23 ms·

If I’m not mistaken, Meta has been lobbying heavily for all of these age-verification bills lately. It seems their strategy is to externalize their responsibil

If I’m not mistaken, Meta has been lobbying heavily for all of these age-verification bills lately. It seems their strategy is to externalize their responsibility to verify age themselves, and thus reduce their exposure to liabilities when child protection acts like COPPA are violated.

NotGMan 7mo ago
Yes https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rsn1tm/it_appears_meta_is_heavily_lobbying_for_linux_age/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rsn1tm/it_a...
- Slow_Hand 7mo ago
  Really, I’m surprised that for all of the discussions on HN around these individual statewide acts that I see so little discussion of Meta as a primary force pushing them.
  - pesus 7mo ago
    There are probably many more people that would profit off of it on HN.
  - iAMkenough 7mo ago
    I wonder if Meta monitors their employees comments on HN?
    - alephnerd 7mo ago
      They don't but frankly no one who matters actually gives a s#it about HN anyhow. HN is also much less representative of the demographics within the American tech industry now as well - almost all the references I see on here are stuff only men in their late 30s to 50s would recognize, and an increasing amount of users appear to be based in Western and Central Europe. Heck, I'm on the younger end by HN standards (early/mid 30s) and when I introduced HN to my peers over a decade ago (this is my throwaway) even back then they complained that it was "toxic", "snooty", and "unhelpful". And it's reputation amongst the younger generation has only gotten worse. HN has "SlashDot"ified, because most people are either in private groupchats on signal/imessage/discord or meeting each other with Luma invites.
  - hypeatei 7mo ago
    Why does it matter specifically that Meta is doing it? This has long been a goal for intelligence apparatus and big tech: get rid of anonymity online to "fight terrorism" and sell ads respectively. Don't get me wrong, it's good to know but it's not earth shattering information.
    - JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
      > Why does it matter specifically that Meta is doing it? Their entire top leadership has shown a multi-year tendency towards psychopathy and lying. Knowing Meta is pushing this bill makes me want to understand why my views and theirs randomly agree as well as carefully read the bill text for any signs Adam Mosseri was within 500 feet of it.
      - JCattheATM 7mo ago
        [flagged]
        JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
        > That's probably a sign that you should reevaluate your views On its own? No. We probably agree on the need to drink water, that doesn’t mean I should now die of thirst.
    - gruez 7mo ago
      >Why does it matter specifically that Meta is doing it? This has long been a goal for intelligence apparatus and big tech: get rid of anonymity online to "fight terrorism" and sell ads respectively. How does getting the OS to do age verification "get rid of anonymity online" or help "sell ads"? Assuming the verification is implemented in a competent way (ie. it's not just providing an id scan for any app to read), it's probably one of the more privacy friendly ways to implement age verification, that's also more secure than an "are you over 18" prompt on every website.
      - hypeatei 7mo ago
- starkparker 7mo ago
  I think? the most recent version of that post is https://web.archive.org/web/20260314074025/https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rtd51g/update_i_pulled_irs_filings_for_the_org_that/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260314074025/https://www.reddi..., which is "awaiting moderator approval"
  - Springtime 7mo ago
    I've seen skepticism about the veracity of the claims, in part as various sources cited in the git repo pointed to todo files not actual data[1] (in that example was only just hours ago a source file was added, when the project still claims part of the conclusions are based on data said to be contained there). Which has led some to suspect much is LLM generated and not properly human-reviewed, in addition to the very short timeframe from initial self-disclosed start of the research to publishing it online (mere 2-3 days) despite the confident tone the author uses. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260317184359/https://lobste.rs/s/ddrcpa/i_traced_2_billion_nonprofit_grants_45#c_alwe0c https://web.archive.org/web/20260317184359/https://lobste.rs...
- dredmorbius 7mo ago
  And discussed on HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410870>.
Lerc 7mo ago
How should they do it? Surely they don't have a responsibility to do something that nobody knows how to do? There have been numerous cases in history where governments have attempted to legislate the outcome they want without regard to how that might be done or if it was possible in the first place. Obviously it can never deliver the results they want. It would be like passing a law to say every company must operate an office on the moon, and then saying that companies lobbying for an advanced NASA space program is them externalising their responsibility.
- tyre 7mo ago
