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.

> The fact is that moderation is hard

Moderation is hard when you prioritise growth and ad revenue over moderation, certainly.

We know a good solution - throw a lot of manpower at it. That may not be feasible for the giant platforms...

Oh no.

Throwing a lot of manpower at moderation only gets you lots of little emperors that try to enforce their own views on others.