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I a small server operator and a client of the internet will not participate in any other methods period, full-stop. Make simple logical and rational laws around RTA headers and I will participate. Many sites already voluntarily add this header. It is trivial to implement. Many questions and a lengthy discussion occurred here [1]. I doubt my little private and semi-private sites would be noticed but one day it may come to that at which point it's back into semi-private Tinc open source VPN meshes for my friends and I.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152074
[1] - https://www.shodan.io/search?query=RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-R... [THESE ARE ADULT SITES, NSFW]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Sites_Advocatin...
This still isn’t perfect, as it creates an incentive for legislators to criminalize improper age header settings and legislate what is considered kid-appropriate. But it’s still better than this age verification crap.
We pay money online mostly through credit cards. Credit card transactions can be reversed. If children spend money on porn, those payments are likely to be reversed. This is really bad for the ability of the porn sites to continue receiving credit card payments, and continue making money.
An age header is a trivial step that can reduce the odds of the adult site receiving payments that later get reversed. Win, win.
But if someone is willing and able to pay, then the adult industry wants the choice of whether to access content to be up to them. If government tries to regulate them, they'll engage in malicious compliance - do the minimum to not be sued, in a way that they can still reach customers.
For example Utah tried to institute age verification. The porn industry blocked all IP addresses from Utah. Business boomed for VPN companies in Utah. Everyone, including porn companies, knows that a lot of that is for porn. But if you show up with a Nevada IP address, the porn's position is, "You're in Nevada. Utah law doesn't apply." Even if the credit card has a Utah zip code.
If you live in Utah, and you're able to purchase a VPN, the porn companies want your money.
If someone is willing and able to pay, they have a source of money. If they aren't allowed to buy something, that control should be applied at the level where they get the money. If the child is using an adult's credit card, responsibility lies with the adult. If children need to have their own credit cards, the obvious point of control is the credit card itself.
But also, most porn is ad-supported, pirated or free. Directly paid content is a small fraction. So all of this is moot for porn.
Exactly. If you’re hurting kids to make more money selling porn videos, straight to jail.
I’m glad there are solutions that won’t ruin the Internet. Now the uphill battle to convince our legislators (see: encryption & fundamentally technically ignorant calls for backdoors).
I’m here to die on this hill!
This one: https://www.w3.org/PICS/
I added PICS to my forums but it was missing many categories of adult content. I ended up just selecting everything as I could not predict what people may upload which made for a very long header.
Today devices do not default to accounts being child accounts. Some day this may change and may require an initial administrator password or something to that affect but this can evolve over time.
Not being able to detect all children doesn't mean that being able to detect 80% of them is somehow less disturbing.
That would also amount to compelled speech.
I disagree. The legal requirement to apply a warning label is a well known, understood and accepted process that is applied to a myriad of hazards to children and adults. As just one example businesses in some states, most notably California are compelled to add warning labels to foods and other products that could cause cancer.
On other hand servers might choose to lie. After all that is their free speech right.
So maybe you need some third party vetting list. Ofc, that one should be fully liable for any damages misclassification can cause... But someone would step up.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47950843
This isn't hypothetical, by the way. There are adults catfishing kids into producing CSAM [0], kidnapping and assaulting minors [1], [2], and in the most extreme case, there's a borderline cult of crazy young adults who do terrorize people for fun [3].
It is a constant game of whackamole by moderators/admins to keep this behavior out of online spaces where kids hang out.
I recognize that this is a "think of the children" argument, but indeed that's the point. The anonymous web was created without thinking about the children, just like how all social media was created without thinking about how it could be used to harm people. Age verification is the smallest step towards mitigating that harm.
Now I disagree very strongly with the laws proposed (and indeed, I've been writing/calling/talking with state reps about this locally, because I don't want my state's bill passed). But the technical challenge needs to address the real problems that legislators are trying to go after.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdnc/pr/discord-user-who-catfis...
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kidnapping-roblox-rcna2...
[2] https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/nebraska-man-charged-wit...
[3] https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/boston/news/ope...
Mandatory age surveillance everywhere is only going to result in massive, normalized ID fraud. You thought fake and stolen IDs were a problem before? You haven't seen anything yet.
And half of it will be from adults trying to avoid privacy invasion.
A tech company doing scans for validation could actually connect to a state database to verify the ID is legit and is not already being used for a different account. It would then be saved. I don't think real world vs tech world usage of fake IDs are the same at all.
