yes

I think next step should be developing a test that can predict how someone will react to it.

Unnecessary: foolish people always gonna fool. Anyone that far gone in the lacking judgement department demands far more help than anyone can reasonably be expected to provide, and attempting to “foolproof” for them will only drag everyone else down while doing nothing for them. Likewise, just because some people overeat junk food doesn’t mean we need to devise some test to decide who can safely get junk food: it’s a personal choice, the risks of bad judgement are reasonably understood, & that bullshit’s beyond paternalistic.

Does it help to frame it in a different light for you if you think of it as those companies exploiting vulnerable peoples’ disorders to extract money from them?

Not at all: we don’t go winning lawsuits against any of those companies promoting themselves to appeal to the consumer because of how the dysfunctional among us may overconsume it. Liberty comes with accepting responsibility for reasonably foreseeable consequences/risks of our choices or no one will be able to realize liberty when someone makes their responsibility everyone else’s duty. Society can’t reasonably be expected to cater to everyone’s irrational/dysfunctional manifestations & whims. The legal standard is reasonable person, not dysfunctional ones. Moreover, the existence of children doesn’t imply we need to childproof all of society: people are still entitled liberty to their adult activity & vices.

When risks are open & obvious, such as the overconsumption of certain foods & legal substances, that’s generally viewed as a matter of personal choice rather than unreasonably dangerous product defect. Even when kids grow obese from overeating junk food, blame primarily lies in whoever provides them that food rather than the product itself no matter how appealing the design of the food, the design on the container, or its advertisements. Especially with the latest wave of moral panic over social media, the risks & dysfunctions of obsessively overconsuming social media or any information service to the extent it impairs us are open & obvious. Parents giving their children these devices, observing excessive attachment, and not cutting them off bear considerable responsibility.

Information & devices to view it are generally benign & noncoercive. People use these services, because some find them useful & engaging to their interests. Those features that effectively meet user demand for engaging information offer legitimate utility to a reasonable person without impairing them. Such features aren’t defects, and “fool-proofing” them would hamper utility to functional adults who can deal with the “dangers” of attention-grabbing information.

However, even supposing such features defectively make the system unreasonably dangerous in a reasonably foreseeable manner, that only demands that service providers provide fair warning. Once duty to warn has been met, users are reasonably aware of risks and responsibility shifts to risk-takers or parents who give children access despite reasonably knowing the risk.

Telling those people to just have self control is like telling someone with depression to just stop being sad.

We can’t rearrange all of society just because some people have depression. Liberty means not imposing on others issues we should be dealing with ourselves or through appropriate services specifically for that.

I don’t know. Seems like self-control issues. People can get addicted to anything: shopping, sex, internet use, work, gaming, exercise. I also disagree with prohibitions on gambling, drug use, prostitution: it’s their money, their body, etc.

Penalizing systems of communication & information delivery seems overreach. The harm seems phony & averted by basic self-control.

OS level parental controls do not give a parent control over a child’s use of a social media platform

A quick web search indicates they can filter/block content, restrict apps, report activity. Additional software can monitor communication (including social media) and alert guardians.

However, the legal opinion wasn’t that parental control software is the best solution or only better solution^[1], but that more effective alternatives (such as non-punitive laws promoting use of client-side parental controls) with less adverse impact exist than punitive laws limited in their enforceability by jurisdiction & that unnecessarily burden & deter (thus harm) free exercise fundamental liberties.^[2] Client-side parental controls only affect their users without affecting everyone else. Unlike regulations on site operators, they work on content originating outside a law’s jurisdiction. Even at the time of that federal court decision, parental controls could screen dynamic content (eg, live chats) over any protocol.

By far, the most appropriate answer is responsible adult involvement & supervision and the education of children to address motivation, coping, & responsible behavior.

The internet is global. A key problem with any coercive law is their jurisdiction isn’t: just as 4chan.org can tell UK’s OfCom to go fuck itself, site operators beyond a law’s jurisdiction can tell its enforcers the same. Another issue is the compliance burden is harder on entrants than the dominant companies in the industry with more resources to afford to comply, thus deterring competition. Do we really want to make it harder to displace our current social media companies with alternatives?

Communication alone rarely poses immediate danger: there’s usually a number of steps between the communication & actual harm where anyone can intervene. We can block or ignore unwanted communication & choose the information we disclose. Responsible people can guide their children on safety & control their access to the devices they give them.

A while ago, when my uncle struck his kid for making an unauthorized payment through the kid’s tablet, I scolded him for creating the situation where the kid could do that instead of setting up a child account with parental controls. When I asked him how child abuse is more responsible than reading some shit designed for him to understand and pressing a few buttons to use the system exactly as designed to prevent this shit from happening, he quickly got the point and did that in about an hour. This shit ain’t hard.

Better solutions already exist, they’re effective, and the solid recommendations governments already have to promote them effectively would work. Governments have largely chosen not to.

And improve parental controls for children’s accounts. I’m sure there’s nothing currently giving a “parent” account high level control over a “child” account, but I’m happy to be corrected if I’m wrong.

