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The question I keep coming back to regarding the recent debate around age verification is "Why now?" I'm 47, and I started using the internet in my early teens

• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• MSFT_Edging 7mo ago
  More studies are being done on the effects of social media. Social media execs have been brought in front of congress multiple times. The US tried to ban tiktok because it showed our military actions in a negative light to millions of teens.
• chasd00 7mo ago
  > Perhaps I'm missing something? maybe since minors can't enter into a contract they can't agree to TOS and therefore their content is ineligible to be used as LLM training material? just guessing.
• flatline 7mo ago
  People often cloak their power grabs behind a move to control some vice. It was just a bunch of us nerds on BBSs back in the day. Now everyone is online. The stakes are completely different.
• AJRF 7mo ago
  Did any groups recently lose control of a narrative? Are people in that group powerful, influential and wealthy? Would that group benefit from being able to use state power against individuals who just won't stop shining light on injustice?
• rwmj 7mo ago
  Meta likes this stuff because (a) it's a barrier to entry to new social networks and (b) it heads off the under 16 bans which have happened in other countries.
  • bmau5 7mo ago
    It's also valuable verifiable data for advertisers, in that it verifies real people are being served your ads, and it's going to the desired age range/appropriate audience
• bashwizard 7mo ago
  It's a coordinated psyop to enforce mass surveillance and control. The question we should ask ourselves is "Who are they?". Their agenda is clear already.
• KellyCriterion 7mo ago
  As Gov you can use it to request for "real names" on the internet?
• nine_k 7mo ago
  Missing something? Perhaps. Pornography is a very convenient pretext. The real target is anonymity and pseudonymity. Both have been abundantly available on the early Internet. Both were and are being gradually squeezed out from it. Various law enforcement agencies would love to know more, always more. The more the users are required to identify themselves, link their online identity (maybe pseudonymous for other users) to their official offline identity, the easier it is to find and catch criminals. Not only criminals, of course, but even if we assume 0% nefarious intent, and only the desire to catch the evildoers who swindle grandmas out of their life's savings, this still holds. Operators of big sites also would benefit. Easier to ban disruptive users. Many great ways to turn the precise identity into targeted ads. The internet has become a very serious, consequential space. More like... the "real world", which was considered separate from the internet in 1990s. Now they are inseparable, so the pressures of the "real world" are equally present offline and online.
  • throwaway290 7mo ago
    incongruent. first you say "pornography is just pretext" then say "it's like real world now". where in "real world" can preteen kids go and see not just porn but people limbs removed and other stuff? pretending the actual issue doesn't exist will not help you stop laws like this
    • nine_k 7mo ago
      The pornography is a real issue, but not the real issue. As many people have noted, a different system could delegate the enforcement to parents. Instead of forcing a web site (or an OS!) to collect identifying information and certify the age, we could demand that a web site would send a header stating the legal age boundary. The user's device then would be demanded to honor it, depending on device's settings. Parental controls should work, and parental controls are already there on most devices. Open-source software would have no trouble implementing parental controls, because they leave the responsibility and the choice with the user. No identity info would leak to third parties. In a more elaborate case, a state identity provider (something that provides birth certificates, passports, etc) would provide an OAuth-like flow that would certify the age of a bearer of a short-lived token to a site which generated the token, without giving any details. This gives the parties more assurance, and gives the state a bit more visibility, but still mostly preserves the user's privacy. I don't think that these simple ideas never came to the lawmakers' minds, or to their tech experts' minds. But it's less appealing to them, because it results in less control. Why not push for more disclosure when a chance presents itself?
• wahnfrieden 7mo ago
  They seek monopoly. Startups can’t afford these barriers and can’t convince users to trust them with the safety and value of the verification process without being an established brand.
