Australians to face age checks from search engines

Australians are broadly supportive of these kind of actions - there is a view that foreign internet behemoths have failed to moderate for themselves and will therefore have moderation imposed on them however imperfect.

Can’t say I blame them.

> there is a view that foreign internet behemoths have failed to moderate for themselves and will therefore have moderation imposed on them however imperfect.

This view is manufactured. The premise is that better moderation is available and despite that, literally no one is choosing to do it. The fact is that moderation is hard and in particular excluding all actually bad things without also having a catastrophically high false positive rate is infeasible.

But the people who are the primary victims of the false positives and the people who want the bad stuff fully censored aren't all the same people, and then the second group likes to pretend that there is a magic solution that doesn't throw the first group under the bus, so they can throw the first group under the bus.

> This view is manufactured. The premise is that better moderation is available and despite that, literally no one is choosing to do it. The fact is that moderation is hard and in particular excluding all actually bad things without also having a catastrophically high false positive rate is infeasible.

Manufactured by whom? Moderation was done very tightly on vbulletin forums back in the day, the difference is Facebook/Google et al expect to operate at a scale where (they claim) moderation can't be done.

The magic solution is if you can't operate at scale safely, don't operate at scale.

> Manufactured by whom?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

> Moderation was done very tightly on vbulletin forums back in the day, the difference is Facebook/Google et al expect to operate at a scale where (they claim) moderation can't be done.

The difference isn't the scale of Google, it's the scale of the internet.

Back in the day the internet was full of university professors and telecommunications operators. Now it has Russian hackers and an entire battalion of shady SEO specialists.

If you want to build a search engine that competes with Google, it doesn't matter if you have 0.1% of the users and 0.001% of the market cap, you're still expected to index the whole internet. Which nobody could possibly do by hand anymore.

Maybe search is dead but doesn’t know it yet.

Edit: you can’t just grow a Wikipedia link to manufacturing consent from the 80s as an explanation here. What a joke of a position. Maybe people have been hoodwinked by a media conspiracy or maybe they just don’t like what the kids are exposed to at a young age these days.

> you can’t just grow a Wikipedia link to manufacturing consent from the 80s as an explanation here. What a joke of a position.

Do you dispute the thesis of the book? Moral panics have always been used to sell both newspapers and bad laws.

> Maybe people have been hoodwinked by a media conspiracy or maybe they just don’t like what the kids are exposed to at a young age these days.

People have never liked what kids are exposed to. But it rather matters whether the proposed solution has more costs than effectiveness.

> Maybe search is dead but doesn’t know it yet.

Maybe some people who prefer the cathedral to the bazaar would prefer that. But ability of the public to discover anything outside of what the priests deign to tell them isn't something we should give up without a fight.

I dispute you’ve made any kind of connection between the two beyond your own feelings.

I put it to you, similarly without evidence, that your support for unfettered filth freedom is the result of a process of manufacturing consent now that American big tech dominates.

The trouble with that theory is that tech megacorps are a relatively recent development, whereas e.g. the court cases involving Larry Flynt were events from the 1970s and 80s and the likes of Hustler Magazine hardly had an outsized influence over the general media.

Meanwhile morals panics are at least as old as the Salem Witch Trials.

Megacorps, simultaniously impotent and trillion dollar companies.