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.
Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing.
> I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent — the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it?
There's an interesting, one-time shakeup that we could actually accomplish. While it's true that there will never again be another constitutional amendment... there's already one out there that will never expire, partially ratified. Completely beyond Congress's ability to rescind it or cockblock it. Article the First.
Were it to be ratified, nearly immediately (whenever the next Census is), the House of Representatives has over 6000 seats. So many that the existing party apparatus wouldn't be able to vet candidates or manipulate. Lobbyists, even, would have a hard time allotting the slush funds to bribe them all.
And what would it take to do all of this? Maybe 10 or 12 people hammering (gently) on some state legislator in Nevada or Kansas. Convince him or her to pass the resolution to ratify. Nothing more than that. A single state even attempting to ratify it would start the ball rolling, and no one would be able to stop it.
> Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing.
The burden of ever-changing law landscape will be carried by ordinary people, not by legislators. That's second.
Also beneficial perhaps would be to have it be necessary that the law spells out the technical implementation. Sort of like patents do.
Further down the line technical solutions that are private will become illegal and in general not being pro survailance will get you in trouble
The solution to privacy problem is not to shout while closing your ears but to make it clear that you see their side, how new tech create new problems, and help solve it in least privacy invasive ways.
Otherwise you will always be seen as somebody who has shady agenda. It's just reality. Ordinary people do not care about e2ee. Gotta read the room.
But chat control and age verification are different things.
Although they appear to be different different things at first sight, they share the same agenda and objective, mass surveillance and identification of the citizens. Once the door is opened, it can be expected that things will not end there; Politicians and their patrons will exploit this data under "committees" (and of course be excluded from such surveillance as an aggravating factor).
Nowadays it's needed a court order to access legally to the privacy of citizens, and this must be done by the Police or the Interpol, nevertheless someones want to break this.
If they were really worried by the citizens security, they would increase the number of police and judges working in this digital divisions, among other things related to this.
So it's likely to work again - not as often as a law-abiding citizen would like, but not never.
It's a matter of phrasing things. Moxie had this illustrative take: If your chat is not e2ee, it'a a group chat. It's you, your mom, every secret service in the world and some ISP employees as well. If we could clarify to our social circles and broader society that every non-e2ee chat can be browsed by some overpaid freckled 20-something borded out of his mind at a FAANG or an ISP then the viewpoint could change.
Maybe one of the most helpful parallels is with mail. I think US and other countries have strict laws about mail communication privacy. Someone can in theory open your mail but it's strictly regulated and not done in a total way.
Also I do think talking about future malicious government prosecuting people based on what was collected previously is actually a good one. But just talking about privacy may be a little too vague.
For many people the state is inefficient, illogical, evil and goes after them without any reason (ex: think COVID restrictions). Then why do you care about another way to label you, if you think they already do it, but randomly.
I feel that the privacy discussions do not acknowledge at all there are many other structural society issues. Sure it would make an evil-intelligent government have a harder time, but will not improve at all life with an evil-idiot government, and to me it seems those are a bit more prevalent (note: idiot = implementing solutions that will not solve the problems they claim they do, while them honestly thinking they do solve them)
Discord recently introduced e2ee for voice chat. Apple has iMessage and Facetime. Whatsapp and to a lesser extent Signal are massively popular.
If you asked and ordinary person "Should the government be able to retroactively access your voice and written communications?" most people would probably react negatively.
Sure, in the pre-computer world, the US could possibly intercept letters and phone calls, but the complexity of that was high enough that it meant it could only happen with really strong cause and cost. With the barrier to scraping up unencrypted communications at near-zero (for governments and hyperscalers), the need for everyday citizens to have protected communications is higher.
Many of my friends use Telegram (never with the secret chats feature), Instagram, Line, etc. The only mainstream app with e2ee is WhatsApp. OK maybe Messenger has this feature recently too. But it's definitely not prevalent or something ordinary person assumes.
I think that most common currency for criminals are still just cold cash... But maybe some use crypto yes. And maybe criminals use e2ee. And Marybe you are rigth that it is a problematic thing for law enforcement. That is not the point though.
The point is criminalizing ordinary people for something completely reasonable like wanting to have the ability to talk in private. And talk in private about what they think of the current leadership...
It doesn't scale as well. Can't go cross-border easily etc.
I agree that it's wrong but I'm talking about common people (and lawmakers who care about) perception. Until they get burned they won't care and might not take your side like that.
And none of these things were ever made illegal.
>Ordinary people do not care about e2ee.
I am an ordinary person, and I care about the right to be secure and private in my communications. The founders of the United States put it in our Bill of Rights. Mail in America can't just be read without a warrant; it is protected by the 4th Amendment.
Those things are barriers that make it more difficult to be criminal. We're talking about a factor that removes those barriers and makes it easier.
And e2ee/cryptography/bitcoin is just the implementation of free speech which supposed to be guaranted?
It is like saying that killing people is OK but storing photo of oneself nudes is a crime - and keep pretending to be not idiot.
The risk is there but it is not a given. The debate is not new, it's been going on for decades. It's a permanent struggle.
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
As has been mentioned elsewhere on the thread - the real issue is often there are complex 2nd and third order effects, often there are devils in the details.
I'm not saying people are not capable of consuming it, I'm saying people don't have the bandwidth.
Direct democracy is best when it's used for very specific proposals with lots of time for debate - not every decision.
If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.
Second, your comment hinges on an interesting hidden assumption. There's implication, that representative democracy selects for a group with inherently higher average bandwidth allocated per proposal and inherently higher average expertise to evaluate the non-immediate, higher-order effects. I'm not going to contest the idea, however, this assumption has to hold quite strictly for the concerns listed to be material.
> If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.
Otherwise this concern is just another side of the lobbying coin. The distinction between professional storytellers curating media in favor of certain party and convincing masses or elected representatives on merit of some law is paper thin anyway.
Eh? It's a representatives full time job to consider these things as oppose to the general public doing a full time job and then having to consider legislation.
The difference between lobbying for representatives versus people directly is that representatives have to answer to the people - whereas no-one loses their job as a citizen if they get persuaded by story tellers.
ie both come down to - "it's their job"
I would not be so sure. What's the fundamental difference between convincing general public to vote certain way in a hypothetical direct-ish democracy and convincing that lobbied-for vote by representatives is the good one in a representative system? Quite a large portion of this full time job is already not spent nitpicking legislative initiatives
In terms of persuasion - if a representative votes in a way that's at odds with the people who elect them, then there is a risk of the representative losing their job.
If you have a small group of citizen, selected at random for a particular decision, if they are bribed/lobbied/copted - they aren't at risk from an electorate down the line.
Obviously given that large scale persuasion is now cheap and automatable - even in a representative democracy you might well choose to set the political weather by directly targeting the electorate.
Right now this is a major threat to democracy - you only need a few people skilled int he dark arts, no morals and a sackful of cash to change the political weather currently.
I don't think it's just a bandwidth problem.
(i.e. Politicians are selected from average people, often on things like appearance, charm, charisma, voice, snappiness, being less-bad than the other candidates, standing for the voter's preferred party, etc. not based on intelligence or systems thinking; so why would they be better reasoning about 3rd order effects than average people? And they are elected on short terms, so why would they be more interested in spending time trying than others?).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Miliband_bacon_sandwich_pho...
If the current scenario is bad, and someone says "we should do this other thing that would be even worse," pointing out that the other thing is worse isn't an endorsement of the current (bad) scenario.
However average people are actually pretty good at making the right moral, common sense calls, if not the technical legal detail. I suspect that's in part because they are not living in the Westminister ( or whatever your seat of power is ) bubble.
So any system needs to blend that common sense, with specific expertise. In theory that's what a representative democracy does - however one of the failings currently is the party system ( note designed, in part, to overcome the bandwidth problem - people grouping together to give a single consistent message rather than 100's of independent ones ), where capture of the party by a few people has become too easy and some options that the majority of people want never being offered at the voting time.
This results in an increasingly angry and volatile electorate.
It's easy to make decisions when you are the benefactor and the costs are born by someone else. Unless you are in a country with overall population density approaching that of an urban hub, there are high chances that the benefits afforded and costs born by the seat of power bubble versus an average person barely overlap.
> however one of the failings currently is the party system <...> where capture of the party by a few people has become too easy and some options that the majority of people want never being offered at the voting time.
I'd argue that the fiefdoms within parties come primarily from their corporate likeness. Since the ultimate goal of any party is to capture power and remain in power, the structures that emerge serve this goal first, everything else second.
If this is true, which doesn't seem that unreasonable, then the crucial factor then becomes what are the key factors in terms of staying in power - responsiveness to the electorate or raising money to persuade the electorate?
Ensuring the latter doesn't take over, in my view, is a top priority to ensure a working democracy - and from the outside, appears to be why the American system is now largely broken.
Some of the examples I've seen it tried - I've seen the people setting it up trying to fix the outcome by carefully choosing the question, then providing expert advice on options scoped by the question.
Framing of the question is a powerful tool to promote the outcome you want, and avoiding ever asking certain questions is another.
Not saying it doesn't have it's place - you just need to be careful that the process isn't used to try and legitimise what would otherwise be unpopular policies via concentrated persuasion on a small number of people.
