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I'm fine with this, as long as they DO NOT require any form of ID or 'age' verification. Instead this should be attacked from the profit side, by banning any f

• throwup238 8mo ago
  Who decides whether an ad is targeting children or not? I’m not playing devil’s advocate, I’m curious what the SOTA is for ad moderation. I’m sure it’s relatively easy to tell a kid’s toy ad from adult ones like alcohol, but how do you differentiate toy ads targeting parents vs toy ads targeting kids?
  • joe_mamba 8mo ago
    >Who decides whether an ad is targeting children or not? Much simpler than that, you just ban all targeted ads full stop end of story. The ad-funded internet existed in the 90s before ad targeting was a thing. You went on a car forum, you'd get ads about car parts. You went on a PC forum, you'd get ads about PC parts. Pretty simple stuff that didn't need to know your age, gender, political affiliation, ovulation status, etc so it's not like the web will go bust without ad targeting. Targeted ads are exploitative and manipulative, and a crime against humanity, or at least on society.
    • majormajor 8mo ago
      None of that attacks the motivation of FB to look the other way to kids clicking the "I'm an adult" button and pocketing money from advertisers buying un-targeted ads for snacks, clothes, makeup, computers/gaming, and a million other things that are equally as aimed at kids as they are at anyone else. (Remember how many kids bought car magazines before they even had drivers' licenses? Advertising has never been "oh, ads for things adults will buy will be completely boring to children.")
    • qgin 8mo ago
      Honestly this is better than covering half of every website with a cookie banner that very few people understand.
    • bobthepanda 8mo ago
      Ads and media are generally exploitative and manipulative, even if not targeted specifically at anybody. 3 years after the nation of Fiji received its first television broadcasts in 1995, dieting and disordered eating went from unheard of to double digit percentages among teenage girls. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/20/world/study-finds-tv-alters-fiji-girls-view-of-body.html https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/20/world/study-finds-tv-alte... > Before 1995, Dr. Becker said, there was little talk of dieting in Fiji. ''The idea of calories was very foreign to them.'' But in the 1998 survey, 69 percent said that at some time they had been on a diet. In fact, preliminary data suggest more teen-age girls in Fiji diet than their American counterparts.
      • junofan 8mo ago
        I mean as of 2011 over half the native women are obese [1]. I don’t know what to make of it other than that’s a lot. Dr. Anne Becker may be really into preserving traditional Fijian culture or whatever but it sounds like some of the local girls don’t want to anymore. [1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26201444/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26201444/
        • bobthepanda 8mo ago
          The introduction of body shaming media vs. actually improving obesity rates is pretty poorly correlated. Introducing anorexia, bulimia, and now bigorexia to a population is probably neutral or net negative. If it wasn’t, you would have expected those rates to decline after the introduction of media informing people.
          • potatototoo99 8mo ago
            I don't know, it works in Japan.
            • bobthepanda 8mo ago
              One out of 190+ countries would be a poor correlation indeed.
  • behringer 8mo ago
    We should ban all ads.
  • ajsnigrutin 8mo ago
    Since platforms know the users age, any ad shown to them should be considered as such. So basically, no ads on underage accounts at all should be the norm.
• mytailorisrich 8mo ago
  Without age verification this is obviously an unenforceable ban... I think Finland already has schemes for age verification.
  • k__ 8mo ago
    Yeah. Zero knowledge proof and you're good to go.
    • unclad5968 8mo ago
      How would a zero knowledge proof of my age work?
      • MatteoFrigo 8mo ago
        Here is one way: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/2010 https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/2010 Our (Google) implementation: https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk An independent implementation by the Internet Security Research Group: https://github.com/abetterinternet/zk-cred-longfellow https://github.com/abetterinternet/zk-cred-longfellow Still being developed but already interoperable with ours. European age verification app: https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/docs/architecture-and-technical-specifications/#71-zero-knowledge-proofs https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/d...
    • Aurornis 8mo ago
      That's not how ID checking works, though. A key part of ID verification laws is that you're confirming the ID presented also belongs to the user. They can't just check for "This person currently has an adult ID in their possession" and nothing more, otherwise one kid at school would borrow their older brothers' ID and then use it to register all of their friends' accounts one day.
      • tzs 8mo ago
        You tie it cryptographically to their phone with keys in the phone's hardware security module. This doesn't stop sharing of ID but it makes it much more inconvenient.
• alkonaut 8mo ago
  Any kind of zero knowledge verification should be ok. But with minors it often goes a long way to just make the law. It’s a good instruction to parents who should be able to control this. Laws on bike helmets for minors are followed nearly 100% not because they are enforced by authorities but because the law gives parents guidance.
  • Mindwipe 8mo ago
    There is no such thing in practice. Anything with zero knowledge is never going to be considered robust enough by a government. Zero knowledge protocols really have no functional revocation mechanism.
