The UK government is now considering legal limits on the number of hours children can spend on social media. There is already a minimum age of 13 for sites such as Facebook and Instagram, but no checks on whether children enter their age accurately. Now government says they will have to prove their age, though they don’t say how a 13 year-old without a passport can do that. A .pdf of a birth certificate is easily forged. Do national identity cards rear their ugly heads again? I kept mine as a souvenir for many years after they were abolished and would really hate to have another one.
Furthermore, a requirement for watching ‘adult’ sites will be that credit card details have to be entered to show the viewer is over 18. Enter the scammers, phishers and fraudsters with new access to family financial details.
Children’s social media hours will be limited by having sites such as Facebook required to cut them off after they have watched for their government-approved length of time.
Does it never occur to the people who come up with these hare-brained ideas that it is really the job of parents to monitor and exercise some control over what their children do? Sensible parents will watch what their children do, just as they will watch what they eat. It is no more the state’s job to tell a parent how long their child may watch social media than it is their job to tell people what to eat for breakfast. Although, come to think of it, they do want to do that as well…
The twittermeister Trump induced recession on Friday and then disappeared for the day into a series of long meetings and discussions on research work from which I did not really emerge until early evening. In the meantime more than twenty comments had arrived suggesting that the conventional narrative of failure that I had portrayed were just wrong in an MMT environment. There are a number of lessons for me in this. One is not to blog in haste. The other is to remember that I have elders on this blog, not all of whom will immediately follow my train of… Read more »
Poe’s law applies. You can’t parody Murphy.
I don’t know why it’s hard to get this right: parents have to decide how best to bring up their kids, but they could sure as fuck do with some help making decisions on what’s best. Philip Larkin had it right. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. It would hardly be a bad thing to try and come up with some good advice. Arguably the entire class/opportunity debate is really caused by good parenting being… Read more »
Also, as a broader point, wouldn’t it be better if the government tried advice first?
I think we have enough examples of government advice being changed, or even worse not changed, to see this as the worst option because it fucks up all kids, as opposed to parents just fucking up their own.
And the dysfunctional scum of the state–whose welfare antics have caused most of the increasing fuck-ups –is going to put everybody right?
Interacting with others through social media is just “interacting”. It’s part of being a member of the society around you. It’s like trying to ban the telephone or banning writing letters, or – fundamentally – banning simply talking. Which reveals exactly what our masters actually think about our actions.
The answer is “fuck off” at every level. We now begin to see how the SNP’s “Commissar for every Child” shit begins to work its way south of the border. And just how are the cunts going to monitor and enforce such shite when large numbers of folk can run rings around them on the Internet to begin with? Britain’s political and bureaucratic scum need to be put up for auction. Whoever pays the most to charity (real not fake) gets the political pig of choice handed over to them. Do what you like with the polipig you bought–no legal… Read more »
Parents are incompetent is only a logical extension of the notion that people are incompetent and that the state should manage everything.
Of course the fact that the state is run by people is a problem.