If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin. People struggle to consider the second-, third-, and nth-order effects of anything so asking them to consider what else might happen if we bring in laws and technical mechanisms to 'protect the children' is unfortunately too a big leap for a lot of them. Most people are bad at spotting causal links between parts of a system, and people who are good at it exploit that.
In fairness, the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control and the will to push it through tends to come from the political circles more than popular belief it is a good idea. I expect that if the measure itself went to a general vote, the majority would be against it once they have to deal with a specific proposal. It takes repeated pushes by the authoritarians looking for an opportunity to get things like speech controls or privacy violations through and the politicians mysteriously give up trying to roll it back no matter what the public pressure might be.
That being said, any expectation of thoughtfulness at all makes politics frustrating. Even basic things like why people keep making small random changes when most of these problems and solutions haven't changed in more than 2 millennia. And there is a pretty easy consensus to come to about what works. The repeated failures of authoritarianism to get to a good place are so consistent it is wild that people keep trying it.
The problem is that "the authoritarians" (read: almost every politician at every level of government, but a drastically increasing percentage the higher you go) only need to get something passed once then it is there forever.
Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing.
I emailed my local TD minister in Ireland about the inherent dangers of chat control. They had some lacky respond with an email that framed the conversation in a way that made it look like I was interested in the illegal content and not privacy/control or nefarious future governments.
When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes.
In this day and age, probably with a relatively tiny investment into public access points, we could very reasonably have a technically functional direct democracy. The legislative cycle is already authenticated so there's no need to solve "authenticated anonymous vote" problem, European countries already have functional eIDAS systems to back the authentication part and the legislative systems are already to some degree digitized.
On one hand, the problem "what if someone sells their vote" is already present and unsolved, in the shape of lobbying. What's interesting, though, that we have built entire systems to shape public opinion and entrenched them into our daily lives, which are used by corporations and politicians alike.
This begs a question: is there such a thing as unbiased public opinion without authenticated internet access?
inb4: direct democracy does not mean parliamentary systems could be abolished altogether, central spaces for debate would still help solve discussion exchange problems
> the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control
I'm not sure about that at all. All my normies friends have no problem immediately submitting their documents to any KYC service that requests it. And talking about chat control they happily parrot the propaganda points, which is something very normal given that they have no insight as we do.
So unfortunately I believe that the laymen are all in favor of chat control.
> the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control and the will to push it through tends to come from the political circles more than popular belief it is a good idea.
This is quite the statement. What evidence do you have that of this? Here in the UK, the equivalent bills are pretty widely supported across he board.
> I expect that if the measure itself went to a general vote, the majority would be against it once they have to deal with a specific proposal
This is likely true of pretty much anything, though. Imagine suggesting that people collectively fund a national road network by paying 20% of their income to the government (or whatever number your state/country/municipality chooses). All of a sudden it’s a terrible idea!
I disagree, if anything the last 12 years or so have shown that there are groups on both sides of the political spectrum that are quite willing to engage and justify censorship.
From "Muh freeze peach" to the actual government requested censorship during COVID everyone is rushing to get a new shiny stick they can use to beat their political opponents with.
I don't believe this. I believe us more tech oriented people live in a dangerous bubble that reassures us that obviously people are against it. But that's very likely not true.
> The repeated failures of authoritarianism to get to a good place are so consistent it is wild that people keep trying it.
Lee Kuan Yew would like a word.
The world is complicated. There may be more than one way to get to a good place, if we can even agree on what good looks like. Most people, even libertarians, think that some kind and degree of authoritarianism is beneficial in a government, we just disagree on the details.
But it’s not about critical thinking or governing well it’s about getting re-elected.
So the argument will go to “think of the children” which is a guise for more control and then pretty soon we are living in the dystopian future of 1984 or the UK where the film V for Vendetta took place.
This same kind of thinking gets idiots like Trump elected because people don’t have any sense of the commons and become single issue voters (sic). “Oh just reduce my taxes on my carried interest… reduce my taxes… I’m a xenophobe I hate immigrants let’s not do anything systematic let’s just hard close the border or the world is flat America only exists we don’t need allies or trading partners (JD Vance) … and so on”
I think there are many arguments for and against this type of regulation. Good arguments on both sides take into account nth-order effects. But both sides have different priorities, and have different weighing of the trade-offs. Calling one side effectively "thick" isn't really taking part in the debate.
(And cause and effect are taught pretty early on in school; not sure you need to learn "systems thinking" to understand nth-order effects.)
What are the nth-order effects that you think are not being considered or weighted accordingly by proponents of this regulation?
There are no good arguments for this type of regulation, but there are some very good arguments to not let kids to use proprietary software. You know, nothing is worse than a half-truth.
Violation of rights to privacy — age verification ties an identity to the request, so if you’re surfing porn or browsing controversial threads, you could be flagged by law enforcement or the other third parties that the state might be sharing data with, such as insurance companies that might infer the wrong things about you. You could be blackmailed, too.
And then there’s also the leakage of those data points to rival nation states, in case of a security breach.
Plenty of bad nth order effects if you just think about it
This is Whataboutism. Maybe the wolf has good reasons for leaving the stockyards gates open, it is a different perspective, yeah, but for the stock it is pretty clear good vs death.
Now of course, no one is going to “directly” dir from these laws but so much meaning that comes with freedom will be lost, but maybe the wolfs see it under a different light.
I've long held that Logic should be a part of the core high school curriculum. Understanding basic if/then propositions and a handful of axioms form a robust foundation for reasoning in any domain.
I agree with your broader point but I'm always skeptical of the claim "we should teach xyz in schools!" Because, well, choose your least favourite subject at school. A language, history or geography, mathematics perhaps. How much do you remember? The reason you don't remember is because you weren't motivated to learn, since you didn't, at the time, think it worth learning. If you think kids are champing at the bit to learn systems thinking, or how to file taxes, or law or anything else really then you are unfortunately wrong.
To me classes being boring and forgettable has more to do with the method of teaching than the subject. Just about anything can be made interesting with the right approach, and often that approach isn’t the typical textbooks, tests, and rote memorization.
Perhaps I’m biased, though. I learn best when provided with working practical examples and hands-on exercises that allow me to develop my own internal models. They can make a concept “click” where I’d be beating my head against a wall with traditional methods for a much longer period of time to achieve the same revelation.
And I agree with the commenter’s well-meaning, but we are technically teaching systems theory already in schools. If you’ve had classes in any of the natural sciences, you’ve had systems thinking. If you don’t remember a whit, well then, proves your point—it’s probably not that great of an idea afterall.
Having grown up through the early-ish days of the web, I'm still surprised the internet in general didn't get an 18+ age rating almost immediately.
Though I suppose that may have something to do with households in the early days having at most one internet connected device even if they were well off, so society could get away with blaming parents for not monitoring kids' use.
Don’t underestimate the impact of AOL - the main experience boomers and greatest generation had of the early internet was moderated and mediated. My parents were not on IRC.
This is an excellent point. I'm self educated while my wife holds multiple degrees and a masters. Yet when she saw a news article about age verification (something I've been following for years thanks to HN) she was like "this is good" and I'm like "why" and the ensuing discussion made it clear that she didn't really think about the repercussions of age verification, just that seemingly smart people in positions of power seemed to think it was a good idea.
And I think this is dangerous. We have smart people like my wife who would probably vote Yes on this if it came to our ballot, because the smart people who wrote the measure were able to control the narrative.
Not that I'm so smart, mind you. I just follow HN and EFF so I'm exposed to this kind of stuff. I'd probably be blind to such things outside of the tech world. I'd love to say that I'd think of nth order effects when at the ballot but honestly maybe I won't.
Admittedly it's a long time since I was in school, but when I was there the notion of teaching the benefits of physical activity was limited to being told to run about for some 'sport', and absolutely nothing about why that's a good idea. Everyone was expected to do the same thing with no consideration for ability, disability, or motivation. Kids were punished with detentions for refusing to endure painful exercise that they couldn't do as well as their more capable peers.
The very obvious second order effect of poor physical education is fat unmotivated adults who don't exercise. Maybe educators need some systems thinking training too.
most people simply dont care to control for higher order effects. they enjoy doing things on principle and then dealing with the effects seperately.
the principle of protecting children is strong. the solution of verification, no matter how poorly implemented, cannot be struck down while people are interested in persuing the principle it claims to represent.
the only other way around it is to come up with another solution that supports the principle and hope it gains more traction. but when the powers at be putting forth the verification may have ulterior motives to begin with, alternative solutions have a way of losing traction
In the US, the public school system can barely teach basic reading and math. And the teachers don't appear to understand 2nd or 3rd order thinking themselves so therefore are unlikely to be able to teach it.
Teaching systems thinking may be an effective solution but it needs an effective delivery system to test it.
Have you talked to any high school students or teachers lately? The ones I have (via my kids) are all articulate, thoughtful, and kind. It gives me a lot of hope for the future.
Nth order effects are unpredictable. You can only observe them after the fact. Systems thinking is a debugging methodology, not at all
a crystal ball. Witness: your comment makes a bunch of predictions that are very unlikely to be true.
If we taught systems thinking in any educational setting, and it took hold for a significant portion of the population, we would have already transcended into immortal thinking energy beings and age verification debates would be irrelevant....
it's not that they're bad at logic in general, it's that the "protecting the children" part gets them emotionally reactive, which bypasses logic. same thing happens when you tell a man who's emotionally reactive about his masculinity that soy will give him tits, just those words are enough to shut down his thinking.
people are plenty good at systems thinking. if we made them better at it, their emotional immaturity would still bypass it.
Unfortunately, I don't think systems thinking alone would help much.
One could present the case in favor of Internet age verification to the nth-order effects, while downplaying the effects in the case against.
So, in addition to presenting the cases with foreseeable effects, we need ways to compare the impact of worst-case scenarios in the two cases, and make a decision or compromise based on that.
Systems thinking is one thing. One sided systems thinking is another.
If you disregard the challenges kids and their parents, or adults as a whole, are facing with just social media, you can easily make a case against age verification.
Yet, the whole reason we are at this juncture, is because there are actual injuries being felt by people. Not because privacy isn’t valued or hasn’t been defended regularly.
Social media age verification is like none of those - social media is the modern public square and age verification is asking everybody to show their papers before participating in free speech in the public. It will have a chilling effect on free speech and will be a tool for authoritarian control
“Age verification” isn't a problem in itself, the problem is how it's done. They could issue a physical id card with a cryptographic chip and do the age verification in a zero-knowledge fashion and it would be perfectly fine.
The problem is the lack of thinking about the solution and just handwaving “age verification” as a political posture, which is why we end up with half-baked systems.
You're framing this as some desirable thing that could be good except that a bad implementation erodes privacy. That's wrong at every step. These bills originate from big tech such as Meta that literally profit from collecting as much personal info from you as possible. https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rsn1tm/it_a...
But even beyond their tainted origins, you can't implement your way out of something badly formed in the first place. You handwave "zero knowledge" but that doesn't do for your privacy what you're hoping it will. That id card will still have a serial number and CCTV of you purchasing it and you will de facto end up trusting some government binary blob to implement this cryptography correctly without backdoors. Snowden was a decade ago. This will have a backdoor. This will be used for surveillance, tomorrow even if by some miracle not today.
And finally, this makes the internet worse. There will be a section of people who are, for one reason or another, not able to pass this bar. Much of the goodness of the internet comes from being able to interact with anyone on it.
People fall through the cracks of the system. You suddenly can't use a digital service any more, because it requires you to use a specific technology that you can't obtain, even though you are old enough. You might be a refugee, you might be someone with special characters in their name or you might be someone from a country that simply doesn't provide recognized digital certifications. Or you might want to run a rooted operating system on your phone or computer.
This assumes good faith, which doesn't match reality. It's about control, not protecting children.
Also age verification is still a problem in itself. Given your idea of a physical card, kids will find a way to use the card of their parents. Even if the card couldn't be misused by others - you give platforms the knowledge of whom is a minor, which means they can be targeted better.
But to be effective you need to prove that the person presenting the ID is the person the ID belongs to.
In person that falls to a human being, and it's an easy and intuitive task that takes seconds.
On the internet this involves some kind of video recording being sent to some agency somewhere being paid a fee, who may later be asked to prove the efficacy of their service. This agency needs a digital copy of the photo from your ID for matching purposes. They'll be tempted to store this for auditing purposes... they'll also be tempted to store correlation IDs etc if the architecture allows.
The issue is trust. You just can't trust these first and third parties not to collaborate for commercial gain or at government demand or request.
And ultimately you're still exchanging verification at registration for a shareable credentials: I could use my ID to sign up to pornhub premium and then sell the username and password to a 16 year old if I wished, just like those buying alcohol can go and give it to the underage. A black market for digital credentials is even easier to establish than material goods
It is a problem in itself. First they want to know your age (they're pretending: of course they want to know your identity, but let's leave that for a moment).
What's next? Your US legal status as determined by your ethnicity? Scan your face to prove you're white? Yeah, that sounds absolutely ridiculous but so did the age verification with KYC just a few years ago.
Unless a tiny chance exists that some system in the middle is not secure. Then you have the problem of those who orient their acceptance to the "oh well" shrug, and then systemic faults get downplayed by default. (Edit: I re-read and notice 'half-baked systems': seemingly, we agree.)
> as a political posture
Which is the core problem of masses accepting pseudo-heartly and not-brainy unacceptable figures. And again, systemic faults incarnated as administrations get downplayed by default.
And it is focussed on social networks, which require an email address, which usually implies a device.
But instead of inserting controls around email addresses (as with paid services) or devices (as with contraband), the requirement is pushed to the application layer. It really makes no sense from a technical POV.
Parents who wish to have both the child and themselves remain sane are already watching over the way their offspring uses the internet.
Truth be told the worst kind of content is nominally child friendly - just incredibly addictive and overstimulating. We're all so preoccupied with preventing our children from looking at gore or porn or even meeting predators online that we forget that those who stand to make money on addictive content will pull every lever necessary.
We should assign one or two adults to children who provide for them, and prevent various dangers, including online ones, from reaching them. It sounds like a lot of effort, but it is also the most important task on the planet.
The existing paradigm is on-device parental controls. It's worked for the past 30 years, and the alternative is forcing everyone to show government ID to use websites.
Do you (or anyone else) have a good resource for learning systems thinking? I might have some from working in SE and just observing the world, but I've never studied it
And those that are keen to make some noise about it are labelled as being conspiracy minded or against the safety of children.
It causes a situation where because of the potential backlash, even if they are right, few people will come to the defense for fear of being ostracized as well.
Look, this is just a baseless opinion because we restrict things from various groups all the time. Gambling, tobacco, alcohol, drugs, firearms, pornography, voting, driver’s licenses, classified material, the list goes on.
Yet people will employ lazy slappery slope fallacies for this one issue in particular.
Give me a break - tech is not remotely interested in comprehensive “systems” thinking about the problems that motivated these age verification policies
have you considered that maybe the "elites/beneficiaries of such laws" - would find it disadvantageous to teach systems thinking to the unwashed masses. an example look at how slavery is taught in the southern united states.
most people that learn systems thinking is coz life forces them to.