Parental controls already exist in every major OS, they suffice to restrict & monitor social media, and they go unused.

A better solution might be for laws to provide parents resources & incentives to parent children’s online activity (including training to use resources they already have) & to provide children education in online safety & literacy. Decades ago, federal courts citing commission findings & studies recommended these alternatives as superior in effectiveness, meeting government duties to minimize impact on civil liberties, allocation of law enforcement resources, etc. For the permanent injunction to COPA, the judge wrote

Moreover, defendant contends that: (1) filters currently exist and, thus, cannot be considered a less restrictive alternative to COPA; and that (2) the private use of filters cannot be deemed a less restrictive alternative to COPA because it is not an alternative which the government can implement. These contentions have been squarely rejected by the Supreme Court in ruling upon the efficacy of the 1999 preliminary injunction by this court. The Supreme Court wrote:

Congress undoubtedly may act to encourage the use of filters. We have held that Congress can give strong incentives to schools and libraries to use them. It could also take steps to promote their development by industry, and their use by parents. It is incorrect, for that reason, to say that filters are part of the current regulatory status quo. The need for parental cooperation does not automatically disqualify a proposed less restrictive alternative. In enacting COPA, Congress said its goal was to prevent the “widespread availability of the Internet” from providing “opportunities for minors to access materials through the World Wide Web in a manner that can frustrate parental supervision or control.” COPA presumes that parents lack the ability, not the will, to monitor what their children see. By enacting programs to promote use of filtering software, Congress could give parents that ability without subjecting protected speech to severe penalties.

I also agree and conclude that in conjunction with the private use of filters, the government may promote and support their use by, for example, providing further education and training programs to parents and caregivers, giving incentives or mandates to ISP’s to provide filters to their subscribers, directing the developers of computer operating systems to provide filters and parental controls as a part of their products (Microsoft’s new operating system, Vista, now provides such features, see Finding of Fact 91), subsidizing the purchase of filters for those who cannot afford them, and by performing further studies and recommendations regarding filters.

Adult supervision, child education on online safety & literacy, parental controls & filters are more effective at less expense to fundamental rights. Governments know this & conveniently forget it.

self-cleaning/pyrolytic oven on wheels

Here is an historic graphic of Social Mobility in the US.

Here is the Gini Coeficient that measures inequality (the higher the more unequal), which actually understates the reality because it’s not that great at reflecting internal inequality in the top quintile (i.e. things like how the top 1% are now way much richer than the top 10% than before).

A problem with these graphs & your inferences is it’s objectively unclear what to expect. What do they look like for other countries? What part of this is explained by other factors like unique historical advantages (eg, an industrial base untouched by war during the postwar boom) dissipating as other countries rebuild & catch up? Can we decouple these time-dependent factors to get an expected baseline performance apart from them?

With that social mobility graph, should we expect nearly all children to earn more than their parents every subsequent generation indefinitely? The remarkably similar graph provided by the source cited by yours shows birthyear of the child starting in 1940. Couldn’t their parents earning substantially less, perhaps by living through the Great Depression, and the postwar boom significantly explain the high proportion earning more than their parents? And as GDP per capita growth rate declines, wouldn’t we likewise expect a declining proportion of children to earn more than their parents? A base of reference would really help here.

As for the Gini coefficient, we see a 7% range from 35% to 42%. While this is an increase, it doesn’t seem staggering & needs evidence to distinctly support your conclusion.

Some problems you mentioned were always present or worse when that Gini coefficient was lower: gerrymandering, obstructions to vote (felon disenfranchisement, intimidation, poll taxes & tests), discriminatory incarceration, 2-party system due to plurality voting, etc. They’re not new developments systematically leading in the direction you claim.

It looks like you started with your conclusion & worked backwards to confirm it with evidence that is not as conclusive as you claim. An open-minded skeptic wouldn’t be convinced.

I find doing AI impressions an effective trolling technique: beep bip boop & some fun punctuation ‒−–—―…:.

They can also be funny with them. Comedy doesn’t need or care about preconceived constraints. Irreverence that challenges our arrogant conformity & self-indulgent vanity that anything is sacred or off-limits is a goal of comedy. It’s part of gaining humility to question & laugh at ourselves & conceited ideas.

yes

Still unnecessary & less effective than less invasive alternatives that already exist & the government could promote. To quote another comment

Governments have commissioned enough studies to know that education, training, and parental controls filtering content at the receiving end are more effective & less infringing of civil rights than laws imposing restrictions & penalties on website operators to comply with online age verification. Laws could instead allocate resources to promote the former in a major way, setup independent evaluations reporting the effectiveness of child protection technologies to the public, promote standards & the development of better standards in the industry. Laws of the latter kind simply aren’t needed & also suffer technical defects.

The most fatal technical defect is they lack enforceability on websites outside their jurisdiction. They’re limited to HTTP (or successor). They practically rule out dynamic content (chat, fora) for minors unless that content is dynamically prescreened. Parental control filters lack all these defects, and they don’t adversely impact privacy, fundamental rights, and law enforcement.