  They could require government ID to sign up and an adult sponsor to certify accounts for kids. Plus a limit on how many accounts an adult can sponsor. It would be a mess, but solve the problem. It’s not that we don’t have the technology, we just don’t want to because the friction would decimate user numbers and engagement; it would be much simpler to regulate (e.g. usage limits on minors); and minors are less monetizable, which would lead to lower CPM on ads. Then there’s the legal liability if you know someone is a minor and they’re sending nudes, for example. And the privacy concerns of tying that back to de-anonymized individuals. But obviously I wouldn’t believe that social media companies care about user privacy on behalf of people.
  - gruez 7mo ago
    >They could require government ID to sign up and an adult sponsor to certify accounts for kids. Plus a limit on how many accounts an adult can sponsor. Requiring all online account creation to go through some government vouching system sounds far worse for privacy than OS doing age verification.
    - intrasight 7mo ago
      OS-based age verification would also have to use a government ID. There is no alternatives to a government ID for such verification.
      - 7mo ago
mgfist 7mo ago
It should be externalized to a degree. Facebook shouldn't be the ones verifying age, but there should be a trusted 3rd party service that does that, which just tells facebook "yes this user is old enough to use your service" or "no they're not old enough". It abso-fucking-lutely should not be at the OS level though, for so many reasons. Even the implementation alone would be a nightmare. Do I need to input my ID to use a fridge or toaster oven? Ridiculous.
- pianoben 7mo ago
  Or, and hear me out, _maybe our computers shouldn't spy on us in the first place_?
  - jachee 7mo ago
    “Impossible to get a man to understand a thing, when his paycheck depends on his not understanding it.”
  - ToucanLoucan 7mo ago
    I'm reminded of a video essay I watched about AI once, which took a side tangent into surveillance capitalism: "Google's data harvesting operation became a load bearing piece of the Internet before the public understood digital privacy. And now we can't get rid of it." The public has been conditioned to expect web services free at point of use. Legitimately it's hard to monetize things like YouTube without ads, and I get that. But turning our entire ecosystem of tech into a massive surveillance mini-state seems like an astonishingly shitty idea compared to just... finding a way to do advertising that DOESN'T involve 30 shadowy ad companies knowing your resting blood pressure. My otherwise creative and amazing industry seems utterly unwilling to confront this. Edit: Like, I don't know, am I crazy for thinking that simply because we can target ads this granularity, that it simply must be that? I get that the ad-tech companies do not want to go back to blind-firing ads into the digital ether on the hope that they'll be seen, but that's also plus or minus the entirety of the history of advertising as an industry, with the last 20 or so years being a weird blip where you could show your add to INCREDIBLY specific demographics. And I wouldn't give a shit except the tech permitting those functions seems to be socially corrosive and is requiring even further erosion of already pretty porous user privacy to keep being legally tenable.
pear01 7mo ago
He doesn't want to have to stand up, turn around and apologize to parents on behalf of an asleep at the wheel Congress again. At some level I don't blame him. It is also a bit strange how in that act alone he showed more accountability than most of the politicians that were questioning him, never mind most executives. I suppose Josh Hawley wants to be liable for personal lawsuits for his acts of Congress too... people cringe at his "robotic" demeanor but I can't remember the last time someone turned and faced people and apologized like this. Most people asked to do the same (even in front of the same body) never do. https://youtu.be/yUAfRod2xgI https://youtu.be/yUAfRod2xgI
SoftTalker 7mo ago
Don't kid yourself, Meta already knows the age of all its users, at least within the broad categories that this bill defines.
- onlyrealcuzzo 7mo ago
  Legally, there's a difference between "knowing" and "accurate enough for loose cannon advertisers".
- maxrmk 7mo ago
  If a company relies on self reported ages, they don't "know" it well enough to satisfy COPPA. Probably. I'm not a lawyer but I do keep up with the latest in privacy enforcement and I think this is the way things are headed. For the record, I'm against age verification laws. But I think companies are pushing for them because of liabilities they face under other laws, not because they would actually like to have the data.
- thesuitonym 7mo ago
  Yes, but they want to show children content that is not appropriate, then claim ignorance.
  - fuzzfactor 7mo ago
    To give them the benefit of the doubt you could say they only want to show children content on its own that is fully parent-agreeable. Meta just wants to do it in the most habit-forming way, that is embedded in a system crafted to mold young behavior into more manipulable consumers. >Meta already knows the age of all its users Roger, now they want a government mandate to target everyone else on the internet.
ezfe 7mo ago
