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Tumblr - E-rated games discourse (and how YouTube “handled” COPPA)

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The really funny part about the whole adults-playing-E-rated-games discourse is that it implies that adults should only and exclusively consume media that's full of graphic violence and explicit sex, which raises some frankly fascinating questions about what these people think adulthood is. There's discourse about this? Adults playing E-rated games? This is a hill people feel like dying on right now? I refuse, this can't possibly be a thing, this is too stupid for you to not be making it up. It has to be made up. It needs to be. Nah, it's a real thing - and not just a Tumblr thing, or even an Internet thing, either. Broadly speaking, there are three major strands to the argument: 1. That adults engaging with media that appeals to children – regardless of whether the media in question is in fact aimed at young audiences - is a sign of immaturity or emotional regression, and that a mature and emotionally healthy adult would naturally only wish to engage with media that's explicitly and exclusively intended for adult audiences. 2. That adults engaging with media that appeals to children represents an inappropriate crossing of boundaries, typically grounded in the notion that any social interaction between adults and children that doesn't consist of the adult exercising authority upon the child is inappropriate, and that adults engaging with media that appeals to children creates an unacceptable risk of such interactions occurring, regardless of whether or not they in fact occur. 3. As a corollary of points 1 and 2, if we take it as given that a. no mentally competent adult would enjoy engaging with media that appeals to children, and b. adults engaging with media that appeals to children creates an inherent risk of inappropriate boundary-crossing, the obvious conclusion is that adults who voluntarily engage with media that appeals to children must be doing so for the explicit purpose of courting such boundary-crossing interactions. None of these are new ideas – all of them date back at least to all that Moral Majority horseshit that was going around in the 1970s. The only real novelty is that there have lately been efforts to re-frame these ideas as progressive, particularly in the context of video game fandom. Oh wow that... might actually explain why youtube “handled" the children's content thing the way it did. If it believes this, then obviously it would want to make e-rated content harder to access, not let you make playlists from it, and punish creators who make it. No, that's a completely unrelated thing – it's really about advertising. In a nutshell, in late 2019 Google was fined 170 million dollars by the FTC for engaging in targeted advertising to minors under the age of 13; that is, for tracking kids' online activity in order to build profiles of their consumer preferences and serve ads tailored to their interests, which it may not surprise you to learn is straight up illegal. What should have happened after that is for Google to stop running targeted ads to anyone who hasn't registered for a Google or YouTube account and warranted that they're over 18. What actually happened is that Google cooked up a piece of legal bizarro logic arguing that it's actually totally okay for Google to build targeted advertising profiles of minors as long as those profiles are never actually used to expose a minor to a targeted ad, and that it's the responsibility of individual content creators to prevent minors from being exposed to targeted advertising by voluntarily demonetising any video that might possibly appeal to kids under 13. This way, Google can continue building targeted advertising profiles of kids, and if anyone is ever able to prove that those profiles were used to actually run a targeted ad, they can claim it's the fault of the individual content creator for choosing to monetise that video knowing that a kid might potentially watch it. I trust you can see where the problem is.

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