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.
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
But Brexit was a vote, by the people. Yes, the pro-leave campaign lied to no ends, but people still made a choice on their own and the majority for leave was quite slim.
This is very different to age sniffing here. Age sniffing is not being queried via public votum - lobbyists push it through without any resistance. It's amazing how this works.
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.
“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.
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.
> This assumes good faith, which doesn't match reality. It's about control, not protecting children.
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
> Given your idea of a physical card, kids will find a way to use the card of their parents.
Sure there are kids who have access to their parents credit card with the PIN, but how frequent is that? In every system, fraud will exist, but that doesn't mean the system is worthless. “The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero”:
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
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.
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.
I'd add that not only were we not taught about health benefits in PE classes, the punishment for non-participation was not only detention but also potentially failing the entire grade. I ended up dropping out in my first year of high school due to a culmination of similar issues. I loved and still love learning, but my school was not an environment for learning. It was an environment for teaching rigid obedience to authority, and nothing more.
My particular favorite thing to rant about is how, on the first day, I was held in detention for the entire day and made to skip the introduction to my classes because I unknowingly wore the wrong shade of blue for the dress code. Like the middle school in the same district, the dress code required a white, red, or blue polo (FUCK YEAH AMERICA!!!!), but the shade of blue from the middle school uniforms was not allowed, something I was never aware of but instead got arbitrarily punished for along with dozens of others, with my parent being made to buy a new set of uniform shirts after school.
It is no wonder that the US is in a state of decline given how horrid the schooling is. I can't imagine a worse environment for stifling intellectual curiosity than the one I was in.
Ironically when I was in high school I was fat and hated pe but biked about 20 minutes to school every day. Now in middle age I still bike everywhere and am in better shape than most of my peers..
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.
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
The public square has never been properly anonymous. If you start saying things which contravene laws or the rights of others, the police have been able to capture you and unmask your identity, if concealed.
So the solution for criminals in the public is for everybody to show their papers walking into a public square? It is not, we have requirements for police process like warrants and a process for determining the requirements for urgent conditions of arrest.
No, obviously not, and this is a completely glib argument.
Who is suggesting people 'show their papers' to go into a public square?
Literally nobody.
It really demonstrates how bad the analogy is - so much so that it's not even analogy.
The 'social controls' on the 'public square' are limited by a few laws (aka directed violence) but apart from that you can say as you like, kids can as well - it's where parents can be parents.
And - don't have problem with kids in the public square.
We have a very real problem with kids on social media, verifiable, scientific.
Kids are depressed, distracted, they bully each other, they're creeped on, and they're not yet in the business having serious discussions about 'Mein Kampf' - they're kids.
Everything in kids lives is introduced in an 'age appropriate' fashion - literally everything.
Given the toxicity of social media, it's a 'primary concern' for one of those gated things.
This is not even an argument - the only argument is 'the slippery slope'.
The science for age bans on social media is weak at best. There were pretty much terrible studies done during Covid and did not attribute all sorts of uncertainty going on at the same time.
If the point were to improve on the mental health of kids there are countless underfunded public programs. Especially in the US, social support programs like food, healthcare basic and mental, actual physical public spaces for kids, arts in curriculum, etc.
This is hauntingly reminiscent of the gun law argument in US:
The government shouldn't infringe on my right to bear arms, mass shooting is a mental health issue anyways, oh but we can't really fund mental health support because my tax shouldn't go towards helping those who put themselves in that situation. Que the same argument for privacy on the internet.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you can't trust the government, then work towards healing it, restructuring it, overhauling it. Subverting the government is such antisocial behaviour, very criminal like.
For what it’s worth, as an Australian, and as the operator of an online community, I unreservedly approve of the social media ban enforced by our government.
Conversely, I don’t agree with the way some other countries are going about it. Especially the UK with the abysmal way they have physically policed online speech by adults. Incredibly sad to see police prioritise non-violent “speech crimes” because they’re too scaredy-cat to tackle actual violent crime.
It shouldn’t be beyond the imagination of cryptography experts to design a system where only governments can issue an age identification certificate, which individuals can use to generate verifiable proof of age tokens. But where the tokens can’t be used by the government to identify the individual.
