If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin. People struggle to consider the second-, third-, and nth-order effects of anything so asking them to consider what else might happen if we bring in laws and technical mechanisms to 'protect the children' is unfortunately too a big leap for a lot of them. Most people are bad at spotting causal links between parts of a system, and people who are good at it exploit that.
ROroenxi1 天前
In fairness, the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control and the will to push it through tends to come from the political circles more than popular belief it is a good idea. I expect that if the measure itself went to a general vote, the majority would be against it once they have to deal with a specific proposal. It takes repeated pushes by the authoritarians looking for an opportunity to get things like speech controls or privacy violations through and the politicians mysteriously give up trying to roll it back no matter what the public pressure might be.
That being said, any expectation of thoughtfulness at all makes politics frustrating. Even basic things like why people keep making small random changes when most of these problems and solutions haven't changed in more than 2 millennia. And there is a pretty easy consensus to come to about what works. The repeated failures of authoritarianism to get to a good place are so consistent it is wild that people keep trying it.
PCpc8621 小时前
The problem is that "the authoritarians" (read: almost every politician at every level of government, but a drastically increasing percentage the higher you go) only need to get something passed once then it is there forever.
Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing.
ABabecedarius18 小时前
Increasingly wishing for this from a fictional constitutional convention:
> I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent — the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it?
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress
SOsolid_fuel13 小时前
> And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it?
30% of Americans would surrender every right they have if it meant someone who looks different would suffer slightly more.
THTheOtherHobbes18 小时前
Add money to politics - more accurately add even more money to politics - and see how this works out.
NONoMoreNicksLeft17 小时前
>Increasingly wishing for this from a fictional constitutional convention:
There's an interesting, one-time shakeup that we could actually accomplish. While it's true that there will never again be another constitutional amendment... there's already one out there that will never expire, partially ratified. Completely beyond Congress's ability to rescind it or cockblock it. Article the First.
Were it to be ratified, nearly immediately (whenever the next Census is), the House of Representatives has over 6000 seats. So many that the existing party apparatus wouldn't be able to vet candidates or manipulate. Lobbyists, even, would have a hard time allotting the slush funds to bribe them all.
And what would it take to do all of this? Maybe 10 or 12 people hammering (gently) on some state legislator in Nevada or Kansas. Convince him or her to pass the resolution to ratify. Nothing more than that. A single state even attempting to ratify it would start the ball rolling, and no one would be able to stop it.
AFafiori17 小时前
This looks like something only a libertarian would like
UNunethical_ban15 小时前
I love that book, and its teachings of cell structures for decentralized rebellion. But it is a libertarian fantasy. And we've seen in the US, particularly due to the voting-system-imposed two party cap, that bad faith actors will sabotage good government as a goal in itself. I'm not confident that we need to make it even harder to pass laws in the US. We need to have voting reform in the country to allow a real free market of political parties that accurately represent the will of the people, and hold true to the values that we have in our Bill of Rights such as freedom of speech and freedom to privacy and civil rights.
THthesz18 小时前
> Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing.
Then you will have a lot of Constitution amendments. That's first.
The burden of ever-changing law landscape will be carried by ordinary people, not by legislators. That's second.
PCpc8612 小时前
> Then you will have a lot of Constitution amendments.
You say that like it's a bad thing?
> The burden of ever-changing law landscape will be carried by ordinary people, not by legislators.
The "burden" would also include, for the most part, being able to look up at any given point in time whether something violated the law without referring to hundreds of thousands of pages of other codes, administrative law, and agency rules.
TETerr_12 小时前
> automatic sunset period
That's attacking the symptom rather than the cause. The deeper issue is that the legislature is not responsive to the people who don't actually want X anymore. Instead, how about:
1. Replace plurality votes and single-primaries with some form of ranked-choice voting. This reduces the spoiler effect and makes it easier for people to organize around their real priorities.
2. Remove the hard-cap on the House of Representatives, peg it to a number of constituents, and let them meet and vote virtually.
3. Instead of a single "winner takes all" for one region (much smaller regions, if the House is uncapped) allow multiple proportional winners for a moderate region.
4. It's not possible to amend how the Senate seats are per-state, but we can at least make it easier for large States to fission if they decide those rules are screwing over their residents. (Subject to conditions conditions I won't bore you with here. Yet.)
INintrasight20 小时前
That would indeed solve many problems. It would also focus legislative minds now and in the future. Not sure it would be beneficial for the judicial branch.
Also beneficial perhaps would be to have it be necessary that the law spells out the technical implementation. Sort of like patents do.
FLflumes_whims_16 小时前
In the saga period of Iceland, 1/3rd of the laws had to be recited orally each year in a public assembly. If we had something like that then our legal code would be a lot slimmer.
GOgoalieca19 小时前
I remember the patriot act.
BEbeezlewax1 天前
I emailed my local TD minister in Ireland about the inherent dangers of chat control. They had some lacky respond with an email that framed the conversation in a way that made it look like I was interested in the illegal content and not privacy/control or nefarious future governments.
MOmonssooon1 天前
This is what I fear the most. It is gas lighting and just manipulation. The idea of privacy will become associated with crime.
Further down the line technical solutions that are private will become illegal and in general not being pro survailance will get you in trouble
SHShinyLeftPad1 天前
Do you acknowledge that for many people and practically e2ee and crime are connected? e2ee is a very useful tool for crime and combined with crypto useful tool for monetizing crime. Criminals used to speak in code, meet clandestine, use burner phones and websites were easy to shut down. Now they don't need to.
The solution to privacy problem is not to shout while closing your ears but to make it clear that you see their side, how new tech create new problems, and help solve it in least privacy invasive ways.
Otherwise you will always be seen as somebody who has shady agenda. It's just reality. Ordinary people do not care about e2ee. Gotta read the room.
But chat control and age verification are different things.
TEteiferer1 天前
> The idea of privacy will become associated with crime.
The risk is there but it is not a given. The debate is not new, it's been going on for decades. It's a permanent struggle.
THtheodric1 天前
Respond and ask them directly if they're accusing you of a crime, or if they intend to address the point of your message rather than making libelous statements that they may later be forced to explain should they persist.
FRfriendzis1 天前
When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes.
In this day and age, probably with a relatively tiny investment into public access points, we could very reasonably have a technically functional direct democracy. The legislative cycle is already authenticated so there's no need to solve "authenticated anonymous vote" problem, European countries already have functional eIDAS systems to back the authentication part and the legislative systems are already to some degree digitized.
On one hand, the problem "what if someone sells their vote" is already present and unsolved, in the shape of lobbying. What's interesting, though, that we have built entire systems to shape public opinion and entrenched them into our daily lives, which are used by corporations and politicians alike.
This begs a question: is there such a thing as unbiased public opinion without authenticated internet access?
inb4: direct democracy does not mean parliamentary systems could be abolished altogether, central spaces for debate would still help solve discussion exchange problems
DRDrScientist22 小时前
You are confusing the ability to bring information to people, with the ability of people to consume it.
As has been mentioned elsewhere on the thread - the real issue is often there are complex 2nd and third order effects, often there are devils in the details.
I'm not saying people are not capable of consuming it, I'm saying people don't have the bandwidth.
Direct democracy is best when it's used for very specific proposals with lots of time for debate - not every decision.
If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.
PCpc8621 小时前
Do you think the average person - ~98 IQ, at most one year of college but likely none, working some sort of retail, home health, or counter food service job - is truly capable of synthesizing third-order effects of a legal proposal and how it interacts with the current environment? If you do, what about someone 10% below average? 20%? Even at 20% below average intelligence we're still talking about one out of every three people, roughly.
I don't think it's just a bandwidth problem.
FRfriendzis20 小时前
First, my comment is a knee jerk reaction to the idea of representative democracy falling to authoritarianism, don't take it as seriously in favor of direct democracy.
Second, your comment hinges on an interesting hidden assumption. There's implication, that representative democracy selects for a group with inherently higher average bandwidth allocated per proposal and inherently higher average expertise to evaluate the non-immediate, higher-order effects. I'm not going to contest the idea, however, this assumption has to hold quite strictly for the concerns listed to be material.
> If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.
Otherwise this concern is just another side of the lobbying coin. The distinction between professional storytellers curating media in favor of certain party and convincing masses or elected representatives on merit of some law is paper thin anyway.
GRgraemep22 小时前
An alternative would be to select representatives by lot. It would get rid of a political class, would automatically be representative (so no arguments about whether women, minorities, whoever are fairly represented) and not select for people who want power and it would mean people have the same amount of time as those in the current system.
REremus21 小时前
> When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes.
I think there is more to it. A large part of democracy is delegating decision making to people with time and expertise to investigate issues more thoroughly than most individuals can or want to.
I have some broad opinions about the environment etc. but I am by no means an expert in the details, so I am happy to delegate day to day decision making to someone with more expertise who's opinions broadly align with my own.
I'd agree that referendums do make more sense on "issues of conscience" though, like whether to have a death penalty, voting reform etc.
AEAeolun23 小时前
If you make it legal to sell your vote, it’d become very obvious very quickly how much money is in politics.
OUOuman23 小时前
I am not sure the hard part of direct democracy was ever only the logistics of voting
PCpc8621 小时前
Representative democracy is rooted in the idea that the average person is kind of a moron. Just look at states where it's incredibly easy to get state-wide referendums on basically anything on the ballot and you'll see the legal landscape there quickly becomes a mess.
SUSubmarineClub20 小时前
> idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy
In the US at least, no it is not. The founders were incredibly concerned about the ‘passions of the mob’ and deliberately built a system that they hoped would temper the excesses of the public.
And after seeing the wacko stuff going on in California, I can’t blame them!
LElelandbatey1 天前
Is there such a thing as "unbiased public opinion" at all though? The memetic effects of language and communication means propaganda and similar tools of rhetoric and leveraged communication will always work, with or without an internet. There's no "solution", only "good enoughs".
Direct democracy is cool, but also impractical. I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance. So what's a level of direct democracy that's "good enough"? How do we make sure we're directly voting in things relevant to our lives? What if "relevant to our lives" is unrelated to our geographic location and is very interests based? If anyone can vote for anything, but most folks don't ever vote for most things, how do you prevent brigading of votes via coordination by groups who see that their group alone can swing what would be a small local vote whatever way they want by virtue of sheer numbers? How do you prevent trolls from going through every vote and just voting no on every "community center paper-and-ink budget" across the entire country?
