Australia has enacted a world-first ban on social media for users aged under 16, causing millions of children and teenagers to lose access to their accounts.
Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit, Kick, Twitch and TikTok are expected to have taken steps from Wednesday to remove accounts held by users under 16 years of age in Australia, and prevent those teens from registering new accounts.
Platforms that do not comply risk fines of up to $49.5m.
There have been some teething problems with the ban’s implementation. Guardian Australia has received several reports of those under 16 passing the facial age assurance tests, but the government has flagged it is not expecting the ban will be perfect from day one.
All listed platforms apart from X had confirmed by Tuesday they would comply with the ban. The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, said it had recently had a conversation with X about how it would comply, but the company had not communicated its policy to users.
Bluesky, an X alternative, announced on Tuesday it would also ban under-16s, despite eSafety assessing the platform as “low risk” due to its small user base of 50,000 in Australia.
Parents of children affected by the ban shared a spectrum of views on the policy. One parent told the Guardian their 15-year-old daughter was “very distressed” because “all her 14 to 15-year-old friends have been age verified as 18 by Snapchat”. Since she had been identified as under 16, they feared “her friends will keep using Snapchat to talk and organise social events and she will be left out”.
Others said the ban “can’t come quickly enough”. One parent said their daughter was “completely addicted” to social media and the ban “provides us with a support framework to keep her off these platforms”.
“The fact that teenagers occasionally find a way to have a drink doesn’t diminish the value of having a clear, national standard.”
Polling has consistently shown that two-thirds of voters support raising the minimum age for social media to 16. The opposition, including leader Sussan Ley, have recently voiced alarm about the ban, despite waving the legislation through parliament and the former Liberal leader Peter Dutton championing it.
The ban has garnered worldwide attention, with several nations indicating they will adopt a ban of their own, including Malaysia, Denmark and Norway. The European Union passed a resolution to adopt similar restrictions, while a spokesperson for the British government told Reuters it was “closely monitoring Australia’s approach to age restrictions”.
Accounts held by users under 16 must be removed on apps that include TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit, Kick, Twitch and Threads under ban
Mumble and Pigdin won't be banned right? Also, swapping mobile numbers and getting on conference calls... Writing letters and all that. There's still other ways to communicate.
I'm almost thinking of making a quick phone app to give them options and ideas on how to communicate outside of the big tech bubble.
I wonder if making your own personal website on Neocities/Geocities will come back in vogue again.
How dare you imply that a parent should educate their children? Don't you know how much they have to work hard already every single day to grow up the child no one forced them to have in the first place??
Lol ok just ask every parent who already can't manage their children's online habits to set up a pihole. I'm sure they won't have any issues with that.
PiHole is only easy to set up for us becaise we're a group of giant nerds. The average parent will think you're talking about their mouth when you say pihole.
For a social media ban to be effective without ostracizing individuals, it has to include the entire friend group.
As an analogy, if the kid's friends all text each other, but your kid doesn't have a phone, they miss out socially. They miss out on organized and impromptu hangouts. And they miss out on inside jokes that develop in the group chat. Over time they feel like more and more of an outsider even if the ready of the group actively tries to include them.
On one hand I do think social media has ruined society, and kids should definately not be on it till their brain has matured a bit, on the other hand I worry how corrupt officials could use this in their favor
because not everyone in the country is under 16. So if you're in your 40s and suddenly decide you want to start using tiktok or facebook then you have to provide proof that you're not a teenager. which means providing ID or selfies or both to whomever they use to verify your identity. Now with that info they can now build a profile about what you do online. Also the issue that what happens if this info you've provided is in a data breach. OR they simply sell it to data collection companies.
That and it's a 'social media ban' which is a pretty broad term. Depending how you define social media it could ecompase a lot of other platforms not included in the initial list i.e. Steam, Discord, etc.
This could lead to further restrictions on freedom of speech and anonymity dependent on whatever agenda the government is pushing or to try to control dissent by forcing the poplace to provide some form of ID to access any platform/access the internet.
That may be a leap too far from where we currently are, but it's an important factor to consider as it could have wider reaching consequences if left unchecked.
That being said, I think the large social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are cesspools that prey on children/teens and are designed to be addictive even for adults.
It's due to that I'm stuck on the fence a little. If anything we as a society should be looking to pressure social media companies to operate ethically.
What has happened instead is that the Australian government has basically pushed the onus on social media companies to block access to these platforms and threatened them with a fine. There's no real plan for implementation, no push for education on social media and its issues.
These laws are written deliberately broad to enable mass censorship. They don't just ban sexual material, but use vague statements like "objectionable material." Actual real-world news is being censored and kept from the eyes of teenagers. Pretty much anything on the Gaza war is considered objectionable material and inappropriate for children to learn about.
It could be used as a wedge to further attack freedom of speech or they could require ID verification for anyone and then use that info to track you and target you if they think you are against them. The nazis used the census data to find and target Jewish people because back then religion used to be recorded in it, Trump and the republicans now require people on visa to have their social media accounts public so they can target anyone who they deem "anti American" and deport them. Any law should be made with checks and balances in place keeping in mind how the worst of humanity could abuse it
Nah. It's not an age issue. It's a social media issue. This stuff is bad for everyone. If you want to protect kids from the dangers of social media, start regulating how social media works for everyone. Why is it ok to start poisoning someone's mind the minute they turn 18?
Some good silver linings here, but what everyone needs to remember here is that nobody would be supporting this at all if facebook wasn’t intentionally predatory and bad for (all) people’s brains.
If regulators in Australia had a spine they would call for an end to those practices, and now that’s infinitely harder to do
I think that's easier said than done. There are a lot of negatives associated with social media and some are easier to put restrictions on (say violent content) but I don't think we really have a good grasp of all the ways use is associated with depression for example. And wouldn't some of this still fall back to age restricted areas, kind of like with movies?
But yeah, it would be nice to see more push back on the tech companies instead of the consumers
True, but there is momentum. It's empowering other countries and that could lead to a second pass at legislation in Aus after its not so outlandish or it could lead to another country doing something better and then Aus copying after the costly validation was done by someone else. I think waiting for perfect legislation likely leads to what we've had for a while and that's even less / very little push back on tech companies
The act of promoting or curating user submitted data makes the company strictly liable for any damages done by the content.
I assume you don't mean simply providing the platform for the content to be hosted, in that case I agree this would definetly help.
The deliberate spreading of harmful false information makes the hosting company liable for damages.
This one is damn near impossible to enforce for the sole reason of the word "deliberate", the issue is that I would not support such a law without that part.
I left out the hosting part for just that reason. The company has to activately do something to gain the liability. Right now the big social media companies are deliberately prioritizing harmful information to maximize engagement and generate money.
As for enforcement hosters have had to develop protocols for removal of illegal content since the very beginning. Its still out there and can be found, but laws and mostly due diligence from hosters, makes it more difficult to find. Its the reason Lemmy is not full of illegal pics etc. The hosters are actively removing it and banning accounts that publish it.
Those protocols could be modified to include obvious misinformation bots etc. Think about the number of studies that have shown that just a few accounts are the source of the majority of harmful misinformation on social media.
Of course any reporting system needs to be protected from abuse. The DMCA takedown abusers are a great example of why this is needed.
This one is damn near impossible to enforce for the sole reason of the word "deliberate", the issue is that I would not support such a law without that part.
It would also be easily abused, especially since someone would have to take a look and check, which would already put a bottleneck in the system, and the social media site would have to take it down to check, just in case, which gives someone a way to effectively remove posts.
That kind of aligns with some actions I would love to see but I don't really see how it helps in the example I used to highlight some of the harder things to fix, depression. How does that improve the correlation between social media use and depression in teenagers? I can see it will improve from special cases like removing posts pro eating disorder content but I'm pretty confident the depression correlation goes well beyond easy to moderate content.
Also, if we presumed that some amount of horrific violence is okay for adults to choose to see and a population of people thinks its reasonable to restrict this content for people below a certain age (or swap violence for sex / nudity) then do we just decide we know better than that population, that freedom is more important, or does it fall back to age restrictions again (but gated on parts of the site)? I'm avoiding saying "government" here and going with "population of people" to try to decouple a little from some of the negatives people associate with government, especially since COVID
But yeah, holding tech companies accountable like that would be lovely to see. I suspect the cost is so large they couldn't pay so it would never happen, but I think that's because society has been ignoring their negative externalities for so long they're intrenched
The kids will move to less monitored platforms and even on things like YouTube, parental controls are now gone.
You need to have an account for parental controls to be applied to, kids aren't allowed an account, vis-a-vis, no more parental controls or monitoring for problem content.
My greedy motivation is to not interact with children on the Internet. I don't actually care what other people's children do on the Internet beyond that.
As someone that grew up with an "unmonitored" internet. I can say that it was significantly more healthy than the profit driven "keep watching" algorithm that is all of social media today.
Yeah. I saw "two girls one cup" and "lemon party". But, did I slowly have my perspective of reality changed by the 30 second videos I swiped on for hours at a time for days on end?
No, most of my time was spent learning about computers, "stealing" music, and chatting with my real life friends.
I don't think a kid today can experience that internet anymore. It's gone. But acting like "unmonitored" internet access is worse is pearl clutching and ignoring the fundamental problems the profit driven internet has created at the expense of societies mental health.
Kids will absolutely find another place to connect online in Australia. But, honestly, I think whatever that is will be healthier than the absolute brain rot that is profit driven social media.
Wow I’m shocked you have no downvotes. I totally agree but Lemmy seems to hate internet restrictions, especially porn. Don’t come for their porn. They’ll destroy you.
There is literally nothing negative about this. Children will be exposed to less internet propaganda, and forums are generally much better with fewer children. Everyone wins.
And the suicide rate of queer and other marginalized kids will skyrocket. What's a few thousand dead kids in the name of protecting the children, right?
Wasn't aware that social media keeps kids alive?...
I've seen enough stories on kids being cyber bullied into suicide that I really doubt there's enough happy inclusion on these platforms to balance that.
Let's legally require social media companies to gather even more sensitive information about their users, making them more vulnerable to identity theft in the process and isolating the most vulnerable in our society from their support networks. There is literally nothing negative about this.
Strangely enough, support networks can exist outside of social media. It's very possible to directly message friends or neighbors without being subjected to the dregs of public social media. It remains possible to get world/local news without an attached public forum.
If you're going to make a space that has content for adults and allows for free adult discussions (with all the nuance and complications that entails), then restrict it to adults only.
This is only a problem in conjuction with legislation requiring social media use (ie: as an official broadcast system, payment platform, electoral tool, etc...). If we fight that and force it to remain an opt-in disinformation platform then who cares?
As it currently stands nothing is forcing you on these platforms other than a conditioned familiarity. Even worse, there are no tech or legal protections preventing them uniquely identifying users today. Them getting an official state ID doesn't change much. More barriers to entry for a shitty surveillance and propoganda platform? Literally no downsides there.
It's a bandaid. And just like previous attempts like this all this will do is make Australian kids better at circumventing the censorship or using an alternative website. Which, honestly, is probably a positive in and of itself. I'd much rather my kid be visiting some random forum type website (like I grew up with) then the absolute brain rot that is social media algorithms.
Seeing "lemon party" posted before the mods removed it definitely fucked me up less than the slop being fed into the brains of teenagers on social media today.
That is why I think FB and others might been quietly lobbying for this solution. This way they can stll be predatory, as long as the kids pretend to be adult. Or just abuse adult users. The alternative, of not being evil, is not compatible with their business model. But it is the business model that should be banned, not socializing online by teenagers.
Tech giants are well known for lobbying against any legislation that gives them less freedoms to exploit markets and regulations of any kind that impact them - but this legislation that was targeted specifically at regulating them and removes a significant number of users - "this is suspicious, I think they might be the ones pushing it!"
There's so many people in under this post trying to turn it into anything but what it is - legislation attempting to protect kids from the harms of social media. Which, again - are well documented.
I was watching a piece on this the other day on PBS and they had some sound bites from youths they interviewed. It really hit me just how much dumber kids get as I get older. They aren't actually dumber, but my understanding about how ignorant they are just keeps getting clearer. I remember think similarly in my youth, so it's not unique to this generation, so no shade, but kids are dumb.
I'm not saying they are dumber than we were, I'm saying all kids are dumb due to ignorance. I do think that a lot of the current generation coming out is better adjusted than my generation, but they are still ignorant to the real world. The more I experience the real world the more ignorant I see that they are.
Without a doubt. Like I said, I remember having views as a teen that were bad due to lack of life experience. I can look back into my 20s and think of plenty times where I was notably better than my teenage years but now I can see I still didn't have it. It's just the nature of growing up and getting older. We all evolve and have new life experiences that highlight our previous gaps in knowledge. It was just really noticable when I was listening to the sound bites in those PBS interviews the other week and it hit me like a truck. A sad, sad truck.
I'm not convinced it happens. I sure as shit feel like an old man some days physically, but my mind ranges from juvenile 12 year old potty humour to 70 year old get off my lawn and everywhere in between. It's less often as I get older, but some days I get humbled when presented with something that I was sure was true that turns out to not be. It's best to take it in stride as a learning opportunity rather than mope about it. It's the xkcd "lucky 10000" situation.
I think that's just experience on your own part. I don't think people have really changed for thousands of years. You can go read translations of ancient accounts, and they don't really sound all that different from today, which is why Ea-Nasir is such a meme.
I'm not saying today's youth is dumber than past youth, I'm saying all youth are dumb due to ignorance, but especially when it comes to social media since that's relatively recent in the grand scheme of the world.
I'm not opposed to the idea that kids shouldn't have access to social media, but they obviously do. Their social lives are online, and their insecure little brains are going to scream that they've been kicked out of the tribe when you cut the link
The ban won't work, but will also cause a lot of damage
Like teenagers, who run off social validation, suddenly feeling like they're excluded from their society
Kids are going to kill themselves.
And far more kids are going to develop complexes that they'll never recover from
Social isolation hits the brain like physical pain. We're hardwired to feel social isolation as trauma, logic can't save you from feeling like you've been cut off from your peers
Withdrawal is an unpleasant, but necessary, part of detox.
On the other hand, I 100% agree it's going to be a shit show. Technological development has outpaced the law as long as I've been alive, and the disparity is only growing... Authorities are not equipped to provide solutions to the problems that technology has created, and continues to create.
There is precedence though. We age gate: nicotine, alcohol, gambling etc..
we shouldnt expect parents to be monitoring children 24/7. actually, as children get older they should be given freedoms, parents have the right to expect our society has some guardrails.
The guardrails already exist. Put parental controls on your kid's devices. Done, solved. Block social media sites, monitor what they're doing online. Don't go making it mandatory for everyone to give social media companies more information than they already have.
A better comparison would be "let's put a government mandated ID scanner on everyone's liquor cabinet so that their kids can't access it! Oh you don't have kids? Too bad, still need that ID scanner!"
Maybe the focus should be on a free (government funded, ideally FOSS) parental controls software suite that makes blocking social media on all major platforms (iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux) simple and easy. Promote it to parents, and get them to parent, instead of deanonymizing the internet for everyone.
The bans are for under 16s, not just 7 year olds. Parents don't control all internet activity for 15 years, at that age they are going to have some autonomy outside of the house.
I'm not sure there is a direct irl analog when it comes to controlling digital spaces, since they are personal by nature. and I think this is where the debate comes in.
Should parents be following their teenage child into every store to make sure they aren't buying alcohol?
I get the concern with providing social media companies a government ID, I certainly would never give them one! I would just not use them. But they provide net negative value in my opinion so no loss.
Parents who were also raised by social media? This isn't a new problem but it is a problem that's getting worse, I don't know if a ban is the answer but so far nobody has even suggested an effective alternative to reducing screen-time for both adults and kids.
This ban isn't supposed to solve a problem overnight, but it's supposed to influence some segment of the population to socialize, to form real communities and to hopefully grow up capable of helping their own kids not get addicted.
This is a real problem, it's widespread across the globe and many, many studies have shown the harm social media has on a huge percentage of teens.
Also, parents work. Parents sleep. You can't fucking hover over your teen night and day, you would hate that worse.
The solution is education not bans. This is crazy. Regulating social media access has some major privacy concerns, will make parents more complacent and will only cause kids to seek other more dubious means of communicating. It also places a major wall in front of the development of new social media platforms.
But what do we do about the fact that even though our knowledge, research and understanding of the problem has increased, the problem has gotten worse? Is there more that can be done on that front that you think would be effective? Genuinely asking to help me shape my opinion.
It's blooming into a larger-scale societal problem than just hoping enough people pull through, a lack of stable mental health and attention spans across large swaths of your population start to erode your society.
Fuck this Helen Lovejoy-arse shithole country. I wonder how many abused youth, marginalised teens and kids who made the mistake of being born to parents living in remote areas just lost access to their support networks. I wonder how many people are gonna have their identities stolen because of data breaches containing either documents or biometrics necessary to enforce this. And for what? So boomer politicians and their constituents aren't challenged by their well-informed children about the genocides they're facilitating at home and abroad? So the pigs in this police state have an even easier time surveiling citizens with all the identifying info websites are gathering??
Social media use by kids and teens has been demonstrated factually to cause harm to people's mental health and social lives. The sources are plenty and widespread.
I still don't know if a ban is the answer, but at least it's an attempt to address a problem. I'm curious what your answer would be to this growing problem?
I figure holding tech giants directly accountable for the specific harms they've caused would be better than punishing an entire population but unfortunately our politicians are mostly either invertebrates who are too cowardly to pick fights with foreign corporate entities (so they're useless drains of political will) or they're actively supportive of them on the grounds of being ideologically pro-business (so, evil).
They feed us their poisons (surveillance capitalism and an unhealthy information ecosystem driven by algorithmic optimisation for advertising revenue) so they can sell us their "medicines" (age gating and mandatory identification online—more data harvesting as a selling point to advertisers) while they suppress our cure (an internet by independent creators as opposed to capitalist brands)
figure holding tech giants directly accountable for the specific harms they’ve caused
I don't disagree that the entire institution is rotten and causing harm, but in terms of just socializing online, just the act of forming communities and forums and discussion groups and sharing content, the essence of what's becoming harmful, what is the right answer here? The stuff that causes a lot of the harm is just what people tend to do online, because humans broadly are not meant to substitute real social connections for whatever is happening when we scroll and type and read other people's thoughts and fantasies and depressed manifestos of strangers every day.
Even now, you're reading my text inside your head in your own voice. The act alone of having this discussion is creating an entirely new kind of information pattern in your brain that we haven't had in the last half-million years or so since our brains evolved. Do you know what this new kind of information processing is doing to your view of the world? Do any of us?
I know if you type "research teens social media health" into google you will have days of reading material about the research done and how harmful these practices are. But I'm not sensing that anyone even cares honestly. Is it better that we let whatever happens happen? I'm not being facetious, I want to know if people genuinely think that this isn't a problem worth fighting.
The stuff that causes a lot of the harm is just what people tend to do online…
The online harms I'm concerned with are bullying, harassment and misinformation. Platforms should be required by society to moderate against these, or face penalties proportionate to revenue. Instead just banning under 16s, even if it could be done in a way that is both effective and respectful of everyone's privacy (I'm not convinced that it can) would still be a lazy abrogation of this responsibility, still leaving kids vulnerable to the same behaviours in offline spaces and everyone else vulnerable to the harms purportedly being caused among the youth online currently. But the government isn't interested in this because these behaviours serve to entrench existing social hierarchies, and the government—being in charge of the nation-state—likes existing social hierarchies.
I figure holding tech giants directly accountable for the specific harms they’ve caused
What if; the social media giants are in another country. Your country doesn't have jurisdiction there and can do fuck all in reality.
Maybe fine them???? Sure, which they will fight in court until the end of time; all the while the harm continues.
I don't know if a ban will work, or what extra harms it will cause. But there are no good options to tackle this on the large scales of whole countries.
Algorithmic social media is mind cancer; if you have a better suggestion for tackling this issue. Let us know.
Lemmy is social media; but there is no algorithmic feed, my views are not being manipulated by some engagement maximizing machine.
What if; the social media giants are in another country. Your country doesn't have jurisdiction there and can do fuck all in reality.Maybe fine them???? Sure, which they will fight in court until the end of time; all the while the harm continues.
The ban proves it's possible to legislate, so maybe they should just legislate something better lol? Holding platforms accountable to a bare minimum standard of moderation against misinformation, bullying and harassment might be a starting point. And hey, if socmed's really that bad for you, then us adults could benefit from this alternative, too! In any case, this ban is literally worse than just leaving the problem be.
1/ it will show the social media companies that, Australia at least; has tools that they can use to reduce their power.
Holding platforms accountable to a bare minimum standard of moderation against misinformation, bullying and harassment might be a starting point.
This would be great; but it is also too little too late. They have tried, and failed at exactly this for years.
I don't see how both these claims can simultaneously be true. Either Australia has tools to hold these companies to account, in which case, how would they have previously failed if they'd already tried? Or it doesn't, and this is just one more completely futile policy that won't give companies any more than the usual slap on the wrist if it ever goes to court.
I argue that they didn't try, because they never actually cared about children's wellbeing, because if they did they'd have done better than this, ergo this policy isn't really about that and is actually about making citizens more easily identifiable online.
Additionally, it does nothing to reduce the power of seppo tech giants. On the contrary, they've got money, they'll be fine. Independent social media sites however, don't all have the resources to implement verification systems, so some will feel the financial burden of compliance a lot harder, and others will simply cease serving Australian users, further strengthening Silicon Valley's hold over the internet.
As I have said over and over again in this thread, what the ban will do is cut children suffering domestic abuse (a problem that is absolutely rife in this country) off from their support networks. It'll cut minority kids that're subjected to bullying by their peers off from their communities. It'll drive more kids to shadier corners of the internet where they're at greater risk of predation. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say this is going to get children killed. Furthermore—and again, as I've been repeating all over this thread—everyone—yes, that includes adults—will be required to submit personally identifiable information to private organisations just to communicate with other people online, making anyone in this country who uses social media a potential victim of identity theft the moment a data breach happens. And happen it will. It's happened before, and it'll happen again. What's more, knowing that the platforms they're using have their identities will make a great many people more hesitant to speak critically about existing power structures, especially the government. This is bad.
I stand by my previously stated opinion that all this is worse than the status quo, but even if it weren't you should be asking why this is the solution that the government came up with.
I don’t see how both these claims can simultaneously be true.
Sorry, my poor communications...I was referring to the social media companies, when I said they had been trying and failing for years. Not trying that hard mind you; moderation is a very expensive problem to solve, and they don't want to spend money they don't explicitly have to.
(it's) actually about making citizens more easily identifiable online.
Maybe. That is speculation, probably a nice little side effect. But not the primary goal.
