Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, our both our winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about attempts to censor and control the internet “for the children”. In first place, it’s Stephen T. Stone with the first comment on the post:

Wow, it’s almost as if a bunch of moralizing busybodies want to control what everyone sees on the Internet and are using “think of the children” as a pretext to enact widescale censorship. Imagine that~.

In second place, it’s an anonymous response to a commenter who attempted to “agree” with the post while hijacking it for their own hateful agenda:

This article is absolutely correct. Parents need to talk to their children and emphasize that when they run across a bigot they should tell that bigot to fuck the hell off and get a life while explaining that they don’t need a bigoted internet Karen harassing them.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with BernardoVerda and one more comment from that post:

Back in the 1960’s, Bonnie Prudden (the one who made the pathetic physical fitness of American school children a hot topic back in the 1950s) noted that there’s two basic strategies to protect your children from drowning:
– keep them entirely away from any and all bodies of water, till they reach adulthood,
or
– teach them to swim
and that one of these ways works much better than the other one does.

The principle still applies.

Next, it’s an anonymous comment about Meta’s plans to charge for account verification:

I could see introducing a one-off fee for verifying someone, on grounds of both covering the costs of doing so and providing a signal between Facebook and the user about which users believe that to be important to them rather than needing to figure shit out adhoc or verifying literally everyone for free, which’d be its own can of worms.

But a monthly subscription fee? Come the fuck on.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Stephen T. Stone again, this time responding to a particular passage from Mike’s court declaration explaining the problems with California’s Kid’s Code, which evokes what it would look like if applied to book stores:

Great, now you’ve given Ron DeSantis an idea.

In second place, it’s Rocky replying to an anonymous comment about Florida’s bill giving anonymous speech the presumption of falsehood:

I presume all you just said is a falsehood. Now bugger off you liar.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with That One Guy and another response to the California Kid’s Code:

But what to call them…

If only there was some group or category of people that could be tasked with keeping kids from questionable or explicit content online, a group that would have a personal connection to them and be directly involved in their lives, able to impose restrictions on individual kids without having to impose those same restrictions on everyone else too…

Ah well, no such group exists apparently so I guess it’s up to the state to pick up the slack.

Finally, it’s one more anonymous comment, again about Meta’s subscription verification plans:

All Meta needs to make back everything they lost on the metaverse last year is 800 million paying subscribers.

That’s all for this week, folks!