Comment by nimbius
3 days ago
the effort is being driven by a handful of tech and social media companies who have suddenly realized they cannot close the pandoras box of AI.
without a meaningful headcount of real users, advertisers will begin to push back on cost or even reduce and eliminate spending on social media altogether.
by proactively identifying real humans, you prevent the collapse of major social media outlets. by tracking their age and location directly, you restore that which AI took away from advertisers in the first place.
age verification makes sure surveillance capitalism continues to function.
I hadn't heard this take before but I find it very compelling. The supply of raw materials for their product pipeline has become contaminated and they need to weed out the adulterant.
No shady agenda about killing public discourse is necessary if you view the push for identify verification in that light. (That doesn't mean it won't kill public discourse, but that's an unintended consequence.)
So now there is a market for verified identities. Good job making the numbers go up.
Besides, major social media platforms can just generate ”verified” profiles to fit a demographic. There is no way for advertisers to verify the audiences are genuine. Even CTR is meaningless unless conversion is tracked. This means Meta et al. will soon be actually buying/scalping advertised products and offloading them onto a secondary market.