Comment by Cthulhu_
13 days ago
Not just government legislation, but also lawsuits. I'm confident that Discord is a hotbed of all kinds of abuse and inappropriate / adult content, a lot targeting younger generations, and most of their resources are spent on that. Age verification doesn't solve that problem per se, but it makes things a bit easier.
The challenge with "protect the children" is not only evildoers targeting them, but targets actively seeking things out. They'll be the first ones looking for ways to circumvent age verification.
It seems to me that also if you succeed in making child-only spaces, those spaces become a magnet for adult abusers. They become an all the more desirable prize for them. Whereas spaces like this - hacker news, that is - don't need any age verification because although it's a safe bet some users are underage here too, the abusers would have to search a long time for them and the seemingly most common manipulation techniques (like pretending to be a child yourself) probably wouldn't work.
That's no reason to just give up. Do we give up on schools because they are attractive to paedophiles?
Children should be safe online and in school or nursery.
We should try our best to protect children online in a similar way that there are age restrictions in the real world like for alcohol and movies. It won't ever be 100% but for parents who care it helps greatly.
For abuse perpetrated by an adult on children we should strive to stop 100% of cases, but unfortunately that is not possible either.
I'm not saying to give up, I'm saying that "for children" spaces online can be counterproductive. Comparing to physical spaces where everyone can see your age and everyone can see what you do, makes no sense.
Open online spaces directed at children are more dangerous for children than the average open online space. Age verification doesn't help at all with that.
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