Is there a problem with this? Most users are using an iPhone and most iPhones already know the accurate age of their user
- enoint 7mo ago
  I’ve heard Android is a more common OS. In any case, if your OS fails to ask a user their age, it’s banned.
  - ezfe 7mo ago
    Okay, sorry yes that was an oversimplification. Android does ask your age as well, so that's all of them for mobile phones.
    - saintfire 7mo ago
      Android doesn't ask your age, Google does for an account. You can use an android phone without a google account. Most people don't but the distinction is important because degoogled android phones will also have to comply.
      - subscribed 7mo ago
        No, unless the law mandates it. So for example operating system that does not ask this question could simply declare itself "inappropriate"/"illegal" in the jurisdiction. Say, GrapheneOS can explicitly disallow image downloads from Californian IPs and not sell phones with preinstalled GOS there. You don't need to be complaint with the Mongolian law to sell in Burkina Faso. Similarly they don't need to be complaint with Ohio law if they do not operate and have presence there. American companies that decide to surveil users ont heir websites with pervasive tracking without consent would only contravene the European GDPR if they allowed EU users to use them. Block the EU (famous http/451), and they're in the clear. IMO, but IANAL.
        enoint 7mo ago
saltyoldman 7mo ago
That's the correct strategy, if anyone sues meta, meta can bring their age verifier into the lawsuit and blame them. It makes sense from a business perspective, insurance perspective. etc...
pembrook 7mo ago
Meta is definitely helping to push this, but they aren't having to push very hard because its already in the zeitgeist. It's a classic moral panic. Millennials are raising kids and turning into their boomer parents. Millennials had their hippie era in their 20s (same stuff their parents did rebranded as "hipster" instead of "hippie," where instead of building a lifestyle of free love and bong hits in the Haight-Ashbury, they built a lifestyle of free love and bong hits in Williamsburg Brooklyn). Now in their 30s-40s they've moved to the suburbs, they're voting Reagan, and are falling for hysterical media-driven moral panics about "what kids these days are up to" just like their Boomer parents did in the 80s-90s. What's even more funny about all these "social media is evil" legislative proposals, they're motivated by the idea of what social media used to be when millennials were in college...which doesn't even exist anymore. The classic narrative that teens are depressed because they're seeing what parties they didn't get invited to is wildly outdated now. Social media isn't social anymore (see Tiktok), it's just algorithmic short form TV. Nobody is seeing content from their peers anymore. In reality, most modern research on social media finds little to no affect on teen mental health. But of course, if you have ulterior motives to undermine privacy or shirk corporate responsibility under the cover of "saving the kids," this moral panic is an already burning flame waiting to be stoked.
- fn-mote 7mo ago
  > teens are depressed because they're seeing what parties they didn't get invited to More modern version: my experiences don’t look like the Instagram shots, my body doesn’t look like theirs, etc. > modern research on social media finds little to no affect on teen mental health Sounds like you know what you’re talking about, but if you have references I would read them. How about research on the effects of social media on academic performance? No disagreement at all that this is another power and surveillance grab.
  - pembrook 7mo ago
    > my experiences don’t look like the Instagram shots, my body doesn’t look like theirs, etc Zero difference from the reality TV/tabloid era. "Influencer" is just a rebranding of "celebrity," and instead of seeing their Hollywood Hills mansion and chiseled bodies on MTV cribs and in Abercrombie ads you see them on your phone. Here's a few quick pulls, the best stuff is the meta-analysis studies but don't have time to dig them all out: [1] Effects of reducing social media use are small and inconsistent: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666560325000714 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266656032... [2] Belief in "Social media addiction" is wholly explained by media framing and not an actual addiction: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-27053-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-27053-2 [3] No causal link between time spent on social media and mental health harm: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-time-does-not-increase-teenagers-mental-health-problems-study https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-t... [4] The Flawed Evidence Behind Jonathan Haidt's Panic Farming: https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evidence-that-social-media-is-causing-the-teen-mental-health-crisis/ https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide...
autoexec 7mo ago
It's amazing how many things We The People want our government to do that go ignored year after year, but the moment corporations want something laws get pushed through at lightning speeds. Does anyone actually think that masses of regular people in Illinois were begging their government to force operating systems to tell every website and advertiser how old their children are? They weren't. A small number of corporations with lots of money wanted that though. Bribing matters a lot more than voting.
