Technology

Government doesn't run on the scientific method, sadly.

Yeah that's the problem with legislation like this. You'll have proponents claim it protects children without actually explaining how.

Sometimes we actually need to act before knowing everything. What we know for a fact currently is that the number of children who think they are trans or non-binary is in a sharp rise in many countries in the west. There are guesses why this is: transactivists like to say that LBTQ+ is now accepted so these people dare to come out. The other side cite e.g. social contagion. All this is happening only in the west, somehow. If this is caused by something that is reversible, then that should be probably tried out.

If their transness is completely internal, then nothing external will affect it. If not, they might be "cured" in some sense. Being trans is utilistically negative, after all -- it doesn't make life exactly easier or better. So if its onset can be genuinely prevented, that would be a net positive for the individual.

Dunno if any of this justifies general censorship, probably not, but I think it's complete madness that children are allowed to see everything there is to see in the internet. I think that will be quoted as one of the greatest mistakes of this century. I'm not at all surprised that their mental health is in a sustained nose dive.

Section 3a of the bill is the part that would be used to target LGBTQ content.

Sections 4 talks about adding better parental controls which would give general statistics about what their kids are doing online, without parents being able to see/helicopter in on exaxrlt what their kids were looking at. It also would force sites to give children safe defaults when they create a profile, including the ability to disable personalized recommendations, placing limitations on dark patterns designed to manipulate children to stay on platforms for longer, making their information private by default, and limiting others' ability to find and message them without the consent of children. Notably, these settings would all be optional, but enabled by default for children/users suspected to be children.

I think the regulations described in section 4 would mostly be good things. They're the types of settings that I'd prefer to use on my online accounts, at least. However, the bad outweighs the good here, and the content in section 3a is completely unacceptable.

Funnily enough, I had to read through the bill twice, and only caught on to how bad section 3a was on my second time reading it.

I don't know that it does. If bills and the discourse around them were actually about the stated topic, it would be revolutionary to politics.