There are so many questions I have about direct democracy systems! Do you have more information?
ANAnthonyMouse23 小时前
> I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance.
The best way to do this is through a combination of subsidiarity and constitutional rights.
You have a central government but its primary purpose is to set out and uphold fundamental rights. It essentially sets out what the local governments can't do, so you can't have ex post facto laws, censor speech, detain people without trial, try to enforce local laws on actions performed in remote jurisdictions, etc.
In particular, the central government should not be in the business of regulating private conduct. Only the local governments do that.
Then you don't have to be worried about appropriations for road maintenance in some other county because you don't live there. Whereas the appropriations in your county are coming out of your pocket, and aren't such a far away thing that your vote is being diluted into irrelevance, so then maybe you want to be paying some attention to that.
IAiamnothere20 小时前
A solution is “liquid democracy”, or instantly revocable delegation of your vote. With good UX, you could build a system that allows you to have a nominal representative you trust for different types of votes, with manual override for votes you want to make yourself. It would require some procedural changes to ensure that people have time to read and debate bills.
(This otherwise great in theory idea is mooted by the fact that remote legislative votes are a terrible idea, as security is a shitshow literally everywhere.)
DBdbspin21 小时前
> Direct democracy is cool, but also impractical. I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance. So what's a level of direct democracy that's "good enough"?
This particular question has an extremely simple answer - derived from the decades of practical development of consensus based systems in democratic spaces (art spaces, leftist political groups etc). You vote / participate in the consensus decision making of the issues that are most important to you. It's that simple. Every issue is democratically decided, and you just 'tune in' to the ones that matter to you.
In terms of brigading / trolling are harder. In consensus institutions they're usually dealt with by limiting the amount of blocking (forcing tabling of an issue) and ensuring that voting / consensus participation is limited to those who are actively involved in the community. This is obviously far more complex on a societal level.
Overall this requires a bigger investment of time, but you're in no way required to care about everything. Over time though, the group / institution / society, is forced to grow up. Or at least grow out of the learned helplessness that dominates contemporary representative democracy.
DGdguest1 天前
I think everyone can agree that having O(100M) people vote on every local initiative is absurd.
But a lot of countries are somewhere on the "direct" vs "representative" spectrum. The US actually abnormally lacking in direct mechanisms, for example. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_by_country
COcoldtea23 小时前
>Is there such a thing as "unbiased public opinion" at all though?
Doesn't really matter except philosophically. There's something close enough to unbiased public opinion when there are no government propaganda campaings, censorship, press owned by conglomerates, and corporate messaging.
XIxinayder1 天前
The Swiss succeeded in this, maybe we should look at their model and improve.
POpo1nt1 天前
The best level of democracy is no democracy. The problem of voting for road repairs is a problem we created by democracy. We voted ourselves into a system we can't escape, just because people back in the days couldn't fully comprehend side effects of their collective decisions.
Very few people realize that there is option to not use government cohersion as a solution to everything.
I know this is unpopular opinion. The system is designed for this to be unpopular opinion.
But the problem is not the democracy, but the level of power we give to the government. If the only power of government would be to pick flag colors and national anthem, no one would care about it.
No one cares about UK having a king, because it doesn't change a thing.
ANanalog837419 小时前
2 ideas about direct democracy.
Selling your vote becomes a nonissue when everybody is doing it.
An LLM informed by a reddit-style discussion tree might be a good way to implement the policy-creating part of a direct democracy.
ECechelon21 小时前
> When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes.
REPLACE FED CHAIR WITH DOVE OR HAWK?
BUILD NEW STRATEGIC BOMBERS?
START A WAR WITH IRAN?
VOTE NOW!
Imagine the chaos. Imagine all the ads.
CHchii1 天前
Stupid things like brexit was put to a vote, but really important things such as age verification and mass surveillance are never put to any vote.
TEteiferer1 天前
In what way was Brexit a stupid thing? It was an extemely important decision, directly affecting everybody's life. If asking people about anything then isn't that what it should be? You might not like the outcome (I don't) but I consider the question of Brexit important.
BEben_w23 小时前
Analogy:
Cancer surgery is an extremely important decision, directly affecting many people's lives.
What happened with Brexit was a analogous a bunch of salesmen on TV saying "that mysterious ache you have, don't listen to doctors who say it's fine, call our surgical team today! It's cancer! We can fix this quickly and you'll be back to your old self within a week!" for two decades, then the country agreeing, going to surgery, and waking up to find they'd had half their liver removed, the post-surgical biopsy results said it was fine and not cancerous at all, it took 6 months to recover and they could never drink alcohol again. And the ache was still there.
If it had been an honest "we know it will cost X, we are willing to spend this because otherwise what is the point of money", that would have been totally fair.
Instead, problems that weren't caused by the EU were blamed on it for decades, while the benefits of membership were treated as the natural state of the world to the extent that talk of losing them was equated with "being punished".
EPepihelix23 小时前
Should we also have a referendum on reducing the tax rate to zero? It would also be an extremely important decision, directly affecting everybody's life. If asking people about anything, then isn't that what it should be?
Not all referenda that might win a "yes" vote are sensible to propose.
NEnextaccountic22 小时前
It was put to vote for stupid reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_vote_in_favour_o...
> The referendum was originally conceived by David Cameron as a means to defeat the anti-EU faction within his own party by having it fail.
After that, another issue is that the leave campaign was heavily based on lies and misleading the British voters.
Couple that with a extreme form of policy lock-in / hysteresis: you need just to form a small margin in a majority at a single point of time. After that point of time, the popular opinion doesn't matter anymore because getting back to EU isn't as easy as leaving. So the misinformation campaign need to work just once. By the time voters realize what happened, it's too late.
This situation is a critical failure of democracy. Not just direct democracy, representative democracy can't work in a post-truth world either.
GOgodwinson__4-81 天前
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QFgcqB8-AxE
SHshevy-java1 天前
But Brexit was a vote, by the people. Yes, the pro-leave campaign lied to no ends, but people still made a choice on their own and the majority for leave was quite slim.
This is very different to age sniffing here. Age sniffing is not being queried via public votum - lobbyists push it through without any resistance. It's amazing how this works.
GRgraemep22 小时前
The pro-remain campaign lied too and I would argue a great deal more. Take a look at the predictions of the immediate effect of Brexit vote (for 1017-18) on page 9 of the Treasury report: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a80772140f0b...
This whole argument is why we do not have more direct democracy. The people in power and people who benefit from the status quo do not want the hoi polloi taking the "wrong" decisions. We might end up nationalising things or taxing big business effectively or all sorts of terrible things. Better to just give people the illusion of choice by letting them choose between two "neo-liberal" parties.
EGegorfine1 天前
> the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control
I'm not sure about that at all. All my normies friends have no problem immediately submitting their documents to any KYC service that requests it. And talking about chat control they happily parrot the propaganda points, which is something very normal given that they have no insight as we do.
So unfortunately I believe that the laymen are all in favor of chat control.
KLklad_majoor11 小时前
Jonathan Haidt sure ain’t no layman and is very much against online anonymity
OUOuman23 小时前
I agree that it is not always mass public demand for authoritarianism. Often it is more like institutional persistence plus vague moral framing
MAmaccard1 天前
I’m not in favour of Chat Control;
> the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control and the will to push it through tends to come from the political circles more than popular belief it is a good idea.
This is quite the statement. What evidence do you have that of this? Here in the UK, the equivalent bills are pretty widely supported across he board.
> I expect that if the measure itself went to a general vote, the majority would be against it once they have to deal with a specific proposal
This is likely true of pretty much anything, though. Imagine suggesting that people collectively fund a national road network by paying 20% of their income to the government (or whatever number your state/country/municipality chooses). All of a sudden it’s a terrible idea!
LOlopis23 小时前
> the evidence is
I don't believe this. I believe us more tech oriented people live in a dangerous bubble that reassures us that obviously people are against it. But that's very likely not true.
THthemaninthedark21 小时前
I disagree, if anything the last 12 years or so have shown that there are groups on both sides of the political spectrum that are quite willing to engage and justify censorship.
From "Muh freeze peach" to the actual government requested censorship during COVID everyone is rushing to get a new shiny stick they can use to beat their political opponents with.
AKakoboldfrying19 小时前
> The repeated failures of authoritarianism to get to a good place are so consistent it is wild that people keep trying it.
Lee Kuan Yew would like a word.
The world is complicated. There may be more than one way to get to a good place, if we can even agree on what good looks like. Most people, even libertarians, think that some kind and degree of authoritarianism is beneficial in a government, we just disagree on the details.
GIgigatexal1 天前
But it’s not about critical thinking or governing well it’s about getting re-elected.
So the argument will go to “think of the children” which is a guise for more control and then pretty soon we are living in the dystopian future of 1984 or the UK where the film V for Vendetta took place.
This same kind of thinking gets idiots like Trump elected because people don’t have any sense of the commons and become single issue voters (sic). “Oh just reduce my taxes on my carried interest… reduce my taxes… I’m a xenophobe I hate immigrants let’s not do anything systematic let’s just hard close the border or the world is flat America only exists we don’t need allies or trading partners (JD Vance) … and so on”
CDcdrini21 小时前
I think there are many arguments for and against this type of regulation. Good arguments on both sides take into account nth-order effects. But both sides have different priorities, and have different weighing of the trade-offs. Calling one side effectively "thick" isn't really taking part in the debate.
(And cause and effect are taught pretty early on in school; not sure you need to learn "systems thinking" to understand nth-order effects.)
What are the nth-order effects that you think are not being considered or weighted accordingly by proponents of this regulation?
EIeimrine21 小时前
There are no good arguments for this type of regulation, but there are some very good arguments to not let kids to use proprietary software. You know, nothing is worse than a half-truth.
RTrTX5CMRXIfFG18 小时前
Violation of rights to privacy — age verification ties an identity to the request, so if you’re surfing porn or browsing controversial threads, you could be flagged by law enforcement or the other third parties that the state might be sharing data with, such as insurance companies that might infer the wrong things about you. You could be blackmailed, too.
And then there’s also the leakage of those data points to rival nation states, in case of a security breach.
Plenty of bad nth order effects if you just think about it
THthinkingtoilet17 小时前
What right to privacy do you have online? For the record, I am fully against this but people just throw the word "right" around. In another thread here people had a "right" to Anthropic's latest model. It almost becomes a joke. You have a right not to use the internet, but if you do the government can make laws, however shitty, if they want to. Relying on "rights" as an argument fails quickly in my opinion. You have a right to buy a gun, but a lot of places require verification. You have the right to be alcohol or porn, but that requires age verification. What right do you have to go online without providing verification? If you can't provide a legal basis, come up with a better argument because yours is easily dismissed.
