If I had to choose between panicking over chlorinated water or spending billions of dollars to disinfect water in a less effective way…

I’d probably just let the water sit out for a while or run it through a cheap carbon filter because I’m not an idiot.

You’re high as a kite if you think a super pac doesn’t have infinitely deeper pockets. They just bid the minimum for these politicians. If millions of grass roots donors gave everything they could, it would be a rounding error for them to match it.

This feels exactly like people fighting against gun control while schools are shot up on the regular. Get over your individualism and sparkling ideals and realize that something has to be done. If your privacy and personal freedom are tied to Facebook and Twitter, maybe that’s a you problem.

Why does every country on earth need to do it? Will a massive majority of the population switch to VPNs just to watch some YouTube videos? Is that any different from kids trying to circumvent other age gated activities? Does YouTube even want that VPN traffic if it makes them less money? Why not just ban smart phones for kids?

What measures do you need to enforce it beyond what already exists? The only ones that matter are massive mega-platforms. If a platform isn’t complying just punish it.

The main question is how much of your life really needs to exist in a digital space? People paid bills, shopped, watched porn, played games and read news before the internet. Democracy falls when an entire generation of voters is raised on supporting Tate-endorsed fascism. This is not a non-issue. It’s happening no matter how much you tut-tut everyone’s parenting.

The solution is to give those laws teeth. Harsh regulations on platforms that serve unmoderated content open to everyone. Enforce transparency on content serving algorithms. Massive penalties for security breaches. Ban platforms that don’t comply.

If you’re worried about state actors having access to your clearnet data, that’s pretty much unavoidable in the internet age. You can lessen that by pushing against the digitization of society. You shouldn’t need a smart phone or internet service to live daily life.

Support brick-and-mortar stores, your local library, a local hobby group. Campaign against always-online car features, IoT e-waste, traffic surveillance laws, etc… Don’t make me choose between subjecting children to a stream of unregulated bullshit and the right to privacy. It’s a false dichotomy propped up by our need for digital convenience.

It’s not social medias fault. This is POOR PARENTING. Plain and simple.

Sounds like absolving social media to me.

The complexity of social media engineering and the scope of its impact is unprecedented. It’s not at all the same thing as video game or TV panic. When you account for how much real-life peer discussion is driven by these platforms, protecting your child from this toxic rhetoric is nearly impossible.

You used to have to show your ID to rent a movie in person, why is doing it online any different? If you (rightfully) are concerned about data collection and surveillance, push for legeslative protections on that topic. This is a completely separate issue with a very clear root cause.

If you believe there should be no accountability or oversight for the richest companies ever that have deep personal access to billions of people across the globe, you should wake to the realities of the 21st century.

I would argue that those factors aren’t a direct cause, but the isolation leaves them vulnerable to things like this. The internet used to be wide open and your semi-random traversal of independent sites would still expose you to a diverse array of people and content.

The pursuit of profit led to massive, accessible, engagement driven social media platforms. Optimization for ad views meant segmenting demographics and serving them distilled content. The hyper specific content led to these demographics living in echo chambers based on their flavor of polarizing content.

The Tate-sphere is built around exploiting that isolation and selling bogus solutions. There’s no specific reason the algorithm funnels into it other than it’s catches a broad user base on a charged topic => $$$. The algorithm could just as easily push young men into fighting for socially beneficial causes, but anger is a strong emotion that gives the most money.

So over a few years millions of parents decided to collectively take a hard pivot into bad parenting? Couldn’t possibly be an unprecedented media environment with algorithmic targeting?