Independent social media sites however, don’t all have the resources to implement verification systems, so some will feel the financial burden of compliance a lot harder, and others
This is a great point; and there is an easy way to solve this problem. Not that the govt will care that a simple solution exists. If you don't have an algorithmic feed a lot of the spread of misinformation is curtailed. If you are not allowed to host images/video etc directly than the moderation of them can be off loaded to 3rd parties.
What’s more, knowing that the platforms they’re using have their identities will make a great many people more hesitant to speak critically about existing power structures.
Another great point. I don't have a good answer to this one, but there are anonymous leak avenues etc for serious stuff.
I know parents who successfully regulate their kids access to social media, games, tv, movies. Pushing this regulation is not the solution. Does more damage and will only make parents more complacent.
I am mostly asking people here what they think the alternative should be. Like you say, parents who manage and monitor this are going have better outcomes... but that's not the norm, and the problem is getting worse despite all of us having more knowledge and proof how vital it is for their kids to have their internet use managed. So I am not convinced any kind of education campaign is going to do much. Most parents are just as addicted to their phones and rather scroll than parent. This is a societal problem with many intersecting problems.
The ban also affects everyone who isn't willing to undergo the age check.
Kids will find a way around is. They'll move to fediverse, and the cooler kids will still hang around the mainstream platforms thanks to their older friend, sibling or cool uncle.
It's not designed to be perfect, it's designed to influence a population towards better practices. If it even makes just 10% of young people grow up a little less alone and less asocial, it will be a success. That success can be built on and maybe in time we can push cultures in regions to not want to use social media as a substitute all the time. There is a very real effect how laws influence the attitudes of people.
It’s not designed at all. Some pearl-clutches said “won’t somebody think of the children”, and then made the social media companies figure out how to implement the ban.
The social media companies all looked at the free, government mandated access to user biometrics and complied.
Do I think that social media should be restricted for children and teens? Sure. Do I think this if going to go about as well as the 2007 porn filter that the government tried to implement? Absolutely.
Do I think that social media should be restricted for children and teens? Sure.
Okay, I agree and I am not exactly cheering for government telling anyone what they can and can't look at... but what's the alternative here? I am cautiously siding with the idea behind the regulation if not the execution, but so far nobody has suggested what we do about a problem that is real, proven and studied and is leading to a worse world.
I'm being serious here and in good faith. Should we do anything?
Am I in the wrong here for thinking we need to do something about this? Or is everyone just okay with whatever the end-result will be from subsequent generations of people growing up anxious, depressed, lacking social skills, without relationship partners? We already have "loneliness" being considered a global health risk, and it's tied directly to digital communication habits. I would ask you or anyone here to just type "research on health social media teens" in google. Just try it and see how much work has gone into studying this problem.
yeah we need to do something about it, and people seem to be trying their best to come up with bullshit arguments against it. "people will find ways around it" and then saying not to bother etc i mean, people under 18 sneak into clubs and get beer... or maybe fake an ID and hit a pub... or get an older friend to do something for them.... it doesnt stop us as a society holding a view that under age drinking isnt great, and we make some effort to enforce that even if its not perfect.
Some pearl-clutches said “won’t somebody think of the children”, and then made the social media companies figure out how to implement the ban.
Bingo.
It's never about "the children." It's a way to normalize handing over biometrics and anonymity to an assumed authority to use the internet.
It's always about control, control, control. It's about tying real identities to online activity, then it's about wholesale harvesting your secrets you didn't even know you were keeping.
Then it's yet another instrument to make sure you shut up and don't step out of line or else.
First they take us away from our kids by necessitating that entire households need full time careers to survive.
Then as a substitute for education and actual parenting we're so eager to offer up our childrens' futures in the name of "protecting" them from the inevitable consequences of parentless households.
Some pearl-clutches said “won’t somebody think of the children”, and then made the social media companies figure out how to implement the ban.
It's more than pearl-clutching though.
Kids dependency on social is a genuine social problem. Any parent that cares about their kids is deeply concerned about this.
I don't really buy the "govt access to biometrics" angle. These companies have all the biometrics they could ever want.
The ban is going to be easy to circumvent technologically, but not so much socially. At this very moment, being the evening of 10 December, families around Australia are having conversations about social media and the problems it can cause.
The Fediverse is social media. Wouldn't instances be required to do age verification? I mean, I guess that'd only be enforceable on Australian instances, but it seems like the whole world is going in that direction.
Maybe just live a happy life instead? Lemmy is an ok place, but even this is just completely unnecessary. Mankind isn't cut out for so much information and communication.
Arcades and malls have been dead for a long time. Capitalism took them away.
Everyone is missing incentive to go outside and hang out with real people, but that's only because we have an alternative that fills you up and requires less effort. Our "socializing" is junk food, it only harms you.
Maybe more young people will start doing what kids have been doing since the dawn of time, and making their own communities and their own places to hang out and play and do active things together, face-to-face.
Most malls ban unaccompanied minors. And most places where kids used to hang out similarly discourage their presence. The death of third places is a well-documented phenomenon, one that goes back decades before anyone dreamed of social media. And while kids have been forming their own communities since the dawn of time, kids haven't been raised in suburban hellscapes since the dawn of time. If you can't drive. If there's no way to your neighorhood except a giant highway that's impossible to bike on, how in the hell are kids supposed to meet up with each other in person? Digital technologies are really the only way kids have to socialize nowadays. We've taken everything else from them.
Digital technologies are really the only way kids have to socialize nowadays.
I don't disagree, but digital technologies are causing a lot of harm. I thought I would prepare for the discussion with a couple links to some suggestive studies, but there have been so many rigorous studies and scientific papers on the harm of social media on young minds that I don't even know where to start. Denying it is like denying climate change at this point.
And maybe my take is becoming radical, but I don't think we should be looking at it in terms of a youth/adult problem. There are likely far more adults addicted to the junk-food substitute that is arguing on twitter or making separate identities to fabricate ideas on message boards who have completely lost their handle on reality. Relationship rates are plummeting, people are so lonely it's being declared a health emergency.
Like, seriously... what should we do? I know the popular answer is to attack the social media companies and "regulate" them but the problem is more fundamental than advertising, it's that we're not evolved to socialize with words on screens, seeing all these thoughts and feelings and unchecked wild, emotion-provoking, short-attention-span messages isn't good for us. It may make you laugh spending an evening scrolling dumb memes, but if you do something like that every night, you're missing time that you could be spending improving your life, your health, your relationships and so on.
And replacing those evolved drives with something else, something alien to us.
As a millennial I honestly just miss how something like MySpace was basically a micro blog, and otherwise, we just chatted with friends-only programs like Yahoo! Messenger / MSN / ICQ/ whatever. There wasn't really some motive to "connect" you to a million "randos" and make you slavishly compete for their fickle approval.
Growing up in a weird kinda rural/suburb hybrid area, the Internet was my gateway to the world outside of school.
It definitely had its problems and drama, but mostly we chatted with people we actually knew (Yahoo chatrooms notwithstanding. Yikes lol) and didn't care about what was "trending" across the world. Algorithms didn't control and force perception of our reality then.
It was literally just about enabling communication.
Outside of that, there was also a much better culture of maintaining privacy and anonymity online, and that everything you see online is BS until proven otherwise.
Of course, this was before techbros decided we should use our real identity everywhere for all to see.
Nowadays it seems like every service is about using your friends as bait to connect you to some hivemind of toxic manipulation to farm you for ads. It encourages creating cults and scams and brainrot bullshit because it's all about harvesting people's already-strained attention for profit, instead of just being a communication platform.
TL;DR: I remember the Internet as a place to log in and hang out, then log off, when meeting with friends outside of school was a logistical nightmare reserved for things like birthday parties if you were lucky.
A lot of damage is already done, but I think if we obliterated the Facebooks and Instagrams and TikToks of "social media" and instead it focused on augmenting existing relationships rather than siloing people as a billion lonely socially-starved individuals in a crowd, we'd see it much differently...
Would you be in favor of nationalizing the internet in order for this to work? That is, no more commercial entities controlling access, no more media sites allowed to use algorithmic or artificially intelligent systems to influence the viewing habits of users, no more ads working their way into everything you see and do, no more sensationalized headlines and distracting video titles competing for attention because it will all be demonetized by law. (ideally, in a world of spherical, frictionless cows.)
In the US the government used to have standards and regulations for things like if a kid's show could be exclusively used to market toys, or that news stations had to follow a fair press agreement. The reason for this was all access to television had to go through airwaves, and the broadcasters for those airwaves were US government property. All broadcasters had to follow a host of rules and guidelines. This is why cable news was such a world-changing thing. Cable was privately owned.
This also has the side effect of the government controlling the news narrative, and I think we have seen enough of that.
I just don't really know if there's a good solution here, for a problem that has to have a solution or we all suffer.
Comment clearly made by someone who does not actually live in the country this discussion is about. Shopping centres are doing just fine. (To be clear, I am firmly against the ban)
They're at a time in their lives where community and free association are vital to them, and yet since they're not necessarily a profitable demographic, they're kicked out and shunned by everywhere that's not home or school, because all that's left is "commercial spaces."
People then wonder why teenagers flip off society and get up to no good, and then maybe wonder why we all turned out to be lonely adults with like maybe one long term friend if we're lucky...
In Australia we have this thing called school, all the kids go there.
I have kids at ages affected by this ban. They don't care about it at all. They already communicate with their friends via iMessage and FaceTime (both unaffected by the ban), they walk to school - so they often walk with friends. Theres a small skate park near the local shops they also walk to and hang out with friends sometimes, they also walk to the shops and practice basketball with friends at nearby ovals with practice courts regularly. They go to cinemas or big shopping centres (malls) with their friends sometimes - but have to be driven there anyway so parents have to coordinate.
TLDR: the ban doesn't affect a lot of kids at all, and they socialize more or less the same as I did when I was a kid.
The only kids heavily affected are those with Snapchat, Tiktok, Facebook and other crap that they shouldn't be on to begin with, and are getting a huge favour done to them by removing them for a few years.
They will probably increase their profits, by finding methods of marketing to kids at increased prices like the tobacco and alcohol industries have done for ages.
People with a serious criminal record. Murderers and worse. Those who leave their victims alive but scarred mentally or physically.
Then those with less serious criminal records. Fraud. White collar crimes. That sort of thing.
Then other "undesirables" depending on who isn't liked by whoever's in charge.
And then the goalposts for what's desirable will start to move.
And the scope won't just be limited to social media. Websites will be categorised further. Some might remain open access to all people (except the ever increasing list of those to be protected and those who shouldn't have access) but others? No. Those sites themselves are undesirable.
Ooh, and social credit! Maybe you'll need to earn social credit which you'll require to access some websites, with some like social media only being provided to people with a high enough social credit score! /s
The age & general cohort of who this applies to is in the legislation (under 16s). Think more about which sites/platforms it applies to. There was some indecision about YouTube (its in EDIT: yt kids is out) & but signal/whatsapp/telegram are not affected - yet.
So Australia is using facial scanning to verify age, allowing everyone else to remain anonymous? That's how it should be done.
Here in Florida MAGA HQ, I'm hearing calls to verify the identity of EVERYONE on the Internet, because that's the ONLY way they can keep the kids off. I even heard one MAGA state legislator say that it's no difference then carding people for buying alcohol. That's how we keep booze out of the hands of kids, so it will work to keep the Internet out of their hands, too.
They want to kill Internet anonymity, just as a report comes out that the DoJ wants to pay bounties to people who report "anti-Trump behavior."
This will go to the Supreme Court before we're finished.
Here in America, they want Driver's Licenses, with names and addresses. There is no good faith in this effort. They want to tie every person to their online activity, and protecting kids is just an excuse, as usual.
I mean, I am 100% pro-freedom of access and speech and all, but tbf anything that super murders social media is a net positive to the world at this point, until it's less harmful and addictive.
have a look at who proposed this change and you'll see why it's being done. it's clear as day that this isn't a win for anyone on the internet in Australia
AFAIK only big platforms are required to take measures, so it's actually the opposite of what you said. it shifts power to smaller platforms who don't have to comply with these rules.
Yeah?, are you willing to let these companies gather even more data by making it mandatory for EVERYONE to submit a face scan or ID for age verification?
Although I agree that children should not be using social media at all, banning is not the solution. It should be for the parents to let their children use social media or not and if they should be using smartphones at all. If I were a parent I would give my kid a dumb phone just to call and sms (and maybe play snake). If they were to go on a trip, I would give a smartphone without any Appstore — just a dumb phone with parental restrictions, secure messenger like Signal (even Whatsapp if needed) to allow keep in touch with us and friends and any coordinators on that trip. If they were to use social media, it would only be on a Linux PC/Laptop.
I mean there are other social activities — Sports, Reading clubs, etc. It is not as if the world didn't socialize before social media. Bullying is not a new problem. Kids should be comfortable enough with their parents to share (which social media addiction doesn't allow) that they are being bullied and not with random stranger online who doesn't give a fuck anyways.
Yeah, but at some point they will and then they'll have to deal with all of the problems without anyone to help them manage the challenges. So either you parent them now or you just set them up to fail later. Take your pick.
Pretty vague but let me make the best out of it. I'd rather prefer my kids to physically explore the world and socialize rather than forming opinions of it and the society through an echo chamber on a 6 inch screen. It is more setting up to be a better human being (if not successful) than a failure. Most of social media is nothing more than following your favorite creators. Staying in contact with your friends is as easy as asking for their number or their home address so they can actually talk and socialize — you absolutely don't need social media for it (you will only need, at most, Instant Messaging apps).
It should be for the parents to let their children use social media or not
The issue is, parents who do not want to let their children use social media have really lost the battle because every other kid is on social media. So if even if a parent stands their ground on a strict "no social" policy, their kid is an outcast.
With this law, even though some kids will still be on social, parents are empowered to hold the line.
This is exactly the purpose. I am largely against banning things but it's SOCIAL media. Parents who want to make the objectively correct decision for their child have to go up against the zeitgeist and risk complete isolation of their kids in exchange.
As long as social media's goals are commercial and have the effect of "digital cocaine", keeping kids and adolescents out of it should be the default, worldwide.
all her 14 to 15-year-old friends have been age verified as 18 by Snapchat
I love how this sentence is just casually sprinkled there. So platforms are getting $50m fines if they do not implement "age verification", but no problem if they fail to identify minors as such? Tells you everything about how they really care about protecting children.
Or, hear me out, let's not waste time developing useless and harmful surveillance technology.
None of this is required to safeguard children, and it does a bad job in its attempt - while doing a great job of scanning every user's face and documents.
Parents should be responsible, educated and empowered with tools to control their kids' activities online. Networks and mobile devices can relatively easily be configured to restrict and monitor activity, especially for young children where you might want to choose what to allow, rather than to block. There will be ways around them, but if that 1% is motivated enough and knows they shouldn't, I think that's fine.
Since she had been identified as under 16, they feared “her friends will keep using Snapchat to talk and organise social events and she will be left out”.
FFS, we all got along just fine and dandy with group-chats via text message. We weren't fucking cavemen.
The fact that this is her fear (and the fact that it's a legitimate fear) proves just how much controls like this are needed. It's literally digital crack that they think there's simply no other way to communicate anymore (both her and her friends)
"One parent said their daughter was completely addicted to social media" Well then fucking take away her phone. Get her a dumb phone. Install parental controls. Go to a therapist if yo have to. But nooooo the government has got to do everything for us incompetent fucks
One parent told the Guardian their 15-year-old daughter was “very distressed” because “all her 14 to 15-year-old friends have been age verified as 18 by Snapchat”. Since she had been identified as under 16, they feared “her friends will keep using Snapchat to talk and organise social events and she will be left out”.
I think the ban should only apply to public-facing platforms, where everybody can see your content.
Platforms where you only talk to your friends should maybe be left out of it.
I would like to say that this is good for the quality of content on social media as well..
There's less bullshit content on social media if there's fewer kids, and also there's less incentive for other people to create bullshit content for teenagers to consume, if there's fewer teenagers on the platforms in the first place.
All umami instances have been infected with a persisting crypto miner. Umami was affected by the next.js CVE but quietly released a fix, so most of their users missed it
Describe the Bug I am reporting this to confirm that a critical vulnerability in Next.js (CVE-2025-66478) led to a root-level compromise on my server, where Umami was running. I understand Umami ha...
All recently open issues are about this. I was a victim, but I'm not the first and people on reddit have done better investigations than I have. Look for the name of the process at the top
Describe the Bug I am reporting this to confirm that a critical vulnerability in Next.js (CVE-2025-66478) led to a root-level compromise on my server, where Umami was running. I understand Umami ha...
Wow I'm glad I happened to see this here. Thank you for the post. I was just thinking about putting all my services behind a VPN too, I think I'm going to go ahead and put that at the top of the list...
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has reaffimed his firm refusal to cede any territory, resisting U.S. pressure for a painful compromise with Russia as he continued to rally European support for Ukraine.
“Undoubtedly, Russia insists for us to give up territories. We, clearly, don’t want to give up anything. That’s what we are fighting for,” Zelenskyy said in a WhatsApp chat late Monday in which he answered reporters’ questions.
“Do we consider ceding any territories? According to the law we don’t have such right. According to Ukraine’s law, our constitution, international law, and to be frank, we don’t have a moral right either.”
And they act in their self interest, so it's basically a dice roll. Oh, also, Russia controls USA, and USA controls the world, so I'm kind of hunkering down and trying to find an AK at this point.
Far from it. A lot of people in Europe are brainwashed by Russian propaganda, even more people are not doing that great and will not sacrifice anything to help Ukraine. In many countries the right is either in power or very close to getting it. Each government is very carefully calculating how to keep the war going without losing the next elections. I think European troops should have been providing air defense to western Ukraine from the very beginning of the war but half or most of the people (depending on the country) don't support sending any troops there.
The European people really shouldn't want to use their own military anyway. Much better to just continue being America's bitch (as America, and everyone else, slides into fascism.)
What if the vast majority of Ukrainians had an interest in ending the war via negotiations, or even to cede land? Would you still stand with Ukrainians?
Yes. If the people of Ukraine are done with the vicious pounding they are giving Russia, its leaders and their already terrible image, it’s up to them to decide that. You have no saying in that. Nor made up statistics and lies about Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.
More than three years into the war, Ukrainians’ support for continuing to fight until victory has hit a new low. In Gallup’s most recent poll of Ukraine — conducted in early July — 69% say they favor a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible, compared with 24% who support continuing to fight until victory.
This marks a nearly complete reversal from public opinion in 2022, when 73% favored Ukraine fighting until victory and 22% preferred that Ukraine seek a negotiated end as soon as possible.
What is Ukrainian leadership doing to understand the hopes of average Ukrainians - regarding an end to this war?
A negotiation typically ends when both parties get what they want. Maybe they don't get everything they want, but they are happy enough with the results to accept the terms.
Capitulation is not negotiating, it's literally giving up many concessions for nothing in return.
Keep in mind that Ukraine was tricked once already with the Crimean war peace deal that saw them give up territory. Russia invaded again and the U.S. turned a blind eye to their aggression for a second time despite repeated promises of security.
You would have to be an idiot to take any deal that gives up territory at this point. That's not a negotiation, it's just surrender. It's kicking the can down the road to give Russia time to recoup their losses and invade again in a few more years.
The United States has proven to be an unreliable ally in the best of times, so why would they accept a peace deal brokered by a pedophile conman?
A negotiation typically ends when both parties get what they want.
This is unlike any negotiation I've ever been in. Id say a negotiation ends when both parties agree on what they wont get. Your negotiation with the used car salesman doesn't end when you get half off sticker price and the salesman gets sticker price. That's just a contradiction.
Regardless... call it what you want: surrender, capitulation, conceding territory, etc... it's just semantics.
Suppose the Ukrainian people wish to surrender. Would you still stand with them?
Your negotiation with the used car salesman doesn’t end when you get half off sticker price and the salesman gets sticker price. That’s just a contradiction.
What kind of idiotic analogy is this? I can't even wrap my head around it.
Regardless… called it what you want: surrender, capitulation, conceding territory, etc… it’s just semantics.
No, it's really not just "semantics". Words have specific meaning.
I completely believe that the majority of Ukrainians want a negotiated end to the war. War sucks and everybody who has had to live trough one will tell you so. But if the "negotiation" is Russia saying "Give us all the territory we have occupied/seized so far, plus some additional territory that we have not yet occupied, and we will withdraw our troops." that's not a negotiation. That's conditional surrender. I really doubt that the people are clamoring to surrender their land and homes to Russian occupiers.
Suppose the Ukrainian people wish to surrender. Would you still stand with them?
I suspect that no matter what I think the Ukrainian people should do, if they decide that they are ready to give up the fight, then that's none of my business. I'm not in the trenches with a rifle, after all.
But if they Ukrainian people want to continue to fight, and negotiate for a favorable peace agreement, I'm all for supporting them so that they can win and make all the bloodshed so far worth it.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that Zelenskyy has a better grasp of the pulse of his own citizens than any of us do.
if they decide that they are ready to give up the fight, then that's none of my business
But if they Ukrainian people want to continue to fight, [...] I'm all for supporting them
Thats some precise and deliberate language you're using. Yet you've still avoided answering the simple question.
Sending tens of thousands of Ukrainians into the grinder?
"Hell yeah! Slava Ukraini! To the last man!
Ukrainians use their agency to negotiate an end to the war
"Meh, not my business"
It's pretty clear that when this war most likely ends via negotiation and a land concession, all the gung ho support we see in threads like this one is going to evaporate.
lmao, bro, I can't force them to fight. I'm just a guy on the other end of the computer. I think you don't understand what the word "support" means.
I support Ukraine's right to independence and freedom.
I support the cessation of hostilities in the region.
I do not support surrender to Russia. Why would I? Choosing to fight and choosing not to fight are two diametrically opposed concepts. Therefore, I do not support a resolution in which Ukraine gives up land to Russia, period.
It’s pretty clear that when this war most likely ends via negotiation and a land concession,
Don't hold your breath on this one, Chief.
all the gung ho support we see in threads like this one is going to evaporate.
Wow, what a stunning prediction. Next are you going to predict that the sun will come back up again after it goes down?
Regardless of how the war ends, the support generally ends with it. That's how thing things tend to work. it's pretty hard to care about a think when the thing is no longer happening. If Ukraine achieved victory through martial victory alone and ended the war purely on their terms, my support would also evaporate because the war would be over.
I do not support a resolution in which Ukraine gives up land to Russia, period.
Well thank you for finally giving up on the evasiveness. Ukrainian agency means nothing to you.
