And they turn into whining crybabies when birth rates start dropping. It's their Achilles' heel, an actual challenge to their control.

Other tech CEOs, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Snap’s Evan Spiegel, and Tesla’s Elon Musk, have also spoken about limiting their children’s access to devices. Gates has said he did not give his children smartphones until age 14 and banned phones at the dinner table entirely. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, in 2018, said he limits his child to the same 1.5 hours per week of screen time as Thiel.

Seems like these failures suing them & demanding government paternalism

Yet, as the trials against social media companies continue and country after country moves toward legislating what Silicon Valley’s billionaires have quietly practiced for years

don't know how to effectively limit access/use parental controls as tech CEOs claim to do.

That article was an insane read. I couldn't have written more unserious people if I tried

How cute. They think the things billionaires say for ammo in the evential lawsuit are actually true.

Duh. You think the CEO of Kraft feeds his kids mac and cheese from a box?

Many years ago a grocery store chain, which was rapidly becoming national, had its progress halted by a meat bleaching scandal. They set impossible goals for their meat department, knowing there was zero way to sell the meat at the volume they demanded, so the local stores were left to do illegal things to meet the impossible quotas. The higher ups claimed plausible deniability, while knowing there was but one answer.

What's even crazier, is the grocery store (Food Lion) sued the journalists who went undercover to
expose it, and won. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-01-23-mn-21242-story.html

Fortunately, the damage to their reputation did far greater damage than they won in the lawsuit, but as far as I could find, no legal actions were taken against Food Lion.

Because they know their kids will have an advantage over the stupefied masses if they can keep them unmezmerizes.

Yeah, but the Epstein class wants us conditioned to be as forgetful as their LLMs, and compartmentalized like good robots so we reset to compliance by default without connecting too many dots. Concentration and focus are how you exercise consciousness, which is the opposite of what the ruling class wants. They've literally attempted to and in the minds of many individuals they've succeeded in framing consciousness as a "mind virus".

And they've convinced you that it's a-okay for your kids to be using these products, in full knowledge of the harm they cause.

He probably just wishes he put it in the contract signed with the mothers.

It's so fucking creepy. It's not just making people dumber, its literally exposing kids to sexual content and sexualizing children in advertisements aimed at adults.

At what point is it ok for all of society to demand these people either be put in jail or at least exiled from the rest of society?

Parents outraged as Meta uses photos of schoolgirls in ads targeting man Instagram pictures of girls as young as 13 were posted to promote Threads site ‘as bait’, campaigner says

Meta CEO Zuckerberg blocked curbs on sex-talking chatbots for minors, court filing alleges

Regulations are keeping your businesses from thriving? The ones you seem to be building to intentionally cater to pedophiles and harm children? Half of these creepy ass broligarchs are already confirmed to be in the Epstein files.

They're pretty open about what they want the future to look like, and the shit they've already got going, like the inescapable 24/7 surveillance where they can pick and choose the victims they want to legally abduct and traffic is just the beginning. And we're supposed to just pretend we're all fucking stupid enough to go along with it?

People get pissed at me but, as a short-term solution, I'm okay with giving up my ID in order to lock kids out. I personally think it is the lesser of two exceedingly great evils.

Ideally, there'd be federal regulation of these platforms in every country banning algorithmically-elevated content, ads, privacy violations, and holding the operators of these platforms accountable for CSAM, but I think that will take decades.

Calling someone "subhuman" is the language of a supremacist. They are some of the absolute worst examples of humanity, yes, but they are still human. Referring to them as subhuman abdicates humanity's responsibility to bring them to justice and to build systems that prevent a disproportionate concentration of power and influence.

Why does it need to take decades though?

I bet if there were actual consequences for this shit, like in the form of seizing assets from the broligarchs who run these companies, and giving them to the victims of their creations, the issue would be solved very quickly.

Also, having people upload their ID seems like just another obvious surveillance ploy/invasion of privacy in the name of safety. These people who have given us nothing but reasons not to trust them, just keep offering us more and more solutions to the issues that they've created.

"We're doing this for your own good. You should say thank you."

Lol I've always known this. People are beyond retarded now. Like biggie use to say

" Never get high on your own supply "

I love how Elon Musk was the sole fuck up in these examples

Listen, billionaires suck. But if you think tech giants are hypocritical for strictly rationing screen time to their children then you have lost the plot.

Social media, and screen time in general, are bad for you. Everyone knows this now. If you aren't limiting your child's access, that's on you.

Before a child can get addicted, their parents have to give them access. If you can't live life without looking at a phone, TV, or tablet every free moment, then you're the reason your kids are turning into morons.

I don't agree.

I started using the web as a curious 8 years old. I was pretending to be an adult in order to sign up to forums, chat with people, etc.

Yes, I was exposed to porn, gore (remember goatse?) but that didn't make me dumb or a molester.

But nothing beats what I learned thanks to the internet. Endless days spent on programming forums, reading articles on a newborn Wikipedia, etc.

Even just talking with older people than me made me learn how to deal with things and life.

I don't think that the internet for a kid is bad per se. I wouldn't like a blanket ban for kids like the UK. If it was like that when I was a kid, I would probably be a more stupid person.

I think that the real bad thing is the stupid phones and apps that give you dopamine rushes.