ASasdf8899020 小时前
This is Whataboutism. Maybe the wolf has good reasons for leaving the stockyards gates open, it is a different perspective, yeah, but for the stock it is pretty clear good vs death.
Now of course, no one is going to “directly” dir from these laws but so much meaning that comes with freedom will be lost, but maybe the wolfs see it under a different light.
CCccppurcell20 小时前
I agree with your broader point but I'm always skeptical of the claim "we should teach xyz in schools!" Because, well, choose your least favourite subject at school. A language, history or geography, mathematics perhaps. How much do you remember? The reason you don't remember is because you weren't motivated to learn, since you didn't, at the time, think it worth learning. If you think kids are champing at the bit to learn systems thinking, or how to file taxes, or law or anything else really then you are unfortunately wrong.
RTrTX5CMRXIfFG18 小时前
And I agree with the commenter’s well-meaning, but we are technically teaching systems theory already in schools. If you’ve had classes in any of the natural sciences, you’ve had systems thinking. If you don’t remember a whit, well then, proves your point—it’s probably not that great of an idea afterall.
COcosmic_cheese17 小时前
The question however is if students are ever challenged or encouraged to apply their learnings beyond the classroom and in daily life. In my experience, the answer is usually “no”.
COcosmic_cheese17 小时前
To me classes being boring and forgettable has more to do with the method of teaching than the subject. Just about anything can be made interesting with the right approach, and often that approach isn’t the typical textbooks, tests, and rote memorization.
Perhaps I’m biased, though. I learn best when provided with working practical examples and hands-on exercises that allow me to develop my own internal models. They can make a concept “click” where I’d be beating my head against a wall with traditional methods for a much longer period of time to achieve the same revelation.
CHchrisweekly19 小时前
I've long held that Logic should be a part of the core high school curriculum. Understanding basic if/then propositions and a handful of axioms form a robust foundation for reasoning in any domain.
NONoPicklez1 天前
Well we teach people the health benefits of physical activity school but many don't continue with it.
ONonion2k1 天前
Sorry, this is going to be a rant. :)
Admittedly it's a long time since I was in school, but when I was there the notion of teaching the benefits of physical activity was limited to being told to run about for some 'sport', and absolutely nothing about why that's a good idea. Everyone was expected to do the same thing with no consideration for ability, disability, or motivation. Kids were punished with detentions for refusing to endure painful exercise that they couldn't do as well as their more capable peers.
The very obvious second order effect of poor physical education is fat unmotivated adults who don't exercise. Maybe educators need some systems thinking training too.
5656938021 天前
I'd add that not only were we not taught about health benefits in PE classes, the punishment for non-participation was not only detention but also potentially failing the entire grade. I ended up dropping out in my first year of high school due to a culmination of similar issues. I loved and still love learning, but my school was not an environment for learning. It was an environment for teaching rigid obedience to authority, and nothing more.
My particular favorite thing to rant about is how, on the first day, I was held in detention for the entire day and made to skip the introduction to my classes because I unknowingly wore the wrong shade of blue for the dress code. Like the middle school in the same district, the dress code required a white, red, or blue polo (FUCK YEAH AMERICA!!!!), but the shade of blue from the middle school uniforms was not allowed, something I was never aware of but instead got arbitrarily punished for along with dozens of others, with my parent being made to buy a new set of uniform shirts after school.
It is no wonder that the US is in a state of decline given how horrid the schooling is. I can't imagine a worse environment for stifling intellectual curiosity than the one I was in.
LOlopis23 小时前
I was in school for 12 years and for 11 of those years I was told I was bad at sports. It was only in the last year of high-school that I finally had a PE teacher that actually tried to teach us that sports is about doing what we like and moving our bodies. I had top grades that year and finally learned that I liked (some) sports. Turns out I was just bad at football (soccer) which was what we were forced to do 90% of the time.
PHphilipbjorge1 天前
It’s been 25 years since I was in school and this was my experience. Unsure if it’s changed…
CACalRobert1 天前
Ironically when I was in high school I was fat and hated pe but biked about 20 minutes to school every day. Now in middle age I still bike everywhere and am in better shape than most of my peers..
Turns out I just really really hate running.
BEben_w23 小时前
Having grown up through the early-ish days of the web, I'm still surprised the internet in general didn't get an 18+ age rating almost immediately.
Though I suppose that may have something to do with households in the early days having at most one internet connected device even if they were well off, so society could get away with blaming parents for not monitoring kids' use.
VEvessenes22 小时前
Don’t underestimate the impact of AOL - the main experience boomers and greatest generation had of the early internet was moderated and mediated. My parents were not on IRC.
OUOuman23 小时前
A lot of bad tech policy seems to come from judging a proposal only by its stated intent
TEtechnol0gic20 小时前
carefully crafted stated intent
RAraxxorraxor22 小时前
No, not everyone exploits that. But those that reject these controls are often ridiculed because the thought about any side effect is too alien.
Yet I don't think age verification will work with national IDs for that matter. I generally use social media sites that won't implement it.
But yes, the normal insta/tiktok user will be affected and not think too much about it. Others will have true freedom of speech.
PEpetcat22 小时前
> I generally use social media sites that won't implement it.
Which social media sites won't implement it?
RAraxxorraxor21 小时前
Most of them are more insignificant than Twitter, Insta, TikTok. And while they do employ advertising here and there, profit is only interesting for keeping up with server costs.
TOTomasBM22 小时前
Unfortunately, I don't think systems thinking alone would help much.
One could present the case in favor of Internet age verification to the nth-order effects, while downplaying the effects in the case against.
So, in addition to presenting the cases with foreseeable effects, we need ways to compare the impact of worst-case scenarios in the two cases, and make a decision or compromise based on that.
INintended20 小时前
Concur.
Systems thinking is one thing. One sided systems thinking is another.
If you disregard the challenges kids and their parents, or adults as a whole, are facing with just social media, you can easily make a case against age verification.
Yet, the whole reason we are at this juncture, is because there are actual injuries being felt by people. Not because privacy isn’t valued or hasn’t been defended regularly.
HEhellojesus16 小时前
I was asking the Google llm search about why iterative games don't reach their competitive equilibrium the round after revealing the theory. In my example, it was the "guess 2/3 the average game", and I asked it why my class didn't immediately converge to zero after it was explained. The llm said people are lazy and I have autism because I couldn't identify or understand the stopping criteria used by my classmates. I'm still confused.
MAMatumio15 小时前
How people play those games has to do with cultural norms and expectations, not just mathematics and logic. Same for age verification.
HEhellojesus15 小时前
But shouldn't the extension of logic be the same in either case, even if there is some premature convergence criteria? I have yet to see someone say age verification is okay because the gov ensure X is the maximum use of the tech. If anything, Public Choice Theory compels the grant that the gov will misuse the data given enough time.
HOhogehoge511 天前
If we taught systems thinking in any educational setting, and it took hold for a significant portion of the population, we would have already transcended into immortal thinking energy beings and age verification debates would be irrelevant....
THthegrim3313 小时前
Devil's advocate - what's the nth-order effect of the current internet / social media setup that we currently have? How much damage is it causing? Who did the analysis on that and decided what ended up with today is the best setup?
CAcaseysoftware20 小时前
> "If we taught systems thinking in schools"
In the US, the public school system can barely teach basic reading and math. And the teachers don't appear to understand 2nd or 3rd order thinking themselves so therefore are unlikely to be able to teach it.
Teaching systems thinking may be an effective solution but it needs an effective delivery system to test it.
FOforlorn_mammoth10 小时前
Alas, the teachers are typically pretty hampered by policies they cannot control.
They are not the thing to blame. It's system thinking all the way down.
CRcriddell18 小时前
Have you talked to any high school students or teachers lately? The ones I have (via my kids) are all articulate, thoughtful, and kind. It gives me a lot of hope for the future.
CAcaseysoftware8 小时前
What's the average look like?
Are you speaking of Austin proper or Round Rock, West Lake, Cedar Park, or similar?
HAhattmall17 小时前
I mean, not surprisingly, this is entirely geographic and system dependent. Do your high school teachers (or elementary) have to wear body cameras, practice administering narcan, and how to clear the chamber of a discovered gun, or do they get to 3D print parts for their classroom and go on field trips?
ABabustamam17 小时前
This is an excellent point. I'm self educated while my wife holds multiple degrees and a masters. Yet when she saw a news article about age verification (something I've been following for years thanks to HN) she was like "this is good" and I'm like "why" and the ensuing discussion made it clear that she didn't really think about the repercussions of age verification, just that seemingly smart people in positions of power seemed to think it was a good idea.
And I think this is dangerous. We have smart people like my wife who would probably vote Yes on this if it came to our ballot, because the smart people who wrote the measure were able to control the narrative.
Not that I'm so smart, mind you. I just follow HN and EFF so I'm exposed to this kind of stuff. I'd probably be blind to such things outside of the tech world. I'd love to say that I'd think of nth order effects when at the ballot but honestly maybe I won't.
BLbluegatty1 天前
No, we have any number of social constructs around 'age and responsibility' - driving, alcohol, pubs, porn, excessive violence and so much more.
It's bereft to suggest that we wouldn't nominally have those in the digital world.
And, people are concerned about nth order effects, it's a huge point of debate.
Yes - there is a huge slippery slope argument to be made, but it's an argument ... to be made. There are all sorts of ways of doing this.
DVdv_dt1 天前
Social media age verification is like none of those - social media is the modern public square and age verification is asking everybody to show their papers before participating in free speech in the public. It will have a chilling effect on free speech and will be a tool for authoritarian control
GHgherkinnn1 天前
Social media, as we have it today, has nothing to do with a public square.
A public square does not have trolls and bots from across the globe teleporting in and out. A public square does not amplify the most divisive comments and drown out your friends's holiday photos because the former makes the ad space more profitable.
SIsimondotau1 天前
A poor analogy.
The public square has never been properly anonymous. If you start saying things which contravene laws or the rights of others, the police have been able to capture you and unmask your identity, if concealed.
PApavlov1 天前
Was there ever a public square where children could participate anonymously among adults? (I’m imagining three Dickensian urchins in a trench coat giving a speech in Hyde Park.)
