When I mentioned that any attempt at identifying users to access or write content is a trojan horse for a wide surveillance yet HN users downvoted and flagged such comments and were zealously supportive of "prottecct kidz"
In the late 90s and early 2000s we as teenagers had access to unfiltered internet and unregulated. The harm to us were largely moral fanaticism, this was when they also tried to ban video games because of violent content and now we have complete censorship and control over what games can sell or not on steam.
Much of the panic on social media amplified by protestants and religious ppl are greatly exaggerated. Porn isnt the danger its the addictive tendencies of the individual that must be educated upon.
Yep. This feels a lot like a repeat of the moral panic from the early eras, only this time the policies are unfortunately within the overton window instead of outside, and have shown to be popular outside of tech circles.
We beat the moral panic last time and kept our freedoms. This time I'm not so certain that we will prevail, there seems to be a coordinated/unified effort on this wide spread surveillance and my hunch tells me the rise of authoritarianism around the world is the drive - much easier to oppress a population in a surveillance state. The "for the children" argument is as old as time.
> In the late 90s and early 2000s we as teenagers had access to unfiltered internet and unregulated. The harm to us were largely moral fanaticism, this was when they also tried to ban video games because of violent content and now we have complete censorship and control over what games can sell or not on steam.
I get your point but I don't agree.
I mean, politicians back then were actually right in assuming that danger looms on the Internet. They just were completely wrong about what was the danger. Everyone and their dog thought that the danger was porn, violent video games (Columbine and Erfurt certainly didn't help there), gore videos (anyone 'member RottenCom), shocker sites (RIP Goatse), more porn, oh and did I say they were afraid of boobs? Or even of cars "shaking" when you picked up a sex worker in GTA and parked in a bush?
What they all missed though was the propaganda, the nutjobs, the ability of all the village idiots of the entire world that were left to solitude by society to now organize, the drive of monetization. That's how we got 4chan which began decent (Project Chanology!) but eventually led to GamerGate, 8chan and a bunch of far-right terrorists; social media itself fueled lynch mobs, enabled enemy states to distribute propaganda at a scale never before seen in the history of humanity and may or may not have played a pivotal role in many a regime change (early Twitter, that was a time...); and now we got EA and a whole bunch of free to play mobile games shoving microtransactions down our children's throats. Tetris of all things just keeps shoving gambling ads in your face after each level. The kids we're not gonna lose to far-right propaganda, we're gonna lose to fucking casinos.
We should have brought down the hammer hard on all of that crap instead of wasting our energy on trying to prevent teenagers from having a good old fashioned wank.
In the late 90s and early 2000s we as teenagers had access to unfiltered internet and unregulated. The harm to us were largely moral fanaticism, this was when they also tried to ban video games because of violent content and now we have complete censorship and control over what games can sell or not on steam.
Much of the panic on social media amplified by protestants and religious ppl are greatly exaggerated. Porn isnt the danger its the addictive tendencies of the individual that must be educated upon.