To stand with Ukraine means to affirm the average Ukrainian's agency. To affirm their agency to dictate the terms of the end of the war - even if it means they wish to surrender. You will not affirm Ukrainians if they decide to surrender, so you dont stand with Ukraine. You stand with Zelensky, at best. You stand with Ukraine *so long as they promise to sacrifice the last able-bodied soldier, at worst.
So let's just all be clear and understand that you dont stand with Ukraine. You tentatively condone them, so long as...
I don't think anyone is questioning whether Ukrainians want the war to end. Of course the majority want the war to end as soon as possible. However, when asked specifically about territorial concessions the majority of Ukrainians are not willing to accept concessions. Source.
Maybe the Ukrainian leadership knows more about what the average Ukrainian wants than you do?
However, when asked specifically about territorial concessions the majority of Ukrainians are not willing to accept concessions.
And never did I argue the opposite. The question was: supposing Ukrainians wish to concede territory, would you still support them?
Maybe the Ukrainian leadership knows more about what the average Ukrainian wants than you do?
Potentially, but given your own source, a solid portion of Ukrainians dont share those warm and fuzzies.
As of December 2024, 52% of Ukrainians trusted President V. Zelenskyi, 39% did not trust him. The remaining 9% responded that they could not decide on their attitude. Although trust indicators have worsened over the year, the balance of trust-distrust remains positive – +13%.
And never did I argue the opposite. The question was: supposing Ukrainians wish to concede territory, would you still support them?
If you never argued the opposite what's the point of you question? Or do you just like to ask about unfounded hypotheticals?
Potentially, but given your own source, a solid portion of Ukrainians dont share those warm and fuzzies.
Am I supposed to believe you purely coincidentally happened upon the lowest trust poll? How about we look at the latest data of the same poll. Turns out a big majority of Ukrainians do trust Zelenskyy.
What if you let an HIV infected man-gorilla fuck your mom, just once in a while though, so he'll stop beating her every day. Seems like it'd be in everyone's best interest yeah?
I fully agree on the ethics and morals of it, but I also believe that Zelenskyy isn't unaware of the larger situation here and has good reason to put down his foot.
In the end this is also going to be a litmus test for Russia's Hybrid Warfare. Let it not succeed.
I hope the powers that be act accordingly before Ukrainians had enough of being pummeled. Well, I think they already had enough, but before it gets so bad that nothing will keep them fighting anymore.
I even think the headline is a little offensive, acting as if ceding land is even an option. They ceded land to Russia a decade ago and they're still getting attacked. WW2 should have taught us that you can't appease guys like Putin and Hitler.
It was stolen and they absolutely fought for it. They just didn't have the backing of its allies, and didn't have the equipment they have now. Ukraine was still being forced to not really have a military during that time as well
Long as he is able to, thats great. If, as I am suspecting, the jUS and Russia write up a false document essentially giving Russia what it wants without Zelenskyy's input or acceptance things might accelerate into direct conflict with nato
Tags are designed for clarity in general but also for neurodivergents specifically. While I can tell that you were being sarcastic, it's possible that others may have been unable to tell.
I'm not saying that you should have put a tag on your comment, but insulting those for whom it would have been helpful is uncalled for.
Are you speaking as someone that struggles with this or are you speaking on behalf of a hypothetical neurodivergent person?
I would have thought it was implied that my comment was directed at neurotypical people (insulting neurodivergent people for social interaction issues? Is that what you assume of me?).
I am autistic and sometimes struggle to understand indirect statements (especially when not in-person, since there's no tone or expressions to read). I did understand your original comment, but even now I don't see why the second comment should be understood to exclude neurodivergent people. I'm speaking both for myself and for anyone similar to past-me who would have genuinely felt insulted but not said anything.
This doesn't say anything about you, but yes I did assume that a stranger on the internet would insult ND people for social interaction issues. I did just join Lemmy though, so maybe that's an old habit that doesn't apply here. I am glad that I was wrong.
I'm a long way from fully versed in the intricate power plays involved here etc etc, but I'm amazed Russia didnt roll over them, and I'm pretty appalled that the world didnt rally behind Ukraine.
Perun has pretty good videos explaining why, and a big reason is that Ukraine had a very good amount of AA as a former Soviet state and it was enough to keep planes out and they didn't want to send conscripts for political reasons so they sent armored vehicles without a full infantry complement which led to them being easy to pick off with the flood of atgms NATO sent.
I think certain Russians were afraid to tell Putin that the military wasn't ready. They also didn't seem to anticipate Javelin missiles or unified Western support. The US learned a few times that invading a country with the goal of taking over the government isn't always so easy.
Didn't seem like the Russians were adequately trained. Unsupported tanks rolling down urban streets with hundreds of windows overheard from which should-fired missiles could rain down. Putin has sent hundreds of thousands of his own people to the slaughter. Dude fucked up.
Everyone in any position of authority in Russia is on the take. This means that the capabilities of the Russian military is purely theoretical, on paper Russia is a formidable force, on paper.
They sent troops in without equipment, without ammunition, and without supplies. Not because they didn't think they would need ammunition and food but because someone nicked them all back in 08 and everyone in the military is too scared of Putin to tell him this. Probably because they were the ones that took some of it.
Meanwhile, I'm eagerly waiting for the local Tankie to, once again, explain how so much death is justified by the dire threat Ukraine poses to a 17 million square kilometer country with 5,459 nuclear warheads. And, apparently, to their own people. I'm sure NATO is still making them do it, yep.
It's a bit narrow to just write off opposing views as "Tankies."
The vast majority of the world sees the Ukraine war as a conflict between white people. Their big objection has nothing to do with Ukrain vs Russia, it's about the attention paid to a European conflict vs all the others around the world. Many nations notice that while Western nations have never been willing to harm their own economies to end conflicts around the world, those same nations are now asking a bunch of 3rd world countries to support our economic sanctions.
Then there's a whole contingent of people who believe that "supporting Ukraine" is a meaningless platitude without a realistic plan for how to do it. Every sober analysis of the war concludes that it's essentially a war of attrition. There are very few experts who believe that there is any chance that any sort of breakthrough tactic or technology will easily get Ukraine's territory back. We know the math behind that; the rate of movement of the front is primarily determined by the number of people and ordinance you throw at the fight. Russia does significantly more of both. That's been the case for the entire war so far and all signs suggest that it will continue to be the case.
You can go look up the movement of the front over the course of the war. To even out the numbers, we'd have to roughly triple the number of shells we send to the front (ignoring troops for now). That would likely bring the war to a stand still. To start reversing the movement at the same rate we'd likely have to triple it again. So cocktail napkin math says that if we actually want to revert back to pre-invasion borders, we'd have to increase expenditures by around 10x and sustain that for the next 3 years.
Not going to get into logistical analysis (I am behind on that). Nor will I dispute the hypocrisy of focusing only on a "white war." That's fair.
But I'm fervent that the justification for Russia's action is total baloney. I can, and absolutely will, write it off.
To put it another way: even if Mexico was provably 100% Nazi, and they worshipped China and drug cartels and whatever boogeyman we have like gods, I would still be ashamed if my country, the US, invaded them as Russia invaded Ukraine. It’s beyond preposterous to think they pose a military threat to the US, or that it’s our job to purify them, much less to breathlessly excuse such an invasion as (say) Russia’s fault.
If "Tankie" means someone who thinks Russia's invasion was justified, it's the wrong word for many people.
There are many people who agree that Russia's invasion was unjustified and also don't believe that a simple "stand with Ukraine" strategy has a snowball's chance in hell of working. If you look back into US history you'll find a number of conflicts that we thought we could win by just offering advice, logistics, and support; they tend to be costly for the US and catastrophic for the country in question.
Justice doesn't win wars and we know what happens when you keep throwing lives and resources at a war without a solid victory plan.
There are many people who agree that Russia’s invasion was unjustified and also don’t believe that a simple “stand with Ukraine” strategy has a snowball’s chance in hell of working.
Based on what? Putin was clearly losing this war until Trump saved him. Russian losses have been catastrophic and no one can possibly consider Putiin's invasion a success or a smart move. It seems to me like it IS working. And it's preferable to IGNORING the Ukrainians and giving Russia an easy out.
Even before Trump Russia was slowly grinding its way west.
You could look at the various strategic objectives and see the Russians slowly and steadily surrounding them and cutting them off. You could watch the Ukrainian counteroffensives crash against defense in depth. You could see the occasional victories slip away. The HIMARS systems that were supposed to turn the tide are twisted piles of metal.
Ignoring Ukraine would also be dumb. A much better idea would be to come up with an actual feasible plan. One would have been to follow US military advice with the above mentioned HIMARS and execute a concentrated attack to the south to cut off almost half the Russian military. An other would be to accept a ceasefire on the current front, heavily entrench the border to create defense in depth, and use that time to develop an actual counteroffensive strategy.
Ah yes, the fascist plan of "Look, we all know the foregone conclusion. X person will never change their mind (certainly not saying I support them), so you shouldn't stand against them."
You can go look up the movement of the front over the course of the war. To even out the numbers, we'd have to roughly triple the number of shells we send to the front (ignoring troops for now). That would likely bring the war to a stand still. To start reversing the movement at the same rate we'd likely have to triple it again. So cocktail napkin math says that if we actually want to revert back to pre-invasion borders, we'd have to increase expenditures by around 10x and sustain that for the next 3 years.
I disagree here with this for two reasons.
First Ukraine's artillery shell production and transition into nato calibers of 105mm and 155mm is increasing, and the strategic relation of power balance between Russian and Ukrainian artillery is actively changing. This isn't static, Ukraine is quickly developing an advantage here especially when you consider efficiency of resources applied to the front.
Second, Russian air defenses are collapsing, Ukraine is hammering them day in day out and there is no way Russia can replace these air defense radars and missile launchers along with sufficiently trained crew at a high enough rate to sustain this current situation. Russia is HUGE there is an incredible amount of territory that must be covered with air defense. I would not call the current situation a simple battle of attrition right now, Russia is facing an existential collapse of their war machine if their air defenses decisively collapse in too many areas. I am not suggesting the likelihood is high at the moment but the probability of it happening is meaningfully increasing every day.
I am not trying to reject all of your points, but I think the aspects I have brought up have to be taken into consideration. Ukraine will have the capacity to domestically produce and maintain L119 105mm howitzers, 155mm bohdana production has finally begun to hit stride as well, these are strategic leaps forward in terms of practical infantry fighting power and I find conversations tend to ignore these non-flashy but quite meaningful transformations that have happened over the past year or two for the Ukrainian military. They make this moment of Russia's faltering general offensive a far more fragile position than people generally recognize. This isn't to say Ukraine isn't in a fragile position itself of course. What I am saying is I wouldn't expect the status quo to necessarily continue indefinitely here, it will for some time and then all of a sudden it abruptly won't.
It's tricky to find current numbers on artillery production. The most reliable numbers I could find are about a year old and all cite a 3:1 advantage for the Russians.
Do you have sources on what the ratio is more recently?
We like to believe that Russian air defenses are collapsing but do we even know this? We know that some facilities have been destroyed but how many did they have in the first place? What can Ukraine do to exploit a gap in air defenses? Traditionally, air defenses are there to stop enemy bombers but that only matters if the enemy has bombers.
War is difficult. It takes much more than a bunch of people standing around saying, "I support XYZ." It takes a huge amount of resources and involves a lot of dead people.
What can Ukraine do to exploit a gap in air defenses?
...Have you not been paying attention to the Ukraine's campaign of long range strikes utilizing missiles and drones?
In terms of shell ratios, I am less interested in trying to find precise numbers on that since it is an incredibly difficult process to accurately do for one army much less two, but also I am not sure it is necessarily relevant in any absolute sense since Ukraine and Russia utilize their artillery so differently.
In terms of hard facts that have changed well here you go:
These two changes alone significantly change the strategic power balance between Ukraine's military and Russia's military as the L119 is unquestionably the best mass production battle tested towed light infantry support howitzer ever made and the bohdana in towed and self propelled forms is a world class 155mm howitzer that is easily compatible with a global constellation of militaries who may increase military aid at any point.
I have been paying attention to Ukraines missile and drone programs.
Missiles and drones are both very effective but neither of them is a replacement for heavy bombing and Russia still makes more missiles than Ukraine does.
Unfortunately shell ratios are an important detail. That's why the serious policy publications (like FP) spend so much time trying to advocate for increased production.
Don’t look at the front lines. Look at the Russian economy. It’s more likely that the Russian economy collapses or Putin is overthrown due to some internal power struggles or uprising than it is for Ukraine to militarily defeat Russia.
That is as long as the West continues to support Ukraine with the bare minimum to bleed both sides continuously.
The best measure I can think of is GDP growth. It can be hard to estimate but it shows the change in an economy over time. The most accurate data I know of for that is the World Bank.
You'll notice that for most of that period, which includes the entire Ukraine war, Russia's economy has been solidly on par with the other 9 largest economies in the world. They still have active trading relations with most of the world volza.com/global-trade-data/ru…
At the current rates, Ukraine will bleed out before Russia does.
Western propaganda machine constantly pumps out information on Russia's economy being on the verge of collapse. I recall buying into it years ago and, well, we're still waiting.
I think it's a bit of old world thinking at work. In the post WW2 period the West controlled the vast majority of global capital so being blocked out of trade by us meant guaranteed economic despair (if you weren't big enough). The world is very different today but many Westerners (even in leadership) still perceive the world as if we're still in that era.
This is an underestimation of Russia's economic realignment from West to East. Primarily with China and to a lesser extent India. It's hubris to assume that Russia has to have a robust economic relationship with the West to remain solvent.
Financially it's a lucrative one and makes them more resilient to Western sanctions. China is on a trajectory to surpass the US economy in 10 years. Wealth, power and influence are gradually drifting East and South so it's important for Western leaders to adapt now instead of disregarding reality and becoming more entrenched. Being forced to align economically with China will likely be to Russia's long term benefit.
The West (particularly US) is currently doubling down on AGI and fossil fuels (US and Canada). The AGI bet can definitely blow up in its face in the short term. Emerging markets are already pivoting hard to renewables so fossil fuels may not be as good a long term bet as they're hoping. The EU is a stagnant market and the UK is still limping after shooting itself in the foot with Brexit. Many of these countries are now tied up by infighting over immigration, impacting their ability to project power.
The only absolute advantage is the massive defense spending but even the majority of that is by the US so if they decide to leave the rest of the West to fend for themselves then all bets are off.
The vast majority of the world sees the Ukraine war as a conflict between white people.
Wow, way to infantilize the vast majority of the world. Believe it or not, they're as smart as you are and as capable of leaning about a particular conflict.
It's a bit oversimplified but essentially accurate. You can easily find a number of sources that will show you that people is Africa, South America, India, and Asia aren't nearly as concerned about the Ukraine war as Americans and Europeans are.
I know they're every bit as smart as I am because I've had many conversations with them. I find they tend to know more about the Ukraine war, and many other international topics, than most Americans seem to.
So cocktail napkin math says that if we actually want to revert back to pre-invasion borders, we’d have to increase expenditures by around 10x and sustain that for the next 3 years.
This is an oversimplification. When the Berlin wall fell and Germany was unified there were assurances made that NATO would not expand eastward which obviously did not pan out.
The West has pushed forward with NATO inclusion of several eastern European nations including Ukraine since that time. During the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, George W. Bush insisted on raising the topic of Ukraine's potential NATO membership, despite opposition from Angela Merkel, who was concerned about the implications for relations with Russia.
The concern from a Russian standpoint was an expanding Western sphere of influence, not fear of Ukrainian military action specifically.
What if Canada joined CSTO and signed some pact with China. Does that give the US justification to invade and annex them? Because it violates some handshake from 36 years ago?
If Russia doesn’t like all this NATO expansion, they can drag someone controversial into an alliance or do some other controversial thing. Have at it. A war is not a rational response, unless you’re a tankie.
It's interesting to invoke the US as it typically has a low threshold for military action.
I don't think it justifies war but I would understand if the US perceived that as a national security threat (though it appears everything is a national security threat in the US today). It would be naive to assume a great power would sit by idly and watch that occur.
I definitely understand that many percieve this through a cultural 'us vs them' lens but I would advise against oversimplified conceptualizations. Global geopolitics is complex and a positive outcome in this war is dependent on deeper understanding of historical contexts and how they play into motivation and strategy today.
NATO is such a big threat to Russia, that as soon as Finland had joined NATO, Russia moved it's troops away from that area. Russia's problem with NATO is not that it sees a defensive alliance like NATO as a threat, the problem for them is that they can't bully and invade NATO countries should they feel like it. Which is also why all the formerly occupied countries that are next to Russia, want to join NATO. Who doesn't want their country to be safe from invasion by a fascist state? Tankies apparently.
The most important point to keep in mine is that most of the world (ie countries outside of NATO) do not see NATO as a defensive alliance.
We can argue back and forth about whether Russia was justified to start a war over perceived expansion (I don't believe so) but historical context is important and I don't think it's hard to see how they perceived a threat from their geopolitical perspective, especially if even Merkel recognized that.
Many NATO members contributed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the international legal framework put in place to justify those wars was cited by Putin at the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine.
That is such a tenuous connection to make. America's retarded war on terror was started by America, and some countries that are also in NATO chose to join. All that had nothing to do with NATO, those other countries were not obliged to join, and as you mentioned other NATO members did not.
You can discount it if you like, but if we're trying to analyze how Russia justifies its invasion and perceives its relationships with other nations, then considering the recent past of various NATO members is relevant.
That's like saying BRICS is an aggressive organisation because of what Russia is currently doing... Not the same, but in a similar vein. Not all of NATO was involved in Iraq (many countries were opposed to it, and it may as well have been a US only operation). Afghanistan... There technically was a casus belli, but I'll agree the way the entire thing was handled was a disaster. The occupation following the initial invasion was, notably, a US thing, not a NATO one.
It would be more accurate to compare it to BRICS being adversarial to the US because China has more than 2x the economy of all the other BRICS nations combined and wants to use it as a counterbalance to the G7.
That would be perfectly accurate and the US is actively trying to inhibit the growth of BRICS as an organization.
NATO has not started a war but that is not mutually exclusive from it being perceived as an arm of American imperialism. The general perception is that due to its astronomical defense spending the US has disproportionate influence within the group. There is precedent for NATO countries joining America in unjustified wars previously. This contributes to the perception that, if the US conjures up a reason to go to war with your country, there is a whole club of countries which America may have coercive leverage over (due to defense investment) that may join in seeking to anhilate you.
NATO countries are (or perhaps were) America's sphere of influence.
That's fair, what was meant was whether Russia could feel justified in doing so (from their perspective) in a similar way that America felt justified in its war on Iraq or its posturing for war in Venezuela. All of which are not justified from an objective perspective.
For the warmongers here who fully back zelenskyy refusal to cede territory i would like to remember you that ukraine is in need for men and you are welcome on the front lines defending land.
You didn't answer the question. Personally i wouldn't want to go in ukraine risking to be burned alive fighting over invisible lines on a map so that a government can claim its theirs. For this reason i do not advocate for war or back the ones who are forcing other people to fight.
The majority of Ukrainians do not support ceding territory.
And what a stupid fucking thought process you have going. Russia invaded Ukraine, they should be fucking leaving not having tankie shits suggesting that Ukrainians should just give up.
Answer the question yourself, if you care so much about ukraine land and are afraid about russia why don't you go on the front lines?
A stupid though process is to believe that something is good only because you are not getting your hands dirty and others are doing it for you. Ukrainians should be allowed to do what the fuck they want, if case you aren't aware people are being drafted by force and many haven't been able to left the country for years.
Recently men beetween 18-22 were allowed to leave the border (after two years of not being able to) and many left the country.
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Answer the question yourself, if you care so much about ukraine land and are afraid about russia why don't you go on the front lines?
Because my donations are worth more than my body. Answer the question, why aren't you being paid to be a mouth piece for russian propaganda? Or seeing how you spell... guessing you're sitting in russia trying to convince me and others that we should abandon Ukrainians in their fight against the ruzzians.
A stupid though process is to believe that something is good only because you are not getting your hands dirty and others are doing it for you. Ukrainians should be allowed to do what the fuck they want, if case you aren't aware people are being drafted by force and many haven't been able to left the country for years.
Yea it's called a war for your survival, they're being drafted because it's needed. Again, the majority want the war to end but the majority don't want to ceded territory. This isn't rocket science.
Recently men beetween 18-22 were allowed to leave the border (after two years of not being able to) and many left the country.
Ok and? People don't like war, people don't like dying...why don't you ask the questions why ruzzia is attacking Ukraine and killing civs?
It's up to ukrainian people to decide what they want to do, not to the martial law or any ruler.
Fueling this war and empowering authoritarian governments is how we all end up under a boot. There are plenty of countries that are still in business with russia including USA (both current and previous administration). Fighting over inches of land benefits governments not the people that are long gone from that burned land.
The chance of Ukraine giving up territory increases a lot once they lose all their fortified front lines and the piece of land which Russia currently doesn't control It has the highest elevation of any landmass in the area
What a mess of a situation. When the soviet union collapsed assurances were made that NATO would not expand eastward beyond Germany. That promise obviously wasn't kept and Russia has perceived that as a provocation in the case of Ukraine being right on their border. But there's more than enough blame to go round and Russia is obviously not helping themselves.
The big questions are if NATO carries any significant impact with a disengaged US and what will be the consequences of Russia now strengthening its relationship with China and India in a world where it already seems like power, wealth and the epicenter of innovation are slowly drifting from the US to China.
It seems to me that the US has come to a realization that it can't project power over the world like it used to and would instead like to focus on its geographical 'sphere' (the Western hemisphere including Canada and South America) instead. Trumps recently released national security strategy document seems to suggest as much.
Unfortunately it's hard to imagine how this war is won for Ukraine without US engagement or a change in the mindset and strategy of the EU.
Trump is a russian asset. The majority of the USA and it's corporate overlords are not happy that trump has given away a fuck ton of our soft power.
Also russia promised not to invade Ukraine when they gave up their nukes...this has nothing to do with NATO, and everything to do with putin being an imperialistic fuck.
No doubt imperialism is involved but I think we need to be realistic in recognizing that non-NATO countries do not see NATO as a defense alliance. They see it as an extension of the American empire/imperialism. With the Trump administration it seems like even America has come to see it that way.
In 2019, the US pulled out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty claiming that Russia had violated the treaty by developing, testing and fielding a ground‑launched cruise missile (GLCM) designated SSC‑8.
Independent analysts noted that the evidence for the Russian violation was contested, with some questioning the reliability of the U.S. claims and pointing out that the United States itself operated missile‑defense systems (e.g., Aegis Ashore) that could be interpreted as infringing the INF’s ban on land‑based intermediate‑range missiles.
This fed into their perception that if Ukraine joined NATO such weapons would pointed in their direction from Ukrainian territory.