In other words, without a solid, fundamental, national level of education, democracy just will not work. And any democratic institution which does not codify the right to education in very specific terms is inherently weak to degradation over time due to subverted interests in the ruling class.
How do we solve this problem? I wish I readily had an answer. But as we witness our democratic institutions crumble in real time, it's hard to imagine the average voter becoming more educated in our lifetime.
>> If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin. People struggle to consider the second-, third-, and nth-order effects of anything
Does this not imply we also wouldn't get the internet because people would have considered the damage it would also cause?
That's by design. Bringing up any kind of systemic issues, or applying a materialist reasoning to anything will get you taxed with communism. This is a classic strategy of the capital class, and is at the foundation of neoliberalism. In Thatcher's own words:
> There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.
They have to keep the population blind to any kind of systemic thinking to rob them blind.
I know systems thinking, and am in favor of a version of these types of legislation. Give me your best argument from systems thinking, and I'll give you a thoughtful reply.
The only reasonable solution shape I've seen is the one that trusts the parents to set an operating system setting that says whether or not the user is allowed to access adult content. And so it doesn't actually verify age, it just verifies parental intent.
The argument usually is that it is a slippery slope. Something that is introduced in the name of virtue ends up being co-opted into a system of control as those in power and peoples attitudes change with subsequent layers of normalization.
A significant part of the cultural value of the internet comes from free anonymous expression. As a key example, look at 4chan - anonymity taken to it's extreme has resulted in on one hand yes a lot of disgusting stuff, but also a cultural hotbed.
Age verification is de facto identity verification. Eff says it well:
> But no matter the method, every system demands users hand over sensitive and immutable personal information that links their offline identity to their online activity.
https://www.eff.org/issues/age-verification
Tying every action taken online to the user's real identity will have a deep and catastrophic chilling effect, destroying those very places that are creating our culture.
> If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin.
But why would we do that?
If we taught people how to think, they wouldn't sit their toddlers down in front an iPad for 8+ hours a day to entertain (read: keep them occupied and quiet) them with YouTube videos, sign them up for a Facebook account before they could wipe their own butts, etc.
The sad irony of this age verification thing is that if we had a decent society and parents with common sense, age verification wouldn't even be a topic.
Parents with common sense comes from teaching children common sense. You have to fix the child education issue first, a lot of adults are too far gone to educate at this point.
Uhh imagine you know about countries other than the US that implement age verification. Like the UK, Brazil, Australia, France, Spain, Italy and dozens of other countries with vastly different educational systems. Then perhaps you could begin to understand the magnitude of your own ignorance of actual power and political ideology. Instead of embarrassingly trying to reason yourself a political education from first principle.
Uh dumb law I don't like. Cause people dumb. If people not dumb, no dumb law. Uhh I am very smart. "Systems thinking" oh fucking hell stfu
Age verification starts the gating of Internet access by governments.
Any site, with any concern about age of user liability, is likely to adopt the practice. Strong laws, sold on their face value safety benefits, will increase that liability.
You won’t see any laws removing or limiting that liability.
The trend will be many more sites becoming government-gated, than we are imagining now.
Beyond surveillance, it’s a real step into government permissioned internet access, on an individual citizen level.
That might be an argument if it wasn’t already happening. US social media platforms already kowtow to domestic and foreign policy and you need look no further than the suppression by Google and Meta of content about Palestine.
What’s fascinating to me of that there are people who win vehemently oppose age verification yet have no absolutely no problem with anti-BDS laws, Gaza suppression, etc. Or worse, they’ll support those things.
I agree. But it's not clear to me that the downsides of this outweigh the upsides.
The government has control over many areas of life, and in most cases I feel that to be on balance a good thing, even though governments can be corrupt or inefficient.
Consider some other domain, like roads. In every country, the government issues licenses that include photographic ID to residents to drive on roads; driving without a license is illegal and can result in fines or even imprisonment. But this level of government control feels normal to people, and most would say the safety benefits outweigh the government interference.
I can walk those roads, or in many cases use a vehicle that doesn't meet licensing requirements such as a moped. Vehicles that do require licensing requirements do so because they've met a minimum threshold for potential danger. All this to say - none of that is like age gating the internet.
That’s because the consequences of unsafe driving is people dying or being maimed. Other than suicide and that one incident with facebook, people do not die in appreciable numbers due to things that happen on the internet.
One day we'll need remote attestation to even get an internet connection. "Untrusted" devices that have been "tampered with" need not apply.
Little by little, everything I hold dear is getting destroyed. Computers of our own, that we control, that we can freely hack on. Everything the word "hacker" stands for. How I wish I could turn back the clock...
And always have that phone on you at all times please.
This goes way beyond any notion of a "hacker tweaking his electronics".
With ID checks, device attestation and a device required for any transaction, and all this data piped in to a central brain (none of which are far fetched), we're all pretty much buggered.
It is a matter of time until advertising companies claw their way in, insurances calculate individual premiums based on behaviour, and remember, we're all one legislation away from being governed by lunatics.
Every time age verification comes up, it’s shocking how many comments here start proposing schemes where we use government-issued tokens combined with secure device attestation to solve the problem.
Some people get so focused on providing a technical solution to the problem of age verification without revealing your full ID to the website that they forget that they’re proposing we start requiring only government-approved devices and operating systems.
Through the lens of information warfare, it's hard not to view those comments as an astroturfing campaign from the exact organizations who would want device attestation
AI mass surveillance is another. The powerful are just ceasing opportunities to accumulate power and capital, seeing that right now it is not good enough for them.
We already have the mass surveillance, but the scale alone has traditionally been the obstacle to do something with it. But, we've had affordable "big data" processing for 20 years or more now (considering Hadoop) so AI is more of a next or different step to draw conclusions out of data. And it's limited by token consumption / context size, unlike big data stuff.
> making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system
Will be interesting to see if this leads to more Linux systems being deployed. Then again with systemd supporting age sniffing (https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954), evading this becomes harder and harder.
As the internet become the place where people do a lot of things, no government (and especially no security services) will be able to keep themselves from trying to control it or at least monitor it.
And with the new LLM features they can automatically do much more than before.
Human nature is a constant and when the government sees an easy way to enforce something, many more bureaucrats will try to do it.
I hear these alarm bells but what I don't understand is what the solution is to non-human or state actor internet commenting or social media campaigns. Most (maybe all?) sites are full of this. Without any sort of verification - how can this ever be solved?
Interesting that the author does not consider that "posts" and "messages" may be constructed using "AI" and the possibiility this might prevent attribution
Perhaps because the "AI" companies are carefully collecting data about users. Perhaps the "AI" companies, like the "social media" companies, know the identities of the authors of "posts" and "messages"
The advertising-based, surveilllance-through-intermediation "business model" of these third party intermediary companies depends on monitoring and learning as much about internet users as possible
Curiously, the author seems OK with the data collection by these third parties and their endless efforts to identity users for the purpose of selling access to them
The author's gripe seems to be with "the state"
Unfortunately, once the data is collected by these third parties, there is no way for the user to control who are its recipients. There is no way for the user to control with whom the collector may collaborate. It could be advertisers. It could be "the state". Indeed, in some cases, the user may not know. What if the collector is secretive, deceptive, unregulated
In the case of so-called "tech" companies all collecting data through intermediation, they are not prohibited from collaborating with anyone, including "the state"
Anyway, the author ends by urging users not to participate in data collection
Perhaps "age verification" is forcing some users to acknowledge that using third party intermediaries for communication and participating in the data collection "business model" of "social media" and "AI" companies, for example, using Mark Zuckerberg's website, Elon Musks's website, Larry Page's website, etc., to communicate or share files, is not worth the potential consequences
Technically true but as the commentator below you says, easily circumvented. Perhaps it's better to think of privacy/freedom of thought as a global human right...
And the neat part is that you can have agreements within a group of countries (say about five) to have them surveil your citizens and share what they find with you while you do the same for them.
We're been doing this for years in the UK. Not just at airports either, but the police actively surveil social media and arrest people for anything that might be considered remotely offensive.
I have wondered that. I have this one and a very VERY bland Facebook that I post something stupid on every 12 months or so. So in a strange way I have accidentally shielded myself.
Why participate? Why not just skip any site that wants a photo of ID? Also, those sites run massive liability risk for the inevitable data breaches that will occur.
This is a reminder to curate and prune all your past social media contribution, because when this goes thru, you KNOW they will apply it retroactively. You'd loathe to lose your cushy job over a moment of lucid honesty back in 2011.
Not your HN account though. They even stopped replying to my annual emails asking if it's "possible" yet. They originally help me change the name, and scrub any replies that mentioned the original name. That's not enough though, thanks to old copies of the site data that still have my original name, linked directly to the real HN post it appears on, showing up in search results.
I've been posting under my real name for over 20 years because this was always going to be the case. Using my real name is a constant reminder to not to post things I might later regret.
I haven’t had any social media accounts since I gave it up for Lent in 2018 and I’m increasingly starting to wonder if that’s a liability for me because there’s no social graph that whatever agency would otherwise use to, idk, confirm I’m not a threat or something. The lack of a digital footprint like that may look weird.
In the intel industry, it is known that metadata is more or less enough to identify people. That's state/military intel. Several countries have already implemented bulk acquisition / collection of data that "crosses the borders", which is a ridiculous concept.
If you're located in, say, Norway - and send someone who is also located in Norway a message via Messenger, there's a good likelihood that message will go to some foreign located Meta server, and back to Norway.
When this was being implemented, there was some noise and protests from experts, but that's about it. For the general population it went quietly and without notice.
The objective of these digital id laws being pushed through age verification is to be able to easily ! legally ! prosecute the dissidents. That's one thing the intelligence agencies could not do with their illegally collected data.
Isn't that the point of e2e encryption? Maybe I have a privileged US take but I've always not cared much for a border crossing in a round trip. It always seemed like a needless expense to have a full vertical server stack in each country to me.
I thought they were gonna wait until internet is flooded with AI content indistinguishable from human content, i.e. wait until people are begging for a "real human" badge which can only be enforced by ID. Instead they're forcing it early with the "but the children!" thing again.
If you look at how workers are mistreated in authoritarian corporations and how some people say it is perfectly fine because you get paid a lot of money to be used and abused, I can't imagine what a reality like this would look like. It does not stop with what you post online, we still can't really tell how our phones know about stuff we talk about irl to serve ads.
Parental controls. Client-side blocking of content. Apple's parental controls are so good that parents give young children unsupervised internet access--the entire generation if iPad babies. Current iPads even use on-device AI to detect nudity in photos and prevent them from being taken, sent, recieved, or viewed.
> These "age verification" laws are - by design - identity attribution systems. They attribute digital identities (accounts) to physical identities (SSN, ID, etc..
No, they don't. The proposed EU verification system provides a proof of age to the service but no physical identity data.
This is possibly a slippery slope, but I don't think it's correct to state the two things are equivalent.
"The Carnival in Venice was first documented in 1296, with a proclamation by the Venetian Senate announcing a public festival the day before the start of Lent. Unquestionably one of the most well-known Carnival festivities in the world, the Carnival of Venice is rife with mystery, adventure, and conspiracy. The day served to break down barriers between people of different economic standings and religious beliefs. During the Renaissance, masked comic performers performed in Venice's piazzas."
"The tradition of wearing masks seems to stem from the 13th century. During the ages the Venetians disguised themselves with mask whenever they thought necessary. It allowed them to escape from the rigid rules of the class hierarchy. All classes could mingle, men could be women, women could be men. It also led to unwanted behaviour, from throwing eggs filled with ink to all imaginable kinds of vulgarities. Masks made people unrecognisable, so they could not be prosecuted.
Near the end of the Republic, the right to wear masks in daily life was severely restricted. By the 18th century, it was limited to three months starting at December 26 and ending on the last day of Carnival, Shrove Tuesday. Masks were also used in ceremonies, eg. when ambassadors arrived and at the five ritual grand banquets offered each year to Venetian dignitaries by the doge. This resembles the Masquerade Balls during Carnival nowadays. Venetian noblemen and noblewomen wore a costume called a bautta consisting of a white mask (volto), a tricorn hat (tricorno), a hood worn under the hat (zendale) and a tabarro, a loose-fitting cloak. There were subtle differences between noble and non-noble (cittadini or popolani), and the popolani were known to wear more colorful, fun masks to festivities like the bull runs."
Count me among those who think publishers should always know who they’re publishing. When law enforcement comes knocking, a warrant should be all they need. Meta can’t shrug and say they don’t know who Batman1964 is.
There’s nothing new in publishing anonymously, just ask George Elliot. What’s new is the notion that publishers have no liability. Social media companies do not claim to speak for themselves. They have no reporters, no sources to protect. They’re one giant “letters to the editor” section. They should know for whom they speak.
Whether or not a writer commits libel is for the courts to decide. Neither the writer nor publisher has the right to avoid responsibility by camouflage.
What happens when federal agents kick down your front door because you ran a free range mom and pop BBS that did not comply with latest ID verification requirements?
Big companies will benefit the most from these regulations. It's just good ol regulatory capture. They will have the most resources to comply with the laws. They have a captive audience that will be more willing to give up their personal info when asked — keep in mind Facebook and instagram is widely used for business. It is your small time forum admin who would rather shut down his hobbyist online community that never made him any money anyway than to ask for IDs. We have already seen stories of websites shutting down due to existing UK regulations. Curiously, all small, personal operations, not the kind of corporate social media they tell you the laws are meant to target.
This is coming, eventually, and it will be a rehash of the 90s. Someone will have to be a sympathetic test case, and the EFF will get back into full gear.
Then either freedom wins again or freedom-loving individuals move to Soviet-style samizdat, “lying flat”, and clever subversion. And the world continues turning as usual.
If you violate memory protection you get a segfault, consistently. That isn't how the law works. Federal agents only kick down your door if they want to - which in this case probably means your forum users disparaged ICE or Trump.
And they absolutely should not scale. Scaling is the root cause of all social media ills. If all you see are the 100 people nearest to you, the village idiot will not be able to spread his gospel so easily
What we need is more personal spaces. Less feeds, more small group chats with people you actually know. I'm totally fine with destroying Reddit/Twitter/etc
Reddit and Twitter can buy their way out of those problems (hell, they can buy their way out of trouble for literally generating sexual abuse content). What makes you think they'll be affected more than the operator of a little Mastodon server do the same?
i want more feeds than centralized services can ever have. on bluesky youre not limited to fyp and following you can install literally hundreds of options. almost all of them are open source and self hostable.
theres a place for group chats and tight communities but we also need global spaces where you can reach anyone. you cant promote your new album or start organizing a union or share some really good pics with the world if all you have is individual servers.
> Conclusions: Despite the intent of the Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024 to delay access to social media platforms and reduce the potential for online harms, little evidence was found of immediate substantive reductions in reported social media use by adolescents under 16 years.
