this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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First, Mastodon is talking about Mississippi in the US.
Second, why can't people parent their own kids? What if I don't agree with the government and want my kid to see stuff the government has decided to block? The government isn't the parent of your child and you shouldn't be treating them as such. If you child is doing something you don't want, it's your job as their parent to stop it.
The article says "Mississippi and elsewhere", so I assumed all sorts of bans were fair game for discussion.
As for your second point, I genuinely don't really care all that much. Take my solution and require platform vendors provide a parental controls API and require websites and apps call it. From there, whether you legally required parents to set up parental controls, you strongly suggest they do it, or you just leave it there as an option doesn't matter as much. Maybe different places can have different laws.
The important thing is that parents should at least be given the tools necessary to be able to do this.
"What if I WANT my kids watching porn???"
Really bold stratagy you got there.
"Promoting homosexuality" was illegal in state schools for half my childhood. Imagine the ignorant, hateful people arguing against same-sex sexual education - they would probably say "YOU want to show PORN to CHILDREN" too. It's a bad-faith character assassination that shouldn't have merit.
Where the hell did I say porn? You think they can't block anything else?
Also, so what if I did? Shouldn't that be a parents decision? Say I'm fine with them watching it at 16yo. Shouldn't that be up to the parent, not the government?
People who give up their freedom to the government are going to lose far more freedom than they're OK with losing. It starts with something you might agree with, but it never stops there.
That argument suggests you bought the lie of what the age verification is for. When every service is required to perform age verification, it quickly becomes not about porn but control.
They're trying to close the Pandora's box that is the internet decades after the fact, and they're learning the hard way how impossible and unpopular that is