The Act comes in to effect late March. It’s a sledgehammer the scope of which includes forums like this and hundreds and maybe thousands of others. Penalties for falling foul of it accidentally or otherwise are significant. Have a read of the explainer and maybe this as well.
https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/401475/
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This unofficial summary would apply but it’s still pretty horrendous.
https://russ.garrett.co.uk/2024/12/17/online-safety-act-guide/
Not sure panic is required. From that link:
“Providers’ safety duties are proportionate to factors including the risk of harm to individuals, and the size and capacity of each provider. This makes sure that while safety measures will need to be put in place across the board, we aren’t requiring small services with limited functionality to take the same actions as the largest corporations.”
We’re hardly facebook.
“The Afterword – a small service with limited functionality”
I think the type of content posted, and the light touch moderation kindly supplied mean this site probably is not likely to be targeted by those seeking to prosecute online activity.
New strapline right there…
Not an easy line to toe but the onus should be on parents IMO to put some kind of filter if they give so much of a shit about what their darlings are accessing.
However there will clearly be a million loopholes that younger tech brains, far more savvy than I, will have no trouble circumventing.
If someone commits suicide after seeing ‘distressing’ content on FaceShite my heart does, sincerely, go out the survivors. But can we be sure they wouldn’t have offed them selves anyway even if we had blocked every single avenue that may depress and un-nerve people of a variety of dispositions in the digital sphere? And should that mindset be catered and kow-towed to above all other essential freedoms?
I also think there has to be a better way than this, although I do appreciate that the potential for awful optics (i.e. in the gutter press) of this mean that western governments at the very least need to be SEEN to be doing something/anything.
Also, I supressed a guffaw at a recent Daily Heil esque headline about Internet Smut ™. Apparently most 13 year olds are watching this… yeah no shit. Onanism is absolutely rife at that age, for us all isnt it? The headline making story should actually be Teenagers of Today Are Not (to paraphrase Friggin in the Riggin) Jerking themselves into a Stupor ****shocker****
Yep. Nearly all teenage/young adult online problems, if not all, can be squarely laid at the parents’ door. Its just laziness.
I agree. The genie is out of the bottle anyway, and if you blocked every possible site there’s nothing to stop one of their mates showing them stuff. What we did was sensible blocks but majored on trying to establish values and an inquisitive mind to deal with the tsunami of crap out there. Thankfully Twang Jr couldn’t care less about social media other than occasionally promoting his musical activities.
Having some factual insight into “problem children” I can say behind every child there are almost always utterly useless parents. These kids are not a “problem”, they are victims. Or at least start that way.
Of course young teens are wanking and looking for wank material. We all did that.
But the vast amounts of porn that are now available online are a bit different to what I was able to access at that age. Hardcore porn is addictive to a significant amount of people and gives a very distorted view to the inexperienced of what ordinary people do in ordinary relationships.
It should not be as accessible as it currently is, especially the violent and deliberately disrespectful stuff.
That apart, it is a fact that within modern social conditioning in The First World, it is now firmly embedded that pretty much all aspects of our personal safety, and that of those we hold dear, are the responsibility of outside agencies, not us.
Outside agencies, like parents?
When it’s regarding people’s kids, that will be the police, teachers, doctors and nurses, social workers, youth workers, other children’s parents etc.
Not the child’s own parents.
I’m not sure how those particular agencies are affected by this act. That’s their job and always has been.
We may be at cross purposes here.
I was no longer referring to the act, I was referring to the comment by yourself above about parental laziness. It’s not just laziness, IMO, it’s also a shift in attitude towards personal responsibility which encourages laziness. “We have all these agencies tasked with looking after us and ours, now. Let them deal with it.”
See what you mean. Oh God yes.
There’s hard-core porn on The Afterword? I haven’t noticed any.
Well Neil Young’s got his knockers, like many of us. Then there’s those pictures of guitars and hifi equipment that crop up quite often. Those knobs, that sleek chrome. Phwoar!
Ah. Where’s @Twang when you need him?
I think age verification is the way forward for the Afterword. Proof via a bus pass should keep the 60’s dodgers out.
It should be offered like Saga membership to all over-50s –
“You’ve worked hard all your life – you deserve a seat in a virtual pub to text bs, exchange Wordle scores, and post old YT clips until the old grey man in tattered clothes calls time at the bar”.
Was involved the lengthy consultation that preceded the OSA. Not a fan of where it’s landed, feels like four parts creating largely pointless bureaucracy to one part solving the problem.
That said, I certainly wouldn’t underplay the problem it’s attempting to address, particularly having sat through some of the evidence.
There’s a well documented mental health crisis among teenagers the occurrence of which has coincided almost exactly with the rise of social media.
There is certainly a role for parental responsibility, but parents aren’t gods. Unpleasant material finds its way to kids at sleepovers and even on the school grounds. My kids aren’t on social media, but they still go to school with many, many kids who are. In some cases that’s kids being aggressively pushed content actively encouraging eating disorders/self harm, or grim misogyny, or god knows what else. It takes a village to raise a child, as they say, and as kids hit their teen years the influence of their mates has a tendency to grow.
None of which is to say parents don’t have a role to play, just that the platforms, some of whom have consciously decided to permit and even encourage some or all of the above content because it drives “engagement”, should be encouraged to clean up their act and take some responsibility for the stuff they’re pushing.
Molly Russell was 14 years old when she was served over 2,000 items of content related to depression, self harm and suicide by Instagram, some of them actively encouraging the viewer to kill themselves. Which she duly did. And let’s be clear – she didn’t have to go looking for it; the algorithm noted her interest and directed a constant stream of this content to her. I’m sure her parents will spend the rest of their lives reflecting that there are many things they might have done differently. Meanwhile, it doesn’t appear that Meta have reflected on their own culpability at all, perhaps unsurprisingly given the state of their CEO.
Happy, as a parent, to keep trying to educate my kids as to the dangers of the dealers at the school gate. But in parallel I would also like someone to at least try to shoo the dealers away.