    • pydry 8mo ago
      expiry
    • JoshTriplett 8mo ago
      (Without accepting the premise that it should be acceptable to have to provide any kind of proof...) > Zero knowledge protocols really have no functional revocation mechanism. None would be needed, you (sadly) only age in one direction, so valid proof would never become invalid proof.
      • mrob 8mo ago
        >valid proof would never become invalid proof Somebody can give their proof of age to another person.
        • JoshTriplett 8mo ago
          And? Presentation of someone else's valid credentials is not fixable by any privacy-preserving mechanism. You can set an expiration date in order to rotate them, and they can be fast-rotating. In any case, it's a moot point: the correct amount of required identification is zero.
• dyauspitr 8mo ago
  I disagree, we should have age verification but maybe it can be done in a mostly anonymous way like a central arbiter of identity from the government or something.
  • salawat 8mo ago
    That's exactly the opposite of anonymous. You cannot have anonymity & age verification that actually guarantees anything. It's a contradiction. Either the chain exists, or it doesn't.
    • alkonaut 8mo ago
      Are you saying it would be impossible to have a service where the site (social media, say) would issue some sort of random token and ask me to sign it using a centralized ID service. Then I log in to the centralized id service and use it to sign the random token and bring it back to the service. The centralized service see who I am, but not what I'm proving my age for. The social media or other site see that I have signed their token so would have the appropriate age, but not who I am. What's impossible about this?
      • tzs 8mo ago
        The problem with that is if someone gets a hold of the logs from both the centralized service and the social media site they can compare timestamps and may be able to match them up. Most people will be doing the whole process (site gives token, person gets token signed, person returns token) as quickly as possible which limits the candidates for a match. Worse, if the central service is compromised and wants to make it easier for log matching to identify people they could purposefully introduce delays which would make it easier to distinguish people. Most people will use the same IP address through the verification process which would really make it easy.
        • dyauspitr 8mo ago
          This is no different from VPN providers. Maybe have the central authority keep no logs just like VPN companies. We already have government agencies that do that for instance the agency that handles text to speech phone calls for deaf people. Alternatively use a VPN to sign the token.
• kuerbel 8mo ago
  Instead of banning social media for teenagers, regulate it in ways that actively reduce addictive design. For example: after 15 minutes of short-form content, show an unskippable timer every third video, displaying today’s, this week’s, and total watch time. The same principle should apply to endless scrolling, make usage visible and interruptible. Base it on actual screen time. This would protect teenagers and benefit adults.
• yoz-y 8mo ago
  There is still a financial incentive to loop in teenagers that would stay on a platform and spend money there later.
• Telemakhos 8mo ago
  > If there's no profit to be made in servicing said demographic and a law requesting at least end user 'agreement' that they are an adult, this should be sufficient. Is it still advertising if an "influencer" takes money on the down low to sip a Pepsi not too obviously in the middle of a video? Is it still advertising if an attractive and young person provides news that happens to be colored in a way that supports the narratives of a particular political faction? Is it still advertising if you can't prove that a foreign power encouraged a popular yoga enthusiast or makeup artist to post some whispered ideas that weaken citizens' faith in your institutions? Does that foreign power ever care about profit? Advertising and propaganda love to explore the grey spaces around definitions, so your bans will end up being a whack-a-mole game. Cutting off kids with an ID check is much easier. Implementing age verification the Apple way would even protect privacy by simply registering whether Apple can attest that the user is over or under the age limit, without handing the ID over to third parties.
  • prussia 8mo ago
    There's no profit for the platform. As of now, both the "influencer" and platform are aligned in that they want children to consume more slop. If the platform doesn't have any incentive anymore, maybe most of those "influencers" will fall away, if the algorithm starts deprioritising content geared toward children. As you say, policing the "influencers" is difficult, but at least it is quite easy and simple to target the platform. Better than nothing.
• quotemstr 8mo ago
  You can tell these proposals are made in bad faith because we can do age verification in an anonymous way using zero-knowledge proofs but regulators demand linkable IDs instead. It's not about protecting the kids. It's about managing the public's information diet. The latter is not a legitimate function of any state.
  • ozgung 8mo ago
    The goal is to ban anonymous internet for everyone. You won't be able to post anything without verifying your id. All these similar efforts in different countries seem coordinated and synchronous, suddenly after 35 years since the advent of the web.
  • sensanaty 8mo ago
    In the Netherlands we already have zero-knowledge ID verification through DigID, I'd be amazed if the Nordics didn't have the same system available to its citizens.
    • sigwinch 8mo ago
      However that’s not anonymous. Ministry of Interior is alerted with your identity each time you use it.
• throwawayk7h 8mo ago
  Why not device-side headers? Kids' devices should always include a header saying "I'm a kid, don't show me adult content.