I just listened to a radio program on my local NPR station about the topic of kids and social media. From what was presented, the research shows (longitudinal study) that there is very little evidence of social media impacting mental health--which is shocking because a majority of adults think there is a connection and the politicians are pushing that narrative. I have not personally vetted the research. Has anyone else?
There's quite a lot of statistics saying currently teens struggle with mental health even more than is historically normal for teenagers. [1, 2] Young people are also spending less time with friends, drinking less, and having less sex than ever before.
Obviously it's difficult to pin a 20-year trend on a single cause. But most parents have the sense their teens spend too much time on their phones; and with social media use as common as it is, almost every kid who commits suicide will have recently used social media. But it's not possible to prove causality in a way that will silence all objections.
I suspect it's particularly easy to convince politicians that social media is bad for mental health because of their lived experience. Consider the experience of being a professional politician on Twitter.
The research is quite confusing. This is because the strongest version of the argument is not "your child uses social media, and that makes them depressed". The strongest version is more like "when a society mass adopts social media, this irrevocably alters the culture in ways that causes massive changes in mental health, most prominently among young girls, including those exposed to the culture who don't even use social media."
This means you get a weird effect where experimental studies of high quality - which are usually the best evidence, are expected by the strong argument to show zero effect.
Correlational studies usually show either a weak effect (stronger in young girls) or no effect (it's extremely rare to see a study showing a positive correlational effect, though).
But even then it's very tricky, as those studies can't exactly be replicated, and we don't know whether changes will actually reverse the cultural artifacts
Super awesome as long as your kids never go anywhere they could access a non-locked-down device. And assuming that device parental controls work, which (at least on iOS) they don't [1].
And if they do it anyway? Sure, you can vote them out but it's hard to dislodge incumbents especially over policy choices rather than obvious problems like corruption. Then even after you've ejected them, you need to push their successor into the Sisyphean task of rewriting populist legislation.
Representative democracy is not adequate to the demands of the information age, where the informational asymmetry between individual and state is unprecedented in history. It's time to explore other models like administrative democracy.
We do not need to lose our rights to privacy because people want to control what their kids do and see. (I'm not even convinced this is true - this is likely just a convenient lie told by the politicians, because I don't see parents clamoring for this.)
We're below replacement rate, so it's not like most people are even having kids, anyway. Yet we have to give up our freedom for other people to raise little Christian tots (or whatever the motivation for this is billed as)?
I grew up in a Deep South Protestant household. Having access to the unfiltered internet got me interested in STEM. Bumping into occasional shock sites and porn as a preteen did not turn me into a satanist cannibal.
Keeping "Kids Safe" is a LIE.
This is about putting collars on every US citizen.
They'll filter you into groups.
They'll control what loans and jobs you can get.
They'll use this information to blackmail you should you ever run for office or gain wealth or power.
This is a threat to democracy and personal liberty.
As a child circa 2000, I remember seeing explicit bestiality porn pop-ups while looking up video game cheat codes. You're right, the internet is much different now, and not in the way you're implying.
At global conferences like Davos, where national leaders and policy makers go to schmooze and exchange ideas, this idea has been discussed for years. I’m sure there has been some subsequent cross-border coordination and discussion.
Everyone ignores stuff like this because of people like Alex Jones who make it seem like a lunatic conspiracy theory. But these conferences happen, and they do influence policy. It’s not a “cabal” that issues orders—many participants are national leaders bringing their perspectives (see the link above about Sanchez)—but it does have an impact.
The banal truth is that many different world leaders have talked each other into this after years of discussion on the proper way to “manage” the Internet. They see cyberspace as a threat to top-down technocratic control and view Internet-enabled populism (aka democracy) as something to be quashed.
> [World leaders] see cyberspace as a threat to top-down technocratic control and view Internet-enabled populism (aka democracy) as something to be quashed.
This has been true ever since the creation of the internet and web.
It's what the original 90s crypto wars were about: the right of individuals to access strong encryption to preserve the privacy of their communications from the government.
Absent that, pandora's box opens.
Age KYC is just the next fight against encryption and privacy dressed up in "for the children" clothes.
Strong encryption always has (and always will) facilitate criminal and illegal activity. Tough tits.
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies should work within the bounds of individual rights, not adjust them for convenience.
If the price of individual freedom^ is that it's harder to track and prosecute child exploitation, drug distribution, and mass terror attacks, then that's the way it needs to be.
^ "Individual freedom" as distinct from corporate freedom. Fuck non-human legal entities' rights to access encryption, aside from on behalf of their users.
Because the internet is global and the negative effects of the internet are happening everywhere at the same time. Also, politicians look at other countries for ideas.
Because it is an organized attack. The lobbyists got their orders,
now they pull it through. It is kind of fascinating to see though -
I bet many people don't realise this coordinated attack. To me it
is blatantly easy to notice. I am glad to not be the only one here.
If Facebook, in light of the 2021 "Facebook Papers," believed the legislation inevitable, what kind of legislation would maximize its advantage?
Noteworthily, the legislation moves age verification from individual apps to app-store operators [Apple, Google] which reduces Facebooks legal exposure for inaccurate/incorrect age verifications.
Coordinated opposition campaigns against misinformed and dangerous legislation has been effective in stopping bad laws [1]. After a website blackout, including a Wikipedia shutdown, lawmakers in Washington decided not to proceed with the Stop Online Privacy Act in 2012.
From your linked Wikipedia articles many corporations including Google were part of that opposite campaign. Exactly the type of people donating untold millions to our legislatures. Had nothing to do with any kind of grassroots pressure.
Dear goverments, if you care about KIDS, provide them a separete internet outside of ICANN with mandatory ID. Let the rest of the people create an anonymous, adult internet with no ID's.
> The term was coined by Timothy C. May in 1988. May referred to "child pornographers, terrorists, drug dealers, etc.".[1] May used the phrase to express disdain for what he perceived as "think of the children" argumentation by government officials and others seeking to justify limiting the civilian use of cryptography tools.
> The phrase is a play on Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Digital rights activist Cory Doctorow frequently cites "software pirates, organized crime, child pornographers, and terrorists".[2][3] Other sources use slightly different descriptions, but generally refer to similar activities.
Can you elaborate on what you think ruined the brains of a generation of young people? Actually, can you even tell us which generation you're referring to so we know what era of the internet you're unhappy with?
If you want to stop this instance of "think of the children", build a working and cheap alternative that respects privacy. It is technically possible, so if you feel as strongly about it as your words suggest, do it. Once it's ready, spread awareness through old-media, new-media, politicians, everything and every means.
No, they won’t. The schools have internet but they also often don’t even allow phones these days. And those networks block almost everything.
They might still get some content downstream of other kids. However, I doubt a “look at this tiktok” here and there has any harmful effects.
What’s harmful is excessive social media use, especially unmonitored. So, either monitor your kid or do not give them access. It’s perfectly fine to have a family computer in the living room if you’re worried about little Timmy looking up “boobies”. Problem solved, and I saved you some money.
I think a lot of parents do basically nothing and then are unhappy with the results. Yes, if you don’t try, you won’t get your desired result. But you can try stuff out, and you can always pivot if you feel it becomes inconvenient. The reality is we don’t need these complex technological solutions. There are simple, brain-dead solutions like “don’t give your kid a phone for hours on end” or “give your kid a flip phone”.
Yeah but don't expect much sympathy on a forum full of uber rich folks whose very income is directly tied to the same revenue streams you mention.
I love freedom as a general principle, but internet 2026 is a undefendable cesspool of amorality, scams and worse. We are not in the 90s or early 00s anymore, and never will be again that era is gone.
EDIT: about half to two thirds of the responders didn't catch "I'm not a fan of these proposed solutions." I am not saying I like these solutions. I am trying to explain why they have support among the general public. Many of these responses are the usual "shoot the messenger" response you get online when you point out what the "other side" thinks and why they think it even if you don't necessarily agree. On this issue I think there's a need, but I have yet to see a good proposal to address it.
Once again, the response in places like this pretends everyone is an upper middle class or above tech-savvy nerd.
I'm not a fan of these proposed solutions, which do invade privacy and remove freedom, but the problems are real. These solutions are being pushed because our industry is doing nothing to police itself or provide parents with the tools they need.
