you can take a teen’s phone off them and they can just walk into a store and buy an inexpensive second hand handset and use the WiFi from a local cafe.
Not put a gun to your head but ring up pretending to be your bank and there’s fraud detected and can you follow these steps to verify your identity and secure your account.
2007 seems a bit early to be looking for an effect. Smartphones were a luxury/tech-nerd/Apple-fanboy purchase in 2007, they didn’t start to see widespread adoption till the iPhone 4/4s (2010-2012) closer to when most of the graphs have their discontinuity. In the US, 50% smartphone ownership didn’t happen till 2014 for adults and 2016 for teens.
The exact same addictive feed on desktop isn’t quite as damaging because you’re forced to leave it behind when you go outside. You can’t carry your desktop round in your pocket everywhere you go, always available at a moment’s notice to fill every idle moment with slop.
The stats don’t agree that government jobs only ever increase. In 1990 there were 1 million more federal workers for a population 100 million smaller. I assume it’s a popular belief because the oligarchs gain power as the federal government loses it, and they have better PR.
The UK already blocks certain websites at the national level, e.g. you can’t access Pirate Bay from a UK ISP, so can’t imagine Ofcom blocking 4chan would cause much consternation among those who aren’t already against the OSA.
In a legal sense probably, but in a statistical cost sense you’re estimating whether the same arson would have spread to the same extent in a pre-industrial climate.
There's no value in making insults for the sake of being insulting protected speech, but in the UK if you're making ECHR Article 10 protected speech that someone happens to find insulting or offensive then that's not a crime. It's unhelpful to permit insults as free speech to prevent some hypothetical future abuse, since all modern dictatorships pay lip service to free speech and instead lock up their political opponents for embezzlement or mortgage fraud or whatever.
When Google has the monopoly on marketing of cleaning companies in your area, from a consumer standpoint it’s effectively the same as if one cleaning company has the local monopoly. The way to win is to pay Google a bigger cut than your competitors, so Google just takes the incumbency premium as its marketing fee instead of the cleaning company.
Actually he successfully sued the tabloids for defamation on the grounds that while, yes he had a cosplaying dungeon, and yes the “attendees” were all in uniform, none of them were in Nazi uniform. To twist the knife he then went on to bankroll all the phone hacking civil cases against the same tabloids.
If a building collapses or a plane crashes that’s a singular case, but the ensuing investigation will be used to enact policy changes based on what went wrong to prevent it happening again. It only becomes ‘meme-driven’ when it deviates from what should be a mundane bureaucratic process, which can include blocking the process as much as putting fingers on the scales.
Free speech existed before social media, so banning social media can't be any less free speech than how things were then. Also the USA has for decades been an outlier in taking an extreme interpretation of free speech that considers, say, Fox News an acceptable use of free speech. Plenty of countries where the regulator would find Fox News unacceptable rank higher than the USA on freedom & democracy indices, so there was always going to be pushback from other countries if the USA attempted to impose the Fox-Newsification of social media on others.
I was reading The Shallows recently about how the Internet affects your brain, it's from 2009 so a bit out of date re: smartphones & a lot re: LLMs but makes the case that the Internet and hypertext generally as a tool is 'bad' for you cognitively because it puts additional load on your working memory, but offloads tasks from the parts of your brain that are useful for higher-level tasks and abstract thinking, so those more valuable skills atrophy. It contrasts this with a calculator that makes you "smarter" because it does the opposite - frees up your working memory so you have more time to focus on high-level thought. Found it quite striking because it seemed most likely LLMs and Smartphones would fit in the hypertext category and not the calculator category yet calculators is exactly what Sam Altman likes to use as an analogy to LLMs.
The liberal democratic argument is that the websites themselves are the ones imposing these harmful effects on their users, therefore by a JS Mill 'harm principle' argument it's fine for the government to intervene and regulate the websites, same justification for regulating, say, the sale of tobacco or knives.
20+ years ago kids would play out on the street unsupervised with their friends from the neighbourhood from the age of 6-8 and all the adults would look out for each others' kids. It's only recently that everyone's retreated inside onto their screens that all sense of community has been lost and you get comments like this.
There is currently a bill going through Parliament to simplify this stuff - https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3946 - though not going so far as to remove all protections.
The difference is the volume and the lack of friction to access, not that these things weren't possible. Physically getting into a strip club or having to look the newsagent in the eye as you purchase a porn mag are much higher barriers to access than there are currently.
Having a device in your pocket that you take everywhere with no stigma to being seen with it yet it has unlimited access to any genre of porn you can think of is hardly comparable to finding a 90s porn mag in a bush from time to time, so you can't really say this has been happening forever.
We'd just go back to human curation, you'd whitelist a few curators you liked, people wanting to promote their content would email a link to a curator, if they thought their audience would like it they'd share it, you'd see it via your whitelist and if you liked the look of it you'd whitelist them.
You're mixing your definitions of authoritarian, there's authoritarian in the 'Nolan chart' sense of the word, which just means 'not a Libertarian', which is like 98% of people, which is different to the Hitler meaning of authoritarian, which means 'rejecting democracy'. If the people agree to ban things they don't like, that's democracy, so it's the Nolan kind of authoritarian but not the Hitler kind of authoritarian. Deciding the people shouldn't be allowed to agree collectively to ban certain things is rejecting democracy, so it's Hitler authoritarian but not Nolan authoritarian.