Comment by fl4regun
5 hours ago
This is a little bit of a tangent compared to the post, but can someone explain to me why it's NOW that we have multiple countries (USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and probably others that I am not aware of) all looking at age verification for a technology (the internet and all the things it lets you access) has existed for over 2 decades, and has been mature for at least 10 years? You could buy illicit drugs and watch porn on the internet since the 2000s, but it's NOW that we're legislating things (in incomprehensibly stupid and hopelessly unenforceable ways)?
The worst part is these are all stupid poorly thought out band-aid solutions to "protect the kids" from platforms that are also detrimental to adults.
It's all caused by a Meta lobbying initiative across multiple countries as documented in https://tboteproject.com/ (sadly, the website is down right now), but you can find references e.g. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/the-tbote-project/
> ...jwz.org...
Holy fuck, man, visiting that with a HN referer serves up a rather NSFW rude image, and evidently sets a cookie to make sure it happens next time too.
replacement link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260401175031/https://www.jwz.o...
Jamie Zawinski is a perfect example of intellectual intelligence unfortunately not translating to emotional intelligence.
https://groups.google.com/g/linux.debian.bugs.dist/c/ItL6xJm...
Not that NSFW, could do with a trim though ...
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Art.
Based jwz novice
Archive of first link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260429210901/https://tboteproj...
NB: don't link jwz.org directly from HN. It plays poorly from both ends.
I feel like HN should ban linking to the domain. After all, no good-faith commenter intends the result that happens.
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Trying to put this all on Meta with a look at their 2025 lobbying spend is missing the point. The “think of the children” panic about the internet pre-dates this by years. Remember the debate around the TikTok ban? The states instituting laws about porn age checks pre-dates all of this too. I think trying to blame Meta is convenient because it’s easy to think there is just one villain coordinating everything, but the debate about children and the internet has been a spreading moral panic for years.
While the panic is indeed nothing new, Meta could have chosen a path of solidarity across the tech industry, lobbying for the ways age/identity verification makes people of all ages less safe, especially in the context of phishing and data harvesting.
Instead, its strategy has become to advocate for increasing the net levels of tracking and regulatory burden, so long as it is positioned to burden other parts of the technology stack (namely, app stores and operating systems) rather than their social networks.
From the link from a sibling commenter: https://web.archive.org/web/20260429210901/https://tboteproj...
> Meta spent a record $26.3 million on federal lobbying in 2025, deployed 86+ lobbyists across 45 states, and covertly funded a group called the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA) to advocate for the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA).
The irony that their namesake Metaverse was meant to be, itself, an operating system and app distribution platform is palpable. When ambitions shift to regulatory capture, a shark has arguably been jumped.
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It's not only Meta though. People need to stop assuming Meta controls everything via its CIAbook. You see several actors behind that; which one contributes the most is an interesting detail, but ultimately it can be simplified to them planning Evil against The People.
Successful propaganda, and political and policy intervention, as with all forms of control and intervention, rely on applying additional pressure where there's a latent interest and potential.
There's a wonderful line from a different context which I find applies quite broadly:
"The Art of ship handling involves the effective use of forces under control to overcome the effect of forces not under control."
-- Charles H. Cotter
Meta, one of the wealthiest corporations and indeed institutions on the Planet, is exploiting a long-extant tendency and proclivity in technological policy. It's doing so against long-standing traditions within the tech community, largely to serve its own interests. Meta aren't the only actor seeking greater surveillance and forced identification, but the are among the very most powerful. Culpability devolves from that, and violation of tech-community norms, alone.
Exactly, it's far bigger than Meta when the government's are pushing a larger agenda here.
The assumption is you have to control people to enforce laws. They keep pushing this notion that is a requirement to keep people safe. That somehow if we have big brother AI surveillance everyone will be on their best behavior.
Oracle, Palantir, Meta, and other mega billionaires push this agenda because who is going to stop them from controlling society and getting absurdly powerful and wealthy from it?
This has all been brewing for years. Remember the TikTok ban and all of the debates around it? We’ve been hearing news headlines about social media and kids for many years. The state level laws around porn site ID checks have been rolling in gradually for years, too.