TFTFNA1 天前
The public square was in communities small enough where townspeople knew each other, and so speech was not anonymous besides those who penned (but not those who distributed) unattributed pamphlets. Moreover, if the speech you were pronouncing was beyond the pale of the community’s values, you could face retribution for it, whether judicial or extra-judicial like tarring and feathering. Even in the nascent USA whose political elite was high on Lockean ideas of natural rights and freedom of speech, the public square was never a free-for-all.
NUNursie1 天前
Social media as it has become now is a shitshow where a minority of angry and/or disingenuous posters dominate discourse.
Twitter (X) was never the public square, and now it's little more than a playground for propagandists. The rest of us do well to ignore it, and it seems that even the 'legacy' media are starting to realise the days of breathlessly reporting on tweet-storms weren't great for anyone.
BLbluegatty1 天前
Your local library has age and ID requirements.
Your local 'town square' has 'some rules'.
Parents are entirely able to overcome any of this if they so choose - including feeding their kids alcohol, guns etc. - and so the freedom does materially exist.
Social Media isn't a place for free expression - it's mostly toxic - like exposing your children to the most vile, inauthentic people.
The more genteel places, frankly, won't have much in the way of age restrictions.
Entire nations are banning social media for kids because it's just not healthy - the teachers want it, the parents want it, the data seems to support it.
I think you're right to be (very concerned) but this is a necessary discussion. As a teacher.
RErealusername6 小时前
If social media can be compared to alcohol, violence and other activities causing harm ... maybe it's on the social companies to fix it?
Age checking is kind of pretending that these companies can do whatever they want and it's okay
STstymaar1 天前
“Age verification” isn't a problem in itself, the problem is how it's done. They could issue a physical id card with a cryptographic chip and do the age verification in a zero-knowledge fashion and it would be perfectly fine.
The problem is the lack of thinking about the solution and just handwaving “age verification” as a political posture, which is why we end up with half-baked systems.
BAball_of_lint1 天前
I strongly disagree.
You're framing this as some desirable thing that could be good except that a bad implementation erodes privacy. That's wrong at every step. These bills originate from big tech such as Meta that literally profit from collecting as much personal info from you as possible. https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rsn1tm/it_a...
But even beyond their tainted origins, you can't implement your way out of something badly formed in the first place. You handwave "zero knowledge" but that doesn't do for your privacy what you're hoping it will. That id card will still have a serial number and CCTV of you purchasing it and you will de facto end up trusting some government binary blob to implement this cryptography correctly without backdoors. Snowden was a decade ago. This will have a backdoor. This will be used for surveillance, tomorrow even if by some miracle not today.
And finally, this makes the internet worse. There will be a section of people who are, for one reason or another, not able to pass this bar. Much of the goodness of the internet comes from being able to interact with anyone on it.
INintended20 小时前
That Reddit post is feeding more conspiracy thinking than helping.
The facts listed also match the actions of a firm aiming to ensure that the burden of verification does not fall on it, for a legislative process that they know is coming.
Red flag after red flag has been raised on child outcomes and social media, for a decade.
The internet is great for people here on HN, who know enough to avoid getting screwed.
The internet is a grotesque horror show for anyone who is stuck on the wrong side of a customer support system. Plus, most people here are thinking from the perspective of someone in the US or EU. They actually get better support than the rest of the world gets.
Let me be clear - I hate that we are at this juncture. However willful ignorance of the harms being inflicted on users is palliative care for our feelings. It means that one day, there is going to be a confrontation between a techie advocating for privacy and the people whose lives are being upended by tech.
Privacy has to be protected effectively, which means acknowledging the hurt and providing solutions for that.
VAvaylian1 天前
People fall through the cracks of the system. You suddenly can't use a digital service any more, because it requires you to use a specific technology that you can't obtain, even though you are old enough. You might be a refugee, you might be someone with special characters in their name or you might be someone from a country that simply doesn't provide recognized digital certifications. Or you might want to run a rooted operating system on your phone or computer.
MAMaKey1 天前
This assumes good faith, which doesn't match reality. It's about control, not protecting children.
Also age verification is still a problem in itself. Given your idea of a physical card, kids will find a way to use the card of their parents. Even if the card couldn't be misused by others - you give platforms the knowledge of whom is a minor, which means they can be targeted better.
JOjonathanstrange1 天前
Kids will simply find a way to circumvent it without any extra steps. To make age verification useful for protecting kids, you'd need to lock down every software on every operating system and put it under tight government control. We're talking about things like every programming language with a networking library, wget, curl, every web browser that was ever developed, etc.
All kinds of tools and software would need to be locked down or criminalized. Otherwise, some smart kid is guaranteed to get around the restriction and give that method to others, and if it's at school on a USB stick.
STstymaar1 天前
> This assumes good faith, which doesn't match reality. It's about control, not protecting children.
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
> Given your idea of a physical card, kids will find a way to use the card of their parents.
Sure there are kids who have access to their parents credit card with the PIN, but how frequent is that? In every system, fraud will exist, but that doesn't mean the system is worthless. “The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero”:
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
NLnly1 天前
But to be effective you need to prove that the person presenting the ID is the person the ID belongs to.
In person that falls to a human being, and it's an easy and intuitive task that takes seconds.
On the internet this involves some kind of video recording being sent to some agency somewhere being paid a fee, who may later be asked to prove the efficacy of their service. This agency needs a digital copy of the photo from your ID for matching purposes. They'll be tempted to store this for auditing purposes... they'll also be tempted to store correlation IDs etc if the architecture allows.
The issue is trust. You just can't trust these first and third parties not to collaborate for commercial gain or at government demand or request.
And ultimately you're still exchanging verification at registration for a shareable credentials: I could use my ID to sign up to pornhub premium and then sell the username and password to a 16 year old if I wished, just like those buying alcohol can go and give it to the underage. A black market for digital credentials is even easier to establish than material goods
STstymaar1 天前
> On the internet this involves some kind of video recording being sent to some agency somewhere being paid a fee, who may later be asked to prove the efficacy of their service. This agency needs a digital copy of the photo from your ID for matching purposes.
That's why I'm talking about an “Id card” using Zero-knowledge proofs in a cryptographic chip, not using a paper ID with your picture on top…
EGegorfine1 天前
It is a problem in itself. First they want to know your age (they're pretending: of course they want to know your identity, but let's leave that for a moment).
What's next? Your US legal status as determined by your ethnicity? Scan your face to prove you're white? Yeah, that sounds absolutely ridiculous but so did the age verification with KYC just a few years ago.
RERebuff50071 天前
Why are those things naturally "whats next"?
We allow bars and car companies to verify age before conducting business. Does that in itself lead to racial discrimination? I think not.
G4g42gregory1 天前
"Age verification" is designed to attribute your identity to your online presence. As such, it's done just right.
MDmdp20211 天前
> and it would be perfectly fine
Unless a tiny chance exists that some system in the middle is not secure. Then you have the problem of those who orient their acceptance to the "oh well" shrug, and then systemic faults get downplayed by default. (Edit: I re-read and notice 'half-baked systems': seemingly, we agree.)
> as a political posture
Which is the core problem of masses accepting pseudo-heartly and not-brainy unacceptable figures. And again, systemic faults incarnated as administrations get downplayed by default.
ANanax321 天前
And it is focussed on social networks, which require an email address, which usually implies a device.
But instead of inserting controls around email addresses (as with paid services) or devices (as with contraband), the requirement is pushed to the application layer. It really makes no sense from a technical POV.
ORorder-matters18 小时前
most people simply dont care to control for higher order effects. they enjoy doing things on principle and then dealing with the effects seperately.
the principle of protecting children is strong. the solution of verification, no matter how poorly implemented, cannot be struck down while people are interested in persuing the principle it claims to represent.
the only other way around it is to come up with another solution that supports the principle and hope it gains more traction. but when the powers at be putting forth the verification may have ulterior motives to begin with, alternative solutions have a way of losing traction
PApasquinelli19 小时前
it's not that they're bad at logic in general, it's that the "protecting the children" part gets them emotionally reactive, which bypasses logic. same thing happens when you tell a man who's emotionally reactive about his masculinity that soy will give him tits, just those words are enough to shut down his thinking.
people are plenty good at systems thinking. if we made them better at it, their emotional immaturity would still bypass it.
AFafiori17 小时前
Well people that have been hearing of the slippery slope fallacy their whole life might end up biased against such an approach
FRfrankie_t1 天前
Do you (or anyone else) have a good resource for learning systems thinking? I might have some from working in SE and just observing the world, but I've never studied it
RARachelF1 天前
Age verification is just one part of this crackdown.
Device attestation is another - making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system and apps linked to your ID.
MAmatheusmoreira1 天前
One day we'll need remote attestation to even get an internet connection. "Untrusted" devices that have been "tampered with" need not apply.
Little by little, everything I hold dear is getting destroyed. Computers of our own, that we control, that we can freely hack on. Everything the word "hacker" stands for. How I wish I could turn back the clock...
SUsuperdisk18 小时前
And people called Stallman alarmist. Truth is, if you give them an inch they take a mile every time, so a hardline stance is strictly required.
GHgherkinnn1 天前
And always have that phone on you at all times please.
This goes way beyond any notion of a "hacker tweaking his electronics".
With ID checks, device attestation and a device required for any transaction, and all this data piped in to a central brain (none of which are far fetched), we're all pretty much buggered.
It is a matter of time until advertising companies claw their way in, insurances calculate individual premiums based on behaviour, and remember, we're all one legislation away from being governed by lunatics.
ECechelon21 小时前
Just wait for the brain scan tech to pan out.
They'll call you in for a routine scan of your thoughts to make sure you haven't been up to any wrongthink.
AUAurornis19 小时前
Every time age verification comes up, it’s shocking how many comments here start proposing schemes where we use government-issued tokens combined with secure device attestation to solve the problem.
Some people get so focused on providing a technical solution to the problem of age verification without revealing your full ID to the website that they forget that they’re proposing we start requiring only government-approved devices and operating systems.
ATAtreiden19 小时前
Through the lens of information warfare, it's hard not to view those comments as an astroturfing campaign from the exact organizations who would want device attestation
FFffaccount215 小时前
They are not. Most people in Europe already have a digital government ID (I know I do), and most people in Europe trust their government more than random for profit companies, and are OK with making them a gatekeeper. People who care about rooting their own phones are a minority, even on HN.
JKjkestner19 小时前
Not too shocking. Many people’s jobs here require that they pretend that they’re not coding for fascism.
