6 ms·

Maybe I'm just getting old and cynical but, while I think current social media is bad for children, I'm very suspicious of the current international agreement t

by dwedge 7mo ago

Maybe I'm just getting old and cynical but, while I think current social media is bad for children, I'm very suspicious of the current international agreement that it's time to take action, especially with all the ID verification coming from multiple avenues

MildlySerious 7mo ago
Two things can be true, and I am in the same boat. Should the next generation have their brains fried by ad-tech corporations and their algorithms? Absolutely not. Should the overdue off-ramp from this trend be the on-ramp to mass-surveillance and government overreach? Also a firm no.
- benrutter 7mo ago
  I really wish this take was more prominent. I really don't buy that mass-surveillance should be required for age verification. There are plenty of very smart people who have created much more complicated things than a digital age verification that doesn't track every time you use it. This also isn't helpful, but I think the sudden push of urgency isn't helping. The internet has existed without any kind of age verification or safety measures for about 30 years. We could have used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy trade offs, but instead we've waited till now to decide that everything has to be rushed through with minimal consideration.
  - jt2190 7mo ago
    > We could have used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy trade offs [of age verification]… There is always a conversation, but it is often not the popular one and gets drown out by whatever everyone is excited about at the moment. You can find it if you seek it out. Lawrence Lessig’s book “Code” (1999), for example, talks about how a completely unrelated internet is an anomaly, and that regulation will certainly be necessary, and advocates that it be done in a thoughtful manner.
  - pixl97 7mo ago
    >used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy trade offs, On HN itself, no way. Too many people here make far too much money on ads to want that. It seems the other part that want freedom also want so much freedom it gives huge corporations the freedom to crush them. >things than a digital age verification that doesn't track every time you use it. The big companies that pay the politicians don't want that, therefore we won't get that.
    - intended 7mo ago
      > On HN itself, no way. Too many people here make far too much money on ads to want that. Ya know, this might explain why the warnings seem to fall on deaf ears here. New favorite person on the internet.
  - jimbokun 7mo ago
    Best time to plant a tree: 30 years ago. Second best time to plant a tree: now.
  - ball_of_lint 7mo ago
    It's not about doesn't - the government can always claim that it doesn't track you. That is unlikely to stay true. It's really either they can't track you or they will track you.
  - OkayPhysicist 7mo ago
    You don't even need to go all high-tech with it: Children, by nature of being children, aren't going out and buying their own smartphones and computers. When Mom and Dad buy the device for their kid, just punch in the kid's age before handing it to them. That's the flow that California's age verification system uses. Personally, I'm opposed to any age verification beyond the current "pinky promise you're 18" type deals, but California's is the least intrinsically offensive to me.
    - autoexec 7mo ago
      > When Mom and Dad buy the device for their kid, just punch in the kid's age before handing it to them. Doing this doesn't accomplish anything in terms of protecting children from the harms of the internet. In fact it feeds your child's age to marketers and child predators. Every website will get to decide how to handle the age data our devices will now be supplying them. In the case of facebook, it's not as if they had no idea the children endlessly posting selfies and posting "six seven" on their service weren't adults. Facebook was 100% aware that the children using their service were children. They knew what schools those kids went to, who their parents were, which other kids they hung out with. Facebook knew they were children and they took advantage of that fact. The law California (and other states) passed doesn't define what content has to be blocked for which ages and doesn't give parents any ability to decide what content their children should or shouldn't be allowed to see. It takes control away from parents. As a parent, I might think that my 16 year old should be allowed to look up information on STDs but the websites that collect my child's age could decide they can't and I'll have no say in it.
