Am I missing something obvious here? What is motivating such stringent measures to be put in place when things have been sufficient without them thus far? Who is asking for this?
I live in my own little online echo chambers, but even I can't believe there's enough ground swell for the government to step in on ... What? Violence? Addiction? This is very confusing.
Anti-LGBTQ+ people have shifted (back, this isn't new) to arguing that any exposure to anybody or anything that isn't completely hetero-normative, to be "child abuse". The internet is one of the few things many children in particularly backwards states (looking at you Florida and Texas) still have that can show them the truth/reality about gender and sexuality. So naturally, conservatives are desperately looking for ways to stop that.
Meanwhile, the blatant, real sexual abuse and grooming of children is mainly happening in the church and in the home. There's a reason these parents don't want their children understanding the very very basics of sexuality, their bodies, and what is right/wrong when it comes to adults touching them. And it ain't because they care about their wellbeing.
A kid can't rat you out if they don't know the word for what you're doing, or that it's even wrong in the first place. How convenient for them.
This is exactly it right here. It's part of the continuing effort to eradicate queer people from public life and to ban any and all discussion of topics that aren't strictly cishet.
It’s kind of hard to believe that all people trying to censor LGBTQ+ and basic sex ed are doing it with the nefarious intent of making sure child abuse is easier. I do not assume my garden-variety homophobe who wants it censored in schools as well as basic sex ed is also a pedophile. It’s part of it for some of them, yes. But for the rest, it’s just that most won’t care that deprivation of sex ed also means making it harder to report pedophiles, because they think learning the truth about sex is a more dangerous and realistic harm because something something degenerate lifestyle. And they might also blame a child victim for being too sexual, because bad things only happen to bad people so of course the child did something to bring it on themselves, and of course their child would never do something like that so no need to worry about pedophilia. But they’re not pedophiles themselves.
It may not be the knowing intention of all of the "normal" people, but it is (one of) the intentions of the politicians, pundits, talking heads, etc. that those people listen to and parrot.
It’s kind of hard to believe that all people trying to censor LGBTQ+ [...]
See, that's the thing, these are humans just existing.
We have a word for "censoring" groups of humans for simply existing. That's called genocide.
So what you're doing (not necessarily you, people in general), excusing the "garden variety" bigot, is reminiscent of what was seen with the Nazis after ww2. Did every German nationalist, and member of the Nazi party, personally commit acts of genocide? Or were they just part of a bigger machine, and their "garden variety" hatred for Jews was unrelated to what was actually happening to them (and other marginalized groups)?
Turns out, when it comes to genocide, you don't get off scot free just because you didn't personally pull the lever to start up the gas chamber.
Personally, I find it very easily believe that the kind of deplorable trash that supports genocide and genocide-enabling policies are also big supporters of child rape. They've already proven themselves to be horrible people after all. Could be that the dim-witted followers aren't all about that lifestyle, but the ones spearheading it certainly are.
And let us not forget that these are the same people who elected America's first child rapist president. When somebody tells you who they are, believe them the first time.
I was mostly thinking about the followers and not leadership. It’s also difficult for me to imagine so many people being pedophiles concentrated in one area if that area isn’t some awful forum full of CP.
Ah well, I think we can all agree that a politician is attempting to pass damaging laws that will make it easier for everyone, including the children the laws are supposedly intended to protect, to come to harm is a very bad thing. This is true regardless of whether the politician wants to personally rape children or finds it repulsive.
I mean they can make up as many bullshit justifications as they want, but what they're doing is abuse and they're trying to make it easier to do. ~Strawberry
I agree with this because the end result is harm, I just don’t agree that everyone is getting into this with the specific intent of making pedophilia easier. That sounds conspiracy-level and far-fetched to me. I also don’t really keep up to date with news because of how rage-baity it is these days, so it’s possible most of the politicians supporting this movement have been caught abusing children sexually and I just have no idea about it. I will always reject the idea that all the ground-level supporters are all pedophiles, that’s way too many people being pedophiles when the highest estimate I’m aware of is 5% of the population.
Even getting into this conversation was a huge mistake for me—notice how I keep replying on what is essentially a politically charged topic. I wrote some messages and ultimately chose not to send them for fear of getting into a big argument.
I oppose these people too because the end result is harm, by the way. Same end result of children coming to harms, including sexual harms, regardless of peoples’ motives in getting into this. I’m just not for saying “they’re all pedos.”
I don't mean pedophilia specifically. I mean the sort of people who think screaming at and hitting their kids is discipline for some reason as well, or the sort of people who deliberately deny necessary healthcare and education to their trans kid, etc. ~Strawberry
Oh you know the usual "think of the children" disguise to pass something intrusive.
Okay, so this isn't a new law or regulation. This is the ESRB and a couple companies requesting approval for a new method of providing verifiable parental consent to be acceptable to use for the purpose of satisfying COPPA's existing requirements. From what I can find, the current approved methods of verifying parental consent appear to be:
submitting a signed form or a credit card
talking to trained personnel via a toll-free number or video chat
answering a series of knowledge-based challenge questions
Instead this would be handing the device to a parent, they snap a selfie and it gets analyzed for age estimation to determine if the person providing parental consent is an adult.
Good or bad, too invasive, idk, not really making a judgement there myself. I'd imagine the companies want this so they don't have to have as many trained personnel and it's probably less likely to be a barrier to consent as compared to putting in a credit card, talking to someone, or answering whatever knowledge-based challenges they use.
Last I heard, computers couldn't reliably identify black people as human, so this is going to piss off a lot of people.
Anyway, please tell me my hypothetical child and I won't be subjected to this insanity unless I opt in.
Yes I'm sure it'll be plagued by technical problems, and obviously the privacy implications.
As for opting in -- that depends on whether this is approved as a method and then who adopts it and whatever they decide. Unless they're brain dead there will need to be a process for failures, so that could conceivably apply to people who opt out as well
Thank you, that's good clarification on what the actual motivations are here. Was having trouble following all the threads and sussing it out myself. Appreciate it.
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