Yes. And when the "think of the children" lie has run its course, they will just continue with one of the other horsemen: [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

These are malicious people, plain and simple. They want everybody monitored and dislike anybody having freedoms. And they will stop short of nothing to get there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse

Completely removing internet anonymity. There was just a story of some dumb racist commenting on a black woman's Facebook and since Facebook has real names she tracked them down and drove to his place of work.

Now it's all well and good for some racist asshole, although that's a really dumb thing to do this since you never know if he has a gun, but increasingly internet anonymity is the only thing we've got to push back

When that piece of shit Charlie Kirk died multiple people lost their jobs for doing

Age verification should be handled with an anonymized digital token. One party verifies the age, the other uses the token to create the account. Both can't be owned by the same company. Neither is government. Unless that can be solved cryptographically, because a nationalized method would be simpler and more cost effective if there was already some sort of national digital ID. Regardless, I think age verification can be done relatively anonymously.

I've never looked but does Reddit actually push feeds on you? ie: Does it track your account behaviour and then make suggestions?

Without the tracking and suggestions it's not using the terrible behaviour that places like Facebook use. Hell even Ebay does that. I deleted my account the same day I created it because Ebay's behaviour changed the moment I signed up.

Reddit is a cesspool of propaganda, authoritarianism, groupthink and, now, tons of LLM bots. It lost any credibility it had a decade ago. Still, I am very against these types of laws. In the UK, they have destroyed all small sites and forums. They are not about protecting children and teens. Is social media bad for teens? It's BAD FOR ADULTS! The algorithmic ranking system is always a massive danger and social media in-general gives people a false sense of relevance.

Small fourms, boards and things like A

I'm inclined to agree with you here. I think we're just now seeing some of the downsides of Social Media, and children do not need to be a part of it.

So here's the thing: I think most websites can tell whether their content is "safe" or not, even given the varied desires of parents. And it'd take all of thirty seconds for the W3C to come up with a standardized way of indicating whether a page is intended to be adult or not. And it'd take all of an hour for Google to add something to Blink to respect a preference set somewhere, password protected of course, as to whether to show adult pages or not.

Most of the arguments would be "But can we guarantee that

They might just want adults to speak more freely because it's good for revenue - which won't happen if they don't feel they have legally protected anonymity. That doesn't mean they are necessarily after just increasing their user count of minors. I'm not entirely on their side but I think it's worth letting them speak and supporting the good in what they say.

I've heard people say, "well kids can get accounts elsewhere and view porn." Look, you have to lead by example. If you're a parent and don't want your kids watching porn, you get a router that does some blocking. It won't get all of it, but you don't allow yourself a bypass either. Explain to you kids, "I know porn is tempting. I think it's wrong and I know it's wrong and try not to watch it." Yes they can still watch it if they want to, but you've let your values be known and they will either share them or

> frowning at the camera

Well this is pretty sad. Not because the teens get past it, but because whatever AI trained on the data decides that adults are generally unhappy.

Reddit is a microcosm. You might as well ban the Internet. Or come up with a real plan that allows nuance, like partial access. We're at the point where AI and LLMs aren't great but they can do basic classifying at a level that should be sufficient to just gate the material that should be gated.

Reddit is totally social media. Also, a message board is social media. Reddit has avatars and you can self post. The site is mostly videos and pictures and memes. And endlessly punny comments. I would relate it less to usenet and more like a email that has been forwarded way too many times.