Comment by bondarchuk
4 days ago
It's kind of weird to me how every article on this topic here has people rushing to comment within a couple minutes with some generic "yes I too support ID checks for internet use!". Has the vibe really shifted so much among tech-literate people?
Although there is some organic support, there is a lot of coordinated astroturfing. It’s apparent if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves.
Governments (and a few companies) really want this.
What are some links to HN comments that you (or anyone else) feel is "coordinated astroturfing"?
The site guidelines ask users to send those to us at hn@ycombinator.com rather than post about it in the threads, but we always look into such cases when people send them.
It almost invariably turns out to simply be that the community is divided on a topic, and this is usually demonstrable even from the public data (such as comment histories). However, we're not welded to that position—if the data change, we can too.
Thanks for replying. I will make an effort to compile a list when I see it in the future. I’ve observed several cases where green names (and a few longstanding accounts) all made the same point, posted in the same time frame, with language matching what I would see on Reddit and X. It could just be organic but it was very suspicious.
I do think that HN does a better job than most at containing this (thanks for your hard work).
> What are some links to HN comments that you (or anyone else) feel is "coordinated astroturfing"?
I don't think that there is any definitive way to prevent or detect this anymore. The number of personnel dedicated to online manipulation has grown too much, and the technology has advanced too far.
These are now discussions that states and oligarchs have interests in, not Juicero or smart skillet astroturfing. And this remains a forum that people use to indicate elite support for their arguments.
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> Governments (and a few companies) really want this.
The cynic in me fears they don't want a privacy-preserving solution, which blinds them to 'who'. Because that would satisfy parents worried about their kids and many privacy conscious folks.
Rather, they want a blank check to blackmail or imprison only their opponents.
I think Larry (not, not that Larry, the other one) spilled the beans in 2024:
"Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on" - Larry Ellison
(I seem to recall from the context of the quote, he isn't saying this is the future he wants, but it's a future he's not particularly opposed to)
But the real threat is "accidental" database leaks from private websites. Let's say you live in a state where abortion isn't legal, and you sign up for a web forum where people discuss getting out-of-state abortions. As soon as that website is required to collect real names (which it will be), it becomes unusable, because nobody can risk getting doxxed.
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That’s not cynicism, it’s reality.
Add to this that more and more sites and services are hostile to VPN connections and obfuscated email address for account registration. Worse still is that for existing accounts introducing ID req'ts, the next step in these changes is your prior anonymous activity could easily become a retro-liablit.y
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This is not a cynical take, it is blindingly obvious. Right now, governments around the world are watching, salivating over what is effectively remote control over the literal thoughts of and total surveillance over their entire population. They are itching insatiably to get control over these systems.
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> It’s apparent if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves
This is true of basically any issue discussed on the internet. Saying it must be astroturfing is reductive
> there is a lot of coordinated astroturfing. It’s apparent if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves.
Is that really evidence of astroturfing? If we're in the middle of an ongoing political debate, it doesn't seem that far fetched for me that people reach similar conclusions. What you're hearing then isn't "astro-turfing" but one coalition, of potentially many.
I often hear people terrified that the government will have a say on what they view online, while being just fine with google doing the same. You can agree or disagree with my assesment, but the point is that hearing that point a bunch doesn't mean it's google astroturfing. It just means there's an ideology out there that thinks it's different (and more opressive seemingly) when governments do it. It means all those people have a similar opinion, probably from reading the same blogs.
Well the hard thing about astroturfing is that only the people running the platform have the hard data to prove it beyond any reasonable doubt.
But I don't think we need 99.99% confidence -- isn't even acknowledged that 30% of twitter is bots or something? I think it's safe to conclude there's astroturfing on any significant political issue.
Also as far as documented cases, there were documented cases of astroturfing around fracking [1], or pesticides [2]
1. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2057047320969435 2. https://www.corywatson.com/blog/monsanto-downplay-roundup-ri...
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> it doesn't seem that far fetched for me that people reach similar conclusions.
How do you suppose it is that millions of people, separated by vast geographic distances, somehow all reach similar conclusions all at once?