We are training teenagers that laws are stupid and can be circumvented easily and without consequences. As well as continuing to subject them to the harms of social media, only now without any means of monitoring them or holding the social media companies responsible.
This is like saying you're not concerned about war because people will notice war is bad and stop doing it. It's not a smart position to hold that bad things are good because they may bring on reversals.
Teens will just pass around micro SD cards full of memes, warez, and porn, like kids did in the old days with floppy disks. Finding creative ways around restrictions is pretty much the definition of being a teenager.
Automated fines, like traffic radar control for free speech, will also become a norm as they won't be able to put everyone in jail.
But I'm not sure the liberal anarcho-tyranny power will be indefinitely immutable. Speech control might be one their last try to keep control in the west. They will crumble like soviet union.
They have this in Germany for copyright. If you torrent, you automatically get a fine letter in your email. If you don't pay, you get a court summons in the post. If you take it to court, you will lose that case and also have to pay court fees.
It's funny how this played out in different countries.
In Australia there is no chance of anything happening, because the courts ruled that payouts were limited to provable incurred losses. You pirated a movie? The maximum awarded at the end of a court case is going to be about $20, and as you can't buy very much lawyer-time for $20, it's never taken to court and the copyright-holders have effectively stopped pursuing people here.
My theory is that age verification is just another way to push human verification. These large tech companies need a way to verify a user is a real person and not an AI bot. Both for displaying ads to real users and cutting down on spam.
Nobody would support a "give away my anonymity online so I can be shown an ad for Coca Cola" bill. But it's easier to sell a law to boomers and lawmakers if you use the disguise of "It's for the children ." As if any of these companies care about the well being of children. See Meta confirming their platforms affect the mental health of children and doing nothing about it. Also platforms like TikTok and YouTube optimizing their algorithms for stealing user's attention spans.
Indeed a lot of social media platforms are used by foreign powers to create discord. Human psychology is much more attentive to negative messages and this is too easy to weaponize. A solution against that would probably be world changing. It would have to preserve anonymity still of course.
We should actually protect minors, then they won't be able to use it as an excuse. Right now it works as an excuse because minors are being harmed by the unrestricted internet, mostly by social media.
They will always bring up a fringe matter to prove that statement wrong, no matter how much you will protect minors, someone else will still harm them and that is enough to justify these actions
I'm honestly amazed that people are only just figuring this out.
I know that reads like I'm being snarky, but I'm not trying to be. Within the last decade in the UK we have had (among others):
- the 2016 Snoopers' Charter
- the 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act
- the 2023 Public Order Act
- the 2023 Online Safety Act
- the 2024 Addendum to the 2016 Snoopers' Charter
Couple that with the whole push to repeal the 1998 Human Rights Act and withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, and the fact we've started imprisoning pensioners for holding up signs, and it's really difficult to _not_ see exactly where this leaves us.
I wish I could look away and get on with my life, but I can't - and I'm starting to realise that that is also part of the design. The increasing reluctance to express controversial opinion online isn't an accidental side effect of all of this legislation. It is intended behaviour, the desired outcome.
Britain doesn't need a European court to grant human rights to its own citizens. You know that the human rights act is not preventing government crackdowns on speech and privacy, and you will also know that the intention is to replace it with a human rights bill of our own.
The current act is being used by lawyers and judges to force migration on a country which never voted for it.
Now would we trust the clearly compromised political class we currently have to implement it? Probably not.
Right now, our identity is kinda tied to a string of letter (password). This password can technically be passed around, created and destroyed at will. Tomorrow, our identity is going to be tied to you as a person. So messages will be signed by YOU as a person.
"Don't let them win. Don't verify your age. Don't give up your identity. If you absolutely must, find one of the numerous age verification services and pay in Monero."
Better yet, how about - "call your representatives"?
Some nerds, for lack of a better term, think crypto and cryptography are the answers to every privacy problem. The only way to fix society and the law is by engaging with those things. Not sidestepping them with cryptography, an unscalable approach in any case.
I'm deeply pessimistic about the future. The only group competent enough to oppose identity verification has its head in the sand.
Have you been to a city council meeting lately ? Ever?
I'm trying to push for surveillance regulation where I live. I'm there monthly.
Calling your representative is the best way to realise that they don't give a fuck.
Yesterday I was editing a clip of one of them lying overtly.
It will be a minor inconveniences.
what we call democracy is a dog and ponies show.
So maybe cryptography is not that ridiculous, after all
Of course the system has a rather obvious remediation for that. You could also run for office or find a kindred spirit to support.
Trying to one to one with a representative or a council just sends them a signal to not care. You're one of n constituents. Showing up to the city council meeting without bringing an exponential curve of people with you over a short enough amount of time in support of your cause simply confirms to your representatives your cause is marginal.
If you are already cutting clips you might as well bite the bullet and run for office. Best of luck with your foray in democracy!
Not every lawmaker is the same and there's more than one way to get a lawmaker's attention.
Get more people with you. Or convince a group that's previously established trust in your jurisdiction to join you in speaking out. Or find out what causes the policymakers do care about and think of a compelling way to frame arguments against age verification in those terms. Heck - if you can get a local government agency to officially back you up, all the better.
There's more to politics than just going to town hall meetings or sending emails or making phone calls!
> These "age verification" laws are - by design - identity attribution systems. They attribute digital identities (accounts) to physical identities (SSN, ID, etc..). This is government's ideal situation, the ability to quickly (automatically?) get identifying information about inconvenient people regardless if they're a criminal or not.
I'll call it out because your article doesn't, but does reference Australia. Here our eSafety commissioner has set the requirements such that the use of Government ID for verification must not be the only option.
There are other age verification technologies that do not assign identity but use other means as a method to identify age. For example, when our ban came into play I wasn't all of a sudden required to offer my ID.
Techies have a real blind spot here. This stuff is very popular, like bipartisan support popular. Yes, it's a precursor to terrible things and they will happen but you have to convince people the the harms outweigh the benefits. Just asking "Why can't they tell the point of this" is not helpful or true. "The point of this" is decided by those pushing it, those pushing it are not politicians, they're parents and they're pushing it because they're scared of social media, not because they want to censor you.
You need to explain to and convince those parents that this will result in something worse.
It's also a huge gift to the very surveillance capitalists they're pretending to protect children from. It de-anonymizes everyone, including children, and with the first exploit and dump of of the database (which will absolutely happen), all those children's real identities will be known to every predator in the world in addition to the social media companies who've already shown they can't be trusted with personal data or the ability to track people across the internet.
It is a catastrophically dangerous idea, and it's exactly what the abusive social media companies want.
Point number 2 doesn't take that long and is largely automated.
This is the thing that so upsetting with the discourse. Privacy is already eroded, its just by private companies, not the state. All social networks have a gateway for law enforcement that allows getting extra details about users.
There is another gateway with ISPs to correlate IPs with end users.
In the USA you can just buy most of that info through brokers.
Sure, people who takes precautions it takes extra work, but for dave on facebook, its pretty automatic.
I really wish people would foccus on that bit, because the way to get privacy back is to get a handle on social media companies(and google). They are the ones who've eroded our privacy, and if we just say "Oooo age gating is bad mmkay" without a viable alternative, then we'll all get something worse.
The solution is to limit what social media companies can profit from, so _they_ can regulate what shit they put in front of kids eyes. They can totally do it (after all how much porn is actually hosted on youtube? its really really hard, because they put in place systems to stop it.)
The Trump administration has been treating dissent as illegal speech/behavior. It would be reasonable to presume that a replacement administration will continue this treatment.
Its not about saying illegal things. It's mostly about saying things that can get you canceled in future in future culture.
Dark jokes and strong opinions are example - you something filthy - let's say dark Holocaust/Nazi joke but funny in situation In group that accept it and it's ok. But if it's recorded, it'll stay forever and will surface in most unexpected moment, like job interview or some other screening by gov/corpos.
Don't say that dirty jokes should be punished in future if in given situation they were received as ok and only later someone else, not in situation is going to judge it
Are you arguing that Holocaust/Nazi jokes should be accepted socially, as long as you only deliver them to people who respond positively to Holocaust/Nazi jokes?
What if your phone listens to you all the time so it can detect "ok google" or "alexa" 24/7 but you happen to say something illegal with your device ID?
What if you brain storm a book/plot idea with a friend aloud and moments later the police knocks on your door because some system said you are about to commit a crime?
Because perfect law enforcement means society can never change. Imagine if, back when it was illegal to be gay, every gay person was immediately sentenced. Do you think we'd be accepting homosexuality today?
Yes, because the zeitgeist still changes regardless of enforcement. If all gay people were sentenced purely for their sexuality and nothing else, how long do you think it will take for ordinary folk to change their view? I reckon not long, unless the society is completely devoid of empathy and justice.
Because it has been shown that even if freedom is speech is a right that people will still be afraid to speak up if they know they are being monitored. Because the reality is that even if you are allowed to speak you might still be punished through other means.
This is much bigger than saying something illegal on the internet. This is about not being able to criticize your government without fear of retribution. Or how about if this was possible 60 years ago. Gays would have been all caught and gay rights never emerged. Or say you are discussing wanting an abortion and are arrested for arrested for it because at that point in time it is made illegal.
The right to have private communication is integral to a free and democratic society.
Morals change. Beliefs change. This is good. If you are monitored for everything we will be oppressed and stuck with no way to progress and grow.
Age verification is an excuse to hide the fact that parents have become useless and should have their rights of becoming parents revoked.
If you ask any millenial, none of this bs existed during our time, parents wouldn't think twice to educate you, if you know you know haha
That statement is weird in itself because said parents are yesterday's millenial.
Add to that how companies and governments are trying to become a China. You cannot silence those that you don't know who they are.
Ohh did you say something a politician or a cop didn't like??? Now they can hunt you down and force you to delete the post or whatever.
Sci-fi movies are no longer just si-fi movies, it is easier than never to:
1. Know how you are and all the consequence behind that
2. Be a victim of identity theft. Look at how many millions of personal information including passports have been leaked into the dark web. In 2026, if you have the right skill and like doing the wrong thing, you can be anyone because their name, address, phone, photo, passporte, everything, is right there.
What gives me peace of mind is that by the time everything goes to shit, I am not longer in this world lmao haha
I think you can look at all things pessimistically, like this article does but at the end of the day we all agree that there are things online we don't want our kids seeing or engaging with and it takes regulators to push how we protect them from those online places. What other options to regulators have?
Age restriction has been around for longer than the internet itself, so its regulators applying that logic to the online world.
Whilst I think age verification has its issues, I don't see what other options they actually have. I'll also make the point that in Australia, our regulations explicitly require that Government ID verification CANNOT be the only way and that companies must adopt an additional approach.
Almost everything in technology used to protect us can be used against us by those want or choosing to do the wrong thing, does that mean we don't do anything?
Why do you or anyone besides me (and my partner) get to decide what is ok for my kid to see?
If you want your kids to not see porn on the internet, cool. Don't give them Internet access. You don't need to make the internet worse for me and my family to make that rule for your family.
And maybe if you are parenting your child well, at some point you will be able to trust them to use the internet in a responsible way.
This is the best solution I've seen, and it's also the simplest. No authority is involved other than the parent. No complicated protocols, or heavy CS theory about privacy preserving algorithms. Just one setting, "this device belongs to a minor" and apps either honor it or they are not allowed in the App store. Will some parents turn it off for their 14 year old? Yes, but some parents buy beer for their 14 year olds. That's a different problem.
Apple, Google, and the social media companies could have done this 10 years ago and we would not even be having this debate today. But they decided they didn't have any social responsibility for what their devices and software did, so here we are.
Yep, there are all sorts of technically interesting ways in which age can be proven without identity being compromised, this link has a good exploration of anonymous credentials, for a start - https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymou...
And there are all sorts of reasons governments want to do this, up to and including the stated-on-the-surface reasons they give; a lot of people don't want their kids exposed to internet harms, be that extreme material or addictive services and doom-scrolling, and don't have the technical know-how to effect that themselves.
The insistence by so many in tech that there is no honest intent and that there is no way to practically provide age verification in a thoughtful, anonymous way is frustrating.
It's frustrating to see so many people engaged in effective conspiratorial thinking and it's frustrating because there are many good arguments to be had here, but they won't land if the 'anti' side doesn't address the real concerns that real people have about the safety and mental health of their kids.
> The insistence by so many in tech that there is no honest intent...
If there were honest intent, then the regs would be beefing up the "Parental Controls" mechanisms present in every major OS and commanding that there be fines for not respecting those settings. Not only does this mechanism require zero involvement of an unrelated third party, it allows a guardian to protect both a child too ignorant of the dangers of the world to be trusted to competently handle them and an adult whose mind has been so damaged by age and/or disease that they can no longer handle those same dangers.
Instead, the systems that we're getting are ones in which computer users are -when it's not mandatory- very, very strongly encouraged to present photo ID to a third party. While all the US regs I can find currently "only" require adding mechanisms for punching in a birth date, it's all but certain that continued evidence of minors lying about their age will cause those laws to be "upgraded" to require a photo ID.
The scary part is not "age checks today, secret police tomorrow". It is that once there is a convenient identity-verification layer for normal internet use, it will be very hard to keep it limited to the original purpose... Every future regulator, prosecutor, platform and "think of the children" campaign will have an incentive to expand it
What would you say to someone who is afraid that a bad actor will find their kids on Discord/Minecraft/4chan and encourage them to commit suicide or shoot up their school?
I would tell them to not give their children internet access at all until they think they are ready. Does it sound realistic? I don't know. From technical point of view certainly realistic, a child doesn't have money / devices of his own
It doesn't have to be, FWIW. We have all the technology we need to decouple attribution from identity. We can achieve efficient and mathematically perfect unlinkability.
Yet the powerful continue to insist on "papers, please" anonymity-rending personal authentication over anonymous authorization. It's not often that the villains of history so clearly identify themselves.
My bunch is that the people driving this stuff were unaware that age verification could be privacy-preserving and can't exactly back down now.
We do need a decentralized scalable permissionless platform for speech. For it to remain sustainable, there should be a slight cost in Monero to making each post on it, preloadable in batches.
That, and it defines children as perpetrators instead of victims. What right could a citizen ever claim in a world where even children are guilty?
There is a huge difference between protecting children and prosecuting/punishing children. Age verification can only be an implementation of the latter.
Look at W Social. The governments will team up with anyone, no matter how shady, as long as they promise to try to restrict free, unattributed speech. They'll team up with absolute sharks, as long as those sharks are gonna help sack and battle the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48584497
Fascism will lose in the long run. Right now the lobbyists
coordinate rather effectively, looking at how many democracies
already succumbed here. Well, we need direct democracy - the
system that we have right now with regard to democracies, is
undermined by corruption.
Yup "protecting kids" has a long, long history of being used as an excuse to restrict citizens rights, yet something like Epstein Island was happening with all the proponents of child protection being happy visitors of the said island.
Jevon McSkimming, the second most powerful person in the New Zealand police, under Jacinda Ardern, was arrested not long ago for viewing extreme kiddie porn involving animals and torture. He had been doing so on his work computer!