There are always claims that is a shadowy cabal of world leaders coordinating in secret or that a specific corporation is lobbying to do it all, but the fact is that ID checking is oddly popular in theory to a lot of people who haven’t thought through the consequences. Check any thread on this topic on Hacker News where the idea is discussed in a way that makes it feel like it’s only for kids or only for Facebook and there’s a huge outpouring of support for the idea.
The topic only becomes unpopular when the actual consequences become apparent. For the Hacker News audience the popularity of these ideas does a complete U-turn as soon as the concept of ID checking extends to platforms we might use, like Reddit, Discord, or YouTube. When commenters think it’s only going to impact Facebook and TikTok they welcome ID checking laws with enthusiastic support.
This has all been brewing for years. Remember the TikTok ban and all of the debates around it?
Tiktok? I remember when people were freaking out about porn games on the Atari 2600.
Now I'm curious-- if I do an image capture of my face on an Atari 2600, can AI recreate a recognizable image of my face from that data?
Edit: by "data" I mean only the screencapture of the Atari 2600 output at some point in time.
Global meetings (whether secret or not) where select people decide what to do next to minimize potential threats to their power. There isn't much more to it, really.
Not just minimize threats, but often to maximize their power.
Lobbyists do not just try to convince a politician that X is a good idea. Lobbyists give the politician money to introduce already drafted legislation, and then give other politicians money to support it. And if they can get the legislation passed in one place, they'll try it again.
The result is that suspiciously similar legislation appears in many places close in time, due to it being pushed by particular interests.
I'm not convinced this is about money as much as it is about blackmail, given how centralized data collection has become and how many intelligence agencies appear to have access to numerous 0-days for routinely gathering additional information. It could be both things as well.
What bothers me most isn't their corruption, but their apparent belief that it won't eventually affect them or their families - perhaps sooner than they think.
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Nefarious actors will always attempt to institute these programs via well-meaning stooges
AI coming along is another “great opportunity” to try and force these programs
Rich people are panicking because they’ve seen a capital-poor country win a war with cheap drones and want to lock down as many technologies as they can, lest the ruled realize they can actually do something about their rulers.
I don't know if they have that level of coordination. To me it seems that they just want to grab as much money and power for themselves while it's possible before considering any interests of their social class.
I don't know if the ruled can really do anything. All these countries, even if they are poorer on paper, are still nation-level actors with power that regular people can't even dream of matching.
I agree that "they" are panicking, but I think it's more towards that they mashed pay-to-skip-classes button only to realize that they ended up being without skills or connections, rather than that it has to do with Ukraine at all, frankly
Imo it definitely has to do with politicians and governments trying to appear strong on the topic of protecting kids from the harms of social media. I also believe a lot of it is well intentioned, albeit poorly executed
I'm with you on the well-intentioned aspect.
But it's not a question of poor execution -- there is simply no way to execute this. There is no way to achieve the goal (age-restricting websites) without identity verification. There are any number of half solutions that will solve 80% of the problem, but to move the needle past that requires identity verification. Even then, as the article points out, we only move to 90%.
It's because of Jonathan Haidt's book
By all means don't provide any additional information on what you mean, what book, what it's about, what it has to do with this, or anything else.
It took me 30s to Google this guy's name and find his latest book on Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxious_Generation
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I don't know who that is or which book you are talking about, because he has written many, it seems.
But 1 since 8 years. The Anxious Generation.
What has changed is that there's now a market for data that maps addresses to apparent ethnicities (for use by palantir to sell to governments, in support of ethnic cleansing programmes).
I think you are right on the big picture : what has changed is Big Tech has recognized that comprehensive data on individuals is valuable. I think the biggest value category however is in the area of highly-targeted opinion manipulation. Build a model of what are the current beliefs of each individual, get paid by marketing or political candidates or whoever to generate an optimized media feed to manipulate that person's beliefs to match some target set of beliefs.
It is particularly bizarre given the increasingly frightening array of designer drugs available at gas stations and convenience stores.
You probably have seen them if you live in the US, and had little idea about them.
I'm not a fan of age verification(++) discussed here, but it's also extremely obvious that social media is a more significant danger to our society (children and non-) than gas station drugs.
I live in Canada so I don't know about this. What are gas stations and convenience stores carrying now?