Framing questions is already a problem with legislation. You can frame "do you want to increase online surveillance" as "do you want to protect children" very successfully!
If you are saying choose people at random to be an MP for 5 years ( or whatever ), then sure that's different and it would be an interesting experiment - though that would be a pretty stressful job to pitch people into at random.
It would be interesting to see how those random 600 people would organise to get stuff done. In the current government you have specialisation - home secretary, foreign secretary etc - you wouldn't want to keep that structure and randomly allocate roles - but if you have the 600 vote on everything then you still have a bandwidth problem.
It may work in some other country..
Jury service in the UK is generally seen in a positive light ( despite having far too much hanging around ).
I suspect the US problems could be easily fixed by forcing employers to pay you while you are doing it.
I think there is more to it. A large part of democracy is delegating decision making to people with time and expertise to investigate issues more thoroughly than most individuals can or want to.
I have some broad opinions about the environment etc. but I am by no means an expert in the details, so I am happy to delegate day to day decision making to someone with more expertise who's opinions broadly align with my own.
I'd agree that referendums do make more sense on "issues of conscience" though, like whether to have a death penalty, voting reform etc.
In the US at least, no it is not. The founders were incredibly concerned about the ‘passions of the mob’ and deliberately built a system that they hoped would temper the excesses of the public.
And after seeing the wacko stuff going on in California, I can’t blame them!
Direct democracy is cool, but also impractical. I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance. So what's a level of direct democracy that's "good enough"? How do we make sure we're directly voting in things relevant to our lives? What if "relevant to our lives" is unrelated to our geographic location and is very interests based? If anyone can vote for anything, but most folks don't ever vote for most things, how do you prevent brigading of votes via coordination by groups who see that their group alone can swing what would be a small local vote whatever way they want by virtue of sheer numbers? How do you prevent trolls from going through every vote and just voting no on every "community center paper-and-ink budget" across the entire country?
There are so many questions I have about direct democracy systems! Do you have more information?
The best way to do this is through a combination of subsidiarity and constitutional rights.
You have a central government but its primary purpose is to set out and uphold fundamental rights. It essentially sets out what the local governments can't do, so you can't have ex post facto laws, censor speech, detain people without trial, try to enforce local laws on actions performed in remote jurisdictions, etc.
In particular, the central government should not be in the business of regulating private conduct. Only the local governments do that.
Then you don't have to be worried about appropriations for road maintenance in some other county because you don't live there. Whereas the appropriations in your county are coming out of your pocket, and aren't such a far away thing that your vote is being diluted into irrelevance, so then maybe you want to be paying some attention to that.
(This otherwise great in theory idea is mooted by the fact that remote legislative votes are a terrible idea, as security is a shitshow literally everywhere.)
This particular question has an extremely simple answer - derived from the decades of practical development of consensus based systems in democratic spaces (art spaces, leftist political groups etc). You vote / participate in the consensus decision making of the issues that are most important to you. It's that simple. Every issue is democratically decided, and you just 'tune in' to the ones that matter to you.
In terms of brigading / trolling are harder. In consensus institutions they're usually dealt with by limiting the amount of blocking (forcing tabling of an issue) and ensuring that voting / consensus participation is limited to those who are actively involved in the community. This is obviously far more complex on a societal level.
Overall this requires a bigger investment of time, but you're in no way required to care about everything. Over time though, the group / institution / society, is forced to grow up. Or at least grow out of the learned helplessness that dominates contemporary representative democracy.
But a lot of countries are somewhere on the "direct" vs "representative" spectrum. The US actually abnormally lacking in direct mechanisms, for example. See
only on a federal level. states like california or texas are more direct than a lot of western europe in some ways. like the fact that ballot props are binding law or sheriffs and state attorneys are elected.
I'm one of those everyones, and I don't agree.
Except if you mean local initiatives that don't concern 100M people, but e.g. some regional municipality. Of course then just the locals can vote, be they 100K or 1M.
I guess I could argue that putting a stop sign at a particular intersection in rural Kansas could concern me, even though I don't live in Kansas, but I think very few people would make that argument in good faith.
Doesn't really matter except philosophically. There's something close enough to unbiased public opinion when there are no government propaganda campaings, censorship, press owned by conglomerates, and corporate messaging.
It's very hard to have truly independent media.
The median size looks to be around 200,000 people, so maybe start by dividing the US population into cantons of around that size and doing most of the rulemaking at that level.
Very few people realize that there is option to not use government cohersion as a solution to everything.
I know this is unpopular opinion. The system is designed for this to be unpopular opinion.
But the problem is not the democracy, but the level of power we give to the government. If the only power of government would be to pick flag colors and national anthem, no one would care about it.
No one cares about UK having a king, because it doesn't change a thing.
That's a quite fatal view. I'm not going to defend the shortcomings of democracy as a system or the issues all real implementations have. But democracy has a feature that is unique about it: as long as it actually is a democracy, as soon as things go a way that the people don't like, they can do something about it and change course. For better or worse, but they can. That's the main point of democracy.
Besides, having votes or electionsor is really just a minor detail of the concept of democracy. There is much more to it, like a free conversation in society, strong independent education, journalism, justice, protection of minorities, etc. The will of the people doesn't fall from the sky or is set in stone. It's a permanent conversation which needs all the other mechanisms. If all that happens is a vote every few years, that's not at all indicative of a democracy. Neither is democracy synonymous with majority rule.
> Very few people realize that there is option to not use government cohersion as a solution to everything.
What is "cohersion"? There are "cohesion" and "coercion". Assuming the latter, what does this have to do with democracy? An autocracy or dictarship or whatever non-democratic system you can imagine also likely has a government, and their coercion mechanisms tend to be worse than in democracies. In a democracy you have an independent judical system that you can use against government overreach.
All in theory. Otherwise we wouldn't debate this. Historically none of these traits are unique to democracy, but developed society. US had a civil war over protection of minorities even though it was considered a democracy.
>In a democracy you have an independent judical system that you can use against government overreach.
Which can only follow laws passed by the government. Separation of powers is not unique to democracy. Again the coercion mechanisms doesn’t matter, but the severity of it.
Which is the position the Monarchy absolutely wants you to have, and they definitely don't want you to know that they have veto power over all laws, and regularly intervene and get laws modified so that they're not included in scope.
Meanwhile they just gave themselves a massive pay rise, at a time when government is cutting public spending in all areas.
His mum Lizzie2 had no problem doing it without causing any problems:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/07/revealed-que...?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vette...
I think it's likely that Chuckie3 is continuing this grand tradition with impunity.
It's much rarer for politicians to even get into jail.
One notable example of their privilege was when Andrew George MP dared to ask a question in parliament about the Duchy of Cornwall, only to be told he wasn't allowed to. (The Duchy of Cornwall is a kind of slush fund for the heir to throne. Charles had it before he became king. It has tax breaks, and also the ability to seize property and mine on people's land.)
The BBC promotes the monarchy heavily as it is under royal charter.
There were significant protests at the Queen's funeral cortege and the current king's coronation. The state clamped down hard, in one case arresting someone for holding up a blank bit of paper.
Let's say Denmark for example.
Selling your vote becomes a nonissue when everybody is doing it.
An LLM informed by a reddit-style discussion tree might be a good way to implement the policy-creating part of a direct democracy.
REPLACE FED CHAIR WITH DOVE OR HAWK?
BUILD NEW STRATEGIC BOMBERS?
START A WAR WITH IRAN?
VOTE NOW!
Imagine the chaos. Imagine all the ads.
Cancer surgery is an extremely important decision, directly affecting many people's lives.
What happened with Brexit was a analogous a bunch of salesmen on TV saying "that mysterious ache you have, don't listen to doctors who say it's fine, call our surgical team today! It's cancer! We can fix this quickly and you'll be back to your old self within a week!" for two decades, then the country agreeing, going to surgery, and waking up to find they'd had half their liver removed, the post-surgical biopsy results said it was fine and not cancerous at all, it took 6 months to recover and they could never drink alcohol again. And the ache was still there.
If it had been an honest "we know it will cost X, we are willing to spend this because otherwise what is the point of money", that would have been totally fair.
Instead, problems that weren't caused by the EU were blamed on it for decades, while the benefits of membership were treated as the natural state of the world to the extent that talk of losing them was equated with "being punished".
Not all referenda that might win a "yes" vote are sensible to propose.
> The referendum was originally conceived by David Cameron as a means to defeat the anti-EU faction within his own party by having it fail.
After that, another issue is that the leave campaign was heavily based on lies and misleading the British voters.
Couple that with a extreme form of policy lock-in / hysteresis: you need just to form a small margin in a majority at a single point of time. After that point of time, the popular opinion doesn't matter anymore because getting back to EU isn't as easy as leaving. So the misinformation campaign need to work just once. By the time voters realize what happened, it's too late.
This situation is a critical failure of democracy. Not just direct democracy, representative democracy can't work in a post-truth world either.
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.
This whole argument is why we do not have more direct democracy. The people in power and people who benefit from the status quo do not want the hoi polloi taking the "wrong" decisions. We might end up nationalising things or taxing big business effectively or all sorts of terrible things. Better to just give people the illusion of choice by letting them choose between two "neo-liberal" parties.