In many cases we are doing less than nothing, because the profit motive is to prevent parents from having this control. "Social" media, gambling-adjacent gaming, and other addictionware, which is a huge profit center for our industry, wants to addict kids early. Gotta get those cigarettes into their hands, which means preventing parents from stopping it.
Right now if you are not a tech-savvy parent your choices are: (1) deny children access to devices or severely limit that access, or (2) allow your kids to be raised by super-addictive infinite scroll brain rot feeds, brainwashed by propaganda and influencer bullshit, and placed on an on-ramp to future gambling addiction via mobile games with engineered "compulsion loops."
Now imagine you are a non-tech-savvy household with two parents who work. You can't really limit access since you can't supervise it enough, so your choice is now binary: no access, kids raised by brain rot and propaganda. Pick one. You have no control, no ability to whitelist, because not only do you not have time to deal with this but the tools often cost money and are imperfect and ineffective.
Then you catch your 11 year old son watching extreme fetish porn that he lacks the maturity to contextualize, or hear him spouting off Nazi ideology or talking about how he's an "alpha male" and women should be his slaves. Or your daughter becomes anorexic by following influencers. Or you have a child who is questioning their sexual orientation or identity and is targeted by an online bullying ring. These are the commonplace examples. There's a lot of much worse shit too, like sextortion of kids. Search for "764."
That's why this push exists. It's not a conspiracy. It's because we -- our industry -- is an amoral shitshow that engineers addiction and refuses to police itself or provide parents with good tools to do so.
I'd also like to note that for the non-tech-savvy privacy is dead and has been dead for over ten years at least. If you are not tech-savvy your devices are recording everything about you and transmitting it to two dozen ad networks and data brokers.
Only nerds have privacy today and only if they invest the time to police their tech environment. If you're not a nerd there's nothing to lose. You already lost it long ago. We -- our industry -- took it away.
You are missing half of the story. This is not “caring legislators punishing big bad tech”. This IS big bad tech. Meta has spent $2B lobbying for this. More than wanting to get kids addicted, Big Tech and the intelligence community wants perfect observability into online activities.
This is a win/win for big tech. If they don’t get age verification, they can keep getting kids addicted to propaganda and consumerism. If they do get age verification, they get to see what everyone in the world thinks and is interested in, all linked to government ID.
Edit: the one outcome big tech does not want is anonymous age verification. This is technologically extremely possible, but that would be a lose/lose for big tech because they would lose kid (aka future consuming adult) addiction AND lose perfect tracking linked to government IDs.
Big Tech, most of all, wants a liability shield for the people it turns into school shooters. Because if Big Tech had to pay for the consequences of its algorithms it would be bankrupt.
I'm telling you why ordinary people support this, and I can tell you they overwhelmingly do... at least those with children.
I'm also aware of what you're talking about. That's called regulatory capture. They know this kind of regulation is coming and want to make sure they're the ones writing it so they can use it to entrench their oligopolies.
My point is that something like this will happen unless we find an alternative. The longer it goes on, the worse the backlash will be.
There is no technological fix for the issue you raise. The issue being parents not wanting to bother raising their kids, and thus giving the state and corporations control over what they can and can’t do. That’s a cultural issue. No idea how to solve it.
Rich parents can have nannies, expensive software, or a parent who stays home from work. Poorer parents do not have time or energy to police this stuff or supervise their kids. They're too busy putting food on the table and paying rent or a mortgage.
Absolutely, it's the system failing and predatory actors seeing a crisis they can exploit.
I was at the laundromat and a woman with kids was complaining across the room about how she only had $700.00 in her account. Note, she had a car, wasn't homeless, but this is actual reality for a huge number of people in the US.
For me that would be a crisis. I always want to have at least a few thousands and then if something unexpected happens, that other people will go into a small debt for, I will just be able to spend the money and not go into debt. And it's not like it's hard to save up a few thousand dollars in a time frame of years, so I don't understand people who don't.
I think it may be that people grew up accustomed to having everything constantly taken away from them, so they learn not to save stuff.
> And it's not like it's hard to save up a few thousand dollars in a time frame of years, so I don't understand people who don't.
Seeing this as some sort of moral failing isn't the right way to look at it. It's possible that that this person could have done that, but it's also they they really may not have been able to, low wages, bad environment, health issues, all of these compound until "it's not hard to just" is a gross way to interpret their situation.
Rich parents can not prevent their children from accessing pornography and social media on the internet, and will also not be able to do so after this legislation.
Pornography is often delivered by people who don't care about US legislation, and social media is carefully left undefined, intentionally confounded with algorithms used to surface content (which people actually do object to at least the opaqueness of.)
I, like most, don't think that the totalitarianism is an unfortunate side-effect of the attempt to protect children online. I think legislation, and legislation like this, will only be successful in increasing surveillance and public manipulation, and that it will have virtually no effect on childrens' consumption of pornography and social media. If you really wanted to protect children, there's better legislation to write and technical solutions to implement.
When I was 14 I could just type porn.com into the address bar to see porn. (I remember they had one of those fake customer testimonials - saying basically "wow! this site is so awesome because porn.com is the best address for a porn site" which was very funny. Besides that it was nothing, so next time I googled the word porn).
Should it be that easy or should there be some road blocks? Should I have been able to go into a store at 14 and buy a beer?
> I'm telling you why ordinary people support this, and I can tell you they overwhelmingly do
This is a claim without backing, and if there were backing to be had, it would constantly be thrown in people's faces by the various administrations that suddenly decided this was a problem that had to be stopped now by any means necessary.
They do not need any public support to implement this, they need opposition to sleep for 5 minutes. It is being advanced by the most unpopular governments in the entire histories of the countries that it is being introduced in.
Your children had access to porn 30 years ago, they will have access to porn after this. There is no actual impetus behind any legal blocking of gambling mechanics in games targeted at children, because they are unbelievably profitable (unlike children as a market for pornography.)
I'm telling you that if you fight invisible enemies, like these campaigners for online age verification (who don't exist), you are fighting a senseless battle.
I'm not dismissing the scenario and your illustration of the mindset of these fictional hoards - if I were concocting a biography and argument for age verification activists, I would come up with the same dynamics and resentments. But it's not real. There are no million-mom marches in DC for age verification on the internet, and certainly not ones so advanced that they've decided that no other method will work: that device/OS/browser level verification of identity is the only way from keeping little Kip from accessing Cambridge Analytics's Russian-Chinese hardcore trans pornography.
They don't exist. Or rather, the bulk of them are Keynesian Beauty Contest judges who have concocted a public opinion that they've followed like lemmings, and only update their vision of public opinion based on new claims from politicians and their PR departments currently pushing the legislation. They don't really believe that age verification is a good solution, but they understand why most people do. I claim that the vast majority of people don't. I'm not even sure I could find a single person to support it in real life if given a 2 minute speech about the obvious and basic privacy and civil liberties implications of such a move, and the many alternative ways to attack the same issue. And governments are prioritizing it, with no hint at all that they will see a reward at the polls. In fact, almost all of the people who are pushing it are unpopular lame ducks who have no ability or no reasonable chance to serve again. They're lining up their next jobs and securing their fortunes.
It's not the only way. The California way is much better. If we implemented that ten years ago there would be no excuse for ID verification now. But we didn't do that, did we? Instead we pushed for unlimited social media access for everybody, destroying an entire generation and now we're surprised when the chickens come home to roost?
Enough with this "but they can work around it" argument, too. Kids can get adults to buy cigarettes for them, we still ban them from buying cigarettes because it's a very useful roadblock.
This is just the latest incarnation. They’ve already used the same tactic successfully to remove other freedoms not related to tech. Just compare the stories from older people about their childhood experiences (when they’re being completely open and honest) with the way children are raised now. My own parents did things that would get them on a terrorist watch list nowadays like building explosives and home made mortars or even just walking through town with a shotgun to go down to the creek for duck hunting at the ripe old age of 13 (with no adult supervision).
Personally I find everything you listed here safer than letting a kid have unfiltered unlimited access to TikTok.
You know a gun or a bomb is dangerous, so you'll probably be careful with it. The gun and the bomb are not engineered on purpose to hook you by exploiting your dopamine pathways and get you to shoot yourself or blow yourself up.