      - jacobgkau 7mo ago
        > The law California (and other states) passed doesn't define what content has to be blocked for which ages No, but it's a framework that would allow other laws to do so. Because... > it's not as if they had no idea the children endlessly posting selfies and posting "six seven" on their service weren't adults. ...you can make statements like that which sound like common sense, but it would be incredibly hard to regulate based on "if you know, you know" (or "you should have known"/"you had to have known"). The law has to provide (guarantee) a way for them to know in order to actually require them to take action based on it. > As a parent, I might think that my 16 year old should be allowed to look up information on STDs but the websites that collect my child's age could decide they can't This is a different problem. It sounds like you're essentially wanting to guarantee access to certain things, not just for your own 16-year-old, but for everyone else's, too (because if it was just yours, you could look it up for/with them if necessary). It'd be difficult to compel businesses to provide services to audiences they don't want to. But again, that's a separate problem that doesn't necessarily conflict with the rest of the system.
- ed_blackburn 7mo ago
  Absolutely: I said something similar recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766649
- Forgeties79 7mo ago
  They’re the oil barons of our day. They frack our data and output psychological/social pollution.
- jimbokun 7mo ago
  So you're saying these corporations are responsible for verifying the age of their users without verifying the age of their users?
  - MildlySerious 7mo ago
    I'm not saying that, nor did I allude to it in any way. I made no assertions as to what the solution should be. The ideal scenario would be everyone choosing not to engage with these predatory platforms. Going from there, the right question to me is what steps we have to take as a society for that to become even remotely realistic and, subsequently, what role governments can or should have in that. For starters, I would be in favor of fines that actually hurt the bottom line instead of this "cost of business" bullshit. We have handed these corporations unprecedented access to and control over our lives, to the point that they erode democracy and the social fabric itself. The inevitable abuse of that power when it comes with barely any strings attached needs to be punished in a way that makes it unattractive as a business model at the very least. Instead of lowering the attack surface by locking out kids, and in turn introducing mass surveillance which at best also lends itself to abuse, the root issues of ruinous greed and lack of accountability need to be addressed. The whole concept that there is no price too high for profits needs to burn. Social media is just one of the more recent manifestations of it.
- svachalek 7mo ago
  Exactly. There's a clear alternative in my mind, one I'm sure is objectionable in its own way but I think is the least evil of the three: require providers to label their content and make them liable for it. This allows parents to do the censoring, which is functionally impossible now because no parent can fight the slippery power of multibillion dollar software investments designed to prevent them from having control over what their kids see.
- gopher_space 7mo ago
  A Kindernet would solve many problems. Hardware-gated access, local moderation and control, zero commerce or copyright, whatever you want to do to make the environment uninteresting to bad actors. Frame opposition to the concept as demand for access to your children.
- kaospilot1800 7mo ago
  [dead]
intended 7mo ago
Meta is lobbying to push age verification to the OS level. I have read the OSINT report from Reddit. The data it has is being interpreted as Meta orchestrating a global lobbying scheme. However the data is equally if not more supportive of Meta simply taking advantage of global political sentiment to position itself better. I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but the HN zeitgeist seems to be resistant to the idea that tech is the “bad guy” today. I work in trust and safety, and have near front row seats to all the insanity playing out today.