On August 4, 2025, the Russian Federation announced the termination of its unilateral moratorium on deploying ground-launched intermediate-range (1,000–5,500 km) and shorter-range (500–1,000 km) missiles, six years after the US pulled out
Not good if you're a fan of denuclearization.
The tough thing about soft power is its built on trust so its unlikely America will be getting it back.
They can not see NATO as a defense alliance all they want... that's literally what it is. And it's why countries join it when russia is trying to invade them. Even suggesting russia is acting in any sort of good faith is bullshit. They're the aggressor in Europe... period.
Well they started the war so there's no question they're the aggressor. But to mount a legitimate defense it is important to understand the factors that contributed to their choice and judge their legitimacy. Certain actions taken by the US are noteworthy.
If we assume we are good faith actors and whoever it is we are against are acting in bad faith then we fail to see the whole picture.
Nothing the USA did, should warrant russia from invading its neighbors. Period. This is not a "well NATO" or "well USA". That's bullshit tankie/russian propaganda talk.
The reality is the US has started numerous wars on shaky grounds / manufactured consent and we at least try to reflect on their rationale and judge whether there's any way for empire to be held accountable for war on false pretenses. In the US' case it essentially never is.
This is clearly a very Western leaning audience that is entrenched in their perspective which is totally fine. As long as it's understood that they are also perceiving reality through propaganda disemminated by their elites.
I don't support imperialism in general, regardless of where it comes from. I'm more interested in how empire justifies imperialistic behaviour and how its subjects align themselves to that behavior. This thread has been illuminating in that regard. I imagine there will be quite a few American supporters for war in Venezuela, for example.
I agree with you. Nothing the USA or any other party has done justifies Russia's war in Ukraine. But how the state justifies imperialism and how the subjects buy into and hold dearly their state's mistruths is a fascinating sight to behold.
Gorbatschow and the former Marshall of the USSR both denied the existence of these verbal assurances They found NATO expansion bad and a grave mistake but never had any reassurances by the West of not expanding To be honest, I find it ridiculous that the Baltic states which could easily be invaded within a few days without foreign help would need to cope with a constant threat of invasion just because Russia is unsecure
After reading the comments. Is Shawn working from the Russian Embassy in Washington DC? The clown fails to understand that nobody with a sane mind wants to be occupied nor influenced by the damn Russians.
If anyone in the Trump administration had any brains at all, this would have been obvious from the outset.
The only people who can see advantage to Ukraine seeding territory to Russia, is Russia. Everyone else involved can see what a monumental tactical error that would be. Especially since everybody knows the only reason Russia is even at the negotiating table is because they are desperate, given that is the case, there is zero reason to capitulate.
Before we talk about today’s announcement, let's take a moment to appreciate what this community has built together. What started as a project to preserve webpages and articles has quietly grown into Linkwarden, a tool used by researchers, journalists, and knowledge collectors all over the world.
As we’ve grown, the Linkwarden community has helped us reach:
16,000+ GitHub stars
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A thriving ecosystem of contributors, donors, and Cloud subscribers keeping the project sustainable
None of this would've happened without you. Thank you! 🚀
Today, we’re excited to launch something you’ve been asking for since the very beginning: the official Linkwarden mobile app, now available on iOS and Android.
Here are the highlights so far:
🧩 Create, organize, and browse your links: A native, mobile-first experience with collections, tags, and powerful search.
📤 Save links directly from the share sheet: Send interesting articles from the browser or any other app straight into Linkwarden, no copy-paste required.
📚 Cached data for offline reading: Catch up on long reads, articles, or saved blog posts when you’re away from Wi-Fi.
☁️ Works with Linkwarden Cloud and self-hosted: Use the same app whether you’re on Linkwarden Cloud or your own self-hosted instance, just point it at your server and sign in.
📱 Built for different screen sizes: Supports iOS / iPadOS, and Android (phones and tablets).
🔜 And more coming soon: This first release is just the foundation, expect many improvements and new features soon.
Get the app
To use the app you’ll first need a Linkwarden account (version v2.13+ recommended).
You can choose between:
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⚡️⚡️⚡️ Self-hosted collaborative bookmark manager to collect, read, annotate, and fully preserve what matters, all in one place. - linkwarden/linkwarden
[Igor] Rogov, 29, was arrested in July 2024 after, prosecutors say, an explosives-filled parcel that had been addressed to him was found in a warehouse in central Poland. In their indictment, the prosecutors say that during their investigation into the package they established that Mr. Rogov had cooperated with the [Russian spy agency] F.S.B.
In addition to spying, he was accused of participating in a Russian plot to send incendiary packages on flights around Europe. Fires last year at shipping hubs in Britain and Germany were linked to the alleged plot, part of a broader Russian campaign of hybrid attacks against Europe that Western officials say have included drone incursions, cyberwarfare and acts of sabotage.
A Russian national charged in Poland with spying for Russian intelligence has admitted to passing information to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), Polish media reported Monday, citing case files.
Investigators also allege that Rogov received a courier shipment containing components for a bomb, including liquid explosives, fuses and a power source.
A Russian national charged in Poland with spying for Russian intelligence has admitted to passing information to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), Polish media reported Monday, citing case files.
A three-year-old girl was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza on Sunday, according to local sources inside the Palestinian territory.
Ahed Tareq al-Bayouk was reportedly playing near her family's tent in Mawasi, Rafah, southern Gaza, when she was shot.
The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that it was "not aware of a strike" but would "conduct an additional review" as more information was provided.
Ahed al-Bayouk's death appears to have taken place on the Palestinian side of the so-called Yellow Line, behind which Israeli troops agreed to withdraw as part of the first phase of a US plan to end fighting in the region.
It should not be reported that Israel is reviewing this. They always just say they are going to review something to get a headline like this. Israel approves of its massacres.
A key UN report on the state of the global environment has been "hijacked" by the United States and other countries who were unwilling to go along with the scientific findings, the co-chair has told the BBC.
The Global Environment Outlook, the result of six years' work, connects climate change, nature loss and pollution to unsustainable consumption by people living in wealthy and emerging economies.
It warns of a "dire future" for millions unless there's a rapid move away from coal, oil and gas and fossil fuel subsidies.
But at a meeting with government representatives to agree the findings, the US and allies said they could not go along with a summary of the report's conclusions.
As the scientists were unwilling to water down or change their findings, the report has now been published without the summary and without the support of governments, weakening its impact.
What the fuck does “not the only ones with nukes” supposed to mean? Every entity with them needs close fucking attention paid to how it behaves and what it says.
I’m not saying do what America wants because they have nukes, I’m saying America is a fucking rabid dog and you don’t take your eyes off a rabid dog.
“Fix your shit not our problem” is a very American thing of you to say and think. Idiot
Pokrovsk has not fallen yet. That is despite President Vladimir Putin's recent claim that Russian forces have taken the city.
There is no doubt Ukraine has been losing ground in this key city in the east. For Russia, Pokrovsk is another stepping stone towards its goal of taking control of all of the Donbas. But Ukraine needs to prove it is still capable of resisting.
At a Ukrainian command post, well behind the front line, orders are relayed by radio in rapid and quick succession. Soldiers watch dozens of live drone feeds. They are coordinating strikes on Russian positions inside the city.
The commander of the Skala Assault Regiment, Yuri, is keen to prove to us that Ukraine still controls the north of the city - to show that the Kremlin's claim that it has taken Pokrovsk is a lie.
The problem is Russians are doing the same and they both have to somehow defend incomplete lines with gaps or risk getting fully surrounded and cut off fron support.
Late one night in April 2020, towards the start of the Covid lockdowns, Shanley Clémot McLaren was scrolling on her phone when she noticed a Snapchat post by her 16-year-old sister. “She’s basically filming herself from her bed, and she’s like: ‘Guys you shouldn’t be doing this. These fisha accounts are really not OK. Girls, please protect yourselves.’ And I’m like: ‘What is fisha?’ I was 21, but I felt old,” she says.
She went into her sister’s bedroom, where her sibling showed her a Snapchat account named “fisha” plus the code of their Paris suburb. Fisha is French slang for publicly shaming someone – from the verb “afficher”, meaning to display or make public. The account contained intimate images of girls from her sister’s school and dozens of others, “along with the personal data of the victims – their names, phone numbers, addresses, everything to find them, everything to put them in danger”.
McLaren, her sister and their friends reported the account to Snapchat dozens of times, but received no response. Then they discovered there were fisha accounts for different suburbs, towns and cities across France and beyond. Faced with the impunity of the social media platforms, and their lack of moderation, they launched the hashtag #StopFisha.
It went viral, online and in the media. #StopFisha became a rallying cry, a safe space to share information and advice, a protest movement. Now it was the social media companies being shamed. “The wave became a counter-wave,” says McLaren, who is now 26. The French government got involved, and launched an online campaign on the dangers and legal consequences of fisha accounts. The social media companies began to moderate at last, and #StopFisha is now a “trusted flagger” with Snapchat and TikTok, so when they report fisha content, it is taken down within hours. “I realised that if you want change in your societies, if you come with your idea alone, it won’t work. You need support behind you.”
Gen Z are the first generation to have grown up with social media, they were the earliest adopters, and therefore the first to suffer its harms. Now they are fighting back
A small brown line snakes its way through the rainforest in northern Sumatra, carving 300 metres through dense patches of meranti trees, oak and mahua. Picked up by satellites, the access road – though modest now – will soon extend 2km to connect with the Tor Ulu Ala pit, an expansion site of Indonesia’s Martabe mine. The road will help to unlock valuable deposits of gold, worth billions of dollars in today’s booming market. But such wealth could come at a steep cost to wildlife and biodiversity: the extinction of the world’s rarest ape, the Tapanuli orangutan.
The network of access roads planned for this swath of tropical rainforest will cut through habitat critical to the survival of the orangutans, scientists say. The Tapanuli (Pongo tapanuliensis), unique to Indonesia, was only discovered by scientists to be a separate species in 2017 – distinct from the Sumatran and Bornean apes. Today, there are fewer than 800 Tapanulis left in an area that covers as little as 2.5% of their historical range. All are found in Sumatra’s fragile Batang Toru ecosystem, bordered on its south-west flank by the Martabe mine, which began operations in 2012.
“This is absolutely the wrong place to be digging for gold,” says Amanda Hurowitz, who coordinates the forest commodities team at Mighty Earth, a conservation nonprofit monitoring developments at the open-pit mine. “And for what? So mountains of gold bullion bars can sit in the vaults of the world’s richest countries.”
Tapanuli orangutans survive only in Indonesia’s Sumatran rainforest where a mine expansion will cut through their home. Yet the mining company says the alternative will be worse
Reporting from Fallujah, Jacobin documents how US-made weapons laced with toxic metals and depleted uranium have turned cities razed by war into biohazards. Soil, bodies, and whole generations are being poisoned in their wake.
Tens of thousands of students across Germany walked out of lessons to oppose the reintroduction of conscription, denouncing the government’s militarisation drive and the growing danger of a third world war.
Tens of thousands of students across Germany walked out of lessons to oppose the reintroduction of conscription, denouncing the government’s militarisation drive and the growing danger of a third world war.
Chinese government circulated sexually explicit deepfakes of dissident Yao Zhang.
Yao Zhang says she doesn’t have any friends, yet every week, thousands of her 175,000 YouTube subscribers tune in to her channel to listen to her live takes on Chinese current affairs.
“China isn’t a democratic country. Everyone suffers in that regime,” Zhang told Radio-Canada during an interview held somewhere between Montreal and Quebec City.
Concerned for her safety, the 39-year-old guards any information that could give away her location.
And for good reason: the Quebec YouTuber, who refuses to be silenced, has been the target of an intimidation campaign by the Chinese government for over a year.
“I have to be very, very careful,” she said. “I stopped all communications with the Chinese community because I don’t know who I can trust.”
[...]
Trained in accounting at McGill University, Zhang did a 180 during the pandemic and began offering news commentary on YouTube, which she continues to do today. The Communist Party of China and president Xi Jinping are often the subjects of her criticisms.
“I’m with Taiwan, I’m with the Uyghurs, I’m with Hong Kong. I’m against the Chinese government,” said the pro-democracy activist.
It was in September 2024 that Zhang first noticed sexually explicit AI-generated images of herself circulating online.
“It wasn’t just one photo. There were many, many of them,” she remembered with disgust.
Shared by anonymous accounts, the images were published on social media under posts of official accounts belonging to the Canadian government and then prime minister Justin Trudeau.
[...]
For the YouTuber, there was no doubt the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was behind what she was seeing. And she was right.
In March, Global Affairs Canada (GAC) released a statement blaming the PRC for a new "spamouflage" campaign using sexually explicit AI-generated images to target individuals in Canada. Zhang says the government told her she is the first documented case of the campaign.
“This new campaign employs various tactics to intimidate, belittle and harass individuals based in Canada who are critical of the PRC,” reads the statement.
Notably, Zhang and members of her family have been doxed. Her date of birth, phone and passport numbers all appear on a doxing website that labels her as a “traitor.” The site, which is still accessible to this day, also uses degrading language to spread defamatory sexually explicit statements about her.
[...]
Though the YouTuber benefits from a certain degree of protection in Canada, she can’t say the same for her family in China.
In 2024, after a trip to Taiwan to support the island’s independence, Zhang said China's national police put pressure on her aunt and grandmother living there in an attempt to silence her.
The strategy is a well known one, detailed in a report published earlier this year by the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions.
“[The PRC] employs a wide range of tradecraft to carry out its activities, one of which is to use a person’s family and friends living in the PRC as leverage against them,” it reads.
[...]
Zhang says she’s received death threats against her and her family and is worried about retribution if she were to ever return to China.
“I’ll go to prison,” she said. “I’ll be like all those who have wanted to change China.”
[...]
Transnational repression is a “genuine scourge” in the country, concluded Marie-Josée Hogue, who presided over the public inquiry into foreign interference. The threat it poses “is real and growing,” adds the report.
The former Canadian ambassador to China, Guy Saint-Jacques, who occupied the function from 2012 to 2016, says budgets allocated to cracking down on dissent “increased substantially” after Xi came to power in 2012.
[...]
Notably, an Enquête investigation revealed that a Chinese dissident found dead in British Columbia in 2022, Hua Yong, was the target of an espionnage operation led by the Chinese secret police.
[...]
Zhang says she is at peace and hopes that more Chinese people in Canada and elsewhere in the world will speak out.
“I am using my life for something very important,” she says.
Last week the survivors of Super Typhoon Odette that struck the Philippines in 2021 filed what may be the most ambitious climate lawsuit to date against global oil giant Shell.
The NSW Resources Regulator’s November 25 “Investigation information release” neither explains what caused the tragedy nor makes any recommendation for how to stop more workers being killed.
The Honduran election has been overshadowed by naked imperialist intervention, with Trump vowing there would be “hell to pay” if the country failed to elect his chosen candidate.
Ultranationalist Israeli politicians, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, wore golden noose-shaped lapel pins to a meeting on Monday in order to show their “commitment” to advancing a widely condemned bill to mandate the death penalty for “terrorists” who kill Israelis. The pins resemble the yellow ribbon pins that Israeli leaders have worn throughout their genocide to to…
Tee hee, genocide is so funny! Look at his fucking face. He's happy about this. Murdering innocents. Maybe he should be the one with a noose around his neck.
Nothing inevitable about it. That kind of thing only happens when you're defeated in war, taken prisoner by your enemies, or when your entire country sees and regrets the course it has taken. Bush and Cheney faced no consequences, and Kissinger faced no consequences, because no one in a position to bring that about wanted to. Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich and the rest will face no consequences unless Israel's apartheid regime falls. And that looks unlikely in the near future.
Either circumstantial changes like the rise of the global South (not counting those that have been up for a while because they sleep with the West) will mean the end of Western imperialism or it'll kill us all (the rest by the West, the West by their own hands and ecological collapse). These dreams are too unrealistic even for me, and I believe in the unseen! 🥲😭
Man. Fuck Zionists, and anyone who supports Israel at this point. There are a lot of good Jewish people in the world, and Israel is ensuring them another Holocaust
I find it astounding that when you bring up Jews who oppose Zionism and support Palestine, the Zionists act like you're talking about Russian online trolls and that its impossible to be a Jew and oppose Zionism.
They're basically MAGAts. They're so devoid of morals and worth, that they literally can't fathom that some of their peers have empathy, compassion, and wisdom.
I wonder what Israel's long-term plan is. Because if they achieve their objective and wipe out Gaza then they're going to be international pariahs for pretty much the rest of history.
Regardless of what governments made decide there is going to be extreme social pressure for businesses to not work with them, and the thing is they represent such a small market it isn't worth the inevitable boycott doing business with them would result in. The Israeli government have to know this, civilians living in Israel must know this, yet here we are.
They're banking on making people believe the Palestinians don't deserve to live, and that enough people simply won't give half a shit about a bunch of brown people dying. Coupled with plenty in the west hating muslims because of american wars of aggression and propaganda, I think they'll succeed. Even if in say 3 months, the whole palestinian area is simply wiped out, bulldosed into a giant gravel parking lot, not enough people will give a shit, because they just don't give a shit about other people.
The British and Americans have also committed a bunch of war crimes and exterminations of people and are not pariahs. My expectation is, sadly, that nothing will meaningfully happen if they were to "achieve their objective".
Here is what I use it for: - Download top voted pictures from CivitAI - Pull weather data and get notified if it is going to rain - Subscribe to events posted by the police (polling their API) - Scrub lunch restaurants for todays menu - Get notified when a streamer I follow on twitch starts streaming - The same for YouTube but I haven't finished this one yet. - Webhook (combined when a one file web page) to note down every time my oldest kid has this strange coughing. - Send me this week's number (because some people use it and knowing that today is week 50 can be useful a few times a year).
I use ntfy for my notifications. I was also planning to monitor if I sold anything in Guild Wars 2 but I haven't bothered setting up a table in a database to keep track of if I have seen the latest changes, otherwise I would get the same notification over and over.
Pull weather data and get notified if it is going to rain
That's a pretty respectful list you have there. I am working on something that will pull in weather data and forecast maps, but haven't completed the flow yet.
I wanted to do the same for One Punch Man but ended writing a bash script for it instead. File access and variables was the biggest hurdle (but both are solvable).
Knowing if it is going to rain in the next hour is nice because I take the bike to work. I like to know which clothes to take with me.
The latest thing I've cobbled together with n8n is a routine that goes out to sol24.net/ and pulls in the current Aurora forecast and the current 7 day video of solar flares into my dashboard. I've always had a fascination with how the sun affects the earth and the protective layers of our atmosphere, since I was a child. I built my own 5 watt, code only, transmitter and receiver and would set in my room late nights collecting QSL cards and talking to people from all over the world . I quickly learned that the ionosphere and other protective layers affected how far my little 5 watt signal would bounce. Solar flares burn holes in the ionosphere and prevent a good bounce halfway around the world. So the challenge was to pick days where there was good ionosphere coverage, and minimal solar flares in conjunction with antenna positioning.
This is the current video which takes you from 11/29 to 12/5. It's mind boggling to me the absolute power and energy represented: sol24.net/data/stereo_7day_euv…
You could probably conjure up something in bash to do this, but I really like working in n8n.
Local hosted n8n: local AI llm agent (for privacy), that can use tools to search the web, check my emails and calendar, save memories, get Youtube transcript, etc.
Scheduled workflows to get me some stock info every morning.
Working on a research crawler with crawl4AI.
Only limitations seem to be my will to learn new stuff. I'm sure all this could be written in Python or something but I'm not a programmer.
I've done some of that stuff in Python, and n8n is just lovely, far simpler. You can also add a node that runs Python code in n8n, so you only gain simplicity, but lose almost nothing.
Just to be clear there are two versions. One with nuts for those who want that AI experience, and one without nuts for the anti-ai faction in the group. The n8n ai-starter kit will spin up n8n with AI. I use the plain n8n mainly because I don't have the equipment to run an in-house AI properly or rather effectively, and I don't want to connect to AI exterior of my network. A friend of mine runs the ai-starter kit and does some really impressive stuff with it, but he has all the new toys to properly run it.
I've only ever added AI to n8n workflows through ollama nodes/tools and agents and whatnot. I haven't seen the version where an AI llm is baked in yet. I did see we have tables now which is handy. Like I said, I'm self self-hosted tho so, either way, don't have to use it if you don't want. I'd probably recommend anyone just install whichever is easiest unless, it's forcing you to download the llm blobs/models and you don't have the space for it.
The helpfully named site AlternativeTo is good for such questions. It's populated by users and served me well over the years.
IFTTT and Zapier are the primary non-self-hosted alternatives, both have been around for ages and have lots of available integrations.
Node-RED and Huginn are the self-hosted alternatives. Huginn is older than both n8n and Node-RED, afaik, and seems to be primarily focused on online queries like updates to a webpage.
In the end I haven't used any of the self-hosted ones, since I'm more of a code guy, so can't say if one is better than another for anything.
You can integrate a host of things into n8n including AI, however you can also just run n8n as an automation tool without anything else integrated. It does take a little reading of the docs to figure that out. I am sure that most people run n8n with AI, and admittedly, the front page of the n8n site promotes the AI version because other users would like to run n8n with AI. Some in this thread are suffering from knee jerk syndrome.
You're entitled to your opinion. 🤷♂️ I will not go near a product that tries to make anything AI the primary focus of itself. This is my opinion and I'm not really looking for anyone to change it, nor am I looking for anyone whose opinion I can change. 😊
Do you take this so personally that you are now resorting to ad hominems? My guy. 🤭
Is this your personal project? Why are you getting this butthurt? I just don't care about AI, because I don't need to use it. And I don't have to care about AI for anyone.
You should see my inbox full of people just like you yapping on and on about this n8n thing, explaining what it's for, when I explicitly said I don't want to know more.
Listen, so you won't feel so sad anymore: I'm not opposed to using AI, I'm just sick of hearing about it because I don't need it for the reasons everybody is saying I should.
Now can you either act like an adult or not talk to me again? Thanks, my dude.
could be one of those cases where the product predates ai but some c-level asked an engineer "could we use this for ai" and the engineer said "i mean, technically yes" and then marketing changed every single mention of the product
yeah this project has been on github for six years and seems to have been closed source before that. it's a graphical automation tool.
like, everything can be used with ai. github itself has "ai agent" plastered everywhere. it's just a buzzword. doesn't mean it's built specifically for ai.
It's automation. Skim the link I sent. Something pops up in a log file or an API returns X instead of Y and you can do some logic based on that. Send yourself an email, ping another API, etc. Sure, you can use it to query an LLM API but that's just marketing. Frontpages are marketing, yes
Marketing matters. I am not interested. And that's fine. I don't have any use for this product, AI or no AI. Everyone can go about their business now and relax all your efforts to make me interested in this. Thank you for showing me that respect.