Related: How do you suppose it is that out of 350-700+ million people (depending on whose numbers you believe), there's always only two "choices" and both of them suck?
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> there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves.
Groups of people who wake up at the same time of the day often have a tendency to be from a similar place, hold similar values and consume similar media.
Just because a bunch of people came to the same conclusion and have had their opinions coalesce around some common ideas, doesn't mean it's astroturfing. There's a noticeable difference between the opinions of HN USA and HN EU as the timezones shift.
"A few"?
"Real" user verification is a wet dream to googlr, meta, etc. Its both a ad inflation and a competive roadblock.
The benefits are real: teens are being preyed upon and socially maligned. State actors and businesses alike are responsible.
The technology is not there nor are governments coordinating appropiate digital concerns. Unsurprising because no one trusts gov, but then implicitly trust business?
Yeah, so obviously, its implementation that will just move around harms.
More than a few companies. Nothing would allow advertisers to justify raising ad rates quite like being able to point out that their users are real rather than bots.
I think we should be careful of writing off this sea change as simple professional influence campaigns. That kind of thinking is just what got Trump to the Whitehouse, and is currently getting the immigrants rounded up.
Things that didn't seem likely to have broad support previously, now are seen as acceptable. In the 90's no one could envision rounding up immigrants. No one could envision uploading an ID card to use ICQ. No one could envision the concept of DE-naturalization or getting rid of birthright citizenship.
Today, in the US for instance, there are entire new generations of people alive. And many, many people who were alive in the 90's are gone. Well these new people very much can envision these things. And they seem to have stocked the Supreme Court to make all these kinds of things a reality.
All because the rest of us keep dismissing all of this as just harmless extreme positions that no one in society really supports. We have to start fighting things like this with more than, "It's not real."
You don’t think the current admin uses influence campaigns? They are called “influence” campaigns for a reason; they are intended to shape both beliefs and behaviors.
Things that have broad support now may have that support primarily because of longstanding influence campaigns.
Both the widespread growth in smoking, and its later drop in popularity, are often credited to determined influence campaigns. You are not immune to propaganda!
>In the 90's no one could envision rounding up immigrants.
Both Clinton and Obama deported way more people than Trump.
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> It’s apparent if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves.
How do you know what is "shared talking points" vs "humans learning arguments from others" and simply echoing those? Unless you work at one of the social media platforms, isn't it short of impossible to know what exactly you're looking at?
It could be, and you’re right that I can’t prove anything beyond a doubt. But there is an entire industry built around professionally manipulating public opinion for money, and the groups most interested in deanonymizing the internet are well resourced. Simple inductive reasoning will tell you that a portion of the support is likely astroturfed.
> there is a lot of coordinated astroturfing.
Interesting. Are you saying all the concerns raised by the proponents of ID verification are invalid and meritless? For example,
1. Foreign influence campaigns
2. Domestic influence campaigns
3. Filtering age-appropriate content
I’m sure there are many other points with various degree of validity.
> Interesting. Are you saying all the concerns raised by the proponents of ID verification are invalid and meritless?
In the US, #1 and #2 are invalid and meritless. Wholly and without reservation. One of the huge reasons for the First Amendment is to ensure that people are able to counter lies uttered in the public sphere with truth.
#3 is handled by parental controls that have existed in mainstream OSs for quite some time now. [0][1][2] However, those preexisting parental controls don't justify additional expansion of the power and influence of authoritarians, so here we are.
[0] <https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/family-safety>
[1] <https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/set-up-content-and-...>
[2] <https://support.google.com/android/answer/16766047?hl=en-rw>
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If you drive out everyone with identity filters, those folks will naturally flock to sites run in nations without the same controls. I don't think you really solve anything except to push traffic elsewhere.
Instead it would be more appropriate to let sites pass headers, such as "we have adult content", thst you could filter on the network or client side. It's still voluntary, of course. Anyone will just visit sites that don't have the checks if necessary.
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The industry clearly prefers a system in which using the internet requires full identification. There are many powerful interests that support this model:
- Governments benefit from easier monitoring and enforcement.
- The advertising industry prefers verified identities for better targeting.
