Continue reading "Pluralistic: Without CDA 230, Facebook will own the internet forever (05 Nov 2026)"
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The literature on harms to kids from online platforms is complex and nuanced, rife with people citing small, ambiguous studies as iron-clad evidence that kids are being destroyed by the internet:
Almost without exception, people who invest in businesses do so without personally inspecting the business, overlooking its processes, seeing its bank statements, meeting its managers and going on the road with its sales-force.
I don't think that it's impossible for politicians, even nontechnical politicians, to make good tech policy. After all, the fact that no one in Congress is a microbiologist doesn't stop federal standards from delivering potable water (and it doesn't excuse the ghastly failures, such as Flint, MI):
The people are the best thing about a life in science fiction – eclectic, bright, opinionated, talented – people like Elise Mathson: writer, jeweller, and all-round brilliant person (she's up for a Hugo this year).
Correction: An earlier draft of this story misstated a technical detail; Mark didn’t email his photo to his doctor; rather, he took the photo with his phone and the image was automatically synched to his Google Photos account, triggering a scan .
A core tenet of the enshittification hypothesis is that all the terrible stuff we're subjected to in our digital lives today is the result of foreseeable (and foreseen) policy choices, which created the enshittogenic policy environment in which the worst people's worst ideas make the most money:
Canada's government is poised to pass a "harmful content" regulation. It's a worst-in-class mutation of a dangerous idea that's swept the globe, in which governments demand that hamfisted tech giants remove broad categories of speech – too swiftly for meaningful analysis.