If that’s how you interpreted my post, I can only hypothesis that you didn’t read it. I can’t think of another explanation.
I actually like the traditional public square model: you have anonymity most of the time, but it’s not some absolute shield you can abuse to be an obnoxious prick. The police can intervene, but the intervention happens in the public square too.
Yes, and plenty of people have spoken in the public square anonymously too, because no attempt is made to unmask when the speech isn’t accused of breaching law.
Publishing a book anonymously in the public square still means someone has to physically manufacture it, distribute it and convince you to read it. All these steps are subject to interdiction by the police.
Was there ever a public square where children could participate anonymously among adults? (I’m imagining three Dickensian urchins in a trench coat giving a speech in Hyde Park.)
Parents are entirely able to overcome any of this if they so choose - including feeding their kids alcohol, guns etc. - and so the freedom does materially exist.
Social Media isn't a place for free expression - it's mostly toxic - like exposing your children to the most vile, inauthentic people.
The more genteel places, frankly, won't have much in the way of age restrictions.
Entire nations are banning social media for kids because it's just not healthy - the teachers want it, the parents want it, the data seems to support it.
I think you're right to be (very concerned) but this is a necessary discussion. As a teacher.
It literally doesn't (at least not if I don't intend to borrow a book and take it home; if I stay there and read, I can do so without any ID. I only need ID to get a library card, and I don't need that to enter and read a book).
The point is that 'even the local library' enacts rules and social conventions - not that they're exhaustively and acutely enforced in all corners.
No 4chan section in the library?
You might wonder why it doesn't have vast array of avant guard adult content, porn or art with really aggressive themes and people calling each other the n-word?
In society we have 'age related' conventions all over the place ... including your Library.
This is the absolute worst of HN, where people dissolve into Reddit-like discussions of bad meatphors and totally out of context hair splitting.
I just can't believe anyone here has any relationship with the reality of children, teaching or parenting whatsoever. It's the same argument made by the 'drugs should be legal and accessible' crowd - completely oblivious to the instantaneous massive health epidemic we'd have with opioids and fentanyl, or the 'anti vaxer' crowd - narrow ideological arguments about expression disconnected from any kind of reality or nuance.
There's a variation of social media that will be fine for the kids, they can be exposed to more into their late teens. Parents that want to opt out, will de facto be allowed to - and there is always a slippery slope with every law.
My local librarian did not restrict my books to the kids section when I was a kid. Also librarians have fought civil legal battles to keep reading activities anonymous. Libraries are unlike the restrictions and risks of the proposed legislation being discussed for social media
Social media as it has become now is a shitshow where a minority of angry and/or disingenuous posters dominate discourse.
Twitter (X) was never the public square, and now it's little more than a playground for propagandists. The rest of us do well to ignore it, and it seems that even the 'legacy' media are starting to realise the days of breathlessly reporting on tweet-storms weren't great for anyone.
In a recent survey of under sixteen year olds in a place where an under sixteen social media ban exists asked how many of them used social media found that 80% were still using it. Do you actually need a login to consume social media? The answer to that is no. You can doom scroll all you want on sites like Reddit with no account whatsoever.
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.
> 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.
How can you fix the child education problem without fixing the parent education? School is but a few hours a day, and kids spend more time with parents and learn from them. I was lucky that my parents liked to read and encouraged me to read, but my friends didn't have the same exposure that I did and never liked to read books.
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
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
You really only need the banners if you're doing privacy-impinging things.
Much like the GDPR notices that a small industry of 'compliance' product companies sold seemingly to everyone as necessary, they aren't if you're only using cookies for functional reasons and not tracking people. Unfortunately that leads to lower margins for advertisers and we can't have that.
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.
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.
Facebook has said it agrees with a report that found it had failed to prevent its platform being used to "incite offline violence" in Myanmar.
The independent report, commissioned by Facebook, said the platform had created an "enabling environment" for the proliferation of human rights abuse.
It comes after widespread violence against the Rohingya minority which the UN has said may amount to genocide.
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
> 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.
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?
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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!
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!
As cynical as it sounds given its frequent use in marketing and often inappropriate use in legal circles, securing what data is collected is important too.