EDIT: I'm being a little hyperbolic here, but I'm also talking about aggregate harm and intent to harm. I'm really being hyperbolic to bash what I consider to be the key villain in this story: addiction engineering, a.k.a. "maximizing engagement." This is the root of all evil.
> Personally I find everything you listed here safer than letting a kid have unfiltered unlimited access to TikTok.
This sounds like you have a media addiction. This is the kind of extreme hyperbole that we spent a year or two saturated with when a bunch of states and a bunch of billionaires decided that American people were saying too much on Tiktok about Israel, and something something China evil.
A lot of people including a lot of kids do have a media addiction. Should we do something about it? Remember that today's kids will be your caretakers when you're 80.
This kind of restrictions expects account control to work. For example, parent's account & separate child account on a device. For the same reasons you describe, it will be ineffective: not tech-savvy. Children will use their parent's/grandma's account on TV and phone, one that has long been verified as "adult" despite the Youtube recommendations consisting of 6-13yo content.
If there were an organic push by parents, they would be happy to buy and promote products today, without waiting for legislation to catch up. Where are these local parental control products?
Speaking of social media and Youtubes of the world, why can't I, as account owner/parent, totally blacklist some "recommendations"?
Age verification is not a fit tool for content filtering. Users want the latter, but get switcheroo'd into the former.
I assume ulterior motives for politicians. It's their PR campaigns that do make it seem like it will solve all children's issues, if only we sacrifice a little privacy for their control. One thing that's never mentioned is increased vulnerability when (inevitably) personal data (of children) leaks.
The logical conclusion is to shutdown Meta, Youtube, TikTok, Twitter to name the biggest offenders. And why on earth would algorithmic manipulation, brain washing and exploitation of adults be allowed via the same platforms?
I am not disagreeing with you, but the conversation to be had is far, far wider than "think of the children!". Part of any deal would have to be: privacy of citizens is not a business model. But then you are facing the full might of Corp Inc, including their legislative powers.
> Or you have a child who is questioning their sexual orientation or identity and is targeted by an online bullying ring.
It is far more common for that child to be targeted by parents, and maybe by people they know in person, especially because of the lousy social environment their parents have pushed them into, and therefore to have limited offline support systems, and you are now trying to take away all they do have.
that much is true, but there are also online bullying rings. Note that this happens on social media but the opposite - information about being trans - is not only on social media.
HN is a venture capital place, we are the ones financially benefiting from destroying children's minds so of course we don't want them to put a stop to it.
Maybe. I see a lot of canned responses to privacy, freedom of speech, "it's not really about protecting children," etc. That might all be true but it doesnt address the problems that people have with the current state of things.
I've said it in other threads but the worst thing you can do is tell people their problems aren't real.
Oh for goodness’ sake, can’t the government (federal or states) create a service that will simply give out a token when someone has passed the age they want (eg 18), and provably goes through a multipart mixer, or just give you a zero-knowledge proof on the device of your choice, anytime you need?
On a related note, if they will require a specific kind of ID to vote, can’t they just make sure everyone can receive that ID?
Of course they can. They don’t want to. And they pretend like they don’t know how to. What this government is lacking, is a distribution system.
To be fair, they will need digital IDs or NFC chips in IDs since deepfakes can now fake the physical IDs next to your face in real time.
It can't, because the government doesn't know shit about technology. Someone who knows tech, is close to the government, and isn't corrupt, would have to propose it and explain what this zorro-proof knowy doohicky is. The government knows ID checks because you get checked at bars.
Horse shit. The government has extremely deep expertise in computer science readily available on their payroll and at their beck and call. They literally have DARPA, for instance.
same thing most parents did, and here we are... don't expect miracles from massively underpaid profession which should be the opposite, literally the way to prepare the future of the nation, or fuck it up
Frankly, our liberty and privacy do not deserve to die because of children.
They are going to track everything everyone does, and the next generation will turn that tracking into coercion and control. This is everything we were warned about in 1984.
Kill products that advertise to kids before you kill privacy.
Make it illegal to advertise to children instead of making people submit their state-issued ID.
Fine parents for letting children online instead of tracking adults in databases.
All of this moral hand-wringing is a lie anyway. They do not care about children. If they did, the kids would get $3 school meals for free instead of 30 million of them going into nutritional deficit.
What hurts a kid more - not getting the necessary nutrition, or them being exposed to porn? I know my friends sent me shock sites when I was a preteen - that didn't turn me into a murdering lunatic. Whereas if I hadn't eaten and grown up healthily, perhaps I wouldn't have made it into a stable career.
Look, I'll do my part with my kids (as in no social e-life before 16, which anyway somewhat aligns with various state bans flying all around the world, if there will be peer pressure then so be it new Commodore flip phone looks ideal for that), I know what sort of cancer to young developing defenseless mind screens have. I can see it all around. Child psychologists all agree, but few parents want to hear that.
But its unfair to kids who have shitty weak lazy parents, and screens are like fentanyl to young mind, there is literally nothing more attention-grabbing in the world for them. Their potential lost to... nothing worth mentioning, just empty dopamine kicks one after another. Its a miniscule fringe situation you say? More than half of kids before 2 are exposed to hours of screens (I see similar articles almost daily these days). This is mankind's future, your pensions, the society that will be taking care of you (and trust me you will need it, the only way to avoid that is to die young). But this isn't about selfish take-care-of-me situation, I just care and worry about how subpar lives such addicts have, spread across whole mankind. Compared to life filled with nature, hobbies, passions, physical social interactions.
I've seen it personally many times, I had kids in my early 40s so most of peers are a solid decade ahead. What began as boasting of having 'digital kids' when younger is now just a sad story of hard addictions thats actively avoided in any conversation, after few drinks parents end up 'what should we do when we have bad kids' sort of questions. When I look at given parents the apple really doesn't fall far from the tree, how could it, after all its just genes and parental upbringing that define people's personalities more than anything else.
> But its unfair to kids who have shitty weak lazy parents, and screens are like fentanyl to young mind, there is literally nothing more attention-grabbing in the world for them.
As much as I generally agree with your comment, it's not "the screens". It's the entire industry hyperoptimizing every bit out of their social networks/media for attention; gambling mechanics in live-service games. In other words, not a "handful" of apps, but too many of the apps and websites you come across.
You'll surely remember the numerous attempts at edu software/games of the 90s. Instead, the current attention monopolies won and have been perfecting their addiction mechanics for the past 20 years.
I like to look back in history for parallels. In 1912 the USA required that all radio transmitters be licensed. There were classifications established for commercial and amateur stations. So at that time Feds understood the power of giving citizens the ability to communicate with the masses.
Fast forward to the 1990s and politicians were clueless about what the internet was doing or would do in future. So what is the correct response when every citizen has the power to, using the archaic term, "broadcast" to the world.
The genie is out of the bottle and needs to be managed for the common good, which is always going to piss off some individuals. It's going to be interesting watching nation states fight over how best to do this.
There's a limited amount of radio spectrum, so it has to be managed. Though technically not unlimited in the strictest sense, internet communications don't have a real limit on how many people can communicate with each other, except limits artificially created.
So, the mafia now reveals its evil face. It wants to censor young people's
way to access information, without conforming to an "age check". This is the
first step, the next is to require of this of everyone else.
This is the biggest attack on personal freedom since decades. It is time to
crush those lobbyists that push for this.
By the way, even ignoring the propaganda by the lobbyists here, at which point
did the "discussion" suddenly become to deny young people access to information?
Because this is implied here. Some people were underage when wikipdia first emerged.
The age sniffing here tries to undermine and revert all of that.
> This is the first step, the next is to require of this of everyone else.
This is the threat day one. They get both groups' information.
Next, they'll start to purge information they don't like because it has been corralled off from the rest of the internet.
If they get lucky to trap a politician or billionaire in their net (and they will), they'll use that information to control how they vote or fund interests.
Next, they'll start to clamp down of people in the group they don't like. They'll lose jobs, banking, get extra audits, and have friction applied to their lives and chances of success.
Over time the fundamentalist group embraces government monitoring and control. The youth are brought up on it. The oligarchy use it to remove their enemies.