An article I read said kratom, 7-OH, tianeptine.
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there's an epidemic of authoritarianism in a lot of countries these days. didn't use to be quite this bad in the last couple of decades.
Do not for a split second operate under the assumption that there aren't coordinating forces working on this. I know this trips the "conspiracy theories!!1!" flag in most people, but you can literally come up with organizations dedicated to things like this in mere seconds of googling. Here's a comment about US state-level coordination I made earlier, with a challenge to produce some examples that I then produced: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=united+nations+committ...
Yes, it screams "conspiracy theories" because it is literally a theory that involves malign conspiracies. And yes, this is repellent to many people.
It is most repellent, I think, to people who genuinely hold the belief ("I want to prevent minors from using websites that are generally agreed to be harmful to minors"). When you tell these people "no, you actually want a totalitarian state that controls what adults are allowed to believe", they think you're crazy, because they don't believe this.
That this is an inevitable consequence of the solution to the problem that they want to solve is a question of tradeoffs that people are not generally aware of, and I think it's way more important for people to be aware of those tradeoffs without being told that it is the illuminati and the freemasons and George Soros and Fox News trying to Orwell their way into a global police state.
I need to figure out some way to communicate how these things really work.
I think lots of people around here would agree that "the rich" are doing nefarious things. But people get real fuzzy on what those things really are and how they work. Like, the rich don't just stand around in a well-apportioned fancy study with a big wooden desk, smoking a cigar and ambiently shouting into the void "GEE I SURE HOPE THINGS GOOD FOR ME HAPPEN" before checking their pocketwatch for the time and pouring themselves an expensive alcoholic beverage... and then, in entirely unrelated news, it so happens that for no reason the government loosens some environmental restrictions that was bothering the billionaire, and some worker's rights get rolled back.
They hire people who know how to build organizations, and give those people money, and those people hire other people who know how to build those sorts of things, and then they hire lawyers and managers and line workers and people who know how to outsource and contract and do whatever it needs to get it done.
And none of these people are going to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times outlining exactly how they're doing all this. Even if they aren't actively trying to be secretive, they don't run around telling people all about it.
You can see a public and frequent example of how this works when a politician spins up a major election campaign, like for President or Governor. An entire organization of thousands of people with one explicitly political goal spun up, grown, expanded with volunteers, and then shut down again in a matter of months. It's much closer to how this stuff looks than the unexamined ideas people seem to have in their heads. It's no problem for a billionaire to spin something like that up for a cross-country law push.
Or, to put it simply, the way the rich accomplish their goals is basically with "conspiracies", specifically in the form of these sorts of organizations built to accomplish their goals. They don't just hope and wish. They use money to pay people to do things. If your view of the world doesn't have room for that, if your brain flips out at the idea that rich people pay people to do things, that's not a sophisticated and refined view of the world that is so much better than the ones held by those people who keep falling for those theories... it's hopelessly naive. Things mostly happen because people take actions. The way you and your buddies may get together to clean up a park on a weekend, a billionaire or a collection of them create organizations to do things.
That doesn't even remotely mean every conspiracy is therefore true. But things like a coordinated push across multiple countries for almost the exact same law is plainly obviously the result of some organization that has been built to accomplish that goal. That is by far the most likely outcome. No other one makes even slightly as much sense. I don't have to know what that organization is for that to be my most dominant hypothesis.
I personally don't think there are many people left yelling "conspiracy" when you say that globalized decisions are being pushed, especially if you've been alive for the last 10 years. Nowadays it's more about who is actually making these decisions and that discussion gets muddy quickly.
Crowd-based analysis of "the files" nearly went out of control, and they noticed how hard it is to identify social media users.
Only trust fund nepo kids from old money are allowed to have vanity social security numbers, multiple identities and scrubbed Wikipedia articles. The plebeians shall have only a single ID and use it to authenticate with every website.
I really want to know who else has a SSN starting with 1337.
I'm maybe a bit of an outlier here in that I do think that this is a genuine grassroots good faith effort to "protect the children" that does not have sinister ulterior motives. I know plenty of parents who have expressed enthusiasm for the idea of age-restricting websites.
"Why now" I think is pretty obvious -- the age limitations that exist currently are easily circumvented, but have given enough of a plausible deniability aspect that politicians have been able to skate by. There has been increasing research and media dedicated to the idea that there are aspects of the internet which we should be shielding children from. While many of this research is dubious, there's a rising moral panic around it.
The core of the problem is that there is no possible implementation of age verification that does not also require identity verification. In this I am in strong agreement with the article, but the use of paranoid and dramatic language as in this article only alienates people who find the conspiratorial tone to be reverse polarizing.
I agree only in the sense that Meta wants the OS to tell them the user’s age - BOTH for the ulterior motive of better ad targeting / fingerprinting, but also because shifting the liability gets the numerous current and future child safety lawsuits off the back.
This would be fine if it was actually done perfectly - ie. Devices get a signed ticket from the government identity provider, device can provides a cryptographically verifiable ticket to the site that its a valid identity and their age is within the $x age range but not tied to the user’s actual identity / document, and the device doesn’t ask the government identity provider to mint a new ticket each time it needs to attest (maybe 500 tickets are minted at a time and you auto renew 500 more each month)
However the likelihood of this actually being done correctly is slim to none.
I've been able to age restrict websites with my childrens' devices for years? Privately, on the device. The website side is pure moatism.
Yes but your approach requires parenting, which is unacceptable to many people with children.
If you mean this to say "this is probably the best we as a society can do on balance from a 'worse-is-better' approach" then I'm pretty much in agreement.
But obviously this doesn't "solve the problem". It's another bandaid with an extensive list of failure modes and tradeoffs. It falls into the class of "the age limitations that exist currently are easily circumvented" type of solution.
In my opinion it is fine to leave it there and accept the tradeoffs. We could mandate better website marking, and mandate better device or app-level mechanisms, and improve monitoring and restricting tools, or we could do even less and keep it more or less heterogenous.
But I do not agree that it is "moatism" to talk about it on the website side. There is a real and genuine desire to actually have the kinds of age restrictions that are only possible with strong user identity broadly deployed. Refusing to engage because of imputation of malign motives on the other party's part is not going to persuade anyone, especially if they do not personally have those malign motives.
It won’t work, it’s just another crank of the enshittification ratchet that will make everyone’s life worse. Well, everyone except those who control a lot of wealth and power, they’ll still be comfortably isolated from the people they abuse.
The <meta name="rating"> html tag has existed since like the 90s. If you legitimately just want to 'protect the children' just enact legislation saying that adult content is responsible for setting this tag. Then parents can decide what their children can and can't see via browser settings. No giant biometric database, no invasive user mapping, no leaks, no creeping techno-feudalist state.
Collecting user biometric data and trying it to a nominally anonymous user identity is not required here.
This is 100% 'won't someone please think of the children' pearl clutching to hide what's actually going on - furthering control of the online exchange of ideas.
Making it more difficult to access social media for Adults to access social media isn't detrimental.
Honestly? I think it's because Elon Musk pissed a bunch of bureaucrats off by buying X and being more permissive about what was allowed. Then came claims that AI porn or something was on X which is a vague claim. People say it was Meta lobbying but that's not it. Meta lobbied to have ID done at the operating system. The lobby for ID was already effective and on its way before that. The actual lobby doesn't seem to be popular at all. It's just some NGOs no one has heard of that support restrictions for porn. The same language popped up on three continents at once. I just don't think this is a grass roots campaign and I don't think corporations drove it either. Ultimately, I think governments decided that unregulated information/anonymity is a threat to their power.
Combination of factors, but mostly because Meta is pushing it globally: https://www.reuters.com/world/meta-lobbies-congress-protecti...
One would think that after the Burma genocide the millionaires at Meta would have learned a lesson and keep their fingers out of politics.
I don't think you have spent much time researching. TLDR: Social media bad for kids.
Facebook was never allowed to let in kids under 13. It's now only being enforced.
FB IPO was over a decade ago, and was on the internet years before that. So only now we decide that we "must act!" and that this is the only way to do it, and all countries are doing it in the same way with no evidence if it even works or not? Why not ten years ago? Heck why not 20 years ago when MySpace was a thing? This whole thing seems extremely manufactured to me.
