6 ms·

Not that I'm condoning it, but this law requires self-declaration, not verification. It might sound pedantic but the practical difference is huge. Self-declara

Not that I'm condoning it, but this law requires self-declaration, not verification. It might sound pedantic but the practical difference is huge. Self-declaration means that the system asks the user to declare if they are a minor. Nothing is verified. Age verification typically means a system which checks ID or has other enforcement measures to try to verify age.

weaksauce 3mo ago
that is the start of a lot of bills like this... they really only ever increase in scope and invasiveness.
- bryanlarsen 3mo ago
  On the contrary in my experience once a legislature passes a bill to "fix" a particular problem they consider it fixed and don't update it for at least 20 years.
  - paimapi 3mo ago
    it depends on whether or not there's someone who sees it as a crusade (rare), sees it as a way to get political clout (very common) and/or is getting a lot of lobbying money (extremely common [1]). see, for eg, the anti-trans bills that are being passed this is the same rhetorical and political strategy, that there are 'dangerous' people who will exploit your children so please vote for me, the person who cares the most about children and will go after the 'dangerous' people [1] https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/04/15/big-tech-is-pushing-states-to-pass-privacy-laws-and-yes-you-should-be-suspicious https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/04/15/big-tech-is-pushing...
    - frumplestlatz 3mo ago
      What is the connection to “anti-trans bills”?
      - paimapi 2mo ago
        they're both grounded in fearmongering that's led to cultural panics and utilize the rhetoric of 'protecting children' as the sell https://www.law.georgetown.edu/gender-journal/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2023/12/How-to-Win-the-War-on-100-Fronts-Siena-Hohne.pdf https://www.law.georgetown.edu/gender-journal/wp-content/upl... "Overwhelmingly, state legislators behind recent anti-trans legislation have argued that they were introducing these bills with the intent to protect children – whether that be “protecting children” from “profoundly unethical and morally wrong” medical practices" https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/eff-gov-pritzker-veto-illinois-hb-5511 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/eff-gov-pritzker-veto-... "Much of H.B. 5511 is modeled after controversial legislation passed in California (A.B. 1043) and New York’s Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act" there's also the rampant astroturfing https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/30/christian-hate-group-funding-us-anti-lgbtq-anti-abortion-organizations https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/30/christian-hate... "The surge in funding to the ADF, which has been termed an “anti-LGBTQ hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, saw it record revenue of $104.5m in 2021, according to filings with the Internal Revenue Service." ADF's main funders being the Servant Foundation or a single billionaire family's pet foundation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_Foundation) and the National Christian Foundation which receives large donations from multiple extremely wealthy individuals like David Green, co-founder of Hobby Lobby (https://readsludge.com/2019/03/19/americas-biggest-christian-charity-funnels-tens-of-millions-to-hate-groups/ https://readsludge.com/2019/03/19/americas-biggest-christian...) this is very much like the funding of these 'privacy' acts by Meta, Alphabet, etc - lots of money directly into the hands of local legislators across multiple state legislatures with the ultimate goal of providing institutional power over individuals, one just has a slightly more Machiavellian economic logic foregrounding it but the strategy, tactics, and overall erosion of civil liberties make for very similar outcomes
  - buran77 3mo ago
    Unless there is a big lobby behind getting more "fixes".
    - an0malous 2mo ago
      Who's the lobby?
  - weaksauce 2mo ago
    i mean with the rise of flock ad campaigns of "think of the children" and them installing platereaders all over the place this kind of thing is something that people want to capitalize on and make a buck. i can definitely see the lobbying pushing for more and more invasive versions of this.
skinfaxi 3mo ago
Think of it like a foot in the door.
mosura 3mo ago
It is a technical ratchet. Once you accept part of the implementation it will never be undone, more will be added.
- AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
  Stronger: Once you accept their right to ask, then you open the door to their right to a truthful answer, and thus to a verified answer.
  - avianlyric 3mo ago
    Hasn’t the right to ask existed since the invention of consent laws? The state being able demand a persons age, and gate their behaviour based on that, has existed for hundreds of years so far. During that entire time the requirement to be truthful has also existed otherwise the laws would be meaningless. All that’s changing now, is figuring out how that extends into the digital realm. I personally find the argument that the digital realm is somehow special compared to the physical realm, and thus certain laws simply shouldn’t apply when “done on a computer”, difficult to reconcile.
    - xp84 3mo ago
      Hard agree. I don't think we allowed video store operators in 1995 to just let kids wander into the back room and rent porn, but we're so used to there just being "no rules" online, it is coming as a massive shock now when it's being suggested that maybe there should be some basic guardrails to discourage that. Let me be clear, I don't want face scans, or more of those creepy companies that operate this age verification crap for Discord, etc. Because I know it's not going to be implemented in the privacy-preserving way it could be, if there's ANY involvement with identity documents. Not least because we don't even have any proper cryptographically useful identity cards, so everything like that operates on a "trust us bro" basis where they pinky promise not to accidentally store everyone's raw face scans / ID cards / numbers / etc and inevitably leak them. But out-of-box age declaration is not extreme and is not slippery-slope, any more than out-of-box user account creation 25 years ago has led to out-of-box ID card checks.
shevy-java 3mo ago
I don't see the argument here. You can easily adjust the law to force verification. You seem to assume that "this is now final, nothing will change after that". Why would you assume this to be the case?
- xboxnolifes 3mo ago
  The slope is only slippery if the change in question makes it easier for future changes to be bad. Otherwise you're only arguing for no changes to ever be made. Does this law make forced verification easier than if this law didn't exist?
  - zamadatix 3mo ago
    Seems so - it builds in the verification infrastructure requirement, making it dead simple to change whether it is opt in or opt out at any time. It's actually pretty hard not to have a change be part of a slippery slope. It requires including blocks for further behavior as any subset implementation is hard to sell as not being a slippery slope path otherwise.
  - 3form 3mo ago
    Potentially. The existence of the law exemplifies the idea the law is there to protect someone; all you need then to upgrade it is to argue that the current method is insufficient protection. Spirit of the law has been established - letter of the law will follow.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - tripleee 3mo ago
    Once you go up the first step of a ladder, the second step is now easier. It's a shifting of the Overton window. You can't enact full surveillance in one move - no-one would accept that. You can boil the frog over a few decades, though.
- MrJohz 3mo ago
  But they could also just implement verification now, which many governments are trying to do. The idea that you shouldn't let a government do one thing because they might do another thing is flawed if they could already do the other thing. The danger of a slippery slope comes when one change enables the next change - for example, a law mandating certain kinds of data collection enables a future decision to discriminate or control based on the collected data. But in this case, no data is being collected, there's no step happening here that enables a more dangerous later step. If anything, I'd argue this makes it harder to implement more invasive measures later, because rather than arguing that some form of age control is necessary, Illinois will specifically need to argue that age verification is necessary over the existing anonymous system. That's harder than saying "there is no protection for children right now, age verification is the only way forward".
SV_BubbleTime 3mo ago
Everyone else is arguing slippery slope. I don’t even get that far, the proper response to my operating system asking me if I’m a minor or not is: fuck you. It isn’t a harmless question. We aren’t friends, I don’t want an algorithm of news and content, it’s an OS.
theNotFractured 2mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

