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.
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 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
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:
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submitting a signed form or a credit card
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talking to trained personnel via a toll-free number or video chat
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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