Complaints had been made against the man for years and been thrown out because of who he was, and the material was only found by accident.
This same individual had been yet another one of those arguing for tighter controls on the internet and free speech for the peasants.
Another one of these "one rule for me, another for thee" types.
The word "China" isn't mentioned once here and that really highlights how shallow this piece is. I've scannned the comments and there's the usual tropes about lack of freedom of speech but let's look at some recent events:
- A 30 year prison sentence for tansporting a box of zines in Texas [1]. To do so they invented "antifa" as an organization out of whole cloth and will now use those convictions as further proof. I've seen this compared to the Salem witch trials;
- Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident, was detained and there is still ongoing deportation proceedings. What for? Organizing a peaceful protest at Columbia against the genocide being committed by Israel [2];
- Renee Good and Alex Pretti who were simply protesting ICE were killed essentially in cold blood and there have been zero consequences;
- Over 700 charged under the Terrorist Act in the UK for expressing support for Palestine. Defenders will argue Palestine Action is a designated terrorism group without asking why. Also, that's how it always works. Slavery was legal once. Freeing slaves was illegal. Does that make the Underground Railroad a terrorist organization? Today it would;
- In ~35 states in the US to work for or in government you have to express varying degrees of loyalty to Israel or at least commit never to boycott Israel eg [3]. To date, the Supreme Court has never substantively taken up these cases as the clear First Amendment violation they are;
- In PA, the Swarthmore 9 are being charged over their protests with the bullshit charge of "defiant trespass" [4];
- In Australia, in the wake of the Bondi shooting, new anti-"hate crime" legislation was passed that is so broad and sweeping that the Greens claim you could be charged with criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu [5].
- Numerous examples of the administration pulling funding and bringing colleges to heel over not cracking down sufficiently on Gaza protests.
So why I find these tired tropes about China so exhausting and lazy is because:
1. Look at what's happening here and in the West at large; and
2. Ironically, China has a system for age verification that actually works and the answer is really simple. The government issues the IDs. It can verify the IDs. We do this all the time with employment (eg E-Verify). You can even do it in such a way that the app doesn't get any sensitive information.
But it's like people say "you can't trust government" (even though the government already has all that data) and then thinks that a private company is the only possible solution (eg Peter Thiel's Persona).
If you've gotten this far you should know that at no point in any of the above have I argued for age verification. So far all I've said is that there is an absolute double standard in the fearmongering around it and that is it possible to create a relatively effective regime for it without handing everyone's data to Peter Thiel.
I think it's inarguable at this point that what we're doing now has been a dismal failure and something's gotta give. I think we should start by attacking the financial incentives here, namely:
1. Tech companies already use behavioural analysis to guess your demographics. If they figure out you're under 18 you should have a restricted experience. That should include no advertising, a much more limited algorithmic feed, etc;
2. Stop tech companies from being able to sell advertising to minors. Don't allow an advertiser to target an audience that includes minors as best as the tech company knows they are minors.
I personally think we could eliminate a bunch of harm just by attacking the advertising incentive here.
I find myself in an odd predicament. For nearly all my life I would have seen all of this as an unconscionable anathema. But having watched what social media has done to our society, the tsunami of bullshit collapsing critical thought, science and reason I just don’t think civilisation can survive this without controls. Too many people are too gullible, too uncritical for it to survive without the state being able to curtail harmful speech at scale. Do I hate it? Absolutely. But I hate the alternative more. And I want the bounds of acceptable speech to be decided by my democratically elected government, not a bunch of American billionaires determined to burn society to the ground so they can pan the ashes for yet more gold.
Wouldn't it be better to curtail social media's addictive design choices, and improve things for everyone, rather than force the audience to carry the weight of responsibility?
The problem isn't social media per se, but rather how social media is designed, and this design is driven by profits and big tech. There are, at least in Europe, no alternatives to the big social media platforms.
I'm not too keen on social media bans, because this neither elimates the desire for social media, nor social media in itself.
>But having watched what social media has done to our society, the tsunami of bullshit collapsing critical thought, science and reason I just don’t think civilisation can survive this without controls.
None of this is new. Every single one of these things has been pointed out millennia ago.
You had already evaluated it and made your decision (against censorship) on this decades ago when you first came across it.
Changing your view now isn't a matter of new information coming to light. It's a matter of you disliking the obvious and inevitable consequences that you had been warned of going into it.
Perhaps it's time you stop changing your mind based on totalitarian propaganda and realize you don't know what you're doing, and stop supporting censorship.
Gonna repost this comment I made last week, as no one interacted with its core idea.
I am torn. I have bore first-hand witness to the scale of the PsyOps war waged on the American people by institutions near and far. Artroturfing to sew division to one means of another.
In all these operations, anonymity is what drives it.
I was born and raised in the anonymous internet, and tasted its freedoms. I oppose censorship. But, at this point, I have come to wonder it it would be best to always have your real-life personality attached to all you do. At least to any action that feeds an algorithm or creates something someone else can see.
It is the nature of the internet that you could never achieve absolute censorship -- and maybe anonymity should belong to the hackers and tinkers with the will and drive to hunt and craft for it.
I do not like holding this opinion, because it feels as though it is on the similar boat as that of those who 'pull up the ladder after themselves'. Increasingly, I see it as pulling shut the trapdoors to hell.
P.S. This goes without saying -- it's also the only was to defend against "ai" bots.
EDIT: I'm thoroughly convinced that my initial position here was wrong. Yeah -- easy to forget that, with, COINTELPRO, the feds are not bound by the same laws as the people, and that oligarch-controlled media will bend over backwards to give them backdoors. Thanks for all the feedback.
> In all these operations, anonymity is what drives it.
The most egregious, prolific lies out there have been fully attributed; and perhaps especially because of attribution, people vehemently disagree on which are the lies.
Those who wield outsized power experience attribution of speech asymmetrically. Filtering societal communication supports the concentration of power.
> But, at this point, I have come to wonder it it would be best to always have your real-life personality attached to all you do. At least to any action that feeds an algorithm or creates something someone else can see.
If attaching your real self to everything is so important, why does it only seem to restrain those without power, while those with the most influence can say whatever benefits them and face no consequences?
Interesting point, as at one point large internet companies like Facebook and Google/Youtube made real names mandatory - Facebook going as far as asking your "friends" to rat on you.
In theory it was a great way to prevent abuse - are people still horrible on the internet if they use their real name? Turns out they are, because it only took a few years of internet for people to no longer have any shame.
- age/identity verification comes with banning of bot traffic posing as human in any communication platform, by law
- end to end encrypted communication is declared a fundamental human right, by law
I don't think we'll see that though. Too much money / power left on the table.
If this is the case then I simply won’t engage.
90 % will not engage and you’re left with the 10% who are willing to put everything they do out there publicly and permanently- probably because they have an ulterior motive or commercial reason to do so
>But, at this point, I have come to wonder it it would be best to always have your real-life personality attached to all you do.
I also had similar thoughts to you, but seeing the election results of the previous decade in the US makes me question the premise that transparency will lead to desirable results because the majority have good intentions.
And that is Europe. The US wouldnt hesitate 2 seconds before shoving you into a federal prison.
> It is the nature of the internet that you could never achieve absolute censorship
Oh yes you can. The only reason you have a 'free' internet now is because the US had to rush its internet out without implementing the censorship and control mechanisms it planned because the USSR was about to release its own internet. Now they are making up for their mistake.
Disliking data centers, illegal immigration, or taxes is not a crime in the United States, nor is posting inconvenient messages about politicians, nor is getting a little too rowdy in a group chat. And none of these things are likely to be made illegal any time soon.
I always find this form of argument in favor of privacy (which is valuable in its own right to be clear) so roundabout. If you’re concerned about the government impinging on your freedom of speech, then why not write an essay arguing for expansive freedom of speech protections? That seems like a much more direct solution to the problem presented in this essay.
I’m not exactly sure how an abuse of power occurring at a public event relates to the question of privacy or freedom of speech. The law did not allow the officer to arrest the man for the content of his speech so he retaliated by enforcing a different law unjustly. This kind of selective enforcement of the law can be a violation of federal law and the man likely has standing to sue.
Note that age verification does not rely on you handing over identifying information to the party requesting it, that's just one possible implementation. Another more privacy conscious one is e.g. iDIN or whatever comes after, which works a bit like oauth in that you're redirected to a trusted 3rd party like your bank which only confirms "this person is 18+" to the requesting party.
The only thing that the requester needs to save is the "this person is 18+ as verified by this party".
Granted, that's still an avenue for law enforcement to find out who you are, but then, so is your internet service provider or VPN (where the VPN is likely already a honeypot)
"Monday’s headline was a ban on under-16s using social media which, to some, sounds about as sinister as a wholesome ribbon-cutting until you ask the obvious question nobody in Downing Street wants asked aloud: how, precisely, do you stop a fourteen-year-old from opening Instagram without first checking the age of the forty-year-old?
You don’t. You can’t. So everyone gets carded. Britain is lifting the system wholesale from Australia, where a computer first scans your face and guesses your age from your cheekbones, then, failing that, surveils you to death, studies your browsing habits and the hours you keep, and then, when the algorithm throws up its hands, simply demands your passport."
If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin. People struggle to consider the second-, third-, and nth-order effects of anything so asking them to consider what else might happen if we bring in laws and technical mechanisms to 'protect the children' is unfortunately too a big leap for a lot of them. Most people are bad at spotting causal links between parts of a system, and people who are good at it exploit that.
In fairness, the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control and the will to push it through tends to come from the political circles more than popular belief it is a good idea. I expect that if the measure itself went to a general vote, the majority would be against it once they have to deal with a specific proposal. It takes repeated pushes by the authoritarians looking for an opportunity to get things like speech controls or privacy violations through and the politicians mysteriously give up trying to roll it back no matter what the public pressure might be.
That being said, any expectation of thoughtfulness at all makes politics frustrating. Even basic things like why people keep making small random changes when most of these problems and solutions haven't changed in more than 2 millennia. And there is a pretty easy consensus to come to about what works. The repeated failures of authoritarianism to get to a good place are so consistent it is wild that people keep trying it.
The problem is that "the authoritarians" (read: almost every politician at every level of government, but a drastically increasing percentage the higher you go) only need to get something passed once then it is there forever.
Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing.
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I emailed my local TD minister in Ireland about the inherent dangers of chat control. They had some lacky respond with an email that framed the conversation in a way that made it look like I was interested in the illegal content and not privacy/control or nefarious future governments.
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When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes.
In this day and age, probably with a relatively tiny investment into public access points, we could very reasonably have a technically functional direct democracy. The legislative cycle is already authenticated so there's no need to solve "authenticated anonymous vote" problem, European countries already have functional eIDAS systems to back the authentication part and the legislative systems are already to some degree digitized.
On one hand, the problem "what if someone sells their vote" is already present and unsolved, in the shape of lobbying. What's interesting, though, that we have built entire systems to shape public opinion and entrenched them into our daily lives, which are used by corporations and politicians alike.
This begs a question: is there such a thing as unbiased public opinion without authenticated internet access?
inb4: direct democracy does not mean parliamentary systems could be abolished altogether, central spaces for debate would still help solve discussion exchange problems
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Stupid things like brexit was put to a vote, but really important things such as age verification and mass surveillance are never put to any vote.
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> the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control
I'm not sure about that at all. All my normies friends have no problem immediately submitting their documents to any KYC service that requests it. And talking about chat control they happily parrot the propaganda points, which is something very normal given that they have no insight as we do.
So unfortunately I believe that the laymen are all in favor of chat control.
I agree that it is not always mass public demand for authoritarianism. Often it is more like institutional persistence plus vague moral framing
I’m not in favour of Chat Control;
> the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control and the will to push it through tends to come from the political circles more than popular belief it is a good idea.
This is quite the statement. What evidence do you have that of this? Here in the UK, the equivalent bills are pretty widely supported across he board.
> I expect that if the measure itself went to a general vote, the majority would be against it once they have to deal with a specific proposal
This is likely true of pretty much anything, though. Imagine suggesting that people collectively fund a national road network by paying 20% of their income to the government (or whatever number your state/country/municipality chooses). All of a sudden it’s a terrible idea!
I disagree, if anything the last 12 years or so have shown that there are groups on both sides of the political spectrum that are quite willing to engage and justify censorship.
From "Muh freeze peach" to the actual government requested censorship during COVID everyone is rushing to get a new shiny stick they can use to beat their political opponents with.
> the evidence is
I don't believe this. I believe us more tech oriented people live in a dangerous bubble that reassures us that obviously people are against it. But that's very likely not true.
> The repeated failures of authoritarianism to get to a good place are so consistent it is wild that people keep trying it.
Lee Kuan Yew would like a word.
The world is complicated. There may be more than one way to get to a good place, if we can even agree on what good looks like. Most people, even libertarians, think that some kind and degree of authoritarianism is beneficial in a government, we just disagree on the details.
But it’s not about critical thinking or governing well it’s about getting re-elected.
So the argument will go to “think of the children” which is a guise for more control and then pretty soon we are living in the dystopian future of 1984 or the UK where the film V for Vendetta took place.
This same kind of thinking gets idiots like Trump elected because people don’t have any sense of the commons and become single issue voters (sic). “Oh just reduce my taxes on my carried interest… reduce my taxes… I’m a xenophobe I hate immigrants let’s not do anything systematic let’s just hard close the border or the world is flat America only exists we don’t need allies or trading partners (JD Vance) … and so on”
I think there are many arguments for and against this type of regulation. Good arguments on both sides take into account nth-order effects. But both sides have different priorities, and have different weighing of the trade-offs. Calling one side effectively "thick" isn't really taking part in the debate.
(And cause and effect are taught pretty early on in school; not sure you need to learn "systems thinking" to understand nth-order effects.)
What are the nth-order effects that you think are not being considered or weighted accordingly by proponents of this regulation?
There are no good arguments for this type of regulation, but there are some very good arguments to not let kids to use proprietary software. You know, nothing is worse than a half-truth.
Violation of rights to privacy — age verification ties an identity to the request, so if you’re surfing porn or browsing controversial threads, you could be flagged by law enforcement or the other third parties that the state might be sharing data with, such as insurance companies that might infer the wrong things about you. You could be blackmailed, too.
And then there’s also the leakage of those data points to rival nation states, in case of a security breach.
Plenty of bad nth order effects if you just think about it
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This is Whataboutism. Maybe the wolf has good reasons for leaving the stockyards gates open, it is a different perspective, yeah, but for the stock it is pretty clear good vs death.
Now of course, no one is going to “directly” dir from these laws but so much meaning that comes with freedom will be lost, but maybe the wolfs see it under a different light.
I've long held that Logic should be a part of the core high school curriculum. Understanding basic if/then propositions and a handful of axioms form a robust foundation for reasoning in any domain.
I agree with your broader point but I'm always skeptical of the claim "we should teach xyz in schools!" Because, well, choose your least favourite subject at school. A language, history or geography, mathematics perhaps. How much do you remember? The reason you don't remember is because you weren't motivated to learn, since you didn't, at the time, think it worth learning. If you think kids are champing at the bit to learn systems thinking, or how to file taxes, or law or anything else really then you are unfortunately wrong.