They just want a plausible defence should it ever end up in court.
That's the point, and it's a big part of why opposing online age verification is a hill to die on.
> Sophisticated places might have a scanner that does what ever validation it does, but again, it's just another cursory check of the photo.
Many/most bars do scan IDs now. Ostensibly it's to verify that it's real, but they do use those systems to keep a log of everyone who enters.
When ID is tied to your bank account you guard it like you guard your bank account. Because it is the same thing. This will drastically lower the incentives to "share" your identity with anyone.
What's more this system is already operational in many countries.
The future of your family and your legacy is up to you, not the government. We don't need age verification to restrict the social darwinism of raising children.
I would rather have parenting licenses than online age verification
https://meshtastic.org/
The real world analog would be if you could buy beer at the store with anyone's ID because they didn't make any effort to reasonably check that the ID was yours or discourage people from sharing or copying IDs.
The systems enforce identity checking because that's the only way age verification can be done without having some reason to discourage or detect credential sharing.
The retort that follows is always "Well it's not perfect. Nothing is perfect." The trap is convincing ourselves that a severely imperfect system would be accepted. What would really happen is that it would be the trojan horse to get everyone on board with age verification, then the laws would be changed to make them more strict.
The two methods that seem feasible are making it hard to copy (putting it in the secure element in your phone, for example, which I don't love) or doing tokens that can only be used a limited number of times per day, like in : https://eprint.iacr.org/2006/454
Let's say Facebook has verified my age somehow. I could share my Facebook login credentials, or the token that their authorization server sends back in response. You can create some hurdles to doing that, like requiring a second factor, but I can just share that too.
You might as well go down the route of accepting that possibility. These systems are never going to hold up in the face of a determined enough teenager.
I’m sure there wouldn’t be a brisk illicit trade in these tokens either. Certainly no one would be incentivized to sell these tokens to teenagers for easy profit.
Even if you could anonymously verify age to issue a “confirmed adult” credential, the whole chain of trust breaks down if one bad actor shares their anonymous credential and suddenly everyone is verifiably an adult.
The solution to that attack is naturally to have some kind of system for sites to report obviously-shared credentials. Which means tracking.
This isn’t even getting to the issue that mandating government-issued credentials is the “foot in the door”. If you mandate the use of government creds for accessing websites, it’s an obvious step to turn around and demand that sites report credential use to “fight credential fraud”.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47951372
Of course the EU solution isn't perfect and there are bypasses (there will always be and have always been), but let's appreciate it that way rather than too many PII, if it must come. I'd prefer the Age/RTA header and parental responsibility too.
It's addressing a real problem in a bad way.
Or perhaps protecting kids isn’t really ageism at all.
You could define a set of 5 or six categories (nudity, sex, drugs, violence, etc.) and have a scale from 1 to 10 for each. Each content producer would rate each category according to defined criteria.
Then each user, or their parent, can set what their own acceptable level is. If you set your violence level at 4 then nothing level 5 or higher will load.
A) Change the laws in all countries (a non-starter), or B) Restrict access to only countries that obey those laws
And Option B is a non-starter to the freedom crowd.
Not to mention all the other issues with labeling, such as:
A) How to label in an internationally-agreeable way B) How to prevent abusive mislabeling
It's fraught, this path.
https://www.eff.org/pages/help-us-fight-back#main-content
Perhaps we NYers should organize a rally outside his office in Manhattan like we did for PIPA/SOPA?
Example, Discord wanted my ID to enable certain features, I declined, I now can't use those features, fine by me. If they started asking for ID anyway, I'd say no and see what happens, even if that means they lock me out entirely. There's no universe where they get my ID.
If you are going to implement age controls, you should implement a ban on underage influencers as well.
I bet there is a 15 year-old much smarter than me making political videos and I wouldn’t necessarily want them to be forced to stop. What if they’re on my “team”! ;) (I kid)
Recalling how we had lots of political debates in high school: if some of those kids made videos and got really popular, and the law made them stop, they would have been incentivized to vote $responsibleParty out.
(Socials bad for kids though maybe they could selfhost their monologues instead)
Its not about intelligence. Else a whole lot of over-age-of-majority wouldn't pass either.
Theres also no old-age cutoff, when their mental faculties significantly decline.