I'm not sure about that at all. All my normies friends have no problem immediately submitting their documents to any KYC service that requests it. And talking about chat control they happily parrot the propaganda points, which is something very normal given that they have no insight as we do.
So unfortunately I believe that the laymen are all in favor of chat control.
> the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control and the will to push it through tends to come from the political circles more than popular belief it is a good idea.
This is quite the statement. What evidence do you have that of this? Here in the UK, the equivalent bills are pretty widely supported across he board.
> I expect that if the measure itself went to a general vote, the majority would be against it once they have to deal with a specific proposal
This is likely true of pretty much anything, though. Imagine suggesting that people collectively fund a national road network by paying 20% of their income to the government (or whatever number your state/country/municipality chooses). All of a sudden it’s a terrible idea!
I don't believe this. I believe us more tech oriented people live in a dangerous bubble that reassures us that obviously people are against it. But that's very likely not true.
From "Muh freeze peach" to the actual government requested censorship during COVID everyone is rushing to get a new shiny stick they can use to beat their political opponents with.
Lee Kuan Yew would like a word.
The world is complicated. There may be more than one way to get to a good place, if we can even agree on what good looks like. Most people, even libertarians, think that some kind and degree of authoritarianism is beneficial in a government, we just disagree on the details.
So the argument will go to “think of the children” which is a guise for more control and then pretty soon we are living in the dystopian future of 1984 or the UK where the film V for Vendetta took place.
This same kind of thinking gets idiots like Trump elected because people don’t have any sense of the commons and become single issue voters (sic). “Oh just reduce my taxes on my carried interest… reduce my taxes… I’m a xenophobe I hate immigrants let’s not do anything systematic let’s just hard close the border or the world is flat America only exists we don’t need allies or trading partners (JD Vance) … and so on”
(And cause and effect are taught pretty early on in school; not sure you need to learn "systems thinking" to understand nth-order effects.)
What are the nth-order effects that you think are not being considered or weighted accordingly by proponents of this regulation?
And then there’s also the leakage of those data points to rival nation states, in case of a security breach.
Plenty of bad nth order effects if you just think about it
Now of course, no one is going to “directly” dir from these laws but so much meaning that comes with freedom will be lost, but maybe the wolfs see it under a different light.
Perhaps I’m biased, though. I learn best when provided with working practical examples and hands-on exercises that allow me to develop my own internal models. They can make a concept “click” where I’d be beating my head against a wall with traditional methods for a much longer period of time to achieve the same revelation.
Though I suppose that may have something to do with households in the early days having at most one internet connected device even if they were well off, so society could get away with blaming parents for not monitoring kids' use.
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.
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.
Turns out I just really really hate running.
Absolutely hate running!
And I think this is dangerous. We have smart people like my wife who would probably vote Yes on this if it came to our ballot, because the smart people who wrote the measure were able to control the narrative.
Not that I'm so smart, mind you. I just follow HN and EFF so I'm exposed to this kind of stuff. I'd probably be blind to such things outside of the tech world. I'd love to say that I'd think of nth order effects when at the ballot but honestly maybe I won't.
Yet I don't think age verification will work with national IDs for that matter. I generally use social media sites that won't implement it.
But yes, the normal insta/tiktok user will be affected and not think too much about it. Others will have true freedom of speech.
Which social media sites won't implement it?
In the US, the public school system can barely teach basic reading and math. And the teachers don't appear to understand 2nd or 3rd order thinking themselves so therefore are unlikely to be able to teach it.
Teaching systems thinking may be an effective solution but it needs an effective delivery system to test it.
the principle of protecting children is strong. the solution of verification, no matter how poorly implemented, cannot be struck down while people are interested in persuing the principle it claims to represent.
the only other way around it is to come up with another solution that supports the principle and hope it gains more traction. but when the powers at be putting forth the verification may have ulterior motives to begin with, alternative solutions have a way of losing traction
One could present the case in favor of Internet age verification to the nth-order effects, while downplaying the effects in the case against.
So, in addition to presenting the cases with foreseeable effects, we need ways to compare the impact of worst-case scenarios in the two cases, and make a decision or compromise based on that.
Systems thinking is one thing. One sided systems thinking is another.
If you disregard the challenges kids and their parents, or adults as a whole, are facing with just social media, you can easily make a case against age verification.
Yet, the whole reason we are at this juncture, is because there are actual injuries being felt by people. Not because privacy isn’t valued or hasn’t been defended regularly.
people are plenty good at systems thinking. if we made them better at it, their emotional immaturity would still bypass it.
This plus methods of narrative steering and psychological manipulation in general.
Though I can't see this happenning while the transnational cartel is still at the helm.
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.
A public square does not have trolls and bots from across the globe teleporting in and out. A public square does not amplify the most divisive comments and drown out your friends's holiday photos because the former makes the ad space more profitable.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
There is a reasonable answer to be found, if we're willing to be inventive. 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.
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.
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.
Publishing a book anonymously in the public square still means someone has to physically manufacture it, distribute it, convince you to read it, and pay for all of this. All these steps are subject to interdiction by the police.
You are right about the public square. That is pretty much what governments want to enforce. To silence everyone not in line, like in medieval towns.
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.
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.
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.
I can be 9 years old and go to the library and read any book they have without showing ID. Whatever your point is, it escapes me.
> The point is that 'even the local library' enacts rules and social conventions - not that they're exhaustively and acutely enforced in all corners.
Then let us do the same thing on the internet. Age verification is not that (at least in the forms being pushed).
> No 4chan section in the library?
No, but there are 4chan-style books I can read there. Anything that isn't outright illegal (Anarchist's cookbook) is pretty darn available there.
> 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?
That'd be because it does have books like that. Your point continues to escape me. Maybe my library is really pushing whatever limits.
> I just can't believe anyone here has any relationship with the reality of children, teaching or parenting whatsoever
I've literally been an assistant teacher for about a year. You probably won't believe me though.
> It's the same argument made by the 'drugs should be legal and accessible' crowd
Who I agree with! Funny how that works!
> completely oblivious to the instantaneous massive health epidemic we'd have with opioids and fentanyl
Imagine a world where we can have that regulated, so people know what they're taking, and can see a doctor to get help without getting the police on their back, rather than the unregulated shitshow we have now.
> or the 'anti vaxer' crowd - narrow ideological arguments about expression disconnected from any kind of reality or nuance.
This comparison escapes me too. Anti-vax started with (or at least got a massive growth boost by) Andrew Wakefield, whose paper was based on science so bad and whose research was so heinous he's no longer a doctor. If the 'drugs should be legal and accessible' stance is based on science that bad, I'd love to see it.
So you prefer the internet be censored to be as civil as the library?
'Age appropriate' content is the easiest and most obvious way to do this, particularly because of the effects of social media on young minds.
---
"No, but there are 4chan-style books I can read there." (at the library)
Nonsense.
This is 4Chan [1] , and your library does not contain stuff like this.
---
"that'd be because it does have books like that."
Again - no - your library contains books in 'avant gard' art that you think is 'avant gard', but it's in the civil sense.
Your library does not contain books or films showing 'rape voyeurism'.
---
"Imagine a world where we can have that regulated, so people know what they're taking,"
They do! It's right on the bottle! In exact quantities and 'high quality ingredients'!
It's made by PURDUE PHARMA, dispensed by doctors, and has caused a vicious national epidemic affecting millions of lives - and is the leading cause of death for ages 18-45 !!
It's truly the litmus test of 'common sense' vs. 'naive ideology'
The 'starting point' for 'harm reduction' is a reasonable reaction to ugly, ham fisted authoritarian 'throw them all in jail' traditional approaches - especially those milder things like 'marijuana' etc.
But in the end 'Harm Reduction' is actually a 'Radical Religious Progressive Cult of Ideology' rooted in the belief that 'Policing' and 'Patriarchy' the the 'Justice System' are the source of all harms, completely oblivious to basic human behaviour, mixed in with a bunch of Libertarian nonsense.
It's not unreasonable to posit that in 'some cases' an addict can have 'controlled access' to a substance 'without judgment' to help them stabilize, and find a path off of heroin on etc.
This is the 'polite' argument, but it's completely effete.
In reality that those cases are surprisingly rare, clinical, and extremely expensive to administer and control.
Reality is 'the alley full of zombies'.
Drugs kill substantially more people than guns - in Canada guns kill about 300 vs 7000 overdose deaths / year.
That's ballpark 40K-80K non-lethal overdoses per year. Every human who has had an 'overdose' is in a very distressed state - their lives may never recover. Each of them has family members who are in distress.
The 'world you are imagining' (where Fentanyl is available over the counter in 'whatever dose') is 5-10% of of the population hospitalized for opioid related problems within 6 months, and a collapse of the medical and law enforcement systems, not to mention all of the other knock on effects aka huge spike in small crime, loss of workforce, taxation, child welfare problems etc..
Singapore, which takes a very aggressive and authoritarian 'zero tolerance' approach has less than 1% of the deaths.
Less than 1%.
99% percent of those dying of overdose, ostensibly are dying because we refuse to actually take action.
And - because they have such a dramatically lower rate of addiction they can afford full rehab for the remaining actual addicts - this is the most damning evidence against the 'harm reduction' approach: it engenders so many addicts that even as 'rich nations' , we can't afford to help, whereas if we could 'contain the problem', we could afford to focus more on actual addicts.
