Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the chit-chat dept

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about the impossibility of complying with the child protection bill being pushed in California. In first place, it’s That One Guy with a comment focusing on the carve-out for telcos and broadband providers:

‘They paid us off so of course they don’t have to follow the rules!’

Nothing says ‘this bill is a grossly dishonest PR stunt’ like exempting certain industries for violations of the very problem those involved in the bill want to claim are super serious.

Given the only way to prevent children from seeing ‘harmful’ content would be to either ban it entirely(oh look, forced moderation) or force even visitors to the site to provide sufficient personal data so as to ensure that only people ‘old enough’ are accessing the site, therefore utterly destroying the ability to even access the site anonymously, to call this bill effectively impossible to comply with does not strike me as hyperbole.

In second place, it’s Norahc answering our rhetorical question about how we mitigate the “harm” Techdirt might provide:

The Harm of Techdirt

The harm this site provides is teaching children to question and think for themselves. Obviously, parents are too busy to do this for their children, so the legislature feels the need to do it for them.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with one more comment from that post, this time from an anonymous commenter asking how any kind of age verification would really work:

And just how do you achieve that, where you cannot see the person submitting the details? Any half competent teenager could provide the details of a parent, up to and including credit card details?

Next, we’ve got an anonymous comment about Lenovo’s legal attack on the Framework laptop:

I’ve never heard of Framework laptops, but thanks to Lenovo, now I have. The best advertising that money can’t buy.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is another anonymous comment about the California law, aiming to save some effort on the requirements:

Can you at least combine all the legal notices so that people don’t just skip the whole lot?

This website contains stories known to the state of California to cause cancer.

In second place, it’s Stephen T. Stone with a comment on our post about how Twitter’s removal of a Florida political candidate who advocated shooting federal agents would have been prevented by DeSantis’s failed content moderation bill:

C’mon Mike, this is a tad unfair⁠—after all, this is what Republicans call “legitimate public discourse” these days, and we should absolutely respect that~.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with one more comment from Stephen T. Stone, this time making a joke about the Biden administration’s announcement that publicly funded research will be made available for free:

How dare the Biden administration spit in the face of people who paid money to access that knowledge~! HOW DARE~!

Finally, it’s Nemo_bis with one final comment on the California law, this time taking up our challenge for someone to explain exactly how any of what’s proposed will help kids:

Well, I’m sure some of those DPIA-writing lawyers have children…

That’s all for this week, folks!