yeahiknow3
Yes, and while I like being anonymous, I don’t like literally half the internet being made of bots and foreign trolls. Lemmy is such a tiny community that we haven’t attracted their attention, but these bot farms and state-sponsored disinformation campaigns could crush this website in a weekend if they directed their attention here.
Why is this bad? What is the upside of anyone under 16 using social media?
EDIT: the last 20 years have been an experiment in online anonymity, and the result is a dead internet infested by AI bots and foreign disinformation. At this point, I think civilized nations with free-speech protections should experiment with this sort of thing.
And yet we don’t have a black market of “lawn darts.” There are no cartels manufacturing and smuggling lawn darts. No epidemic of lawn dart users. Something about these cases is disanalogous.
All laws are concessions. You surrender some rights in order to safeguard other more important rights. It seems that the right to use lawn darts is not one that people value, unlike the right to eat, drink, and imbibe whatever they want.
Medical doctors agree that sugar is extremely harmful, hepatotoxic. There’s no upside to ingesting it unless you’re starving. Why is it legal? Because,
- there’s no moral standing for the government to tell anyone what to do with their own body as long as they’re not harming anyone else, and
- the consequences of outlawing sugar would be worse than the harms of ingesting it.
- And the same is true of drugs.
Pragmatism is one way to justify policies (seat belt laws infringe on your autonomy, but they make society quantifiably better). Unfortunately, criminalizing drugs makes society worse.
Many of the downsides of drug abuse are a direct consequence of such criminalization: addicts unable to seek medical treatment and having their lives ruined, communities torn apart by drug cartels and police violence.
We criminalize drunk driving, which is the “action that can harm others,” not merely drinking, which is an action that does not harm others.
Decisive empirical evidence shows that the criminalization of drugs makes society worse. It creates drug cartels, incites crime, fills up our prisons with victims (whose lives it ruins), and balloons law enforcement budgets.
I don’t do drugs. It’s worse than that. I study metaethics.
Of ALL the things to block. Why not AI blocking? Or social media blocking.