- surcap526 7mo ago
  [dead]
- bryan_w 7mo ago
  Do you think Meta wouldn't want to be legally mandated to ask for your id? The improvement to ad targeting alone would be enough to pay for any lost users. They would probably want nothing more than to be in the same business as idema and the other online identity/age verification providers are. Critically think about this for a second before believing some ChatGPT generated "OSINT" report on reddit. Otherwise, you'll allow corpos to use your mob hatered against you
  - intended 7mo ago
    I think that report has multiple issues, but it’s currently popular and people are fond of blaming meta. Even your point - meta is not after mandated IDs, but they see the way public opinion is moving and are using it to their tactical advantage. They are lobbying to push the regulatory burden on app stores and operating systems.
b65e8bee43c2ed0 7mo ago
given that it's happening simultaneously with the war on E2EE and general purpose computing, their goals are as transparent as it gets. the West is at this point only a decade behind China.
expedition32 7mo ago
Tech bros deliberately made digital crack for kids and corporations refuse to moderate online content. There is no conspiracy the general public is faced with a crisis and they are desperate for a solution. The teen suicide statistics do not lie.
- dwedge 7mo ago
  The general public is being told they are faced with a crisis. This has been a problem for at least a decade, yet suddenly it's at the forefront and conveniently ties into ID verification for everyone to use general purpose computing. I'm sorry but if you don't think there's a conspiracy I have a bridge to sell you. It was already unveiled that Meta has lobbied billions towards promoting this legislative change
  - kgwxd 7mo ago
    > The general public is being told they are faced with a crisis. > This has been a problem for at least a decade. I get you're point, but anyone that doesn't is asking "Which is it?" I think everyone can see there is problems. Is there a crisis? I don't think so. Same problems we've always had, but on a computer. People that know tech, know these laws cross a MAJOR line. Not a little slippery slope thing, this is off a cliff. But I don't think most people, that are already used to having to sign in with an online account on every device they use, even their TV, see it as that big a step. They don't even realize how predatory it is that they are required to sign in. What they need to see is that the sign in requirement was a choice by the vendor. These are LAWS, demanding no one ever be given the choice to not reveal personal information about themselves to use ANY computer. That's the point that needs to be driven home.
  - jimbokun 7mo ago
    You're arguing there's a conspiracy, but even if there is, what is the best action for governments to take given the devastating impact social media has been demonstrated to have on young people especially?
    - 7mo ago
raincole 7mo ago
Governments always want censorship and speech control. That never changes. The only difference is that now the general populace has accumulated enough disgruntlement to social media to be used against themselves.
- gmerc 7mo ago
  No the difference is that when governments are still constrained by the rule of law it’s cheap PR to fight the government on data access claims but once they are authoritarian fascist industrialists fall over themselves to feed everything into Palantir
lionkor 7mo ago
A lot of the ID verification stuff is coming FROM those companies
- boysenberry 7mo ago
  I’ve just been stung by iOS 26.4’s implementation of the age-gate. My only option has been to rollback with a 26.3.1 IPSW. I unlurked and made a thread last night, but I think it might be hidden due to account age: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47511919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47511919
  - Ajedi32 7mo ago
    Yep, your post and this comment were hidden. I vouched for them so they're visible now. Good luck!
    - boysenberry 7mo ago
      [dead]
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
gostsamo 7mo ago
because it is a false dilemma
surcap526 7mo ago
[dead]
b00ty4breakfast 7mo ago
That's because we should be regulating the social media industry rather than regulating social media users. Unfortunately, social media users don't have billions of dollars to spend on lobbying and related activities around the world.
- Aurornis 7mo ago
