I disagree with your opening statement
where did you get that idea?

I mean, nobody ever went to jail for making a children' cartoon the mascot for Camel cigarettes either.

Even people who legitimately care about protecting children from harm aren't willing to actually confront the causes of that harm.

Why do we choose to punish our
dependent children for the crimes
of under-regulated mega businesses
and our own lack of time/energy/ability?
Many children, the most vulnerable, find their only friends, people like them with whom they can find kind belonging, on social media.
You don't want kids exposed to the evils and can't reign in those exposing them, give them good places online to participate
with each other, and, better, good places irl.

far from being banned from today's
primary source of information and
connection, children and everyone else need to learn these social skills, to think critically, to check multiple sources of different kinds, to question, query, look for the logical inconsistencies, to be able to act effectively
in the world we have made

Definitely.
We gotta hit all the problems.

(and yea, age verification and "chat control" can go fuck off)

I don't disagree.
Well, there's definitely harm on masto, also.
Like, zionists harassing palestinians under the protection of mods.
And all those places dedicated to harassment (kiwifarms, etc.)

But overall, when people think "social media", they are not thinking of mastodon.

And the places they do think of should not exist in their present form.

@gabrielesvelto

Oh, absolutely, Age Verification is just a massive ID theft, and absolutely nothing good about it.

It's just a little jarring to perceive a discourse of "How can we steal SoMe from the little darlings, like, that's abuse" (I know OP is not meant like that)

@gabrielesvelto

Yes, the bans we're talking about on all the harmful things Facebook and the like do would render them completely and permanently unprofitable and would end them and we would be left with prosocial networking like we have here.

The way you get there is not by punishing young people and banning them from participation in the public life and information landscapes these platforms usurped.

• That's why it's illegal to advertise tobacco and spirits to minors and the few advertising permissible has to feature a cast that is above 25.
  • At least in Germany that is; Not shure if it's EU-wide tho.

Case in point: "Age Verification" is cyberfascist horseshite and a poor excuse to normalize both Tech-Illiteracy and Antisocial Media's unwillingness to properly moderate their shit.

#AgeVerification #Cyberfascism #TechIlliteracy #TechIlliterates #AntisocialMedia #SocialMedia #Moderation

Maybe they'll only apply to the huge corporate sites, at first, but remember: they're trying to force this crap into our operating systems now, including Linux. "First they blocked kids from accessing the big evil sites, but we didn't care because they were big and evil and kids shouldn't be getting addicted to them anyway."

...and, not to defend Big Tech Social, but some network effects mean some people really depend on them (which is itself a problem, yes).

I mean, there's definitely some discussion to be had here, but... let's be sure we all agree there's a problem, yeah?

@gabrielesvelto

Or we could just remove the incentive the corpos have to profit from minors, or ban the corpos out right, thus ending the real problem once and for all.

The goal should be to fix the actual problems, though. If politicians were introducing "protect kids by holding social networking companies accountable" legislation as often as they introduce "protect children by isolating them and introducing more surveillance" legislation, the corpos might have voluntarily created controls or at least better labeling by now.

The video game rating system is an example of an industry policing itself to avoid legislation. That's probably not the way to do social networking. The point is, back when government regulation meant something, just the threat was enough to get companies to do the needful.

That's where we need to be with this. Hold the perpetrators responsible. Saying "this is just how it is" is a little bit defeatist.

Kids need spaces to be themselves away from the eyes of their parents once they reach a certain level of maturity. All that shit is complicated and requires his parenting and a proper educational system to do well.

We have to keep pushing back on surveillance disguised as protecting kids, even if the alternative still sucks. I don't have "the answer". I just know that as an LGBTQIAS2 kid who didn't have access to those spaces (because they didn't exist yet), I was self-hating until my 30s when I finally found them. My awakening was ten years in the making on the Something Awful forums, a website known for infamous "goon meets", "do you have stairs in your house", Photoshop Phriday, Shmorky, tasteless memes, Zack Parsons' liminal horror, and Slenderman. It also had extremely active and diverse forums where I first met out LGBTQIAS2 people and learned that what I thought was normal was anything but. The site itself was not a safe space, but that forum was a lifeline.