Anything that puts on the front page of its project site the use case for itself to relate to AI agents instantly makes me suspicious and not interested. I can't help it.
I get it. Some of us are staunch anti-ai. That's fine. I am not an n8n sales person, but I just wanted to make it clear, there are two versions and you can integrate a host of thing into it. Personally, I would run the AI version with a private AI that doesn't need an external LLM. But my equipment is not that new and it takes some power to run AI efficiently and effectively. No issues with anyone, it just seemed that there was some confusion.
I'm running n8n now, and used Node-RED several years ago.
I'm ultimately coming to the conclusion that I prefer Node-RED. They're pretty similar in capability, at least for my purposes, and the modern UX of n8n doesn't make up for its weird license, in-app upsells (e.g. "this feature is only available on the Enterprise plan"), and increasingly AI-centric functionality.
I self host n8n in a docker container on my home lab mainly as something to just fuck about with.
Production workloads include leveraging my work calendar and completing my daily time sheets, cleaning up my mailbox at the end of the week, and providing access alerts for my Traefik proxy.
My most common use case is telegram integration via bot API - adding mobile controls to services that otherwise don't have acceptable (for me) UI. I've also tried their LLM integration and tool node to create a simple agent that reaponds directly to messages, but for now it can only save links to my linkwarden instance. I found it acceptable and plan to add more tools. Basically, i want it to automatically decide what to do with stuff that i send to chat.
I can't think of a use case, that couldn't be realized in Bash instead.
Well, everything can be done in bash (or in python, more probably), but n8n makes it easier to tweak. With "batteries included" many stuff can be done without prior research and without external dependencies. They even added built-in databases in recent release.
Human rights defender and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who advocates for Ukraine on the international stage, Oleksandra Matviichuk, has called on Germany to supply Ukraine with long-range Taurus missiles and to take a more decisive stance against Russia.
...
Matviichuk noted that it takes Russian missiles less than a minute to reach, for example, a school in Kharkiv.
“The only way to prevent this is to stop these missiles while they are still at a military airfield in Russia. For that, we need Taurus,” she told the media group Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland (RND) in an interview.
As stated, the human rights defender urged Germany to more thoroughly analyse the mistakes the country had made in its relations with Russia, particularly highlighting cases of bribery of the German elite during the construction of the gas pipeline.
In her view, until 2022, Germany — like the civilised world in general — allowed Moscow to act with impunity for far too long.
...
“Russian war crimes in Chechnya, Moldova, Georgia, Mali, Libya, Syria — no one was held accountable,” Matviichuk emphasised, calling on Berlin to act more decisively now by reassessing its overall policy toward Moscow.
“We are living in times that test all of us for genuine leadership, genuine courage, and genuine responsibility,” she stated.
Earlier, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz did not oppose supplying long-range missiles to Ukraine. However, after taking office, he has not made the corresponding decision.
Human rights defender and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who advocates for Ukraine on the international stage, Oleksandra Matviichuk, has called on Germany to supply Ukraine with long-range Taurus missiles and to take a more decisive stance against Russi…
She probably had an orgasm while saying it too. Just imagine the stock price. Thank you, brave Ukrainian fighters for all the stock pri...i mean, democracy, you're dying for. SLAVA UKRAINE!
Production of Taurus cruise missiles has been suspended in Germany Thomas Gottschild, head of the German representative office of the MBDA missile manufacturer, said that the production of Taurus cruise missiles in Germany has been suspended due …
If you really want people to think positively about the person in question, I suggest not to name the Nobel peace prize within the text. Kissinger and Machado should be enough to suspect a neonazi bias.
A major earthquake of magnitude 7.6 has hit Japan's north-eastern region.
The quake occurred at 23:15 (14:15 GMT) at a depth of 50km (31 miles), about 80km off the coast of the Aomori region, the Japan Meteorological Agency said,
It prompted tsunami warnings which have now been downgraded to advisories, while waves of 40cm (16in) were seen in some places.
Local media reports that some people in the region have been injured, while trains have been suspended as a precaution.
[quote]A Fediverse Enhancement Proposal (FEP) is a document that provides information to the Fediverse community. The goal of a FEP is to improve interoperability and well-being of diverse services, applications and communities that form the Fediverse.
T
A Fediverse Enhancement Proposal (FEP) is a document that provides information to the Fediverse community. The goal of a FEP is to improve interoperability and well-being of diverse services, applications and communities that form the Fediverse.
The FEP Process is an initiative of the SocialHub developer community, a liaison of the W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group.
Discovered this today. If you're on the developer side of things or are interested in how the Fediverse / ActivityPub is being built and enhanced, take a look at this codeberg repo.
when reading through the jellyfin with chromecast guide i realized that it would probably be less effort to just let the casting api be public, with the added bonus that i could then cast my library to any device that supports it. but that seems like it would paint a giant target on the server.
what's the recommended way of doing stuff like this? ideally i want to be able to go to someone's house and just play some of my media on their tv.
not that any of this is doable in the near future, since i'm behind cgnat and won't get my colocated bounce server up until spring.
i've set up servers with static ips in datacenter settings before. the way you know you're online is usually that your cpu activity jumps a few percent from all the incoming ssh traffic from russia and china. i don't want to risk anything happening to my home server.
I am not sure lol. perhaps your ssh port isn't exposed to the internet, or maybe the bots are just ignoring you? maybe your hosting provider has some sort of security process to reject those attempts preemptively?
Non standard port. But aren't secret chinese hack farm scanning wider than just 22 ? I don't know and deep down believe that it's pawned and scrubbing logs.
The resources required to port scan every port on every IP is generally not worth it. AFAIK they tend to stick to lower ports or popular ports. Unless they're intentionally targeting a specific IP or IP range, they're just looking for low hanging fruit.
The ability to generate a bunch of traffic that looks like it's coming from legit, every-day residential IPs is invaluable to disinformation campaigns. If they can get persistence in your network, they can toss it into a bot net which they'll sell access to on the dark web.
A sucker opens insecure services to the open internet every day, that's free real estate to bot farms. Only when the probability of finding them is low enough is it not worth the energy/network costs. I think hosting on non-standard ports is probably correlated with lowering that probability below some threshold where it becomes not worth it...don't quote me, though.
At the end of the day, the rule is not to depend on security by obscurity, but that doesn't mean never use it.
This whole thread (that I shamelessly hijacked) is very informative and allowed me to understand that cybersecurity is in practice a mixture of concrete nerdy log books and vague feeling of being under a threshold of worthiness.
I woke up this morning and there was a faint noise coming from the server: immediately thought "ok that's it, it's pawned and become a node in a vast grid of malicious bots"....it was a cron verification of drives
Hah yeah, I've definitely pulled the plug on my router before because I wasn't sure what I was seeing.
I mean, cybersecurity I would consider to be a research field. In practice, yeah, it's a bunch of people just doing their best.
I tend to keep everything inside my network and only expose what I need visible on non standard ports, one of those being a VPN. It's not that I couldn't run these services public facing, it's that the people taking the time to constantly update, configure, and auditing everything full time to head off red team are being paid. I don't need to deal with an attack surface any larger than it needs to be, ain't nobody got time for that.
Allowing external access to your services means that any misconfiguration or bugs can be exploited to gain control of your machine(s).
Once that happens they can be fucked with, your data stolen, your resources co-opted for someone else’s use, etc. and often times it can be made to look as though whatever bad shit it’s doing is your doing.
So, understand your security posture. You can’t be too careful. Taking over weak or exposed machines is a global industry now.
But you can, in fact, be too careful. Availability is one arm of the security triad.
If whatever complex configuration you have set up to avoid exposing something to the Internet is incompatible with something and what you wanted to do can't be done, or if you look and see that setting all that up would be too hard and don't bother to expose the service at all, then your security posture is incorrect because your service is just as unavailable as if someone else broke it.
Okay thanks for mentionning overblown paranoia, that's what I have.
What kind of exploitable server misconfigurations are we talking about here?? Brute forcing won't work because fail2ban, right? I'm a noob and deep down I'm convinced that my homeserver is compromised and has beenpart of a bitcoin mining farm for years... Yet, not a single proof...
my homeserver is compromised and has beenpart of a bitcoin mining farm for years
The very first Linux server I deployed on a VPS was hacked almost immediately because of my ignorance. The bot gained entrance, and they supplanted a miner rig. Now, on a tiny VPS, it's pretty easy to tell if you're running a coin miner because all of the resources will be pegged. However, I got to thinking, on a corporate server, if they did manage to do this, it would almost be undetectable until someone started reviewing logs.
It’s not just opening stuff to the internet, it’s opening stuff to the internet without any authentication in this case. If you don’t know how that’s bad…….
I set up Jellyseer so my friends can request whatever. Just blame your full collection of My Little Pony and Gilmore girls on that one friend from Finland (unless you're in Finland, and then use Greece).
EDIT: ddns does not work behind cgnat, only vpns and cloudflare tunnels do. my bad.
cgnat is doable with a dynamic dns service. you sign up free at duckdns, freedns, or desec, set up the subdomain you want (example.dedyn.io), install or host in a container a small ddns tool that will periodically (5 min typically) check what your current ip is and update your dns record with that dns service automatically with an api. some routers even have a dynamic dns setting so you can do it without a separate install.
as far as security, you'll at a minimum want a long, unique password for any jellyfin accounts, and you should place it behind a reverse proxy like nginx, nginx proxy manager for a gui, caddy, or traeffik for some docker automagic fuckery i still don't understand. i use nginx proxy manager, set up a wildcard *.example.dedyn.io certificate and force ssl on each service i'm forwarding.
you can get fanicer and have an authentication layer self hosted as well like authelia or authentik, but beware that apparently mobile apps and smart tv apps for jellyfin do not play nice because they use the same http port as web access and do not have the ability to pop open a web portal for a secondary auth and will not work with these yet. so it's a good extra layer and 2fa sso addition but only if you use the webgui jellyfin and don't rely on an app, which considering you're asking about casting is probably not your use case.
what else you can do is set up a crowdsec or fail2ban service that will read logs from either the reverse proxy or jellyfin itself and ban ips thru your host firewall that fail to log in to help prevent bots from brute forcing in.
it's not perfect but with a reverse proxy, ip banning tool, and strong, long passwords on jellyfin it should be relatively ok.
however it would probably be most secure to setup an openvpn or tailscale to vpn to your host and have a definitely secure link to jellyfin from everywhere. i don't use these myself so i don't know about limitations this way such as mobile app or smart tv app compatibility, though. and if you want to share with other users it comes with its own security considerations of letting others have a vpn into your host.
hope some of this helps, also there's a cloudflare tunnel thing you can use instead of those dynamic dns services for domain redirect to ip behind cgnat, but i haven't used it either and don't know what all it entails.
oh dang, i thought i saw docs and comments saying ddns would help behind a cgnat too, must be mistaken. it's just for isps who give semi-static ips that change, not full cgnat. after some quick googling it looks like tailscale or other vpn or cloudflare tunnel are your only options.
as i said i'm getting my bouncer server set back up next year after the datacenter it's in has finished renovations, so actually getting a public address is not the biggest issue.
I mean, anything with a web server can have vulnerabilities. Just look at the LastPass breach where hackers got in through an employee's exposed Plex library.
Sure, software can always be vulnerable. What's the difference between me consuming it from someone else or my private server?
Plex was running on his private computer, not a dedicated server, right? Windows? His version was 75 versions behind the current version at the time. How could the malware escape the server's/plex' sandbox? With a keylogger? Why wasn't he using a password software? This isn't the best example for your point
Plex was running on his private computer, not a dedicated server, right?
They opened it to the internet - that's the big difference (and the topic at hand). Security is a multi-layered thing, but if your weakest point is a gaping hole, the rest doesn't mean much. To my point - assuming Jellyfin ain't gonna have vulnerabilities even when you're fully up-to-date, is foolhardy.
This video addresses many of the concerns of hosting stuff in public, and details a way (and some tools) to do it relatively securely. (There's always a risk there'll be a zero-day vulnerability in a web application like Jellyfin, but you can mitigate against them if you use the right strategies/tools, and you're vigilant enough.)
Since you're on cgnat, you can set up Pangolin on a VPS, or Tailscale-->rinetd-->Tailscale tunnel, also on a VPS. (Apparently frp is another similar solution, with p2p proxying.)
i'll worry about the nat traversal when i get my bouncer back up, but it will probably be less full-featured than pangolin. previously i just used a reverse ssh setup but that was a bit too rudimentary.
Yea I haven't tried Pangolin myself - looks a bit bloated for my tastes, but I have tried rinetd across Tailscale and it worked brilliantly (very simple conf file), and I've done reverse ssh before (using autossh) which was a bit fiddly. frp does look promising though, just as a VPS<->home bridge.
Not spesifically helpful with your cgnat-situation, but my jellyfin runs on a isolated network and it's just directly exposed to the internet via named reverse proxy in order to share the library with family and friends. Should someone get access to that they can obviously use the VM for nefarious purposes, but it's a known risk for me and the attacker would need to breach trough either my VLAN isolation or out of the virtual environment to my proxmox host if they wanted to access my actually valuable data.
Sure, there's bots trying every imaginable password combination and such, but in my scenario even if they could breach either the jellyfin server or reverse proxy it's not that big of a deal. Obviously I keep the setup updated and do my best to keep bad actors out. but as I mentioned, breach for that one server would not be the end of the world.
With cgnat there's not much else to do than to run a VPN where server is somewhere publicly accessible and route traffic via that tunnel (obviously running a VPN-client on jellyfin-server or otherwise routing traffic to it via VPN). Any common VPN-server should do the trick.
i like how everyone got hooked on the cgnat thing when i gave the actual solution in the main post. but yeah there's always the option of not doing anything until i see issues.
Also, don’t use the default “data/media/{library name}” (or whatever the suggested format is) folder setup that the Trash Guide has you set up. At least change the “tv”, “movies”, etc name to something different. Jellyfin has a known vulnerability where an attacker can get access to media without valid credentials if they already know the file path. Jellyfin devs have stated that they have no intention of ever fixing this, because it would require completely divesting from the Kodi branch that everything is built on. And since everyone follows the Trash Guide to set their *Arr stack and library up, guessing file paths is laughably easy.
You’re using the suggested file naming in your *Arr stack, so Jellyfin can automatically match media? Congrats, so is everyone else. You’re using the suggested folder layout so your *Arr stack can use hardlinks? Congrats, so is everyone else. At least change the library folder names. Since your library folder doesn’t need to match the name of your Jellyfin library, you can literally have your “tv”, “movies”, and other folders be named whatever you want. Hell, name your tv folder “peepee” and your movies folder “poopoo” for all I care.
This needs to be copypasta'd as a reply to every comment suggesting that opening up jellyfin to the internet is easy and everyone should do it to get away from Plex.
having your ssh port blocked in the firewall being second
So like if I want to access my PC from outside, is it enough that I don't have a firewall installed but that I open up some random port and redirect it to my PC's port 22, and then connect to it via the random port?
make sure you aren't accidentally exposing jellyfins port directly to the internet
If you don't want to worry too much, you can setup a vpn (like wireguard) on your server for ssh access.
Using a non standard port is a good idea, but not entirely foolproof because bots might still port scan (even if unlikely that they do that for ssh I'm not sure). At a mininum, you probably want to use keys for login like the other commenter on the main comment said.
Personally, using a vpn for when I want access to SSH when I'm out is worth the couple hours setting it up the one time (very simple setup with wireguard-easy for example). Maintenence time spent on upgrading is very low.
(Tl;dr personally I'd use a vpn to access ssh specifically rather than exposing it to the internet)
Same thing for Jellyfin?
Not 100% sure what you mean, but to clarify: Don't accidentally expose jellyfins port to the internet (eg the default port 8096). Make sure it is only accessible from outside your network through your reverse proxy.
I agree, there is a lot of paranoia, but honestly that's probably a good thing, because the people who are paranoid might not know that much, so a good amount of paranoia is healthy there.
The chance of being exploited is very low for me to care too too much. Why spend countless days locking up my entire infra when there's a very low low chance anyone could exploit me in the first place (obviously get your setup to a good standard, I don't recommend not reading up on anything and exposing server, etc. Just for me, I don't need to over do it).
That being said, personally I have ssh behind a vpn because that's a very important service that only I am accessing anyways, so it makes sense for me to disable that attack vector.
An Idea I am also using for other things where I do not want to use a VPN: 1. Setup a reverse proxy (e.g. traefik) 2. Setup an oauth middleware for everything (forward Auth) 3. Create rules to exempt very specific request based on IP, headers, etc... from the middleware.
In the casting use case you have to find a request and check if there is any parameter that you can use to safely whitelist the request. Ofcourse someone could get behind this and fake the request to match the whitelist. But without knowing that there is even a whitelist no one will really try
My workaround will be to get a Chromecast or anything castable, a travel router (probably gli.net), setup a VPN and use that.
Any other device that's outside of my home is unable to open a connection due to authelia intercepting the connection and the client unable to understand that.
Tencent, China’s largest publicly traded company, operates WeChat, a chat and social media platform with 1.3 billion users in China. As all Chinese services and companies in the country's domestic markets, Tencent's WeChat is subject to Beijing's censorship.
To Combat this censorship, the NGO "GreatFire" has been running a project called FeeWeChat. GreatFire constantly monitors WeChat for posts that contain certain “sensitive” keywords and archives them. If the archived posts later are removed on the WeChat site by Chinese censors, they mark them accordingly as 'censored.'
FreeWeChat has documented over 45 million posts since 2015, with more than 700,000 later censored, providing insights how China's censorship machine works.
GreatFire has been using U.S.-based cloud hosting company Vultr for its work. Now Tencent, through its intermediary Group IB, accused FreeWeChat of trademark infringement and of promoting banned content, despite the project’s role in exposing censorship practices.
After months of silence and failed negotiations, Vultr formally terminated FreeWeChat’s hosting in November 2025, ignoring arguments from the GreatFire NGO and letters of support from human rights groups.
on November 28, 2025, with many of our questions still left unanswered, Vultr closed GreatFire's account at Tencent’s request. In doing so, Vultr acted as Tencent’s vehicle to extend Chinese censorship well beyond the borders of China.
Totally agree. However, freewechat is up - guessing they changed providers pretty quick, maybe already saw this coming. Let this be the Streisand effect they (and China) deserve.
Research from the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab at Johns Hopkins University found that 75% of China's low-carbon foreign direct investment is in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.
Southeast Asia remained the top destination for Chinese cleantech manufacturing investments, the CEF report found
The Middle East and North Africa were the fastest-growing investment destinations, driven by national strategies for diversifying away from oil.
A new joint assessment by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) and the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) aims to dispel any remaining scepticism among those who still fail to recognise the threat from Russia.
The document [is] not yet public ... The weekly newspaper Spiegel obtained a draft and outlined its main findings [links to article in German]. The 30‑page analysis details cases of disinformation, espionage, sabotage, subversion and political influence operations in Germany.
The study covers the period from July 2024 to June 2025, also examining the consequences of earlier incidents. In just the first six months of 2025, 143 suspected acts of sabotage were recorded – an upward trend.
...
“The central conclusion: Germany is at the heart of hybrid threats. They emanate not only from Russia, but above all from Russia,” Spiegel writes. The aim of hybrid operations is to foster a sense of insecurity and destabilise the state. The analysis suggests that various incidents that have shaken Germany form a chain of hybrid attacks either orchestrated or exploited by Russia.
A recent public hearing with all three German intelligence agencies likewise concluded that Russia is the primary actor behind sabotage and subversive activity in the country.
...
Another key finding: in planning acts of sabotage, Russia shows no hesitation in taking lives. One example concerns an attack in the logistics sector with links to Lithuania.
In July 2024, incendiary devices were sent by DHL aircraft from Lithuania to the UK and Germany. A major disaster was narrowly avoided: the parcels did not make it onto the intended aircraft because it was delayed. The devices ignited in DHL’s Leipzig warehouse instead.
Investigators believe so‑called single‑use agents – individuals recruited via channels such as Telegram and given limited information – were used in Lithuania and other countries to carry out such operations.
Low‑level agents, often drawn from the criminal underworld, are suspected in other cases too – including a 2024 attempt to cast a shadow over then Vice‑Chancellor Robert Habeck and his Green Party. Hundreds of exhaust pipes were clogged with expanding foam, and cars were plastered with stickers featuring Mr Habeck’s image. These actions are seen as an attempt to influence the Bundestag election campaign.
...
The report also identifies tools of political influence, such as the pro‑Russian platform Voice of Europe, through which pro‑Kremlin members of the European Parliament were allegedly financed. AfD MEP Petr Bystron is among those investigated over suspected payments from the portal.
Security agencies also point to the instrumentalisation of violent attacks on German society for propaganda purposes. After the fatal attack at Magdeburg’s Christmas market last December, Russian channels used the incident to discredit the German government and praise the AfD as a “positive alternative”, fuelling social tension and seeking to shift Germany’s political course.
Germany has spent recent days showcasing its new defence capabilities – unveiling a system capable of intercepting ballistic missiles and preparing to open a centre dedicated to countering drone threats.
U.S. freight railroads are a major source of pollution, chuffing out more nitrogen oxide, the primary component of smog, than all the nation’s coal-fired power plants combined, according to a Reuters calculation using government data.
Well, trains are the cheapest and most fuel efficient way to move freight. Your move Reuters. Not saying locomotive emissions couldn't use some work, but name an even remotely competitive alternative. We'll wait. Nationalized rail would also be nice.
Beyond individual intimidation, the study highlights how these pro-China diaspora networks try to influence local politics. Community groups and lobbyists aligned with Beijing work to shape debates in foreign parliaments, cultivate alliances and strengthen what the author, Ray Wong, calls a “repressive nationalist diaspora.” Such efforts, the study warns, do more than target individuals: they erode basic rights and shift political environments in ways favorable to China’s foreign policy objectives.
...
Current [German] legislation does not yet clearly address harassment, coercion or intimidation carried out by non-state actors acting on behalf of a foreign government. As a result, some dissidents living in Germany - including Uyghur, Tibetan, Hong Kong and mainland Chinese activists - may face gaps in protection. Enhancing the legal framework, the study suggests, would help ensure that all individuals on German soil can fully rely on the country’s commitment to safeguarding fundamental rights.
...
The study acknowledges Germany’s strong emphasis on victim protection and crisis response, but notes that these efforts could be further strengthened through more robust preventive measures. Enhancing legal tools to address foreign-directed surveillance and harassment, it suggests, would help ensure that critics are better protected and that authorities are fully equipped to respond effectively.
...