  > That's because we should be regulating the social media industry rather than regulating social media users. These lawsuits and regulations are against the industry, not the users. The regulations and lawsuits are driving the pressure to ID check users and remove end-to-end encryption.
- jimbokun 7mo ago
  The ask is to treat users differently based on age. How can they do that without verifying their users age?
  - b00ty4breakfast 7mo ago
    we should be removing the harmful aspects of modern social, which are harmful for everyone not just minors, by making them unprofitable or even outright illegal. Instead we are saying "only adults should use this" which, while technically regulating the industry, places the restriction on users. We're treating it like tobacco or alcohol (2 industries who have similarly spent millions upon millions of dollars in lobbying efforts) but we should be treating it like asbestos.
    - jimbokun 7mo ago
      OK, so what would be in the text of this law making it enforceable and not easily game-able by the social media companies and without severe unintended consequences?
      - dminik 7mo ago
        Why are you asking lawmaker questions of people on HN? What kind of answer are you expecting? Just because I don't know how to write a law that can prevent it doesn't mean that I can't recognize an actual issue when I see it.
kgwxd 7mo ago
Really? You still think you're the one looking at it all wrong? It's exactly what you think it is. Stop giving blatant malice the benefit of the doubt, especially the doubt they've directly instilled.
Aurornis 7mo ago
I’m deeply worried by how uncritical these responses are. Meta is removing end-to-end encryption specifically because these lawsuits are trying to claim end-to-end encryption is a tool for child abuse. The “think of the children” angle is the perfect angle to pressure companies to make communications readable by the government. And here tech audiences are welcoming it and applauding because they couldn’t read past the headline and they think anything that hurts Zuck is good. How anyone can see this happening and not draw the connections to Discord and other services also pushing ID checks is beyond me. Believing that this will only apply to services that don’t effect you is short sighted.
BrtByte 7mo ago
[dead]
afavour 7mo ago
Meta spent $2bn lobbying for this ID verification stuff: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361235
barbazoo 7mo ago
There's no agreement other than maybe that social media is bad for children. To get kids off of there you need to identify who's a kid and who isn't. Same with alcohol and tobacco. Obviously people shouldn't give their ID to Meta and hopefully many will not but those that do, for me, as someone who doesn't use social media, that's a small price to pay to keep kids off. Again, Meta is completely optional, it's a platform to share stupid videos, no one NEEDS to be there.
crystal_revenge 7mo ago
> I'm very suspicious of the current international agreement that it's time to take action Especially since, when you look at the behavior of younger people, they're way more careful about social media than millennials were. My teenage child an their friends keep all of their conversations in a massive but private group chat. Any social media consumed by them, is basically 'read only'. They don't post online, none of them of have social media accounts where they post pictures of themselves etc. Same with all of my younger gen-z coworkers. If they have socials the post very selectively and all content is work friendly. The people I see that need "protection" are aging millenials that don't really understand how wildly they're exposing themselves and families. I cringe when I see the amount of personal photos and information shared by the view millenials I know who still need their ego-boost from these platforms (and that number itself is much smaller). Younger people don't share their opinion and anything resembling private photos online any more.
- miladyincontrol 7mo ago
  I definitely would not agree with this and the user metrics of platforms like tiktok and instagram definitely would argue otherwise to your anecdote. Many are showing far more of an alleged window to their lives than ever before, key word being alleged as its always greatly curated in an way that oft attempts to make everything look perfect and effortless. Absolutely are a lot of gen z who avoid social media, but to pretend most are privately hunkered away is completely ignorant of today's social media usage.

