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The Internet and the courts: One step forward, one step back
Two recent US decisions just happened related to the Internet, one I think is good and the other, not so much.
First up, we have Cox v. Sony, decided by SCOTUS. Sony sued Cox (an ISP) for alleged contributory copyright infringement merely for providing Internet services to people who infringed their copyrights. The jury found in favor of Sony, and ruled that Cox had in fact contributed to copyright infringement just by providing Internet access. If not overturned, this would have been a troubling precedent to set since the liability for copyright infringement would have expanded massively, forcing ISPs to clamp down even more on their users, potentially leading to (even more) mass surveillance.
Thankfully, SCOTUS reversed the lower courts and found in favor of Cox, ruling that a service provider is only liable for contributory copyright infringement if the service induced or was specifically tailored for such infringement. Since Cox did not do either in any way, it is not liable.
Second, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Youtube liable for the plaintiff's social media addiction that developed during her childhood. Her lawyers said that design features like infinite feeds, autoplay, and notifications were a substantial factor in causing her harm, while the defendants pointed to her turbulent home life and that none of her therapists identified social media as the cause of her mental health. And I also would sooner find her parents more responsible for letting her be on screens all day than the social media platforms themselves.
Regardless, a decision like this one is sure to accelerate the trend of requiring "age verification" (doxing yourself) to use anything on the Internet. The laws and courts are increasingly taking the position that the optimal number of minors on the Internet is zero. After all, everyone keeps getting sued for having underage users, but no one's getting sued for the inevitable data breaches that will happen when there's databases of people's dox floating around. If you don't want to lose tons of money in lawsuits, forcing people to dox themselves seems like the safer bet.
California has introduced age verification for all operating systems, and yes, this includes all Linux distributions, and yes, some of them are actually going to implement it. Brazil has also passed an age verification law. Apple has already implemented age verification, at least in the UK. I'm not aware of a jurisdiction that has taken a clear and unambiguous stance that doxing yourself to use the Internet is a horribly massive invasion of privacy, only jurisdictions that haven't taken a pro-doxing stance yet. Sure, some age verification laws, like Louisiana's, will get struck down for being unconstitutional, but like gun control laws, these cases will take months to work their way through the courts, and they will probably slightly tweak their laws to be juuuust different enough that any cases challenging it will have to start from scratch every single time.
It used to be that society expected parents to watch their children and monitor their Internet usage. But by and large, parents seem to have abdicated that responsibility, and as a consequence, the responsibility has shifted to the government, who have shifted it to Internet platforms, who have now shifted it to the entire rest of society, diminishing everyone's freedom in the name of protecting children. I think the biggest and cruelest irony is that, like gun control, none of this effort will do anything to actually protect children.
The fucking problem with this shit is even if you don't let your kids have a smartphone with social media apps, if you send them to school, every single friend of theirs does and they use these social apps to communicate and bond and if your kid is the weirdo without one they feel unable to function socially and hate you every day for restricting them.
I have an extremely hard time keeping this stuff away from my kid even though we're homeschooling. He does an online piano course from his tablet sitting above his keyboard. The course web site embeds YouTube video content. He's repeatedly had trouble just sticking to the course and I've had to ratchet up parental controls to the point where each video he watches has to be approved by me now. They just won't let you program YouTube to say "only show and allow this kid this piano guy's channel", nothing else
I'm on the third parental control regime at this point. Next thing to try is to replace his tablet with a locked down laptop where he can only run a pre installed web browser that force enables a vibe coded extension.
Kids have hated their parents for placing restrictions for their own good since time immemorial. Doesn't make it ok to give up though (to be clear: I'm not accusing you of giving up, just that many parents do seem to give up these days). If social media truly is tantamount to doing drugs in terms of the harm it causes kids (as I've seen alleged), then even being a complete social outcast is less bad for the kid than being on social media.
I disagree a lot.
Two ideas:
I saw a study recently that claimed that it's quite literally healthier to be a pack a day smoker with an active social life than a wellness guru who has no friends.
my parents did this to me as a child/teenager (now ~20 years ago, yikes!). Even back then, not having a blackberry/dumb cellphone was rapidly causing social issues as adoption pumped. And finally at the end of grade 9 my parents, realizing this, started listening to my pleading and got me a phone.
Would I be better off if I AND ALL MY PEERS never interacted with the Internet or social media until age 18 or 25? Sure.
Was I better off after I got a phone, so I could stop being "that guy with no phone" amongst my peers? 1,000%. Being othered is no joke, especially for kids/teens who are WAY more sensitive to this.
I mean define “better”, because I’m generally social media negative and I don’t see it making life better in any sense that I can consider “the good life” as it existed in the before times. Kids don’t seem to spend as much time really socializing offline, playing pickup games, having healthy hobbies, and so on. Even adults, a lot of times they don’t spend time talking to other adults in work downtime, they are generally in their phones doing some form of social media or games. How is that a better life? How is a loneliness epidemic good for American society? How is it good for kids or adults to get less exercise, spend less time socializing, etc?
To me the good life is one that’s fairly simple and balanced. A person should be spending time with others, spend time being active, have creative hobbies, and have a good enough job to live on. The phone seems to eat most of the non-working hours for a good number of people around me.
I agree with everything you said
The ideal solution is we RETVRN and tech is a side enabler of what you described, and screen time is much lower across the board.
But that requires collective action and minimal defection (especially in the context of kids and teens).
100 teenagers with no social media all doing 1990s activities (spraypainting the train tracks? Whatever) are clearly all better off
100 teenagers all addicted to social media? Clearly worse off than the above group.
95 teenagers addicted to social media, and 5 teenagers who aren't allowed on social media and are thus cut out from participating in many shared experiences with their peers? Of all three scenarios, those 5 teens are by far the worst off.
I can look for it later, but teenagers literally say this. They wish they could leave social media but because the supermajority of their friends and peers do not, they are stuck participating, lest they be left behind socially.
I think this is true, and honestly I think the best thing is to simply pick a level of technology use that fits. I mean honestly other than this place and I’m trying to learn to blog, I mostly limit my internet to radio and podcasts. It’s actually an improvement over indiscriminate of the internet. And it started from reading about live in the 1940s and following a few video blogs about people trying to live life for a week or a month as if it were 1942 (in Britain). I tried it out because I thought I was using the internet too much, and tbh it is an interesting experiment because it has improved my life in ways I didn’t expect.
If you don’t want that, I suppose you could go more modern. But even simple things like having one TV and one tower style computer where you do all the internet stuff and keep it in a public place in the home would probably work. It’s what happened in 1990. It was pretty good.
If anyone here wants the complete story I’d be willing to do an effort post on the experience and the things that it changed.
I remember hearing about this!
I read and enjoy basically every effort post on this site. So very interested
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