Raise the bar for a data breach. It has value. Much more value if the law did a much better job of restricting what is collected in the first place and its dissemination.
There's no hypothetical, they tried to equate this to basically buying a gun where you do the certification on purchase. Internet connected devices are not planned to be controlled like that but per session. Under that model what they proposed is obviously not going to work.
"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."
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?
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
For reference, a similar case of selective enforcement against an outspoken critic of the local government in Texas resulted in the critic receiving a settlement of $500k following an unjust arrest
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.
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
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.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QFgcqB8-AxE
But Brexit was a vote, by the people. Yes, the pro-leave campaign lied to no ends, but people still made a choice on their own and the majority for leave was quite slim.
This is very different to age sniffing here. Age sniffing is not being queried via public votum - lobbyists push it through without any resistance. It's amazing how this works.
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.
This is what I fear the most. It is gas lighting and just manipulation. The idea of privacy will become associated with crime.
Further down the line technical solutions that are private will become illegal and in general not being pro survailance will get you in trouble
“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.
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.
> This assumes good faith, which doesn't match reality. It's about control, not protecting children.
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
> Given your idea of a physical card, kids will find a way to use the card of their parents.
Sure there are kids who have access to their parents credit card with the PIN, but how frequent is that? In every system, fraud will exist, but that doesn't mean the system is worthless. “The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero”: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
"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.
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.
I'd add that not only were we not taught about health benefits in PE classes, the punishment for non-participation was not only detention but also potentially failing the entire grade. I ended up dropping out in my first year of high school due to a culmination of similar issues. I loved and still love learning, but my school was not an environment for learning. It was an environment for teaching rigid obedience to authority, and nothing more.
My particular favorite thing to rant about is how, on the first day, I was held in detention for the entire day and made to skip the introduction to my classes because I unknowingly wore the wrong shade of blue for the dress code. Like the middle school in the same district, the dress code required a white, red, or blue polo (FUCK YEAH AMERICA!!!!), but the shade of blue from the middle school uniforms was not allowed, something I was never aware of but instead got arbitrarily punished for along with dozens of others, with my parent being made to buy a new set of uniform shirts after school.
It is no wonder that the US is in a state of decline given how horrid the schooling is. I can't imagine a worse environment for stifling intellectual curiosity than the one I was in.
It’s been 25 years since I was in school and this was my experience. Unsure if it’s changed…
Ironically when I was in high school I was fat and hated pe but biked about 20 minutes to school every day. Now in middle age I still bike everywhere and am in better shape than most of my peers..
Turns out I just really really hate running.
Same. In my mid 40's and probably in the top 20% of my age group.
Absolutely hate running!
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.
> 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.
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
A poor analogy.
The public square has never been properly anonymous. If you start saying things which contravene laws or the rights of others, the police have been able to capture you and unmask your identity, if concealed.
So the solution for criminals in the public is for everybody to show their papers walking into a public square? It is not, we have requirements for police process like warrants and a process for determining the requirements for urgent conditions of arrest.
No, obviously not, and this is a completely glib argument.
Who is suggesting people 'show their papers' to go into a public square?
Literally nobody.
It really demonstrates how bad the analogy is - so much so that it's not even analogy.
The 'social controls' on the 'public square' are limited by a few laws (aka directed violence) but apart from that you can say as you like, kids can as well - it's where parents can be parents.
And - don't have problem with kids in the public square.
We have a very real problem with kids on social media, verifiable, scientific.
Kids are depressed, distracted, they bully each other, they're creeped on, and they're not yet in the business having serious discussions about 'Mein Kampf' - they're kids.
Everything in kids lives is introduced in an 'age appropriate' fashion - literally everything.
Given the toxicity of social media, it's a 'primary concern' for one of those gated things.
This is not even an argument - the only argument is 'the slippery slope'.
The science for age bans on social media is weak at best. There were pretty much terrible studies done during Covid and did not attribute all sorts of uncertainty going on at the same time.
If the point were to improve on the mental health of kids there are countless underfunded public programs. Especially in the US, social support programs like food, healthcare basic and mental, actual physical public spaces for kids, arts in curriculum, etc.
