Comment on Australia says platforms like Steam and Roblox have 'significant' child safety gaps
badgermurphy@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
I fear this may be some of the same thinking that got us mandates for manufacturers to put warnings not to suffocate yourself on plastic bags.
Chozo@fedia.io 15 hours ago
I mean, child mortality from plastic bag suffocation dropped after they started printing those warnings so I'm not sure why that'd be something to fear.
badgermurphy@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
I hope, for the sake of our species, that the statistic you’re citing was a spurious correlation. It’s just this side of “water is wet”.
Chozo@fedia.io 13 hours ago
It's easy to look back at history and say "what a bunch of idiots", but it's important to remember that there was once a time when having plastic bags all around your home wasn't such a ubiquitous thing like it is today. The things that seem obvious to us now were still new and untested at one time. The rise in plastic film suffocation started around the rise of dry-cleaning; until that point, there wasn't much disposable plastic film in people's lives, at all. Society had no prior experience to learn from, in this sense.
What we're seeing here isn't too dissimilar in this regard. Up until fairly recently, the concept of a globally-connected, unmoderated network that was accessible by children and predators alike just didn't exist. That network existing in literally everybody's pockets 24 hours a day is an even newer idea. And it's not even just one network, it's in almost every facet of kids' lives these days.
We can all sit around and say "wow what a bunch of bad parents for allowing this to happen", but many of those parents didn't grow up in a world where this was a reality. While many of them grew up in a time where online predators existed, they didn't grow up in a time when those predators could interact with children directly at any time and any location. They grew up in a time when you had a PC in your room, which you didn't take with you, and that your parents could physically access; kids these days take their phone everywhere at all times, parental controls today are more useless than when we were kids, and it's trivially easy for kids to hide their online presence from their parents now. Today's parents, by and large, just simply do not have the experience needed to address this on a large scale.
The morbid reality is that the only reason it seems obvious not to let children play with plastic bags is because nearly every single plastic bag you've ever seen in your entire life says "this bag is not a toy". You grew up in a world where that problem had already been solved, and at the cost of dozens of dead children.
This is not yet a solved problem.
badgermurphy@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Look, I get it. Warning labels prevent avoidable deaths, and rules like the ones mandating the labeling on the bags are written in someone’s blood.
That said, there are billions of us at this point, and there were over a billion at the time of the example we’re using. While it may sound callous, a number like dozens against that backdrop is so statistically insignificant that we may want to see how many people might have died as a result of creating and placing millions of liters of warning ink on billions of bags and make sure that didnt have even more lethality.
The point I’m making is that some warnings and protections can be more onerous than they are helpful, and while a child dying or being harmed is tragic, reactionary response worsening conditions for everyone that is still alive can be, too. It is important to carefully measure safety and security against the harms it may cause, or you’ll end up with widespread safety bans and everyone rolling around in impermeable bubbles.
I dont know the fine details in Australia’s particular case beyond this article and maybe some others I vaguely remember, but it is wise to be very wary of villains wrapping themselves in the “save the children” flag while they strip away people’s privacy and security. I have 4 Flock cameras in my neighborhood to “protect the kids”, but all they’re protecting is the brutal social hierarchy, which kills tons of kids.