The author also calls for a central coordinating authority to link intelligence services, law enforcement, foreign policy units and victim support agencies. Such coordination, the study suggests, would enable Germany to respond even more effectively to emerging challenges and align more closely with other democracies that are enhancing their approaches to foreign interference.
Ultimately the study serves as a stark reminder: the battleground over fundamental rights is no longer limited by geography. Taking proactive steps, it suggests, would not only strengthen Germany’s national security but also reinforce the country’s longstanding commitment to human rights and democracy at home.
China’s efforts to silence critics far beyond its borders have become a feature of its global reach. A new study commissioned by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom warns that Germany - home to one of Europe’s largest Chinese diaspora commun…
Ahh yes, the Russia's approach. Instead of being a decent country and naturally attracting globally good opinions, talent, etc., they have to reduce themselves to brainwashing and strongarming.
After Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine, China decided to purchase Russian aircraft, combat vehicles, ammunition, and equipment to enhance its paratroopers.
Chinese officers and representatives of defense manufacturers have repeatedly visited Russia to inspect examples of weaponry and negotiate deals.
In 2023 and 2024, Beijing entered into several confidential contracts with Moscow to acquire Russian armaments, with the funds intended for Russian arms manufacturers being subject to international sanctions.
The known deadline for implementing some of the contracts is 2027.
The Kyiv Independent has identified several dozen Chinese military personnel and employees of arms manufacturers who continued to cooperate with the Russian arms industry, thereby violating international sanctions.
...
A little over a month after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Russian government received a request from China, according to leaked correspondence reviewed by the Kyiv Independent.
In it, Beijing asked to buy a set of weapons and armored vehicles for airborne troops. The request, numbered ZH2022-Y53, was received on April 7, 2022, the documents show.
Three weeks later, according to the documents, Russia's Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation instructed Rosoboronexport, the state-owned company responsible for all arms exports from Russia, to demonstrate Russian air-droppable combat vehicles to a Chinese delegation.
...
The agreements are set to provide sanctioned Russian arms manufacturers with revenue from the export of their weaponry to China. In return, China will receive weaponry and equipment for its airborne forces, the PLAAF Airborne Corps, which have been strengthening amid expectations of an attack on Taiwan.
...
A key element of the cooperation is the steady flow of Chinese officers and defense industry officials who have been traveling to Russia since 2023 for closed-door talks. By piecing together leaked Russian documents with photos and travel data, the Kyiv Independent was able to identify many of these previously anonymous visitors by name and rank.
Chinese Major General Fan Jianjun was photographed during his visit to the annual Russian arms forum in the Moscow suburbs in August 2023. He was pictured showing then-Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu models of Chinese weaponry.
Fan Jianjun represented China's highest military authority, the Central Military Commission of the People's Republic of China (PRC). In 2023, he led the Bureau of Military Equipment and Technical Cooperation within the Equipment Development Department of the PRC Central Military Commission.
The Bureau's procurement division purchases imported weapons and equipment for China, including from Russia.
None of the Russian media that covered the event mentioned who was in the photo next to Shoigu.
Key findings:
* After Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine, China decided to purchase Russian aircraft, combat vehicles, ammunition, and equipment to enhance its paratroopers.
Don't be so sure. Agent Krasnoff desperately wants the approval of Putin and Xi. He basically handed what was left of our economic influence to China nearly the moment he took office. And has spent the year screaming and crying like a petulant child. He will abandon Taiwan at the first hint of any approval or attention from Russia or China.
Related Real Life Lore video from 3y ago but still relevant, that explains the "deadline" of around 2030 for mainland China to attempt an invasion (around 21:00 on video) and the escalation happening then -
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
[ul]
[li]Chinese AI companies are quietly tapping into Kenya’s young workforce, hiring students and recent graduates to label thousands of videos a day. [/li]
[li]The work is done through opaque networks of middlemen and WhatsApp groups that operate like
Chinese AI companies are quietly tapping into Kenya’s young workforce, hiring students and recent graduates to label thousands of videos a day.
The work is done through opaque networks of middlemen and WhatsApp groups that operate like digital factory floors.
Kenya’s weak labor protections and soaring youth unemployment have made it a hot spot for cheap AI labor, prompting officials and unions to warn of a new form of digital colonialism as the government rushes to draft regulations.
True that brother. I make way less than what I should be making. in the summer when I'm whored out I make $40 base. Rest of the year or internal work I'm making $26
i can go independent and charge $120+ an hour but it's hard to get clients when the two big players will purposely go out of their way to fuck you over.
TL;DR: Mozilla’s translation bot on Support Mozilla (that is currently overwriting user contributions is based on the closed source, copyright infringing LLM, Google Gemini.
Google puts up a major chunk of the funding Mozzia gets in a year. If you don't want them being the default choice in search or having your queries fed to their bots then start putting up the money to make their support no longer required.
Not really conductive as long as most funds are siphoned by the C-suite ranks. Get rid of the C-fat first, maybe even turn Mozilla into a co-op, then have the People fund it.
Their support isn't required though, it's desired.
Mozilla have millions of $, they are actively investing in various money making schemes (sorry, financial investment vehicles) well outwith the original scope of Mozilla.
They take the money because they want the money, they could refuse it any time they want. But they won't, because they don't want to. They're not a poor FOSS project with an independent developer that needs donations to survive, stop treating them like they are.
Mozilla has created some brilliant software, but they're leaving their original mission behind, burning goodwill with many people around the world, and setting themselves up to be shunned by the open source community the second a viable alternative pops up.
You wouldn't hear anything bad about it because the project, as far as I can tell, us like 4 months old. It's far too young for any daily use and to see what the project matures into.
start putting up the money to make their support no longer required
There's no way individual donations from ordinary people could match Google's. They're also likely to be less reliable.
Mozilla doesn't even ask for donations from users a whole lot, and the money they receive mostly doesn't go into development of the browser:
These funds directly support advocacy campaigns (i.e. asking big tech companies to protect your privacy), research and publications like the *Privacy Not Included buyer's guide and Internet Health Report, and covers a portion of our annual MozFest gathering.
There's no way individual donations from ordinary people could match Google's. They're also likely to be less reliable.
Thank god. I do really believe all the Google money is actively stifling innovation at Mozilla. The only thing they can't do is building a better browser than chrome is, for fear of becoming a viable alternative again.
So they use the money for some CEO pay. and weird projects while Firefox further falls from popularity.
I hope for the day Firefox's market share has dropped to a level tha Google just won't pay any money anymore for the default search engine deal.
That day - and not one day before - innovation will resume.
It's too late to give (life) support. Web browsers are a dying ecosystem as it's too complex to create competition. Why not abandon them and instead support software that does a seperatable part of what modern browsers do?
I am 100% ready to replace my browser with a blend of Usenet/RSS subscriptions, maybe sprinkle some Gemini (not the G*gle AI) atop of it. Fuck it, I might even get a library card for shits and giggles.
Man I collect library cards. At this point I'm a member of three different library systems. No joke, libraries are amazing and one of the best resources we've got left in this country. Go get a card man!
Six months ago, Anthony Aycock wrote a piece for this website called “How a Single Court Case Could Determine the Future of Book Banning in America” in which he detailed a case working …
I don't necessarily disagree on the complexity point, but I don't think breaking up the functionality of a web browser fixes the issue.
Web browsers are one of those basic tools everyone who uses a computer relies upon. Breaking that up would not only lead to user frustration, I think it'd introduce brand new territories bad actors like Google could monopolize. Now that unified "web browsers" exist it's incredibly difficult to ask users to stop using them. It turns from "download this program" to "download these four or five separate programs and follow this guide to learn how to daisy chain them together into a browser equivalent.". That's a reasonable ask for some people. Hell, it's a reasonable ask for me frankly. But your average user isn't going to have the time nor the patience to attempt to make that solution work.
Hopefully interoperability of seperate apps as 'part of a web browser experince' can be improved to help all users. However, the less technologically inclinded will have to step up and do something if they want to avoid growing frustrations from an endlessly, enshitifying browser experience.
Having a "do one thing" software design doesn't avoid all issues of anti-competition practices, nor does it prevent anti-features. For that I'd look towards software freedom licenses (as opposed to proprietary software).
We already have software that does some seprate parts of web browsers and comes with the OS; video players, text readers and protocol specific apps. The question is, are advanced users using alternatives like Gemini protocal? Hopefully activity will lead to others entering the new communities.
HTML is old and weird and its browsers have a bad ecosystem. The way to go would be to ignore xkcd 927 and make a new standard and a pilot browser for it. The hard part would be getting people to use it.
Voting with your wallet doesn’t work when you are the product. They don’t care about your money when google’s will dwarf any amount individuals could hope to raise, even collectively. Nothing prevents them from just taking both your money and google’s and changing absolutely nothing.
The money from Google was surely what killed their browser. I'm not saying there was a behind the scenes deal. They just got lazy and spent Google's money in stupid ways instead of improving their product so that they could gain a real userbase.
Imagine if they spent that money towards just the browser (not possible, but imagine anyways), we could be in a very different place where Chrome doesn't have 99% (or whatever it is) market share.
Firefox is a good browser, but where could they have been today if it was prioritised over paying the CEO millions for nothing? They have recently been sorta catching up, i've seen a lot of updates that actually include features I use, but I think it's too late.
Time for one of the new built from the ground up browsers to shine when complete. I still stand by Firefox and recommend it, but as soon as their is an open competitor that is production ready, I'm outta here.
They have undoubtly done amazing things for the web, but their idiocy is astounding sometimes and I don't wanna stay on a sinking ship. I'd rather use a new browser that helps keep the web secure, safe a pleasant for us all without annoyances or dumb beurocracy.
They also haven't written a browser. It's an apples and oranges comparison. There are plenty of Firefox derivatives that don't have all the bloat that Mozilla, et cetera, is putting into there. That's not the point. The point is how controlled they are by one of their competitors, namely Google.
There are only three main browser makers. Chrome by Google Firefox by Mozilla and WebKit/Safari now maintained by Apple but derived from Linux's K desktop environment web engine. There are a lot of wrappers written around these, but at the end of the day, there's still just the three.
The one real interesting bright spot though that I'm looking forward to is servo. Originally started by Mozilla, but now completely free of them. It's not yet in a daily driver's state, but it's looking to be quite interesting.
Yes, they are both WebKit, though largely irrelevant. Personally, I'm a daily KDE user. I did install falkon out of Curiosity for a short while. But neither it or konqueror are generally in any distributions base install. Including KDE neon.
They are usable, so long as you don't use any sort of add-ons.
Falkon is based on Qt web. So it is also WebKit.
Correction Falkon and Qt web engine are indeed chromium. Konqueror alone then would be WebKit
Ah you are correct. Thanks for the correction. I may have read otherwise, somewhere, but who knows that may have been an AI-tinted site. It's been a hot minute since I last messed with programming using QT. I could have sworn it was webkit but the facts are the facts.
I wish Firefox was better integrated into KDE. Whenever I open a link in a different app, Firefox opens the link but stays in the background where it seems like it should come to the foreground.
Apple’s WebKit (WebCore+JavaScriptCore) was originally a fork of KHTML/KJS. They shared at the beginning but not very well. They eventually opened up their source and made changes that were more friendly to other developers. A lot of browsers and embedded renderers use WebKit, now, besides Safari and KDE based ones.
Google forked WebCore for Chromium. I don’t think they share a codebase, anymore. Edge, Opera and many embedded renderers use Chromium.
Anyway, I just think it’s interesting that most every browser out there is descended from KHTML.
So what is that, a build of Chromium with no Vivaldi features? What is the point exactly? I can download Chromium by itself already. I'll even get edit history, unlike the big tarball that Vivaldi gives me.
Introduction Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open source software must comply with the following criteria: 1. Free Redistribution The license shall…
Servo aims to empower developers with a lightweight, high-performance alternative for embedding web technologies in applications. For more details on sponsorship tiers and fees, go to https://servo.org/sponsorship/
Is there a way to verify that? I did run Servo months ago and some pages did render without issues. Others not but that wasn't enough for me to draw such a conclusion. I remember Mozilla pushed for webcompat.com/ so wondering if this can be used to see the pace of change.
v0.0.2
This release is equivalent to nightly 2025-11-14, with some additional manual testing of the release artifacts.
For our first release, the version number received a lot of attention. We are ...
It's funny seeing the sudden surge of "copyright is awesome!" On the Internet now that it's become a useful talking point to bludgeon the hated Abominable Intelligence with.
Have any actual court cases established that Gemini is violating copyright, BTW? The major cases I've seen so far have been coming down on the "training AI is fair use" side of things, any copyright issues have largely been ancillary to that.
Copyright isn't awesome, it is useful. The whole basis of open source is built on the concept of copyright (copyleft), so alignment with copyright isn't "sudden", it is fundamental.
Copyrights is mostly used by big companies to fuck with the competition so they can keep a strangle hold on the consumers.
It's a deeply flawed system not in any way to our advantage. Actually having copyright laws strengthened so they apply to AI training would instantly kill the open source scene and make certain only a handful of companies can afford to put out models.
Copyleft is built as a protection against big companies and how unfair the playing field is because of copyright laws. It's like saying crime is a good thing because without it, we wouldn't have a police force.
I'm disagreeing with the positive spin you are trying to put on it. We have cops because of crime. Having cops is a good thing (mostly) but we wouldn't need them if there was no crime.
Copyright can be used to in a good way. Unfortunately, its mostly used by big corporations as a battering ram to extract as much money as possible from smaller businesses and even just individuals
For me the requirements in a browser are: - Works without many issues - Has extensions (or built-in features) that do what NoScript, Ublock Origin, Dark Reader, CanvasBlocker, and Redirector do on LibreWolf - Relatively secure - Open source and free from corporate evil - Not annoying in any major ways
When the required extensions get made for Falkon, I'm probably switching
When they are in late beta or ready for use, I will try Servo-based browsers and Ladybird
I daily driver QuteBrowser and have for awhile now. I like it. does everything I need it to do and the vim style navigation is awesome.
Sure there are some quirks that can be solved via userscripts and trust me I have a lot written for it but everything that requires an extension in firefox or chrome i have working on Qutebrowser. I don't get adds with youtube in fact dare I saw I have it set up better than what you could get on Firefox or Chrome, I have my password management via bitwarden, it all just works. And the dev, The Compiler, is great and is always on top of issues that come up.
there's yet to be any site i've come across that just doesn't work.
Is there any good alternative to FF that is cross device compatible and keep my sessions between said devices, but without me having to press anything more than "Install" or to type "apt-get install firefox"?
I hear a lot of these newer open source friendly browser, but switching between my pc/notebook/phone/tablet, is a requirement. I'd love to find something that fit that so I could switch.
I've been on librewolf for years, and as long as I'm running the FlatPak version, all Firefox extensions work. Having said that, you do have a few options to sync. One is using your Firefox account (I don't suggest you do because of Mozilla's BS over the past year or so, but you would be sharing way less stuff this way). In my case, the only thing I want synced in browsers is the bookmarks, so I use floccus extension in every browser, floccus app in android, and host them all in a self-hosted linkwarden instance. I hope that helps.
For the unaware, is a alternative to platforms such as Reddit and Tildes.
I've been using Lemmy as one of my main social platforms for the past 6 months...
Solution 2 in the post, multicommunities. I'm not sure it actually solves the problem though, as you still have to go to the actual community to post and I imagine multicomms add an extra layer of confusion to that.
Clicking though to community to post and selecting a community from the create post page are same problem rearranged. A user who subbed to ~technology@piefed.social isn't going to know the difference between !technology@lemmy.world, !technology@lemmy.zip and !technology@piefed.social.
To be honest that's a problem that can't be solved by tooling, it's a human issue.
I know why there is - !buyeuropean@feddit.uk - !buyfromeu@feddit.org - !buyfromeu@europe.pub
If people don't want to consolidate similar communities and just keep them existing next to each other then users have to figure out the differences (sometimes there are almost none) between two communities.
I can’t follow this link while logged in to my account from feddit.org—is that what you’re saying? Piefed allows it, others not (yet, from what I've read and understood).
I used Mlem in this case. I can open the link just fine on the Web UI. What exactly am I looking at there? Sorry for asking stupid questions. I really like Lemmy and the whole idea of the Fediverse so far, I'm just trying to understand more of it.
got it now. thanks for explaining. So this works for all crossposts, same url posts, and i can combine different communities together myself? not sure about the las part.
A lot of the "less active ones" are completely dead. Many mid-tier topics (not niche, but not "meme shitpost") have a sea of dead communities and 1-2 active ones and it's difficult to find them without actually clicking through the full list of results.
Tbh, and I plan to do this for piefed.social soon (and rimu has given me the go-ahead) - abandoned discarded communities with literally zero posts need to be purged by instances. It's just clutter.
If a community was active and then isn't, that's fine, but a lot of communities are made and then never used.
Tbh, and I plan to do this for piefed.social soon (and rimu has given me the go-ahead) - abandoned discarded communities with literally zero posts need to be purged by instances. It’s just clutter.
Cool, it's a good idea. But there are also other instances.
Then there is the issue of communities with a large number of subs but where the last post was 7 months ago and they have 0 MAUs. While a community with a lot less subs can have several posts per week and at least some MAUs (couple of hundred).
I think this could also be improved with a better search page, which shows how active the communities are in the search results so you don't have to click through them all, I think v1.0 is getting that
It would force you to write a more descriptive name. Maybe we want to hide by community title and not the handle though.
Say you want to have a community for memes. It is terrible UX if you just see seven different "memes@domainname.ending" in the result. So with an opinionated search, you instead name your community Sopuli Memes, Solarpunk Memes, Programming Memes etc., or just Funny Memes Archive, and they would not be hidden.
I'm not sure if the centralization is worse than the large portion of users on the large servers who joining copies of established communities on their own instances. Also, from my other reply:
It would force you to write a more descriptive name. Maybe we want to hide by community title and not the handle though.
Say you want to have a community for memes. It is terrible UX if you just see seven different “memes@domainname.ending” in the result. So with an opinionated search, you instead name your community Sopuli Memes, Solarpunk Memes, Programming Memes etc., or just Funny Memes Archive, and they would not be hidden.
Technically yes. The problem would be how to decide which community put in spotlight and which in grey (or any other meaningful distinction). Would it be automatic (if yes, how to decide the algorithm), or manual (if yes, how to decide how to left them). These things can be discussed out and solved, but we should be aware that these questions are here.
And it would work only for real duplicates of communities, not healthy separated communities based on actual, conscious and cherished differences.
"Separate conversations are splintering discourse, we should all just shout over each other in one massive wall of text!"
The separate communities across instances is a benefit of federation just like separate posts are a benefit over a single thread for everythjngs. Yes, features that allow them to be combined for those that want that way of interacting is great, but we don't need a single news community between all instances when there are can be massive differences between instances.
you’re right, definitely something I hadn’t really thought about. I just don’t get the sense that some communities are intentionally spread across different instances. Like there are two Plex communities on two separate instances that basically talk about the same stuff. I guess it’s just part of getting used to things, and it throws me off a bit since I’m still new to the fediverse.
In fact, there is a problem of asymmetry of difficulty. It is much easier to start a new community, that dealing with existence of several separated communities. Especially as social solutions (eg in case that the communities are really about the same thing in the same way, asking all members to switch, so for newcomers it is easy to know which one is active and maintained).
Proposed solution 3: Communities following communities
The ability for communities to "subscribe" to other communities is an idea that comes from this Github comment. This is, in my opinion, the best proposed solution by far. Community a can follow community b, making posts from b also appear on a.
What this means is that community moderators can choose to have posts from other communities to show up on theirs. That means if all the pancake communities are following each other, I can post on pancake@a.com and it would show up on the other pancake communities as well, and the comments would simply be grouped into just one post!
The main proposed solution doesn't force merging on anyone. Mods can decide whether or not they want content from other communities to show up in their space. No two news instances have to merge if they serve different audiences.
It isn't explicitly called out in the proposal but I could easily see there being an option for mods to unlink individual posts from other communities if they get too spicy.
The article does a good job breaking it down, but a short example is if you want to post about technology, you have to choose one of those communities to post to.
You can cross post or repost in the other communities but then any discussion gets fragmented, people see the same thing multiple times in their feed, only engage with one, and likely not the same one as somebody else.
On the other hand only posting in one community could significantly reduce engagement if you choose poorly.
Wait, so am I reading correctly from the wiki page the only app that supports merging crosspost comments is Interstellar, which also doesn't support crossposting?
This is a non issue. Different communities and instances have different rules, norms, cultures etc. There's no need to smash everyone together in a monoculture.
Practically, I myself have experienced several fragmented communities about the same topic with similar ethos. This was not a healthy separation based on different norms. It was simple, ineffective fragmentation. Or, at least the ethos and norms differences wasn't clear.
I feel like it is just a matter of time before either:
The fragmented communities develop more and become distinct, so that they are more unique and shouldn't merge.
One of the communities becomes the more popular "default" option, and the other becomes less active as people gather in the more popular one.
Even if that doesn't happen, redundancy isn't bad. We've seen how hard it is to migrate when there's only 1 real option and that option disappears or goes bad for some reason (i.e. reddit). If there was another fairly active community with the same focus, that would make it easier to keep going. That's part of why decentralization is good.
Nice thing would be to have a structured way to clearly present differences between communities of same name. Eg. possibility to link (in machine readable way) in sidebar to other communities and mark them as pure duplicates, or state the actual difference. This information could show also in search and crosspoting dialog.
Start coding and learn prompts engineering and workflows, be the manager and not the workhorse. You can inpaint you can Photoshop, you can still write or be an editor, review copy etc.
There are also things that present-day generative AI is not very good at in existing fields, and I'm not sure how easy it will be to address some of those. So, take the furry artist. It looks like she made a single digitally-painted portrait of a tiger in a suit, a character that she invented. That's something that probably isn't all that hard to do with present-day generative AI. But try using existing generative AI to create several different views of the same invented character, presented consistently, and that's a weak point. That may require very deep and difficult changes on the technology front to try to address.
I don't feel that a lot of this has been hashed out, partly because a lot of people, even in the fields, don't have a great handle on what the weaknesses are and what might be viably remedied and how on the AI front. Would be interesting to try to do some competitions in various areas, see what a competent person in the field and someone competent in using generative AI could do. It'll probably change over time, and techniques will evolve.
There are areas where generative AI for images has both surpassed what I expected and underperformed. I was pretty impressed with its ability to capture the elements of what creates a "mood", say, and make an image sad or cheerful. I was very surprised at how effective current image generation models were, given their limited understanding of the world, at creating things "made out of ice". But I was surprised at how hard it was to get any generative AI model I've tried to generate drawings containing crosshatching, which is something that plenty of human artists do just fine. Is it easy to address that? Maybe. I think I could give some pretty reasonable explanations as to why consistent characters are hard, but I don't really feel like I could offer a convincing argument about why crosshatching is, don't really understand why models do poorly with it, and thus, I've no idea how hard it might be to remedy that.