Corpocrap scrolley apps exploit you on purpose, but that doesn't generalize. Not.that non techy people understand that

People get pisses at you for good reason

I used to work at a "Big Data" company that sold browsing data to a ton of companies. One problem the dev team ran into was that the standard ad-blocking plugins that they'd install on their machines also blocked our stuff, so my support team would have to inform them of bugs.

Lots of fun stories from that job.

I hate to say this, but the Internet is not the same as it was back when I was growing up.

You always had the possibility of stumbling across a bad actor. Now the billionaire tech broligoply who own most social media are the bad actors. How many websites did you visit where the person running the website has been caught repeatedly trying to psychologically manipulate and control the masses via disinformation?

Back in the day, nobody would be doing whatever the fuck it is these people are doing with kids and their pedo adjacent targeted ads and chat bots bc they would be afraid of being sent to jail for cp

Personally, I don’t feel comfortable giving my ID to social media. Especially not with the many data breaches that are happening these days. I think it was a month or three ago that Discord had their data breach and got thousands of ID’s stolen of people.

Yet Discord still decides to push forward their “verification system with ID or face scan”.

Also here’s a screenshot of a comment someone once made and that also got me thinking about the future of “showing your ID and/ or Face scan to ‘protect the kids’”. Another note; people and especially teenagers will nearly always find ways to get around rules. I mean, we all were teenagers before and we often also got around the rules.

Thats because he has like 14 kids with numerous women and doesn't actually parent them.

Musk doesn't even remember his kids' names except maybe that one he named by smashing the keyboard with his fist

What about the one he used as a shield? Or are they the same?

Anti-christ thiel says whayt. Only because the billionaires have gotten thier wealth through unethical means, not including harming other people, of course the wrath will be directed at thier children too, since they benefited from it.

thiel should not be around children, considering his ties with epstein, plus he wanted his own fantasy island of young men/boys.

At least germany is working on a system where people are able to verify that they are over 18 (and maybe other things if they extend the system) without needing to send the ID to some website.

They use the Zero-Knowledge-Proofs which is still quite young.

A plus about that is that it only says if the person with the proof is older or younger but not who it is and other stuff

But sadly its not reality yet

Yeah that's the one

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/elon-musks-human-shield-son-x-ae-a-xii

Zuckerberg had to testify last week 'in an unprecedented social media trial that questions whether Meta’s platforms deliberately addict and harm children' https://lemmy.world/post/43284616

everyone talking about "phone bad" meanwhile im reminded of how abusive parents tend to track and watch everything kids do online. Like have we forgotten all of a sudden these people are extremely linked to the child rapist to end all child rapists???

I'm extremely hesitant to hand it to Thiel, Gates and Elon, especially in anything relating to how children should be treated.

The tobacco industry is a good historical example of all the shit world dominating companies do. The most sneaky thing I can remember is that they finance perfectly good research on a lot of causes of cancer, except for tobacco, so researchers were too busy and happy to get some money to work on something, to investigate tobacco. They also have been buying companies that used to finance legitimate research so researchers that depended on them are now forced into a conflict of interest. https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj.q1153

Personal anecdote, a young female data scientists left my current department to join Philip Morris, it blows my mind that young educated people would join this industry willingly, I guess it was for the money.

Seems this would be good evidence in the case that’s currently at trial.

Vaguely agree with the sentiment here.

Every single person I know who had helicopter parents ended up... a bit odd... in a bad way.

Yeah because they see us as animals that they can hurt to enrich themselves. They don't give a fuck what the consequences are to your children, that's your problem. Just because they reshape the inescapable environment you raise your kids in, doesn't mean they will ever see themselves as responsible for the effect that has on them, or you.

The mass of humanity needs to accept that private power concentrations are a threat to humanity and take steps to ensure they don't exist. Private interest are hostile to community interests. There is no middle ground with selfishness, it is relentless. The most selfish people will always end up with the power if power is allowed to concentrate. Democracy was literally the remedy for it and we've allowed democracy to be removed from the hands of the many in favour of the few.

Private power and community power can not peacefully coexist.

Nah. They’re subhuman. At best.

There's gotta be a modern version of Fortunate son brewing somewhere with a cybertruck whizzing sound as the intro.

I'm sitting on a train reading that and it must have been a weird look for other passengers as I was constantly grimacing! I may have verbally exclaimed a few times as well!

Surely he at least knows the name of the one he used to carry around as a human shield after the Health Care Insurance CEO got executed?!

Nowadays it's filled with giant, powerful, activelly predactorial entities using teams of Psychologists to come up with ways to subvert human falibilities and weaknesses to their ends no matter how much it fucks up their victims.

Back in the day pretty much the worst that could happen to you was getting hurt when trying to do for fun some kind of explosive based on a FAQ from Usenet.

What was like a sleepy village with some shady corners has been turned into Blade Runner's Los Angeles whilst some governments are trying to make it more like Mega City One.

Democracy was literally the remedy for it and we’ve allowed democracy to be removed from the hands of the many in favour of the few.

Exactly, the entire point of having a government is supposed to be to protect society from these people.

•Thiel has been equally explicit. In a now-infamous 2009 essay for the Cato Institute, he declared that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” But he’d made the point in far greater detail in an earlier essay on Strauss, in which he argued that elites must use “esoteric” doublespeak to hide their true intentions from the masses who wouldn’t and shouldn’t understand the plans their natural-born leaders were making for them.