weaksauce 3mo ago

that is the start of a lot of bills like this... they really only ever increase in scope and invasiveness.

bryanlarsen 3mo ago
On the contrary in my experience once a legislature passes a bill to "fix" a particular problem they consider it fixed and don't update it for at least 20 years.
- paimapi 3mo ago
  it depends on whether or not there's someone who sees it as a crusade (rare), sees it as a way to get political clout (very common) and/or is getting a lot of lobbying money (extremely common [1]). see, for eg, the anti-trans bills that are being passed this is the same rhetorical and political strategy, that there are 'dangerous' people who will exploit your children so please vote for me, the person who cares the most about children and will go after the 'dangerous' people [1] https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/04/15/big-tech-is-pushing-states-to-pass-privacy-laws-and-yes-you-should-be-suspicious https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/04/15/big-tech-is-pushing...
  - frumplestlatz 3mo ago
    What is the connection to “anti-trans bills”?
    - paimapi 2mo ago
      they're both grounded in fearmongering that's led to cultural panics and utilize the rhetoric of 'protecting children' as the sell https://www.law.georgetown.edu/gender-journal/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2023/12/How-to-Win-the-War-on-100-Fronts-Siena-Hohne.pdf https://www.law.georgetown.edu/gender-journal/wp-content/upl... "Overwhelmingly, state legislators behind recent anti-trans legislation have argued that they were introducing these bills with the intent to protect children – whether that be “protecting children” from “profoundly unethical and morally wrong” medical practices" https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/eff-gov-pritzker-veto-illinois-hb-5511 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/eff-gov-pritzker-veto-... "Much of H.B. 5511 is modeled after controversial legislation passed in California (A.B. 1043) and New York’s Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act" there's also the rampant astroturfing https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/30/christian-hate-group-funding-us-anti-lgbtq-anti-abortion-organizations https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/30/christian-hate... "The surge in funding to the ADF, which has been termed an “anti-LGBTQ hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, saw it record revenue of $104.5m in 2021, according to filings with the Internal Revenue Service." ADF's main funders being the Servant Foundation or a single billionaire family's pet foundation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_Foundation) and the National Christian Foundation which receives large donations from multiple extremely wealthy individuals like David Green, co-founder of Hobby Lobby (https://readsludge.com/2019/03/19/americas-biggest-christian-charity-funnels-tens-of-millions-to-hate-groups/ https://readsludge.com/2019/03/19/americas-biggest-christian...) this is very much like the funding of these 'privacy' acts by Meta, Alphabet, etc - lots of money directly into the hands of local legislators across multiple state legislatures with the ultimate goal of providing institutional power over individuals, one just has a slightly more Machiavellian economic logic foregrounding it but the strategy, tactics, and overall erosion of civil liberties make for very similar outcomes
- buran77 3mo ago
  Unless there is a big lobby behind getting more "fixes".
  - an0malous 2mo ago
    Who's the lobby?
- weaksauce 2mo ago
  i mean with the rise of flock ad campaigns of "think of the children" and them installing platereaders all over the place this kind of thing is something that people want to capitalize on and make a buck. i can definitely see the lobbying pushing for more and more invasive versions of this.