• BatteryMountain 7mo ago
  Locking down the entire chain of trust. Try to start an ISP and/or become a public Certificate Authority.You will quickly run into steep requirement (admin and financial). To buy IP address space, get peering partners for traffic transit, hosting dns, hosting email (good luck getting mail delivered to the big providers without having your own users verified via mobile number). Try to build a mobile app, or phone or runtime - all the key signing, binary signing involved, the entire security model from hardware/firmware, boot, memory access, runtime safety and on and on. Then there are the intelligence agencies and various countries surveillance laws, information laws. If you add it all together, we are already monitored 100%. They want to linked and prove the monitored device is linked a certain human beyond a doubt. Email, Mobile, Full names are not enough, they want your biometrics too. They want you serial numbers of devices and mac addresses of networked devices and SIM cards. They want it all.They want your children to have devices with camera, mic and gps trackers in. Your kids will be part of kompromat before they reach adulthood and some of them will be blackmailed by government agents and other bad actors throughout life. Some kids will be trafficked with the help of all these tech solutions, because they know exactly where your kids are at every moment. Add home assistants, smart tv's with cameras, toys with cameras, outdoor cameras, shopping mall cameras everywhere, in-vehicle cameras and mics. Bluetooth beacons everywhere. Add it all up and ask yourself, is this truly about child safety? Not at all. I'd argue they would be more exposed. If they wanted children safer, they'd recommend parents and schools to 100% remove kids from the internet or devices with public internet access. Why does a 10 year old need to know how to join a teams meeting and being comfortable on a video call? Not to mention the access to weird porn and gore sites that WILL traumatize a young mind. Then contemplate what all this data will be used for in the hands of extremists, nazi's, dictators, the effects on free speech & journalism, the propaganda machines reach on you and your family. The internet is 10000% cooked and no longer open. It's better to disconnect from it at this point.
  • merpkz 7mo ago
    > Some kids will be trafficked with the help of all these tech solutions, because they know exactly where your kids are at every moment. What the hell are you talking about? They already know where my kids are! At school which is funded by government.
• guitarlimeo 7mo ago
  Have you questioned whether you might have been better off without seeing ISIS decapitation videos when you were a teenager (you might be too old for that though)? Or maybe that you have something that makes you more immune to this stuff? I think that I'm biased to think "it shouldn't be a crisis" because I saw that stuff as a kid and turned out ok, it's a prime example of survivor bias, maybe someone who saw that stuff didn't turn out that well. Also one thing I've been wondering I'm not sure if that's the beginning of my everlong cynicism. If it is, then I might have been better off without being exposed to that material that early in my life.
  • xvector 7mo ago
    Nearly everyone I know that saw this stuff turned out just fine We do not need to turn society into a police state because we're afraid the next generation might not be able to handle what we handled fine for the most part Edge cases should not dictate the removal of our freedom & rights
    • hedora 7mo ago
      These bills are specifically exempting platforms that distributed the ISIS videos (like meta), and including platforms that did not. apt-get install isis-beheading-vids doesn't work on any Linux distribution I've seen, and it's not like Microsoft or Apple were preloading them on laptops. These bills have nothing to do with online safety. They exist purely to establish a police state (that will currently be run by a convicted felon with child abusers as deputies -- look at what ICE has been doing to the kids they round up, especially the pregnant ones).
      • throwaway290 7mo ago
        "bills trying to fix it are bad" != "the problem doesn't exist" if you agree that online safety problem exists then suggest better solution. if you disagree then keep on living in a fantasy world
        • 7mo ago
• hedora 7mo ago
  This is outlined in Project 2025 (which I have not read). As I understand it, the age verification laws are part of a three pronged plan to eliminate privacy, freedom of speech and freedom of expression online. The goals being to expand current police abuses to include LGBTQ++, reporters, democrats, non-whites, non-christians, demonstrators, etc. It all is predictable and makes perfect sense if you assume the goal is to hold control over the white house in 2029 while being even less popular than they currently are.
  • parineum 7mo ago
    > This is outlined in Project 2025 (which I have not read). Great sentence. Aside from making me completely doubt everything you're stating, I don't understand why people just take it as a given that Project 2025 is something the current administration gives two shits about. Is war in Iran in Project 2025?
    • rootusrootus 7mo ago
      > I don't understand why people just take it as a given that Project 2025 is something the current administration gives two shits about. Because if you use project 2025 as a scorecard, the current administration is hitting all the salient points very quickly. With a score that high, inferring that the administration does in fact give two shits about it seems reasonable.
      • sippeangelo 7mo ago
        Said scoreboard: https://www.project2025.observer https://www.project2025.observer
      • parineum 7mo ago
        I noticed this scorecard doesn't show things that are done that _aren't_ in project 2025 and things that are directly in opposition. There's no "Did the opposite" status, just "Not started", "In progress", and "Completed". Furthermore, looking through the list of objectives, the "completed" objectives are all fairly middle of the road conservative points, it's no surprise that many of those are marked as completed. The one's that are making headlines are mostly found in the "Not Started" sections. https://www.project2025.observer/en?sort=status-asc https://www.project2025.observer/en?sort=status-asc It's not surprising that a conservative think tank and a conservative administration are aligned on a quite a few things but there are plenty of things in this list of objectives that the current administration has either not done or said anything regarding or has actively worked against. As an exercise, go through all 320 objectives and see how many _you_ agree with. Plenty of them are milquetoast positions. A chunk of them are also just "continue enforcing existing laws", sinister wording for bog standard practices or broad/vague enough that every administration could probably call it completed. In short, it's a padded list.