jasomill 7mo ago
What does this bill have to do with age verification? It legally mandates the existence of a required "age" field in user account records, a user interface to populate it during account setup, a mechanism for service providers to read this field, and that providers act as if it has been populated accurately. As someone who has been the de facto "system administrator" for my family's computer systems since kindergarten, this has to be one of the stupidest policies I've ever seen gain traction.
pocksuppet 7mo ago
Sometimes even things that are good for Meta are good for the rest of us. This law, and the one in California, mean that liability is disclaimed as long as the parent selects an age above 18 for the child. It's like a section 230 for age protection. Meta supports this because they won't be liable for wrong age inputs, and we should also support this because it doesn't verify age in any other way.
- phendrenad2 7mo ago
  We should support something that does the minimum to accomplish the goal. As luck would have it, we don't need to do anything because parental controls already exist, and apps like YouTube already have a "kid mode". But for some reason, people are very attached to the idea of getting that number. Your age. It isn't enough to have a boolean isAdult. Oh no, they want to know how old you are, and they want that number to follow tou everywhere you go. View a site on your PC and then load it in incognito to create an account and comment? Oh look, this person we've identified as pockauppet age 99 or whatever viewed the page, then someone registered aged 99 and commented on that same page. This is a data goldmine. But I guess we're not against sharing data anymore.
  - pocksuppet 7mo ago
    Have you used parental controls? They're complete and utter shit. You cut your child off from almost all of the internet, or you may as well not have any controls at all.
    - phendrenad2 7mo ago
      Have you? What makes you think they can't be improved? And what do you think will happen when people set the age in this new system?
      - pocksuppet 7mo ago
        App developers don't want to comply with them - that's one reason. Now the law says app developers have to follow parental controls, and are liable for ignoring parental controls. That's a sensible law.
cess11 7mo ago
With all the LLM bots they need a new way to sort out the people from the machines to not lose ad revenue and to help their spook friends. It's better for them if this "responsibility" rests with another organisation, they don't get blamed as much when the information leaks and it is replaceable.
fuzzfactor 7mo ago
Facebook has always been there for only one reason; for people who don't value privacy. Nothing less, nothing more. Most things that are not suitable for children were recognized so long ago that it was decades, centuries, or millennia before anybody living was ever born. Like porn, when it got on the web it has always been instinctively gatekept as traditionally as possible, and complaints which do arise over the decades are addressed by the websites in ways that measure up to how you expect a company to act. Consistent with the way they truly don't want underage visitors to their websites at all. Those complaints are now dwarfed by what parents are saying about Facebook in particular. Facebook, and now Meta, is just not something that previous generations had to deal with, so it didn't get handled in a very adult way as it should have been from the beginning. And it only got worse as it got bigger. If it wasn't worse for their kids than porn, parents wouldn't be screaming so much louder than ever. I guess it turns out the combination of fundamentally devaluing privacy across-the-board including minors is the main problem, and then the idea of hooking them early, like cigarette companies would do with as much habit-forming reinforcement as possible, is what leverages the lack of overall privacy through the roof. What's really needed is bold gatekeeping on Meta's digressions alone, they should be the ones to aggressively keep everyone underage off their site. Like they really mean it, which has not existed before. That's what's been wrong the whole time, the internet was so much better before Facebook came along with their anti-privacy mission, and it got put on steroids. Reining in Meta alone should be big enough to be noticeable, no-one else has a shred of responsibility by comparison. Facebook has invested $billions in these underage crowds and they want to know exactly when everyone else on the internet turns a certain age even if they are not on Facebook. Don't give it to them no matter how much they pay. It would be the complete opposite of an advanced thinker who wants to respond by compromising more people's privacy across the regular internet, when Meta is the primary source of the problem, and they're who stand to benefit the more privacy is compromised in any way, child or adult. Like my 19th century grandmother would say, "what's wrong with some people?"
cyanydeez 7mo ago
I think their strategy is to just sell more software. Liability was cut by buying the presidency.

