I'm pretty sure this is a "pick your poison" problem. We as a society are damned no matter what we do or do not do. For my part, we need to do something, because things are not fine the way they are, including the half ass Australian solution. We can't keep putting the onus on private enterprise to address social issues.
I may sound crazy for saying so, but I think the answer is more government run infrastructure for enabling identity-based operations, like payments and authentication, with rules about standards, open source, contractor selection, and audit that make operation transparent. It can work if technical operations are legislated instead of "left for the engineers to figure out." Then at least the evolution of systems can become real political issues that map to election cycles.
My stance is probably a polarizing one, but this is precisely why we need to be able to debate the minutae of these systems through our political discourse instead of just "will we; won't we" legislation. This should be debated in democratic process.
We could try investing in positive infrastructure that improves peoples life's in stead of creating the panopticon torment nexus. Things like third spaces where people can spend time is save spaces where they form communities and public transit so that people can get to those places. Incentivize positive behaviors instead of closing off public spaces and pricing more and more people out of being able to do anything with the minuscule amount of free time they have besides going on the internet.
Allowing the relevant authorities to control, shut down and arrest serious crimes doesn't turn a country into a surveillance state.
Poor surveillance controls do though - let's perhaps fix those instead of allowing garbage like Flock to spread and then hand wring? EU started with GDPR, let's see others follow and build on it?
Who gets to decide which crimes are serious enough to warrant the types of actions being advocated for? Who is going to implement and regulate such controls? Our governments have shown their willingness to violate those controls any time they see fit and are not held to account. Do you honestly believe that you could never end up on the bad side of that deal?
I think the lie is to look at the problems we have that the internet has enabled and say "things are ok as they are don't try to do anything to solve it."
If the problem is "social media bad for kids" then any parent that allows their children to access social media is as guilty of abuse or neglect as a parent that lets them play in traffic. Throw the parents in prison and put the kids in foster care. Problem solved.
People make problems where there are none. Parents all around me are giving smartphones to their eight year olds without supervision.
I have kids and no amount of bullshit is going to convince me this is necessary for social interaction of any kind. If anything the "phone kids" are the weird ones.
People are creating this problem. You can easily, very easily, say "no" to a kid. I pay to keep you bloody alive and I will defend your sanity with everything I got because these kids are our future. Being disliked or "hated" by them is the least of my worries. Are we adults or what?
Sometimes I think there is a severe lack of "adulting" lately. No amount of legislation will fix that.
Well, as I said, we figured out ways to make parents big-r Responsible by applying harsh penalties when they abuse or neglect their children. We spend countless billions on government agenices whose sole purpose is to intervene when parents fail their children. We should use this pre-existing system to deal with the problem of parents allowing their children to use social media.
That is a bold statement to make, and I wonder how many more people would be willing to make the same statement whenever these conversations come up on HN.
Things are, in fact, okay as they are, attempts to impose identity requirements would make things less okay, and people trying to claim they aren't okay need to be defeated.
Oh, a great many things are broken and need fixing. "The internet doesn't have enough surveillance and deanonymization" is just not one of those things.
I may sound crazy for saying so, but I think the answer is more government run infrastructure for enabling identity-based operations, like payments and authentication, with rules about standards, open source, contractor selection, and audit that make operation transparent. It can work if technical operations are legislated instead of "left for the engineers to figure out." Then at least the evolution of systems can become real political issues that map to election cycles.
My stance is probably a polarizing one, but this is precisely why we need to be able to debate the minutae of these systems through our political discourse instead of just "will we; won't we" legislation. This should be debated in democratic process.