- Social media companies gain more reliable data and engagement.
- Online shopping companies can reduce fraud and increase tracking.
- Many SaaS companies would also welcome stronger identity verification.
In short, anonymity is not very profitable, and governments often favor identification because it increases oversight and control.
Of course, this leads to political debate. Some point out that voting often does not require ID, while accessing online services does. The usual argument is that voting is a constitutional right. However, one could argue that access to the internet has become a fundamental part of modern life as well. It may not be explicitly written into the Constitution, but in practice it functions as an essential right in today’s society.
You are missing the age/ID verification tech companies, who profit from violating privacy here. They have a strong incentive to try and convince/trick governments into legally requiring their services.
When anonymity is outlawed, then only outlaws will be anonymous.
There’s some nuance here.
Realizing that much of the internet is totally toxic to children now and should have a means of keeping them out is distinct from agreeing to upload ID to everything.
A better implementation would be to have a device/login level parental control setting that passed age restriction signals via browsers and App Stores. This is both a simpler design and privacy friendly.
I like this take. Ultimately the only people responsible for what kids consume are the parents. It’s on them to control their kids’ internet access, the government has no place in it. If you want to punish someone for a child being exposed to inappropriate content, punish the negligence of the parents.
I've thought the same.
At least here in US: Google/Apple device controls allow app to request whether user meets age requirements. Not the actual age, just that the age is within the acceptable range. If so, let through, if not, can't proceed through door.
I know I am oversimplifying.
But I like this approach vs. uploading an ID to TikTok. Lesser of many evils?
There already is a means to keep children away from toxic content: parents (possibly with the help of locally run content blocking software).
This also means the only operating systems allowing access to the internet will be these with the immense surveillance and ad-infested.
Not at all. You require websites to respect the signal of its set just like GPC. If there’s no signal it fails open. And if a kid installs Linux and sets the signal themselves, well, who cares, they can also sneak into R rated movies. It’s enough friction to kill the ubiquity.
It doesn't sound simple. Now there needs to be some kind of pipeline that can route a new kind of information from the OS (perhaps from a physical device) to the process, through the network, to the remote process. Every part of the system needs to be updated in order to support this new functionality.
It's not simple, but it's also not new. mTLS has allowed for mutual authentication on the web for years. If a central authority was signing keys for adults, none of the protocol that we currently use would need to change (although servers would need to be configured to check signatures)
and is it easier to implement id checks for each online account that people have, had, and will ever have in the future?
parents need to start parenting by taking responsibility on what their kids are doing, and government should start governing with regulations on ad tech, addictive social media platforms, instead of using easily hackable platforms for de anonymization, which in turn enable mass identity theft.
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now?
I think it's quite embarrassing that the WWW exists since more than 3 decades and still there's no mechanism for privacy friendly approval for adults apart from sending over the whole ID. Of course this is a huge failure of governments but probably also of W3C which rather suggests the 100,000th JavaScript API. Especially in times of ubiquitous SSO, passkeys etc. The even bigger problem is that the average person needs accounts at dozens if not hundreds of services for "normal" Internet usage.
That being said, this is a 1 bit information, adult in current legislation yes/no.
> and still there's no mechanism for privacy friendly approval for adults apart from sending over the whole ID. Of course this is a huge failure of governments but probably also of W3C
I consider it a huge success of the Internet architects that we were able to create a protocol and online culture resilient for over 3 decades to this legacy meatspace nonsense.
> That being said, this is a 1 bit information, adult in current legislation yes/no.
If that's all it would take to satisfy legislatures forever, and the implementation was left up to the browser (`return 1`) I'd be all for it. Unfortunately the political interests here want way more than that.
SSO and passkeys don't solve adult verification. I don't see how this problem is embarrassing for the www - it's a hard problem in a socially permissible way (eg privacy) that can successfully span cultures and governments. If you feel otherwise, then solutions welcome!
There's a high chance the government is attempting to influence public opinion by using botted comments, which is easier than ever to pull off.
Seems like these articles and the subsequent top replies saying
"use a token from the device so the ID never leaves, this is way better right!"