NotGMan 7mo ago

Yes https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rsn1tm/it_appears_meta_is_heavily_lobbying_for_linux_age/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rsn1tm/it_a...

Slow_Hand 7mo ago
Really, I’m surprised that for all of the discussions on HN around these individual statewide acts that I see so little discussion of Meta as a primary force pushing them.
- pesus 7mo ago
  There are probably many more people that would profit off of it on HN.
- iAMkenough 7mo ago
  I wonder if Meta monitors their employees comments on HN?
  - alephnerd 7mo ago
    They don't but frankly no one who matters actually gives a s#it about HN anyhow. HN is also much less representative of the demographics within the American tech industry now as well - almost all the references I see on here are stuff only men in their late 30s to 50s would recognize, and an increasing amount of users appear to be based in Western and Central Europe. Heck, I'm on the younger end by HN standards (early/mid 30s) and when I introduced HN to my peers over a decade ago (this is my throwaway) even back then they complained that it was "toxic", "snooty", and "unhelpful". And it's reputation amongst the younger generation has only gotten worse. HN has "SlashDot"ified, because most people are either in private groupchats on signal/imessage/discord or meeting each other with Luma invites.
- hypeatei 7mo ago
  Why does it matter specifically that Meta is doing it? This has long been a goal for intelligence apparatus and big tech: get rid of anonymity online to "fight terrorism" and sell ads respectively. Don't get me wrong, it's good to know but it's not earth shattering information.
  - JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
    > Why does it matter specifically that Meta is doing it? Their entire top leadership has shown a multi-year tendency towards psychopathy and lying. Knowing Meta is pushing this bill makes me want to understand why my views and theirs randomly agree as well as carefully read the bill text for any signs Adam Mosseri was within 500 feet of it.
    - JCattheATM 7mo ago
      [flagged]
      - JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
        > That's probably a sign that you should reevaluate your views On its own? No. We probably agree on the need to drink water, that doesn’t mean I should now die of thirst.
  - gruez 7mo ago
    >Why does it matter specifically that Meta is doing it? This has long been a goal for intelligence apparatus and big tech: get rid of anonymity online to "fight terrorism" and sell ads respectively. How does getting the OS to do age verification "get rid of anonymity online" or help "sell ads"? Assuming the verification is implemented in a competent way (ie. it's not just providing an id scan for any app to read), it's probably one of the more privacy friendly ways to implement age verification, that's also more secure than an "are you over 18" prompt on every website.
    - hypeatei 7mo ago
starkparker 7mo ago
I think? the most recent version of that post is https://web.archive.org/web/20260314074025/https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rtd51g/update_i_pulled_irs_filings_for_the_org_that/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260314074025/https://www.reddi..., which is "awaiting moderator approval"
- Springtime 7mo ago
  I've seen skepticism about the veracity of the claims, in part as various sources cited in the git repo pointed to todo files not actual data[1] (in that example was only just hours ago a source file was added, when the project still claims part of the conclusions are based on data said to be contained there). Which has led some to suspect much is LLM generated and not properly human-reviewed, in addition to the very short timeframe from initial self-disclosed start of the research to publishing it online (mere 2-3 days) despite the confident tone the author uses. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260317184359/https://lobste.rs/s/ddrcpa/i_traced_2_billion_nonprofit_grants_45#c_alwe0c https://web.archive.org/web/20260317184359/https://lobste.rs...
dredmorbius 7mo ago
And discussed on HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410870>.