by dwedge 7mo ago

MildlySerious 7mo ago

Two things can be true, and I am in the same boat. Should the next generation have their brains fried by ad-tech corporations and their algorithms? Absolutely not. Should the overdue off-ramp from this trend be the on-ramp to mass-surveillance and government overreach? Also a firm no.

benrutter 7mo ago
I really wish this take was more prominent. I really don't buy that mass-surveillance should be required for age verification. There are plenty of very smart people who have created much more complicated things than a digital age verification that doesn't track every time you use it. This also isn't helpful, but I think the sudden push of urgency isn't helping. The internet has existed without any kind of age verification or safety measures for about 30 years. We could have used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy trade offs, but instead we've waited till now to decide that everything has to be rushed through with minimal consideration.
- jt2190 7mo ago
  > We could have used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy trade offs [of age verification]… There is always a conversation, but it is often not the popular one and gets drown out by whatever everyone is excited about at the moment. You can find it if you seek it out. Lawrence Lessig’s book “Code” (1999), for example, talks about how a completely unrelated internet is an anomaly, and that regulation will certainly be necessary, and advocates that it be done in a thoughtful manner.
- pixl97 7mo ago
  >used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy trade offs, On HN itself, no way. Too many people here make far too much money on ads to want that. It seems the other part that want freedom also want so much freedom it gives huge corporations the freedom to crush them. >things than a digital age verification that doesn't track every time you use it. The big companies that pay the politicians don't want that, therefore we won't get that.
  - intended 7mo ago
    > On HN itself, no way. Too many people here make far too much money on ads to want that. Ya know, this might explain why the warnings seem to fall on deaf ears here. New favorite person on the internet.
- jimbokun 7mo ago
  Best time to plant a tree: 30 years ago. Second best time to plant a tree: now.
- ball_of_lint 7mo ago
  It's not about doesn't - the government can always claim that it doesn't track you. That is unlikely to stay true. It's really either they can't track you or they will track you.
- OkayPhysicist 7mo ago
  You don't even need to go all high-tech with it: Children, by nature of being children, aren't going out and buying their own smartphones and computers. When Mom and Dad buy the device for their kid, just punch in the kid's age before handing it to them. That's the flow that California's age verification system uses. Personally, I'm opposed to any age verification beyond the current "pinky promise you're 18" type deals, but California's is the least intrinsically offensive to me.
  - autoexec 7mo ago
    > When Mom and Dad buy the device for their kid, just punch in the kid's age before handing it to them. Doing this doesn't accomplish anything in terms of protecting children from the harms of the internet. In fact it feeds your child's age to marketers and child predators. Every website will get to decide how to handle the age data our devices will now be supplying them. In the case of facebook, it's not as if they had no idea the children endlessly posting selfies and posting "six seven" on their service weren't adults. Facebook was 100% aware that the children using their service were children. They knew what schools those kids went to, who their parents were, which other kids they hung out with. Facebook knew they were children and they took advantage of that fact. The law California (and other states) passed doesn't define what content has to be blocked for which ages and doesn't give parents any ability to decide what content their children should or shouldn't be allowed to see. It takes control away from parents. As a parent, I might think that my 16 year old should be allowed to look up information on STDs but the websites that collect my child's age could decide they can't and I'll have no say in it.
    - jacobgkau 7mo ago
      > The law California (and other states) passed doesn't define what content has to be blocked for which ages No, but it's a framework that would allow other laws to do so. Because... > it's not as if they had no idea the children endlessly posting selfies and posting "six seven" on their service weren't adults. ...you can make statements like that which sound like common sense, but it would be incredibly hard to regulate based on "if you know, you know" (or "you should have known"/"you had to have known"). The law has to provide (guarantee) a way for them to know in order to actually require them to take action based on it. > As a parent, I might think that my 16 year old should be allowed to look up information on STDs but the websites that collect my child's age could decide they can't This is a different problem. It sounds like you're essentially wanting to guarantee access to certain things, not just for your own 16-year-old, but for everyone else's, too (because if it was just yours, you could look it up for/with them if necessary). It'd be difficult to compel businesses to provide services to audiences they don't want to. But again, that's a separate problem that doesn't necessarily conflict with the rest of the system.
ed_blackburn 7mo ago
Absolutely: I said something similar recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766649
Forgeties79 7mo ago
They’re the oil barons of our day. They frack our data and output psychological/social pollution.
jimbokun 7mo ago
So you're saying these corporations are responsible for verifying the age of their users without verifying the age of their users?
- MildlySerious 7mo ago
  I'm not saying that, nor did I allude to it in any way. I made no assertions as to what the solution should be. The ideal scenario would be everyone choosing not to engage with these predatory platforms. Going from there, the right question to me is what steps we have to take as a society for that to become even remotely realistic and, subsequently, what role governments can or should have in that. For starters, I would be in favor of fines that actually hurt the bottom line instead of this "cost of business" bullshit. We have handed these corporations unprecedented access to and control over our lives, to the point that they erode democracy and the social fabric itself. The inevitable abuse of that power when it comes with barely any strings attached needs to be punished in a way that makes it unattractive as a business model at the very least. Instead of lowering the attack surface by locking out kids, and in turn introducing mass surveillance which at best also lends itself to abuse, the root issues of ruinous greed and lack of accountability need to be addressed. The whole concept that there is no price too high for profits needs to burn. Social media is just one of the more recent manifestations of it.
svachalek 7mo ago
Exactly. There's a clear alternative in my mind, one I'm sure is objectionable in its own way but I think is the least evil of the three: require providers to label their content and make them liable for it. This allows parents to do the censoring, which is functionally impossible now because no parent can fight the slippery power of multibillion dollar software investments designed to prevent them from having control over what their kids see.
gopher_space 7mo ago
A Kindernet would solve many problems. Hardware-gated access, local moderation and control, zero commerce or copyright, whatever you want to do to make the environment uninteresting to bad actors. Frame opposition to the concept as demand for access to your children.
kaospilot1800 7mo ago
[dead]