Yeah, the voting majority keeps 'under age' from voting. But at least in the USA, we have children as young as 11 being tried as adults but with none of the benefits.
—
After posting, I questioned whether political speech is special. Like should fifteen-year-olds who love film be able to make videos about them and get lots of followers… but I couldn’t be thought police. So maybe-
The platform just has to be designed non-addictively.
Is this accurate?: In reality, Facebook was so powerful the regulators could never make them stop at any turn. Now that they finally got sued big time, we finally educated ourselves enough as constituents to raise enough of a stink to trigger straight up bans. (educated ourselves, or politicians legislate based how bad headlines are, or it was so egregious it genuinely ticked them off… …)
Anyone who has hone so far as to become an influencer is already a lost cause. No law could save them.
That just makes it even worse, why deprive the younger generation of one of the few remaining methods they have to make a decent income? We should be encouraging youth entrepreneurship, not making them spend even longer in classrooms learning things that LLMs will do better than them.
Children do not need, nor are they entitled to, any kind of "freedom" to work for a living.
In the weekends they can stock shelves, deliver pizza, deliver newspapers, wash dishes, babysitting, feed animals or other typical jobs for children in the age range of 12 to 16.
Why? Presumably so they can go to college and get a high paying job that may not exist in 10 years? The direction we give kids coming up always seems to lag behind reality by 10 or 20 years. Perhaps we shouldn't stand in the way of the new generation figuring things out for themselves in this brave new world. The old playbooks to a solid middle class life are increasingly outdated.
My nieces and nephews really don't know what they are going to do in their futures because so much is uncertain right now.
If it feels like a longshot to expect normal 9-5 office jobs to be around in 5 years, and it's also a longshot being an influencer, then why not go for the influencer thing?
Not if it's done in a half arsed way. I'm in the UK and so far my age verification has involved doing a selfie with the webcam for Reddit. That's it. No one needing my name, ID number etc. (Apart from banks of course).
Really this is just the modern equivalent of putting the porn mags on the top shelf at the newsagent to stop the kids getting them. We don't need more.
First, that's easily enough to identify you from biometric data, and it's naive to assume it won't be resold. Second, I kept getting asked for ID into my 40s because I looked young. People don't all age in the same way, so this system will fail for people at the tails of a normal distribution - some 15 year olds will easily pass for 25 and vice versa.
a convenient record of your face is all we need
I believe if you are a "minor" then you can go the post-a-selfy route.
I could imagine it ending with a court ruling that people are responsible to protect their own personal documents which... yeah, that would muddy the waters in a world where every website expects to see your ID.
That's not just the plan - that's what's already legally required in many US states.
These laws were introduced by the explicitly religious right-wing groups like Exodus Cry and Morality in Media, as ways to de facto outlaw pornography (in their own words). They've since been laundered into the mainstream so the general public is unaware of the root cause.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/13/california-advances...
Separately I still don't fully agree with concerns raised regarding social media and identification for everyone. Bots, people who are online just stirring up trouble, &c. are causing pretty significant challenges and problems for society. If you spew a bunch of racist stuff for example I think people deserve to know who you are.
And you know we do this all the time. Folks want gun registries and things like that (and I agree, as a matter of practice, but not principal) so I'm not sure why we're ok with that form of requiring identification to exercise your rights and against this one other than political priorities.
Humans are inherently social, and social networks are based on trust. Trust is primarily a function of reputation, peer pressure, and legal consequences. Reputation requires tying behavior to a stable identity. Peer pressure only works when you’re not anonymous. For there to be legal consequences for bad behavior, we must identify bad actors. I don’t see why anyone would want to remove any of this. To protect some freelance journalists in Iran?
Also I don’t think that the “pro privacy” activists really understand the scale and severity of harm being done to children through the internet. I as a programmer who makes my living on the internet, would gladly support the shutting down of the whole internet if it would save the life of a single precious child.
Responsible parents don't have separate OS accounts for their children.
Would you vote for that? Prove who you are to visit this website? Would you do it to access Hacker News? Your newspaper?
Didn’t think so.
And porn companies should always be held responsible for not doing their due diligence and freely distributing porn to minors. Which is already illegal in teh US and most places.
Shall we just abolish all laws? None of them have any effect whatsoever, if they are even slightly imperfect... by your rule.
My question is: are digital age verifications the best way to protect kids from harmfull effects of pornography? And my worry is: what unwanted side-effects will age verification have for our society as a whole.
