Nope, not mocking you.

I see the word time a lot of times here too.

We now already have a few generations with plenty of members who started watching online porn when they were technically too young for that, and we can now tell that this hasn’t harmed them.

No, it has not. What on Earth could possibly be wrong with a young person reading our discussions here on Lemmy and expanding their knowledge about all the topics we discuss here, for example? Even participating in it, asking and answering questions about any topic they find interesting? I find it hard to think of a more harmless hobby.

I myself started regularly participating in online communities at the age of 10 (that was more than 20 years ago, when there were not yet even rumors of a product called “iPhone” and I didn’t even have my first own desktop computer yet). The vast majority of my joyful memories of my preteen and teen years stem from my participation in online communities. The vast majority of memories I have of pretty much anything else during that time period are negative. Online communities taught me many important things about life that I now use every day and that I probably wouldn’t have easily learned elsewhere. They turned me into a more creative person with better communication skills, especially in writing.

So, no, the situation is not that people who want to ban young people from social media have a noble goal that oh-so-unfortunately cannot be achieved without invading everyone’s privacy. The situation is that those people have a completely illegitimate (in my mind, outright evil) goal in the first place.

You’re talking about two different "OP"s.

The OP of this post isn’t banned on lemmy.ml, but the OP of the post that this thread is about (i.e. that can’t be seen there) is: https://lemmy.ml/u/breadsmasher@lemmy.world

The first two depend on centralized services and nonfree software, which are things I don’t like. The third doesn’t. The fourth doesn’t have to.

So by those metrics I like cryptocurrency the most. In fact I have invested a bit of my savings in Bitcoin. I have never used Uber or AirBnB meanwhile.

Can’t I just ask it for the seahorse emoji once in a while and achieve the same result or something…

I agree with much of that, but not the things after “bring down the [list of companies]”.

I agree we need to bring them down, but not through governmental regulations and fines, but by us (the general public) building replacements for them. Like the thing we’re using here.

All that state regulation will do is make that harder because that regulation will also apply to those replacements and make sure nobody can ever operate anything that replaces them unless they have enough revenue to comply with those regulations.

The EU is planning to do something along those lines, as I understand it.

But that’s completely beside the point because it’s not a good idea in the first place to prohibit young people from participating in online communities. Participating in online communities is a fun, fulfilling and mostly harmless activity that improves many young people’s mental health, creativity, communication skills, and probably has other benefits too. I wouldn’t be the person I am now if I hadn’t started doing that regularly at age 10.

We shouldn’t be talking about “actually it’s about surveillance” or thinking about less privacy-invasive ways to achieve the same goal. We should be saying “if your goal is to reduce the amount of young people on social media, or the time they spend there, then your goal is wrong”.

The thing you posted this on is also social media.

At least according to the article, Malaysia’s ban is actually limited to big tech, making it slightly less bad than most Internet regulations that are just regulatory capture for big tech.

Has anyone tried to tell Malaysian teens about the fediverse and how they can still be here as much as they want, I wonder? 😜

It would be a desirable consequence. I remember when I was the age that politicians currently want to ban from “social media”, I was active on web forums where the majority or at least a significant minority of active users were also that age.

But looking at current Internet users’ habits, especially those of the youngest ones, I’m not sure text-based communities are still interesting enough to them. Current Internet usage seems to mostly be about videos.

Has that happened because of the existing similar laws in Australia and other countries?

If I delete this post, will it be completely removed across all instances that synchronized it?

It will send out a message to relevant servers that it should be deleted. There is no guarantee that they will comply with that message. If your post has been copied to hundreds or thousands of other servers, there is no guarantee that they will all receive or understand that message. Some may even be actively malicious, for example because they are controlled by exactly the people you want to hide from!

I remember once deleting a comment (on this account) a few seconds after posting it. After that, I kept getting upvotes for it! I found out that that was happening because one very popular instance had for some reason not deleted the comment, so its users had no idea that it was supposed to be gone.

Is a deleted post traceable in any way?

Everything on the public Internet is. Anyone can set up a bot that just scrapes and archives everything on the Internet that it can find; and governments certainly have the resources to do so!

Is it kept in a log or a database on ferdiverse instances?

Potentially.

With governments across the globe increasingly surveiling us online and scrutinizing everything we say, I’m starting to think I should plainly delete any account that has personally identifiable information like my real name and photo. I initially thought it would be easier to connect with family and friends, but now I’m growing increasingly worried about how this can be used against me.

Posting things on the public Internet, especially under one’s real name, inherently comes with that risk. Always has.

so we finally solved https://xkcd.com/949/ I guess?

I can’t read the article because it’s behind a paywall…

…but the headline is more than sufficient, really. I cannot believe that any of these people think they are the good guys. “Let’s prevent young people from finding friends. It’s a bad thing that isolated young people can find communities of people they have anything in common with. I’m making the world a better place by passing legislation to ban them from doing those things! … Wait, are we the baddies? No, can’t be!”

yes, let’s start with lemmy and people who post comments like this to it

And are we going to get closer to the Internet of 2005 by adding government regulation?

I agree with you that today’s commercial “social media” isn’t great and probably does cause psychological harm to at least some young people.

But any government regulation will only serve to make sure no one can build any forum or platform without enough revenue to cover compliance costs.

How do these people look at themselves in the mirror and think they are looking at a good person???

Isolating young people from, in many cases, their only way to participate in communities of people they have anything in common with is supposed to be good for them? Reduce suicide rates?

Even disregarding the privacy problems, it’s just an evil idea in the first place. The Internet is exactly (!) where young people belong.

News outlets, for example, could spin up a server on their own official domain, and provide accounts to employees. So someone posting from a @news.bbc.com instance could, at a glance, be understood to be a genuine BBC reporter.

Some already do that. The ones I am familiar with are in German though: social.heise.de and mastodon.derstandard.at.

Probably just ask it for the seahorse emoji or something idk