Read only or not, relying on Chinese or Russian gps data for increased accuracy even in civilian increases dependency no?
That seems like a bad idea to me. I’ve thought for about 20 years that increasing our dependence on anti democratic regimes was a risk, no matter what the benefits for global development etc. It’s not isolationist to want to only rely on your friends and not enemies.
(Which is why Europe needs to disentangle itself from the US as fast as possible).
It decreases dependency on GPS and thus it decreases risk because if there's an attack on a GPS system by an adversary, it's likely that they will not be attacking their own system at the same time. I'd rather have my enemy's open source, perfectly functional clock in my back pocket than be without the time. Enjoying that the competing clock has a sub second display is optional.
If you are relying on it without a graceful fall back then it would be a problem. If you take it as a boost on top of existing capabilities then it is a pure win. In practice it can be hard to parse the two scenarios. People get used to thinking that something is available and it turns out that it was always leverage against them.
All meaningful research on SM is highly gatekept by the industry. There is plenty of evidence from whistleblowers that internal assessments were that the services were causing harm.
Plenty of researchers study and publish on the topic of social media. You’re conflating internal processes/experiments where Meta was very likely damaging people with public research.
Do you have teenage kids? It feels highly urgent to me because the generation of kids aged 12-21 are severely impacted by the harms and cultural distortion these services cause. I think it would be hard to imagine their hold on this generation and the impact without first hand observation.
I'd argue that any teenagers who go from having access today to not having it tomorrow are probably not going to magically become different in the ways you desire; it seems a lot more likely to have effects on kids who are younger and haven't already been influenced by it, but at that point we're actually talking about trying to make a structural changes to make things different in the long term. That type of thing seems very strange to enact by making a blanket regulation on the supposed victims of the harms than on the perpetrators of it.
Think of it like current kids being bombarded by cancer-causing radiation. The sooner you get them out of it the better. Yes, it is better still to never have been exposed, but the second best time to stop it is now.
If you think the big social media companies are literally bombarding kids with radiation, I'm confused why you still don't seem to consider it at least as urgent to shut down the radiation-generating companies.
That's basically the point I was trying to make with my initial response; I think any claim that something is so urgent that we need to act now even with a solution that everyone admits isn't great should be scrutinized pretty thoroughly, because historically calls like this are at least as likely to be a way of manufacturing consent as they are to actually be some emergency, especially when the emergency apparently is not clear enough without needing a lot of explanation.
Peer pressure is one thing. The entire commercial might of the US tech and cultural industry is harder to resist. It’s not fair to put responsibility on children to have willpower in their use of SM when thousands of PHds are actively researching how to make the services more addictive and increase their network effects.
It would appear that is exactly what is being proposed : to not place that responsibility on the children, but for the parents and other adults to shoulder that burden by not allowing the children to become victims of the addictive Social Media empire.
Vaccination has a very reasonable public health argument, even ignoring the fact that it has been massively eroded, and comparing vaccination to social media is disingenuous.
If Timmy is on Instagram, John’s health isn’t at risk. If Timmy comes to school with measles, John’s health is at risk, and vaccination has been shown to reduce the risk to both Timmy and John.
The point that HN libertarians miss is that the whole point of social networks is that they benefit from network effects. This is what makes them profitable. But it’s also what makes it necessary to subject them to democratic accountability and makes them a legitimate target of public policy.
If my teenagers entire peer groups spends 90% of their waking life on addictive social networks and a ‘normal’ social life is impossible without it then the parent is faced with a Hobsons choice. It’s easy enough to band my 10 year old from social networks. It’s much more complex doing that to 14 year olds and potentially does have negative effects for them unless their friends are similarly limited. This is why we need regulation.
One obvious solution is of course to break these companies up. Set a maximum user count that a communication network operator is allowed to have before we break them up (say, 10M). Require some kind of good-faith open federation for any communication provider over a certain size (e.g. if a user adds a user from another provider as a friend/contact/follow, you must allow that and cannot claim you are "blocking spam" or something to act as a gatekeeper).
Then your friends could use the evil instance, you could talk to them on it through your good one as a federating relay (e.g. yours might operate on a friend whitelist), but the parent could otherwise block access to the wider content pool and ad-filled addictive UI of the evil instances.
This would actually work well for ISPs and phone companies too while we're at it. And email providers. Actually a statutory maximum size (customers, revenue, etc.) could make sense for companies in general, probably. Revenue above 0.1% of GDP? Breakup.
If your 14yo spends 90% of their waking life on any device it should be pretty obvious for a parent. If you let your kid spend that much time on a phone, then any government ban in place isn't going to do what you think it will.
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