People should not be able to misrepresent themselves on the internet, it may have been safe in low volumes but it is scary now and will be outright dangerous as a modality in the hands of AI agents. If you think teen mental health is bad now, wait until social media campaign capabilities previously only available to nation states fall into the hands of ordinary school bullies.
Maybe age verification isn't the way to mitigate this obvious risk, but there has to be something that can be done to stop rampant sockpuppeting.
Saw it with the UK laws. It just gets rammed through. Whether it’s ignorance, malice, hidden force, a desire for surveillance state, genuine concern for children - doesn’t matter, the forces in favour are substantially more and seemingly motivated to try over and over until it sticks.
Much like brexit or for that matter trump reelection I just don’t have much faith in wisdom of the democratic collective consensus anymore and I don’t think it’ll get any better in an AI misinformation echo chamber world. Onwards into dystopia
Exceeding gloomy take I know
Took forever to get a response and likely achieved little, but to their credit the response wasn't entirely canned and did at least give the impression that they understood what I'm saying
> Every website. Every platform. Every app. Every service. Your children will never know what it was like to think freely online. They will never explore ideas anonymously. They will never question authority without it being logged in their permanent profile. They will never speak freely without fear that every word will be used...
No. Nobody's proposing you need to verify your identity to read articles on the New York Times or Wikipedia or political blogs. And nobody is proposing you need to verify your identity to leave comments on a news article or blog post. And any proposed law around that would run into massive first-amendment constitutional hurdles. It would be struck down easily.
There's always going to be a spectrum of websites that range from open and anonymous (like news and political discussion) to strongly identity-verified (like online banking). I don't like online age verification for particular sites, but at the same time I think it's completely misleading to see it as this slippery slope to a world where anonymous speech no longer exists.
We can have reasoned arguments around how people's usage of sites is tracked and how to prevent that, without making this about free speech and "the hill to die on".
Bad: some still entertain the idea that we should do age verification using some sort of crypto primitives
There is no reason for age verification at all.
I am from the goatse generation. Rotten.com. steakandcheese. Horrific stuff tbh, I mostly stayed away from it, and I didn't need a helicopter government to protect me from it.
The moment you accept the narrative that kids need to be protected from the Internet you have already lost.
You've already condemned those kids to a life of slavery. So much for protecting them.
What we need is not online verification, but a competent government that does its existing job well.
Who's been arrested over the Epstein files? Who is protecting those kids?
No one.
That same government wants to "protect" your kids by KYCing everyone.
Give me a break.
At some point you'll realize the contradiction in not trusting these "multi-billion-dollar businesses" to the point that you are risking enslaving humanity and "dying on this hill" and yet at the same time trusting those same businesses to implement this dystopian system in a privacy-preserving way.
When that realization hits, it will be a loud sound, possibly heard by nearby telepaths.
I find it disgusting that most laws today are based on creating a perfect world instead of addressing harms in the least intrusive way. There is no balancing of interests, even when they state that there are. Every side complains about the others and potential future abuses, except when it is their plan. Nobody tries to design the law with a devil's advocate perspective to make as effective as reasonably possible (not perfect!) while limiting overreach.
The real problem is the pursuit of perfection. A perfect world does not exist, nor will it ever (laws of nature, physics, etc). One person's view of perfect is not the same as another's. We've lost the capacity for legislative empathy through are impatience and self importance. It's no longer about restricting government and providing people with rights. It's about how we can use government to shove the desires of a majority or plurality onto the total population.
There are ways to do age verification with reasonable anonymity, but they aren't perfect and can create underground markets (see gaming in China). At a certain point, we need to step back and put the responsibilities where they belong - with parents, instead of causing massive negative externalities on everyone else.
Yeah, yeah, but the children...
Private entities being frontrunners in AI Fear either means that these companies have too much unchecked power or that they have are covert instruments of governments.
When you set up kids devices in your family they ask you to provide the birthday anyway.
I’m keen to see the arguments against this.
Kids should not be able/allowed to buy/use devices that are dangerous for them
But the device itself should not care at the fallacious idea “it might be able to”
The Cashier Standard – Age Verification Without Surveillance
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47809795
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/7fe74381-a683-4f49-9c2b-1...
It doesn't have to be perfect.