This is the true objective. They actually want DEVICE based ID.
I want LESS things that are tied to me financially and legally to be stolen when(not if) these services and my device are compromised.
If you dig into the CEO of the The Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA), he has spent years going out of his way to spam pro-age verification propaganda across random sites like Techdirt and Michael Geist's blog.
Its not unreasonable to assume that he would seek to automate his bullshit.
See here for some examples:
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/08/26/who-would-benefit-from-c...
https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2025/10/senate-bill-would-grant-...
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Yeah, I've been saying for years that LLMs are a technology that basically unlock three major new technologies:
1. Automatic shaping of online community discussions (social media, bots, etc)
2. Automatic datamining, manipulating and reacting to all digitally communicated conversations (think dropping calls or MITM manipulation of conversations between organizers of a rival poltical party in swing districts proir to an election, etc. CointelPro as a service)
3. Giving users a new UI (speech) with which they can communicate with computer applications
it's a solid business model actually
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Unless you live in North Korea, no there is not. This is pure conspiracy theory.
well at least your screen name is accurate, which is more than can be said of your comment.
There are better and there are really really bad ways to do ID checks. In a world that is increasingly overwhelmed by bots I don't see how we can avoid proof-of-humanity and proof-of-adulthood checks in a lot of contexts.
So we should probably get ahead of this debate and push for good ways to do part-of-identity-checks. Because I don't see any good way to avoid them.
We could potentially do ID checks that only show exactly what the receiver needs to know and nothing else.
> We could potentially do ID checks that only show exactly what the receiver needs to know and nothing else.
A stronger statement: we know how to build zero-knowledge proofs over government-issued identification, cf. https://zkpassport.id/
The services that use these proofs then need to implement that only one device can be logged in with a given identity at a time, plus some basic rate limiting on logins, and the problem is solved.
Thank you - this gets way too few attention especially among tech folks. People act like uploading your government ID to random online services was the only solution to this problem, which is really just a red herring.
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Yes this is what I'm thinking about!
The challenge here though is to prove to the user, especially without forcing the user to go into technical details, that it is indeed private and isn't giving away details.
The user needs to be able to sandbox an app like that and have full control of its communications.
When ID checks are rolled out there is immediate outrage. Discord announced ID checks for some features a couple weeks ago and it has been a non-stop topic here.
From what I’ve seen, most of the pro-ID commenters are coming from positions where they assume ID checks will only apply to other people, not them. They want services they don’t use like TikTok and Facebook to become strict, but they have their own definitions of social media that exclude platforms they use like Discord and Hacker News. When the ID checks arrive and impact them they’re outraged.
Regulation for thee, not for me.
This is what I was wondering too. It doesn't seem genuine. Most people in tech I know will strongly oppose ID checks for internet use, rightfully so.
I think that not doing partial-identity checks invite bot noise into conversations. We could have id checks that only check exactly what needs to be checked. Are you human? Are you an adult? And then nothing else is known.
Identity checks do not prevent bot noise. They just increase the difficulty for bot operators a bit (steal / buy identities or verified accounts). Added bonus for them: Their bot comments now appear more authentic.
We have a Scylla vs Charybdis situation, where lack of ID leads to an internet of bots, while on the other end we get a dystopia where everything anyone has ever said about any topic is available to a not-so-liberal government. Back in the day, it was very clear that the second problem was far worse than the first. I still think it is, but I sure see arguments for how improved tooling, and more value in manipulating sentiment, makes the first one quite a bit worse than it was in, say, 1998.
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> Has the vibe really shifted so much among tech-literate people?
HN has largely shifted away from tech literacy and towards business literacy in recent years.
Needless to say that an internet where every user's real identity is easily verifiable at all times is very beneficial for most businesses, so it's natural to see that stance here.
You talk about tech literacy, but then conflate age verification with knowing someone's identity. You should see the work people are doing to perform age verification in a way that preserves privacy, for example the EU and Denmark.
It's very odd. I see it everywhere I go.
I think a lot of the younger generation supports it, actually. They didn't really grow up with a culture of internet anonymity and some degree of privacy.