Lerc 7mo ago

How should they do it? Surely they don't have a responsibility to do something that nobody knows how to do? There have been numerous cases in history where governments have attempted to legislate the outcome they want without regard to how that might be done or if it was possible in the first place. Obviously it can never deliver the results they want. It would be like passing a law to say every company must operate an office on the moon, and then saying that companies lobbying for an advanced NASA space program is them externalising their responsibility.

tyre 7mo ago
They could require government ID to sign up and an adult sponsor to certify accounts for kids. Plus a limit on how many accounts an adult can sponsor. It would be a mess, but solve the problem. It’s not that we don’t have the technology, we just don’t want to because the friction would decimate user numbers and engagement; it would be much simpler to regulate (e.g. usage limits on minors); and minors are less monetizable, which would lead to lower CPM on ads. Then there’s the legal liability if you know someone is a minor and they’re sending nudes, for example. And the privacy concerns of tying that back to de-anonymized individuals. But obviously I wouldn’t believe that social media companies care about user privacy on behalf of people.
- gruez 7mo ago
  >They could require government ID to sign up and an adult sponsor to certify accounts for kids. Plus a limit on how many accounts an adult can sponsor. Requiring all online account creation to go through some government vouching system sounds far worse for privacy than OS doing age verification.
  - intrasight 7mo ago
    OS-based age verification would also have to use a government ID. There is no alternatives to a government ID for such verification.
    - 7mo ago

mgfist 7mo ago

It should be externalized to a degree. Facebook shouldn't be the ones verifying age, but there should be a trusted 3rd party service that does that, which just tells facebook "yes this user is old enough to use your service" or "no they're not old enough". It abso-fucking-lutely should not be at the OS level though, for so many reasons. Even the implementation alone would be a nightmare. Do I need to input my ID to use a fridge or toaster oven? Ridiculous.

pianoben 7mo ago
Or, and hear me out, _maybe our computers shouldn't spy on us in the first place_?
- jachee 7mo ago
  “Impossible to get a man to understand a thing, when his paycheck depends on his not understanding it.”
- ToucanLoucan 7mo ago
  I'm reminded of a video essay I watched about AI once, which took a side tangent into surveillance capitalism: "Google's data harvesting operation became a load bearing piece of the Internet before the public understood digital privacy. And now we can't get rid of it." The public has been conditioned to expect web services free at point of use. Legitimately it's hard to monetize things like YouTube without ads, and I get that. But turning our entire ecosystem of tech into a massive surveillance mini-state seems like an astonishingly shitty idea compared to just... finding a way to do advertising that DOESN'T involve 30 shadowy ad companies knowing your resting blood pressure. My otherwise creative and amazing industry seems utterly unwilling to confront this. Edit: Like, I don't know, am I crazy for thinking that simply because we can target ads this granularity, that it simply must be that? I get that the ad-tech companies do not want to go back to blind-firing ads into the digital ether on the hope that they'll be seen, but that's also plus or minus the entirety of the history of advertising as an industry, with the last 20 or so years being a weird blip where you could show your add to INCREDIBLY specific demographics. And I wouldn't give a shit except the tech permitting those functions seems to be socially corrosive and is requiring even further erosion of already pretty porous user privacy to keep being legally tenable.

pear01 7mo ago

He doesn't want to have to stand up, turn around and apologize to parents on behalf of an asleep at the wheel Congress again. At some level I don't blame him. It is also a bit strange how in that act alone he showed more accountability than most of the politicians that were questioning him, never mind most executives. I suppose Josh Hawley wants to be liable for personal lawsuits for his acts of Congress too... people cringe at his "robotic" demeanor but I can't remember the last time someone turned and faced people and apologized like this. Most people asked to do the same (even in front of the same body) never do. https://youtu.be/yUAfRod2xgI https://youtu.be/yUAfRod2xgI

SoftTalker 7mo ago

Don't kid yourself, Meta already knows the age of all its users, at least within the broad categories that this bill defines.

onlyrealcuzzo 7mo ago
Legally, there's a difference between "knowing" and "accurate enough for loose cannon advertisers".
maxrmk 7mo ago
If a company relies on self reported ages, they don't "know" it well enough to satisfy COPPA. Probably. I'm not a lawyer but I do keep up with the latest in privacy enforcement and I think this is the way things are headed. For the record, I'm against age verification laws. But I think companies are pushing for them because of liabilities they face under other laws, not because they would actually like to have the data.
thesuitonym 7mo ago
Yes, but they want to show children content that is not appropriate, then claim ignorance.
- fuzzfactor 7mo ago
  To give them the benefit of the doubt you could say they only want to show children content on its own that is fully parent-agreeable. Meta just wants to do it in the most habit-forming way, that is embedded in a system crafted to mold young behavior into more manipulable consumers. >Meta already knows the age of all its users Roger, now they want a government mandate to target everyone else on the internet.