This is hauntingly reminiscent of the gun law argument in US:
The government shouldn't infringe on my right to bear arms, mass shooting is a mental health issue anyways, oh but we can't really fund mental health support because my tax shouldn't go towards helping those who put themselves in that situation. Que the same argument for privacy on the internet.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you can't trust the government, then work towards healing it, restructuring it, overhauling it. Subverting the government is such antisocial behaviour, very criminal like.
For what it’s worth, as an Australian, and as the operator of an online community, I unreservedly approve of the social media ban enforced by our government.
Conversely, I don’t agree with the way some other countries are going about it. Especially the UK with the abysmal way they have physically policed online speech by adults. Incredibly sad to see police prioritise non-violent “speech crimes” because they’re too scaredy-cat to tackle actual violent crime.
It shouldn’t be beyond the imagination of cryptography experts to design a system where only governments can issue an age identification certificate, which individuals can use to generate verifiable proof of age tokens. But where the tokens can’t be used by the government to identify the individual.
If that’s how you interpreted my post, I can only hypothesis that you didn’t read it. I can’t think of another explanation.
I actually like the traditional public square model: you have anonymity most of the time, but it’s not some absolute shield you can abuse to be an obnoxious prick. The police can intervene, but the intervention happens in the public square too.
People publish entire books anonymously.
Yes, and plenty of people have spoken in the public square anonymously too, because no attempt is made to unmask when the speech isn’t accused of breaching law.
Publishing a book anonymously in the public square still means someone has to physically manufacture it, distribute it and convince you to read it. All these steps are subject to interdiction by the police.
Was there ever a public square where children could participate anonymously among adults? (I’m imagining three Dickensian urchins in a trench coat giving a speech in Hyde Park.)
Your local library has age and ID requirements.
Your local 'town square' has 'some rules'.
Parents are entirely able to overcome any of this if they so choose - including feeding their kids alcohol, guns etc. - and so the freedom does materially exist.
Social Media isn't a place for free expression - it's mostly toxic - like exposing your children to the most vile, inauthentic people.
The more genteel places, frankly, won't have much in the way of age restrictions.
Entire nations are banning social media for kids because it's just not healthy - the teachers want it, the parents want it, the data seems to support it.
I think you're right to be (very concerned) but this is a necessary discussion. As a teacher.
> Your local library has age and ID requirements.
It literally doesn't (at least not if I don't intend to borrow a book and take it home; if I stay there and read, I can do so without any ID. I only need ID to get a library card, and I don't need that to enter and read a book).
It literally does - and you just admitted it.
The point is that 'even the local library' enacts rules and social conventions - not that they're exhaustively and acutely enforced in all corners.
No 4chan section in the library?
You might wonder why it doesn't have vast array of avant guard adult content, porn or art with really aggressive themes and people calling each other the n-word?
In society we have 'age related' conventions all over the place ... including your Library.
This is the absolute worst of HN, where people dissolve into Reddit-like discussions of bad meatphors and totally out of context hair splitting.
I just can't believe anyone here has any relationship with the reality of children, teaching or parenting whatsoever. It's the same argument made by the 'drugs should be legal and accessible' crowd - completely oblivious to the instantaneous massive health epidemic we'd have with opioids and fentanyl, or the 'anti vaxer' crowd - narrow ideological arguments about expression disconnected from any kind of reality or nuance.
There's a variation of social media that will be fine for the kids, they can be exposed to more into their late teens. Parents that want to opt out, will de facto be allowed to - and there is always a slippery slope with every law.
My local librarian did not restrict my books to the kids section when I was a kid. Also librarians have fought civil legal battles to keep reading activities anonymous. Libraries are unlike the restrictions and risks of the proposed legislation being discussed for social media
Social media as it has become now is a shitshow where a minority of angry and/or disingenuous posters dominate discourse.
Twitter (X) was never the public square, and now it's little more than a playground for propagandists. The rest of us do well to ignore it, and it seems that even the 'legacy' media are starting to realise the days of breathlessly reporting on tweet-storms weren't great for anyone.
In a recent survey of under sixteen year olds in a place where an under sixteen social media ban exists asked how many of them used social media found that 80% were still using it. Do you actually need a login to consume social media? The answer to that is no. You can doom scroll all you want on sites like Reddit with no account whatsoever.
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.