The younger generation is growing up where the internet is a giant dumpster fire of enshitification that a tanker full of gasoline just got poured on in the form of AI chatbots. With agents becoming even easier the equivalent of script kiddies are going to make it so much worse.
Privacy with respect to the government was one of the final pillars, but when everything placed on the internet is absorbed by the alphabets of government agencies, and the current admin does searches of it as their leisure they understand nothing is anonymous anymore.
It's funny that this is what the younger generation is going to think Millennials and older are completely stupid for still supporting. The current structure only benefits corporations and bots.
Giving up one's privacy and anonymity will solve nothing. Bots will buy stolen IDs and use those anyway, as well.
Its weird how all these 1,000 IQ innovators suddenly can't figure it out.
I dont think they want to figure it out. They think the internet should be stagnant unchanging and eternal as it currently exists because it makes the most money. If you disagree you're either a normie, bot, or need to parent harder or something. There is nothing you can do don't dare try to change it.
Beware the vocal minority. Internet comment sections only tell you the sentiments of people who make comments.
HN comments sentiment seems to shift over the age of the thread and time of day.
My suspicion is that the initial comments are from people in the immediate social circle of the poster. They share IRC or Slack or Discord or some other community which is likely to be engaged and have already formed strong opinions. Then if the story gains traction and reaches the front page a more diverse and thoughtful group weighs in. Finally the story moves to EU or US and gets a whole new fresh take.
I’m not surprised that people who support something are the ones most tuned in to the discussion because for anyone opposed they also have their own unrelated thing they care about. So the supporters will be first since they’re the originators.
A lot of people are unhappy with the state of the Internet and the safety of people of all ages on it. I believe we should be focusing on building a way to authenticate as a human of a nation without providing any more information, and try to raise the bar for astroturfing to be identity theft.
There's absolutely some astroturfing happening, but I wouldn't discount that there is some organic support as well. Journalists have been pushing total de-anonymization of the internet for a while now, and there are plenty of people susceptible to listening to them.
It does feel like a shift, and sometimes coordinated signaling. This post was at the top of this thread not long ago. Now it's all pro-age verification posts.
It's inauthentic at best. The four horsemen of the infocaplypse are drugs, pedos, terrorists, and money laundering - they trot out the same old tired "protect the children!" arguments every year, and every year it's never, ever about protecting children, it's about increasing control of speech and stamping out politics, ideology, and culture they disapprove of. For a recent example, check out the UK's once thriving small forum culture, the innumerable hobby websites, collections of esoteric trivia, small sites that simply could not bear the onerous requirements imposed by the tinpot tyrants and bureaucrats and the OSA.
It's never fucking safety, or protecting children, or preventing fraud, or preventing terrorism, or preventing drugs or money laundering or gang activities. It's always, 100% of the time, inevitably, without exception, a tool used by petty bureaucrats and power hungry politicians to exert power and control over the citizens they are supposed to represent.
They might use it on a couple of token examples for propaganda purposes, but if you look throughout the world where laws like this are implemented, authoritarian countries and western "democracies" alike, these laws are used to control locals. It's almost refreshingly straightforward and honest when a country just does the authoritarian things, instead of doing all the weaselly mental gymnastics to justify their power grabs.
People who support this are ignorant or ideologically aligned with authoritarianism. There's no middle ground; anonymity and privacy are liberty and freedom. If you can't have the former you won't have the latter.
I think it's complicated by the turning tide on the health effects of social media.
So people are kind of primed for "makes sense to keep kids from these attention driven platforms"
But I think the average person isn't understanding the implications of the facial/id scanning.
Could be astroturfing
The average tech “literate” person uses discord, social media, a GitHub with their real name, a verified LinkedIn, and Amazon Echo.
These are not the same people from 30 years ago. The new generation has come to love big brother. All it took to sell their soul was karma points.
Many of the things you mention are also tools that many people use in a professional context which mostly doesn't work if you try to be anonymous. Yes, some people choose to be pseudonymous but that mostly doesn't work if your real-life and virtual identities intersect, such as attending conferences or company policies that things you write for company publications be under your real name.