skinfaxi 3mo ago

Think of it like a foot in the door.

mosura 3mo ago

It is a technical ratchet. Once you accept part of the implementation it will never be undone, more will be added.

AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
Stronger: Once you accept their right to ask, then you open the door to their right to a truthful answer, and thus to a verified answer.
- avianlyric 3mo ago
  Hasn’t the right to ask existed since the invention of consent laws? The state being able demand a persons age, and gate their behaviour based on that, has existed for hundreds of years so far. During that entire time the requirement to be truthful has also existed otherwise the laws would be meaningless. All that’s changing now, is figuring out how that extends into the digital realm. I personally find the argument that the digital realm is somehow special compared to the physical realm, and thus certain laws simply shouldn’t apply when “done on a computer”, difficult to reconcile.
  - xp84 3mo ago
    Hard agree. I don't think we allowed video store operators in 1995 to just let kids wander into the back room and rent porn, but we're so used to there just being "no rules" online, it is coming as a massive shock now when it's being suggested that maybe there should be some basic guardrails to discourage that. Let me be clear, I don't want face scans, or more of those creepy companies that operate this age verification crap for Discord, etc. Because I know it's not going to be implemented in the privacy-preserving way it could be, if there's ANY involvement with identity documents. Not least because we don't even have any proper cryptographically useful identity cards, so everything like that operates on a "trust us bro" basis where they pinky promise not to accidentally store everyone's raw face scans / ID cards / numbers / etc and inevitably leak them. But out-of-box age declaration is not extreme and is not slippery-slope, any more than out-of-box user account creation 25 years ago has led to out-of-box ID card checks.

shevy-java 3mo ago

I don't see the argument here. You can easily adjust the law to force verification. You seem to assume that "this is now final, nothing will change after that". Why would you assume this to be the case?

xboxnolifes 3mo ago
The slope is only slippery if the change in question makes it easier for future changes to be bad. Otherwise you're only arguing for no changes to ever be made. Does this law make forced verification easier than if this law didn't exist?
- zamadatix 3mo ago
  Seems so - it builds in the verification infrastructure requirement, making it dead simple to change whether it is opt in or opt out at any time. It's actually pretty hard not to have a change be part of a slippery slope. It requires including blocks for further behavior as any subset implementation is hard to sell as not being a slippery slope path otherwise.
- 3form 3mo ago
  Potentially. The existence of the law exemplifies the idea the law is there to protect someone; all you need then to upgrade it is to argue that the current method is insufficient protection. Spirit of the law has been established - letter of the law will follow.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- tripleee 3mo ago
  Once you go up the first step of a ladder, the second step is now easier. It's a shifting of the Overton window. You can't enact full surveillance in one move - no-one would accept that. You can boil the frog over a few decades, though.
MrJohz 3mo ago
But they could also just implement verification now, which many governments are trying to do. The idea that you shouldn't let a government do one thing because they might do another thing is flawed if they could already do the other thing. The danger of a slippery slope comes when one change enables the next change - for example, a law mandating certain kinds of data collection enables a future decision to discriminate or control based on the collected data. But in this case, no data is being collected, there's no step happening here that enables a more dangerous later step. If anything, I'd argue this makes it harder to implement more invasive measures later, because rather than arguing that some form of age control is necessary, Illinois will specifically need to argue that age verification is necessary over the existing anonymous system. That's harder than saying "there is no protection for children right now, age verification is the only way forward".

SV_BubbleTime 3mo ago

Everyone else is arguing slippery slope. I don’t even get that far, the proper response to my operating system asking me if I’m a minor or not is: fuck you. It isn’t a harmless question. We aren’t friends, I don’t want an algorithm of news and content, it’s an OS.

theNotFractured 2mo ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog