This decision is not unexpected. But we were prepared. Hence, we're pushing forward with @Europarl_EN ammending #StopKillingGames to the Digital Fairness Act. We can move on without the Commission and their non-decision, as @accursedfarms mentioned before: https://t.co/UqQ9AsJo4J
Okay but actually don't though. Because it can spread to non data center areas and can be very hard to get rid of. Find a very aggressive and hard to kill plant native to your area and plant those near the data centers instead.
“Adults can still access social media through age checks like facial recognition, digital IDs, passports and credit cards”
They’re not tryna hide it at all.
Instead of focusing on genuine issues in this country they are forcing digital surveillance.
Disgusting.
I’m actually a child online safety expert and was one of the pioneers in this space with Club Penguin and so I feel uniquely positioned to critique this.
The groomer problem is real but it’s also vastly overstated. The far larger issue we saw at Penguin was suicidality or reports of sexual abuse in the home.
There is no solution for lazy/bad parenting. You can implement all the ID laws you want but if parents are going to just hand kids their phones unlocked, those kids will have access to all the same things the parents have unfettered.
What I found is that these draconian safety laws actually make it harder to be an honest operator of kids apps because on one hand it’s so much legal risk and so much user friction that it simply becomes uninvestible as a business.
Parents will just lie to let their kids use the unfettered internet. For example, I have a friend who works in mobile gaming who has two kids, one above and one below the age limit but separated by just 2 yrs, and the two wanted to play and chat together on Roblox - which is reasonable. To do this, he just verified that his younger kid is old enough for the chat feature when he’s not.
This happens all the time and will happen with these laws to. How far do we want to go with this? Scan the face of the user in real-time to make sure it’s not a kid using the device? We could do that but it feels like a massive unwanted intrusion of privacy.
That’s how you know this law isn’t about kids. COPPA and GDPR-K and so forth already make it illegal to allow chat and other grooming vectors to kids.
What’s really being done here is trying to eliminate online anonymity. And this is a far bigger issue that goes to core speech rights because if you cannot criticize the govt anonymously and if wrong speech is a crime then it becomes easy to identify all the detractors of the govt in power, and ban, fine or jail them for speech crimes.
Starmer has already been doing this and he wants to do it at a much bigger scale. Starmer won’t even acknowledge the problem of actual grooming gangs in Britain’s neighborhoods but he’s worried about online grooming?
No he’s not, and this hypocrisy gives away the game. What he wants is to kill online anonymity so he can enforce censorship of his unpopular policies. No politician should have this power.
People need to pay attention to what is happening in the UK, because they started all of this age verification stuff and then forced it to the rest of the world. It's digital colonialism.
In place of A Minute of Wally (Our work load is a little large...!) I made a Tumblr blog post to say how we're doing!
Nothing too big, but you can see the full picture there! 🦋 💌 ! Thank you!!!
(Artwork by Huck!)