> Has the vibe really shifted so much among tech-literate people?
Actually, yes, it seems to have shifted quite a bit. As far as I can tell, it seems correlated with the amount of mis/disinformation on the web, and acceptance of more fringe views, that seems to make one group more vocal about wanting to ensure only "real people" share what they think on the internet, and a sub-section of that group wanting to enforce this "real name" policy too.
It in itself used to be fringe, but really been catching on in mainstream circles, where people tend to ask themselves "But I don't have anything to hide, and I already use my real name, why cannot everyone do so too?"
The vibe has shifted quite a bit among the general populace, not just in tech.
The short version is that voters want government to bring tech to heel.
From what I see, people are tired of tech, social media, and enshittified apps. AI hype, talk of the singularity, and fears about job loss have pushed things well past grim.
Recent social media bans indicate how far voter tolerance for control and regulation has shifted.
This is problematic because government is also looking for reasons to do so. Partly because big tech is simply dominant, and partly because governments are trending toward authoritarianism.
The solution would have been research that helped create targeted and effective policy. Unfortunately, tech (especially social media) is naturally hostile to research that may paint its work as unhealthy or harmful.
Tech firms are burned by exposés, user apathy, and a desire to keep getting paid.
The lack of open research and access to data blocks the creation of knowledge and empirical evidence, which are the cornerstones of nuanced, narrowly tailored policy.
The only things left on the table are blunt instruments, such as age verification.
I highly doubt the sentiment is from real humans. If anything, it proves that a web-of-trust-based-attestation-of-humanity is the real protection the internet needs.
The audience shifted from tech-literate to the opposite.
Too may in tech for the money that’s for sure. No fundamentals, just drilled leetcode.
I don't support ID for internet use, only for adult content specifically. There's things on Discord that would shock you to your core if you saw some of it, I don't think children should be blindly exposed to any of it. Specifically porn. Tumblr almost got kicked out of the app store over porn, they went the route of banning it and killing what to me felt like a dying social media platform as things stood.
Do you think strip clubs and bars should stop IDing people at the door? I don't. Why should porn sites be any different?
The difference is that at the strip club, you show your ID to the bouncer, who makes sure its valid and that the photo matches your face, and then forgets all about it. Online, that data is stored forever.
The principle of online ID checks is completely sound; the implementation is not.
That's pretty much over, too. PatronScan and others collect and share data as a first-class feature, e.g., to broadly 86 people.
https://www.sacbee.com/food-drink/article231580393.html
The implementation is sound. Instead of getting an ID, the bouncer gets a serial number from you, he calls his government contact who tells him you are of age. The serial number is meaningless to him.
This would be impractical in meatspace, but works perfectly fine on the internet.
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Until sex, sexuality, and sexual fantasies no longer have any potential stigma associated with them, any sort of verification to view mature content is unacceptable.
That sort information can permanently destroy peoples lives.
I think so. A lot of people think the internet now is a somewhat negative construct and don’t feel so strongly about it somewhat dying away.
I think the word you're missing is fatigue.
The average tech literate person keep seeing their data breached over and over again. Not because THEY did anything wrong, but because these Corpos can't help themselves. No matter how well the tech literate person secures their privacy it has become clear that some Corpo will eventually release everything in an "accident" that causes their efforts to become meaningless.
After a while it's only human for fatigue to build up. You can't stop your information from getting out there. And once it's out there it's out there forever.
Meanwhile every Corpo out there in tech is deliberately creating ways to track you and extract your personal information. Taking steps to secure your information ironically just makes you stand out more and narrows the pool you're in to make it easier to find you and your information. And again you're always just one "bug" from having it all be for nothing.
I still take some steps to secure my privacy, I'm not out there shouting my social security information or real name. But that's habit. I no longer believe that privacy exists.
To the extent we ever had it in the past was simply the insurmountable restrictions on tracking and pooling the information into some kind of organization and easy lookup. Now that it is easier and easier to build profiles on mass numbers of people and to organize those and rank them the illusion is gone. Privacy is dead. Murdered.
And people are tired of pretending otherwise.