Nobody who understands how adversarial systems like this work is seriously expecting a 100% flawless performance of blocking every single minor and accepting every single adult, the question is how much risk is acceptable, and the risks posed by this system are acceptable for alcohol, cigarettes, and other adult items that can arguably pose much more acute risk of serious injury or bodily harm to kids.
1) the cards can just be re-sold which creates a black market and defeats the "cashier physically saw the person buying the card" angle
2) nickle and dimes people for simply browsing the internet (verification can dystopia anyone?)
3) related to #2, it creates winners in the private sector since presumably you need central authorities handing out these codes
I abhor the idea of digital ID verification, but if we're going to do it, let's not create a web of new problems while we're at it.
I imagine this could be done with appropriate zero-knowledge measures so that the combination of Alice's age token and Bob's private key creates a capability to exercise the option, but without the service (e.g. a social media site) knowing that the token belongs to Alice, and without the ID provider (e.g. the state) knowing that Bob was the one who exercised it.
While honest customers have no reason to make use of this option, if Alice blindly sells her tokens to anybody willing to pay, there's bound to be some trolls out there who will do it just for the laughs.
This is far from a perfect system since a dishonest site could also make use of the option. But it theoretically works without revealing anybody's identity (unless the option is used, and then only if the service and the ID provider collude).
Second - The codes would be priced on the order of magnitude of pennies per verification - think 10 cents or less, accessible even to low / fixed income folks without really making a dent in their budget.
Third - the proposal explicitly mentions a nonprofit running it as an option, and the idea would be that law codifies the method to be approved, not a specific vendor, so competitive markets could emerge, too. Would you argue that restrictions on the sale of alcohol are creating artificial winners in the private sector of alcohol manufacturing?
I don't think it applies, the difference is that codes are digital and can be sold over the internet, anonymously, in a scallable manner.
I still like this solution because all the solutions I've seen have flaws and this one being so easy to explain makes it great to campaign for.
Second, it doesn't matter what it costs, it's inconvenient and I already spent time (possibly money too) obtaining a government ID... on top of a theoretical mandate that says I need to show the ID on a bunch of websites.
Third, I'm not sure I follow your point on alcohol restrictions creating winners? The non-profit idea could potentially be good, but I'm not hopeful that real world legislation would be crafted that way.
EDIT: also more on #1 and "severe consequences" for re-selling... yes that's exactly what we want to avoid: creating more reasons to put people in prison and a bigger burden on law enforcement and the court system.
It is easy to defend on the motte hill (protection of children, protection against abuse and heinous crimes), and easy to expand and farm on the bailey (universal surveillance, mass data collection, and the erosion of privacy).
Um, no? iOS is doing age verification just by your credit card. I never saw people all that upset about giving their credit card info to their phone wallet app or even to a bunch of websites.
I would say it's not really an ID no, which is the point. The post is claiming that a digital ID is necessary for age verification, but clearly it isn't.
The author has said a lot about what kind of future awaits with mass surveillance and AI, but I believe it’s not enough. Technofascism Is not that far away.
The reason we are up shit creek is because large companies didn't want to spend 2-5% of profits on decent editorial controls to stop bad actors making money from bending societal red lines (ie pile ons, snuff videos, the spectrum of grift, culture of abusing the "other side")
They also didn't want to stop the "viral" factor that allows their networks to grow so fucking fast.
This isn't really about freedom of speech, its about large media companies not wanting to take responsibility for their own shit.
meta desperately want kids to sign up. There are no penalties for them pushing shit on them. If an FCC registered corp had done half the shit facebook did, they'd have been kicked off air and restructured.
So frankly its too fucking late. Meta, google and tiktok will still find ways to push low quality rage bate to all of us, and divide us all for advertising revenue.
Of course, it's probably also been coopted by the neverending stream of nanny-state political power grabs in both the US and EU.
Evident when the fight against "hate" was suddenly everywhere, and also during covid.
This one-sided view has some good points, but for goodness sake, don't pretend that the alternative has no downsides.
State your well reasoned opinion where you have considered the facts. Or just say you are in support of this openly.
All it does is covertly promote the idea by presenting it as reasonable and on an equal level to the other idea. While at the same time being able to shut down debate, by pretending they don't actually think that.
Anybody can say something like "but what about the good side of the African slave trade" but they will be debated and the argument shut down if they present it as their actual argument and engage in good faith with the comments. Using the devil's advocate technique is an extremely useful way to argue in bad faith, anonymously on the Internet.