Age verification makes it easier for the bad guys to identify and groom children without adults finding out. Sting operations are that much harder if you have to convince the surveillance capitalism machine that you're an actual child, not just your target.
The information leaks: everything causally downstream of the verification is potentially a source of information. Examples include targetted advertising, activity in age-gated communities, etcetera.
Children in adult spaces who do not reveal that they are children are rarely targeted by child abusers; but if children are corralled into "child spaces" (which are functionally ghettos, given how much of society now takes place online), it will be easier to locate and identify them.
Children are far from helpless, when it comes to online threats. For example, when abusive comments are posted on scratch.mit.edu, you will see a flood of warnings and chaff to try to protect other children from the abusive material, while the Scratch Team work through the moderation queue. However, many social media sites are designed to disempower users, so we don't see this kind of thing there: I suspect separating children from adults in those spaces makes children less safe, not more safe.
What about services for AI agents? I don't mean services where the agents use a human's account, but one where they use a permissionless or a dedicated account that they self-registered. By politician grade logic, I guess it won't be long before AI agents are mandated to have a separate annual registration, permit, and fee, not that we should agree to any of it.
People should have cared more when it was discovered that the previous administration colluded with the major social media companies to ban individuals that had a counter-narrative to the government and political rivals, which altered the outcome of our elections.
This is the definition of fascism, and it was just brushed under the carpet by the tech community.
You're distorting pretty hard about what happened there (mister random numbered throwaway account) but even if you weren't, that is not the definition of fascism.
Everything that happened during the pandemic period is an embarrassment most would like to forget. The authoritarians however remember everything and see how little friction there is against them expanding their power, especially if they can wrap it up in a threat.
Kids want it themselves. All popular people want it too. Imagine if we don't do this for the kids? Either this or kids will get hurt. All my friends want it too. One eastern country didn't protect their kids and look where it's at. This is the only way to save kids and we need to act fast! You should rather be against child labor than this.
"kids" is just another word for "people" by the way - everyone is a kid, and everyone is an adult, except for people who die very young. We should not make the mistake of thinking of them as two separate independent categories of people.
Politicians who want to track everyone all the time.
The rare few politicians who want it to be easier to raise healthy children.
Tech CEOs who don't want to be liable for harming children's development.
Tech CEOs who want to track everyone all the time.
The rare few tech CEOs who want to improve the world (by not harming children's development) and whose business model doesn't require it or who compete with one that does (e.g. operators of edutainment websites if those even still exist).
App coders who don't want to train a neural network to check IDs themselves.
1. Don't assume Meta is anything other than a state propaganda and surveillance apparatus.
2. It's onerous for upstarts, so it entrenches Instagram and Facebook.
3. Guaranteed knowledge of who everyone is, and their web browsing activities, furthers their surveillance ends.
4. If you keep people off until they're adults and then throw them in with no guidance, they'll have an even worse time. Which is good for propagandizing.
5. They get to collect biometrics from everyone, even the underaged ones who attempt verification. All the better to build panopticon, along side Clearview and Flock.
6. The Heritage Foundation wants it, and everything else on Project 2025 has been proceeding as planned with lackluster resistance, so why would this be different? (Spoiler: the next part is calling everything they don't like, such as LGBT people being visible or alive, as "harmful" and using these new surveillance tools to deal with that.)
Meta has a long history of breaking the law. I have no doubts Meta will have access to the personal details once you've "verified your age". They'll know WHO you are, as accurately as possible. Can you imagine how much that it worth to Meta, history's largest harvester of personal data? A whole lot more than $2B.
Now, based on their ruthless disregard for the law, do you think they're just going to use it to sell your ads?
They lobby for because then they can collect biometrics from kids and then reject them. So they don't serve underage kids , no fines but they do get data.
They will collect it from everyone to prove your age.
The question only that is it worth the gamble by Meta, as in how many people would rather leave the sites (from Whatsapp to Insta to Facebook) than give them their ID
The GOP. This is part of Project 2025. They want to outlaw porn.
> Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should
be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed
as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that
facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
A lot of it would go away if they just stopped consuming it. They consume it at least as much as anybody else. The only difference is the self loathing and belief that they need to be - and are qualified to be - the moral police.
Because in their philosophy sex serves a purpose (procreation and the deepening of the marital union).
Anything that doesn’t support those two aims (contraception, abortion, gay marriage, pornography etc.) is therefore immoral but there’s nothing wrong with sex in its ‘proper’ context.
Their philosophy is extremely inconsistent. In reality it's emotionally driven. Not sure what specific emotions cause one to think sex is wrong except for reproduction, but a lot of the people who push this sort of thing turn out to be closeted gay homophobes.
I’m not supporting it, but how is it inconsistent?
I can speak more to the Catholic view than the evangelical, but if you accept the initial premise that there is a creator God then the rest follows fairly naturally (you can look the ‘the theology of the body’ if you want to read more)
It's a redpill/misogynist/incel/Tate-style talking point, they have this meme that women just file rape charges against everyone they ever regret having sex with.
Wouldn't it be great if we could just legislate fixes for everything? /s
This seems to be a result of what people call the uniparty system, but that's not really an accurate term:
This actually embodies what the establishment on both sides of the aisle want: CONTROL
They want this for many different reasons: they have an unbridled lust for power, or perhaps they are willing to burn down fair elections for the good of all mankind, but actually let's be more generous!!
Most likely because they are afraid, unjustly or not:
* of real terrorists that they think, sometimes correctly, are using E2EE
* of children's immature minds having neural pathways being changed by things they're not quite ready for, or perhaps becoming addicted to the very real and powerful nature of porn)
* or, you know, whatever! Maybe they're parents and want to protect their kids and everyone else's kids.
Really, why doesn't actually matter too much.
The fact is that they just don't understand the technology and the FUNDAMENTAL TRADE-OFF BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND FREEDOM, that tension between privacy/human rights/dignity and technological "bad things" that are always in the news.
They get told one simple thing by lobbyists or even well-meaning constituents, and then they form their worldview around it. And THEN they write legislation (or, more likely, get handed ready-made legislation by lobbyists with an axe to grind)
We, the knowledgeable in this area (regardless of our party persuasion -- I'll work on my people, you work on yours!) should start to educate our non-technical legislators. We have to be the trusted voice of reason when it comes to tech, because they're hearing a lot of things from a lot of different voices.
How? By getting involved. Get involved at the LOCAL level, because THOSE people are the ones that serve as the feedramp for national or international politics. After 20 years, your education might percolate upwards to the people who are actually writing new laws. You don't need to be a "crazy" sounding activist or conspiracy theorist: in fact, that works against you (usually). Just be an adult, try to understand what they're trying to accomplish, and explain how they can accomplish it or that it can't be done that way for specific and reasonable reasons.
These are all just my opinions as I see increasing amounts of this sort of legislation being pushed by Meta and other actors. This comment also has a very US-centric bias, so please correct me if you're in another country where things work differently.
That sounds like a reasonable aim. Online services should be responsible for implementing age verification checks on content that children shouldn't be accessing, just like vendors of alcohol and nicotine products are responsible for age verification.
The EFF likes to frame everything that might even slightly rein in online service providers as being a terrible assault on online freedom and therefore, in their view, shouldn't be done. But I don't see them coming up with any better solutions. Just endless complaints, while soliciting donations to keep generating these endless complaints.
There's a big difference here, in the US anyways, neither alcohol nor nicotine have first amendment protections. Basically all content delivered over the US does.
But isn't putting something behind an age gate similar in concept to putting it behind a paywall? The speech is still there, whatever it may be, just has conditions for access.
"You can own a printing press, but we'll throw you in jail if you dare to show the printings to anyone."
The first amendment is a two way street. Everyone has an inalienable right to seek and read/view any media, and the government of the United States is forbidden from taking any actions that limit the mass dissemination of media.
The whole context of the amendment is existing governments preventing people from mass printing and distributing political pamphlets. "You can write something, but not distribute it" is entirely antithetical to the point of the amendment.
But there are already laws that, for example, restrict children from buying pornographic magazines. These have been found by the Supreme Court to be constitutionally compatible. I don't see why this would be different with similar laws that apply to online services.