ezfe 7mo ago

Is there a problem with this? Most users are using an iPhone and most iPhones already know the accurate age of their user

enoint 7mo ago
I’ve heard Android is a more common OS. In any case, if your OS fails to ask a user their age, it’s banned.
- ezfe 7mo ago
  Okay, sorry yes that was an oversimplification. Android does ask your age as well, so that's all of them for mobile phones.
  - saintfire 7mo ago
    Android doesn't ask your age, Google does for an account. You can use an android phone without a google account. Most people don't but the distinction is important because degoogled android phones will also have to comply.
    - subscribed 7mo ago
      No, unless the law mandates it. So for example operating system that does not ask this question could simply declare itself "inappropriate"/"illegal" in the jurisdiction. Say, GrapheneOS can explicitly disallow image downloads from Californian IPs and not sell phones with preinstalled GOS there. You don't need to be complaint with the Mongolian law to sell in Burkina Faso. Similarly they don't need to be complaint with Ohio law if they do not operate and have presence there. American companies that decide to surveil users ont heir websites with pervasive tracking without consent would only contravene the European GDPR if they allowed EU users to use them. Block the EU (famous http/451), and they're in the clear. IMO, but IANAL.
      - enoint 7mo ago

saltyoldman 7mo ago

That's the correct strategy, if anyone sues meta, meta can bring their age verifier into the lawsuit and blame them. It makes sense from a business perspective, insurance perspective. etc...

pembrook 7mo ago

Meta is definitely helping to push this, but they aren't having to push very hard because its already in the zeitgeist. It's a classic moral panic. Millennials are raising kids and turning into their boomer parents. Millennials had their hippie era in their 20s (same stuff their parents did rebranded as "hipster" instead of "hippie," where instead of building a lifestyle of free love and bong hits in the Haight-Ashbury, they built a lifestyle of free love and bong hits in Williamsburg Brooklyn). Now in their 30s-40s they've moved to the suburbs, they're voting Reagan, and are falling for hysterical media-driven moral panics about "what kids these days are up to" just like their Boomer parents did in the 80s-90s. What's even more funny about all these "social media is evil" legislative proposals, they're motivated by the idea of what social media used to be when millennials were in college...which doesn't even exist anymore. The classic narrative that teens are depressed because they're seeing what parties they didn't get invited to is wildly outdated now. Social media isn't social anymore (see Tiktok), it's just algorithmic short form TV. Nobody is seeing content from their peers anymore. In reality, most modern research on social media finds little to no affect on teen mental health. But of course, if you have ulterior motives to undermine privacy or shirk corporate responsibility under the cover of "saving the kids," this moral panic is an already burning flame waiting to be stoked.

fn-mote 7mo ago
> teens are depressed because they're seeing what parties they didn't get invited to More modern version: my experiences don’t look like the Instagram shots, my body doesn’t look like theirs, etc. > modern research on social media finds little to no affect on teen mental health Sounds like you know what you’re talking about, but if you have references I would read them. How about research on the effects of social media on academic performance? No disagreement at all that this is another power and surveillance grab.
- pembrook 7mo ago
  > my experiences don’t look like the Instagram shots, my body doesn’t look like theirs, etc Zero difference from the reality TV/tabloid era. "Influencer" is just a rebranding of "celebrity," and instead of seeing their Hollywood Hills mansion and chiseled bodies on MTV cribs and in Abercrombie ads you see them on your phone. Here's a few quick pulls, the best stuff is the meta-analysis studies but don't have time to dig them all out: [1] Effects of reducing social media use are small and inconsistent: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666560325000714 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266656032... [2] Belief in "Social media addiction" is wholly explained by media framing and not an actual addiction: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-27053-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-27053-2 [3] No causal link between time spent on social media and mental health harm: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-time-does-not-increase-teenagers-mental-health-problems-study https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-t... [4] The Flawed Evidence Behind Jonathan Haidt's Panic Farming: https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evidence-that-social-media-is-causing-the-teen-mental-health-crisis/ https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide...