The 'world you need to imagine' is one where we actually are able to restrict fentanyl, definitely restrict doctors from handing out entire bottles, and are able to afford actual rehab for those how need it.
Addiction is a social disease: it's a learned behaviour transmitted from one person to another. The most dangerous thing to society, is not a 'guy with a gun' - it's a fentanyl addict who will teach or induce someone around them into 'walking death'. That form of 'transmission' is actually more dangerous than COVID.
We're not going to expose our kids to free drugs, or guns, or porn, or vodka, and neither will our kids not use Social Media until they're old enough to be properly socialized to ingest and understand the impact of it.
Then they grow to be adults and make their own decisions, watch porn ... drink vodka ... just not fentanyl. That's it.
---
(Warning, this is a 4-chan like to crude content - only to make a point about what 4chan is)
[1] https://boards.4chan.org/soc/thread/35155514/kik-dick-pic-th...
Given that I can find books that aren't civil there, sure.
> This is 4Chan [1] , and your library does not contain stuff like this.
Finding dick pics at my local library isn't hard, if you know where to look. Ditto 4chan.
> Your library does not contain books or films showing 'rape voyeurism'.
That'd be because it's illegal. Hence my comment about that.
> It's made by PURDUE PHARMA, dispensed by doctors, and has caused a vicious national epidemic affecting millions of lives - and is the leading cause of death for ages 18-45 !!
I'm glad I don't live in the US, where doctors are lobbied (this doesn't seem like the right word, but you get the idea) to push opiates or whatever other drugs on patients, only to then get away with it. Preventing things like that is also included in 'a world where we can have that regulated'. For instance:
> The 'world you need to imagine' is one where we actually are able to restrict fentanyl, definitely restrict doctors from handing out entire bottles, and are able to afford actual rehab for those how need it.
I agree we should restrict doctors from pushing opioids! And rehab should be state sponsored! That too is harm reduction.
> Singapore, which takes a very aggressive and authoritarian 'zero tolerance' approach has less than 1% of the deaths.
Ah, yes, sterile Singapore. I guess 30 years in prison is better than dying.
I'll refrain from commenting on the rest of your post. Have a good day. I know I won't.
--> Your local library fought for your right to read literature of some kind.
---> They did not fight for your right to gang up on others and call them the n-word, to spread lies and slander about people, to harass children and expose them to creeps and pedophiles, to inundate children with hyper-targeted advertising, or 'Andrew Tate 'how to beat women' seminars'.
Nobody is pushing for a ban on social media so that the kids will be stopped from reading 'Judy Bloom' stories about a girl's 'first period'.
It's disingenuous to suggest that this has anything to do with the causes your librarians stand for.
Literally the opposite - your librarians are creating essentially 'safe spaces' for kids so they can read and be civil.
| They did not fight for your right to gang up on others and call them the n-word, to spread lies and slander about people, to harass children and expose them to creeps and pedophiles, to inundate children with hyper-targeted advertising, or 'Andrew Tate 'how to beat women' seminars'.
I think existing laws should be engaged to address pedophiles and incitement of violence in public spaces and social media - no new legislation is really needed. Barring potential victims from a place instead of prosecuting the noxious behavior from the public place seems like an odd approach indeed.
As for libraries - libraries are curated spaces of freedom that are obviously under assault by right wing parties to ban books that support cultural and personal acceptance for other societies as well as out groups like lgbt information, and even basic women's health information. The problem for authoritarians is libraries are too free - not that they are "curated".
The problem is the lack of thinking about the solution and just handwaving “age verification” as a political posture, which is why we end up with half-baked systems.
You're framing this as some desirable thing that could be good except that a bad implementation erodes privacy. That's wrong at every step. These bills originate from big tech such as Meta that literally profit from collecting as much personal info from you as possible. https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rsn1tm/it_a...
But even beyond their tainted origins, you can't implement your way out of something badly formed in the first place. You handwave "zero knowledge" but that doesn't do for your privacy what you're hoping it will. That id card will still have a serial number and CCTV of you purchasing it and you will de facto end up trusting some government binary blob to implement this cryptography correctly without backdoors. Snowden was a decade ago. This will have a backdoor. This will be used for surveillance, tomorrow even if by some miracle not today.
And finally, this makes the internet worse. There will be a section of people who are, for one reason or another, not able to pass this bar. Much of the goodness of the internet comes from being able to interact with anyone on it.
The facts listed also match the actions of a firm aiming to ensure that the burden of verification does not fall on it, for a legislative process that they know is coming.
Red flag after red flag has been raised on child outcomes and social media, for a decade.
The internet is great for people here on HN, who know enough to avoid getting screwed.
The internet is a grotesque horror show for anyone who is stuck on the wrong side of a customer support system. Plus, most people here are thinking from the perspective of someone in the US or EU. They actually get better support than the rest of the world gets.
Let me be clear - I hate that we are at this juncture. However willful ignorance of the harms being inflicted on users is palliative care for our feelings. It means that one day, there is going to be a confrontation between a techie advocating for privacy and the people whose lives are being upended by tech.
Privacy has to be protected effectively, which means acknowledging the hurt and providing solutions for that.
There is no “win” here, which doesn’t have the issue coming back.
Dismissing the harms only makes privacy advocacy irrelevant to voters.
Defending privacy effectively means plugging the root cause it is being encroached.
This is being articulated as a defense of privacy when it originates from social media harms to kids.
If that's a "fact", where is the proof? What harms are there that can only be addressed with age verification and not in any other way?
> Dismissing the harms [...]
This is a strawman you've created.
> Defending privacy effectively means plugging the root cause it is being encroached.
Defending privacy means defending privacy, not submitting to nefarious interests and well-meaning but misled followers.
> This is being articulated as a defense of privacy when it originates from social media harms to kids.
Social media can be dangerous to kids, I don't see anyone disputing that. The dispute is around the solution to this issue.
> Social media can be dangerous to kids, I don't see anyone disputing that. The dispute is around the solution to this issue.
It may not be what you intend, but that is how the dispute is going to be rendered.
I have no dispute with you over the conclusion of your comment. The meat and potatoes is in the shape of the solution.
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.
All kinds of tools and software would need to be locked down or criminalized. Otherwise, some smart kid is guaranteed to get around the restriction and give that method to others, and if it's at school on a USB stick.
This is just an argument against any regulation whatsoever. Yes, some people will find ways to do illegal stuff, but that doesn't mean forbidding stuff is useless. For instance gangs members always find a way to get access to weapons even in countries where firearms is regulated, but there are still pretty much zero mass slaughter in schools in these countries.
> To make age verification useful for protecting kids, you'd need to lock down every software on every operating system and put it under tight government control.
No! This should never be implemented at the software or OS level in the first place. You should be handed a chip card that you can use for that purpose, like how the bank rent you a credit card. Any other implementation is a bad one, and should be fought.
But by fighting the very idea of age verification instead, an idea that pretty much nobody else in the society has issues with when it comes to voting rights, driving rights, or alcohol consumption, you are just favoring these poor implementations by moving the debate on a ground you can't win.
> Otherwise, some smart kid is guaranteed to get around the restriction and give that method to others,
You should really read that “The optimal amount of fraud is non zero” blog post I linked above.
You don't need government ID to talk to people and share info. You don't need government ID to take a dump.
Also the criticism of the article is just ignored while it is a very likely development and lack of imagination isn't an excuse.
Even today government in the EU are already implementing mass surveillance, even by third parties.
Verification wasn't needed in the past, it won't be needed in the future.
Requiring an internet ID is the the opinion of a marginalised minority that has difficulties with technology. Aside from those that are advertisers of course.
Parents are speaking for their kids in a group and against the status quo. The status quo is not working for them.
I have been beating on this drum to avoid this situation for far longer than it has been the topic of interest on HN for the past few months.
We are here, because difficult conversations were avoided and action which could be taken to stop this from metastizing came in the way of growth.
The “parents” win just by having the laws passed, because it makes it clear what guard rails society expects to have in place for internet use.
If you want, I could give you stories of how KYC rules are not followed in India, enabling fraud. How certain rules in the DSA are toothless, resulting in reduced compliance.
Privacy is going to lose. Correction, it is losing, because the people who think they are defending it don’t understand that the forces at play have changed.
Second, if you hand over a chip card, you still need to lock down and tightly control every executable on every machine. How else would you guarantee that kids cannot access content the government deems unsuitable for them?
Third, I still haven't seen a coherent argument why parents shouldn't be in charge of what content their children are allowed to consume. I'm not at all against governments providing free parental control software, for example, or voluntary industry standards similar to the movie ratings.
Finally, "protecting the children" is obviously a pretense. The sole purpose of the push for this is for governments to get the foot in the door of operating systems they currently can't control well. It's the starting point for a surveillance infrastructure: age verification -> digital ID verification -> tracking who said what and handing the data over to intelligence and law enforcement.
Businesses are always going to favor the cheapest options, but that's why regulation exist.
> Second, if you hand over a chip card, you still need to lock down and tightly control every executable on every machine. How else would you guarantee that kids cannot access content the government deems unsuitable for them?