Because it’s been building for a while, and (in my opinion) because it’s not a major traffic generating topic on builder focused sites like HN.
The most proximate domino was the Australian social media ban. Australia was already a country known to experiment with ways to deal with social media - see the news fee they imposed on platforms.
Behind that was the build up of negative outcomes from social media for kids, and adults.
The harms are not something I tend to find actively discussed on HN; I assume because more people are interested in building the next thing, not digging into the trust and safety details.
Customer safety and support are also not going to get anyone promoted in tech. These are cost centers and will often stand in the way of addictive design.
Meta executives were nailed precisely for greenlighting designs their own teams told them were harmful for teens.
At the same time, there is lobbying going on by these firms, to push the burden of verification to someone else.
However, the degree of harm being caused by social media meant we were always going to see voter backlash.
> The harms are not something I tend to find actively discussed on HN;
Define actively. They are discussed often. In discussions of age restrictions especially.
Any time in the past 5 years would be a guide line.
I work in the safety side of things, and I've seen the difference in conversations in comment threads here.
Social media was unleashed onto the world with no harm studies or thought for the long term impact.
Now we’re catching up and realizing how bad it is.
For a similar case, see tasers in Canada after a handcuffed immigrant was killed by one. The question came up “how were tasers certified safe for humans?”. The answer was “they weren’t. A private company just started selling them to police forces who just started using them.”
Tasers are bad is your example? cops should go back to clubbing people over the head I suppose? - Remember all metaphors are bad.
> ... but can someone explain to me why it's NOW that we have multiple countries (USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and probably others that I am not aware of) all looking at age verification for a technology
I don't know why but governments, nearly worldwide, all teaming up on x continents to push the exact same narrative is recent but not totally new: remember the "masks do not work against SaRS-COV-2" to only then lock us all up and then force people to wear face masks?
Media all pushing the "if you believe it possibly can be a lab-leak, you're just as nuts as conspiracy theorists who believe the moon landing was faked" was honestly quite scary to witness too.
And the speed at which virtually everybody, including on HN, started to then push for that propaganda was quite scary too.
For the record, the report mandated (under Biden) by US Congress concludes that the virus has non-zootropic features and the biggest "expert" on the matter, Peter Daszak, has been debarred and cannot ever again receive funding from the US to work on gain-of-function research on viruses.
I stand my case: the "you're a conspiracy nut if you believe the virus could be man-made" was a coordinated setup.
You're asking why, now, they're teaming up to require face verification.
I'm asking why they all sang the same fake tunes about Covid-19 / SaRS-COV2: "Masks do not work" was repeated worldwide, to then forcing us to wear masks was a lie (one of the two was a complete lie).
And of course the incessant propaganda machine, hard at work, to explain everywhere that it couldn't possibly have leaked from a lab tied to Peter Daszak's research doing gain-of-function research on bat viruses, in the very FUCKING CITY, where it all started, was a gigantic lie.
The absolute worst in all of this is the people believing the lies even when the evidence is right in front of their eyes.
I kept posting here on HN back then about how it was folly to not open your eyes and make your mind work two seconds and I posted about that one independent journalist who found the Peter Daszak link very early on and fought for the truth. But the herds, worldwide, were way too pleased to buy the governments' lies.
Years after the fact we got proven the governments, worldwide, lied and teamed up to hide the truth.
"Despite congressional mandates requiring the declassification of COVID-origin intelligence under both the 2023 law and last year’s National Defense Authorization Act of 2026, substantial portions of the newly released records remain blacked out."
The CIA stated they now believe it's a lab leak.
Oh really?
https://www.whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19...
This, like Goebbels' propaganda technique in nazi Germany, should be studied for years and years: how Goebbels' techniques were used, worldwide, to try to hide the governments' responsibilities in the countless deaths resulting from the virus they funded.
It's the same, worldwide-coordinated, "think of the humans" propaganda they're using for face ID.
> can someone explain to me why it's NOW that we have multiple countries
Because there are actors pushing for this. And they let money flow, so the lobbyists work.
People think lobbyists don't do this? Well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...
These lobbyists were dumb. You can be certain that some lobbyists are so efficient that detecting them reliably is very difficult. Even more so when private media is controlled by a few billionaires who are "in" on the system.
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