Critique of the author's style is fine. An opposing view should honestly be presented as such.
Regardless how stupid this argument is, rags will always pounce on it.
This is just a dirty trick of the creeps to make the resistance harder.
It's the same with tough on crime. "What, you want criminals to keep getting away with it?!"
I would substitute "deeply" for "superficially". Like, if my parents found some way to prohibit porn when I was an adolescent, I wouldn't say they cared deeply about me. I would say they were misguided and authoritary. The "care deeply" idea you are putting forward is just trying to distil whatever societal norm currently is into the youngs.
Protect the children refers to a type of property, not a type of human.
What is fascinating is to see how governments ALL fall for it. There is zero resistance. This is fascinating to me. It shows how little real effort is necessary once you have the lobbyists in place. Kind of scary to witness too.
It is an apartheid system. All apartheid slavery systems will eventually die, so age sniffing will die too. But it will most likely be a long fight as more and more money will be invested by crazy corporations such as Palantir and others.
The whole "debate" is already not logical by the way. Let's for a moment assume the "but but but the kids!" is a real argument rather than a strawman argument, which it is. Ok so ... I am a "concerned parent", for the sake of discussion. I have three young kids. I am not a tech nerd. The kids see "unfitting content" on the antisocial media such as facebook and what not. So, what do I do? Well ... they have a smartphone? Aha, so ... I am not so concerned? Having no smartphone is no option? Ok so ... I say they can have a smartphone, but they may not use antisocial media. Ok. First - in any free society, is it acceptable that this kind of censorship is done on ALL kids? What if I, as a parent, do not agree with this? Well, tough luck - the laws force you into the age sniffing routine suddenly. But, even those parents who want the state to act as totalitarian: why would I want to hand over control to ANY politician for that matter? That makes no sense to me. I am aware that some parents may think differently, but do all parents think like that, even IF they buy into the "we protect the children" lie? I don't want ANY information from ANY of my computers to go into private hands here. So the whole argument already makes zero sense from the get go.
Of course those who know how things work, they know that this is the build up towards identifying everyone on the world wide web at all times AND to make access to information conditional, e. g. if the state does not know you, you can not access information. Aka a passport system for the www. Built right into the operating system too. Windows already complied. MacOSX too. The battle for Linux will be interesting; it may be some hybrid situation, like systemd. And the systemd distributions will all succumb to age sniffing, courtesy of Poettering "this is really harmless if we store your age in the database, just trust me".
You're not qualified to say that because you aren't a proponent of age verification. That's just imputing motives.
As a proponent of age verification and can tell you it's absolutely about protecting kid from damaging services like porn. It's a common sense control and that's why it has bi-partisan support in the US during a time where there is nearly 0 bi partisan support.
People will show what they are made of.
The writing style of the author is very annoying.
It's also ironic that this guy is so adamant about protecting the children on xitter. It's like preaching against racism on 4chan.
The Internet pretty much runs our lives now, so: I do.
Lots of things require having Internet access, an email address, being able to visit a website, coordinate with others on a Facebook page for a local group, etc.
No one requires me to buy a pack of cigarettes to register for classes, pay bills, submit something to the government, etc.
States have broad power to do what is being feared in the thread and haven’t already and to think that they’re waiting for this final piece of the puzzle to enact some insane regime is laughable. They could do that right now without the internet at all.
Social media is probably not healthy and kids should probably not be on social media. Age verification and age limits for social media will be a good thing for kids.
Instead of fear mongering, finding a middle ground, like governments adding some rules and protections on how this information or system is used is probably a better response.
I might be in the minority, but I think incorporating an identity layer into the internet itself should happen with the right protections for users and should have happened at the beginning of the net and is probably a result of lack of foresight by the creators of ARPANET.
> Our freedom is already being eroded, saying that it is being eroded more is just fear mongering.
> They want to hurt you, instead of fear mongering, find a middle ground where they're hurting you differently.
Or maybe you aren't being litteral and are just saying that what children see and hear has no influence on their developmemt. Either way, total bullshit.
