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I'm saying that there's at least one person in this thread that would vehemently disagree with you. I'll go further here and say that I agree with them; this is super wrong.

What are some examples of what you're thinking of in terms of reasonably safe spaces?

They do it with physical spaces too. If they can't make money off of it, it's gotta go.

We bulldozed the playground and now we're very concerned about children playing in traffic.

The parallels with rape culture are insane.

I genuinely think that in the future we’re going to look back at this current era of “the internet is obviously deeply broken for everyone, and in response, we’re going to dismantle internet privacy while pretending it’s for the good of children” with deep embarrassment. Rather like Prohibition.

I think about this a lot--how many goofy flash websites I went to as a teenager that required zero socializing!

making big money is probably the biggest, yet under-discussed aspect of this

I don’t know if this is what Faine is referring to, but a good example of the now-gone kid focused spaces is Club Penguin. There were a bunch of sites like that which well predated it, and they were easy to overlook if you weren’t looking for them.

Not sure of your age, but when I first started calling BBSs circa 1989 there was absolutely nothing beyond the whims of the sysop to serve as a guard rail. I sailed the seven seas and learned to write malicious assembly language code before I was old enough for Selective Service. Lament, not a brag.

And even if the law is written so that it's the companies who allowed the kids on their platform who'll be in trouble, not the kids themselves, kids aren't necessarily going to be aware of that. They'll hear "kids are banned from social media" and think that does mean legal trouble for them. >

The shared ecosystem of a dominant social media is great for a lot of network reasons, but at that point they must be recognized as infrastructural monopolies and regulated to hell.

Because of COPPA!

Which ones are you thinking of? MySpace? Usenet?

The philosophy of "every product must scale globally and be as close to universally appealing and accepting as can be made profitable" is antithetical to building safe spaces for children. Those two things are fundamentally incompatible goals.

Hmmmmmm......

Clearly this is a very dumb excuse to convince rubes to sign off on putting internet anonymity to death once and for all. Often via lobbied politicians who might even be epstein pals. You know. To protect the kids. Jfc..

There is a lot to unpack in this statement. Why aren't there baseline product safety standards for social media products? Why hasn't the method of proving your identity changed in decades? Should governments be running digitally native sources of truth for identity? Can they?

when the school of Something Awful looks like a good alternative you know things are bad

They are like robbers dressed up as cops telling you to hand over your all your valuables so they can keep then safe for you* (*This is a documented in-person crime to prey on old people).

While simultaneously telling us that it's vitally important that kids learn to use AI, which has been known to talk them into murder or suicide. A confederacy of evil dunces.