• rglover 7mo ago
  Just talked to a long-time friend laughing about the state of things and how we used to have unfettered access to horrific gore photos at 14. Don't ask me what the appeal was, I have no idea, but it was possible.
• Quarrelsome 7mo ago
  its because we hired a generation of the greatest minds to build habit forming and addictive products. So now we're seeing signs of how bad that is for children's mental health prior to their ability to consent to that.
  • xvector 7mo ago
    Blocking this is the responsibility of a parent. Spend some time to configure parental controls etc. Pushing to turn society into a police state because parents are too tired/lazy/tech-illiterate is simply not the solution
    • baggachipz 7mo ago
      This is akin to blaming the consumer who doesn't recycle their plastic, when in fact plastic is inherently un-recyclable and needs to be regulated at a federal level. Too bad the lobbying tricks of the plastic industry effectively shifted the blame.
    • Quarrelsome 7mo ago
      > Blocking this is the responsibility of a parent. Spend some time to configure parental controls etc. sure but the bar is low for a reason. On top of that, we're discriminating against people born to bad parents by leaving them vulnerable, arguably furthering inequality. I don't think anything is necessarily out of scope in terms of the solution, what matters is identifying the issue (i.e. the intentionally addictive properties of these platforms) and trying to reduce harm.
      • xvector 7mo ago
        Edge cases where people are born to bad parents are not a reason to give up our freedom and rights
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
• WarmWash 7mo ago
  I don't think anyone who still holds up "the dangers of porn" can argue with any credibility anymore. We have a population scale study that lasted 30 years, and millennials turned out fine. Same with violent video games and harsh language music. What does seem to definitely be having a severe negative impact though is social media.
  • stingraycharles 7mo ago
    I wouldn’t mind having some kind of law that restricts any minor from using social media whatsoever. Because I wish the current generation of children to have a somewhat worry-free childhood like I had.
    • colechristensen 7mo ago
      Ok but EVERY generation wants to project its childhood on to the next one and is upset that the new generation is absolutely ruined by modern culture viewing its own history, mostly forgotten, with rose-tinted glasses. You can find thousands of years old testament to how the children are being destroyed by modern culture, and each new generation thinks THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT. (and people will agree with this and say this time with these concerns is actually different with a list of reasons)
      • tommit 7mo ago
        isn't Gen Z the first generation that's scoring worse on all kinds of tests than their parents did? seems like this time it may actually be different. and peer reviewed.
• furyofantares 7mo ago
  I'm the same age as you, started when I was maybe 15 on BBSes. The porn was certainly a lot harder to come by, still images that took a while to download, had to do it when family was out of sight on the family computer and clean up history after. Kids have personal devices and can go down a rabbit hole of content in their room. It seems fairly different. Age ranges are different too, 10 year olds have phones and have maybe been using an iPad their whole life. But even then, I think if adults knew what we were up to, maybe they would have lobbied for stuff then too. For my 10 year old, we don't allow youtube or any other algorithm doomscrolling feed. And no voice chat in online gaming. We plan on waiting until 13 for a phone, or behind-closed-doors internet, and we use parental controls. I'm not presenting this as an argument for age verification, I think it's a naive solution that comes with major drawbacks and won't work anyway. But the landscape is very different and I think we should try to understand where parents who support this are coming from, because lobbying from Meta or whatever isn't the only issue. There are parents who have been making choices for their young kids and have to start letting go at some point as the kids age, and maybe, at whatever point parents stop monitoring, they would like the kids to not be fully in the deep end. I think we should acknowledge that and explain why age verification isn't a solution, rather than pretend the world is the same and pretend don't have any legitimate concerns by saying "well we turned out okay". (edit: reworked the tone in response to feedback)
  • huflungdung 7mo ago
    [dead]
  • devmor 7mo ago
    > at whatever point parents stop monitoring, they would like the kids to not be fully in the deep end Parents want to stop monitoring their kids, but still want their kids' experiences to be catered to their ideals, so the rest of society must now bend towards what you want for your kids specifically? What about parents who want a different set of guardrails for their kids - more limited or less limited than you? What about people who aren't kids - does their privacy or freedom not matter, just because you don't want to handle it yourselves anymore? That sounds to me (a non-parent) like a very selfish and naive worldview. I'm assuming from your tone that you are in support of this, so would you explain to me why you think its not?