intended 7mo ago

Meta is lobbying to push age verification to the OS level. I have read the OSINT report from Reddit. The data it has is being interpreted as Meta orchestrating a global lobbying scheme. However the data is equally if not more supportive of Meta simply taking advantage of global political sentiment to position itself better. I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but the HN zeitgeist seems to be resistant to the idea that tech is the “bad guy” today. I work in trust and safety, and have near front row seats to all the insanity playing out today.

surcap526 7mo ago
[dead]
bryan_w 7mo ago
Do you think Meta wouldn't want to be legally mandated to ask for your id? The improvement to ad targeting alone would be enough to pay for any lost users. They would probably want nothing more than to be in the same business as idema and the other online identity/age verification providers are. Critically think about this for a second before believing some ChatGPT generated "OSINT" report on reddit. Otherwise, you'll allow corpos to use your mob hatered against you
- intended 7mo ago
  I think that report has multiple issues, but it’s currently popular and people are fond of blaming meta. Even your point - meta is not after mandated IDs, but they see the way public opinion is moving and are using it to their tactical advantage. They are lobbying to push the regulatory burden on app stores and operating systems.

b65e8bee43c2ed0 7mo ago

given that it's happening simultaneously with the war on E2EE and general purpose computing, their goals are as transparent as it gets. the West is at this point only a decade behind China.

expedition32 7mo ago

Tech bros deliberately made digital crack for kids and corporations refuse to moderate online content. There is no conspiracy the general public is faced with a crisis and they are desperate for a solution. The teen suicide statistics do not lie.

dwedge 7mo ago
The general public is being told they are faced with a crisis. This has been a problem for at least a decade, yet suddenly it's at the forefront and conveniently ties into ID verification for everyone to use general purpose computing. I'm sorry but if you don't think there's a conspiracy I have a bridge to sell you. It was already unveiled that Meta has lobbied billions towards promoting this legislative change
- kgwxd 7mo ago
  > The general public is being told they are faced with a crisis. > This has been a problem for at least a decade. I get you're point, but anyone that doesn't is asking "Which is it?" I think everyone can see there is problems. Is there a crisis? I don't think so. Same problems we've always had, but on a computer. People that know tech, know these laws cross a MAJOR line. Not a little slippery slope thing, this is off a cliff. But I don't think most people, that are already used to having to sign in with an online account on every device they use, even their TV, see it as that big a step. They don't even realize how predatory it is that they are required to sign in. What they need to see is that the sign in requirement was a choice by the vendor. These are LAWS, demanding no one ever be given the choice to not reveal personal information about themselves to use ANY computer. That's the point that needs to be driven home.
- jimbokun 7mo ago
  You're arguing there's a conspiracy, but even if there is, what is the best action for governments to take given the devastating impact social media has been demonstrated to have on young people especially?
  - 7mo ago

raincole 7mo ago

Governments always want censorship and speech control. That never changes. The only difference is that now the general populace has accumulated enough disgruntlement to social media to be used against themselves.

gmerc 7mo ago
No the difference is that when governments are still constrained by the rule of law it’s cheap PR to fight the government on data access claims but once they are authoritarian fascist industrialists fall over themselves to feed everything into Palantir

lionkor 7mo ago

A lot of the ID verification stuff is coming FROM those companies

boysenberry 7mo ago
I’ve just been stung by iOS 26.4’s implementation of the age-gate. My only option has been to rollback with a 26.3.1 IPSW. I unlurked and made a thread last night, but I think it might be hidden due to account age: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47511919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47511919
- Ajedi32 7mo ago
  Yep, your post and this comment were hidden. I vouched for them so they're visible now. Good luck!
  - boysenberry 7mo ago
    [dead]

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

gostsamo 7mo ago

because it is a false dilemma

surcap526 7mo ago

[dead]

b00ty4breakfast 7mo ago

That's because we should be regulating the social media industry rather than regulating social media users. Unfortunately, social media users don't have billions of dollars to spend on lobbying and related activities around the world.