RAranyume1 天前
AI mass surveillance is another. The powerful are just ceasing opportunities to accumulate power and capital, seeing that right now it is not good enough for them.
CTCthulhu_21 小时前
We already have the mass surveillance, but the scale alone has traditionally been the obstacle to do something with it. But, we've had affordable "big data" processing for 20 years or more now (considering Hadoop) so AI is more of a next or different step to draw conclusions out of data. And it's limited by token consumption / context size, unlike big data stuff.
MOmorganf22 小时前
I think you mean "seizing". "Ceasing opportunities" means the precise opposite of what I think you intend to say.
OUOuman22 小时前
Age verification is the visible, easy-to-sell layer. Device attestation is the more structural one...
INintrasight20 小时前
That's why the politicians need to make it clear that what they're talking about is device attestation.
I'm an optimist, but I don't think any age verification laws will gain traction without first solving the device attestation problem.
SHshevy-java1 天前
> making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system
Will be interesting to see if this leads to more Linux systems being deployed. Then again with systemd supporting age sniffing (https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954), evading this becomes harder and harder.
EGegorfine1 天前
Lennart Poettering is here to make sure Linux won't be a safe place for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
ZAzahlman1 天前
Why would it? Such a government would just... not approve Linux, if it interfered with their objectives.
DAdarkwater1 天前
Evading what exactly? If the age verification is a flag sent by the OS and you are the OS administrator, you can do whatever you want.
LTLtWorf19 小时前
Sure, but your device won't be able to connect to anything useful.
KLKlonoar1 天前
Systemd changes don’t make it harder, you control the damn OS at the source code level if you choose.
M9M95D23 小时前
Theoretically, yes, but Gentoo with all their resources couldn't keep even eudev alive. How much free time does one person need to maintain a fork of the entire systemd?
CHcheesepaint36 分钟前
>> These "age verification" laws are - by design - identity attribution systems.
At least in the case of the EU, this is not the case. The age verification is performed anonymously based on the eWallet.[0]
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EU...
NENevermark20 小时前
Age verification starts the gating of Internet access by governments.
Any site, with any concern about age of user liability, is likely to adopt the practice. Strong laws, sold on their face value safety benefits, will increase that liability.
You won’t see any laws removing or limiting that liability.
The trend will be many more sites becoming government-gated, than we are imagining now.
Beyond surveillance, it’s a real step into government permissioned internet access, on an individual citizen level.
JMjmyeet18 小时前
That might be an argument if it wasn’t already happening. US social media platforms already kowtow to domestic and foreign policy and you need look no further than the suppression by Google and Meta of content about Palestine.
What’s fascinating to me of that there are people who win vehemently oppose age verification yet have no absolutely no problem with anti-BDS laws, Gaza suppression, etc. Or worse, they’ll support those things.
NENevermark12 小时前
> US social media platforms already kowtow to domestic and foreign policy
That is an entirely different and less dangerous issue.
The issue is that when you give power of individual attestation to the government, over your ability to access age-gated sites, you have also given them the power to individually withhold or revoke attestation.
Age-gating will spread as sites limit their legal liabilities, and governments saber rattle.
Even child-friendly sites will age-gate to avoid liability issues, by confirming parents set up their child's account.
This isn't theory: Right now, Wikipedia is having to fight to avoid age-gating. [0]
This fine-grained government control over each citizen is an unprecedented expansion of power/control/threat to freedom. Whether used explicitly, or as a tool of fear that operates implicitly no matter who is in power.
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/we-support-wikimedia-f...
STstarik3616 小时前
> suppression by Google and Meta of content about Palestine
That is nonsense. This type of content appears on my TikTok/Reels feeds nonstop even if I don't interact with it.
JMjmyeet15 小时前
Oh we're using anecdotes as evidence now are we? How about more comprehensive and quantitative analysis eg [1]? Former Netanyahu staffer, Jordana Cutler, now Meta's Public Policy Director for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora, just came out and said that's what they did [2][3][4].
More evidence: leaked audio from ADL Chief Jonathon Greenblatt saying "we have a Tiktok problem" [5]. Kinda weird that within a few months later Biden signed a hastily passed law to force a sale of Tiktok. Weird.
Need more? Twitch updated it's Hateful Conduct Policy to say "Zionist" is "hate speech" [6]. This is for a political designation not a religious or ethnic one as evidenced by the fact that Christian Zionists outnumber Jewish Zionists in the US by about 30 to 1 [7].
[1]: https://theconversation.com/social-media-platforms-are-compl...
[2]: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/metas-israel-policy-chi...
[3]: https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorship...
[4]: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/hrw-inve...
[5]: https://x.com/snarwani/status/1725138601996853424
[6]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/twitch-changes-hateful-content-...
[7]: https://www.trtworld.com/article/15656249?_rt=1
AKakoboldfrying19 小时前
I agree. But it's not clear to me that the downsides of this outweigh the upsides.
The government has control over many areas of life, and in most cases I feel that to be on balance a good thing, even though governments can be corrupt or inefficient.
Consider some other domain, like roads. In every country, the government issues licenses that include photographic ID to residents to drive on roads; driving without a license is illegal and can result in fines or even imprisonment. But this level of government control feels normal to people, and most would say the safety benefits outweigh the government interference.
STstronglikedan17 小时前
I can walk those roads, or in many cases use a vehicle that doesn't meet licensing requirements such as a moped. Vehicles that do require licensing requirements do so because they've met a minimum threshold for potential danger. All this to say - none of that is like age gating the internet.
RErecursive-call18 小时前
That’s because the consequences of unsafe driving is people dying or being maimed. Other than suicide and that one incident with facebook, people do not die in appreciable numbers due to things that happen on the internet.
PRprobably_wrong17 小时前
> Other than suicide and that one incident with facebook, people do not die in appreciable numbers
Is your argument that "no one is dying other than those who are dying"?
I became radicalized against social media when I saw the statistics for suicide rates in teenage girls [1]. With Facebook having been found legally guilty of addicting teenagers, I can't in good conscience say "kids will figure it out" when there's clear evidence that the richest men alive are investing millions and armies of behavioral scientist to keep them addicted.
There are most definitely consequences for things that happen on the Internet, including depression and death. I don't like that age verification mechanism are raising so many problematic issues, but I also don't like that so far we've tried nothing and are running out of ideas.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/05/03/suicide-... or https://archive.is/wY1OH
AKakoboldfrying18 小时前
People die on roads anyway, even with government control. And if there were no official government control, most roads would still not be a free-for-all -- in most places, informal community standards for road use would have developed in their stead. It is only the difference between these two states of affairs that government control of roads buys us. (FWIW I certainly think the difference is likely very large and government control of roads is therefore warranted.)
One of the consequences of the government knowing who wrote or said everything on the Internet would be that it would be much harder for organised crime like drug and human trafficking to operate. Of course, another well known consequence is that the opportunity for government corruption is greatly magnified. My point is that the safety improvement is significant enough that the debate is worth having.
Attitudes to government involvement vary from place to place. In Germany, you need to register your home address with the local government; while most Americans would chafe at this level of government "surveillance", a majority of Germans are comforted by it.
FIfirefoxd1 天前
It gives a new spin to:
> Everything you say CAN and WILL be used against you.
Especially when what you said has already been recorded and tied to your identity before you faced the authorities.
Edit: from last week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632269
CXcx42net2 小时前
It seems that age verification (much like chat control) is getting more and more inevitable.
Instead of arguing on the bad this brings, we should push our authorities to enforce mechanism that still respect the anonymity of a person.
France's "France Identité" started to implement an approach that respect anonymity by using what they call a "double anonymity: a principle that ensures that neither the adult site nor the age-appropriate provider can know who is accessing what. Using advanced cryptographic technologies—digital signatures and zero-knowledge proofs—the system generates proof of age without revealing identity or browsing history."
(source: https://entrevue.fr/en/police-justice/verification-dage-sur-...)
French's state should already have these informations from us (as a French citizen) so asking them to provide a certificate that guarantee my age seems like an obvious choice, and giving that digital certificate to any site without having to tell the issuer where I'm going is, I think, the best solution for the worst project.
(There a lot of news about this, but mostly in French. If you are curious:
- https://www.franceinfo.fr/societe/pornographie/l-arcom-impos...
- https://www.frandroid.com/culture-tech/web/2962099_france-id...
)
FRfreefaler1 天前
Cory Doctorow had a very profound talk about it very long time ago (10+years).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
As the internet become the place where people do a lot of things, no government (and especially no security services) will be able to keep themselves from trying to control it or at least monitor it.
And with the new LLM features they can automatically do much more than before.
Human nature is a constant and when the government sees an easy way to enforce something, many more bureaucrats will try to do it.
BTbtbuildem1 天前
This is a reminder to curate and prune all your past social media contribution, because when this goes thru, you KNOW they will apply it retroactively. You'd loathe to lose your cushy job over a moment of lucid honesty back in 2011.
SIsimplyluke15 小时前
I think we should go one level higher and question when having opinions and being a multi-dimensional human became a professional risk. That has certainly not always been the case.
JAjay_kyburz1 天前
I've been posting under my real name for over 20 years because this was always going to be the case. Using my real name is a constant reminder to not to post things I might later regret.
JAjay_kyburz1 天前
sigh, another typo on my permanent record.
KGkgwxd22 小时前
For interpersonal discussion, it's a great way to keep yourself in check. For activism and journalism, that's exactly what "they" want from you. They'd rather you self censor, and live in fear of even just criticizing them by utilizing you own good reputation.
BIbigbuppo9 小时前
Facebook keeps backups.
PHphendrenad217 小时前
I can see it now: boards of directors will only hire CEOs from the amish population, it's the only way to avoid criticism.
REremarkEon1 天前
I haven’t had any social media accounts since I gave it up for Lent in 2018 and I’m increasingly starting to wonder if that’s a liability for me because there’s no social graph that whatever agency would otherwise use to, idk, confirm I’m not a threat or something. The lack of a digital footprint like that may look weird.
WEweberer1 天前
What do you consider social media? Because I'd definitely classify this site as one.
REremarkEon14 小时前
The big ones, like Facebook, instagram, TikTok, twitter, maybe Reddit. But I suppose you’re right, the line between “messaging board” and “social media” is a little challenging to define.
MImicrogpt1 天前
It's already too late for that but you can at least, by deleting now, reduce the chances they see it.
