it. It’s an awful downgrade of just playing in a browser page. I subscribe to some channels there in my RSS reader like a boss. Never watch what their recommendation algorithms suggests.

I tell them what I want to watch, I don’t let them tell ME what to watch, and frankly I wish all those videographers would start a peertube instance or something instead of posting their work on a corporate surveillance site.

I say you should avoid that algorithm stuff, it’s crazy manipulative.

But people should be free to do what they want.

I’m free to block Facebook! And I do: and I encourage everyone else to do so too.

Edit your DNS, block their domain names. Do it.

But if governments or corporations have the power to mandate those choices for everyone, it will go badly.

Prohibitions always do.

The Actual Consequences

There is support for these laws because people think the only consequence of a ban on a thing is that the thing stops existing.

For instance: Heroin is dangerous and addictive? Ban it then.

And suddenly you have organized crime and a grey market and criminal gangs shooting each other in the streets while addicts can’t seek help and have to resort to crime to fund their addiction. Their lives more chaotic and criminal than ever. Our streets are littered in needles.

Well done everyone.

Now we think algorithmic social media may be mind bending?

Shall we ban it? For kids? Even if we can’t define it?

If you break kids access to the internet you sacrifice all the good that the majority of kids are getting from it for an ineffective solution which won’t fix anything and will mean massive increases in government surveillance and censorship. To data-hordes being hacked and people suffering ID theft.

And it won’t help.

Misogyny and sexism and depression are older than the internet.

Plus of course kids remain better at accessing computers than their parents. You’re going to end up breaking the internet for adults who can’t figure out how to verify while the kids start to use VPNs and stolen IDs to browse 4chan.

What law then?

None of these surveillance companies trying to break your kid’s brains would exist if we hadn’t made it illegal to reverse engineer their manipulative crappy software and produce compatible none-manipulative clones.

But they have been granted legal monopoly, so they can do what they like.

If you want a law to protect internet users it isn’t

“Force them to consent before you spy on them”

or

“age-gate chat forums”,

No. The real solutions are more like:

“Buying and selling data about an individual is illegal and punishable by years in jail and a penalty of 2x yearly profit”

or

“Advertising must be based on the content of the page context not the tracking of the individual”.

If a legal intervention is warranted then we don’t want a system where website operators have to pick between a list of monopoly providers to hand over their data to and force them all to spy on their users to age-check.

We want companies to be explicitly allowed to reverse engineer and reproduce other company’s proprietary access methods, to increase competition and end these rentier monopolies that allow them to push their manipulative phone apps.

End the DMCA and the similar laws which they campaigned for to prevent competition. It’s those laws which give the corporations the power to push their algorithms and limit alternatives.

Summary

I see no sign of any recognition from those who would want such a ban that they see any of the collateral damage a successful ban would have on the majority of kids who are not falling for this bullshit. That they are banning any good at all along with the bad.

I see that the lobbying for these laws are funded by the absolute worst companies on the internet, those who will be entrenched by the legal compliance costs, that will cement themselves as the arbitrators of who is allowed to access the internet.

It’s a gift to Palantir and other surveillance companies. The very people running these algo-feeds are the ones who benefit from IDing every user and stalking them across the internet on their government-approved internet-licence IDs.

I don’t think even a successful ban on social media for kids would actually address the issue of kids being exposed to sexism and misogony or reduce the kids alienation and depression.

A ban can’t help, will make many things worse, won’t address the problem, and will make competing with the worst surveillance capitalists on the planet more difficult.

Going to war with every internet site and advice forum and making internet access harder won’t fix anything, and will have massive collateral damage against everyone seeking support from strangers or trying to learn things their parents won’t teach them.

But I see we are going to do it anyway.

The direction is clear.

Those companies do get what they lobby for, and they are lobbying hard for ID checks on every website, wrapping their desire to enclose the internet commons for themselves in a faux concern for children’s welfare.

And governments wish to monitor and control the internet, so they will pass these laws.

I wonder how many parents have a family group-chat that they’re going to accidentally ban their kids from using, not realizing that ‘social media’ might include Whatsapp? 😆

It won’t fix anything, it will make the situation for kids worse, impose costs and rents and hacks and exploits on all of us, and increase government and corporate power.

Many will lose access to their networks of support and help.

So it goes.

We will build a better more censorship resistant internet. It’s already here really: Briar. Matrix. Nostr. Bitchat. Veilid. Spritely. And the rest.

The laws may push us there faster.

The race will go on.