Almost anything can be a slippery slope to almost anything. We'd never get anything done.
Systems thinking?
Dude, more that 2 thirds of black kids can barely read [1]
[1] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/groups/?gra...
That page says most kids can barely read. Are you a kid?
> Across student groups, average fourth-grade reading scores in 2022 were lower for the following student groups:
> [..] > male and female students;
So reading scores were lower for everyone? Why single out groups?
> 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.
How can you fix the child education problem without fixing the parent education? School is but a few hours a day, and kids spend more time with parents and learn from them. I was lucky that my parents liked to read and encouraged me to read, but my friends didn't have the same exposure that I did and never liked to read books.
What? School is basically the same hours as a full time job. How is it but a few hours a day? Did you time travel from the 1800s?
Indeed, and then after school care because both parents are still working until 6 pm, quietly eat dinner, watch cocomelon, and then to bed. Horror.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
And if you say you don't have any, they'll assume you're lying and deny you.
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.
It's good that I don't have any reason to go to the US.
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.
The bad thing about this:
Can you trust future governments to respect "Nulla poena sine lege"?
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.
It seems unlikely that running a website without age verification will be illegal across the entire planet.
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.
Ironically 99% of them don’t meet legal requirements. They serve no purpose.
The purpose is to make people think laws like gdpr are bad for people, rather than bad for the surveillance industry.
Cookie banners aren't across the whole internet.
You really only need the banners if you're doing privacy-impinging things.
Much like the GDPR notices that a small industry of 'compliance' product companies sold seemingly to everyone as necessary, they aren't if you're only using cookies for functional reasons and not tracking people. Unfortunately that leads to lower margins for advertisers and we can't have that.
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.
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.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-46105934
Facebook has said it agrees with a report that found it had failed to prevent its platform being used to "incite offline violence" in Myanmar. The independent report, commissioned by Facebook, said the platform had created an "enabling environment" for the proliferation of human rights abuse. It comes after widespread violence against the Rohingya minority which the UN has said may amount to genocide.
Myanmar?
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.
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
They already have started right ? Like example - bluesky (bsky.social)
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.
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.
I don’t expect teenagers to do anything but largely be harmed by the internet.
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.
> If I say something illegal
A situation that should be impossible due to freedom of speech.
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?
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's why recaptcha is now doing human verification via mobile phone QR scan
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.
I imagine they still go after prolific totrenters
Imagine a machine mounted on the wall that prints you a ticket every time you swear
"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
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!
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!
> 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%.
As cynical as it sounds given its frequent use in marketing and often inappropriate use in legal circles, securing what data is collected is important too.
Raise the bar for a data breach. It has value. Much more value if the law did a much better job of restricting what is collected in the first place and its dissemination.
Punishing companies for data breaches will solve more data breaches than any amount of encryption.
I find that particularly unrealistic that we can arrive at a good place solely by fining companies for data breaches.
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.
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?
The verification is not done per device but per usage session.
This is incorrect, and you have failed to read my mind on how it works. Extremely weird attempt, but I applaud the bravado anyways.
Why are you telling someone else how their hypothetical implementation works?
There's no hypothetical, they tried to equate this to basically buying a gun where you do the certification on purchase. Internet connected devices are not planned to be controlled like that but per session. Under that model what they proposed is obviously not going to work.
Comment 1: “maybe it should be this way”
Comment 2: “it can’t be that way because of this”
Comment 3: “but it can, because it could maybe be this way”
You: “There was no hypothetical”
Oh my god the comments are getting so stupid. Please, I beg you to stop.
"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.
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?
I like the California law where the device owner sets the parental controls and apps have to obey them or get fined.
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.
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.
The author made an assertive statement without any hint of rhetoric, reasoning, historical parallel, evidence, legislative example etc.
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
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”
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.
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
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.
What are you talking about. They already have automated attribution of speech.
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?
> 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.
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.
For reference, a similar case of selective enforcement against an outspoken critic of the local government in Texas resulted in the critic receiving a settlement of $500k following an unjust arrest
https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2025/10/15/i-feel-like-i-can...
it's an example of the government silencing people for speech
No, it's an example of someone being told to leave, not doing so, and then being arrested for trespassing.