Exactly what I’m saying to the kids who argue that they can’t function without it. My generation did, and it’s easier for them having text and email, which I didn’t have until I was in my mid-teens.

Unfortunately, in some communities, that’s still impossible to do fully.

Hopefully that’ll change with time. I’d love to see another mass migration to federated platforms.

TBH, I don’t trust them any further than I can throw them. If it comes to that, I’ll use an old ID with invalid info, but thankfully I don’t use Meta but maybe once a week to check work-related DM’s.

This is a lesser of two evils thing.

Is this the same entitled bitch who got a $1,000,000 ranch as a present?

Maybe pay some fucking taxes, Phoebe.

Sure, thank you for not being a prick in your approach like everyone else.

A few reasons:

First, your private info is already out there. Either it’s hanging out on Spokeo (and you should go there, look yourself up, and request that they delete it.) or one of Google/Meta/Whatever’s servers. Thanks to the video disclosure in the Guthrie case, we know definitively that all of those cameras you have in your home and around your neighborhood are recording you and feeding the information to the government without a warrant for permanent storage. Further, providing ID is something we do for a lot of things that are appropriately age-gated already.

Secondly, and I think this is the bigger point, is the mounting evidence of detrimental effects social media is having on kids’ cognitive abilities. It affects adults too, but to a lesser extent, likely because our brains have already matured. I know schoolteachers who can’t get their kids to answer a question correctly when the answer is literally written on the dry erase board in front of them, to give one example. The other problem here is the effects on self esteem and mental health, as algorithmically-elevated content is designed to isolate, anger, and cause mental health problems, and the rise in suicide rates is evidence of that. Happy people aren’t buying every piece of shit they’re fed in their feed’s ads.

I would prefer to see the companies themselves held accountable and these algorithms made illegal, but I don’t think that will realistically happen, so age-gating via ID is, to me, the best that can be done right now, and I think it’s essential.

Could End Anonymous Internet Access for Everyone

Don’t come over here threatening me with a good time.

People get pissed at me but, as a short-term solution, I’m okay with giving up my ID in order to lock kids out. I personally think it is the lesser of two exceedingly great evils.

Ideally, there’d be federal regulation of these platforms in every country banning algorithmically-elevated content, ads, privacy violations, and holding the operators of these platforms accountable for CSAM, but I think that will take decades.

And they’ve convinced you that it’s a-okay for your kids to be using these products, in full knowledge of the harm they cause.

Absolutely.

I think this moment happens for everyone, because we don’t always realize how our behaviors affect other people negatively, but it’s a sign of growth and maturity when you hit the point where that level of empathy kicks in.

I hate living here.

Feels like Mamdani is the only politician we’ve elected in a generation who has any real power and any real intent to do lasting positive good with it.

As a working artist, can confirm.

Seeing nude people for work is less fun.

It’s a good time to be alive.

I’m just over here enjoying the fact that their reach (at least as far as we know) isn’t absolute, and they’re being forced to eat a dick, legally speaking.

Between this and the Galleri Test, there are some really exciting things happening in medical breakthroughs.

It’s just so fun having an OS that you can make work for you vs being shoehorned into things you never asked for.

Anecdotally I took paper notes all through college because it allowed me to retain knowledge without studying.

Same, though when I was studying for exams I found typing and retyping my notes to be exceedingly helpful. Not sure if it’s muscle memory or being part of the video game generation, but there’s just something between the hand/brain connection that really helped me out.

That’s so friggin’ cool. Well done!

**EDIT: The movie is ‘The Invasion’ (2007)

There was a sci-fi movie 20 years ago about an alien intelligence taking over world governments, replicating itself into human hosts via inoculations for a ‘virus’, and as the movie progresses world peace is achieved, but the protagonists fight against it over fears of losing free will.

And I’m over here like… the aliens are the bad guys?

Oh, I do.

I just don’t trust the majority to do anything meaningful themselves. It’s why recycling doesn’t work and why Democrats and Republicans keep getting elected. Our only power now is local.

As always, the cruelty is the point. As the article denotes, it really only takes a few days’ incarceration to ruin someone’s life, seeing as how most Americans are living hand-to-mouth or paycheck-to-paycheck, so it takes very little effort to achieve the cruelty that the DOJ and the fascists want.