You don't need to guarantee that. It's like saying you can't have an alcohol consumption ban on teenagers without spying on them all the time. It's technically true but it doesn't matter: having teenagers consume way less booze due to the rules than they would without it, and that's fine for most people, societies don't need to enforce an absolute 100% ban of things for bans to deliver the expected outcome.
> Third, I still haven't seen a coherent argument why parents shouldn't be in charge of what content their children are allowed to consume.
It's much less about what their children are allowed to consume, but what are businesses allowed to sell to their children. It's exactly like alcohol restrictions: the government don't raid houses to check if parents are letting child drink whine and beer at home, but it aggressively enforces that bars don't sell booze to teenagers.
> Finally, "protecting the children" is obviously a pretense.
Not from the electors. Most people are favorable to these things, and that's why these laws are voted. Obviously intelligence agencies are always trying to get access to more data whenever they can, but that's not the reason why these laws are voted, and the representatives routinely could vote for a version of that which doesn't serve any intelligence purpose.
At the very least, you will need to make sure that no child can install Linux. Otherwise, why wouldn't they? Most kids aren't stupid and want to know what their braindead parents are doing on the internet.
I really believe it's dangerously naive to believe this is about the children. It's quite obvious why suddenly ominous entities are shilling for age verification, digital IDs, digital wallets, and so on (more is to come). Countries in the EU used to get valuable SIGINT from the US that prevented many serious crimes. They still get it but now they've realized that the US might not always remain aligned with them and panic because they have almost no access to modern operating systems except for buying 0-day exploits on shady black markets. They desperately need to get their foot in the door to get the right surveillance infrastructure going. At the same time, politicians are rightly worried about the influence of bots on elections.
These are the principal reason why governments are suddenly pushing for this. If this was about the children, they'd have done it 30 years earlier. Until very recently, this discussion didn't even exist. It's manufactured.
“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...
This is not an argument, it's just a stupid quip. And I would sooner suggest that you "never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice". Humans are overwhelmingly selfish and more than willing to harm others to serve themselves.
The traditional quip works well on small-scale stuff, but if there's loads of money or power to be gained, malice and greed tends to be fairly prevalent.
In person that falls to a human being, and it's an easy and intuitive task that takes seconds.
On the internet this involves some kind of video recording being sent to some agency somewhere being paid a fee, who may later be asked to prove the efficacy of their service. This agency needs a digital copy of the photo from your ID for matching purposes. They'll be tempted to store this for auditing purposes... they'll also be tempted to store correlation IDs etc if the architecture allows.
The issue is trust. You just can't trust these first and third parties not to collaborate for commercial gain or at government demand or request.
And ultimately you're still exchanging verification at registration for a shareable credentials: I could use my ID to sign up to pornhub premium and then sell the username and password to a 16 year old if I wished, just like those buying alcohol can go and give it to the underage. A black market for digital credentials is even easier to establish than material goods
That's why I'm talking about an “Id card” using Zero-knowledge proofs in a cryptographic chip, not using a paper ID with your picture on top…
You still need to send a digital image from the id, signed by an authority, saying "this person is 18"
You then still need a trusted ID service or algorithm to capture an image of the user _at the time of use_ to compare that to.
Just having access to your digital ID credentials proves nothing
The zero knowledge proof only helps prevent tracking between the ID service and the website you're logging into. This is valuable but requires standardisation and client side support, which doesn't exist.
All the time the client side is implemented by JavaScript served from the server side you're just trusting these parties to behave and not snoop
> You then still need a trusted ID service or algorithm to capture an image of the user _at the time of use_ to compare that to.
> Just having access to your digital ID credentials proves nothing
If I have access to your digital ID I shouldn't be able to impersonate you anymore than I should be able to fly using your passport.
Your passport is useful not just because it's difficult to forge, but because border control is a thing.
What's next? Your US legal status as determined by your ethnicity? Scan your face to prove you're white? Yeah, that sounds absolutely ridiculous but so did the age verification with KYC just a few years ago.
We allow bars and car companies to verify age before conducting business. Does that in itself lead to racial discrimination? I think not.
But saying “we must abandon the idea of age verification in bar” is never going to work in any democratic setting.
Voters genuinely want to protect the children, without second thoughts.
A second order effect of this is that a small number of parents have the ability to manage their kids use of tech.
A side effect of that is kids seeing their peers use tech. I’ve seen 9 month babies getting hypnotized by screens.
This is excluding situations with an antagonist preying on the child, such as grooming or bullying.
Yes, in an ideal world, it would all go down to parenting. Since we live in reality, some of that work is shifting to ensuring defaults are in place.
I thought it was a great question. I wish I remembered more details and had the links ready.
No, they aren't in place at all. It's the parents' job and vast majority of parents do it fine. Nobody wants the Nanny state you propagate.
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.
But instead of inserting controls around email addresses (as with paid services) or devices (as with contraband), the requirement is pushed to the application layer. It really makes no sense from a technical POV.
Truth be told the worst kind of content is nominally child friendly - just incredibly addictive and overstimulating. We're all so preoccupied with preventing our children from looking at gore or porn or even meeting predators online that we forget that those who stand to make money on addictive content will pull every lever necessary.
In large part that's because, if they'd done so, the kids would've been socially isolated from their peers, at least the most normal ones with the most normal parents, which are the kinds of friends most other normal parents want their kids to have.
It's a collective action problem, except instead of "I can be better off if I ignore what I know is best for society", it's "if I ignore what I know is best for my kids psychologically, they will still have friends, and social media brainrot is a lesser evil than socially isolating my kid from all the normal kids at school."
And also, giving kids social media interaction devices is a convenient form of babysitting. It reduces up-front effort of parenting.
I never had any of the popular social medias when I was growing up, and I wasn’t isolated from anybody aside from the one bloke who insisted on doing all his texting via instagram. I’m in uni now and people kind of laugh when I ask them for a phone number, but if anything it’s improved my social status.
>And also, giving kids social media interaction devices is a convenient form of babysitting. It reduces up-front effort of parenting.
This is the real issue to me. Parents are overworked and exhausted because you can’t support a family on one salary, so there’s no more stay-at-home parents. I was extremely lucky in that my mom’s firm got bought out when I was in 5th grade and she retired on the severance package. Parenting is a full time job and society needs to treat it like one. If stay-at-home parents got a salary from the government, 90% of what’s wrong with kids would be solved (and the falling birthrate issue too).
My problem is I don’t think anyone is (seriously) suggesting we get rid of the laws protecting children in the physical world, and having nieces and nephews, they nowadays spend more time in the virtual world than the physical world, often with their friends so it’s hard to track what they do.
What is the next step?
Ok, that sounds snarky, but this is where we are. Parents are asking for age controls, and governments are happy to give them what they want, with them getting an added level over privacy.
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.
Yet people will employ lazy slappery slope fallacies for this one issue in particular.
most people that learn systems thinking is coz life forces them to.
How do we solve this problem? I wish I readily had an answer. But as we witness our democratic institutions crumble in real time, it's hard to imagine the average voter becoming more educated in our lifetime.
Does this not imply we also wouldn't get the internet because people would have considered the damage it would also cause?
> There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.
They have to keep the population blind to any kind of systemic thinking to rob them blind.
> [..] > male and female students;
So reading scores were lower for everyone? Why single out groups?
Age verification is de facto identity verification. Eff says it well:
> But no matter the method, every system demands users hand over sensitive and immutable personal information that links their offline identity to their online activity. https://www.eff.org/issues/age-verification
Tying every action taken online to the user's real identity will have a deep and catastrophic chilling effect, destroying those very places that are creating our culture.
What about climate change and the current mass extinction?
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.
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
Device attestation is another - making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system and apps linked to your ID.
Little by little, everything I hold dear is getting destroyed. Computers of our own, that we control, that we can freely hack on. Everything the word "hacker" stands for. How I wish I could turn back the clock...
This goes way beyond any notion of a "hacker tweaking his electronics".
With ID checks, device attestation and a device required for any transaction, and all this data piped in to a central brain (none of which are far fetched), we're all pretty much buggered.
It is a matter of time until advertising companies claw their way in, insurances calculate individual premiums based on behaviour, and remember, we're all one legislation away from being governed by lunatics.
They'll call you in for a routine scan of your thoughts to make sure you haven't been up to any wrongthink.
Some people get so focused on providing a technical solution to the problem of age verification without revealing your full ID to the website that they forget that they’re proposing we start requiring only government-approved devices and operating systems.
I'm an optimist, but I don't think any age verification laws will gain traction without first solving the device attestation problem.
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.
Any site, with any concern about age of user liability, is likely to adopt the practice. Strong laws, sold on their face value safety benefits, will increase that liability.
You won’t see any laws removing or limiting that liability.
The trend will be many more sites becoming government-gated, than we are imagining now.
Beyond surveillance, it’s a real step into government permissioned internet access, on an individual citizen level.
What’s fascinating to me of that there are people who win vehemently oppose age verification yet have no absolutely no problem with anti-BDS laws, Gaza suppression, etc. Or worse, they’ll support those things.
That is nonsense. This type of content appears on my TikTok/Reels feeds nonstop even if I don't interact with it.
The government has control over many areas of life, and in most cases I feel that to be on balance a good thing, even though governments can be corrupt or inefficient.