To me classes being boring and forgettable has more to do with the method of teaching than the subject. Just about anything can be made interesting with the right approach, and often that approach isn’t the typical textbooks, tests, and rote memorization.
Perhaps I’m biased, though. I learn best when provided with working practical examples and hands-on exercises that allow me to develop my own internal models. They can make a concept “click” where I’d be beating my head against a wall with traditional methods for a much longer period of time to achieve the same revelation.
And I agree with the commenter’s well-meaning, but we are technically teaching systems theory already in schools. If you’ve had classes in any of the natural sciences, you’ve had systems thinking. If you don’t remember a whit, well then, proves your point—it’s probably not that great of an idea afterall.
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Having grown up through the early-ish days of the web, I'm still surprised the internet in general didn't get an 18+ age rating almost immediately.
Though I suppose that may have something to do with households in the early days having at most one internet connected device even if they were well off, so society could get away with blaming parents for not monitoring kids' use.
Don’t underestimate the impact of AOL - the main experience boomers and greatest generation had of the early internet was moderated and mediated. My parents were not on IRC.
This is an excellent point. I'm self educated while my wife holds multiple degrees and a masters. Yet when she saw a news article about age verification (something I've been following for years thanks to HN) she was like "this is good" and I'm like "why" and the ensuing discussion made it clear that she didn't really think about the repercussions of age verification, just that seemingly smart people in positions of power seemed to think it was a good idea.
And I think this is dangerous. We have smart people like my wife who would probably vote Yes on this if it came to our ballot, because the smart people who wrote the measure were able to control the narrative.
Not that I'm so smart, mind you. I just follow HN and EFF so I'm exposed to this kind of stuff. I'd probably be blind to such things outside of the tech world. I'd love to say that I'd think of nth order effects when at the ballot but honestly maybe I won't.
Well we teach people the health benefits of physical activity school but many don't continue with it.
Sorry, this is going to be a rant. :)
Admittedly it's a long time since I was in school, but when I was there the notion of teaching the benefits of physical activity was limited to being told to run about for some 'sport', and absolutely nothing about why that's a good idea. Everyone was expected to do the same thing with no consideration for ability, disability, or motivation. Kids were punished with detentions for refusing to endure painful exercise that they couldn't do as well as their more capable peers.
The very obvious second order effect of poor physical education is fat unmotivated adults who don't exercise. Maybe educators need some systems thinking training too.
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No, not everyone exploits that. But those that reject these controls are often ridiculed because the thought about any side effect is too alien.
Yet I don't think age verification will work with national IDs for that matter. I generally use social media sites that won't implement it.
But yes, the normal insta/tiktok user will be affected and not think too much about it. Others will have true freedom of speech.
> I generally use social media sites that won't implement it.
Which social media sites won't implement it?
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A lot of bad tech policy seems to come from judging a proposal only by its stated intent
carefully crafted stated intent
Well people that have been hearing of the slippery slope fallacy their whole life might end up biased against such an approach
> If we taught systems thinking in schools ...
This plus methods of narrative steering and psychological manipulation in general.
Though I can't see this happenning while the transnational cartel is still at the helm.
most people simply dont care to control for higher order effects. they enjoy doing things on principle and then dealing with the effects seperately.
the principle of protecting children is strong. the solution of verification, no matter how poorly implemented, cannot be struck down while people are interested in persuing the principle it claims to represent.
the only other way around it is to come up with another solution that supports the principle and hope it gains more traction. but when the powers at be putting forth the verification may have ulterior motives to begin with, alternative solutions have a way of losing traction
> "If we taught systems thinking in schools"
In the US, the public school system can barely teach basic reading and math. And the teachers don't appear to understand 2nd or 3rd order thinking themselves so therefore are unlikely to be able to teach it.
Teaching systems thinking may be an effective solution but it needs an effective delivery system to test it.
Have you talked to any high school students or teachers lately? The ones I have (via my kids) are all articulate, thoughtful, and kind. It gives me a lot of hope for the future.
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Nth order effects are unpredictable. You can only observe them after the fact. Systems thinking is a debugging methodology, not at all a crystal ball. Witness: your comment makes a bunch of predictions that are very unlikely to be true.
Nth order effects are unpredictable. You can only observe them after the fact. Systems thinking is a debugging methodology, not at all a crystal ball.
If we taught systems thinking in any educational setting, and it took hold for a significant portion of the population, we would have already transcended into immortal thinking energy beings and age verification debates would be irrelevant....
it's not that they're bad at logic in general, it's that the "protecting the children" part gets them emotionally reactive, which bypasses logic. same thing happens when you tell a man who's emotionally reactive about his masculinity that soy will give him tits, just those words are enough to shut down his thinking.
people are plenty good at systems thinking. if we made them better at it, their emotional immaturity would still bypass it.
Unfortunately, I don't think systems thinking alone would help much.
One could present the case in favor of Internet age verification to the nth-order effects, while downplaying the effects in the case against.
So, in addition to presenting the cases with foreseeable effects, we need ways to compare the impact of worst-case scenarios in the two cases, and make a decision or compromise based on that.
Concur.
Systems thinking is one thing. One sided systems thinking is another.
If you disregard the challenges kids and their parents, or adults as a whole, are facing with just social media, you can easily make a case against age verification.
Yet, the whole reason we are at this juncture, is because there are actual injuries being felt by people. Not because privacy isn’t valued or hasn’t been defended regularly.
No, we have any number of social constructs around 'age and responsibility' - driving, alcohol, pubs, porn, excessive violence and so much more.
It's bereft to suggest that we wouldn't nominally have those in the digital world.
And, people are concerned about nth order effects, it's a huge point of debate.
Yes - there is a huge slippery slope argument to be made, but it's an argument ... to be made. There are all sorts of ways of doing this.
Social media age verification is like none of those - social media is the modern public square and age verification is asking everybody to show their papers before participating in free speech in the public. It will have a chilling effect on free speech and will be a tool for authoritarian control
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“Age verification” isn't a problem in itself, the problem is how it's done. They could issue a physical id card with a cryptographic chip and do the age verification in a zero-knowledge fashion and it would be perfectly fine.
The problem is the lack of thinking about the solution and just handwaving “age verification” as a political posture, which is why we end up with half-baked systems.
I strongly disagree.
You're framing this as some desirable thing that could be good except that a bad implementation erodes privacy. That's wrong at every step. These bills originate from big tech such as Meta that literally profit from collecting as much personal info from you as possible. https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rsn1tm/it_a...
But even beyond their tainted origins, you can't implement your way out of something badly formed in the first place. You handwave "zero knowledge" but that doesn't do for your privacy what you're hoping it will. That id card will still have a serial number and CCTV of you purchasing it and you will de facto end up trusting some government binary blob to implement this cryptography correctly without backdoors. Snowden was a decade ago. This will have a backdoor. This will be used for surveillance, tomorrow even if by some miracle not today.
And finally, this makes the internet worse. There will be a section of people who are, for one reason or another, not able to pass this bar. Much of the goodness of the internet comes from being able to interact with anyone on it.
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People fall through the cracks of the system. You suddenly can't use a digital service any more, because it requires you to use a specific technology that you can't obtain, even though you are old enough. You might be a refugee, you might be someone with special characters in their name or you might be someone from a country that simply doesn't provide recognized digital certifications. Or you might want to run a rooted operating system on your phone or computer.
This assumes good faith, which doesn't match reality. It's about control, not protecting children.
Also age verification is still a problem in itself. Given your idea of a physical card, kids will find a way to use the card of their parents. Even if the card couldn't be misused by others - you give platforms the knowledge of whom is a minor, which means they can be targeted better.
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But to be effective you need to prove that the person presenting the ID is the person the ID belongs to.
In person that falls to a human being, and it's an easy and intuitive task that takes seconds.
On the internet this involves some kind of video recording being sent to some agency somewhere being paid a fee, who may later be asked to prove the efficacy of their service. This agency needs a digital copy of the photo from your ID for matching purposes. They'll be tempted to store this for auditing purposes... they'll also be tempted to store correlation IDs etc if the architecture allows.
The issue is trust. You just can't trust these first and third parties not to collaborate for commercial gain or at government demand or request.
And ultimately you're still exchanging verification at registration for a shareable credentials: I could use my ID to sign up to pornhub premium and then sell the username and password to a 16 year old if I wished, just like those buying alcohol can go and give it to the underage. A black market for digital credentials is even easier to establish than material goods
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It is a problem in itself. First they want to know your age (they're pretending: of course they want to know your identity, but let's leave that for a moment).
What's next? Your US legal status as determined by your ethnicity? Scan your face to prove you're white? Yeah, that sounds absolutely ridiculous but so did the age verification with KYC just a few years ago.
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"Age verification" is designed to attribute your identity to your online presence. As such, it's done just right.
> and it would be perfectly fine
Unless a tiny chance exists that some system in the middle is not secure. Then you have the problem of those who orient their acceptance to the "oh well" shrug, and then systemic faults get downplayed by default. (Edit: I re-read and notice 'half-baked systems': seemingly, we agree.)
> as a political posture
Which is the core problem of masses accepting pseudo-heartly and not-brainy unacceptable figures. And again, systemic faults incarnated as administrations get downplayed by default.
And it is focussed on social networks, which require an email address, which usually implies a device.
But instead of inserting controls around email addresses (as with paid services) or devices (as with contraband), the requirement is pushed to the application layer. It really makes no sense from a technical POV.
What’s the alternative? How do you solve the problem of not allowing children into online spaces where they shouldn’t be allowed in?
Parents who wish to have both the child and themselves remain sane are already watching over the way their offspring uses the internet.
Truth be told the worst kind of content is nominally child friendly - just incredibly addictive and overstimulating. We're all so preoccupied with preventing our children from looking at gore or porn or even meeting predators online that we forget that those who stand to make money on addictive content will pull every lever necessary.
We should assign one or two adults to children who provide for them, and prevent various dangers, including online ones, from reaching them. It sounds like a lot of effort, but it is also the most important task on the planet.
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The existing paradigm is on-device parental controls. It's worked for the past 30 years, and the alternative is forcing everyone to show government ID to use websites.
Do you (or anyone else) have a good resource for learning systems thinking? I might have some from working in SE and just observing the world, but I've never studied it
Journalists are supposed to be helping the people by doing it.
Most people just want to blame someone else of their problems
And those that are keen to make some noise about it are labelled as being conspiracy minded or against the safety of children.
It causes a situation where because of the potential backlash, even if they are right, few people will come to the defense for fear of being ostracized as well.
Look, this is just a baseless opinion because we restrict things from various groups all the time. Gambling, tobacco, alcohol, drugs, firearms, pornography, voting, driver’s licenses, classified material, the list goes on.
Yet people will employ lazy slappery slope fallacies for this one issue in particular.
Give me a break - tech is not remotely interested in comprehensive “systems” thinking about the problems that motivated these age verification policies
You can exploit both ways.
have you considered that maybe the "elites/beneficiaries of such laws" - would find it disadvantageous to teach systems thinking to the unwashed masses. an example look at how slavery is taught in the southern united states.
most people that learn systems thinking is coz life forces them to.
Classic STEM guy thinking that STEM is the cure for everything
In other words, without a solid, fundamental, national level of education, democracy just will not work. And any democratic institution which does not codify the right to education in very specific terms is inherently weak to degradation over time due to subverted interests in the ruling class.
How do we solve this problem? I wish I readily had an answer. But as we witness our democratic institutions crumble in real time, it's hard to imagine the average voter becoming more educated in our lifetime.
>> If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin. People struggle to consider the second-, third-, and nth-order effects of anything
Does this not imply we also wouldn't get the internet because people would have considered the damage it would also cause?
That's by design. Bringing up any kind of systemic issues, or applying a materialist reasoning to anything will get you taxed with communism. This is a classic strategy of the capital class, and is at the foundation of neoliberalism. In Thatcher's own words:
> There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.
They have to keep the population blind to any kind of systemic thinking to rob them blind.
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That page says most kids can barely read. Are you a kid?
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I know systems thinking, and am in favor of a version of these types of legislation. Give me your best argument from systems thinking, and I'll give you a thoughtful reply.
The only reasonable solution shape I've seen is the one that trusts the parents to set an operating system setting that says whether or not the user is allowed to access adult content. And so it doesn't actually verify age, it just verifies parental intent.
The argument usually is that it is a slippery slope. Something that is introduced in the name of virtue ends up being co-opted into a system of control as those in power and peoples attitudes change with subsequent layers of normalization.
A significant part of the cultural value of the internet comes from free anonymous expression. As a key example, look at 4chan - anonymity taken to it's extreme has resulted in on one hand yes a lot of disgusting stuff, but also a cultural hotbed.
Age verification is de facto identity verification. Eff says it well:
> But no matter the method, every system demands users hand over sensitive and immutable personal information that links their offline identity to their online activity. https://www.eff.org/issues/age-verification
Tying every action taken online to the user's real identity will have a deep and catastrophic chilling effect, destroying those very places that are creating our culture.
Almost anything can be a slippery slope to almost anything. We'd never get anything done.
> If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin.
What about climate change and the current mass extinction?
Yes those might be slightly more iimportant.
> If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin.
But why would we do that?
If we taught people how to think, they wouldn't sit their toddlers down in front an iPad for 8+ hours a day to entertain (read: keep them occupied and quiet) them with YouTube videos, sign them up for a Facebook account before they could wipe their own butts, etc.
The sad irony of this age verification thing is that if we had a decent society and parents with common sense, age verification wouldn't even be a topic.
Parents with common sense comes from teaching children common sense. You have to fix the child education issue first, a lot of adults are too far gone to educate at this point.
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I don't get why you would start there. Their parents probably didn't have youtube or ipads and they and/or their parents are the ones pushing it.
Uhh imagine you know about countries other than the US that implement age verification. Like the UK, Brazil, Australia, France, Spain, Italy and dozens of other countries with vastly different educational systems. Then perhaps you could begin to understand the magnitude of your own ignorance of actual power and political ideology. Instead of embarrassingly trying to reason yourself a political education from first principle.
Uh dumb law I don't like. Cause people dumb. If people not dumb, no dumb law. Uhh I am very smart. "Systems thinking" oh fucking hell stfu
Age verification starts the gating of Internet access by governments.
Any site, with any concern about age of user liability, is likely to adopt the practice. Strong laws, sold on their face value safety benefits, will increase that liability.
You won’t see any laws removing or limiting that liability.
The trend will be many more sites becoming government-gated, than we are imagining now.
Beyond surveillance, it’s a real step into government permissioned internet access, on an individual citizen level.
That might be an argument if it wasn’t already happening. US social media platforms already kowtow to domestic and foreign policy and you need look no further than the suppression by Google and Meta of content about Palestine.
What’s fascinating to me of that there are people who win vehemently oppose age verification yet have no absolutely no problem with anti-BDS laws, Gaza suppression, etc. Or worse, they’ll support those things.