Aurornis 7mo ago
> That's because we should be regulating the social media industry rather than regulating social media users. These lawsuits and regulations are against the industry, not the users. The regulations and lawsuits are driving the pressure to ID check users and remove end-to-end encryption.
jimbokun 7mo ago
The ask is to treat users differently based on age. How can they do that without verifying their users age?
- b00ty4breakfast 7mo ago
  we should be removing the harmful aspects of modern social, which are harmful for everyone not just minors, by making them unprofitable or even outright illegal. Instead we are saying "only adults should use this" which, while technically regulating the industry, places the restriction on users. We're treating it like tobacco or alcohol (2 industries who have similarly spent millions upon millions of dollars in lobbying efforts) but we should be treating it like asbestos.
  - jimbokun 7mo ago
    OK, so what would be in the text of this law making it enforceable and not easily game-able by the social media companies and without severe unintended consequences?
    - dminik 7mo ago
      Why are you asking lawmaker questions of people on HN? What kind of answer are you expecting? Just because I don't know how to write a law that can prevent it doesn't mean that I can't recognize an actual issue when I see it.

kgwxd 7mo ago

Really? You still think you're the one looking at it all wrong? It's exactly what you think it is. Stop giving blatant malice the benefit of the doubt, especially the doubt they've directly instilled.

Aurornis 7mo ago

I’m deeply worried by how uncritical these responses are. Meta is removing end-to-end encryption specifically because these lawsuits are trying to claim end-to-end encryption is a tool for child abuse. The “think of the children” angle is the perfect angle to pressure companies to make communications readable by the government. And here tech audiences are welcoming it and applauding because they couldn’t read past the headline and they think anything that hurts Zuck is good. How anyone can see this happening and not draw the connections to Discord and other services also pushing ID checks is beyond me. Believing that this will only apply to services that don’t effect you is short sighted.

BrtByte 7mo ago

[dead]

afavour 7mo ago

Meta spent $2bn lobbying for this ID verification stuff: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361235

barbazoo 7mo ago

There's no agreement other than maybe that social media is bad for children. To get kids off of there you need to identify who's a kid and who isn't. Same with alcohol and tobacco. Obviously people shouldn't give their ID to Meta and hopefully many will not but those that do, for me, as someone who doesn't use social media, that's a small price to pay to keep kids off. Again, Meta is completely optional, it's a platform to share stupid videos, no one NEEDS to be there.

crystal_revenge 7mo ago

> I'm very suspicious of the current international agreement that it's time to take action Especially since, when you look at the behavior of younger people, they're way more careful about social media than millennials were. My teenage child an their friends keep all of their conversations in a massive but private group chat. Any social media consumed by them, is basically 'read only'. They don't post online, none of them of have social media accounts where they post pictures of themselves etc. Same with all of my younger gen-z coworkers. If they have socials the post very selectively and all content is work friendly. The people I see that need "protection" are aging millenials that don't really understand how wildly they're exposing themselves and families. I cringe when I see the amount of personal photos and information shared by the view millenials I know who still need their ego-boost from these platforms (and that number itself is much smaller). Younger people don't share their opinion and anything resembling private photos online any more.

miladyincontrol 7mo ago
I definitely would not agree with this and the user metrics of platforms like tiktok and instagram definitely would argue otherwise to your anecdote. Many are showing far more of an alleged window to their lives than ever before, key word being alleged as its always greatly curated in an way that oft attempts to make everything look perfect and effortless. Absolutely are a lot of gen z who avoid social media, but to pretend most are privately hunkered away is completely ignorant of today's social media usage.