Generally speaking, things that you sell (the legal term is commercial speech, iirc) is more able to be regulated by the government.
The government can ban the sale of those things to minors, generally. So the category of porn sites that require a credit card and pay gate the content might be regulateable.
But that's not how places like pornhub or xvideos operate
What content shouldn't children be accessing? Is the content a 7, 11 or 16 year old shouldn't access different between age brackets? Who makes that determination? Is this access restriction at the whole site level, or per-post? Does safe-harbor apply, or is a site-operator liable for age-inappropriate content it hosts for its clients? On S3, for example, is each object tagged with an age category, or would it have to be a totally separate S3, like GovCloud?
It requires manual moderation. Companies like Facebook, Google, and co. have spent much effort telling you that's impossible. In fact, that is a type of half-truth that is a lie. The full truth is that it's impossible _at their scale_.
Their business models require little to no human moderation, because it simply doesn't scale (for their business to stay profitable).
Personally, my feeling is that if you can't take care of your product, you should go out of business.
Nah, it should be like in California. When you set up an account you should put how old thr user is, and websites should get a header that says whether it's over 18 or not. No ID checks, just good parenting.
Aims aside, did you even read the article? This will mostly end anonymity online and require heavier policing of content.
A child might see something they shouldn't walking down the street, strolling thru the park, visiting the local zoo, or visiting an ice cream parlor. Should those places be requiring identification and hiring extra security guards to wander around making sure nobody is saying it doing anything politically objectionable?
Let's not accept creeping digital tyranny with self-assuring complacency... call or write (preferably snail mail) your congresspeople!!
I hate this analogy because it isn't true. This isn't like a clerk checking your age before you buy booze this is like a clerk taking a photocopy of your ID and a list of everything you bought and then storing those records forever every time you buy alcohol.
Most stores already have continuously-recording CCTV, which effectively does that too.
At least online there can be a separation between the age verification provider and the online content provider, so that the latter doesn't learn anything from the former except that the user's age is above or below a specific cut-off point. So it can actually be more privacy-preserving than purchasing age-restricted goods over the counter.
they literally do that though. They don't all just look at your ID any more, some scan it with a scanner or phone and that literally does what you just said. Paying with a card also does it.
> vendors of alcohol and nicotine products are responsible for age verification.
You don't wind up in a database for buying alcohol.
This proposal puts your name right next to the category of porn you're into, which will be a great way to coerce all those politicians into voting for the "correct" bill. Would be a shame if they found out a state senator watched porn, so maybe they'd better vote yes on the proposal.
In time, this will be used to shape what people are "allowed" to think. Porn will gradually be purged from the internet and then go away entirely as the US becomes more fundamentalist and Christian.
Then people who are neither of those things will start to be denied jobs and loans. Politicians that don't fit the mold will stop winning.
This is about turning the US to Christianity. (Read: this is really about controlling the massses and using religious fundamentalism as a tool to do so.)
Technology is the perfect tool for control. Just as we were becoming a liberal/libertarian society and letting people live their lives how they wanted, the wrong people started using technology not as an enabler of free minds, but as an inescapable straitjacket.
You've read 1984, right?
The sensors have been widely deployed. The internet will become your Big Brother. You won't be able to buy, sell, or even move between state lines without being in the good graces of the state.
> You don't wind up in a database for buying alcohol.
Yes you do, if they scan your ID with any technology they're uploading a picture to that company's server. If you use a payment card then your bank and the card network also know.
> as the US becomes more fundamentalist and Christian.
As Christian I would say "more fundamentalist and less Christian". I am not sure this is religiously based. We have similar things happening in European countries that are not religious. Its a moral panic and "think of the children".
> You don't wind up in a database for buying alcohol.
My (just turned 18) daughter said a pub in the UK scanned her driving license so they may well be connecting to some database before letting young people buy alcohol. IIRC the EU wants its age verification app to be used for things like this.
I agree with you. It's less about the religion and more about the control.
Christianity is easy to reach for in the US, especially when there are sects and denominations that align with government-mandated censorship of certain ideologies.
Age verification can be done by a third party, so that the online service isn't provided with any details of your identity, just that you passed an age verification check.
But if you're still worried about online pornographers getting a copy of your identity, maybe don't use their websites? It's an easily avoidable risk. Perhaps use your imagination instead, or read an erotic novel bought in cash from a second-hand bookshop, or something like that.
Do you hear yourself? You're a guy telling people that if they don't want to be put on a list for reading a book, they should read other books.
> erotic novel bought in cash from a second-hand bookshop
Your confidence that this will remain an option probably means that you aren't aware of the many court battles, lives ruined, and leftover frozen conflicts resulting from attempts to publish novels. Its a confidence you could only have developed since the mid-1960s.
There is absolutely no physical reason why the government couldn't record all of the books you buy, arrest secondhand booksellers that don't keep those lists faithfully, and even sit outside of secondhand booksellers identifying everyone walking into the building and putting them on a list of people who are interested in obtaining books through unorthodox methods.
If everyone had been like you, there wouldn't be erotic novels available from bookstores. Or communist novels, or gay novels, etc.. And through the mails, it would become federal. The government mainly opened mail to search for possible birth control information being sent.
Just put the age verification in the browser already.
Then introduce some new headers the browser sends to servers with some proof that the user was verified and the browser would need a response (like CORS) for it to work.
We need social programs like social housing, universal healthcare, free education, and universal food stamps. We need to actually use the abundance of resources we have to meet our fundamental needs (shocker I know).
Parents would have a better chance at fighting back. Both with the time gained to communicate their disapproval, and a better relationship with their kids to be more likely to disapprove of it.
Obviously it's difficult to pin a 20-year trend on a single cause. But most parents have the sense their teens spend too much time on their phones; and with social media use as common as it is, almost every kid who commits suicide will have recently used social media. But it's not possible to prove causality in a way that will silence all objections.
I suspect it's particularly easy to convince politicians that social media is bad for mental health because of their lived experience. Consider the experience of being a professional politician on Twitter.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/publications... [2] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/child-adolescent-and-yo...
The research is quite confusing. This is because the strongest version of the argument is not "your child uses social media, and that makes them depressed". The strongest version is more like "when a society mass adopts social media, this irrevocably alters the culture in ways that causes massive changes in mental health, most prominently among young girls, including those exposed to the culture who don't even use social media."
This means you get a weird effect where experimental studies of high quality - which are usually the best evidence, are expected by the strong argument to show zero effect.
Correlational studies usually show either a weak effect (stronger in young girls) or no effect (it's extremely rare to see a study showing a positive correlational effect, though).
And where you get the most juice is looking at population level introduction of social media studies like those discussed here: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
But even then it's very tricky, as those studies can't exactly be replicated, and we don't know whether changes will actually reverse the cultural artifacts
Now it's "present your personal info when demanded or else".
1. https://www.macworld.com/article/2305919/apple-parental-cont...
I’ve already stated who I am when I paid.
Representative democracy is not adequate to the demands of the information age, where the informational asymmetry between individual and state is unprecedented in history. It's time to explore other models like administrative democracy.
We're below replacement rate, so it's not like most people are even having kids, anyway. Yet we have to give up our freedom for other people to raise little Christian tots (or whatever the motivation for this is billed as)?
I grew up in a Deep South Protestant household. Having access to the unfiltered internet got me interested in STEM. Bumping into occasional shock sites and porn as a preteen did not turn me into a satanist cannibal.
Keeping "Kids Safe" is a LIE.
This is about putting collars on every US citizen.
They'll filter you into groups.
They'll control what loans and jobs you can get.
They'll use this information to blackmail you should you ever run for office or gain wealth or power.
This is a threat to democracy and personal liberty.
Child safety is a LIE.
Kids are safer today.
That's not happening like this, also because peer and public tolerance for it is nearly nil.
The internet now is much safer.
2006 is on the other side of the event horizon of "Don't be evil."
For instance:
https://idtechwire.com/spains-pm-proposes-mandatory-digital-...
https://www.weforum.org/publications/reimagining-digital-id/
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/01/davos-agenda-digital...
Everyone ignores stuff like this because of people like Alex Jones who make it seem like a lunatic conspiracy theory. But these conferences happen, and they do influence policy. It’s not a “cabal” that issues orders—many participants are national leaders bringing their perspectives (see the link above about Sanchez)—but it does have an impact.