> suppression by Google and Meta of content about Palestine
That is nonsense. This type of content appears on my TikTok/Reels feeds nonstop even if I don't interact with it.
I agree. But it's not clear to me that the downsides of this outweigh the upsides.
The government has control over many areas of life, and in most cases I feel that to be on balance a good thing, even though governments can be corrupt or inefficient.
Consider some other domain, like roads. In every country, the government issues licenses that include photographic ID to residents to drive on roads; driving without a license is illegal and can result in fines or even imprisonment. But this level of government control feels normal to people, and most would say the safety benefits outweigh the government interference.
I can walk those roads, or in many cases use a vehicle that doesn't meet licensing requirements such as a moped. Vehicles that do require licensing requirements do so because they've met a minimum threshold for potential danger. All this to say - none of that is like age gating the internet.
That’s because the consequences of unsafe driving is people dying or being maimed. Other than suicide and that one incident with facebook, people do not die in appreciable numbers due to things that happen on the internet.
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Age verification is just one part of this crackdown.
Device attestation is another - making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system and apps linked to your ID.
One day we'll need remote attestation to even get an internet connection. "Untrusted" devices that have been "tampered with" need not apply.
Little by little, everything I hold dear is getting destroyed. Computers of our own, that we control, that we can freely hack on. Everything the word "hacker" stands for. How I wish I could turn back the clock...
And people called Stallman alarmist. Truth is, if you give them an inch they take a mile every time, so a hardline stance is strictly required.
And always have that phone on you at all times please.
This goes way beyond any notion of a "hacker tweaking his electronics".
With ID checks, device attestation and a device required for any transaction, and all this data piped in to a central brain (none of which are far fetched), we're all pretty much buggered.
It is a matter of time until advertising companies claw their way in, insurances calculate individual premiums based on behaviour, and remember, we're all one legislation away from being governed by lunatics.
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Every time age verification comes up, it’s shocking how many comments here start proposing schemes where we use government-issued tokens combined with secure device attestation to solve the problem.
Some people get so focused on providing a technical solution to the problem of age verification without revealing your full ID to the website that they forget that they’re proposing we start requiring only government-approved devices and operating systems.
Through the lens of information warfare, it's hard not to view those comments as an astroturfing campaign from the exact organizations who would want device attestation
Not too shocking. Many people’s jobs here require that they pretend that they’re not coding for fascism.
AI mass surveillance is another. The powerful are just ceasing opportunities to accumulate power and capital, seeing that right now it is not good enough for them.
We already have the mass surveillance, but the scale alone has traditionally been the obstacle to do something with it. But, we've had affordable "big data" processing for 20 years or more now (considering Hadoop) so AI is more of a next or different step to draw conclusions out of data. And it's limited by token consumption / context size, unlike big data stuff.
I think you mean "seizing". "Ceasing opportunities" means the precise opposite of what I think you intend to say.
Age verification is the visible, easy-to-sell layer. Device attestation is the more structural one...
That's why the politicians need to make it clear that what they're talking about is device attestation.
I'm an optimist, but I don't think any age verification laws will gain traction without first solving the device attestation problem.
> making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system
Will be interesting to see if this leads to more Linux systems being deployed. Then again with systemd supporting age sniffing (https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954), evading this becomes harder and harder.
Lennart Poettering is here to make sure Linux won't be a safe place for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
Why would it? Such a government would just... not approve Linux, if it interfered with their objectives.
Evading what exactly? If the age verification is a flag sent by the OS and you are the OS administrator, you can do whatever you want.
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Systemd changes don’t make it harder, you control the damn OS at the source code level if you choose.
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It gives a new spin to:
> Everything you say CAN and WILL be used against you.
Especially when what you said has already been recorded and tied to your identity before you faced the authorities.
Edit: from last week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632269
Cory Doctorow had a very profound talk about it very long time ago (10+years).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
As the internet become the place where people do a lot of things, no government (and especially no security services) will be able to keep themselves from trying to control it or at least monitor it. And with the new LLM features they can automatically do much more than before.
Human nature is a constant and when the government sees an easy way to enforce something, many more bureaucrats will try to do it.
I hear these alarm bells but what I don't understand is what the solution is to non-human or state actor internet commenting or social media campaigns. Most (maybe all?) sites are full of this. Without any sort of verification - how can this ever be solved?
Interesting that the author does not consider that "posts" and "messages" may be constructed using "AI" and the possibiility this might prevent attribution
Perhaps because the "AI" companies are carefully collecting data about users. Perhaps the "AI" companies, like the "social media" companies, know the identities of the authors of "posts" and "messages"
The advertising-based, surveilllance-through-intermediation "business model" of these third party intermediary companies depends on monitoring and learning as much about internet users as possible
Curiously, the author seems OK with the data collection by these third parties and their endless efforts to identity users for the purpose of selling access to them
The author's gripe seems to be with "the state"
Unfortunately, once the data is collected by these third parties, there is no way for the user to control who are its recipients. There is no way for the user to control with whom the collector may collaborate. It could be advertisers. It could be "the state". Indeed, in some cases, the user may not know. What if the collector is secretive, deceptive, unregulated
In the case of so-called "tech" companies all collecting data through intermediation, they are not prohibited from collaborating with anyone, including "the state"
Anyway, the author ends by urging users not to participate in data collection
Perhaps "age verification" is forcing some users to acknowledge that using third party intermediaries for communication and participating in the data collection "business model" of "social media" and "AI" companies, for example, using Mark Zuckerberg's website, Elon Musks's website, Larry Page's website, etc., to communicate or share files, is not worth the potential consequences
This is already happening if you want to visit the US. Customs officers will look at your social media accounts to make sure you are compliant.
surveillance of foreigners (particularly) with residence in a different country is a different issue from surveillance of own citizens.
Technically true but as the commentator below you says, easily circumvented. Perhaps it's better to think of privacy/freedom of thought as a global human right...
And the neat part is that you can have agreements within a group of countries (say about five) to have them surveil your citizens and share what they find with you while you do the same for them.
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We're been doing this for years in the UK. Not just at airports either, but the police actively surveil social media and arrest people for anything that might be considered remotely offensive.
And if you say you don't have any, they'll assume you're lying and deny you.
It's good that I don't have any reason to go to the US.
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I have wondered that. I have this one and a very VERY bland Facebook that I post something stupid on every 12 months or so. So in a strange way I have accidentally shielded myself.
Why participate? Why not just skip any site that wants a photo of ID? Also, those sites run massive liability risk for the inevitable data breaches that will occur.
This is a reminder to curate and prune all your past social media contribution, because when this goes thru, you KNOW they will apply it retroactively. You'd loathe to lose your cushy job over a moment of lucid honesty back in 2011.
It's already too late for that but you can at least, by deleting now, reduce the chances they see it.
Not your HN account though. They even stopped replying to my annual emails asking if it's "possible" yet. They originally help me change the name, and scrub any replies that mentioned the original name. That's not enough though, thanks to old copies of the site data that still have my original name, linked directly to the real HN post it appears on, showing up in search results.
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I can see it now: boards of directors will only hire CEOs from the amish population, it's the only way to avoid criticism.
I've been posting under my real name for over 20 years because this was always going to be the case. Using my real name is a constant reminder to not to post things I might later regret.
sigh, another typo on my permanent record.
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I haven’t had any social media accounts since I gave it up for Lent in 2018 and I’m increasingly starting to wonder if that’s a liability for me because there’s no social graph that whatever agency would otherwise use to, idk, confirm I’m not a threat or something. The lack of a digital footprint like that may look weird.
What do you consider social media? Because I'd definitely classify this site as one.
In the intel industry, it is known that metadata is more or less enough to identify people. That's state/military intel. Several countries have already implemented bulk acquisition / collection of data that "crosses the borders", which is a ridiculous concept.
If you're located in, say, Norway - and send someone who is also located in Norway a message via Messenger, there's a good likelihood that message will go to some foreign located Meta server, and back to Norway.
When this was being implemented, there was some noise and protests from experts, but that's about it. For the general population it went quietly and without notice.
The objective of these digital id laws being pushed through age verification is to be able to easily ! legally ! prosecute the dissidents. That's one thing the intelligence agencies could not do with their illegally collected data.
Isn't that the point of e2e encryption? Maybe I have a privileged US take but I've always not cared much for a border crossing in a round trip. It always seemed like a needless expense to have a full vertical server stack in each country to me.
Wondering if someone can explain the logic
I thought they were gonna wait until internet is flooded with AI content indistinguishable from human content, i.e. wait until people are begging for a "real human" badge which can only be enforced by ID. Instead they're forcing it early with the "but the children!" thing again.
If you look at how workers are mistreated in authoritarian corporations and how some people say it is perfectly fine because you get paid a lot of money to be used and abused, I can't imagine what a reality like this would look like. It does not stop with what you post online, we still can't really tell how our phones know about stuff we talk about irl to serve ads.
Do you remember the pipa/sopa protests from like a decade ago?
The internet, as we knew it, is over. It has been dead for a few years, but it is getting clear now only. It had its great moments, while it lasted.
Maybe it should be possible for a parent to set a child age in a device.
Everyone else can stay anonymous.
I look forward to hearing why that won't work and what problems it will cause.
If the server can trust the device, then you don't need the parent, you can use a digital-enabled id card or passport.
This is in fact the EU age verification app
https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/european-ag...
The concern here is the trust in the device appears to be tied to proprietary os/device vendors.
Parental controls. Client-side blocking of content. Apple's parental controls are so good that parents give young children unsupervised internet access--the entire generation if iPad babies. Current iPads even use on-device AI to detect nudity in photos and prevent them from being taken, sent, recieved, or viewed.
You're describing California AB1043 which passed a few months ago and is now the law in California. We all got very angry about it when it passed.
How does the parent prove they are the parent. All you need is to think about the next step, come on now.
…upon device purchase? Very obviously?
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> These "age verification" laws are - by design - identity attribution systems. They attribute digital identities (accounts) to physical identities (SSN, ID, etc..
No, they don't. The proposed EU verification system provides a proof of age to the service but no physical identity data.
This is possibly a slippery slope, but I don't think it's correct to state the two things are equivalent.
Maybe not the laws, but the systems being built are attribute based.
"The Carnival in Venice was first documented in 1296, with a proclamation by the Venetian Senate announcing a public festival the day before the start of Lent. Unquestionably one of the most well-known Carnival festivities in the world, the Carnival of Venice is rife with mystery, adventure, and conspiracy. The day served to break down barriers between people of different economic standings and religious beliefs. During the Renaissance, masked comic performers performed in Venice's piazzas."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_in_Italy#Venice
"The tradition of wearing masks seems to stem from the 13th century. During the ages the Venetians disguised themselves with mask whenever they thought necessary. It allowed them to escape from the rigid rules of the class hierarchy. All classes could mingle, men could be women, women could be men. It also led to unwanted behaviour, from throwing eggs filled with ink to all imaginable kinds of vulgarities. Masks made people unrecognisable, so they could not be prosecuted.
Near the end of the Republic, the right to wear masks in daily life was severely restricted. By the 18th century, it was limited to three months starting at December 26 and ending on the last day of Carnival, Shrove Tuesday. Masks were also used in ceremonies, eg. when ambassadors arrived and at the five ritual grand banquets offered each year to Venetian dignitaries by the doge. This resembles the Masquerade Balls during Carnival nowadays. Venetian noblemen and noblewomen wore a costume called a bautta consisting of a white mask (volto), a tricorn hat (tricorno), a hood worn under the hat (zendale) and a tabarro, a loose-fitting cloak. There were subtle differences between noble and non-noble (cittadini or popolani), and the popolani were known to wear more colorful, fun masks to festivities like the bull runs."
https://www.carnival-in-venice.eu/venetian-carnival-masks.ht...
Mask in real life then, mask in social internet now. Meaning stays the same. I like this analogy.
Count me among those who think publishers should always know who they’re publishing. When law enforcement comes knocking, a warrant should be all they need. Meta can’t shrug and say they don’t know who Batman1964 is.
There’s nothing new in publishing anonymously, just ask George Elliot. What’s new is the notion that publishers have no liability. Social media companies do not claim to speak for themselves. They have no reporters, no sources to protect. They’re one giant “letters to the editor” section. They should know for whom they speak.
Whether or not a writer commits libel is for the courts to decide. Neither the writer nor publisher has the right to avoid responsibility by camouflage.
Freedom of expression is inseparable from the right to privacy.
Should journalists be forced to reveal their sources if the subject of a claim sues for defamation?
Freedom of expression is not absolute and never was.
Should everyone just shrug off anonymous hoaxes and hate speech?
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I don't like age verification. However I'm not concerned about it.
The internet needs new spaces that are more decentralized and less in bed with governments.
We already lost our freedom when we agreed to move from IRC to Discord, from phpBB to Reddit, etc.
The teenagers who are blocked from mainstream social media will deliver us new free online spaces that are better than what they're blocked from.
What happens when federal agents kick down your front door because you ran a free range mom and pop BBS that did not comply with latest ID verification requirements?
Big companies will benefit the most from these regulations. It's just good ol regulatory capture. They will have the most resources to comply with the laws. They have a captive audience that will be more willing to give up their personal info when asked — keep in mind Facebook and instagram is widely used for business. It is your small time forum admin who would rather shut down his hobbyist online community that never made him any money anyway than to ask for IDs. We have already seen stories of websites shutting down due to existing UK regulations. Curiously, all small, personal operations, not the kind of corporate social media they tell you the laws are meant to target.
This is coming, eventually, and it will be a rehash of the 90s. Someone will have to be a sympathetic test case, and the EFF will get back into full gear.
Then either freedom wins again or freedom-loving individuals move to Soviet-style samizdat, “lying flat”, and clever subversion. And the world continues turning as usual.
If you violate memory protection you get a segfault, consistently. That isn't how the law works. Federal agents only kick down your door if they want to - which in this case probably means your forum users disparaged ICE or Trump.
I mean, social networks already made genocide happen. They they were instrumental in the curren winning march of fascism - in USA, in EU in Asia.
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It seems unlikely that running a website without age verification will be illegal across the entire planet.
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Such spaces will never scale if there's widespread legal prohibitions.
It is foolish to assume we can innovate our way around the law as opposed to talking with lawmakers to oppose the law before it gets on the books.
And they absolutely should not scale. Scaling is the root cause of all social media ills. If all you see are the 100 people nearest to you, the village idiot will not be able to spread his gospel so easily
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That sounds like mistaken optimism due to a mistaken interpretation of the invisible hand.
Mandating age verification and the inevitable implementation requirements are bad for freedom.
Behaviour changes and innovations will mitigate some of the negatives, but bad things are bad.
What we need is more personal spaces. Less feeds, more small group chats with people you actually know. I'm totally fine with destroying Reddit/Twitter/etc
Reddit and Twitter can buy their way out of those problems (hell, they can buy their way out of trouble for literally generating sexual abuse content). What makes you think they'll be affected more than the operator of a little Mastodon server do the same?
i want more feeds than centralized services can ever have. on bluesky youre not limited to fyp and following you can install literally hundreds of options. almost all of them are open source and self hostable.
theres a place for group chats and tight communities but we also need global spaces where you can reach anyone. you cant promote your new album or start organizing a union or share some really good pics with the world if all you have is individual servers.
