It feels a bit bizarre to call for a stop to “Kids Online Safety Act”, almost like we don’t care about kid’s safety. Whoever is designing the names for these acts is either very clever or it is an excellent coincidence.
It makes perfect sense to me. The point is to lessen pushback against it. Opponents of the act can be labeled as being against kids' safety. It's entirely purposeful and wholly in line with how many bills have been named in American politics over the last several decades. Controversial bills tend to be labeled as 'protecting the children' or 'counter-terrorism' or 'patriotic' when they are usually the complete opposite.
I mean it’s brilliant in one sense, but when you’re too on-the-nose about it people are likely to see your scheme for what it is. Invoking children, money launderers, terrorists, or drug dealers is a red flag.
I feel the Bush era made people cynical and suspicious of such bills in particular. What with the
Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act. Also the “Coalition of the willing” and “You Are Either With Us, Or With the Terrorists”. After seeing such sophistry result in over a million people dying, I am fairly hostile towards politicians that engage in such demagoguery. But hey, I guess it does work, especially as people forget the last demagogue.
Nice. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the intellect and time it takes to adequately capture a concept or whatever it wants to communicate, but there's like a supervillainy aspect to the Bush legislation. It feels weirdly manipulative and autocratic, like they put a gun to the words/lettets' "heads" and demanded they assemble themselves correctly and extra-judicially ;) and then waterboarded them once they were in place as an extra... yeah
It's not just the Bush admin. It's all of them. For example, the Biden admin passed the Inflation Act a year or so ago, which was made to sound helpful in the fight against inflation, but in reality it exasperates the inflation problem.
I hate the double-speaky ones like those especially. At the end of the day, wolves are going to create the "Love Sheep Act". Sure, they LOVE the sheep. Just not in any way that bodes well for the sheep.
"What do you want? You had a problem with inflation, so we created the Inflation Act because it worked so well, WE wanted more of it, despite the unfortunate collateral damage of YOU. We gotta look at the bigger picture/upper classes".
Between the Bigger Picture^TM and the Overton Window^TM, there's just never any space for the regular and affected
Edit: btw, nice on the S.H.R.E.-K, don't think I didn't see that aha ;) As always, I'm eventually get around to it aha
> It feels a bit bizarre to call for a stop to “Kids Online Safety Act”, almost like we don’t care about kid’s safety
That's the point of the name. I do like, though, that the repressive morality policing bill was also named in a way that it shares the acronym used for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, known for its repressive morality police, but I think that, unlike the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act, the acronym was unplanned.
People always have the option of calling things other than how their proponents want them known. This has been used to great effect by the media in the UK (eg. "bedroom tax").
Perhaps there's space for an organisation that "renames" these accurately, maintains a mapping, and then opponents should just start using the "corrected" names instead?
It is exactly titled like that for the reason you are feeling. Look at the “PATRIOT ACT”. You want to be against the PATRIOT ACT? Well, you must be a terrorist!
It's typical for US politicians to be slimy cowards unable to defend the value of their bills, so they instead tie it to evocative topics to try and turn bills into social levers to get results.
These lawmakers don't actually care about children. One look at family law will tell you that.
George Lakoff has done extensive research on metaphors and framing.
Basically whoever first frames the issue, wins. U.S. politicians are masterful at that.
The bill which installed domestic surveillance and paved the road to a (more) police state wasn't called "The Police State Act". It was called "The Patriot" act. Who'd vote against "Patriot"ism?
The Bush bill which cut taxes for the richest people in the country at the expense of everybody else wasn't called "The Billionaire Enrichment Act". It was called "The Tax Relief" bill. Who'd vote against "relief"?
It is incredibly important to refuse to repeat malicious framing without at least reframing.
Noone would want to be remembered voting against "Kids safety". This is a very powerful frame and repeating it activates the brain in powerful ways.
A better way to refer to the bill would be "The Spying on Young People Act maliciously named as Kids online safety act"
As George Lakoff says, never use their title, because it embeds the frame in the readers' brains and that's the battle lost right there.
Empower parents to do what exactly? Routers have the ability to pinpoint and target devices, shut them off at certain times, and have global filters. AdGuard gives even more fine grained website specific features, letting you shut off YouTube for all devices.
Specific devices like the Switch and MacOS also let you setup times, block apps, block websites, and allow apps to only work for a certain time.
Kids will try and get around the blocks to keep playing games, but punishing them for getting around the blocks and talking to them about it instead of trying to automate everything still works
The parental controls on Nintendo Switch are a joke. Barely any options to be useful.
For example, try blocking a specific app, like YouTube.
I think that's one a the biggest problems, when a company adds parental controls. It's usually minimal effort. Just enough so they can say "see, we give parents control". It's a PR move.