The banal truth is that many different world leaders have talked each other into this after years of discussion on the proper way to “manage” the Internet. They see cyberspace as a threat to top-down technocratic control and view Internet-enabled populism (aka democracy) as something to be quashed.
This has been true ever since the creation of the internet and web.
It's what the original 90s crypto wars were about: the right of individuals to access strong encryption to preserve the privacy of their communications from the government.
Absent that, pandora's box opens.
Age KYC is just the next fight against encryption and privacy dressed up in "for the children" clothes.
Strong encryption always has (and always will) facilitate criminal and illegal activity. Tough tits.
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies should work within the bounds of individual rights, not adjust them for convenience.
If the price of individual freedom^ is that it's harder to track and prosecute child exploitation, drug distribution, and mass terror attacks, then that's the way it needs to be.
^ "Individual freedom" as distinct from corporate freedom. Fuck non-human legal entities' rights to access encryption, aside from on behalf of their users.
Noteworthily, the legislation moves age verification from individual apps to app-store operators [Apple, Google] which reduces Facebooks legal exposure for inaccurate/incorrect age verifications.
If they are asking you to leave a message, have your kids leave the message.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
The only people who think otherwise are terminally online losers who have never organized anything larger than a birthday party.
seems like a lot more people believe that than the population you are describing
Money matters but a popular movement is more powerful still in some places look up DSA
> The term was coined by Timothy C. May in 1988. May referred to "child pornographers, terrorists, drug dealers, etc.".[1] May used the phrase to express disdain for what he perceived as "think of the children" argumentation by government officials and others seeking to justify limiting the civilian use of cryptography tools.
> The phrase is a play on Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Digital rights activist Cory Doctorow frequently cites "software pirates, organized crime, child pornographers, and terrorists".[2][3] Other sources use slightly different descriptions, but generally refer to similar activities.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
It gives the adults the option to be apathetic. In reality, anyone who is a kid now will never know any better.
It just means we're the last generations that had the luxury of a world that remembered what privacy was.
Sounds about right.
They might still get some content downstream of other kids. However, I doubt a “look at this tiktok” here and there has any harmful effects.
What’s harmful is excessive social media use, especially unmonitored. So, either monitor your kid or do not give them access. It’s perfectly fine to have a family computer in the living room if you’re worried about little Timmy looking up “boobies”. Problem solved, and I saved you some money.
I think a lot of parents do basically nothing and then are unhappy with the results. Yes, if you don’t try, you won’t get your desired result. But you can try stuff out, and you can always pivot if you feel it becomes inconvenient. The reality is we don’t need these complex technological solutions. There are simple, brain-dead solutions like “don’t give your kid a phone for hours on end” or “give your kid a flip phone”.
I love freedom as a general principle, but internet 2026 is a undefendable cesspool of amorality, scams and worse. We are not in the 90s or early 00s anymore, and never will be again that era is gone.
Once again, the response in places like this pretends everyone is an upper middle class or above tech-savvy nerd.
I'm not a fan of these proposed solutions, which do invade privacy and remove freedom, but the problems are real. These solutions are being pushed because our industry is doing nothing to police itself or provide parents with the tools they need.
In many cases we are doing less than nothing, because the profit motive is to prevent parents from having this control. "Social" media, gambling-adjacent gaming, and other addictionware, which is a huge profit center for our industry, wants to addict kids early. Gotta get those cigarettes into their hands, which means preventing parents from stopping it.
Right now if you are not a tech-savvy parent your choices are: (1) deny children access to devices or severely limit that access, or (2) allow your kids to be raised by super-addictive infinite scroll brain rot feeds, brainwashed by propaganda and influencer bullshit, and placed on an on-ramp to future gambling addiction via mobile games with engineered "compulsion loops."
Now imagine you are a non-tech-savvy household with two parents who work. You can't really limit access since you can't supervise it enough, so your choice is now binary: no access, kids raised by brain rot and propaganda. Pick one. You have no control, no ability to whitelist, because not only do you not have time to deal with this but the tools often cost money and are imperfect and ineffective.
Then you catch your 11 year old son watching extreme fetish porn that he lacks the maturity to contextualize, or hear him spouting off Nazi ideology or talking about how he's an "alpha male" and women should be his slaves. Or your daughter becomes anorexic by following influencers. Or you have a child who is questioning their sexual orientation or identity and is targeted by an online bullying ring. These are the commonplace examples. There's a lot of much worse shit too, like sextortion of kids. Search for "764."
That's why this push exists. It's not a conspiracy. It's because we -- our industry -- is an amoral shitshow that engineers addiction and refuses to police itself or provide parents with good tools to do so.
I'd also like to note that for the non-tech-savvy privacy is dead and has been dead for over ten years at least. If you are not tech-savvy your devices are recording everything about you and transmitting it to two dozen ad networks and data brokers.
Only nerds have privacy today and only if they invest the time to police their tech environment. If you're not a nerd there's nothing to lose. You already lost it long ago. We -- our industry -- took it away.
This is a win/win for big tech. If they don’t get age verification, they can keep getting kids addicted to propaganda and consumerism. If they do get age verification, they get to see what everyone in the world thinks and is interested in, all linked to government ID.
Edit: the one outcome big tech does not want is anonymous age verification. This is technologically extremely possible, but that would be a lose/lose for big tech because they would lose kid (aka future consuming adult) addiction AND lose perfect tracking linked to government IDs.
I'm also aware of what you're talking about. That's called regulatory capture. They know this kind of regulation is coming and want to make sure they're the ones writing it so they can use it to entrench their oligopolies.
My point is that something like this will happen unless we find an alternative. The longer it goes on, the worse the backlash will be.
Rich parents can have nannies, expensive software, or a parent who stays home from work. Poorer parents do not have time or energy to police this stuff or supervise their kids. They're too busy putting food on the table and paying rent or a mortgage.
I was at the laundromat and a woman with kids was complaining across the room about how she only had $700.00 in her account. Note, she had a car, wasn't homeless, but this is actual reality for a huge number of people in the US.
I think it may be that people grew up accustomed to having everything constantly taken away from them, so they learn not to save stuff.
Seeing this as some sort of moral failing isn't the right way to look at it. It's possible that that this person could have done that, but it's also they they really may not have been able to, low wages, bad environment, health issues, all of these compound until "it's not hard to just" is a gross way to interpret their situation.
Pornography is often delivered by people who don't care about US legislation, and social media is carefully left undefined, intentionally confounded with algorithms used to surface content (which people actually do object to at least the opaqueness of.)
I, like most, don't think that the totalitarianism is an unfortunate side-effect of the attempt to protect children online. I think legislation, and legislation like this, will only be successful in increasing surveillance and public manipulation, and that it will have virtually no effect on childrens' consumption of pornography and social media. If you really wanted to protect children, there's better legislation to write and technical solutions to implement.
Should it be that easy or should there be some road blocks? Should I have been able to go into a store at 14 and buy a beer?
This is a claim without backing, and if there were backing to be had, it would constantly be thrown in people's faces by the various administrations that suddenly decided this was a problem that had to be stopped now by any means necessary.
They do not need any public support to implement this, they need opposition to sleep for 5 minutes. It is being advanced by the most unpopular governments in the entire histories of the countries that it is being introduced in.
Your children had access to porn 30 years ago, they will have access to porn after this. There is no actual impetus behind any legal blocking of gambling mechanics in games targeted at children, because they are unbelievably profitable (unlike children as a market for pornography.)
I'm telling you that if you fight invisible enemies, like these campaigners for online age verification (who don't exist), you are fighting a senseless battle.
I'm not dismissing the scenario and your illustration of the mindset of these fictional hoards - if I were concocting a biography and argument for age verification activists, I would come up with the same dynamics and resentments. But it's not real. There are no million-mom marches in DC for age verification on the internet, and certainly not ones so advanced that they've decided that no other method will work: that device/OS/browser level verification of identity is the only way from keeping little Kip from accessing Cambridge Analytics's Russian-Chinese hardcore trans pornography.