Nope, they just break the law:
https://www.bmj.com/content/393/bmj-2026-363695
> Conclusions: Despite the intent of the Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024 to delay access to social media platforms and reduce the potential for online harms, little evidence was found of immediate substantive reductions in reported social media use by adolescents under 16 years.
We are training teenagers that laws are stupid and can be circumvented easily and without consequences. As well as continuing to subject them to the harms of social media, only now without any means of monitoring them or holding the social media companies responsible.
The law doesn't make it a crime for children to access social media, but for the companies that provided it to allow that child to access it.
They already have started right ? Like example - bluesky (bsky.social)
The only thing teenagers are delivering is doomscrolling addiction. Seems improper me that the revert to something like irc en mass
This is like saying you're not concerned about war because people will notice war is bad and stop doing it. It's not a smart position to hold that bad things are good because they may bring on reversals.
You do realize the next step is ISP-level tagging of traffic? And VPNs are already being outlawed in much of the western world.
Unless you expect the teenagers to run underground mesh radio networks and risk FCC's hammer (real jailtime), it's just wishful thinking.
Teens will just pass around micro SD cards full of memes, warez, and porn, like kids did in the old days with floppy disks. Finding creative ways around restrictions is pretty much the definition of being a teenager.
I don’t expect teenagers to do anything but largely be harmed by the internet.
Automated fines, like traffic radar control for free speech, will also become a norm as they won't be able to put everyone in jail. But I'm not sure the liberal anarcho-tyranny power will be indefinitely immutable. Speech control might be one their last try to keep control in the west. They will crumble like soviet union.
They have this in Germany for copyright. If you torrent, you automatically get a fine letter in your email. If you don't pay, you get a court summons in the post. If you take it to court, you will lose that case and also have to pay court fees.
It's funny how this played out in different countries.
In Australia there is no chance of anything happening, because the courts ruled that payouts were limited to provable incurred losses. You pirated a movie? The maximum awarded at the end of a court case is going to be about $20, and as you can't buy very much lawyer-time for $20, it's never taken to court and the copyright-holders have effectively stopped pursuing people here.
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Imagine a machine mounted on the wall that prints you a ticket every time you swear
My theory is that age verification is just another way to push human verification. These large tech companies need a way to verify a user is a real person and not an AI bot. Both for displaying ads to real users and cutting down on spam.
Nobody would support a "give away my anonymity online so I can be shown an ad for Coca Cola" bill. But it's easier to sell a law to boomers and lawmakers if you use the disguise of "It's for the children ." As if any of these companies care about the well being of children. See Meta confirming their platforms affect the mental health of children and doing nothing about it. Also platforms like TikTok and YouTube optimizing their algorithms for stealing user's attention spans.
many platform companies probably do not want to verify that a user is real, except in certain niche cases, as bots help them pump their numbers.
The ad companies I think would want the opposite
If they cannot distinguish real people from bots they can just charge more for more ads shown !
Indeed a lot of social media platforms are used by foreign powers to create discord. Human psychology is much more attentive to negative messages and this is too easy to weaponize. A solution against that would probably be world changing. It would have to preserve anonymity still of course.
That's why recaptcha is now doing human verification via mobile phone QR scan
You're right. Many countries use the protection of minors as an excuse, but in reality, they just want to strengthen the regulation of speech.
We should actually protect minors, then they won't be able to use it as an excuse. Right now it works as an excuse because minors are being harmed by the unrestricted internet, mostly by social media.
They will always bring up a fringe matter to prove that statement wrong, no matter how much you will protect minors, someone else will still harm them and that is enough to justify these actions
> they just want
Because you know their motivations. You've spoken to 'them'.
I'm honestly amazed that people are only just figuring this out.
I know that reads like I'm being snarky, but I'm not trying to be. Within the last decade in the UK we have had (among others):
- the 2016 Snoopers' Charter
- the 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act
- the 2023 Public Order Act
- the 2023 Online Safety Act
- the 2024 Addendum to the 2016 Snoopers' Charter
Couple that with the whole push to repeal the 1998 Human Rights Act and withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, and the fact we've started imprisoning pensioners for holding up signs, and it's really difficult to _not_ see exactly where this leaves us.
I wish I could look away and get on with my life, but I can't - and I'm starting to realise that that is also part of the design. The increasing reluctance to express controversial opinion online isn't an accidental side effect of all of this legislation. It is intended behaviour, the desired outcome.
It’s a great time to build parallel systems and networks among likeminded individuals.
If you see tyranny coming, your options (other than silent complicity) are pretty much build a support network or exit.
Britain doesn't need a European court to grant human rights to its own citizens. You know that the human rights act is not preventing government crackdowns on speech and privacy, and you will also know that the intention is to replace it with a human rights bill of our own.
The current act is being used by lawyers and judges to force migration on a country which never voted for it.
Now would we trust the clearly compromised political class we currently have to implement it? Probably not.
Right now, our identity is kinda tied to a string of letter (password). This password can technically be passed around, created and destroyed at will. Tomorrow, our identity is going to be tied to you as a person. So messages will be signed by YOU as a person.
"Don't let them win. Don't verify your age. Don't give up your identity. If you absolutely must, find one of the numerous age verification services and pay in Monero."
Better yet, how about - "call your representatives"?
Some nerds, for lack of a better term, think crypto and cryptography are the answers to every privacy problem. The only way to fix society and the law is by engaging with those things. Not sidestepping them with cryptography, an unscalable approach in any case.
I'm deeply pessimistic about the future. The only group competent enough to oppose identity verification has its head in the sand.
Have you been to a city council meeting lately ? Ever?
I'm trying to push for surveillance regulation where I live. I'm there monthly.
Calling your representative is the best way to realise that they don't give a fuck. Yesterday I was editing a clip of one of them lying overtly. It will be a minor inconveniences.
what we call democracy is a dog and ponies show.
So maybe cryptography is not that ridiculous, after all
Of course the system has a rather obvious remediation for that. You could also run for office or find a kindred spirit to support.
Trying to one to one with a representative or a council just sends them a signal to not care. You're one of n constituents. Showing up to the city council meeting without bringing an exponential curve of people with you over a short enough amount of time in support of your cause simply confirms to your representatives your cause is marginal.
If you are already cutting clips you might as well bite the bullet and run for office. Best of luck with your foray in democracy!
Not every lawmaker is the same and there's more than one way to get a lawmaker's attention.
Get more people with you. Or convince a group that's previously established trust in your jurisdiction to join you in speaking out. Or find out what causes the policymakers do care about and think of a compelling way to frame arguments against age verification in those terms. Heck - if you can get a local government agency to officially back you up, all the better.
There's more to politics than just going to town hall meetings or sending emails or making phone calls!
> Calling your representative is the best way to realise that they don't give a fuck
That just means not enough people did it.
> So maybe cryptography is not that ridiculous, after all
Until they make that illegal. What'll you do then?
It. Doesn't. Scale.
Law alone cannot fix it. Tech alone cannot fix it.
If we wish to preserve the values we grew up with, we need both.
Law can fix 90% of it. Tech can fix 10%.
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> These "age verification" laws are - by design - identity attribution systems. They attribute digital identities (accounts) to physical identities (SSN, ID, etc..). This is government's ideal situation, the ability to quickly (automatically?) get identifying information about inconvenient people regardless if they're a criminal or not.
I'll call it out because your article doesn't, but does reference Australia. Here our eSafety commissioner has set the requirements such that the use of Government ID for verification must not be the only option.
There are other age verification technologies that do not assign identity but use other means as a method to identify age. For example, when our ban came into play I wasn't all of a sudden required to offer my ID.
Techies have a real blind spot here. This stuff is very popular, like bipartisan support popular. Yes, it's a precursor to terrible things and they will happen but you have to convince people the the harms outweigh the benefits. Just asking "Why can't they tell the point of this" is not helpful or true. "The point of this" is decided by those pushing it, those pushing it are not politicians, they're parents and they're pushing it because they're scared of social media, not because they want to censor you.
You need to explain to and convince those parents that this will result in something worse.
It's also a huge gift to the very surveillance capitalists they're pretending to protect children from. It de-anonymizes everyone, including children, and with the first exploit and dump of of the database (which will absolutely happen), all those children's real identities will be known to every predator in the world in addition to the social media companies who've already shown they can't be trusted with personal data or the ability to track people across the internet.
It is a catastrophically dangerous idea, and it's exactly what the abusive social media companies want.
I should probably stop advocating for systematically killing the ultra-wealthy huh
The author made an assertive statement without any hint of rhetoric, reasoning, historical parallel, evidence, legislative example etc.
The bad thing about this:
Can you trust future governments to respect "Nulla poena sine lege"?
Point number 2 doesn't take that long and is largely automated.
This is the thing that so upsetting with the discourse. Privacy is already eroded, its just by private companies, not the state. All social networks have a gateway for law enforcement that allows getting extra details about users.
There is another gateway with ISPs to correlate IPs with end users.
In the USA you can just buy most of that info through brokers.
Sure, people who takes precautions it takes extra work, but for dave on facebook, its pretty automatic.
I really wish people would foccus on that bit, because the way to get privacy back is to get a handle on social media companies(and google). They are the ones who've eroded our privacy, and if we just say "Oooo age gating is bad mmkay" without a viable alternative, then we'll all get something worse.
The solution is to limit what social media companies can profit from, so _they_ can regulate what shit they put in front of kids eyes. They can totally do it (after all how much porn is actually hosted on youtube? its really really hard, because they put in place systems to stop it.)
If I say something illegal during a meeting, people will notice it and will report it to the police. Then I may get arrested or fined.
Why should it be different on the internet ? Provided we live in countries where freedom of speech is enacted.
Of course in Russia or china it's different but surely they already have tools like that.
It's not different on the internet. If you commit a crime on the internet it's still illegal and it can still be reported to the police.
What makes you suggest otherwise?
How do you "say something illegal" ?
You speak against the Party or its leaders.
The Trump administration has been treating dissent as illegal speech/behavior. It would be reasonable to presume that a replacement administration will continue this treatment.
Its not about saying illegal things. It's mostly about saying things that can get you canceled in future in future culture.
Dark jokes and strong opinions are example - you something filthy - let's say dark Holocaust/Nazi joke but funny in situation In group that accept it and it's ok. But if it's recorded, it'll stay forever and will surface in most unexpected moment, like job interview or some other screening by gov/corpos.
Don't say that dirty jokes should be punished in future if in given situation they were received as ok and only later someone else, not in situation is going to judge it
Are you arguing that Holocaust/Nazi jokes should be accepted socially, as long as you only deliver them to people who respond positively to Holocaust/Nazi jokes?
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What if your phone listens to you all the time so it can detect "ok google" or "alexa" 24/7 but you happen to say something illegal with your device ID?
What if you brain storm a book/plot idea with a friend aloud and moments later the police knocks on your door because some system said you are about to commit a crime?
What if your neuralink reports unacceptable thoughts to the police?
Because perfect law enforcement means society can never change. Imagine if, back when it was illegal to be gay, every gay person was immediately sentenced. Do you think we'd be accepting homosexuality today?
Yes, because the zeitgeist still changes regardless of enforcement. If all gay people were sentenced purely for their sexuality and nothing else, how long do you think it will take for ordinary folk to change their view? I reckon not long, unless the society is completely devoid of empathy and justice.
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> If I say something illegal
A situation that should be impossible due to freedom of speech.
Here are some crimes you can commit by speaking, where freedom of speech cannot be used as a defence:
- assault / terror threats
- extortion / blackmail
- fraud
- conspiracy / solicitation to commit a crime
- treason / sedition
- perjury
- slander
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Because it has been shown that even if freedom is speech is a right that people will still be afraid to speak up if they know they are being monitored. Because the reality is that even if you are allowed to speak you might still be punished through other means.
This is much bigger than saying something illegal on the internet. This is about not being able to criticize your government without fear of retribution. Or how about if this was possible 60 years ago. Gays would have been all caught and gay rights never emerged. Or say you are discussing wanting an abortion and are arrested for arrested for it because at that point in time it is made illegal. The right to have private communication is integral to a free and democratic society. Morals change. Beliefs change. This is good. If you are monitored for everything we will be oppressed and stuck with no way to progress and grow.
I feel we are there already.
The weather is a bit rainy now but there is sun in the forecast for afternoon.
^^^ that is all we have left to discuss already in personal conversations at work anyways.
Feels like the run up to the "current world" in a Peter Watts novel
Age verification is an excuse to hide the fact that parents have become useless and should have their rights of becoming parents revoked.
If you ask any millenial, none of this bs existed during our time, parents wouldn't think twice to educate you, if you know you know haha
That statement is weird in itself because said parents are yesterday's millenial.
Add to that how companies and governments are trying to become a China. You cannot silence those that you don't know who they are.
Ohh did you say something a politician or a cop didn't like??? Now they can hunt you down and force you to delete the post or whatever.
Sci-fi movies are no longer just si-fi movies, it is easier than never to:
1. Know how you are and all the consequence behind that
2. Be a victim of identity theft. Look at how many millions of personal information including passports have been leaked into the dark web. In 2026, if you have the right skill and like doing the wrong thing, you can be anyone because their name, address, phone, photo, passporte, everything, is right there.
What gives me peace of mind is that by the time everything goes to shit, I am not longer in this world lmao haha
> Ohh did you say something a politician or a cop didn't like??? Now they can hunt you down and force you to delete the post or whatever.
Thats not true, as displayed by the recent Afroman case.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/19/entertainment/afroman-law...
> should have their rights of becoming parents revoked.
Ok. So what does it mean to revoke the right for someone to become parents? Be honest and be specific.
I think you can look at all things pessimistically, like this article does but at the end of the day we all agree that there are things online we don't want our kids seeing or engaging with and it takes regulators to push how we protect them from those online places. What other options to regulators have?
Age restriction has been around for longer than the internet itself, so its regulators applying that logic to the online world.
Whilst I think age verification has its issues, I don't see what other options they actually have. I'll also make the point that in Australia, our regulations explicitly require that Government ID verification CANNOT be the only way and that companies must adopt an additional approach.
Almost everything in technology used to protect us can be used against us by those want or choosing to do the wrong thing, does that mean we don't do anything?
Why do you or anyone besides me (and my partner) get to decide what is ok for my kid to see?
If you want your kids to not see porn on the internet, cool. Don't give them Internet access. You don't need to make the internet worse for me and my family to make that rule for your family.
And maybe if you are parenting your child well, at some point you will be able to trust them to use the internet in a responsible way.
I like the California law where the device owner sets the parental controls and apps have to obey them or get fined.
This is the best solution I've seen, and it's also the simplest. No authority is involved other than the parent. No complicated protocols, or heavy CS theory about privacy preserving algorithms. Just one setting, "this device belongs to a minor" and apps either honor it or they are not allowed in the App store. Will some parents turn it off for their 14 year old? Yes, but some parents buy beer for their 14 year olds. That's a different problem.