Consider some other domain, like roads. In every country, the government issues licenses that include photographic ID to residents to drive on roads; driving without a license is illegal and can result in fines or even imprisonment. But this level of government control feels normal to people, and most would say the safety benefits outweigh the government interference.
Is your argument that "no one is dying other than those who are dying"?
I became radicalized against social media when I saw the statistics for suicide rates in teenage girls [1]. With Facebook having been found legally guilty of addicting teenagers, I can't in good conscience say "kids will figure it out" when there's clear evidence that the richest men alive are investing millions and armies of behavioral scientist to keep them addicted.
There are most definitely consequences for things that happen on the Internet, including depression and death. I don't like that age verification mechanism are raising so many problematic issues, but I also don't like that so far we've tried nothing and are running out of ideas.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/05/03/suicide-... or https://archive.is/wY1OH
One of the consequences of the government knowing who wrote or said everything on the Internet would be that it would be much harder for organised crime like drug and human trafficking to operate. Of course, another well known consequence is that the opportunity for government corruption is greatly magnified. My point is that the safety improvement is significant enough that the debate is worth having.
Attitudes to government involvement vary from place to place. In Germany, you need to register your home address with the local government; while most Americans would chafe at this level of government "surveillance", a majority of Germans are comforted by it.
> 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
The term "social media" as used here means a third party website, e.g., Mark Zuckerberg's website, Elon Musk's website, Larry Page's website, etc., encouraging internet users to communicate and/or share files with other internet users via the website, allowing the third party to intermediate, collect data, perform surveillance and provide ad services to other third parties who want to target the "social media" user
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.
If you're located in, say, Norway - and send someone who is also located in Norway a message via Messenger, there's a good likelihood that message will go to some foreign located Meta server, and back to Norway.
When this was being implemented, there was some noise and protests from experts, but that's about it. For the general population it went quietly and without notice.
Wondering if someone can explain the logic
(for example: https://www.dw.com/en/eu-weighs-giving-us-data-for-fewer-tra...)
The internet, as we knew it, is over. It has been dead for a few years, but it is getting clear now only. It had its great moments, while it lasted.
Everyone else can stay anonymous.
I look forward to hearing why that won't work and what problems it will cause.
This is in fact the EU age verification app
https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/european-ag...
The concern here is the trust in the device appears to be tied to proprietary os/device vendors.
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.
No, they don't. The proposed EU verification system provides a proof of age to the service but no physical identity data.
This is possibly a slippery slope, but I don't think it's correct to state the two things are equivalent.
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...
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.
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.
Then either freedom wins again or freedom-loving individuals move to Soviet-style samizdat, “lying flat”, and clever subversion. And the world continues turning as usual.
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.
> Genocides have happened before we had internet, or TV, or radio, or any modern technology people attribute genocides to.
Genocides became more frequent every since we have technology. Technology facilitates genocides. Both by creating actual means of killing (industrial killing in WWII) and by creating conditions for distribution of "work". Radio specifically was instrumental in Rwanda.
Haven’t seen any Amish committing genocides, have you?
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.
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.
I really don’t think people should minimize actual historical and current events for political purposes. Knee jerk "bad things are inconvenient, therefore they did not happened" denial is how we got here.
> essentially tiny political differences
The political differences between actual fascism that is on the rise, its actual opposition and those in between are large. Not small. Also, in more recent events there were pogroms in Belfast now. Elon Musk personally contributed to their incitement.
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.
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.
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.
No algorithmic recommendation.
No mixing between known users (friends, followers etc.), recommended users (swipe feed) and advertised content.
No publication of user content. It's social media, not global media.
I posit that these points will be enough to curtail most of social media ills. Don't allow recommendation of slop and there will be a similar reduction in production. There will still be the village idiot that shares slop content, but their reach is limited since they have to actively persuade people to their message, rather than be recommended for being psychologically stimulating.
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.
theres a place for group chats and tight communities but we also need global spaces where you can reach anyone. you cant promote your new album or start organizing a union or share some really good pics with the world if all you have is individual servers.
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.
Unless you expect the teenagers to run underground mesh radio networks and risk FCC's hammer (real jailtime), it's just wishful thinking.
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 know that reads like I'm being snarky, but I'm not trying to be. Within the last decade in the UK we have had (among others):
- the 2016 Snoopers' Charter
- the 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act
- the 2023 Public Order Act
- the 2023 Online Safety Act
- the 2024 Addendum to the 2016 Snoopers' Charter
Couple that with the whole push to repeal the 1998 Human Rights Act and withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, and the fact we've started imprisoning pensioners for holding up signs, and it's really difficult to _not_ see exactly where this leaves us.
I wish I could look away and get on with my life, but I can't - and I'm starting to realise that that is also part of the design. The increasing reluctance to express controversial opinion online isn't an accidental side effect of all of this legislation. It is intended behaviour, the desired outcome.
If you see tyranny coming, your options (other than silent complicity) are pretty much build a support network or exit.
The current act is being used by lawyers and judges to force migration on a country which never voted for it.
Now would we trust the clearly compromised political class we currently have to implement it? Probably not.
Because you know their motivations. You've spoken to 'them'.
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.
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
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!
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!
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.
If we wish to preserve the values we grew up with, we need both.
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.
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.
You need to explain to and convince those parents that this will result in something worse.
The title is almost obvious. Surveilance is already 24/7/365. If you're not completely appalled you haven't been paying attention.
With regards to 'democracy', as with jurors, common-sense is a mixed bag... A politician in an area close to mine ran a write-in campaign contacted ~8000+ people, got ~5k votes. The Democrat on the ballot was unknown, signed-up last minute, gave no ballot statment, didn't advertise, or canvas and won; surmisably because they were listed as Democrat.
Another, earlier, was a Democrat state representative who got redistricted out of their seat by their own party for lack of toeing the party line.
Most of my ballot here is single person for each category, Should a challenger come up... well money is speech and thus taxation is censorship, and propaganda costs. When you hear a politician speak they are psychologically projecting from their own affectual experience.
Freedom ended with the concept of allodium. We've all been slaves ever since. Don't believe that, walk nude, spouting nazi, or Stalinist slogans at work or even in your front yard or porch and see if you can pay your property tax or rent for the next period.
It is a catastrophically dangerous idea, and it's exactly what the abusive social media companies want.
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.
If they cannot distinguish real people from bots they can just charge more for more ads shown !
Can you trust future governments to respect "Nulla poena sine lege"?
This is the thing that so upsetting with the discourse. Privacy is already eroded, its just by private companies, not the state. All social networks have a gateway for law enforcement that allows getting extra details about users.
There is another gateway with ISPs to correlate IPs with end users.
In the USA you can just buy most of that info through brokers.
Sure, people who takes precautions it takes extra work, but for dave on facebook, its pretty automatic.
I really wish people would foccus on that bit, because the way to get privacy back is to get a handle on social media companies(and google). They are the ones who've eroded our privacy, and if we just say "Oooo age gating is bad mmkay" without a viable alternative, then we'll all get something worse.
The solution is to limit what social media companies can profit from, so _they_ can regulate what shit they put in front of kids eyes. They can totally do it (after all how much porn is actually hosted on youtube? its really really hard, because they put in place systems to stop it.)
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.
What makes you suggest otherwise?
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
People have got into trouble for having retold a controversial joke that they had heard, when the reason they retold had been because they themselves had been upset about it.
I too don't think that holocaust jokes should be accepted, but sometimes people say things because they don't know better at the time. There have been cases of people retelling "dog whistles" without having understood their contextual meaning for certain groups. I've even seen politicians use the phrase "Works sets you free" without understanding why it is inappropriate. People learn and change, but old posts can linger on the Internet for a long time.
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?
A situation that should be impossible due to freedom of speech.
- assault / terror threats
- extortion / blackmail
- fraud
- conspiracy / solicitation to commit a crime
- treason / sedition
- perjury
- slander
Sedition, the bugbear of would-be censors, has never really caught on as a tool of prosecutors in the US. There have been several attempts to use laws against sedition to attack dissidents in the US, but only a few cases have stuck, and it was usually during wartime or with extremely unfavorable defendants. Courts have (rightly) slapped down most uses of sedition laws as violations of free speech.
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.
The weather is a bit rainy now but there is sun in the forecast for afternoon.
^^^ that is all we have left to discuss already in personal conversations at work anyways.
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
Thats not true, as displayed by the recent Afroman case.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/19/entertainment/afroman-law...
Ok. So what does it mean to revoke the right for someone to become parents? Be honest and be specific.
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?
If you want your kids to not see porn on the internet, cool. Don't give them Internet access. You don't need to make the internet worse for me and my family to make that rule for your family.
And maybe if you are parenting your child well, at some point you will be able to trust them to use the internet in a responsible way.
Apple, Google, and the social media companies could have done this 10 years ago and we would not even be having this debate today. But they decided they didn't have any social responsibility for what their devices and software did, so here we are.
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.
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.
Not everyone knows they exist, and there's a huge install base of older and/or cheaper devices that may not be getting updates that could be strengthened like this.
