The purpose of a Law is what it does, not what its proponents loudly claim it’s meant to do.
Privacy-intrusive age verification…for social media and video-sharing platforms.
I stand by my hypothesis that this merely a protect the children justification to de-anonymize the internet.
That way, when someone posts video of the situation on the ground in Gaza, the authorities know who it is, and can intervene.
Here in the states, there’s all sorts of things the regime doesn’t want to appear on video, from ICE brutality and officer-involved shootings, to the conditions in for-profit detention centers, to the conditions in neighborhoods near data centers.
I don’t know what all videos might be uploaded in the EU, but it’s not completely rosy and rainbows over there.
I’ve yet to see any “protect the kids” legislation that isn’t either thinly veiled surveillance overreach or corporate collusion
Advertising to children sees more money returned on money spent in advertising. All these protect the children laws will assist advertising and companies who sell space to advertising the ability to make more money.
That is all that it is. The rest of the debate is just filler and weak justifications.
They want the internet to be as cable, radio, and books before it. It just took longer because of the complexity of the systems. They can’t stand that people for about 20 years had the means to educate themselves and they’ve been fighting to censor it since at least 2012. The problem is that now the tech bros are on board. Before they still had enough idealist types internally to keep them pushing back.
It was only a matter of time. having been raised in the free and open internet it really breaks my heart.
A knowledgeable people is a free people. No system of government EVER would allow or encourage it.
Yeah, but let’s not kid ourselves, overall the internet hasn’t exactly enlightened the general population.
EU Kids Act Won’t Keep the Internet Accountable and Trustworthy
The internet has never been either of those things. It’s mostly full of shit. The question is how to deal with that and personally I cannot see any good solution.
When a citizen’s initiative presents a serious issue, gets a record number of signatures, and provides some good, easy to implement solutions - the European Comission says it’ll do nothing, because it wants to focus on deregulation.
The same Comission is perfectly fine with implementing new, insanely vague and/or complicated laws that benefit literally nobody other than big tech companies, at the expense of everyone else.
And then the same Comission wonders why anti-EU sentiment is growing.
We’re slowly but steadily getting to a point where the EU has all the dystopian surveillance and control measures in place as China does, except without any of the benefits that come with them.
The EU Commission is nominated, not elected, with only confirmation votes in the EU Parliament for members other than its head.
Unsurprisingly, this executive organ whose members are chosen behind closed doors and not even by the democratically elected representatives of EU citizens has long been the most corrupt part of the EU, often pretty much selling the EU to large foreign companies known for giving non-executive board memberships and millionaire “consultancy” gigs to retired politicians.
Yes, the Comission is a problem, but sadly, it’s not the only problem.
The European Council is just as big of an issue. It’s mostly made up of member states’ heads of state/government, so technically it’s democratically elected, except the Comission’s president who also gets a seat there, for whatever reason.
However, members of the Council almost always push for their countries’ best interests, instead of the EU’s as a whole. And they’re an even bigger issue when they happen to be anti-EU, like about half of the current Council.
Which essentially means the only EU body that is fully democratically elected, and elected on an EU level is the Parliament. Which coincidentally has the least influence, and which isn’t free of its own issues either.
The Parliament’s current president - Roberta Metsola - appears to be friends with some American billionaires, and her husband is the head of an American lobby.
Does that sound like a conflict of interests? Well, that’s probably because it is. Usually, all MEPs are legally required to disclose such conflicts of interests, but for some reason she never had to.
In case you may be interested, she’s also anti-abortion, part of Malta’s nationalist party, and one of the main pushing forces behind Chat Control.
Read more here: https://www.politico.eu/article/roberta-metsola-lobbyist-husband-ukko-european-parliament-president-transparency/
So, effectively where the US already was when conditions were ripe for a certain despot to rally his base and seize power
One of the most irritating aspects of the “EU Kids Act” is that a single, technically questionable measure is being treated as if it could solve a complex societal problem. Education and the development of digital literacy cannot be mandated by bureaucratic monstrosities detached from reality.
Just as in real life, children and young people need to learn to recognize risky situations, set boundaries, and seek help. Regulation should support them in this, but it cannot replace these skills.
Source: https://www.ccc.de/updates/2026/kids-act [translated from German via Google]
Of course, absolutely…
Even at USSR times, children were safer and much more educated, self-confident, self-sufficient, or even more free back then. They were capable to think with their own head, make choices, believe in their decisions. They were capable and mature.
They were disciplined and had a direction for a better life.Now? Most of the children are dependent or even addicted, uneducated, have organization and health issues, and rarely decide themselves but rely on trends/hearsay/rumors, and have no idea what to do or where to go with their life, I believe, considering the most children I see nowadays.