KGkgwxd22 小时前
Not your HN account though. They even stopped replying to my annual emails asking if it's "possible" yet. They originally help me change the name, and scrub any replies that mentioned the original name. That's not enough though, thanks to old copies of the site data that still have my original name, linked directly to the real HN post it appears on, showing up in search results.
CICider998612 小时前
Dang removing your posts only hurts the flow of conversation and has zero benefit for your privacy.
All HN threads are archived by the IA and there's data dumps of the whole thing under 50 GB iirc.
Going back and messing with comments will not help. The only way to prevent your posts from being associated with you is to never post or associate them in the first place.
MImicrogpt22 小时前
If you're in Europe, you can sue them under GDPR? They won't obey - HN explicitly chooses to disobey European laws - but having an arrest warrant out might be inconvenient enough for them to do it anyway.
TRTrackerFF1 天前
In the intel industry, it is known that metadata is more or less enough to identify people. That's state/military intel. Several countries have already implemented bulk acquisition / collection of data that "crosses the borders", which is a ridiculous concept.
If you're located in, say, Norway - and send someone who is also located in Norway a message via Messenger, there's a good likelihood that message will go to some foreign located Meta server, and back to Norway.
When this was being implemented, there was some noise and protests from experts, but that's about it. For the general population it went quietly and without notice.
ZRzrn90020 小时前
The objective of these digital id laws being pushed through age verification is to be able to easily ! legally ! prosecute the dissidents. That's one thing the intelligence agencies could not do with their illegally collected data.
KNknollimar22 小时前
Isn't that the point of e2e encryption? Maybe I have a privileged US take but I've always not cared much for a border crossing in a round trip. It always seemed like a needless expense to have a full vertical server stack in each country to me.
Wondering if someone can explain the logic
IAiamflimflam11 天前
This is already happening if you want to visit the US. Customs officers will look at your social media accounts to make sure you are compliant.
RAraffael_de22 小时前
surveillance of foreigners (particularly) with residence in a different country is a different issue from surveillance of own citizens.
ACaccount4219 小时前
And the neat part is that you can have agreements within a group of countries (say about five) to have them surveil your citizens and share what they find with you while you do the same for them.
RAraffael_de19 小时前
or you do like EU and just hand over your own citizens' data to non-EU countries.
(for example: https://www.dw.com/en/eu-weighs-giving-us-data-for-fewer-tra...)
BIbingoMen57 分钟前
The state does not make a difference. It is an illusion that the "own" citizens are worth anything to the state. You are workers, aka capital, nothing more.
The truth is that 'foreigner' is a term invented by states to create a distinction where there is mostly no difference. I have more in common with a normal citizen from elsewhere than I do with Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.
REredmaple89216 小时前
Technically true but as the commentator below you says, easily circumvented. Perhaps it's better to think of privacy/freedom of thought as a global human right...
KYkypro20 小时前
We're been doing this for years in the UK. Not just at airports either, but the police actively surveil social media and arrest people for anything that might be considered remotely offensive.
MImicrogpt1 天前
And if you say you don't have any, they'll assume you're lying and deny you.
RAranyume1 天前
It's good that I don't have any reason to go to the US.
A9a961 天前
As you can see, it's quickly coming to other countries near you.
HEHerbManic1 天前
I have wondered that. I have this one and a very VERY bland Facebook that I post something stupid on every 12 months or so. So in a strange way I have accidentally shielded myself.
MAmawadev1 天前
If you look at how workers are mistreated in authoritarian corporations and how some people say it is perfectly fine because you get paid a lot of money to be used and abused, I can't imagine what a reality like this would look like. It does not stop with what you post online, we still can't really tell how our phones know about stuff we talk about irl to serve ads.
BIbingoMen51 分钟前
It is interesting how the article frames "opposition to immigration" as a threat for the state or reason to prosecution. Therefore, the state would prefer it if everyone opposed it, especially in a fascist state.
What is illegal immigration?
I think it's funny that most people who scream about freedom only mean their own freedom. "Age verification" is nothing more as a new law, from a state. You all so naive that the state would stop by their "own" citizens, because... because why?
STstretchwithme1 天前
Maybe it should be possible for a parent to set a child age in a device.
Everyone else can stay anonymous.
I look forward to hearing why that won't work and what problems it will cause.
BIbig8522 小时前
Parental controls. Client-side blocking of content. Apple's parental controls are so good that parents give young children unsupervised internet access--the entire generation if iPad babies. Current iPads even use on-device AI to detect nudity in photos and prevent them from being taken, sent, recieved, or viewed.
RIriffraff19 小时前
If the server can trust the device, then you don't need the parent, you can use a digital-enabled id card or passport.
This is in fact the EU age verification app
https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/european-ag...
The concern here is the trust in the device appears to be tied to proprietary os/device vendors.
VAvasco1 天前
How does the parent prove they are the parent. All you need is to think about the next step, come on now.
KUkulahan1 天前
…upon device purchase? Very obviously?
UNunknown22 小时前
[deleted]
MImicrogpt1 天前
You're describing California AB1043 which passed a few months ago and is now the law in California. We all got very angry about it when it passed.
KLklad_majoor12 小时前
“it's really just a precursor to attribution of speech, particularly attributing your words to your real identity.” How silly to remember that’s how mankind interacted and verified information and reliability for millennia, before Social Media made sockpuppetry trolling and lynch parties the favorite tools for social change. But I guess most Social Media users must be whistleblowers and/or living in totalitarian states.
NOnot_your_vase21 小时前
Do you remember the pipa/sopa protests from like a decade ago?
The internet, as we knew it, is over. It has been dead for a few years, but it is getting clear now only. It had its great moments, while it lasted.
ANandai18 小时前
I thought they were gonna wait until internet is flooded with AI content indistinguishable from human content, i.e. wait until people are begging for a "real human" badge which can only be enforced by ID. Instead they're forcing it early with the "but the children!" thing again.
INinitramfs1 天前
"The Carnival in Venice was first documented in 1296, with a proclamation by the Venetian Senate announcing a public festival the day before the start of Lent. Unquestionably one of the most well-known Carnival festivities in the world, the Carnival of Venice is rife with mystery, adventure, and conspiracy. The day served to break down barriers between people of different economic standings and religious beliefs. During the Renaissance, masked comic performers performed in Venice's piazzas."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_in_Italy#Venice
"The tradition of wearing masks seems to stem from the 13th century. During the ages the Venetians disguised themselves with mask whenever they thought necessary. It allowed them to escape from the rigid rules of the class hierarchy. All classes could mingle, men could be women, women could be men. It also led to unwanted behaviour, from throwing eggs filled with ink to all imaginable kinds of vulgarities. Masks made people unrecognisable, so they could not be prosecuted.
Near the end of the Republic, the right to wear masks in daily life was severely restricted. By the 18th century, it was limited to three months starting at December 26 and ending on the last day of Carnival, Shrove Tuesday. Masks were also used in ceremonies, eg. when ambassadors arrived and at the five ritual grand banquets offered each year to Venetian dignitaries by the doge. This resembles the Masquerade Balls during Carnival nowadays. Venetian noblemen and noblewomen wore a costume called a bautta consisting of a white mask (volto), a tricorn hat (tricorno), a hood worn under the hat (zendale) and a tabarro, a loose-fitting cloak. There were subtle differences between noble and non-noble (cittadini or popolani), and the popolani were known to wear more colorful, fun masks to festivities like the bull runs."
https://www.carnival-in-venice.eu/venetian-carnival-masks.ht...
PIpineapple_opus1 天前
Mask in real life then, mask in social internet now. Meaning stays the same. I like this analogy.
ZAzarzavat1 天前
I don't like age verification. However I'm not concerned about it.
The internet needs new spaces that are more decentralized and less in bed with governments.
We already lost our freedom when we agreed to move from IRC to Discord, from phpBB to Reddit, etc.
The teenagers who are blocked from mainstream social media will deliver us new free online spaces that are better than what they're blocked from.
PIpibaker1 天前
What happens when federal agents kick down your front door because you ran a free range mom and pop BBS that did not comply with latest ID verification requirements?
Big companies will benefit the most from these regulations. It's just good ol regulatory capture. They will have the most resources to comply with the laws. They have a captive audience that will be more willing to give up their personal info when asked — keep in mind Facebook and instagram is widely used for business. It is your small time forum admin who would rather shut down his hobbyist online community that never made him any money anyway than to ask for IDs. We have already seen stories of websites shutting down due to existing UK regulations. Curiously, all small, personal operations, not the kind of corporate social media they tell you the laws are meant to target.
IAiamnothere19 小时前
This is coming, eventually, and it will be a rehash of the 90s. Someone will have to be a sympathetic test case, and the EFF will get back into full gear.
Then either freedom wins again or freedom-loving individuals move to Soviet-style samizdat, “lying flat”, and clever subversion. And the world continues turning as usual.
MImicrogpt1 天前
If you violate memory protection you get a segfault, consistently. That isn't how the law works. Federal agents only kick down your door if they want to - which in this case probably means your forum users disparaged ICE or Trump.
WAwatwut1 天前
I mean, social networks already made genocide happen. They they were instrumental in the curren winning march of fascism - in USA, in EU in Asia.
PIpibaker1 天前
This is why China and Russia are shiny beacons of democracy and liberalism — they heavily regulate their social media!
Seriously, do people not look at history or at least the world around them when they make such claims? Genocides have happened before we had internet, or TV, or radio, or any modern technology people attribute genocides to. Hatred and violence are parts of human nature and trying to blame it on technology is just us trying not to make ourselves look bad.
JOjosteink1 天前
That’s a very dramatic take - and I dare say a counter-factual one too.
Which actual genocide would you be talking about?
I really don’t think people should water out words like that over what is essentially tiny political differences.
ZAzarzavat1 天前
It seems unlikely that running a website without age verification will be illegal across the entire planet.
PIpibaker1 天前
So if you want to run a BBS for say vintage motorcycle owners, you have to move to a country without such laws and make sure to never set foot in any country that does?
ZRzrn90020 小时前
People are downvoting this, but the objective is precisely that.
VAvasco1 天前
It seemed unlikely to me that cookie banners would be a thing across the whole internet if nothing else because no website operators would put them in. How wrong was I.
All they need to do is popularize the idea of "if your website doesn't do X, it'll place lower on google" and people will do anything.
My websites still don't have cookie banners and the police still hasn't come to my house. And the websites uses cookies like every other website always did.
ROrockskon1 天前
Such spaces will never scale if there's widespread legal prohibitions.