Apple, Google, and the social media companies could have done this 10 years ago and we would not even be having this debate today. But they decided they didn't have any social responsibility for what their devices and software did, so here we are.
Yep, there are all sorts of technically interesting ways in which age can be proven without identity being compromised, this link has a good exploration of anonymous credentials, for a start - https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymou...
And there are all sorts of reasons governments want to do this, up to and including the stated-on-the-surface reasons they give; a lot of people don't want their kids exposed to internet harms, be that extreme material or addictive services and doom-scrolling, and don't have the technical know-how to effect that themselves.
The insistence by so many in tech that there is no honest intent and that there is no way to practically provide age verification in a thoughtful, anonymous way is frustrating.
It's frustrating to see so many people engaged in effective conspiratorial thinking and it's frustrating because there are many good arguments to be had here, but they won't land if the 'anti' side doesn't address the real concerns that real people have about the safety and mental health of their kids.
> The insistence by so many in tech that there is no honest intent...
If there were honest intent, then the regs would be beefing up the "Parental Controls" mechanisms present in every major OS and commanding that there be fines for not respecting those settings. Not only does this mechanism require zero involvement of an unrelated third party, it allows a guardian to protect both a child too ignorant of the dangers of the world to be trusted to competently handle them and an adult whose mind has been so damaged by age and/or disease that they can no longer handle those same dangers.
Instead, the systems that we're getting are ones in which computer users are -when it's not mandatory- very, very strongly encouraged to present photo ID to a third party. While all the US regs I can find currently "only" require adding mechanisms for punching in a birth date, it's all but certain that continued evidence of minors lying about their age will cause those laws to be "upgraded" to require a photo ID.
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The irony is AI already have more freedom of speech and maybe reach compared to humans in most "western democracies".
... use Monero. Why author didn't start with this claim? Intention would be more clear
What is the clear intention?
I feel we are preaching to the choir here. How do we get this message out to the wider population when it's being corralled so much?
I think this Cloudflare business ties into it, although it is masquerading as bot protection.
The scary part is not "age checks today, secret police tomorrow". It is that once there is a convenient identity-verification layer for normal internet use, it will be very hard to keep it limited to the original purpose... Every future regulator, prosecutor, platform and "think of the children" campaign will have an incentive to expand it
What would you say to someone who is afraid that a bad actor will find their kids on Discord/Minecraft/4chan and encourage them to commit suicide or shoot up their school?
I would tell them to not give their children internet access at all until they think they are ready. Does it sound realistic? I don't know. From technical point of view certainly realistic, a child doesn't have money / devices of his own
Listen to your children, give them attention, they are your responsibility, don't give them internet access if you find it unsafe
It doesn't have to be, FWIW. We have all the technology we need to decouple attribution from identity. We can achieve efficient and mathematically perfect unlinkability.
Yet the powerful continue to insist on "papers, please" anonymity-rending personal authentication over anonymous authorization. It's not often that the villains of history so clearly identify themselves.
My bunch is that the people driving this stuff were unaware that age verification could be privacy-preserving and can't exactly back down now.
age verificiation is throttling of speech. so the internet becomes again like TV or newspaper. u can transmit with license only. not anonymously.
We do need a decentralized scalable permissionless platform for speech. For it to remain sustainable, there should be a slight cost in Monero to making each post on it, preloadable in batches.
Have one. Called the internet.
It is not censorship resistant without using the domains of some foreign nations.
That, and it defines children as perpetrators instead of victims. What right could a citizen ever claim in a world where even children are guilty?
There is a huge difference between protecting children and prosecuting/punishing children. Age verification can only be an implementation of the latter.
Look at W Social. The governments will team up with anyone, no matter how shady, as long as they promise to try to restrict free, unattributed speech. They'll team up with absolute sharks, as long as those sharks are gonna help sack and battle the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48584497
Calls to mind a quote attributed to Cardinal Richelieu, 16th century Secretary of State for France:
‘If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him”
Fascism will lose in the long run. Right now the lobbyists coordinate rather effectively, looking at how many democracies already succumbed here. Well, we need direct democracy - the system that we have right now with regard to democracies, is undermined by corruption.
What makes you think that age verification on the internet wouldn't be wildly popular with the demos?
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Yup "protecting kids" has a long, long history of being used as an excuse to restrict citizens rights, yet something like Epstein Island was happening with all the proponents of child protection being happy visitors of the said island.
Jevon McSkimming, the second most powerful person in the New Zealand police, under Jacinda Ardern, was arrested not long ago for viewing extreme kiddie porn involving animals and torture. He had been doing so on his work computer!
Complaints had been made against the man for years and been thrown out because of who he was, and the material was only found by accident.
This same individual had been yet another one of those arguing for tighter controls on the internet and free speech for the peasants.
Another one of these "one rule for me, another for thee" types.
What are you talking about. They already have automated attribution of speech.
The word "China" isn't mentioned once here and that really highlights how shallow this piece is. I've scannned the comments and there's the usual tropes about lack of freedom of speech but let's look at some recent events:
- A 30 year prison sentence for tansporting a box of zines in Texas [1]. To do so they invented "antifa" as an organization out of whole cloth and will now use those convictions as further proof. I've seen this compared to the Salem witch trials;
- Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident, was detained and there is still ongoing deportation proceedings. What for? Organizing a peaceful protest at Columbia against the genocide being committed by Israel [2];
- Renee Good and Alex Pretti who were simply protesting ICE were killed essentially in cold blood and there have been zero consequences;
- Over 700 charged under the Terrorist Act in the UK for expressing support for Palestine. Defenders will argue Palestine Action is a designated terrorism group without asking why. Also, that's how it always works. Slavery was legal once. Freeing slaves was illegal. Does that make the Underground Railroad a terrorist organization? Today it would;
- In ~35 states in the US to work for or in government you have to express varying degrees of loyalty to Israel or at least commit never to boycott Israel eg [3]. To date, the Supreme Court has never substantively taken up these cases as the clear First Amendment violation they are;
- In PA, the Swarthmore 9 are being charged over their protests with the bullshit charge of "defiant trespass" [4];
- In Australia, in the wake of the Bondi shooting, new anti-"hate crime" legislation was passed that is so broad and sweeping that the Greens claim you could be charged with criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu [5].
- Numerous examples of the administration pulling funding and bringing colleges to heel over not cracking down sufficiently on Gaza protests.
So why I find these tired tropes about China so exhausting and lazy is because:
1. Look at what's happening here and in the West at large; and
2. Ironically, China has a system for age verification that actually works and the answer is really simple. The government issues the IDs. It can verify the IDs. We do this all the time with employment (eg E-Verify). You can even do it in such a way that the app doesn't get any sensitive information.
But it's like people say "you can't trust government" (even though the government already has all that data) and then thinks that a private company is the only possible solution (eg Peter Thiel's Persona).
If you've gotten this far you should know that at no point in any of the above have I argued for age verification. So far all I've said is that there is an absolute double standard in the fearmongering around it and that is it possible to create a relatively effective regime for it without handing everyone's data to Peter Thiel.
I think it's inarguable at this point that what we're doing now has been a dismal failure and something's gotta give. I think we should start by attacking the financial incentives here, namely:
1. Tech companies already use behavioural analysis to guess your demographics. If they figure out you're under 18 you should have a restricted experience. That should include no advertising, a much more limited algorithmic feed, etc;
2. Stop tech companies from being able to sell advertising to minors. Don't allow an advertiser to target an audience that includes minors as best as the tech company knows they are minors.
I personally think we could eliminate a bunch of harm just by attacking the advertising incentive here.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Mahmoud_Khalil
[3]: https://www.txdot.gov/manuals/csd/ncp/standards_for_contract...
[4]: https://iacenter.org/2026/06/27/swarthmore-9-on-trial-for-pr...
[5]: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jan/21/criti...
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I find myself in an odd predicament. For nearly all my life I would have seen all of this as an unconscionable anathema. But having watched what social media has done to our society, the tsunami of bullshit collapsing critical thought, science and reason I just don’t think civilisation can survive this without controls. Too many people are too gullible, too uncritical for it to survive without the state being able to curtail harmful speech at scale. Do I hate it? Absolutely. But I hate the alternative more. And I want the bounds of acceptable speech to be decided by my democratically elected government, not a bunch of American billionaires determined to burn society to the ground so they can pan the ashes for yet more gold.
Wouldn't it be better to curtail social media's addictive design choices, and improve things for everyone, rather than force the audience to carry the weight of responsibility?
> Wouldn't it be better to curtail social media's addictive design choices
Hacker news has a doomscroll front page. Ive never notice you have a problem with it
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The problem isn't social media per se, but rather how social media is designed, and this design is driven by profits and big tech. There are, at least in Europe, no alternatives to the big social media platforms. I'm not too keen on social media bans, because this neither elimates the desire for social media, nor social media in itself.
found the nudge unit employee
>But having watched what social media has done to our society, the tsunami of bullshit collapsing critical thought, science and reason I just don’t think civilisation can survive this without controls.
None of this is new. Every single one of these things has been pointed out millennia ago.
You had already evaluated it and made your decision (against censorship) on this decades ago when you first came across it.
Changing your view now isn't a matter of new information coming to light. It's a matter of you disliking the obvious and inevitable consequences that you had been warned of going into it.
Perhaps it's time you stop changing your mind based on totalitarian propaganda and realize you don't know what you're doing, and stop supporting censorship.
Gonna repost this comment I made last week, as no one interacted with its core idea. I am torn. I have bore first-hand witness to the scale of the PsyOps war waged on the American people by institutions near and far. Artroturfing to sew division to one means of another.
In all these operations, anonymity is what drives it.
I was born and raised in the anonymous internet, and tasted its freedoms. I oppose censorship. But, at this point, I have come to wonder it it would be best to always have your real-life personality attached to all you do. At least to any action that feeds an algorithm or creates something someone else can see.
It is the nature of the internet that you could never achieve absolute censorship -- and maybe anonymity should belong to the hackers and tinkers with the will and drive to hunt and craft for it.
I do not like holding this opinion, because it feels as though it is on the similar boat as that of those who 'pull up the ladder after themselves'. Increasingly, I see it as pulling shut the trapdoors to hell.
P.S. This goes without saying -- it's also the only was to defend against "ai" bots.
EDIT: I'm thoroughly convinced that my initial position here was wrong. Yeah -- easy to forget that, with, COINTELPRO, the feds are not bound by the same laws as the people, and that oligarch-controlled media will bend over backwards to give them backdoors. Thanks for all the feedback.
> In all these operations, anonymity is what drives it.
The most egregious, prolific lies out there have been fully attributed; and perhaps especially because of attribution, people vehemently disagree on which are the lies.
Those who wield outsized power experience attribution of speech asymmetrically. Filtering societal communication supports the concentration of power.
> But, at this point, I have come to wonder it it would be best to always have your real-life personality attached to all you do. At least to any action that feeds an algorithm or creates something someone else can see.
If attaching your real self to everything is so important, why does it only seem to restrain those without power, while those with the most influence can say whatever benefits them and face no consequences?
Interesting point, as at one point large internet companies like Facebook and Google/Youtube made real names mandatory - Facebook going as far as asking your "friends" to rat on you.
In theory it was a great way to prevent abuse - are people still horrible on the internet if they use their real name? Turns out they are, because it only took a few years of internet for people to no longer have any shame.
> are people still horrible on the internet if they use their real name
Yep. Google forced real names on youtube. People kept acting the same way.
I think I agree, so long as:
- age/identity verification comes with banning of bot traffic posing as human in any communication platform, by law - end to end encrypted communication is declared a fundamental human right, by law
I don't think we'll see that though. Too much money / power left on the table.
If this is the case then I simply won’t engage. 90 % will not engage and you’re left with the 10% who are willing to put everything they do out there publicly and permanently- probably because they have an ulterior motive or commercial reason to do so
>But, at this point, I have come to wonder it it would be best to always have your real-life personality attached to all you do.
I also had similar thoughts to you, but seeing the election results of the previous decade in the US makes me question the premise that transparency will lead to desirable results because the majority have good intentions.
> I have bore first-hand witness to the scale of the PsyOps war waged on the American people by institutions near and far.
You can be sure that none of those organizations will be affected by it. Especially the domestic ones.
> But, at this point, I have come to wonder it it would be best to always have your real-life personality attached to all you do.
No:
https://bianet.org/haber/eu-strips-journalist-huseyin-dogru-...
And that is Europe. The US wouldnt hesitate 2 seconds before shoving you into a federal prison.
> It is the nature of the internet that you could never achieve absolute censorship
Oh yes you can. The only reason you have a 'free' internet now is because the US had to rush its internet out without implementing the censorship and control mechanisms it planned because the USSR was about to release its own internet. Now they are making up for their mistake.
Disliking data centers, illegal immigration, or taxes is not a crime in the United States, nor is posting inconvenient messages about politicians, nor is getting a little too rowdy in a group chat. And none of these things are likely to be made illegal any time soon.
I always find this form of argument in favor of privacy (which is valuable in its own right to be clear) so roundabout. If you’re concerned about the government impinging on your freedom of speech, then why not write an essay arguing for expansive freedom of speech protections? That seems like a much more direct solution to the problem presented in this essay.
farmer arrested over datacenter debate: https://www.gadgetreview.com/arrest-him-the-moment-police-ha...
I’m not exactly sure how an abuse of power occurring at a public event relates to the question of privacy or freedom of speech. The law did not allow the officer to arrest the man for the content of his speech so he retaliated by enforcing a different law unjustly. This kind of selective enforcement of the law can be a violation of federal law and the man likely has standing to sue.
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Note that age verification does not rely on you handing over identifying information to the party requesting it, that's just one possible implementation. Another more privacy conscious one is e.g. iDIN or whatever comes after, which works a bit like oauth in that you're redirected to a trusted 3rd party like your bank which only confirms "this person is 18+" to the requesting party.
The only thing that the requester needs to save is the "this person is 18+ as verified by this party".
Granted, that's still an avenue for law enforcement to find out who you are, but then, so is your internet service provider or VPN (where the VPN is likely already a honeypot)
> Note that age verification does not rely on you handing over identifying information to the party requesting it
It most certainly does, because it has to:
https://reclaimthenet.org/starmers-social-media-ban-surveill...
"Monday’s headline was a ban on under-16s using social media which, to some, sounds about as sinister as a wholesome ribbon-cutting until you ask the obvious question nobody in Downing Street wants asked aloud: how, precisely, do you stop a fourteen-year-old from opening Instagram without first checking the age of the forty-year-old?
You don’t. You can’t. So everyone gets carded. Britain is lifting the system wholesale from Australia, where a computer first scans your face and guesses your age from your cheekbones, then, failing that, surveils you to death, studies your browsing habits and the hours you keep, and then, when the algorithm throws up its hands, simply demands your passport."
That's not a requirement to hand over identifying information to the party requesting it.