Comment by johnc1

People on average aren't very smart and will happily support programs objectively harmful to them and everyone else because the government and a nice lady from the breakfast TV says it's necessary to think of someone's else's children watching porn (this soundbite is gross. I don't understand how it's okay for the serious people to repeat it).

> But governments enjoy on a pretty broad support for this

No they do not. They do an enormous amount of PR trying to convince people that they have it, though.

In the real world when there is a ton of support behind a position, you see representatives of it all over the place and they are pushing the agenda and the coverage. In the world of online age verification, you just see a bunch of lame duck politicians using procedure to sneak policy changes in and keep objections from being heard, and a few government contractor-surrogates writing op-eds (that they haven't read.)

When puritans go on the march, they're actually pretty loud. Most of the anti-social media people are hippy-dippy upper-middle class liberals who curse "screens," completely believed Cambridge Analytica's PR and think that Trump rules through mind control - who will be bothered by the end of anonymity; and the remainder are angry online right-wingers who think that they were censored by and as a result of social media. They're not marching together, they're not marching to have people identified when they're using the internet, neither of them are even prioritizing social media right now and they aren't putting pressure on anyone.

The fact that it's so unpopular is why there are lame ducks doing it. They're just assuring their fortunes on the way out, and the person on the way in will pretend like they had nothing to do with it even though it will be will be passed and implemented on their watch.

Formally politicians may be in charge, but at this point most political power derives from within the administrative state.

> its about who can track you and why. I'd much rather a list of times I access a site that required age verification being stored by the government, than every single fucking page I looked at tracked by google/meta.

It is about what abuses can happen from that info. Google could sell your data. The government can imprison you. You don't think Trump wouldn't try to collect info on his opponents and weaponize the DOJ against them?

Alien disclosure.

In 1953, Eisenhower signed a pact with the Zeta Reticulans (grey aliens) at Holloman Air Force Base. This pact set in motion a century-long program of preparing humanity for the alien disclosure. Communication must be controlled at a global scale, to avoid mass panic and the collapse of society when the disclosure is announced.

Haha a backdoor ban, I see what you did there ;)

And yes that usage of the law by linking LGBT content to porn is something I've seen in Europe like in Hungary too. But even in the Netherlands, one of my friends is always foaming at the mouth about schools mentioning lgbt in sex ed class. When it's the most important time to prevent people needlessly struggling with their orientation.

Luckily where I live this isn't a thing and it's still very pro lgbt. The city always makes a huge deal about pride month with posters and events everywhere.

I do worry about the control over the internet too. And I've seen it coming for a while. When I was younger there was this WAN movement where people connected their WiFi networks together with parabolic dishes and the government was always trying to prevent and discredit that saying it was used for illegal file sharing (which it was but so is/was the internet).

I'm not so worried for myself because I'm so technical, whatever restrictions they come up with I can work around them. But most people aren't that lucky.

Kids won't see these things unless they go looking for them and most of those things will not be under age verification anyway. And misleading advertisement has been a thing of forever and it's not going to go away becasuse too many rich people make money off it.

This is really a matter of parents not giving their kids devices to access the internet until they are ready for what is there.

And I've never seen executions or child molestations in my life. It's not like this is so easy to come across.

Also I'm not a millennial.

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Or, just incentivize or mandate stores to sell "child-certified" phones with parental controls pre-configured (along with a physical plug-and-play usb key for parents disable them when the child is old enough).

People aggressively attacked the proposal of California to add parental controls into OSes, so I'm not sure if that would fly.

I consider myself fairly tech literate and parental controls are incredibly hard to use correctly. I ended up just setting up an android phone with an MDM, because as someone with a sysadmin background it was far easier for me than anything I could find targeted at parents.

The local school district has been issuing iPads to kids for about a decade, and they still haven't figured out how to block exactly what they want blocked. The system they give parents for monitoring the iPads is a joke (Apparently my kid spent 75% of his iPad time the last week of school on sites categorized as "web").

I am a member of FIRE, I am extremely opposed to the mandatory ID laws, but the state of parental controls is phenomenally bad and saying you have to be "on the margin of society" to not be able to set it up is so far from my experience that I couldn't help but to respond to this comment.

I'm not sure what the solution is; a lot of people have suggested requiring sites to send categories (e.g. if every social media site was self-tagged, then blocking social media could be just a single check box in parental controls), but that probably isn't constitutional in the US (Compelled speech is usually banned under 1A grounds), and is subject to too much interpretation (seems unlikely that all 50 states would agree on a definition of "social media" much less "pornography").

Having devices send the age out to sites seems strictly better than ID checks to me, but is still a "one size fits all" approach to parental controls, I worry that if that became the norm the already mediocre controls that exist would atrophy, and it certainly would make it easier for malicious actors to setup a website to target minors.

I am he

As you are he

As you are me

And we are all together

Exactly! We already have content tags on TV/Movies, just extend it to the web and make mandatory.

I imagine it could be not trivial to enforce (esp. for offshore web) - but definitely easier than enforcing the same sites to implement much more complicated identity verification (while preferably also not leaking this data).

But that might not even be necessary. A small on-device AI can probably do a decent job classifying pretty much everything we don't want children to see - with and option for parents to override it when needed.

For kids with parents like that, the internet is probably the least of their problems.

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You don't belive parents generally protect and nurture their children?

For most of human history there were few, if any, laws governing how children were raised yet civilization didn't collapse because of that, and, indeed, there were no discernable effects. In many places parental-infanticide was even legal. Yet always parents did their best to keep their children safe in general, because that's what parents naturally do. Somehow its different now to you I guess but I fail to see why. Obviously some parents will do a poor job, that's true about every human thing. If people can't drive we take away their license. If people can't parent, however, we apperently have to bend everything in society to cater to their failure and create a massive surveillance state.