More than doing the bare minimum as a PR move I think it just has to do with such options being of limited practicality. No amount of that kind of tinker knob beats the effectiveness and manageability of requiring approval to download anything, which the Switch does support.
I have a lot of my electronics fed from remote controlled switches. I press a button and off or on it is. I have one switch with five buttons - router, pc, monitor, etc. When the kids are a pain, i select what to switch off of theirs (so they can still play games, but perhaps won'thave the internet(....costs about €15 or so. Saves me a fortune when i leave the house, too (no 'standby' lights anywhere).
Just like my pc, i decide, and I'm in charge.
My router has a setting called parental controls with dead simple settings. If you don't want to parent and take away the device for disobeying rules then you have time to learn how to open your router settings.
I'd like parental controls at sub-app granularity. For example, to monitor a child's chats, with full knowledge of the child. To see all social media activity and add to the blocklist remotely. That kind of thing.
If you want to read your child's private messages then you need to demand access to their passwords. I expect that to go over just as well as it would with adults
Targeting services with the router doesn’t work against downloaded content. The OS sleep times can be bypassed by changing the system time and disabling wifi. There are also the free web proxy websites that let you bypass a whole lot of other things too.
I encourage this hacking spirit in them though and let them have a whole day if they find a new workaround. Right now, I have the unlock code set to all-zero but they haven’t figured that one out yet!
Best advice for getting them off devices I have is to take them away. If you need them distracted for a bit, a larger screen like a real TV or desktop doesn’t seem to hold them as tightly too.
>Empower parents to do what exactly
Oh idk, maybe not spend 100% of their conscious time/energy working to make someone else enough money to buy their fifth yacht??? And actually parent?? So kids aren't pawned off on to screens for 12 hours a day?? Seems pretty damn simple when most households need to be two income what the problem is. Parenting being pawned off on technology. All this "parenting" software is missing the point so hard it's comical.
Maybe subsidize child care and recognize the economic value raising children has and how much unpaid work parents do for all our future? Then parents would actually have time and energy and money to parent.
The macOS parental controls are garbage that rarely work correctly or as they appear they should - which Apple a few months ago even admitted to an irate journalist that, yeah, they have problems.
I’ve tried using them - they are unusable. What’s the point of parental controls that randomly let you open private windows in Safari, without filtering, after a few hours of being logged in because the daemon crashed? It’s pointless and actively dangerous as a parent thinks they are working, but they aren’t.
Windows parental controls - what’s the point when you can’t disable Windows Copilot or Edge Copilot or the Bing search suggestions in the taskbar or the Microsoft News feed on new Edge tabs? Or when it comes preloaded with the Movies and TV and Microsoft News apps full of junk? Or when Microsoft Office lets you embed videos from Bing without respecting parental control SafeSearch preferences? The parental controls on Windows are wildly insufficient.
Nintendo Switch? I was stunned. Whole device, no granular per-user settings? What about families that can’t afford one per child? No ability to disable the eShop or force an eShop rating within the parental controls app? No ability to set a PIN code for just using the Switch? No ability to hide, say, M-rated titles for older kids from younger kids?
Modern parental controls suck, either are incomplete or don’t work, and are unfit for purpose.
I think a white listing system could work. Let each country have it's own set of tags (us-7, us-13, ca-violence) which websites can include in headers or meta-tags. Then browsers and (mitm-)proxies could be configured with an accepted list. It would work well for schools, kiosks, kids devices that the parents control, and home routers. Websites would have clear guidelines per country and incentives to comply and include the tags. Encryption and privacy would ensure that the rest of the web operates as it does today; current software wouldn't need to change.
Say your website is hosted in Madeupland, which hasn't implemented such a system in a legal fashion, and falsely advertises us-7 tag compliance. What happens?
Well, for better or worse, you get your tags with a digital certificate from a third party (kind of like the ESRB rating) verifying compliance. But you get a public key to prove it.
The U.S. refuses to regulate Amazon for knowingly going along with the world's largest fraud market. They make bills like this to detract from the much larger and insidious evil of mega tech corps. After all, they pay for the bills.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadIt feels a bit bizarre to call for a stop to “Kids Online Safety Act”, almost like we don’t care about kid’s safety. Whoever is designing the names for these acts is either very clever or it is an excellent coincidence.
I feel the Bush era made people cynical and suspicious of such bills in particular. What with the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act. Also the “Coalition of the willing” and “You Are Either With Us, Or With the Terrorists”. After seeing such sophistry result in over a million people dying, I am fairly hostile towards politicians that engage in such demagoguery. But hey, I guess it does work, especially as people forget the last demagogue.