• shit_game 7mo ago
  "Now" is when this level and depth of mass identification and surveilance has become technologically feasible, financially valuable, and politically possible. The political planets have aligned in many nations for private industry to lobby for this power, sating their own goals as advertisers and the state's goals as authoritarians. This is an open conspiracy between every tech giant and every government to perpetually identify every action that every person ever makes online for the sakes of advertising, propagandizing, surveiling, persecuting, and imprisoning people. It is not a coincidence that this is occurring in all western nations at the same time; these economies are incredibly large and active, and these governments have been under attack from the far-right for decades.
• thatguy0900 7mo ago
  I wonder if it's because of election interference. Foreign countries bot farms basically have free reign to assault the minds of your people 24/7 online, idk how you stop that outside of identity verification systems
• ChiperSoft 7mo ago
  It all makes a lot more sense when you find out they want to declare anything lgbtq related as pornographic. The right has figured out that they can keep queer kids (especially trans kids) in the closet if they don't let them learn what their "difference" actually is. It's "don't say gay" applied to the internet.
• sneak 7mo ago
  It has nothing to do with porn and everything to do with making anonymous use of the internet (and thus anonymous mass publishing) illegal and impossible.
• dylan604 7mo ago
  I would suggest removing your artificial filter limiting your thinking to porn. During the days of BBS type sites, the monetization of personal information was not a thing. Forcing a user to be identifiable in a government mandated manner means the data gathered about you becomes more valuable because it can be pinned to you, not an account you've made, but to you. The government likes the same result if not for the same monetary reasoning, especially this government. Knowing who you are, what you've said, what you read, watch, listen, as well as where you are/have been will all be valuable in different forms of value. Any reasoning after that is just fluff to get people not looking at it critically to accept it.
• casey2 7mo ago
  The value of data increases year on year, even old data, but old data is worth much less than new. But for hyperscalers we've cost the threshold, now any data at all is worth more than storage space, and the profits are too much to ignore. It's not just targeted advertising, though you can open youtube kids/instagram/tiktok and see plenty of that and age brackets happen to perfectly align with leaked metas' advertising brackets. (5-10, 10-12) (group A), 13-15 (group B), 16-17 (group C), 18-24, 24-30. I think it's largely driven by the increasing computing power
• ryukoposting 7mo ago
  An unfortunate side effect of Epstein mania is that people (particularly legislators) are more receptive than ever to the "think of the children!" strawman. This approach is highly effective right now, and it might never work again in Zuckerberg's lifetime. America needs another Zappa.
  • smt88 7mo ago
    My observation of Epstein "mania" is that politicians are revealing themselves to not particularly care about children being sexualized. The push for age verification seems to stem from conservative states trying to appear to care about children through symbolic gestures while cutting other funding and protections for children.
    • ryukoposting 7mo ago
      Conservative states? California passed this bill first! And it's on the docket in Colorado! This is weapons-grade dark money bullshit, not a blue-or-red problem.
• 0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
  It's "Now" only because of a confluence of factors - namely, $2B spent on convincing lawmakers to do this now, because Meta doesn't wanna be fined $52B again. It's nothing to do with porn. The lawmakers passing this are passing it because "protecting the children" is always going to get them votes (even if it doesn't actually protect the children)
• ibejoeb 7mo ago
  This is better framed as something like "know your actor." The goal is to have everything attributable to a natural person. Nobody wants that, though, so we have say that porn isn't for kids. (Now, there's a lot of disagreement about that, but that's another matter.)
• PurpleRamen 7mo ago
  > "Why now?" Because they worked on it for decades, and it's finally showing results. > I've seen every age of the Internet, and there's always been widely available pornographic materials. Just because something bad happened in the past, we should stay away from fixing it? Just because you didn't (probably) suffer as much as others, we should continue looking away? And that's leaving out that the world on all levels and corners today has become significant worse than in your youth. > Why all of a sudden is this a crisis? It's not all of a sudden. The calls' haven been around for a decade and longer, but research has become better over the years, so it's harder to ignore them. And now there is also AI, which significant speeds up the spreading of fake news, bot messages, sexualized deep fakes, and other very problematic content.