> Not only does this mechanism require zero involvement of an unrelated third party
But what if we do want to regulate the behaviour of those third parties? We know they've been cognisant of the harms and addictive behaviours their stuff promotes (see internal Meta research), and in fact seem to have designed for that. If the controls are only at the consumer side, are we not likely to see an arms race where they continue to try to addict kids around the controls?
You're also assuming a level of technical sophistication on the part of parents, voters and politicians that would necessarily lead them to come to the same conclusions as yourself about solutions. This may simply not be present.
This is what I mean by "good arguments that won't land". We can talk about how solutions should work, whether solutions can possibly work, and even make strong arguments that regulation in this area is wrong in and of itself. Jumping straight to "they're all liars and only want to spy on me" makes the entire thing look like a group of fringe nutters unable to take onboard how people (particularly non-tech people) feel.
"Oddly", the laws that demand you enter your birthday (and will eventually demand you scan your ID) seem to require OS producers to make it so that users will not be ignorant of these new features. [0] I wonder if it's possible to do the same thing for Parental Controls...?
> ...there's a huge install base of older and/or cheaper devices that may not be getting updates that could be strengthened like this.
They're not going to be getting updated to be compliant with any of the new state (or Federal) user-identification regs, so I don't see what good-faith reason you could have for bringing them up.
> But what if we do want to regulate the behaviour of those third parties?
You use law and regulation? You mention nothing in your subsequent paragraphs that a "Papers, Please!" mechanism will prevent that a "Beefed-up and difficult-to-bypass Parent Controls" mechanism will not.
[0] For example, AB1043 says (among other things)
1798.501. (a) An operating system provider shall do all of the following:
(1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.I mean, 'papers please' mechanisms are a type of law and regulation, we're arguing over what sort of law and regulation should be used, no?
In Australia, platforms are being regulated, the regulation says they must not allow under 16s to have accounts. How they achieve this is up to them to a large extent. "Papers-please" then is their doing. It's certainly not the only way things can be done - see anonymous credentials, verifiable credentials and other such schemes that don't involve showing your identification documents to everyone that asks.
> You mention nothing in your subsequent paragraphs that a "Papers, Please!" mechanism will prevent that a "Beefed-up and difficult-to-bypass Parent Controls" mechanism will not.
An arms race to work around the controls, which seems likely to me unless there is some sort of regulation on the service providers.
But either way, look at this! We're discussing how things might work, rather than dismissing things out of hand and impugning each others' motives. Going to the "Papers please" governments and parents in those populations, saying "Look, we understand there is concern and we think there's a better way", or even "We understand the concern but here's why acting on it in any way is a bad idea" is a lot better than "You're all evil and probably stupid".
Yes, they are. I still have no idea how laws of the form "You must honor the signals you get from Beefed-Up Parental Controls and we fine or jail you if you do not" fails to constrain the behavior of US-based businesses. You seem to have an understanding of how it won't, so do let me know what I'm missing?
> An arms race to work around the controls,
Whether the arms race is server-side or client-side is irrelevant. If anything, I'd expect a client-side implementation to be far more robust... if for no other reason than because the private company that is contracted to implement and run a server-side implementation will cut every corner to improve their profit margins.
> In Australia...
Speaking from a civil-liberties perspective, Australia has been a shithole for a long time now. They can very safely be ignored by US parents and US lawmakers.
> "You're all evil and probably stupid".
The people who are pushing for these "Papers Please!" regs are evil. The lawmakers (and parents) who aren't asking "Wait, what about the existing Parental Controls mechanisms built into every major OS?" are stupid and -if that stupidity is willful- also evil. Those are plain facts. One is not obligated to be all niceys to people who are invested in tearing yet another chunk out of the vial organs of civic life.
> If anything, I'd expect a client-side implementation to be far more robust...
You're not really describing a client-side solution, you're describing legislation of something like the old Do Not Track header, which is a server-side solution, and fines for services which don't respect it. In such a situation I would expect 'smart' firms like Meta to start finding just-this-side-of-legal ways to get kids hooked on their services. But I suppose the same is likely to happen with server-side-verified blocks on kids using services, Meta can spin up new services that don't quite meet the definition and try to work around it. I guess this is orthoganal to the method of blocking kids.
> from a civil-liberties perspective Australia has been a shithole for a long time now. They can very safely be ignored by US parents and US lawmakers.
Even though what they are doing is less "Papers please" and more "Services must verify, how it's done is up to you", which seems lower down your evil scale than the US states you're up in arms about?
Interesting take.
But again, this is fine, it's an exchange of ideas. You don't seem to be against age verification in principle, you're acknowledging that people want something done. The article and many commenters here are immediately writing off everything in this area as effectively a distraction from full monitoring of everything everyone does on the net.
So while we may disagree entirely on how to go about effecting any sort of solution, and we may not (honestly I'm not entirely averse to the parental controls idea), you're not dismissing the problem out of hand, and in general I have no quarrel with you or your approach.
I suppose you missed the part where I said
Australia has been a shithole for a long time now.
> You're not really describing a client-side solution, you're describing legislation of something like the old Do Not Track header, which is a server-side solution...
Mmm. No, there are three systems being described here.
1) "Beefed up Parental Controls", where all service-restriction information is entered and stored client-side and sent server-side as needed.
2) "Age Please!", where a "guardian account" associates the birthdate/year of one or more users to their respective accounts using the client device. This information is entered and stored client-side and is sent server-side as needed.
3) "Papers Please!" -which is what #2 will become-, where a user uses their client device to photograph their government-issued photo ID to be sent to a third-party and processed server-side.
Because we're talking about accessing an Internet-hosted service, your apparent confusion about the need to send some information to the services servers is -itself- confusing.
> You don't seem to be against age verification in principle...
I'm 100% against it. I'm 100% for guardian-controlled content-restriction policies. I'm also completely fine with a "How old is your cutie? What things do you want them to not see or do?" wizard that populates those policies with some defaults that the guardian can fine-tune if they wish to.
> It's not even about being "all niceys" it's about recognising that the concern people have is genuinely held, and addressing it.
An equally important skill is recognizing when those concerns are not genuinely held. Anyone who should know about "Parental Controls" and chooses "Papers Please!" or "Age Please!" is evil. Lawmakers and regulators pushing for this stuff are in this bucket. Anyone who -once introduced to the concept- claims to see no world in which "Parental Controls" can be beefed up and also claims that "Age Please!" or "Papers Please!" is the only viable option is -at minimum- unrecoverably stupid, and is probably also evil.
The part that I quoted? That would be quite a feat. Either way I think it's definitely a choice to entirely ignore what a country is doing in this area due to historical reasons, when the country you're interested in making changes to appears to be doing worse.
> Mmm. No, there are three systems being described here.
There are more than three options here. Here are more possibilities (already in use in some places) -
4. Service providers make an informed guess about who might be a kid, based on usage patterns and scanning the pictures they've uploaded.
5. Anonymous credentials systems, as described in the link in my first post that you responded to.
Neither of these is a 'papers please' solution.
> your apparent confusion about the need to send some information to the services servers is -itself- confusing.
So you're also implicitly ignoring solution 6, which a lot of people elsewhere in this thread are arguing for, which is parents using existing parental control systems built into their devices, which work 100% client side?
> I'm 100% for guardian-controlled content-restriction policies.
That's age verification of a sort by the guardian, enforced server-side. So no, you're not against these systems in principle, you're just proposing a solution that you find palatable.
> Anyone who should know about "Parental Controls" and chooses "Papers Please!" or "Age Please!" is evil.
Why? Parental controls at the moment are patchy, poorly understood and certainly don't operate in the way you're proposing they should in future. It's easy to see why people might declare that such schemes are inadequate.
I am finding it very funny that you are determined to put yourself in the category of "People Nursie disagrees with because they dismiss the entire thing as a conspiracy", even while you're not actually doing that, you're arguing in good faith and I applaud it!
I'm 100% fine with those, but people report that they're "insufficient" for vague reasons. That's why I suggest we beef them up. Also...
> Why? Parental controls at the moment are patchy, poorly understood and certainly don't operate in the way you're proposing they should in future.
you seem to agree with the reports I'm hearing. That's why I suggest beefing them up.
> The part that I quoted? That would be quite a feat.
One that you managed, somehow. Gratz.
> ...they dismiss the entire thing as a conspiracy
Unless you're using the "Two or more people get together to plan something" definition of the word "conspiracy" -which happens to neatly cover planning to go to lunch-, I don't consider this to be a conspiracy. [0]
> There are more than three options here.
I was only discussing three, and I'm sure we can come up with way more than five in total, but sure, let's go.
> 4. Service providers make an informed guess...
That's happening now and has been for a while now. We all see how willing the larger operators are to rely on their guesses rather than relying on the judgment of a third-party. Having said that... when last I checked, 4chan was one of the operators who are doing the noble thing in the face of all this hysteria. [1] It sure is something when 4chan is on the right side of an issue and the big guys aren't.
> 5. Anonymous credentials systems...
They're absolutely not going to be anonymous in practice. As I mentioned earlier:
...the private company that is contracted to implement and run a server-side implementation will cut every corner to improve their profit margins.
Absolutely not. Do explain where the restricted account has either its age, documents that contain its user's age, or documents that can be used to look up its user's age entered into it. A helpful hint is to ask yourself how you'd distinguish between the content restrictions set for a precocious eleven-year-old and those set for an adult suffering from both PTSD and advanced dementia who needs to be protected from both scammers and graphic depictions of sex and violence.