More generally you're committing I believe two separate fallacies of ambiguity? Like one in going from the institution of social media to its reification in the form of specific websites, and then a second fallacy when you go from the specific websites to all websites in general? Like if you said "Gun ownership is not a thing at all. Gun ownership is a piece of metal. Pieces of metal cannot be healthy or unhealthy." OK but, you owning a gun is known in the scientific literature to significantly correlated with a bunch of very adverse health effects for you, such as you dying by suicide or you dying from spousal violence or your protracted grief and wasting away because your child accidentally killed themselves. Like to say that it's impossible for the institution to have adverse health effects because we can situate the objects of that institution into a broader category which doesn't sound so harmful, is frankly messed up.
[1]: Bernadette & Headley-Johnson, "The Impact of Social Media on Health Behaviors, a Systematic Review" (2025) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12608964/ - the content you consume can promote healthy or unhealthy behaviors
[2]: Lledo & Alvarez-Galvez, "Prevalence of Health Misinformation on Social Media: Systematic Review" (2021) https://www.jmir.org/2021/1/E17187/ is notable not just for its content but also like a thousand papers that cite it getting into all of the weeds of health influencers sharing misinformation to make a buck
[3]: Sun & Chao, "Exploring the influence of excessive social media use on academic performance through media multitasking and attention problems" (2024) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10639-024-12811-y was a study of a reasonably large cohort showing correlations between social media usage and particular forms of multitasking that inhibit academic performance -- more generally there's broad anecdata that the current "endless scrolling constant dopamine hits" model that social media gravitates to, produces kids that are "out of control" with aggressive and attentional difficulties -- see Kazmi et al. "Effects of Excessive Social Media Use on Neurotransmitter Levels and Mental Health" (2025) (PDF warning - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sharique-Ahmad-2/public...) for more on the actual literature that has probed those questions
[4]: The APA has a whole "Health advisory on social media use in adolesence" https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advi... which is pretty even-handed about "these parts of social media are acceptable, those parts can maybe even be downright good -- but here are the papers that say that for adolescents, it can mess with their sleep, it can expose them to cyberhate content that measurably promotes anxiety and depression, it has been measured to promote disordered eating if they use it for social comparison..."
> If you want the best for your children, you must stop online age verification.
> Your children are being targeted. The infrastructure being built under the cover of child safety is designed to enslave them for the rest of their lives.
Jumped the shark on that one, and really off-color. I'm less inclined to listen to guy, not because of his actual points, but because of how unreasonable he sounds when articulating them. A great lesson in how not to do rhetoric.
"Your children will never know what it was like to think freely online. They will never explore ideas anonymously. They will never question authority without it being logged in their permanent profile. They will never speak freely without fear that every word will be used against them.
They will grow up in a digital cage. And you will have to tell them you saw it being built and did not stop it when you had the chance."
So I'm with the author on this one. Under the cover of child safety, digital IDs will cage us (or at least children entering the verification age), and it will probably never be rolled back.
Would that be such a bad thing? Frankly I would welcome a world in which kids are not using Instagram or TikTok. They don’t have to live in a cage if we don’t let them in the cage.
Personally, my plan is that when age verification laws get passed, every service that requires ID is a service I stop using. And I expect my life to be better for it!
Let’s take a basic example: Wikipedia, which hosts pornography, easily could be a target of such legislation. Now there is infrastructure in place to know when you read about “Criticisms of policy X” and maybe it’s handled safely or maybe it’s handed directly to the government.
What about news? It’s a hop skip and leap from “age verify pornography with ID” to “age verify content about sexual abuse or violence.” Now the infrastructure is in place to see the alt-news criticisms you read.
Twitch or YouTube wouldn’t even wait to comply, ID verification is something that these corporations are already perfectly fine with. Now, you watching a history of your government’s crimes is a potentially tracked red flag that you’re a dissident to be watched.
Do you think if this sort of legislation is enacted, it will stop at large websites? It will be an excuse used by the government and supported by big tech firms to shut down any small websites which don’t comply. After all, Google, MS, et al, they would rather that your entire concept of the internet start and end in a service they control.
But will your friends and family opt out? Their phones are always listening. They can just as easily listen to you, even if you go to great pains not to expose yourself to technology. They'll make a shadow profile of any avoidant user whether they want it or not.
Bullshit. These are all-encompassing monopolies and government services. More likely, they'll ban you and you'll end up having to go to court out of desperation to demand that they service you.
This is very limited thinking. If you lacked this sort of imagination 20 years ago, you wouldn't have been able to predict today.
> Frankly I would welcome a world in which kids are not using Instagram or TikTok.