Source : I worked on our Standard Hybrid Relationship Engagement frameworK.
"What do you want? You had a problem with inflation, so we created the Inflation Act because it worked so well, WE wanted more of it, despite the unfortunate collateral damage of YOU. We gotta look at the bigger picture/upper classes".
Between the Bigger Picture^TM and the Overton Window^TM, there's just never any space for the regular and affected
Edit: btw, nice on the S.H.R.E.-K, don't think I didn't see that aha ;) As always, I'm eventually get around to it aha
That's the point of the name. I do like, though, that the repressive morality policing bill was also named in a way that it shares the acronym used for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, known for its repressive morality police, but I think that, unlike the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act, the acronym was unplanned.
Perhaps there's space for an organisation that "renames" these accurately, maintains a mapping, and then opponents should just start using the "corrected" names instead?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak
These lawmakers don't actually care about children. One look at family law will tell you that.
Basically whoever first frames the issue, wins. U.S. politicians are masterful at that.
The bill which installed domestic surveillance and paved the road to a (more) police state wasn't called "The Police State Act". It was called "The Patriot" act. Who'd vote against "Patriot"ism?
The Bush bill which cut taxes for the richest people in the country at the expense of everybody else wasn't called "The Billionaire Enrichment Act". It was called "The Tax Relief" bill. Who'd vote against "relief"?
It is incredibly important to refuse to repeat malicious framing without at least reframing.
Noone would want to be remembered voting against "Kids safety". This is a very powerful frame and repeating it activates the brain in powerful ways.
A better way to refer to the bill would be "The Spying on Young People Act maliciously named as Kids online safety act"
As George Lakoff says, never use their title, because it embeds the frame in the readers' brains and that's the battle lost right there.
Always reframe.
I doubt this bill will fix it, and will probably make things worse.
But serious thought and political will needs to be given to how to protect kids.
The best way to do that is empower, parents, not government. But nobody really wants to do that. Look at how crappy parental controls are.
I’ve personally battled with my kids over online content. It’s absolutely nuts how difficult moderating your child’s content is.
It’s like we are stuck in the 80s where parents are expected to just “watch tv with their kids and talk about it.”
Tech could solve this problem, but there simply isn’t money in it. Politically, there’s no will to help parents either.
So when you’re writing your Senators about this bill, make it clear they should be deferring to parents on this matter.
Specific devices like the Switch and MacOS also let you setup times, block apps, block websites, and allow apps to only work for a certain time.
Kids will try and get around the blocks to keep playing games, but punishing them for getting around the blocks and talking to them about it instead of trying to automate everything still works
For example, try blocking a specific app, like YouTube.
I think that's one a the biggest problems, when a company adds parental controls. It's usually minimal effort. Just enough so they can say "see, we give parents control". It's a PR move.
This requires non-trivial networking knowledge. Tired layperson parents need an easier solution.
I encourage this hacking spirit in them though and let them have a whole day if they find a new workaround. Right now, I have the unlock code set to all-zero but they haven’t figured that one out yet!
Best advice for getting them off devices I have is to take them away. If you need them distracted for a bit, a larger screen like a real TV or desktop doesn’t seem to hold them as tightly too.
> I have the unlock code set to all-zero but they haven't figured that one out yet!
Maybe subsidize child care and recognize the economic value raising children has and how much unpaid work parents do for all our future? Then parents would actually have time and energy and money to parent.
I’ve tried using them - they are unusable. What’s the point of parental controls that randomly let you open private windows in Safari, without filtering, after a few hours of being logged in because the daemon crashed? It’s pointless and actively dangerous as a parent thinks they are working, but they aren’t.
Windows parental controls - what’s the point when you can’t disable Windows Copilot or Edge Copilot or the Bing search suggestions in the taskbar or the Microsoft News feed on new Edge tabs? Or when it comes preloaded with the Movies and TV and Microsoft News apps full of junk? Or when Microsoft Office lets you embed videos from Bing without respecting parental control SafeSearch preferences? The parental controls on Windows are wildly insufficient.
Nintendo Switch? I was stunned. Whole device, no granular per-user settings? What about families that can’t afford one per child? No ability to disable the eShop or force an eShop rating within the parental controls app? No ability to set a PIN code for just using the Switch? No ability to hide, say, M-rated titles for older kids from younger kids?
Modern parental controls suck, either are incomplete or don’t work, and are unfit for purpose.
Contact pages for our two senators are:
Alex Padilla:
https://www.padilla.senate.gov/contact/contact-form/
Laphonza Butler:
https://www.butler.senate.gov/share-your-opinion/
Any site other than https://www.senate.gov/states/CA/intro.htm is likely to have old information.