They don't exist. Or rather, the bulk of them are Keynesian Beauty Contest judges who have concocted a public opinion that they've followed like lemmings, and only update their vision of public opinion based on new claims from politicians and their PR departments currently pushing the legislation. They don't really believe that age verification is a good solution, but they understand why most people do. I claim that the vast majority of people don't. I'm not even sure I could find a single person to support it in real life if given a 2 minute speech about the obvious and basic privacy and civil liberties implications of such a move, and the many alternative ways to attack the same issue. And governments are prioritizing it, with no hint at all that they will see a reward at the polls. In fact, almost all of the people who are pushing it are unpopular lame ducks who have no ability or no reasonable chance to serve again. They're lining up their next jobs and securing their fortunes.
Enough with this "but they can work around it" argument, too. Kids can get adults to buy cigarettes for them, we still ban them from buying cigarettes because it's a very useful roadblock.
You know a gun or a bomb is dangerous, so you'll probably be careful with it. The gun and the bomb are not engineered on purpose to hook you by exploiting your dopamine pathways and get you to shoot yourself or blow yourself up.
EDIT: I'm being a little hyperbolic here, but I'm also talking about aggregate harm and intent to harm. I'm really being hyperbolic to bash what I consider to be the key villain in this story: addiction engineering, a.k.a. "maximizing engagement." This is the root of all evil.
The statistics on people killed/injured by their kids accidentally discharging firearms in the US disagree[0]
[0] eg. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/unintentional-shootings... "At least 157 people were killed and 270 were injured last year in unintentional shootings by children" (2024)
This sounds like you have a media addiction. This is the kind of extreme hyperbole that we spent a year or two saturated with when a bunch of states and a bunch of billionaires decided that American people were saying too much on Tiktok about Israel, and something something China evil.
If there were an organic push by parents, they would be happy to buy and promote products today, without waiting for legislation to catch up. Where are these local parental control products?
Speaking of social media and Youtubes of the world, why can't I, as account owner/parent, totally blacklist some "recommendations"?
Age verification is not a fit tool for content filtering. Users want the latter, but get switcheroo'd into the former.
I am not disagreeing with you, but the conversation to be had is far, far wider than "think of the children!". Part of any deal would have to be: privacy of citizens is not a business model. But then you are facing the full might of Corp Inc, including their legislative powers.
It is far more common for that child to be targeted by parents, and maybe by people they know in person, especially because of the lousy social environment their parents have pushed them into, and therefore to have limited offline support systems, and you are now trying to take away all they do have.
... and information isn't really the question. Not that there's actually any good definition for "social media".
The public at large have real issues with the current state of the internet and people here don't want to hear it or address it so we get this.
And, more so, that they've had a decade to reduce or mitigate the harms but have consistently (some might think deliberately) failed to do so.
So now we have the sledgehammer of legislation being wielded to do the job instead.
It's not an ideal outcome by any means, but what did people think was going to happen?
I've said it in other threads but the worst thing you can do is tell people their problems aren't real.
On a related note, if they will require a specific kind of ID to vote, can’t they just make sure everyone can receive that ID?
Of course they can. They don’t want to. And they pretend like they don’t know how to. What this government is lacking, is a distribution system.
To be fair, they will need digital IDs or NFC chips in IDs since deepfakes can now fake the physical IDs next to your face in real time.
What kids get to see at home is up to the parents.
They are going to track everything everyone does, and the next generation will turn that tracking into coercion and control. This is everything we were warned about in 1984.
Kill products that advertise to kids before you kill privacy.
Make it illegal to advertise to children instead of making people submit their state-issued ID.
Fine parents for letting children online instead of tracking adults in databases.
All of this moral hand-wringing is a lie anyway. They do not care about children. If they did, the kids would get $3 school meals for free instead of 30 million of them going into nutritional deficit.
What hurts a kid more - not getting the necessary nutrition, or them being exposed to porn? I know my friends sent me shock sites when I was a preteen - that didn't turn me into a murdering lunatic. Whereas if I hadn't eaten and grown up healthily, perhaps I wouldn't have made it into a stable career.
But its unfair to kids who have shitty weak lazy parents, and screens are like fentanyl to young mind, there is literally nothing more attention-grabbing in the world for them. Their potential lost to... nothing worth mentioning, just empty dopamine kicks one after another. Its a miniscule fringe situation you say? More than half of kids before 2 are exposed to hours of screens (I see similar articles almost daily these days). This is mankind's future, your pensions, the society that will be taking care of you (and trust me you will need it, the only way to avoid that is to die young). But this isn't about selfish take-care-of-me situation, I just care and worry about how subpar lives such addicts have, spread across whole mankind. Compared to life filled with nature, hobbies, passions, physical social interactions.
I've seen it personally many times, I had kids in my early 40s so most of peers are a solid decade ahead. What began as boasting of having 'digital kids' when younger is now just a sad story of hard addictions thats actively avoided in any conversation, after few drinks parents end up 'what should we do when we have bad kids' sort of questions. When I look at given parents the apple really doesn't fall far from the tree, how could it, after all its just genes and parental upbringing that define people's personalities more than anything else.
As much as I generally agree with your comment, it's not "the screens". It's the entire industry hyperoptimizing every bit out of their social networks/media for attention; gambling mechanics in live-service games. In other words, not a "handful" of apps, but too many of the apps and websites you come across.
You'll surely remember the numerous attempts at edu software/games of the 90s. Instead, the current attention monopolies won and have been perfecting their addiction mechanics for the past 20 years.
Fast forward to the 1990s and politicians were clueless about what the internet was doing or would do in future. So what is the correct response when every citizen has the power to, using the archaic term, "broadcast" to the world.
The genie is out of the bottle and needs to be managed for the common good, which is always going to piss off some individuals. It's going to be interesting watching nation states fight over how best to do this.
There's no big conspiracy here, just a limited amount of the spectrum.
As others have said, there is a coordinated push to drive this legislation everywhere. There is no fight in nation states. Just capitulation.
This is the biggest attack on personal freedom since decades. It is time to crush those lobbyists that push for this.
By the way, even ignoring the propaganda by the lobbyists here, at which point did the "discussion" suddenly become to deny young people access to information? Because this is implied here. Some people were underage when wikipdia first emerged. The age sniffing here tries to undermine and revert all of that.
This is the threat day one. They get both groups' information.
Next, they'll start to purge information they don't like because it has been corralled off from the rest of the internet.
If they get lucky to trap a politician or billionaire in their net (and they will), they'll use that information to control how they vote or fund interests.
Next, they'll start to clamp down of people in the group they don't like. They'll lose jobs, banking, get extra audits, and have friction applied to their lives and chances of success.
Over time the fundamentalist group embraces government monitoring and control. The youth are brought up on it. The oligarchy use it to remove their enemies.
Within two generations we're living in 1984.
IMO porn and drug mafia is far more likely to be lurking in reddit and here and spreading misinformation. Russian bots help here too.
Children in adult spaces who do not reveal that they are children are rarely targeted by child abusers; but if children are corralled into "child spaces" (which are functionally ghettos, given how much of society now takes place online), it will be easier to locate and identify them.
Children are far from helpless, when it comes to online threats. For example, when abusive comments are posted on scratch.mit.edu, you will see a flood of warnings and chaff to try to protect other children from the abusive material, while the Scratch Team work through the moderation queue. However, many social media sites are designed to disempower users, so we don't see this kind of thing there: I suspect separating children from adults in those spaces makes children less safe, not more safe.
This is the definition of fascism, and it was just brushed under the carpet by the tech community.
It's for the kids, you understand - to protect the kids.
There is no more noble purpose than to protect the kids.
Only a monster would not want to protect the kids.
Tried to collect more logical fallacies here.
[1] - https://nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20230829-Think-Of-The-Chi...
Politicians who want to track everyone all the time.
The rare few politicians who want it to be easier to raise healthy children.
Tech CEOs who don't want to be liable for harming children's development.
Tech CEOs who want to track everyone all the time.
The rare few tech CEOs who want to improve the world (by not harming children's development) and whose business model doesn't require it or who compete with one that does (e.g. operators of edutainment websites if those even still exist).