It is foolish to assume we can innovate our way around the law as opposed to talking with lawmakers to oppose the law before it gets on the books.
FYfyredge1 天前
And they absolutely should not scale. Scaling is the root cause of all social media ills. If all you see are the 100 people nearest to you, the village idiot will not be able to spread his gospel so easily
ROrockskon1 天前
The social media you don't want will continue to scale.
KJkjshsh1231 天前
That sounds like mistaken optimism due to a mistaken interpretation of the invisible hand.
Mandating age verification and the inevitable implementation requirements are bad for freedom.
Behaviour changes and innovations will mitigate some of the negatives, but bad things are bad.
GIGigachad1 天前
What we need is more personal spaces. Less feeds, more small group chats with people you actually know. I'm totally fine with destroying Reddit/Twitter/etc
LIligne18 小时前
Reddit and Twitter can buy their way out of those problems (hell, they can buy their way out of trouble for literally generating sexual abuse content). What makes you think they'll be affected more than the operator of a little Mastodon server do the same?
TAtancop1 天前
i want more feeds than centralized services can ever have. on bluesky youre not limited to fyp and following you can install literally hundreds of options. almost all of them are open source and self hostable.
theres a place for group chats and tight communities but we also need global spaces where you can reach anyone. you cant promote your new album or start organizing a union or share some really good pics with the world if all you have is individual servers.
MAmarcus_holmes1 天前
Nope, they just break the law:
https://www.bmj.com/content/393/bmj-2026-363695
> Conclusions: Despite the intent of the Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024 to delay access to social media platforms and reduce the potential for online harms, little evidence was found of immediate substantive reductions in reported social media use by adolescents under 16 years.
We are training teenagers that laws are stupid and can be circumvented easily and without consequences. As well as continuing to subject them to the harms of social media, only now without any means of monitoring them or holding the social media companies responsible.
TOtompagenet21 天前
The law doesn't make it a crime for children to access social media, but for the companies that provided it to allow that child to access it.
PIpineapple_opus1 天前
They already have started right ? Like example - bluesky (bsky.social)
HAHavoc1 天前
The only thing teenagers are delivering is doomscrolling addiction. Seems improper me that the revert to something like irc en mass
VAvasco1 天前
This is like saying you're not concerned about war because people will notice war is bad and stop doing it. It's not a smart position to hold that bad things are good because they may bring on reversals.
GIgigel821 天前
You do realize the next step is ISP-level tagging of traffic? And VPNs are already being outlawed in much of the western world.
Unless you expect the teenagers to run underground mesh radio networks and risk FCC's hammer (real jailtime), it's just wishful thinking.
IAiamnothere19 小时前
Teens will just pass around micro SD cards full of memes, warez, and porn, like kids did in the old days with floppy disks. Finding creative ways around restrictions is pretty much the definition of being a teenager.
KUkulahan1 天前
I don’t expect teenagers to do anything but largely be harmed by the internet.
SIsixsupersoup1 天前
Automated fines, like traffic radar control for free speech, will also become a norm as they won't be able to put everyone in jail.
But I'm not sure the liberal anarcho-tyranny power will be indefinitely immutable. Speech control might be one their last try to keep control in the west. They will crumble like soviet union.
MImicrogpt1 天前
They have this in Germany for copyright. If you torrent, you automatically get a fine letter in your email. If you don't pay, you get a court summons in the post. If you take it to court, you will lose that case and also have to pay court fees.
NUNursie1 天前
It's funny how this played out in different countries.
In Australia there is no chance of anything happening, because the courts ruled that payouts were limited to provable incurred losses. You pirated a movie? The maximum awarded at the end of a court case is going to be about $20, and as you can't buy very much lawyer-time for $20, it's never taken to court and the copyright-holders have effectively stopped pursuing people here.
THthreeshells1 天前
Imagine a machine mounted on the wall that prints you a ticket every time you swear
RIriffraff19 小时前
> These "age verification" laws are - by design - identity attribution systems. They attribute digital identities (accounts) to physical identities (SSN, ID, etc..
No, they don't. The proposed EU verification system provides a proof of age to the service but no physical identity data.
This is possibly a slippery slope, but I don't think it's correct to state the two things are equivalent.
IPipodopt19 小时前
Maybe not the laws, but the systems being built are attribute based.
评论
20 条顶层评论请先登录 h4cker 账号，然后连接 Hacker News 后发表评论。
If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin. People struggle to consider the second-, third-, and nth-order effects of anything so asking them to consider what else might happen if we bring in laws and technical mechanisms to 'protect the children' is unfortunately too a big leap for a lot of them. Most people are bad at spotting causal links between parts of a system, and people who are good at it exploit that.
In fairness, the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control and the will to push it through tends to come from the political circles more than popular belief it is a good idea. I expect that if the measure itself went to a general vote, the majority would be against it once they have to deal with a specific proposal. It takes repeated pushes by the authoritarians looking for an opportunity to get things like speech controls or privacy violations through and the politicians mysteriously give up trying to roll it back no matter what the public pressure might be. That being said, any expectation of thoughtfulness at all makes politics frustrating. Even basic things like why people keep making small random changes when most of these problems and solutions haven't changed in more than 2 millennia. And there is a pretty easy consensus to come to about what works. The repeated failures of authoritarianism to get to a good place are so consistent it is wild that people keep trying it.
The problem is that "the authoritarians" (read: almost every politician at every level of government, but a drastically increasing percentage the higher you go) only need to get something passed once then it is there forever. Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing.
Increasingly wishing for this from a fictional constitutional convention: > I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent — the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it? https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress
> And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it? 30% of Americans would surrender every right they have if it meant someone who looks different would suffer slightly more.
Add money to politics - more accurately add even more money to politics - and see how this works out.
>Increasingly wishing for this from a fictional constitutional convention: There's an interesting, one-time shakeup that we could actually accomplish. While it's true that there will never again be another constitutional amendment... there's already one out there that will never expire, partially ratified. Completely beyond Congress's ability to rescind it or cockblock it. Article the First. Were it to be ratified, nearly immediately (whenever the next Census is), the House of Representatives has over 6000 seats. So many that the existing party apparatus wouldn't be able to vet candidates or manipulate. Lobbyists, even, would have a hard time allotting the slush funds to bribe them all. And what would it take to do all of this? Maybe 10 or 12 people hammering (gently) on some state legislator in Nevada or Kansas. Convince him or her to pass the resolution to ratify. Nothing more than that. A single state even attempting to ratify it would start the ball rolling, and no one would be able to stop it.
This looks like something only a libertarian would like
I love that book, and its teachings of cell structures for decentralized rebellion. But it is a libertarian fantasy. And we've seen in the US, particularly due to the voting-system-imposed two party cap, that bad faith actors will sabotage good government as a goal in itself. I'm not confident that we need to make it even harder to pass laws in the US. We need to have voting reform in the country to allow a real free market of political parties that accurately represent the will of the people, and hold true to the values that we have in our Bill of Rights such as freedom of speech and freedom to privacy and civil rights.
> Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing. Then you will have a lot of Constitution amendments. That's first. The burden of ever-changing law landscape will be carried by ordinary people, not by legislators. That's second.
> Then you will have a lot of Constitution amendments. You say that like it's a bad thing? > The burden of ever-changing law landscape will be carried by ordinary people, not by legislators. The "burden" would also include, for the most part, being able to look up at any given point in time whether something violated the law without referring to hundreds of thousands of pages of other codes, administrative law, and agency rules.
> automatic sunset period That's attacking the symptom rather than the cause. The deeper issue is that the legislature is not responsive to the people who don't actually want X anymore. Instead, how about: 1. Replace plurality votes and single-primaries with some form of ranked-choice voting. This reduces the spoiler effect and makes it easier for people to organize around their real priorities. 2. Remove the hard-cap on the House of Representatives, peg it to a number of constituents, and let them meet and vote virtually. 3. Instead of a single "winner takes all" for one region (much smaller regions, if the House is uncapped) allow multiple proportional winners for a moderate region. 4. It's not possible to amend how the Senate seats are per-state, but we can at least make it easier for large States to fission if they decide those rules are screwing over their residents. (Subject to conditions conditions I won't bore you with here. Yet.)
That would indeed solve many problems. It would also focus legislative minds now and in the future. Not sure it would be beneficial for the judicial branch. Also beneficial perhaps would be to have it be necessary that the law spells out the technical implementation. Sort of like patents do.
In the saga period of Iceland, 1/3rd of the laws had to be recited orally each year in a public assembly. If we had something like that then our legal code would be a lot slimmer.
I remember the patriot act.
I emailed my local TD minister in Ireland about the inherent dangers of chat control. They had some lacky respond with an email that framed the conversation in a way that made it look like I was interested in the illegal content and not privacy/control or nefarious future governments.
This is what I fear the most. It is gas lighting and just manipulation. The idea of privacy will become associated with crime. Further down the line technical solutions that are private will become illegal and in general not being pro survailance will get you in trouble
Do you acknowledge that for many people and practically e2ee and crime are connected? e2ee is a very useful tool for crime and combined with crypto useful tool for monetizing crime. Criminals used to speak in code, meet clandestine, use burner phones and websites were easy to shut down. Now they don't need to. The solution to privacy problem is not to shout while closing your ears but to make it clear that you see their side, how new tech create new problems, and help solve it in least privacy invasive ways. Otherwise you will always be seen as somebody who has shady agenda. It's just reality. Ordinary people do not care about e2ee. Gotta read the room. But chat control and age verification are different things.
> The idea of privacy will become associated with crime. The risk is there but it is not a given. The debate is not new, it's been going on for decades. It's a permanent struggle.
Respond and ask them directly if they're accusing you of a crime, or if they intend to address the point of your message rather than making libelous statements that they may later be forced to explain should they persist.
When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes. In this day and age, probably with a relatively tiny investment into public access points, we could very reasonably have a technically functional direct democracy. The legislative cycle is already authenticated so there's no need to solve "authenticated anonymous vote" problem, European countries already have functional eIDAS systems to back the authentication part and the legislative systems are already to some degree digitized. On one hand, the problem "what if someone sells their vote" is already present and unsolved, in the shape of lobbying. What's interesting, though, that we have built entire systems to shape public opinion and entrenched them into our daily lives, which are used by corporations and politicians alike. This begs a question: is there such a thing as unbiased public opinion without authenticated internet access? inb4: direct democracy does not mean parliamentary systems could be abolished altogether, central spaces for debate would still help solve discussion exchange problems
You are confusing the ability to bring information to people, with the ability of people to consume it. As has been mentioned elsewhere on the thread - the real issue is often there are complex 2nd and third order effects, often there are devils in the details. I'm not saying people are not capable of consuming it, I'm saying people don't have the bandwidth. Direct democracy is best when it's used for very specific proposals with lots of time for debate - not every decision. If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.