People are saying privacy is dead for decades, yet privacy continually declines more and more. And there's still quite a ways it can go from here. The defeatist attitude only helps further erosion.
Please don’t mistake description for advocacy.
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I mean there has always been some part of the tech literate people that were like that, they were just less likely to post about it on forums. Heck after the eternal September it wasn't uncommon for 'jokes' about requiring a license to use the internet.
This is a VC site, when the revenue generating model of the Internet has strongly shifted into surveillance capitalism overdrive.
Cui bono?
> Has the vibe really shifted so much among tech-literate people?
Yes.
Or more honestly, there was always an undercurrent of paternalistic thought and tech regulation from the Columbine Massacre days [0] to today.
Also for those of us who are younger (below 35) we grew up in an era where anonymized cyberbullying was normalized [1] and amongst whom support for regulating social media and the internet is stronger [2].
The reality is, younger Americans on both sides of the aisle now support a more expansive government, but for their party.
There is a second order impact of course, but most Americans (younger and older) don't realize that, and frankly, using the same kind of rhetoric from the Assange/Wikileaks, SOPA, and the GPG days just doesn't resonate and is out of touch.
Gen X Techno-libertarianism isn't counterculture anymore, it's the status quo. And the modern "tech-literate" uses GitHub, LinkedIn, Venmo, Discord, TikTok, Netflix, and other services that are already attached to their identity.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/weekinreview/the-nation-a...
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/us/suicide-of-girl-after-...
[2] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/09/why-young...
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It’s bots pushing another false narrative. You’ll notice this in anything around politics or intelligence the past 10+ years, with big booms around 2016 and 2024 “for some reason”
No. There are significant numbers of real people who genuinely support this type of thing. Dismissing it as "bots" or a "false narrative" leads to complacency that allows this stuff to pass unchallenged.
The problem is: The people who typically support this type of thing are either technically illiterate and they support it, because it sounds good. Or they are promoting these laws because they actually want more surveillance and control. It's not about protecting children.
I still haven't read any truly compelling argument, why this type of surveillance is actually effective and proportionate.
Better to let a hundred people’s “privacy” be violated than to let another child be radicalized or abused or misled by online predation.
I don't subscribe to this. I value my privacy more.
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The information being collected isn’t inherently private. Usage patterns, facial analysis, stylometry, etc.
there is a lot you can do to determine a person’s age without ever having to see a formal ID.
I used to be so against this but after the never ending cat and mouse game with my kids (especially my son) I don't think the tech crowd really appreciates how frustrating it is and how many different screens there are.
Tons of data also showing higher suicide rates, depression rates, eating disorders etc. so it's not as if there is no good side to this.
> Tons of data also showing higher suicide rates
Here is the data:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm
and the more recent data:
https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/
I was a child of the 90's, where the numbers were higher, where we had peak PMRC.
> depression rates
Have these changed? Or have we changed the criteria for what qualifies as "depression"? We keep changing how we collect data, and then dont renormalized when that collection skews the stats. This is another case of it, honestly.
> eating disorders
Any sort of accurate data collection here is a recent development:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7575017/
> never ending cat and mouse game with my kids (especially my son)
Having lived this with my own, I get it. Kids are gonna be kids, and they are going to break the rules and push limits. When I think back to the things I did as a kid at their age, they are candidly doing MUCH better than I, or my peer group was. Drug use, Drinking, ( https://usafacts.org/articles/is-teen-drug-and-alcohol-use-d... ) teen pregnancy are all down ( https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45184 )
If they are so intent on disobeying what makes you they won't just use a VPN or ask someone older to login for them (or any other workaround, depending on the technology)?
I think the tech crowd appreciates how hard it is to lock down access to tech, since they were the kids bypassing the restrictions
You are the one handing them those screens.
As a tech-literate person, I'm not 100% against the concept of ID if only because I think people will be more reasonable if they weren't anonymous.
This conflicts with my concerns about government crackdowns and the importance of anonymity when discussing topics that cover people who have a monopoly on violence and a tendency to use it.
So it's not entirely a black/white discussion to me.
