I didn’t understand your disagreement. Yes just like a bar shouldn’t be responsible for a person that gets plastered drunk after they leave, Facebook shouldn’t be responsible for the actions of a predator that goes to a porn website to lure kids. Just like the Catholic Church shouldn’t be responsible for a public school teacher that rapes her students at school. The only times any of these organizations are responsible is when the abuses happen while using their services.

I don’t get why this is controversial.

I can’t speak for the military’s recruiting practices. Yes, I fully agree that the military’s recruitment practices are very predatory, and should be reigned in. Politically, I personally think “enlistment” shouldn’t be an option at all. It should be random draft. Every year the military should tell Congress how many new recuits they need, and Congress should approve a draft of 18 year olds for that many new recuits. The draft should be random, with no deferments or other ways out of service other than health reasons as determined by a military physician. (But that’s way off topic.)

The problem the predators would have if they are relegated to the “kid friendly” sectors is that those sectors are much better policed by users and the corporations.

It’s not really the public content that is the problem, the problems really come when a predator can lure a child into a private chat. That’s when the predator can start their process of grooming that eventually leads to blackmailing the child (grooming is a process and it’s damn evil and damn sinister). By relegating the users to “kid friendly” areas, the opportunity to pull kids into private spaces is greatly diminished.

Now, will the predators stop being predators? No. But if the platforms have strong child protection policies that make it more difficult for the predators, then they will move on to a website that has weaker policies. Which is just about the best an organization or platform can do, make the predators uncomfortable enough that they go hunt someone else’s kids.

Correct. Right now the OS maker is not responsible. That exactly why Meta is pushing so hard to change the laws to make them responsible.

Your analogy is a good analogy. In your car analogy, today, no one blames the car manufacturer for a drunk driver, but we do blame bars and bar tenders. In many states, bars have to be licensed and if the bar tender allows some one to get drunk and drive home the bar and the bar tender can be held liable. This situation would be like if bars got together to lobby state and national governments to make it so that the car manufacturers had to install breathalyzers in every car so that the bars could reduce their liability and responsibility.

Yes, that is common.

But just Google child predators in video games.

Sure. And if a parent knowingly installs one of those OS’s on a computer they let their children use, THEN you can fully blame the parent.

There will always be sites that don’t care and won’t comply with any OS level restrictions in the first place.

And I’ll support strong laws that hold those sites accountable for negligence. I’m really struggling to see why this is so controversial.

Right, I was making the point that just like the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church can’t just shrug off their responsibility, online orgs don’t get a free pass either.

But if these laws are passed, then they will get a free pass, and just point at the OS maker as the problem. Be mad about that and I’m on your side.

These companies that show clear negligence need to be seized by the state and stripped for parts.

Yes! That’s what you should be upset about. These companies are pushing these laws to get out of being held accountable for their products. Be upset about THAT and I’m on your side!

(But that would also mean that small developers and Fediverse hosts would also have to be held accountable for their service.)

Okay, for your ignorance, parents bare some responsibility but not all the responsibility.

Just like the parents didn’t bare all the responsibility with the Catholic Church abuses or the Boy Scout abuses, they also don’t bare all the responsibility for the online abuses. The providers of the service also share in that responsibility.

I know you don’t. And you don’t have to. No one is forcing you to care. No law anywhere threatens any legal liability on the user.

But it’s because providers of games and online platforms don’t care that governments are having to pass laws to force organizations producing these products to care.

(Which is also why Meta is pushing these laws so hard, so that it becomes someone else’s legal responsibility to care.)

So you are going with: Deny the problem of child sexual predators exists at all.

Right. That’s why Facebook is trying to get the laws changed so that it’s the OS that is responsible.

There is a big conspiracy behind this, it’s just not a shadowy-government one.

Are you saying that you literally haven’t read any things else on this thread?

It’s not the job of the [Catholic Church] or the [Boy Scouts] to monitor and control a kids access.

Yes it is. It absolutely is. If you provide a service, you should responsible for the safety of that service, especially if you are providing and advertising that service to kids.

They are focusing on the platforms. That’s exactly why Meta, et. al., are pushing for these laws. To off load that responsibility.

And if you are blaming the parents then you don’t understand the problem.

It reeks of a coordinated agenda,

It is a coordinated agenda, just not a secret one like people want to think. It’s being pushed by Meta and a string of popular app makers and games to avoid having to be responsible for their own platforms.

Therefore, some Fediverse instances, may end up implementing age checking, or stopping altogether if they can’t afford the additional costs of age checking.

That’s a strange argument to me. That’s exactly what Meta is intending to prevent from having to do by pushing these laws. If countries and states pass laws like the California law specifically, then no fediverse instance will need to worry about age verification. They just ask the user’s browser to ask the OS. California’s version of the law would really help small businesses and small developers, because it puts all the child protection responsibility onto the OS.

Now, regarding the “kid friendly” limitation: if the Web gets limited to “non-adult content”… what’s “adult content” to begin with?

In this case, “kid friendly content” becomes “any content that the website wants to be responsible and liable for letting users that report being <18 have access to”.

My biggest frustration with the community is not that people don’t like the proposed solution but that

1. There is so much flat denial that there is actually a major online child predator problem, and/or
2. No one should be held responsible to fix it, and/or
3. no one is offering alternative solutions.

I’m really not upset with individual users here. I understand that you are removed from the problem and don’t understand it. I really don’t blame you personally. I have had training on youth protection and it’s not an easy problem, and just throwing the parents under the bus isn’t fair. When it comes to child predators, they are often just as much the victims as the kids are. (Yes, I mean that.)

I’m upset with the EFF. They don’t have an excuse for their ignorance. They’ve been taught the problem many times and just refuse to acknowledge it. (Red flag if there ever was one, if you ask me.) If they didn’t like the verification rules then they need to start proposing alternative solutions (which they don’t have).

Do you also believe that the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church also have no responsibility to protect kids, because doing to would similarly require collecting data on people?

(I would disagree with you if you said yes, but I’ll respect your position for being consistent.)

If their goal is to find an excuse to declare you a terrorist then there are much easier ways to do that that are already available to them. This really isn’t an efficient way to do that.

And, as best as I’m aware, no age verification laws anywhere threaten any consequences for the user. The consequences are only for the OS makers.

(Granted, the California law, at least, could be read to say that it’s the entity installing the OS to confirm ages, not necessarily the OS maker. So for most Linux distros that would shift the user age verification responsibility completely to the user installing the OS, but I’m not sure how that would work out in courts or whether websites and applications would recognize that. It will probably never actually be an issue that is adjudicated.)

… And if a kid using that browser was abused because the browser lied to the website about the users’ age, then the browser’s creators should bare some consequences for lying to the website that otherwise would have put up protections. Right?