Comment by zarzavat
15 hours ago
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.
This is why China and Russia are shiny beacons of democracy and liberalism — they heavily regulate their social media!
Seriously, do people not look at history or at least the world around them when they make such claims? Genocides have happened before we had internet, or TV, or radio, or any modern technology people attribute genocides to. Hatred and violence are parts of human nature and trying to blame it on technology is just us trying not to make ourselves look bad.
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That’s a very dramatic take - and I dare say a counter-factual one too.
Which actual genocide would you be talking about?
I really don’t think people should water out words like that over what is essentially tiny political differences.
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It seems unlikely that running a website without age verification will be illegal across the entire planet.
So if you want to run a BBS for say vintage motorcycle owners, you have to move to a country without such laws and make sure to never set foot in any country that does?
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People are downvoting this, but the objective is precisely that.
It seemed unlikely to me that cookie banners would be a thing across the whole internet if nothing else because no website operators would put them in. How wrong was I.
All they need to do is popularize the idea of "if your website doesn't do X, it'll place lower on google" and people will do anything.
My websites still don't have cookie banners and the police still hasn't come to my house. And the websites uses cookies like every other website always did.
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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
The social media you don't want will continue to scale.
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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.