Alec Muffett

IMPORTANT: this letter in the WSJ is amongst the clearest expressions of wisdom you'll read, re: blanket bans on teen social media access.

We saw this with peanut allergies: early avoidance yields later life-threatening adult reactiveness at scale. Managed exposure during youth prevents harm.

If you read 1 thing about Social Media Bans this week, it should be Rod Wilson’s magisterial letter to the WSJ; extract, text & link below “Bans feel decisive, but they avoid the harder truth: The digital environment isn’t temporary, and adolescence can’t be postponed until it becomes convenient for adults. We aren’t raising chi…

If you read 1 thing about Social Media Bans this week, it should be Rod Wilson’s magisterial letter to the WSJ; extract, text & link below
https://alecmuffett.com/article/147467
#SocialMediaBan #censorship #parenting

Across Civil Society you can almost hear the mumbling of activists suddenly staring at their shoes wondering if they now have to defend AI & “Effective Altruism” against Trump ZOMG! Defense secretary Pete Hegseth designates Anthropic a supply chain risk | The Verge archived at Anthropic response & rebuttal:

Across Civil Society you can almost hear the mumbling of activists suddenly staring at their shoes wondering if they now have to defend AI & “Effective Altruism” against Trump
https://alecmuffett.com/article/147459
#EffectiveAltruism #anthropic #hegseth

If you read 1 thing about Social Media Bans this week, it should be Rod Wilson’s magisterial letter to the WSJ; extract, text & link below “Bans feel decisive, but they avoid the harder truth: The digital environment isn’t temporary, and adolescence can’t be postponed until it becomes convenient for adults. We aren’t raising chi…

If you read 1 thing about Social Media Bans this week, it should be Rod Wilson’s magisterial letter to the WSJ; extract, text & link below
https://alecmuffett.com/article/147467
#SocialMediaBan #censorship #parenting

Doubtless, but still happy to see the exchanges.

Across Civil Society you can almost hear the mumbling of activists suddenly staring at their shoes wondering if they now have to defend AI & “Effective Altruism” against Trump ZOMG! Defense secretary Pete Hegseth designates Anthropic a supply chain risk | The Verge archived at Anthropic response & rebuttal:

Across Civil Society you can almost hear the mumbling of activists suddenly staring at their shoes wondering if they now have to defend AI & “Effective Altruism” against Trump
https://alecmuffett.com/article/147459
#EffectiveAltruism #anthropic #hegseth

Absolutely bonkers approach to technology from the House of Lords.

Screenshot of amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill with a new clause beginning: "AI search services safety: offence (1) It is an offence for the provider of a generative AI search service to allow the creation, viewing, listening to, sharing, broadcasting or storing, using that service, of content— (a) that would be illegal content, as defined by section 59 of the Online Safety Act 2023 ('illegal content' etc), (b) that would be content that is harmful to children, as defined by section 60 of that Act ('content that is harmful to children'), if the user is a child," and with a definition "(2) For the purposes of this section, a generative AI search service means a deep or large language model able to generate text, images and other content based on the data on which they were trained and user prompts."

Baroness Kidron has tabled an amendment that would criminalise most, if not all, general-purpose LLMs bills.parliament.uk/publications...

The offence says "generative AI search service" but there's no search or service element in the definition – just models.

#CPBill #genAI #censorship #techpolicy

> We aren’t raising children for a world without algorithms. We are raising them for a world shaped by artificial intelligence, public visibility and constant comparison. Removing access doesn’t build resilience, judgment or self-regulation. It simply […]

Read it at:

www.wsj.com/opinion/if-t...

> We aren’t raising children for a world without algorithms. We are raising them for a world shaped by artificial intelligence, public visibility and constant comparison. Removing access doesn’t build resilience, judgment or self-regulation. It simply […]

Read it at:

www.wsj.com/opinion/if-t...

Fog in Channel. Europe cut off.

Possibly you should try and talk to some kids who have been isolated and had a positive experience.

Wow, so much projection.

"where do you think here is, precisely?"

I regret I don't have time to dig into it right now due to parenting

ps: the reason they felt isolated in covid lockdown was "removal of choice and agency"

That's why this is the same, but also different.

"You types?"

Also: how many of the teens are just circumventing the controls?

You know, when the proposals of new things that they try are simultaneously populist, oppressive, isolationist, driven by moral panic, and disenfranchised the teenage demographic from communication amongst themselves… I'm ok with them not trying those things.

If it were something like "it's not oppressive to ban women from driving cars, after all they have buses and public transport" - at least in the West people would flip their lids.

Noting in passing that you deleted your embarrassing post that "if it turns out that the censorship is bad in a couple of years we can undo it" — ignoring that, we must observe that social media IS HOW TEENS SOCIALISE AND IT'S BEING REMOVED FROM THEM.

"Alternatives exist" is not the issue.

Ah, right so, and similarly we can just ignore the prior impact upon all of the kids who lost time and social growth when we had COVID lockdown — after all, it all got better in the end, right?

No permanent harm, right?

Bye, Troll

What an abject, shabby show of populism over principles, this is.

Observations on last night's conference call with the great and the good. As others have blogged - good pieces from Zoe O'Connell here  , Miss S-B here , the always brilliant Lord Bonkers here , just for start...

Compare: LibDem political circles in 2012 - again, @markpackuk.bsky.social ? - should remember the Communications Capabilities Development Program (government spying on communications) that LibDem grassroots fought, against the parliamentary party:

aviewfromhamcommon.blogspot.com/2012/04/obse...

This is populist hand-wringing nonsense and should be beneath the political principles of anyone who calls themselves a liberal. We should be helping parents, teaching kids and fixing society, not banning communication.

How dare they?

Text: Families are crying out for action to protect our children from harmful social media. Faced with an opportunity to vote for a ban for the first time, Labour MPs voted against our plan.

Text: Our message to social media giants is clear: if your platform spreads harmful content or relies on addictive and algorithms, you should not be allowed anywhere near our children. We will not give up the fight. https://www.libdems.org.uk/ageratings

Text: This is atrocious, appalling posturing by the Liberal Democrats who have betrayed and are betraying the principles of free speech and communication which they used to proudly hold dear. We don't need censorship in this country and we don't need to lock our children away from communicating with each other and from learning about the wide world. What we need is social action to build a better community. This is appalling. This is debasement. You should be ashamed of yourselves and to call yourself liberals.

The @libdems.org.uk are on Facebook, baying for the introduction of censorship and the social isolation of our kids.

The Labour Party are being more liberal than the Liberal Democrats themselves.

The #LibDems should be ashamed of themselves.

/cc @markpackuk.bsky.social

We need to stop using industry-friendly PR terms like “age verification” and call it what it is: Digital ID

Yeeeeeeeeeah; regrettably that's a "cart before the horse" approach, because it's great to look at privacy and "examine these challenges around five ethical principles: autonomy, justice, non-maleficence, beneficence, and explicability" - but unless you have a threat model you miss "adequacy".

A Sequence of Spankingly Bad Ideas An encounter with those who seek to gain from the Digital Economy Bill’s Age Verification requirements

ps: if you want some history and a fun read from 2016, check out:

medium.com/@alecmuffett...

Hi Taylor. Having lived in the AV debate-hell for ~10 years, at some point someone will try rebutting you with:

"WE CAN USE ZERO-KNOWLEDGE CRYPTOGRAPHIC PROTOCOLS TO MAKE IT PRIVATE AND *NOT* DIGITAL ID!"

When that happens, please point them at this paper:

www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/...