autoexec 7mo ago

It's amazing how many things We The People want our government to do that go ignored year after year, but the moment corporations want something laws get pushed through at lightning speeds. Does anyone actually think that masses of regular people in Illinois were begging their government to force operating systems to tell every website and advertiser how old their children are? They weren't. A small number of corporations with lots of money wanted that though. Bribing matters a lot more than voting.

jasomill 7mo ago

What does this bill have to do with age verification? It legally mandates the existence of a required "age" field in user account records, a user interface to populate it during account setup, a mechanism for service providers to read this field, and that providers act as if it has been populated accurately. As someone who has been the de facto "system administrator" for my family's computer systems since kindergarten, this has to be one of the stupidest policies I've ever seen gain traction.

pocksuppet 7mo ago

Sometimes even things that are good for Meta are good for the rest of us. This law, and the one in California, mean that liability is disclaimed as long as the parent selects an age above 18 for the child. It's like a section 230 for age protection. Meta supports this because they won't be liable for wrong age inputs, and we should also support this because it doesn't verify age in any other way.

phendrenad2 7mo ago
We should support something that does the minimum to accomplish the goal. As luck would have it, we don't need to do anything because parental controls already exist, and apps like YouTube already have a "kid mode". But for some reason, people are very attached to the idea of getting that number. Your age. It isn't enough to have a boolean isAdult. Oh no, they want to know how old you are, and they want that number to follow tou everywhere you go. View a site on your PC and then load it in incognito to create an account and comment? Oh look, this person we've identified as pockauppet age 99 or whatever viewed the page, then someone registered aged 99 and commented on that same page. This is a data goldmine. But I guess we're not against sharing data anymore.
- pocksuppet 7mo ago
  Have you used parental controls? They're complete and utter shit. You cut your child off from almost all of the internet, or you may as well not have any controls at all.
  - phendrenad2 7mo ago
    Have you? What makes you think they can't be improved? And what do you think will happen when people set the age in this new system?
    - pocksuppet 7mo ago
      App developers don't want to comply with them - that's one reason. Now the law says app developers have to follow parental controls, and are liable for ignoring parental controls. That's a sensible law.

cess11 7mo ago

With all the LLM bots they need a new way to sort out the people from the machines to not lose ad revenue and to help their spook friends. It's better for them if this "responsibility" rests with another organisation, they don't get blamed as much when the information leaks and it is replaceable.

fuzzfactor 7mo ago

Facebook has always been there for only one reason; for people who don't value privacy. Nothing less, nothing more. Most things that are not suitable for children were recognized so long ago that it was decades, centuries, or millennia before anybody living was ever born. Like porn, when it got on the web it has always been instinctively gatekept as traditionally as possible, and complaints which do arise over the decades are addressed by the websites in ways that measure up to how you expect a company to act. Consistent with the way they truly don't want underage visitors to their websites at all. Those complaints are now dwarfed by what parents are saying about Facebook in particular. Facebook, and now Meta, is just not something that previous generations had to deal with, so it didn't get handled in a very adult way as it should have been from the beginning. And it only got worse as it got bigger. If it wasn't worse for their kids than porn, parents wouldn't be screaming so much louder than ever. I guess it turns out the combination of fundamentally devaluing privacy across-the-board including minors is the main problem, and then the idea of hooking them early, like cigarette companies would do with as much habit-forming reinforcement as possible, is what leverages the lack of overall privacy through the roof. What's really needed is bold gatekeeping on Meta's digressions alone, they should be the ones to aggressively keep everyone underage off their site. Like they really mean it, which has not existed before. That's what's been wrong the whole time, the internet was so much better before Facebook came along with their anti-privacy mission, and it got put on steroids. Reining in Meta alone should be big enough to be noticeable, no-one else has a shred of responsibility by comparison. Facebook has invested $billions in these underage crowds and they want to know exactly when everyone else on the internet turns a certain age even if they are not on Facebook. Don't give it to them no matter how much they pay. It would be the complete opposite of an advanced thinker who wants to respond by compromising more people's privacy across the regular internet, when Meta is the primary source of the problem, and they're who stand to benefit the more privacy is compromised in any way, child or adult. Like my 19th century grandmother would say, "what's wrong with some people?"

cyanydeez 7mo ago

I think their strategy is to just sell more software. Liability was cut by buying the presidency.