App coders who don't want to train a neural network to check IDs themselves.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410870
2. It's onerous for upstarts, so it entrenches Instagram and Facebook.
3. Guaranteed knowledge of who everyone is, and their web browsing activities, furthers their surveillance ends.
4. If you keep people off until they're adults and then throw them in with no guidance, they'll have an even worse time. Which is good for propagandizing.
5. They get to collect biometrics from everyone, even the underaged ones who attempt verification. All the better to build panopticon, along side Clearview and Flock.
6. The Heritage Foundation wants it, and everything else on Project 2025 has been proceeding as planned with lackluster resistance, so why would this be different? (Spoiler: the next part is calling everything they don't like, such as LGBT people being visible or alive, as "harmful" and using these new surveillance tools to deal with that.)
Now, based on their ruthless disregard for the law, do you think they're just going to use it to sell your ads?
They will collect it from everyone to prove your age.
The question only that is it worth the gamble by Meta, as in how many people would rather leave the sites (from Whatsapp to Insta to Facebook) than give them their ID
Plus they are lobbying for it to be someone else's problem they are lobbying for device and OS based age verification.
Watch this "regulate 3d printers because of children" hearing: https://youtu.be/sue88CXzPcQ?t=2285
Normal people that call themselves good names like "moms for actions" drag us into this totalitarian hell.
> Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
https://web.archive.org/web/20241103190346/https://static.pr...
Here is the list of cosponsors in case anyone was curious if their "representative" is on the list https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/s1748/cosponsors
Anything that doesn’t support those two aims (contraception, abortion, gay marriage, pornography etc.) is therefore immoral but there’s nothing wrong with sex in its ‘proper’ context.
I can speak more to the Catholic view than the evangelical, but if you accept the initial premise that there is a creator God then the rest follows fairly naturally (you can look the ‘the theology of the body’ if you want to read more)
Marriage is by itself not consent for sex and you can't sue somebody to get them to have sex with you either
This seems to be a result of what people call the uniparty system, but that's not really an accurate term:
This actually embodies what the establishment on both sides of the aisle want: CONTROL
They want this for many different reasons: they have an unbridled lust for power, or perhaps they are willing to burn down fair elections for the good of all mankind, but actually let's be more generous!!
Most likely because they are afraid, unjustly or not:
* of real terrorists that they think, sometimes correctly, are using E2EE
* of children's immature minds having neural pathways being changed by things they're not quite ready for, or perhaps becoming addicted to the very real and powerful nature of porn)
* or, you know, whatever! Maybe they're parents and want to protect their kids and everyone else's kids.
Really, why doesn't actually matter too much.
The fact is that they just don't understand the technology and the FUNDAMENTAL TRADE-OFF BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND FREEDOM, that tension between privacy/human rights/dignity and technological "bad things" that are always in the news.
They get told one simple thing by lobbyists or even well-meaning constituents, and then they form their worldview around it. And THEN they write legislation (or, more likely, get handed ready-made legislation by lobbyists with an axe to grind)
We, the knowledgeable in this area (regardless of our party persuasion -- I'll work on my people, you work on yours!) should start to educate our non-technical legislators. We have to be the trusted voice of reason when it comes to tech, because they're hearing a lot of things from a lot of different voices.
How? By getting involved. Get involved at the LOCAL level, because THOSE people are the ones that serve as the feedramp for national or international politics. After 20 years, your education might percolate upwards to the people who are actually writing new laws. You don't need to be a "crazy" sounding activist or conspiracy theorist: in fact, that works against you (usually). Just be an adult, try to understand what they're trying to accomplish, and explain how they can accomplish it or that it can't be done that way for specific and reasonable reasons.
These are all just my opinions as I see increasing amounts of this sort of legislation being pushed by Meta and other actors. This comment also has a very US-centric bias, so please correct me if you're in another country where things work differently.
Always remember Hanlon's Razor and the Golden Rule (for the other team too)
The EFF likes to frame everything that might even slightly rein in online service providers as being a terrible assault on online freedom and therefore, in their view, shouldn't be done. But I don't see them coming up with any better solutions. Just endless complaints, while soliciting donations to keep generating these endless complaints.
That's a much thornier legal issue
The first amendment is a two way street. Everyone has an inalienable right to seek and read/view any media, and the government of the United States is forbidden from taking any actions that limit the mass dissemination of media.
The whole context of the amendment is existing governments preventing people from mass printing and distributing political pamphlets. "You can write something, but not distribute it" is entirely antithetical to the point of the amendment.
The issue is not that age gates are illegal, but that the government forcing people to use age gates is illegal.
The government can ban the sale of those things to minors, generally. So the category of porn sites that require a credit card and pay gate the content might be regulateable.
But that's not how places like pornhub or xvideos operate
Their business models require little to no human moderation, because it simply doesn't scale (for their business to stay profitable).
Personally, my feeling is that if you can't take care of your product, you should go out of business.
A child might see something they shouldn't walking down the street, strolling thru the park, visiting the local zoo, or visiting an ice cream parlor. Should those places be requiring identification and hiring extra security guards to wander around making sure nobody is saying it doing anything politically objectionable?
Let's not accept creeping digital tyranny with self-assuring complacency... call or write (preferably snail mail) your congresspeople!!
At least online there can be a separation between the age verification provider and the online content provider, so that the latter doesn't learn anything from the former except that the user's age is above or below a specific cut-off point. So it can actually be more privacy-preserving than purchasing age-restricted goods over the counter.
You don't wind up in a database for buying alcohol.
This proposal puts your name right next to the category of porn you're into, which will be a great way to coerce all those politicians into voting for the "correct" bill. Would be a shame if they found out a state senator watched porn, so maybe they'd better vote yes on the proposal.
In time, this will be used to shape what people are "allowed" to think. Porn will gradually be purged from the internet and then go away entirely as the US becomes more fundamentalist and Christian.
Then people who are neither of those things will start to be denied jobs and loans. Politicians that don't fit the mold will stop winning.
This is about turning the US to Christianity. (Read: this is really about controlling the massses and using religious fundamentalism as a tool to do so.)
Technology is the perfect tool for control. Just as we were becoming a liberal/libertarian society and letting people live their lives how they wanted, the wrong people started using technology not as an enabler of free minds, but as an inescapable straitjacket.
You've read 1984, right?
The sensors have been widely deployed. The internet will become your Big Brother. You won't be able to buy, sell, or even move between state lines without being in the good graces of the state.
Be a good citizen and comply.
Yes you do, if they scan your ID with any technology they're uploading a picture to that company's server. If you use a payment card then your bank and the card network also know.
As Christian I would say "more fundamentalist and less Christian". I am not sure this is religiously based. We have similar things happening in European countries that are not religious. Its a moral panic and "think of the children".
> You don't wind up in a database for buying alcohol.
My (just turned 18) daughter said a pub in the UK scanned her driving license so they may well be connecting to some database before letting young people buy alcohol. IIRC the EU wants its age verification app to be used for things like this.
This is a time of "first they came for the....".
Christianity is easy to reach for in the US, especially when there are sects and denominations that align with government-mandated censorship of certain ideologies.
But if you're still worried about online pornographers getting a copy of your identity, maybe don't use their websites? It's an easily avoidable risk. Perhaps use your imagination instead, or read an erotic novel bought in cash from a second-hand bookshop, or something like that.
> erotic novel bought in cash from a second-hand bookshop
Your confidence that this will remain an option probably means that you aren't aware of the many court battles, lives ruined, and leftover frozen conflicts resulting from attempts to publish novels. Its a confidence you could only have developed since the mid-1960s.
There is absolutely no physical reason why the government couldn't record all of the books you buy, arrest secondhand booksellers that don't keep those lists faithfully, and even sit outside of secondhand booksellers identifying everyone walking into the building and putting them on a list of people who are interested in obtaining books through unorthodox methods.
If everyone had been like you, there wouldn't be erotic novels available from bookstores. Or communist novels, or gay novels, etc.. And through the mails, it would become federal. The government mainly opened mail to search for possible birth control information being sent.
Then introduce some new headers the browser sends to servers with some proof that the user was verified and the browser would need a response (like CORS) for it to work.
We need social programs like social housing, universal healthcare, free education, and universal food stamps. We need to actually use the abundance of resources we have to meet our fundamental needs (shocker I know).