Governments know better & choose worse, because it’s not about promoting the public good, it’s about imposing control.

Wrong technical solution to a made up problem.

Governments have commissioned enough studies to know that education, training, and parental controls filtering content at the receiving end are more effective & less infringing of civil rights than laws imposing restrictions & penalties on website operators to comply with online age verification. Laws could instead allocate resources to promote the former in a major way, setup independent evaluations reporting the effectiveness of child protection technologies to the public, promote standards & the development of better standards in the industry. Laws of the latter kind simply aren’t needed & also suffer technical defects.

The most fatal technical defect is they lack enforceability on websites outside their jurisdiction. They’re limited to HTTP (or successor). They practically rule out dynamic content (chat, fora) for minors unless that content is dynamically prescreened. Parental control filters lack all these defects, and they don’t adversely impact privacy, fundamental rights, and law enforcement.

Governments know better & choose worse, because it’s not about promoting the public good, it’s about imposing control.

AI companies are making a choice when they design unsafe platforms.

The right choice.

Technology to prevent this harm already exists: Anthropic’s Claude, for example, consistently tried to dissuade users from acts of violence.

That shit’s awfully condescending & paternalistic.

AI platforms are becoming a weapon for extremists and school shooters.

For deficient plans: AI gets shit wrong so often, we should probably encourage idiots to concoct their “foolproof” plans on it.

Demand AI companies put people’s safety ahead of profit.

Nah: thought isn’t action. Liberty means respecting others’ freedom to have “unsafe” thoughts. Someone else could pose the same questions to audit security weaknesses & prepare safety plans.

Moreover, all of this was already possible with a search engine & notes. Information alarmists can get fucked.

If they actually worked, sure.

Not sure that part’s absolutely necessary: if it’s publicly promoted to the extent that parents don’t have an excuse (eg, time, cost, access) other than low willpower/interest they are reasonably accountable for, then the public has fulfilled its duty to empower parents to direct the rearing of their children while protecting everyone’s fundamental rights. However, I also think interested parents would popularly adopt voluntary solutions with enough public resources committed to promote & provide them in a major way. While the public expense may seem extra, I think the government’s duty to protect fundamental rights justifies the expense.

Another comment mentions legislatively commissioned studies that suggest solutions similar to yours, but broader & less intrusive. Recommendations included

• A broad, national, private sector conversation should be encouraged on the development of next-generation systems for labeling, rating, and identifying content reflecting the convergence of old and new media.
• Government and the private sector should undertake a major education campaign to promote public awareness of technologies and methods available to protect children online.

They also stressed the importance of adult involvement to provide child supervision & teach children internet safety, information literacy, & skills to evaluate inappropriate messages. If the government had pursued these recommendations (it didn’t), I think it would have succeeded.

It’s also worth noting those & newer studies found client-side filters more effective than age verification for a number of reasons.

• false positives & negatives are low & can be corrected
• filters all internet protocols (not only HTTP or successors) regardless of geographic origin (including those beyond legal jurisdiction) or dynamism (eg, live chats also filtered)
• highly granular (eg, can filter sections inside web pages)

You obviously don’t buy porn magazines for your teens and don’t show news from war zones to your young kids and keep eye on the movies/shows they watch

Though Australia isn’t the US, the US federal courts had an interesting opinion there: parents may always allow their children to access protected speech. Even with sex-related materials, the Supreme Court has stated

the prohibition against sales to minors does not bar parents who so desire from purchasing the magazines for their children.

They regarded as constitutionally defective laws that impose a single standard of public morality. Instead, they’d allow laws that “support the right of parents to deal with the morals of their children as they see fit”. Laws that take away parental control are also impermissible.

“It is cardinal with us that the custody, care and nurture of the child reside first in the parents, whose primary function and freedom include preparation for obligations the state can neither supply nor hinder.” Prince v. Massachusetts, supra, at 166.

In another decision, they regard & defend parental responsibility & discretion in leaving access open to children.

The Fabulous Associates […]. Id. at 788. The court noted that “[i]n this respect, the decision a parent must make is comparable to whether to keep sexually explicit books on the shelf or subscribe to adult magazines. No constitutional principle is implicated. The responsibility for making such choices is where our society has traditionally placed it — on the shoulders of the parent.”

So, according to them, presenting such content to children ought to be left up to their parents, and laws shouldn’t infringe on their right to do that.

Not even then: people are fallible, partners can cheat, and admitting that creates a compromising predicament for the person least likely to admit it. It’s in everyone’s interest of health to simply take all sensible precautions regardless. Only reason not to is when you want to conceive.

And? The word enshittification is not a great contribution to society.

immiserated and precaratized

dafuq?

Whereas the people who choose when and how to use AI — the centaurs

que?

The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide

A bit contrived?

Thanks for bringing us this extraterrestrial perspective, OP. Extraterrestrial voices matter! 🫡