That “Kids Act” is ridiculously awful, disgusting even… It is designed to manipulate on the future of us, people, starting from children, to control now children then mature, and make them dependent on the system from their dear infant development time when you absorb knowledge like a sponge.
That system is going to force children to be raised within that limited and carefully designed system so that raised people would continue to live how the system wants them to live, since they don’t even know other options based their mind foundation on it. That system disregards your individual safety mechanisms, making your unique worldviews limited, controllable, and vulnerable for those who control it within that “act” system.
That is, a child that did not learn how to distinguish good from bad, learn how to protect themselves manually, will depend on that system or parents, but when parents die, the system will be their own “safety” they’ll trust, and hence - controlled by it.
That’s because didactics and urbanism of today are not science-driven, or more precisely, they are science driven, but aimed at things different than stated.
There’s the famous city benches example, that today’s typical benches are only useful for sitting in one inconvenient pose not doing anything useful and not moving, and for not too long, you won’t even be able to relax. And that’s considered good urbanism, it disallows people to lie down on a bench (that’s in itself not too bad a thing, who the hell decided we all should be upright stick-in-the-butt serious types, preferably in suits, with faces like from ads, only doing things the accepted way? what’s the problem in someone sleeping a few hours on a bench? it attracts drunks and homeless? they’ll make their own bench of cardboard and junk, I promise you it won’t smell better), to take conversational poses while sitting on a bench (like when playing chess or drinking coffee or eating a sandwich or whatever, use it as a social space), to even rest - one would think benches are for resting.
It’s being justified in various ways, but in fact these “urbanists” are not too different from police agents, their only goal is to destroy opportunities for public social spaces in urban areas forming. They are approaching the problem scientifically, just not the one they are claiming to approach. They don’t want you to just meet and talk with strangers, or hang out with your friends, without all the control apparatus of FAANG moderation, whitelist of allowed ways to communicate typical for today’s Web, blackbox recommendations and no agency at all. That’s also why today’s urban park zones are more like green streets than like well-treated small forests.
It’s the same with learning environments for children and playgrounds. It’s being claimed that those “safe spaces and only vetted ways to communicate” environments and approaches are scientifically justified for didactics, for that they are not, but they condition children to obey authority. It’s aimed to discourage them from thinking outside of the presented ruleset, from verifying and checking claimed reality, and from experimenting before believing. Like those idiotic colorful playgrounds with nothing really to do, which is why children are usually not very excited with them. If you take a child to a zoo, they’ll look at animals all the time and never be bored, and they’ll play in all the spaces around, just because those are neutral things like containers for junk and benches (normal ones) and signs. But in a dedicated playground (a modern one, with all that colored plastic round crap) they’ll be bored to hell, because those are not designed to be interesting for children. They might play in the surroundings, because, well, they usually don’t erase the district around that new playground, but those playing in the new playground itself are usually like 4-6 years old at best.
It’s all crap aimed at somehow “growing” and “conditioning” people who will be better material for what these jerks want the humanity to be, with their likes being the ones making policies, of course.
It’s the lowest quality human material experimenting on others’ children.
Each and every such initiative should be met with Molotov cocktails and just somehow broken legs for those pushing them.
Because, no matter the inconveniences, universal city spaces are necessary with all the homeless and drunks and junkies and exhibitionists and hooligans included, and environments for children allowing to learn are also necessary.
Those doing all this “safety” crap only want to somehow grow a generation of humans that will obey.
Thank you… heartfelt… dear @belochka@lemmy.world … for the truth… for seeing it, for the actually human attitude, empathy, understanding…
Please… please share your message as an explicit blog or article post, to make it searchable! Your viewpoint, including the reference for urban environment, which is awesome, deserves it absolutely…
An actual blog post from your message will bring more people to it. Just please omit the Molotov part, since these are people, too who were raised in their environment and see the world that way. They inherit problems that should be solvable with better examples, not destruction, I believe. That is, I don’t share the same idea regarding the Molotov part path… which is cleansing, destructive, painful, and damages someone’s family whose parents loved their children, too…
Here, I wholeheartedly agree with you…
Thank you, @belochka@lemmy.world …
For instance, your message to be posted at:
- Bearblog (their Manifesto);
- Ghost (self-hosted or public instance; examples);Related:
- https://fugumichi.bearblog.dev/some-good-platform-for-blogging-journaling-archiving/;
- https://manuelmoreale.com/blog-platforms
Coming soon, from the directors of ChatControl.
WeDiddleKidsAct.look at how much they love the children !
No, I will not provide my ID online
Child indoctrination has always been a thing. Now we are creating a tools for directed internet content and advertising.
who could have thought ?
