Problem with Wikipedia specifically going all-in on a UK block is, due to the licence, there's nothing to stop someone circumventing the block to make a OSA-compliant Britipedia mirror with minimal effort.
A majority of adult GenZs who've grown up with this stuff agree it was bad for their childhood and most older adults use social media and feel the negative effects too. Using some sophistry to argue it's all made up by the government is like Democrats arguing Biden was fit to run a second term when everyone can see with their own eyes he was not.
There's a cognitive dissonance to the opposition to this:
a) Content controls don't work, what are the government thinking?
b) This is parents' problem, they should use content controls.
Individual action doesn't work because it only takes one kid in the class who doesn't have parental controls then everyone loses. There's also obvious workarounds such as VPNs and a teenager walking into a pawn shop with £50 for a second hand smartphone without parental controls.
It also makes no sense that parents can't be bothered to turn on parental controls yet can be bothered to run a national grassroots campaign for this stuff (see e.g. http://smartphonefreechildhood.org)
Although your idea of an OS-level age flag is also being pushed by the Anxious Generation's Jonathan Haidt, so definitely has merit/traction as an alternative.
I guess if everywhere's zoned for max density. If it's zoned as a public park, so no ability to develop it and generate revenue, or close it off for private use, then its rated value would be close to zero. Possibly negative if ownership imposes some maintenance obligations on the owner.
Manufacturing Consent is a book that rails against ad-supported media empires. I think anyone who reads it would come away more supportive of these kinds of restrictions. If you want to give it a go, the first chapter is basically a summary of the rest of the book.
The problem with trying too hard to neutrally report both sides of a story is that's not unbiased either, it's just biased in favour of the side that can lie the most convincingly.
These days the courts give wide latitude to companies to offer virtually any plausible reason why superficially altruistic acts are in fact good long term for shareholder value. Anyone wanting to do what Ford did just needs to keep their mouth shut about the real reasons.
Foreign countries buy USD through trade. Japan needs dollars for international trade so the US Treasury prints dollars and gives them to Japan and in return Japan gives the US Nintendo Switches or whatever. Those dollars go into the international trade system and some of those dollars will just circulate internationally indefinitely and won't ever make their way back to the US, hence the perpetual trade deficit. This is a great deal for the US because at the national level they effectively got those Nintendo Switches for free.
Of course, because we also consider intent, so the law distinguishes saying something true that someone happens to find offensive (which carries EHRC Article 10 protections), as opposed to saying something to cause offence that also happens to be true (which does not). If you're worried about a compromised judiciary one day interpreting such a distinction unfavourably then it's pointless because by that point they can interpret any law in a way that silences critics of the regime. Navalny was officially in jail for embezzlement but no-one's suggesting we shouldn't have embezzlement laws on free speech grounds.
Or they just take the more nuanced JS Mill view that free speech is about truth and not simply about being able to say whatever you want without any consequences. Being offensive for the sake of being offensive has nothing to do with finding truth, so isn't perceived as a question of free speech.
There's been pushback against this, 8 states have passed “Reasonable Childhood Independence” laws since 2018, Georgia in the last few days, and more will.
I can recommend Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk that covers Trump #1 doing this sort of thing - go after the public bodies that protect against low probability but high consequence events because you'll get minimal pushback from the general public who are unlikely to notice.
Most have the same zero-sum first-order attitude to free speech, and couldn't see what's happening now was always going to be net worse for free speech than any controls that could have been put in place to reduce the chance of getting to this point.
Changing the code of practice is a years long statutory consultation process, they're not going to be able to change the rules to go after you on a whim.
The deal private for profit corporations make with society is that profit provides an incentive that leads to better outcomes, yet every developed country with a not-for-profit healthcare system has better outcomes.
The theory is that (a) the tax would be paid by the property owner and not the venue (it is assumed rent follows an econ 102 inelastic supply model) and (b) property would be less attractive as a store of wealth so prices would drop.
A cycling site with 275k MAU would be in the very lowest category where compliance is things like 'having a content moderation function to review and assess suspected illegal content'. So having a report button.
It's not that hard to create privacy friendly age verification. Have a system like Sign in with Apple vouch that you're over 18. Go to Apple store to flash your ID and they just set a flag on your account. Apple doesn't give the site any personal info when you use Sign in with Apple. Apple isn't giving the government any of your details without a warrant. No Apple store nearby? It doesn't have to be Apple, licence it out to a few companies.
I guess it will become self-fulfilling if everyone denies that there are privacy friendly options. Legislatures globally are starting to take this seriously so chances are it's happening one way or another.
The idea that social media is like a Meta commercial, all making new friends and video calls to smiling Grandparents, etc. is a fabrication, presumably one that a lot of HN folks have a vested interest in maintaining. Kids are lonelier now than they have ever been.
And totally counterproductive, given the underlying insinuation that scaling back the government would solve the problem, when in reality it just hands more power over to corporations to do even more [wrongdoing].
This gets raised every charter renewal and they always find the administrative overhead of e.g. collecting Netflix subscriptions, etc. is pro rata higher than the overhead for the licence fee.