Both Google and Facebook have enforced real identity and its not improved the state of peoples comments at all. I don't think anonymity particular changes what many people are willing to say or how they say it, people are just the creature you see and anonymity simple protects them it doesn't change their behaviour all that much.
I think opt-in ID is great. Services like Discord can require ID because they are private services*. Furthermore, I think that in the future, a majority of people will stay on services with some form of verification, because the anonymous internet is noisy and scary.
The underlying internet should remain anonymous. People should remain able to communicate anonymously with consenting parties, send private DMs and create private group chats, and create their own service with their own form of identity verification.
* All big services are unlikely to require ID without laws, because any that does not will get refugees, or if all big services collaborate, a new service will get all refugees.
The problem is this is only true for values of "reasonable" that are "unlikely to be viewed in a negative light by my government, job, or family; either now or at any time in the future". The chilling effect is insane. There was a time in living memory when saying "women should be able to vote" was not a popular thing.
I mean, this is _literally the only thing needed_ for the Trump admin to tie real names to people criticizing $whatever. Does anyone want that? Replace "Trump" with "Biden", "AOC", "Newsom", etc. if they're the ones you disagree with.
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> I think people will be more reasonable if they weren't anonymous.
I've seen people post appalling shit on fuckin LinkedIn under their own names.
Strong moderation keeps Internet spaces from devolving into cesspools. People themselves have no shame.
Same. Also on Facebook and Nextdoor (with real names and addresses).
Real name moderator is a fallacy.
That's what I believe as well. Anons have turned the internet into an unsafe cesspit. It's the opposite of a "town square."
Internet anonymity is FAR from something new.
When you’re young, the overwhelming and irrepressible desire to overcome society's proscriptions to satisfy your intellectual and sexual curiosity is natural and understandable. The open Internet made that easier than ever, and I enjoyed that freedom when I was younger—though I can’t say it was totally harmless.
When you’re older and have children—especially preteens and teenagers—you want those barriers up, because you’ve seen just how fucked up some children can get after overexposure to unhealthy materials and people who want to exploit or harm them.
It’s a matter of perspective and experience. As adults age, their natural curiosity evolves into a desire to protect their children from harm.
> When you’re older and have children—especially preteens and teenagers—you want those barriers up, because you’ve seen just how fucked up some children can get after overexposure to unhealthy materials.
You mean that you shirk your responsibility to teach your child how to protect themself on the Internet, and instead trust the faceless corp to limit their access at the cost of everyone's privacy? How does this make sense...
They may be looking at the societal level and saying: "I can attempt to teach my kids best practices, but I've learned I sure can't rely on my peers to do the same with their kids...", then feeling like the outcome of that, if left as-is, is societal decline... and then believing that something needs to be done beyond the individual level.
If a business demands you reveal your identity as a condition of use, and you would rather maintain your anonymity, you can choose not to use that business. It's not like these companies are providing essential services necessary for life.
Heck, you can't even obtain housing -- which is an essential service -- without having to provide identity in most cases.
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The only thing this is going to achieve is to bar unverified users form the vaguely reputable and mainstream places into the small, completely unregulated spaces, sites and networks.
I presume you prefer hard requirement of IDs.
I'm saying this will make kids go to i2p, tor, to the obscure fora in countries not giving a f* about western laws.
As a parent to the teens and teens, THIS makes me concerned. The best vpns are very hard to detect (I know, I try it myself).
> I'm saying this will make kids go to i2p, tor, to the obscure fora in countries not giving a f* about western laws.
Some will, but most won't. Similarly, most kids who are dissuaded from buying alcohol because they don't have ID are not going to break the law to get it, or switch to hard drugs as an alternative.
You can't let perfect be the enemy of better.
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So you basically want to prevent your children from doing what you did at their age?
And you don't mind that freedoms of all of us would be restricted as a result?
And then, we keep blaming boomers for those restrictions.
Yes, in exactly the same way that my dad would want me to only use SawStop table saws so that I don't lose a finger like he did.
As for "freedoms," you're not free to vote or drink alcohol below a certain age. And before the internet, minors couldn't purchase pornography, either. Some people perceive this change as a return to normal, not an egregious destruction of freedom.
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