Some fantastic images are really easy to create with generative image AI. Some are surprisingly difficult. To name two things that I recall !imageai@sh.itjust.works regulars have run into over the past couple years, trying to create colored car treads (it looks like black treads are closely associated with the "tire" token) and trying to create centaurs (generative AI models want to do horses or people, not hybrids). The weaknesses may be easy to remedy or hard, but they won't be the same weaknesses that humans have; these are things that are easy for a human. Ditto for strengths --- it's relatively-easy for generative AI to create extremely-detailed images ("maximalist" was a popular token that I recall seeing in many early prompts) or to replicate images of natural media that are very difficult or time-consuming to work in in the real world, and those are areas that aren't easy for human artists.
I've noticed, at least with the model I occasionally use, that the best way I've found to consistently get western eyes isn't to specify round eyes or to ban almond-shaped eyes, but to make the character blonde and blue eyed (or make them a cowgirl or some other stereotype rarely associated with Asian women). If you want to generate a western woman with straight black hair, you are going to struggle.
I've also noticed that is you want a chest smaller than DDD, it's almost impossible with some models — unless you specify that they are a gymnast. The model makers are so scared of generating a chest that could ever be perceived as less than robustly adult, that just generating realistic proportions is impossible by default. But for some reason gymnasts are given a pass, I guess.
This can be addressed with LORAs and other tools, but every time you run into one of these hard associations, you have to assemble a bunch of pictures demonstrating the feature you want, and the images you choose better not be too self-consistent or you might accidentally bias some other trait you didn't intend to.
Contrast a human artist who can draw whatever they imagine without having to translate it into AI terms or worry about concept-bleed. Like, I want portrait-style, but now there are framed pictures in the background of 75% of the gens, so instead I have to replace portrait with a half-dozen other words: 3/4 view, posed, etc.
Hard association is one of the tools AI relies on — a hand has 5 fingers and is found at the end of an arm, etc. The associations it makes are based on the input images, and the images selected or available are going to contain other biases just because, for example, there are very few examples of Asian woman wearing cowboy hats and lassoing cattle.
Now, I rarely have any desire to generate images, so I'm not playing with cutting edge tools. Maybe those are a lot better, but I'd bet they've simply mitigated the issues, not solved them entirely. My interest lies primarily in text gen, which has similar issues.
I’ve also noticed that is you want a chest smaller than DDD, it’s almost impossible with some models — unless you specify that they are a gymnast.
That's also another point of present generative AI image weakness --- humans have an intuitive understanding of relative terms and can iterate on them.
So, it's pretty easy for me to point at an image and ask a human artist to "make the character's breasts larger" or "make the character's breasts smaller". A human artist can look at an image, form a mental model of the image, and produce a new image in their head relative to the existing one by using my relative terms "larger" and "smaller". They can then go create that new image. Humans, with their sophisticated mental model of the world, are good at that.
But we haven't trained an understanding of relative relationships into diffusion models today, and doing so would probably require a more sophisticated --- maybe vastly more sophisticated --- type of AI. "Larger" and "smaller" aren't really usable as things stand today. Because breast size is something that people often want to muck with, people have trained models on a static list of danbooru tags for breast sizes, and models trained on those can use them as inputs, but even then, it's a relatively-limited capability. And for most other properties of a character or thing, even that's not available.
For models which support it, prompt term weighting can sometimes provide a very limited analog to this. Instead of saying "make the image less scary", maybe I "decrease the weight of the token 'scary' by 0.1". But that doesn't work with all relationships, and the outcome isn't always fantastic even then.
It really depends, you can be bad a prompting and waste time generating and reviewing or learn to be able to say what you want produced. It's like being a director or manager, you need to lay out what you expect your team to accomplish, give guidance.
I work in a creative industry for a pretty large business, with limited exception really nobody is using AI except maybe to send lazy email responses. If there's workers getting replaced by slop it's not where I'm at.
It just really hasn't shown much ability to not fuck up. People dip their toe in occasionally to show upper upper management we're leveraging "all the tools available to us", but I've never seen it used for anything more substantial than a mood board.
You sounds like you work at a great company. Every single level of my leadership at my company is fully brainwashed by it. They literally tell us how to do our jobs with AI, and yes, it's almost always wrong and creates headaches and long emails explaining why we can't or shouldn't listen to what "they" are telling us to do.
A family member is a graphic designer for an agency. They use AI to reformat files, and claim that having AI do it, then fixing it, is quicker and easier than doing it some other way. But their actual creative process doesn't involve AI at all.
Mmm, maybe. Affects also works as it means to influence. It’s subtle and context matters, but if AI is still changing things with their job then affects is the verb you want. If AI has changed their job and nothing further is happening then effect is the noun you want.
To be exact, there is a noun "affect" whose plural would presumably be "affects", but it's a term of art in psychology and absolutely not the word that is wanted here.
I'm only a hobbyist and create for fun, but I hate GenAI with a passion; I hate everything it stands for and now I genuinely think it's a scam and that it needs to be treated and prosecuted as the scam it is.
And Sam Altman of OpenAI infamy really needs his own Harry Markopolos turning up the heat on him and contributing to him eventually getting busted like Markopolos did to Madoff 18 years ago, since if GenAI is a scam, then Sam Altman is the modern-day Bernie Madoff.
I do retouching work. Recently lost a client to an 'AI' retouching firm. When the client came back to me to fix loads of stuff and I looked at the output, it became apparent that the work had actually just been outsourced to India and there was no magic AI solution.
Gen AI is an amazing tool but not a one click solution like so many are claiming.
[quote]Hollywood is feeling the lure of Saudi Arabian money (…)
Saudi money is also behind a portion of Paramount Skydance’s more than $60 billion bid this week for Warner Bros Discovery, according to Variety, which cites multiple sources, and Bloomberg
Hollywood is feeling the lure of Saudi Arabian money (...)
Saudi money is also behind a portion of Paramount Skydance’s more than $60 billion bid this week for Warner Bros Discovery, according to Variety, which cites multiple sources, and Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the discussions. A spokesperson for Paramount declined to comment.
Additionally, the kingdom is backing a $1 billion new independent content studio called Arena SNK launched in October by former Lionsgate executive Erik Feig, and a $55 billion deal for video game maker Electronic Arts announced in September. A representative for Feig declined to comment.
Executives from Sony traveled to Saudi Arabia this fall for meetings, a spokesperson confirmed. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts also traveled to the country this fall to attend a conference and view a potential theme park site in Qiddiya, a tourism megaproject in Riyadh province, according to a source with knowledge of Roberts’ trip who was not authorized to speak on the record about it. (Comcast owns NBCUniversal, which is the parent company of NBC News.)
The Red Sea Film Festival 2025 is going on right now (Dec 4-13). The glitterati are partying with Saudi royalty & following the money while blithely ignoring Saudi human rights abuses
Ok, so Hollywood will do what they did with China when trying to sell their movies there, Saudi's will suddenly for some random reason be cool, popular and kind completely out of the blue.
Well the real problem is that what you're saying does exist to some extent, and it's a very easily controlled variable
So when execs and investors look at marvel, they learn the wrong lesson. Endgame threw in an insane number of expensive actors and made an insane amount of money
Instead of looking at the years of setup and buildup of characters in this grand artistic vision, they're working with spreadsheets to try to min-max the actor to box office numbers
It's why everything just keeping getting worse. The finance brained people are running the world, and you can always count on them to learn the wrong lesson
A slapstick comedy about accidentally killing a journalist in an embassy and desperately trying to get rid of the body by dismembering it and taking it out in suitcases.
Alien invasion movie, it turns out the only thing that kills the aliens is crude oil.
Historical drama about prophet Mohammad: first ever movie where the main character is always just out of frame.
For some reason I'm reminded of the new Top Gun's absolute refusal to name their enemy. The studios's pathetic cowardice took me right out of the movie.
I thought it was funny how it was some magical conglomerate of Iran and Russia, and how the plot literally included the exact nuclear refinery target that was bombed earlier this year.
Ignoring all the insane air fight stupidity, the only thing I could think about during the whole movie was the WKUK Nerf Nuke spoof.
LLMs are useful because they generalize so well. But can you have too much of a good thing? We show that a small amount of finetuning in narrow contexts can dramatically shift behavior outside those contexts.
Samsung is reportedly preparing to wind down its SATA SSD business, and a notable hardware leaker warns the move could have broader implications for consumer storage pricing than Micron’s decision to end its Crucial RAM lineup.
Ziggurat
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •rozodru
in reply to Ziggurat • • •DreamButt
in reply to Ziggurat • • •redwattlebird
in reply to Ziggurat • • •Mumble and Pigdin won't be banned right? Also, swapping mobile numbers and getting on conference calls... Writing letters and all that. There's still other ways to communicate.
I'm almost thinking of making a quick phone app to give them options and ideas on how to communicate outside of the big tech bubble.
I wonder if making your own personal website on Neocities/Geocities will come back in vogue again.
T156
in reply to Ziggurat • • •If enough of it is still around. A lot of the old spaces that used to exist aren't around any more.
Plus things like YouTube and Discord aren't banned, do chances are, they would end up there instead.
Github may be, strangely enough.
CaptainPedantic
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •Have you tried parenting her?
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Kami
in reply to CaptainPedantic • • •like this
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comrade_twisty
in reply to CaptainPedantic • • •ms.lane
in reply to CaptainPedantic • • •CaptainPedantic
in reply to ms.lane • • •"Give me your phone, give me your laptop" works pretty well.
My phone has a giant "setup parental controls" button. You can block specific websites using tools like PiHole that are easy to set up.
ThrowawayOnLemmy
in reply to CaptainPedantic • • •Ricky Rigatoni
in reply to CaptainPedantic • • •DreamButt
in reply to CaptainPedantic • • •WoodScientist
in reply to DreamButt • • •ameancow
in reply to DreamButt • • •davad
in reply to CaptainPedantic • • •True, but there's also a little more nuance.
For a social media ban to be effective without ostracizing individuals, it has to include the entire friend group.
As an analogy, if the kid's friends all text each other, but your kid doesn't have a phone, they miss out socially. They miss out on organized and impromptu hangouts. And they miss out on inside jokes that develop in the group chat. Over time they feel like more and more of an outsider even if the ready of the group actively tries to include them.
BackgrndNoize
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •athairmor
in reply to BackgrndNoize • • •TrackinDaKraken
in reply to athairmor • • •rozodru
in reply to athairmor • • •Nuggsy
in reply to rozodru • • •That and it's a 'social media ban' which is a pretty broad term. Depending how you define social media it could ecompase a lot of other platforms not included in the initial list i.e. Steam, Discord, etc.
This could lead to further restrictions on freedom of speech and anonymity dependent on whatever agenda the government is pushing or to try to control dissent by forcing the poplace to provide some form of ID to access any platform/access the internet.
That may be a leap too far from where we currently are, but it's an important factor to consider as it could have wider reaching consequences if left unchecked.
That being said, I think the large social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are cesspools that prey on children/teens and are designed to be addictive even for adults.
It's due to that I'm stuck on the fence a little. If anything we as a society should be looking to pressure social media companies to operate ethically.
What has happened instead is that the Australian government has basically pushed the onus on social media companies to block access to these platforms and threatened them with a fine. There's no real plan for implementation, no push for education on social media and its issues.
WoodScientist
in reply to athairmor • • •BackgrndNoize
in reply to athairmor • • •WoodScientist
in reply to BackgrndNoize • • •Arcane2077
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •Some good silver linings here, but what everyone needs to remember here is that nobody would be supporting this at all if facebook wasn’t intentionally predatory and bad for (all) people’s brains.
If regulators in Australia had a spine they would call for an end to those practices, and now that’s infinitely harder to do
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porcoesphino
in reply to Arcane2077 • • •I think that's easier said than done. There are a lot of negatives associated with social media and some are easier to put restrictions on (say violent content) but I don't think we really have a good grasp of all the ways use is associated with depression for example. And wouldn't some of this still fall back to age restricted areas, kind of like with movies?
But yeah, it would be nice to see more push back on the tech companies instead of the consumers
Arcane2077
in reply to porcoesphino • • •porcoesphino
in reply to Arcane2077 • • •ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝
in reply to porcoesphino • • •porcoesphino
in reply to ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝 • • •The_v
in reply to porcoesphino • • •Its a very simple fix with a few law changes.
This would bankrupt Facebook, Twitter, etc within 6 months.
Attacker94
in reply to The_v • • •I assume you don't mean simply providing the platform for the content to be hosted, in that case I agree this would definetly help.
This one is damn near impossible to enforce for the sole reason of the word "deliberate", the issue is that I would not support such a law without that part.
The_v
in reply to Attacker94 • • •I left out the hosting part for just that reason. The company has to activately do something to gain the liability. Right now the big social media companies are deliberately prioritizing harmful information to maximize engagement and generate money.
As for enforcement hosters have had to develop protocols for removal of illegal content since the very beginning. Its still out there and can be found, but laws and mostly due diligence from hosters, makes it more difficult to find. Its the reason Lemmy is not full of illegal pics etc. The hosters are actively removing it and banning accounts that publish it.
Those protocols could be modified to include obvious misinformation bots etc. Think about the number of studies that have shown that just a few accounts are the source of the majority of harmful misinformation on social media.
Of course any reporting system needs to be protected from abuse. The DMCA takedown abusers are a great example of why this is needed.
T156
in reply to Attacker94 • • •It would also be easily abused, especially since someone would have to take a look and check, which would already put a bottleneck in the system, and the social media site would have to take it down to check, just in case, which gives someone a way to effectively remove posts.
porcoesphino
in reply to The_v • • •That kind of aligns with some actions I would love to see but I don't really see how it helps in the example I used to highlight some of the harder things to fix, depression. How does that improve the correlation between social media use and depression in teenagers? I can see it will improve from special cases like removing posts pro eating disorder content but I'm pretty confident the depression correlation goes well beyond easy to moderate content.
Also, if we presumed that some amount of horrific violence is okay for adults to choose to see and a population of people thinks its reasonable to restrict this content for people below a certain age (or swap violence for sex / nudity) then do we just decide we know better than that population, that freedom is more important, or does it fall back to age restrictions again (but gated on parts of the site)? I'm avoiding saying "government" here and going with "population of people" to try to decouple a little from some of the negatives people associate with government, especially since COVID
But yeah, holding tech companies accountable like that would be lovely to see. I suspect the cost is so large they couldn't pay so it would never happen, but I think that's because society has been ignoring their negative externalities for so long they're intrenched
ms.lane
in reply to Arcane2077 • • •Where?
The kids will move to less monitored platforms and even on things like YouTube, parental controls are now gone.
You need to have an account for parental controls to be applied to, kids aren't allowed an account, vis-a-vis, no more parental controls or monitoring for problem content.
socsa
in reply to ms.lane • • •wheezy
in reply to ms.lane • • •As someone that grew up with an "unmonitored" internet. I can say that it was significantly more healthy than the profit driven "keep watching" algorithm that is all of social media today.
Yeah. I saw "two girls one cup" and "lemon party". But, did I slowly have my perspective of reality changed by the 30 second videos I swiped on for hours at a time for days on end?
No, most of my time was spent learning about computers, "stealing" music, and chatting with my real life friends.
I don't think a kid today can experience that internet anymore. It's gone. But acting like "unmonitored" internet access is worse is pearl clutching and ignoring the fundamental problems the profit driven internet has created at the expense of societies mental health.
Kids will absolutely find another place to connect online in Australia. But, honestly, I think whatever that is will be healthier than the absolute brain rot that is profit driven social media.
venusaur
in reply to Arcane2077 • • •socsa
in reply to Arcane2077 • • •Arcane2077
in reply to socsa • • •socsa
in reply to Arcane2077 • • •Arcane2077
in reply to socsa • • •WoodScientist
in reply to socsa • • •stickly
in reply to WoodScientist • • •Wasn't aware that social media keeps kids alive?...
I've seen enough stories on kids being cyber bullied into suicide that I really doubt there's enough happy inclusion on these platforms to balance that.
Walk_blesseD
in reply to socsa • • •You are a fucking imbecile.
stickly
in reply to Walk_blesseD • • •Strangely enough, support networks can exist outside of social media. It's very possible to directly message friends or neighbors without being subjected to the dregs of public social media. It remains possible to get world/local news without an attached public forum.
If you're going to make a space that has content for adults and allows for free adult discussions (with all the nuance and complications that entails), then restrict it to adults only.
This is only a problem in conjuction with legislation requiring social media use (ie: as an official broadcast system, payment platform, electoral tool, etc...). If we fight that and force it to remain an opt-in disinformation platform then who cares?
As it currently stands nothing is forcing you on these platforms other than a conditioned familiarity. Even worse, there are no tech or legal protections preventing them uniquely identifying users today. Them getting an official state ID doesn't change much. More barriers to entry for a shitty surveillance and propoganda platform? Literally no downsides there.
wheezy
in reply to Arcane2077 • • •It's a bandaid. And just like previous attempts like this all this will do is make Australian kids better at circumventing the censorship or using an alternative website. Which, honestly, is probably a positive in and of itself. I'd much rather my kid be visiting some random forum type website (like I grew up with) then the absolute brain rot that is social media algorithms.
Seeing "lemon party" posted before the mods removed it definitely fucked me up less than the slop being fed into the brains of teenagers on social media today.
Kindness is Punk
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •a_non_monotonic_function
in reply to Kindness is Punk • • •That was my first reaction after processing the news--lets hold them accountable for hate, exploitation, etc.
If they can't play nice they don't get to do business at all.
Jajcus
in reply to Kindness is Punk • • •The alternative, of not being evil, is not compatible with their business model.
But it is the business model that should be banned, not socializing online by teenagers.
pulsewidth
in reply to Jajcus • • •Tech giants are well known for lobbying against any legislation that gives them less freedoms to exploit markets and regulations of any kind that impact them - but this legislation that was targeted specifically at regulating them and removes a significant number of users - "this is suspicious, I think they might be the ones pushing it!"
There's so many people in under this post trying to turn it into anything but what it is - legislation attempting to protect kids from the harms of social media. Which, again - are well documented.
Jumuta
in reply to Kindness is Punk • • •Dalraz
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •PriorityMotif
in reply to Dalraz • • •BassTurd
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •foofiepie
in reply to BassTurd • • •Er no.
My progeny is a decade ahead of where I was at his age. Smarter and more self assured and stable.
He’s not dumber. But I’ve realised I am.
BassTurd
in reply to foofiepie • • •foofiepie
in reply to BassTurd • • •Ah I see. Yep. And it’s easier to see it as you get older.
Didn’t want to miss out on the chance to diss myself though. I was as dumb as a rock back then. And in many ways, still am.
BassTurd
in reply to foofiepie • • •foofiepie
in reply to BassTurd • • •BassTurd
in reply to foofiepie • • •frongt
in reply to BassTurd • • •BassTurd
in reply to frongt • • •Bonifratz
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •So, Australia's first?
SpacePirate
in reply to Bonifratz • • •ThomasWilliams
in reply to SpacePirate • • •E_coli42
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •sudoer777
in reply to E_coli42 • • •theneverfox
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •This is going to be a shit show.
I'm not opposed to the idea that kids shouldn't have access to social media, but they obviously do. Their social lives are online, and their insecure little brains are going to scream that they've been kicked out of the tribe when you cut the link
The ban won't work, but will also cause a lot of damage
ameancow
in reply to theneverfox • • •Like what exactly?
theneverfox
in reply to ameancow • • •Like teenagers, who run off social validation, suddenly feeling like they're excluded from their society
Kids are going to kill themselves.
And far more kids are going to develop complexes that they'll never recover from
Social isolation hits the brain like physical pain. We're hardwired to feel social isolation as trauma, logic can't save you from feeling like you've been cut off from your peers
bcgm3
in reply to theneverfox • • •Withdrawal is an unpleasant, but necessary, part of detox.
On the other hand, I 100% agree it's going to be a shit show. Technological development has outpaced the law as long as I've been alive, and the disparity is only growing... Authorities are not equipped to provide solutions to the problems that technology has created, and continues to create.
theneverfox
in reply to bcgm3 • • •Withdrawal isn't what I'm worried about... You can't cut teens off from their peers and get a good result
Those who can will evade, those who can't will feel a crippling level of isolation. That doesn't do good things to a teenage mind
EvilBit
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •socsa
in reply to EvilBit • • •EvilBit
in reply to socsa • • •lunelovegood
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •Literally the fault of the parent.
yes_this_time
in reply to lunelovegood • • •There is precedence though. We age gate: nicotine, alcohol, gambling etc..
we shouldnt expect parents to be monitoring children 24/7. actually, as children get older they should be given freedoms, parents have the right to expect our society has some guardrails.
yes_this_time
in reply to yes_this_time • • •UnpledgedCatnapTipper
in reply to yes_this_time • • •The guardrails already exist. Put parental controls on your kid's devices. Done, solved. Block social media sites, monitor what they're doing online. Don't go making it mandatory for everyone to give social media companies more information than they already have.
A better comparison would be "let's put a government mandated ID scanner on everyone's liquor cabinet so that their kids can't access it! Oh you don't have kids? Too bad, still need that ID scanner!"
Maybe the focus should be on a free (government funded, ideally FOSS) parental controls software suite that makes blocking social media on all major platforms (iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux) simple and easy. Promote it to parents, and get them to parent, instead of deanonymizing the internet for everyone.
ameancow
in reply to UnpledgedCatnapTipper • • •But nobody does that, and the problem is getting worse.
What's your answer if you can't get a population to make better choices and people are being harmed by something?
I'm not saying there's a right answer here, I am genuinely looking for alternatives on a societal level to address a proven health problem.
yes_this_time
in reply to UnpledgedCatnapTipper • • •The bans are for under 16s, not just 7 year olds. Parents don't control all internet activity for 15 years, at that age they are going to have some autonomy outside of the house.
I'm not sure there is a direct irl analog when it comes to controlling digital spaces, since they are personal by nature. and I think this is where the debate comes in.
Should parents be following their teenage child into every store to make sure they aren't buying alcohol?
I get the concern with providing social media companies a government ID, I certainly would never give them one! I would just not use them. But they provide net negative value in my opinion so no loss.
I like the idea of FOSS parental controls.
irelephant
in reply to UnpledgedCatnapTipper • • •ameancow
in reply to lunelovegood • • •Parents who were also raised by social media? This isn't a new problem but it is a problem that's getting worse, I don't know if a ban is the answer but so far nobody has even suggested an effective alternative to reducing screen-time for both adults and kids.
