alt Hacker News> a small fraction of kids branching off into fringe networks that are off the radar and will take them to very dark places very quickly.
I don't think this is much of an issue at all. The path of least resistance, by an overwhelmingly wide margin, is just using a proxy, TOR, or whatever else to bypass the filtering. Sites will be doing the bare minimum for legal compliance, and so it won't be particularly difficult.
Beyond that I'd also add that for those of us that were children during the early days of the internet, "we" were always one click away from just about anything you could imagine in newsgroups, IRC, and so on. It never really seems to have had much of any negative effect, let alone when contrasted against the overwhelmingly negative effect of social media.
I don't really know why that is, and I half suspect nobody really does. You can come up with lots of clever hypotheses that are all probably at least partially true, but on a fundamental level it's quite surprising how destructive 'everybody' communicating online turned out to be. And that obviously doesn't end just because somebody turns 18.
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> a small fraction of kids branching off into fringe networks that are off the radar and will take them to very dark places very quickly.
I've been grappling with this all afternoon and I still cannot determine what my stance on this.
I grew up when the internet was a bit of a wildwest, and I've definitely seen things online that I wish I never had without my consent.
But there's also a bizarre thought that mayb exposure to this isn't such a bad thing because it keeps us human, and aware of privilidge and our safety - and why that is such an important thing to think about
I'd equate it at some level to seeing the inside of the production of food and being put of eating meat, or eating anything non-organic again.
I'm not sure I would like my own children to see it, but I'm hyper aware of what conflict and crime looks like as a result.
Comparatively to social media at least I was making a choice to click on something risky or that I would not like to see rather than having a algorithm choose for me. Not sure if I am just becoming a middle-aged tech dinosaur though.,
I think one difference from how we grew up (remember bbs’es?) is that it was something in your desktop, not an omnipresent force in your pocket
The real problem is social media. Their machine learning algorithms are optimised to boost toxic content, as they result in more engagement (time spent). This is a fundamental trait of humans. Even babies look at angry faces longer than happy faces.More time spent means more advertising revenue.
It means the current generation gets exposed to a lot of toxic content all in the name of driving advertising revenue. In the olden days you could get everything, but it wasn't forced down your throat, or rather your reels.