That is what we’re debating, yes.

If it could be conclusively proven that a system like this has saved a child’s life, would that benefit outweigh the misuse?

If not, how many children’s lives would it need to save for it to outweigh the misuse?

Sure, maybe, but I’d also say you shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Yes, we should absolutely have better mental healthcare safety nets. Yes, false positives are probably a pretty common prank.

But this isn’t a zero sum game. This can work on tandem with a therapist/counsellor to try and identify someone before they shoot up a school and get them help. This might let the staff know a kid is struggling with suicidal ideation before they find the kid OD’d on moms sleeping pills.

In an ideal world would this be unnecessary? Absolutely. But we don’t live in that ideal world.

That argument could be expanded to any tool though.

People run people over with cars or drive drunk. Ban cars?

People use computers to distribute CP. Ban computers?

People use baseball bats to bludgeon people to death. Ban baseball?

The question of if a tool should be banned is driven by if its utility is outweighed by the negative externalities of use by bad actors.

The answer is wildly more nuanced than “if it can hurt someone it must be banned.”

You say “the last time this happened” as if this wasn’t a generalized trend across all schooling for the past decade or so.

Out of the tens of thousands of schools implementing systems like this, I’m not surprised that one had some letch who was spying on kids via webcam.

And I’m all for having increased forms of oversight and protection to prevent that kind of abuse.

But this argument is just as much of a “won’t someone think of the children” as the opposite. Just cause one school out of thousands did a bad thing, doesn’t mean the tech is worthless or bad.

This article feels pretty disingenuous to me.

It glosses over the fact that this is surveillance on computers that the school owns. This isn’t them spying on kids personal laptops or phones. This is them exercising reasonable and appropriate oversight of school equipment.

This is the same as complaining that my job puts a filter on my work computer that lets them know if I’m googling porn at work. You can cry big brother all you want, but I think most people are fine with the idea that the corporation I work for has a reasonable case for putting monitoring software on the computer they gave me.

The article also makes the point that, while the companies claim they’ve stopped many school shootings before they’ve happened, you can’t prove they would have happened without intervention.

And sure. That’s technically true. But the article then goes on to treat that assertion as if it’s proof that the product is worthless and has never prevented a school shooting, and that’s just bad logic.

It’s like saying that your alarm clock has woken you up 100 days in a row, and then being like, “well, there’s no proof that you wouldn’t have woken up on time anyway, even if the alarm wasn’t there.” Yeah, sure. You can’t prove a negative. Maybe I would usually wake up without it. I’ve got a pretty good sleep schedule after all. But the idea that all 100 are false positives seems a little asinine, no? We don’t think it was effective even once?

Lack of good examples of countries that are successful without being capitalist?

Pretty ubiquitously non-capitalist countries have a pretty poor track record.

I often hear the phrase, capitalism is terrible, but it’s the least bad of the terrible options.

As an aside, I’m arguing here for capitalism, not billionaires. Supporting capitalism isn’t an endorsement of a complete lack of controls and safeguards.

Google doesn’t seem to find anything with that title when I Google it?

The Ash Tree seems to be some early 1900s story, and Daniel Harms doesn’t seem to have anything of that title as far as I can tell. :(

No, it was kind of a standalone type web forum. Greyish background, iirc.

Pretty sure I was linked it from Lemmy, and I don’t subscribe to no sleep here.

I think the issue is that, while a country is certainly allowed to write it’s own laws, the idea that it is deeply fundamentally immoral for the government to prevent someone from saying something (or compel them to say something) is very deeply baked into the American zeitgeist (of which I am a part.)

So in the same way that a country is perfectly within its sovereign rights to pass a law that women are property or minorities don’t have the right to vote, I can still say that it feels wrong of them to do so.

And I would also decry a country that kicks out a company that chooses to employ women or minorities in violation of such a law, even if that is technically their sovereign right to do so.

Printing Nazi propaganda isn’t illegal in the US.

And I realize this isn’t in the US, obviously. But I think that the idea that the government shouldn’t be able to ban people from saying things, or compel them to say things, is so baked into the American zeitgeist (of which I am a member), that it feels wrong in a fundamental moral sense when it happens.

It’s the old, “I don’t agree with anything that man says, but I’ll defend to the death his right to say it,” thing.

I can see both sides on this one I think?

Out of curiosity, would you feel differently about this if it had been a print newsletter or physical book publisher that was printing Nazi propaganda that got shutdown because they refused to stop printing Nazi propaganda?

If so, what’s the substantive difference? If not, are you affirming banning people from publishing books based on ideological grounds?

Obviously banning books is bad, but obviously Nazis are bad, and that’s a hard square to circle.