This is the sort of passive reactionary nonsense that causes the danger that we're in. Everything isn't something to give up lightly, even if you think that it will force your neighbor to turn his music down, or get rid of bad reality television. I don't like kids on social media either. I don't like adults on it. I think kids are suffering more from surveillance than from TikTok.
The time to worry about not having a digital cage was quite awhile ago. Instead tech people pushed Chrome and Android and Gmail and ads onto us.
Curious about via Google Chrome versus not
1: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Edit: yes it is hyperbolic and ridiculous to suggest people will be "enslaved" because they don't have access to the internet. Do you realize that makes everybody who grew up in the 90s or earlier a "slave"?
He’s 100% correct.
For a start, child are parents responsibility, and the state should stay out of that as much as reasonably possible.
Nothing more would need to me said on the matter if that’s as far as it went, but it isn’t.
There can be no free speech if the state can imprison you for what you say, and they know everything you say.
I dropped the word ‘online’ from the above paragraph, because on is the real world. Touch grass, but there’s no way online isn’t real. Are these words not real simple because I telegraphed them to you?
That’s not a world I want to live in.
And not distributing porn to children is a porn company's responsibility.
You are repeating a very common talking point but its not a good one.
Age verification laws make it possible to hold services providers liable for breaking the law (it's already illegal to distribute porn to minors in many places, like the US).
It's both true and completely irrelevant that parents should do a better job protecting their children from harmful services online.
Yes
That's why stores let kids buy alcohol and tobacco, of course, because no responsible parent would let them buy that, right?
That's why any kid can go watch any movie in the cinema right?
Yes it's the parents responsibilities. Do you think a middle class single mother has the resources to keep their kids entertained and out of social media for the whole day?
The problem with age verification is 100% the lack of anonymity in its implementation (which I do agree has ulterior motives) - but honestly not the age check in itself
Yes. At least in the U.S., the federal government does not regulate that, it is voluntary by the MPA (formerly MPAA) and theaters. A kid can buy a ticket for a PG movie and walk into an R-rated movie.
> Do you think a middle class single mother has the resources to keep their kids entertained and out of social media for the whole day?
Mine did. While not everyone has a backyard, things like pencils, papers, books, used toys, etc can be found inexpensively or for free.
You want to force us to compromise when we were minding our own goddamn business.
I haven't heard too many people say these extreme-sounding, yet at least arguably true points out loud.
Someone should be saying them, and the fact that it's not your particular cup of tea may not be the biggest issue here.
Make no mistake you are engaging in your own form of rhetoric when you respond like this. You are in effect moving the discussion away from the subject at hand, and towards the perceived faults in the author’s communication style. This is a rhetorical slight of hand and it’s highly disingenuous.
If I were the author of the post, I'd value the feedback.
It's important to remember that they're targeting your children. You grew up with freedom from surveillance and constant identification. You were able to communicate anonymously and without the content of your speech being sold to Walmart and the cops. They are putting in effort to make sure that your children will never have that reality as a reference point. The idea of the government and a dozen corporations not knowing everything that they are doing at all times, and not using and selling that information freely, will sound like the ramblings of a delusional old fool.
It's important that you engage with that. Denial is not something to brag about.
It seems reasonable to me to hold porn companies responsible for distributing porn to minors.
I can see why it's unfortunate but the idea posited that that it's somehow illegal in the US is ridiculous. You have no right to watch porn anonymously at the expense of holding porn companies liable for distributing porn to minors.
Internet 1.0 was largely read only, ephemeral, or decentralized. Chat rooms, IRC, personal webpages, etc. There was anonymity and there were not age restricted services.
Internet 2.0 introduced age restricted services and the enforcement lagged. The enforcement is now catching up. You can still do all the Internet 1.0 things anonymously but you can no longer gamble online as a 14 year old and hopefully soon you wont be able to watch porn either.
The point of this is not to verify age really. It is to verify identity. There's no way to prove someone is some age without presenting a legal ID.
Also, it's not just porn, facebook, online gambling etc. It is the OS based on some bills. So ALL your activities.
There was porn before most everything on the web. Porn is also speech / art.
Anonymous access should be available for any website that wants to share their content on the Internet provided they have the rights to that content.
States that seek to limit that could make a legal argument that they have the right to limit access, but in the end it’s infringing speech. Worse, it’s unenforceable.
And yes, I would make the same arguments for people posting hateful shit or misinformation.