This ban isn't supposed to solve a problem overnight, but it's supposed to influence some segment of the population to socialize, to form real communities and to hopefully grow up capable of helping their own kids not get addicted.
This is a real problem, it's widespread across the globe and many, many studies have shown the harm social media has on a huge percentage of teens.
Also, parents work. Parents sleep. You can't fucking hover over your teen night and day, you would hate that worse.
2deck
in reply to ameancow • • •ameancow
in reply to 2deck • • •I agree.
But what do we do about the fact that even though our knowledge, research and understanding of the problem has increased, the problem has gotten worse? Is there more that can be done on that front that you think would be effective? Genuinely asking to help me shape my opinion.
It's blooming into a larger-scale societal problem than just hoping enough people pull through, a lack of stable mental health and attention spans across large swaths of your population start to erode your society.
2deck
in reply to ameancow • • •Walk_blesseD
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •And for what? So boomer politicians and their constituents aren't challenged by their well-informed children about the genocides they're facilitating at home and abroad? So the pigs in this police state have an even easier time surveiling citizens with all the identifying info websites are gathering??
ameancow
in reply to Walk_blesseD • • •Social media use by kids and teens has been demonstrated factually to cause harm to people's mental health and social lives. The sources are plenty and widespread.
I still don't know if a ban is the answer, but at least it's an attempt to address a problem. I'm curious what your answer would be to this growing problem?
Walk_blesseD
in reply to ameancow • • •I figure holding tech giants directly accountable for the specific harms they've caused would be better than punishing an entire population but unfortunately our politicians are mostly either invertebrates who are too cowardly to pick fights with foreign corporate entities (so they're useless drains of political will) or they're actively supportive of them on the grounds of being ideologically pro-business (so, evil).
They feed us their poisons (surveillance capitalism and an unhealthy information ecosystem driven by algorithmic optimisation for advertising revenue) so they can sell us their "medicines" (age gating and mandatory identification online—more data harvesting as a selling point to advertisers) while they suppress our cure (an internet by independent creators as opposed to capitalist brands)
ameancow
in reply to Walk_blesseD • • •I don't disagree that the entire institution is rotten and causing harm, but in terms of just socializing online, just the act of forming communities and forums and discussion groups and sharing content, the essence of what's becoming harmful, what is the right answer here? The stuff that causes a lot of the harm is just what people tend to do online, because humans broadly are not meant to substitute real social connections for whatever is happening when we scroll and type and read other people's thoughts and fantasies and depressed manifestos of strangers every day.
Even now, you're reading my text inside your head in your own voice. The act alone of having this discussion is creating an entirely new kind of information pattern in your brain that we haven't had in the last half-million years or so since our brains evolved. Do you know what this new kind of information processing is doing to your view of the world? Do any of us?
I know if you type "research teens social media health" into google you will have days of reading material about the research done and how harmful these practices are. But I'm not sensing that anyone even cares honestly. Is it better that we let whatever happens happen? I'm not being facetious, I want to know if people genuinely think that this isn't a problem worth fighting.
Walk_blesseD
in reply to ameancow • • •The online harms I'm concerned with are bullying, harassment and misinformation. Platforms should be required by society to moderate against these, or face penalties proportionate to revenue. Instead just banning under 16s, even if it could be done in a way that is both effective and respectful of everyone's privacy (I'm not convinced that it can) would still be a lazy abrogation of this responsibility, still leaving kids vulnerable to the same behaviours in offline spaces and everyone else vulnerable to the harms purportedly being caused among the youth online currently.
But the government isn't interested in this because these behaviours serve to entrench existing social hierarchies, and the government—being in charge of the nation-state—likes existing social hierarchies.
absGeekNZ
in reply to Walk_blesseD • • •What if; the social media giants are in another country. Your country doesn't have jurisdiction there and can do fuck all in reality.
Maybe fine them???? Sure, which they will fight in court until the end of time; all the while the harm continues.
I don't know if a ban will work, or what extra harms it will cause. But there are no good options to tackle this on the large scales of whole countries.
Algorithmic social media is mind cancer; if you have a better suggestion for tackling this issue. Let us know.
Lemmy is social media; but there is no algorithmic feed, my views are not being manipulated by some engagement maximizing machine.
Walk_blesseD
in reply to absGeekNZ • • •The ban proves it's possible to legislate, so maybe they should just legislate something better lol? Holding platforms accountable to a bare minimum standard of moderation against misinformation, bullying and harassment might be a starting point. And hey, if socmed's really that bad for you, then us adults could benefit from this alternative, too! In any case, this ban is literally worse than just leaving the problem be.
absGeekNZ
in reply to Walk_blesseD • • •I don't really agree; the ban will do two things.
1/ it will show the social media companies that, Australia at least; has tools that they can use to reduce their power.
2/ show kids that this is really serious; it is not just your parents saying shit you can ignore.
Will some kids work out how to get around it; yep, 100%. Will it be a big portion; maybe, tech literacy is not as high as it could/should be.
This would be great; but it is also too little too late. They have tried, and failed at exactly this for years.
It is that bad for you! Algorithmic social media is doing you harm.
Walk_blesseD
in reply to absGeekNZ • • •Wall of text incoming.
I don't see how both these claims can simultaneously be true. Either Australia has tools to hold these companies to account, in which case, how would they have previously failed if they'd already tried? Or it doesn't, and this is just one more completely futile policy that won't give companies any more than the usual slap on the wrist if it ever goes to court.
I argue that they didn't try, because they never actually cared about children's wellbeing, because if they did they'd have done better than this, ergo this policy isn't really about that and is actually about making citizens more easily identifiable online.
Additionally, it does nothing to reduce the power of seppo tech giants. On the contrary, they've got money, they'll be fine. Independent social media sites however, don't all have the resources to implement verification systems, so some will feel the financial burden of compliance a lot harder, and others will simply cease serving Australian users, further strengthening Silicon Valley's hold over the internet.
As I have said over and over again in this thread, what the ban will do is cut children suffering domestic abuse (a problem that is absolutely rife in this country) off from their support networks. It'll cut minority kids that're subjected to bullying by their peers off from their communities. It'll drive more kids to shadier corners of the internet where they're at greater risk of predation. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say this is going to get children killed.
Furthermore—and again, as I've been repeating all over this thread—everyone—yes, that includes adults—will be required to submit personally identifiable information to private organisations just to communicate with other people online, making anyone in this country who uses social media a potential victim of identity theft the moment a data breach happens. And happen it will. It's happened before, and it'll happen again.
What's more, knowing that the platforms they're using have their identities will make a great many people more hesitant to speak critically about existing power structures, especially the government. This is bad.
I stand by my previously stated opinion that all this is worse than the status quo, but even if it weren't you should be asking why this is the solution that the government came up with.
absGeekNZ
in reply to Walk_blesseD • • •Sorry, my poor communications...I was referring to the social media companies, when I said they had been trying and failing for years. Not trying that hard mind you; moderation is a very expensive problem to solve, and they don't want to spend money they don't explicitly have to.
Maybe. That is speculation, probably a nice little side effect. But not the primary goal.
This is a great point; and there is an easy way to solve this problem. Not that the govt will care that a simple solution exists. If you don't have an algorithmic feed a lot of the spread of misinformation is curtailed. If you are not allowed to host images/video etc directly than the moderation of them can be off loaded to 3rd parties.
Another great point. I don't have a good answer to this one, but there are anonymous leak avenues etc for serious stuff.
2deck
in reply to ameancow • • •ameancow
in reply to 2deck • • •I don't disagree with any of that.
I am mostly asking people here what they think the alternative should be. Like you say, parents who manage and monitor this are going have better outcomes... but that's not the norm, and the problem is getting worse despite all of us having more knowledge and proof how vital it is for their kids to have their internet use managed. So I am not convinced any kind of education campaign is going to do much. Most parents are just as addicted to their phones and rather scroll than parent. This is a societal problem with many intersecting problems.
socsa
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •redwattlebird
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •Michal
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •The ban also affects everyone who isn't willing to undergo the age check.
Kids will find a way around is. They'll move to fediverse, and the cooler kids will still hang around the mainstream platforms thanks to their older friend, sibling or cool uncle.
ameancow
in reply to Michal • • •KaChilde
in reply to ameancow • • •It’s not designed at all.
Some pearl-clutches said “won’t somebody think of the children”, and then made the social media companies figure out how to implement the ban.
The social media companies all looked at the free, government mandated access to user biometrics and complied.
Do I think that social media should be restricted for children and teens? Sure.
Do I think this if going to go about as well as the 2007 porn filter that the government tried to implement? Absolutely.
ameancow
in reply to KaChilde • • •Okay, I agree and I am not exactly cheering for government telling anyone what they can and can't look at... but what's the alternative here? I am cautiously siding with the idea behind the regulation if not the execution, but so far nobody has suggested what we do about a problem that is real, proven and studied and is leading to a worse world.
I'm being serious here and in good faith. Should we do anything?
Am I in the wrong here for thinking we need to do something about this? Or is everyone just okay with whatever the end-result will be from subsequent generations of people growing up anxious, depressed, lacking social skills, without relationship partners? We already have "loneliness" being considered a global health risk, and it's tied directly to digital communication habits. I would ask you or anyone here to just type "research on health social media teens" in google. Just try it and see how much work has gone into studying this problem.
lightsblinken
in reply to ameancow • • •"people will find ways around it" and then saying not to bother etc
i mean, people under 18 sneak into clubs and get beer... or maybe fake an ID and hit a pub... or get an older friend to do something for them....
it doesnt stop us as a society holding a view that under age drinking isnt great, and we make some effort to enforce that even if its not perfect.
MonkeMischief
in reply to KaChilde • • •Bingo.
It's never about "the children." It's a way to normalize handing over biometrics and anonymity to an assumed authority to use the internet.
It's always about control, control, control.
It's about tying real identities to online activity, then it's about wholesale harvesting your secrets you didn't even know you were keeping.
Then it's yet another instrument to make sure you shut up and don't step out of line or else.
First they take us away from our kids by necessitating that entire households need full time careers to survive.
Then as a substitute for education and actual parenting we're so eager to offer up our childrens' futures in the name of "protecting" them from the inevitable consequences of parentless households.
lightsblinken
in reply to MonkeMischief • • •harmbugler
in reply to lightsblinken • • •null_dot
in reply to KaChilde • • •It's more than pearl-clutching though.
Kids dependency on social is a genuine social problem. Any parent that cares about their kids is deeply concerned about this.
I don't really buy the "govt access to biometrics" angle. These companies have all the biometrics they could ever want.
The ban is going to be easy to circumvent technologically, but not so much socially. At this very moment, being the evening of 10 December, families around Australia are having conversations about social media and the problems it can cause.
sobchak
in reply to Michal • • •Scrollone
in reply to sobchak • • •Ibuthyr
in reply to Scrollone • • •harmbugler
in reply to Michal • • •myfunnyaccountname
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •WoodScientist
in reply to myfunnyaccountname • • •ameancow
in reply to WoodScientist • • •Arcades and malls have been dead for a long time. Capitalism took them away.
Everyone is missing incentive to go outside and hang out with real people, but that's only because we have an alternative that fills you up and requires less effort. Our "socializing" is junk food, it only harms you.
Maybe more young people will start doing what kids have been doing since the dawn of time, and making their own communities and their own places to hang out and play and do active things together, face-to-face.
WoodScientist
in reply to ameancow • • •ameancow
in reply to WoodScientist • • •I don't disagree, but digital technologies are causing a lot of harm. I thought I would prepare for the discussion with a couple links to some suggestive studies, but there have been so many rigorous studies and scientific papers on the harm of social media on young minds that I don't even know where to start. Denying it is like denying climate change at this point.
And maybe my take is becoming radical, but I don't think we should be looking at it in terms of a youth/adult problem. There are likely far more adults addicted to the junk-food substitute that is arguing on twitter or making separate identities to fabricate ideas on message boards who have completely lost their handle on reality. Relationship rates are plummeting, people are so lonely it's being declared a health emergency.
Like, seriously... what should we do? I know the popular answer is to attack the social media companies and "regulate" them but the problem is more fundamental than advertising, it's that we're not evolved to socialize with words on screens, seeing all these thoughts and feelings and unchecked wild, emotion-provoking, short-attention-span messages isn't good for us. It may make you laugh spending an evening scrolling dumb memes, but if you do something like that every night, you're missing time that you could be spending improving your life, your health, your relationships and so on.
And replacing those evolved drives with something else, something alien to us.
MonkeMischief
in reply to ameancow • • •As a millennial I honestly just miss how something like MySpace was basically a micro blog, and otherwise, we just chatted with friends-only programs like Yahoo! Messenger / MSN / ICQ/ whatever. There wasn't really some motive to "connect" you to a million "randos" and make you slavishly compete for their fickle approval.
Growing up in a weird kinda rural/suburb hybrid area, the Internet was my gateway to the world outside of school.
It definitely had its problems and drama, but mostly we chatted with people we actually knew (Yahoo chatrooms notwithstanding. Yikes lol) and didn't care about what was "trending" across the world. Algorithms didn't control and force perception of our reality then.
It was literally just about enabling communication.
Outside of that, there was also a much better culture of maintaining privacy and anonymity online, and that everything you see online is BS until proven otherwise.
Of course, this was before techbros decided we should use our real identity everywhere for all to see.
Nowadays it seems like every service is about using your friends as bait to connect you to some hivemind of toxic manipulation to farm you for ads. It encourages creating cults and scams and brainrot bullshit because it's all about harvesting people's already-strained attention for profit, instead of just being a communication platform.
TL;DR: I remember the Internet as a place to log in and hang out, then log off, when meeting with friends outside of school was a logistical nightmare reserved for things like birthday parties if you were lucky.
A lot of damage is already done, but I think if we obliterated the Facebooks and Instagrams and TikToks of "social media" and instead it focused on augmenting existing relationships rather than siloing people as a billion lonely socially-starved individuals in a crowd, we'd see it much differently...
ameancow
in reply to MonkeMischief • • •Would you be in favor of nationalizing the internet in order for this to work? That is, no more commercial entities controlling access, no more media sites allowed to use algorithmic or artificially intelligent systems to influence the viewing habits of users, no more ads working their way into everything you see and do, no more sensationalized headlines and distracting video titles competing for attention because it will all be demonetized by law. (ideally, in a world of spherical, frictionless cows.)
In the US the government used to have standards and regulations for things like if a kid's show could be exclusively used to market toys, or that news stations had to follow a fair press agreement. The reason for this was all access to television had to go through airwaves, and the broadcasters for those airwaves were US government property. All broadcasters had to follow a host of rules and guidelines. This is why cable news was such a world-changing thing. Cable was privately owned.
This also has the side effect of the government controlling the news narrative, and I think we have seen enough of that.
I just don't really know if there's a good solution here, for a problem that has to have a solution or we all suffer.
Walk_blesseD
in reply to ameancow • • •Comment clearly made by someone who does not actually live in the country this discussion is about. Shopping centres are doing just fine.
(To be clear, I am firmly against the ban)
MonkeMischief
in reply to WoodScientist • • •This. I feel so bad for teenagers.
They're at a time in their lives where community and free association are vital to them, and yet since they're not necessarily a profitable demographic, they're kicked out and shunned by everywhere that's not home or school, because all that's left is "commercial spaces."
People then wonder why teenagers flip off society and get up to no good, and then maybe wonder why we all turned out to be lonely adults with like maybe one long term friend if we're lucky...
pulsewidth
in reply to WoodScientist • • •In Australia we have this thing called school, all the kids go there.
I have kids at ages affected by this ban. They don't care about it at all. They already communicate with their friends via iMessage and FaceTime (both unaffected by the ban), they walk to school - so they often walk with friends.
Theres a small skate park near the local shops they also walk to and hang out with friends sometimes, they also walk to the shops and practice basketball with friends at nearby ovals with practice courts regularly. They go to cinemas or big shopping centres (malls) with their friends sometimes - but have to be driven there anyway so parents have to coordinate.
TLDR: the ban doesn't affect a lot of kids at all, and they socialize more or less the same as I did when I was a kid.
The only kids heavily affected are those with Snapchat, Tiktok, Facebook and other crap that they shouldn't be on to begin with, and are getting a huge favour done to them by removing them for a few years.
Poojabber
in reply to myfunnyaccountname • • •ikidd
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •chunes
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •yazomie
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •Siegfried
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •palordrolap
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •Who's next to be blocked?
I mean, now that the infrastructure and policies are in place, it's only a matter of time.
skisnow
in reply to palordrolap • • •null_dot
in reply to palordrolap • • •palordrolap
in reply to null_dot • • •People with a serious criminal record. Murderers and worse. Those who leave their victims alive but scarred mentally or physically.
Then those with less serious criminal records. Fraud. White collar crimes. That sort of thing.
Then other "undesirables" depending on who isn't liked by whoever's in charge.
And then the goalposts for what's desirable will start to move.
And the scope won't just be limited to social media. Websites will be categorised further. Some might remain open access to all people (except the ever increasing list of those to be protected and those who shouldn't have access) but others? No. Those sites themselves are undesirable.
null_dot
in reply to palordrolap • • •dustycups
in reply to null_dot • • •Think more about which sites/platforms it applies to. There was some indecision about YouTube (its in EDIT: yt kids is out) & but signal/whatsapp/telegram are not affected - yet.
SleepyPie
in reply to palordrolap • • •Not every new law is a slippery slope that leads to something, this line of reasoning is literally a fallacy.
When we blocked youth from drinking, we didn’t inch towards making it illegal for people in their 30s did we? Worst we got was like 21 in some places.
BarneyPiccolo
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •So Australia is using facial scanning to verify age, allowing everyone else to remain anonymous? That's how it should be done.
Here in Florida MAGA HQ, I'm hearing calls to verify the identity of EVERYONE on the Internet, because that's the ONLY way they can keep the kids off. I even heard one MAGA state legislator say that it's no difference then carding people for buying alcohol. That's how we keep booze out of the hands of kids, so it will work to keep the Internet out of their hands, too.
They want to kill Internet anonymity, just as a report comes out that the DoJ wants to pay bounties to people who report "anti-Trump behavior."
This will go to the Supreme Court before we're finished.
0x0
in reply to BarneyPiccolo • • •BarneyPiccolo
in reply to 0x0 • • •nickyEtch
in reply to BarneyPiccolo • • •How else will they know if the person is over 16, or just pretending to be over 16?
Gotta verify everyone, scan all of their faces.
BarneyPiccolo
in reply to nickyEtch • • •Mannimarco
in reply to BarneyPiccolo • • •BarneyPiccolo
in reply to Mannimarco • • •0x0
in reply to BarneyPiccolo • • •BarneyPiccolo
in reply to 0x0 • • •Minors don't have to prove they aren't adults, adults have to prove they aren't minors.
It's for the kids, you Commie.
lazyViking
in reply to BarneyPiccolo • • •BarneyPiccolo
in reply to lazyViking • • •cv_octavio
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •Jumuta
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •null_dot
in reply to Jumuta • • •Jumuta
in reply to null_dot • • •null_dot
in reply to Jumuta • • •Jumuta
in reply to null_dot • • •null_dot
in reply to Jumuta • • •PokerChips
in reply to null_dot • • •null_dot
in reply to PokerChips • • •On the contrary.
Loads of new platforms have sprung up with are not listed amongst those required to implement age verification.
Yes, any which become successful will be required to implement age verification but... they will already be successful.
gandalf_der_12te
in reply to PokerChips • • •dantheclamman
in reply to null_dot • • •Ibuthyr
in reply to Jumuta • • •lmmarsano
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •ABetterTomorrow
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •Montreal_Metro
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •demizerone
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •Mannimarco
in reply to demizerone • • •SleepyPie
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •sonofearth
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •filcuk
in reply to sonofearth • • •sonofearth
in reply to filcuk • • •fodor
in reply to sonofearth • • •sonofearth
in reply to fodor • • •null_dot
in reply to sonofearth • • •The issue is, parents who do not want to let their children use social media have really lost the battle because every other kid is on social media. So if even if a parent stands their ground on a strict "no social" policy, their kid is an outcast.
With this law, even though some kids will still be on social, parents are empowered to hold the line.
Spitefire
in reply to null_dot • • •RonniePickering
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •[鳳凰院 凶真 Hououin Kyouma]|[alt: 黃家駒 Wong Ka Kui]
in reply to RonniePickering • • •wabafee
in reply to RonniePickering • • •Treczoks
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •floquant
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •I love how this sentence is just casually sprinkled there. So platforms are getting $50m fines if they do not implement "age verification", but no problem if they fail to identify minors as such? Tells you everything about how they really care about protecting children.
null_dot
in reply to floquant • • •That's not how the law is structured.
Sites are required to implement reasonable measures.
If kids are being evaluated as 18, with no additional checks, that's not reasonable and they're risking the penalties.
We're going to find out whether the regulator has much appetite to issue those penalties, but we will see I guess.
gandalf_der_12te
in reply to floquant • • •it's a new technology. it will probably take years to figure out how to do age-verification properly.
floquant
in reply to gandalf_der_12te • • •Or, hear me out, let's not waste time developing useless and harmful surveillance technology.
None of this is required to safeguard children, and it does a bad job in its attempt - while doing a great job of scanning every user's face and documents.
Parents should be responsible, educated and empowered with tools to control their kids' activities online. Networks and mobile devices can relatively easily be configured to restrict and monitor activity, especially for young children where you might want to choose what to allow, rather than to block. There will be ways around them, but if that 1% is motivated enough and knows they shouldn't, I think that's fine.
Hemingways_Shotgun
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •FFS, we all got along just fine and dandy with group-chats via text message. We weren't fucking cavemen.
The fact that this is her fear (and the fact that it's a legitimate fear) proves just how much controls like this are needed. It's literally digital crack that they think there's simply no other way to communicate anymore (both her and her friends)
Comalnik
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •Well then fucking take away her phone. Get her a dumb phone. Install parental controls. Go to a therapist if yo have to.
But nooooo the government has got to do everything for us incompetent fucks
SaveTheTuaHawk
in reply to Comalnik • • •I had this issue with a 15 year old. Phone gone, just an analog flippy, put in parental controls to prevent loading brain rot apps.
He's happier for it.
gandalf_der_12te
in reply to Comalnik • • •If this actually worked. I tried it once and it did not work at all. Platforms/apps don't seem to respect the device settings at all.
k0e3
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •gandalf_der_12te
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •I think the ban should only apply to public-facing platforms, where everybody can see your content.
Platforms where you only talk to your friends should maybe be left out of it.
gandalf_der_12te
in reply to SLVRDRGN • • •I would like to say that this is good for the quality of content on social media as well..
There's less bullshit content on social media if there's fewer kids, and also there's less incentive for other people to create bullshit content for teenagers to consume, if there's fewer teenagers on the platforms in the first place.