[0] Yes, I read ahead to the end of the sentence I quoted. The statement to which this footnote is attached is included for completeness' sake.
Yes that's the entire point of this whole thread, congrats for getting there in the end.
You don't consider this a conspiracy.
People like the article author do, and in doing so they miss the mark on having any effect on the wider conversation because they aren't willing to even acknowledge the existence of the problem. You are actually engaging with the topic and putting forwards ideas and engaging with solutions. You have thoughts about how something might be made to work. You are not who I1 am complaining about.
(As an aside, why not actually try reading the link about anonymous credentials? It's very informative and it shows you what's possible even if you're too cynical to believe anyone would ever implement it)
I think this Cloudflare business ties into it, although it is masquerading as bot protection.
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.
There is a huge difference between protecting children and prosecuting/punishing children. Age verification can only be an implementation of the latter.
‘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”
Complaints had been made against the man for years and been thrown out because of who he was, and the material was only found by accident.
This same individual had been yet another one of those arguing for tighter controls on the internet and free speech for the peasants.
Another one of these "one rule for me, another for thee" types.
- A 30 year prison sentence for tansporting a box of zines in Texas [1]. To do so they invented "antifa" as an organization out of whole cloth and will now use those convictions as further proof. I've seen this compared to the Salem witch trials;
- Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident, was detained and there is still ongoing deportation proceedings. What for? Organizing a peaceful protest at Columbia against the genocide being committed by Israel [2];
- Renee Good and Alex Pretti who were simply protesting ICE were killed essentially in cold blood and there have been zero consequences;
- Over 700 charged under the Terrorist Act in the UK for expressing support for Palestine. Defenders will argue Palestine Action is a designated terrorism group without asking why. Also, that's how it always works. Slavery was legal once. Freeing slaves was illegal. Does that make the Underground Railroad a terrorist organization? Today it would;
- In ~35 states in the US to work for or in government you have to express varying degrees of loyalty to Israel or at least commit never to boycott Israel eg [3]. To date, the Supreme Court has never substantively taken up these cases as the clear First Amendment violation they are;
- In PA, the Swarthmore 9 are being charged over their protests with the bullshit charge of "defiant trespass" [4];
- In Australia, in the wake of the Bondi shooting, new anti-"hate crime" legislation was passed that is so broad and sweeping that the Greens claim you could be charged with criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu [5].
- Numerous examples of the administration pulling funding and bringing colleges to heel over not cracking down sufficiently on Gaza protests.
So why I find these tired tropes about China so exhausting and lazy is because:
1. Look at what's happening here and in the West at large; and
2. Ironically, China has a system for age verification that actually works and the answer is really simple. The government issues the IDs. It can verify the IDs. We do this all the time with employment (eg E-Verify). You can even do it in such a way that the app doesn't get any sensitive information.
But it's like people say "you can't trust government" (even though the government already has all that data) and then thinks that a private company is the only possible solution (eg Peter Thiel's Persona).
If you've gotten this far you should know that at no point in any of the above have I argued for age verification. So far all I've said is that there is an absolute double standard in the fearmongering around it and that is it possible to create a relatively effective regime for it without handing everyone's data to Peter Thiel.
I think it's inarguable at this point that what we're doing now has been a dismal failure and something's gotta give. I think we should start by attacking the financial incentives here, namely:
1. Tech companies already use behavioural analysis to guess your demographics. If they figure out you're under 18 you should have a restricted experience. That should include no advertising, a much more limited algorithmic feed, etc;
2. Stop tech companies from being able to sell advertising to minors. Don't allow an advertiser to target an audience that includes minors as best as the tech company knows they are minors.
I personally think we could eliminate a bunch of harm just by attacking the advertising incentive here.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Mahmoud_Khalil
[3]: https://www.txdot.gov/manuals/csd/ncp/standards_for_contract...
[4]: https://iacenter.org/2026/06/27/swarthmore-9-on-trial-for-pr...
[5]: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jan/21/criti...
Hacker news has a doomscroll front page. Ive never notice you have a problem with it
None of this is new. Every single one of these things has been pointed out millennia ago.
You had already evaluated it and made your decision (against censorship) on this decades ago when you first came across it.
Changing your view now isn't a matter of new information coming to light. It's a matter of you disliking the obvious and inevitable consequences that you had been warned of going into it.
Perhaps it's time you stop changing your mind based on totalitarian propaganda and realize you don't know what you're doing, and stop supporting censorship.
In all these operations, anonymity is what drives it.
I was born and raised in the anonymous internet, and tasted its freedoms. I oppose censorship. But, at this point, I have come to wonder it it would be best to always have your real-life personality attached to all you do. At least to any action that feeds an algorithm or creates something someone else can see.
It is the nature of the internet that you could never achieve absolute censorship -- and maybe anonymity should belong to the hackers and tinkers with the will and drive to hunt and craft for it.
I do not like holding this opinion, because it feels as though it is on the similar boat as that of those who 'pull up the ladder after themselves'. Increasingly, I see it as pulling shut the trapdoors to hell.
P.S. This goes without saying -- it's also the only was to defend against "ai" bots.
EDIT: I'm thoroughly convinced that my initial position here was wrong. Yeah -- easy to forget that, with, COINTELPRO, the feds are not bound by the same laws as the people, and that oligarch-controlled media will bend over backwards to give them backdoors. Thanks for all the feedback.
The most egregious, prolific lies out there have been fully attributed; and perhaps especially because of attribution, people vehemently disagree on which are the lies.
Those who wield outsized power experience attribution of speech asymmetrically. Filtering societal communication supports the concentration of power.
If attaching your real self to everything is so important, why does it only seem to restrain those without power, while those with the most influence can say whatever benefits them and face no consequences?
In theory it was a great way to prevent abuse - are people still horrible on the internet if they use their real name? Turns out they are, because it only took a few years of internet for people to no longer have any shame.
Yep. Google forced real names on youtube. People kept acting the same way.
- age/identity verification comes with banning of bot traffic posing as human in any communication platform, by law - end to end encrypted communication is declared a fundamental human right, by law
I don't think we'll see that though. Too much money / power left on the table.
I also had similar thoughts to you, but seeing the election results of the previous decade in the US makes me question the premise that transparency will lead to desirable results because the majority have good intentions.
You can be sure that none of those organizations will be affected by it. Especially the domestic ones.
> But, at this point, I have come to wonder it it would be best to always have your real-life personality attached to all you do.
No:
https://bianet.org/haber/eu-strips-journalist-huseyin-dogru-...
And that is Europe. The US wouldnt hesitate 2 seconds before shoving you into a federal prison.
> It is the nature of the internet that you could never achieve absolute censorship
Oh yes you can. The only reason you have a 'free' internet now is because the US had to rush its internet out without implementing the censorship and control mechanisms it planned because the USSR was about to release its own internet. Now they are making up for their mistake.
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.
https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2025/10/15/i-feel-like-i-can...
This could be a case of selective enforcement, a deliberate attempt to retaliate against the man for his previous speech, which would be illegal under federal law (see Gonzales v. Trevino).
It’s also possible that this is not a new thing and the municipality in question just regulates city business very strictly. This is bad in its own right, it grants too much power to the state which can be abused, but would not be a free speech question.
There's unreasonable discrimination because the public comment period is only used for speech which disagrees with the government.
The only thing that the requester needs to save is the "this person is 18+ as verified by this party".
Granted, that's still an avenue for law enforcement to find out who you are, but then, so is your internet service provider or VPN (where the VPN is likely already a honeypot)
It most certainly does, because it has to:
https://reclaimthenet.org/starmers-social-media-ban-surveill...
"Monday’s headline was a ban on under-16s using social media which, to some, sounds about as sinister as a wholesome ribbon-cutting until you ask the obvious question nobody in Downing Street wants asked aloud: how, precisely, do you stop a fourteen-year-old from opening Instagram without first checking the age of the forty-year-old?
You don’t. You can’t. So everyone gets carded. Britain is lifting the system wholesale from Australia, where a computer first scans your face and guesses your age from your cheekbones, then, failing that, surveils you to death, studies your browsing habits and the hours you keep, and then, when the algorithm throws up its hands, simply demands your passport."
There’s nothing new in publishing anonymously, just ask George Elliot. What’s new is the notion that publishers have no liability. Social media companies do not claim to speak for themselves. They have no reporters, no sources to protect. They’re one giant “letters to the editor” section. They should know for whom they speak.
Whether or not a writer commits libel is for the courts to decide. Neither the writer nor publisher has the right to avoid responsibility by camouflage.
Should journalists be forced to reveal their sources if the subject of a claim sues for defamation?
Should everyone just shrug off anonymous hoaxes and hate speech?
1. I need to identify myself for everything on the internet because of said "hoaxes" and "hate speech";
2. I don't need to identify myself anywhere on the internet, and let go of said "hoaxes" and "hate speech", but can have the right of saying anything that I need to say without fearing for my safety and the safety of my relatives due to the government;
Then yes, I would prefer the second option without a blink. Unfortunately, for what we have seen in the last few decades, there is no intermediary option. The proverb is true: give them an inch, and they will take a mile.