Do you think the average person - ~98 IQ, at most one year of college but likely none, working some sort of retail, home health, or counter food service job - is truly capable of synthesizing third-order effects of a legal proposal and how it interacts with the current environment? If you do, what about someone 10% below average? 20%? Even at 20% below average intelligence we're still talking about one out of every three people, roughly. I don't think it's just a bandwidth problem.
First, my comment is a knee jerk reaction to the idea of representative democracy falling to authoritarianism, don't take it as seriously in favor of direct democracy. Second, your comment hinges on an interesting hidden assumption. There's implication, that representative democracy selects for a group with inherently higher average bandwidth allocated per proposal and inherently higher average expertise to evaluate the non-immediate, higher-order effects. I'm not going to contest the idea, however, this assumption has to hold quite strictly for the concerns listed to be material. > If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers. Otherwise this concern is just another side of the lobbying coin. The distinction between professional storytellers curating media in favor of certain party and convincing masses or elected representatives on merit of some law is paper thin anyway.
An alternative would be to select representatives by lot. It would get rid of a political class, would automatically be representative (so no arguments about whether women, minorities, whoever are fairly represented) and not select for people who want power and it would mean people have the same amount of time as those in the current system.
> When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes. I think there is more to it. A large part of democracy is delegating decision making to people with time and expertise to investigate issues more thoroughly than most individuals can or want to. I have some broad opinions about the environment etc. but I am by no means an expert in the details, so I am happy to delegate day to day decision making to someone with more expertise who's opinions broadly align with my own. I'd agree that referendums do make more sense on "issues of conscience" though, like whether to have a death penalty, voting reform etc.
If you make it legal to sell your vote, it’d become very obvious very quickly how much money is in politics.
I am not sure the hard part of direct democracy was ever only the logistics of voting
Representative democracy is rooted in the idea that the average person is kind of a moron. Just look at states where it's incredibly easy to get state-wide referendums on basically anything on the ballot and you'll see the legal landscape there quickly becomes a mess.
> idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy In the US at least, no it is not. The founders were incredibly concerned about the ‘passions of the mob’ and deliberately built a system that they hoped would temper the excesses of the public. And after seeing the wacko stuff going on in California, I can’t blame them!
Is there such a thing as "unbiased public opinion" at all though? The memetic effects of language and communication means propaganda and similar tools of rhetoric and leveraged communication will always work, with or without an internet. There's no "solution", only "good enoughs". Direct democracy is cool, but also impractical. I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance. So what's a level of direct democracy that's "good enough"? How do we make sure we're directly voting in things relevant to our lives? What if "relevant to our lives" is unrelated to our geographic location and is very interests based? If anyone can vote for anything, but most folks don't ever vote for most things, how do you prevent brigading of votes via coordination by groups who see that their group alone can swing what would be a small local vote whatever way they want by virtue of sheer numbers? How do you prevent trolls from going through every vote and just voting no on every "community center paper-and-ink budget" across the entire country? There are so many questions I have about direct democracy systems! Do you have more information?
> I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance. The best way to do this is through a combination of subsidiarity and constitutional rights. You have a central government but its primary purpose is to set out and uphold fundamental rights. It essentially sets out what the local governments can't do, so you can't have ex post facto laws, censor speech, detain people without trial, try to enforce local laws on actions performed in remote jurisdictions, etc. In particular, the central government should not be in the business of regulating private conduct. Only the local governments do that. Then you don't have to be worried about appropriations for road maintenance in some other county because you don't live there. Whereas the appropriations in your county are coming out of your pocket, and aren't such a far away thing that your vote is being diluted into irrelevance, so then maybe you want to be paying some attention to that.
A solution is “liquid democracy”, or instantly revocable delegation of your vote. With good UX, you could build a system that allows you to have a nominal representative you trust for different types of votes, with manual override for votes you want to make yourself. It would require some procedural changes to ensure that people have time to read and debate bills. (This otherwise great in theory idea is mooted by the fact that remote legislative votes are a terrible idea, as security is a shitshow literally everywhere.)
> Direct democracy is cool, but also impractical. I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance. So what's a level of direct democracy that's "good enough"? This particular question has an extremely simple answer - derived from the decades of practical development of consensus based systems in democratic spaces (art spaces, leftist political groups etc). You vote / participate in the consensus decision making of the issues that are most important to you. It's that simple. Every issue is democratically decided, and you just 'tune in' to the ones that matter to you. In terms of brigading / trolling are harder. In consensus institutions they're usually dealt with by limiting the amount of blocking (forcing tabling of an issue) and ensuring that voting / consensus participation is limited to those who are actively involved in the community. This is obviously far more complex on a societal level. Overall this requires a bigger investment of time, but you're in no way required to care about everything. Over time though, the group / institution / society, is forced to grow up. Or at least grow out of the learned helplessness that dominates contemporary representative democracy.
I think everyone can agree that having O(100M) people vote on every local initiative is absurd. But a lot of countries are somewhere on the "direct" vs "representative" spectrum. The US actually abnormally lacking in direct mechanisms, for example. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_by_country
>Is there such a thing as "unbiased public opinion" at all though? Doesn't really matter except philosophically. There's something close enough to unbiased public opinion when there are no government propaganda campaings, censorship, press owned by conglomerates, and corporate messaging.
The Swiss succeeded in this, maybe we should look at their model and improve.
The best level of democracy is no democracy. The problem of voting for road repairs is a problem we created by democracy. We voted ourselves into a system we can't escape, just because people back in the days couldn't fully comprehend side effects of their collective decisions. Very few people realize that there is option to not use government cohersion as a solution to everything. I know this is unpopular opinion. The system is designed for this to be unpopular opinion. But the problem is not the democracy, but the level of power we give to the government. If the only power of government would be to pick flag colors and national anthem, no one would care about it. No one cares about UK having a king, because it doesn't change a thing.
2 ideas about direct democracy. Selling your vote becomes a nonissue when everybody is doing it. An LLM informed by a reddit-style discussion tree might be a good way to implement the policy-creating part of a direct democracy.
> When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes. REPLACE FED CHAIR WITH DOVE OR HAWK? BUILD NEW STRATEGIC BOMBERS? START A WAR WITH IRAN? VOTE NOW! Imagine the chaos. Imagine all the ads.
Stupid things like brexit was put to a vote, but really important things such as age verification and mass surveillance are never put to any vote.
In what way was Brexit a stupid thing? It was an extemely important decision, directly affecting everybody's life. If asking people about anything then isn't that what it should be? You might not like the outcome (I don't) but I consider the question of Brexit important.
Analogy: Cancer surgery is an extremely important decision, directly affecting many people's lives. What happened with Brexit was a analogous a bunch of salesmen on TV saying "that mysterious ache you have, don't listen to doctors who say it's fine, call our surgical team today! It's cancer! We can fix this quickly and you'll be back to your old self within a week!" for two decades, then the country agreeing, going to surgery, and waking up to find they'd had half their liver removed, the post-surgical biopsy results said it was fine and not cancerous at all, it took 6 months to recover and they could never drink alcohol again. And the ache was still there. If it had been an honest "we know it will cost X, we are willing to spend this because otherwise what is the point of money", that would have been totally fair. Instead, problems that weren't caused by the EU were blamed on it for decades, while the benefits of membership were treated as the natural state of the world to the extent that talk of losing them was equated with "being punished".
Should we also have a referendum on reducing the tax rate to zero? It would also be an extremely important decision, directly affecting everybody's life. If asking people about anything, then isn't that what it should be? Not all referenda that might win a "yes" vote are sensible to propose.
It was put to vote for stupid reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_vote_in_favour_o... > The referendum was originally conceived by David Cameron as a means to defeat the anti-EU faction within his own party by having it fail. After that, another issue is that the leave campaign was heavily based on lies and misleading the British voters. Couple that with a extreme form of policy lock-in / hysteresis: you need just to form a small margin in a majority at a single point of time. After that point of time, the popular opinion doesn't matter anymore because getting back to EU isn't as easy as leaving. So the misinformation campaign need to work just once. By the time voters realize what happened, it's too late. This situation is a critical failure of democracy. Not just direct democracy, representative democracy can't work in a post-truth world either.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QFgcqB8-AxE
But Brexit was a vote, by the people. Yes, the pro-leave campaign lied to no ends, but people still made a choice on their own and the majority for leave was quite slim. This is very different to age sniffing here. Age sniffing is not being queried via public votum - lobbyists push it through without any resistance. It's amazing how this works.
The pro-remain campaign lied too and I would argue a great deal more. Take a look at the predictions of the immediate effect of Brexit vote (for 1017-18) on page 9 of the Treasury report: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a80772140f0b... This whole argument is why we do not have more direct democracy. The people in power and people who benefit from the status quo do not want the hoi polloi taking the "wrong" decisions. We might end up nationalising things or taxing big business effectively or all sorts of terrible things. Better to just give people the illusion of choice by letting them choose between two "neo-liberal" parties.
> the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control I'm not sure about that at all. All my normies friends have no problem immediately submitting their documents to any KYC service that requests it. And talking about chat control they happily parrot the propaganda points, which is something very normal given that they have no insight as we do. So unfortunately I believe that the laymen are all in favor of chat control.
Jonathan Haidt sure ain’t no layman and is very much against online anonymity
I agree that it is not always mass public demand for authoritarianism. Often it is more like institutional persistence plus vague moral framing
I’m not in favour of Chat Control; > the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control and the will to push it through tends to come from the political circles more than popular belief it is a good idea. This is quite the statement. What evidence do you have that of this? Here in the UK, the equivalent bills are pretty widely supported across he board. > I expect that if the measure itself went to a general vote, the majority would be against it once they have to deal with a specific proposal This is likely true of pretty much anything, though. Imagine suggesting that people collectively fund a national road network by paying 20% of their income to the government (or whatever number your state/country/municipality chooses). All of a sudden it’s a terrible idea!
> the evidence is I don't believe this. I believe us more tech oriented people live in a dangerous bubble that reassures us that obviously people are against it. But that's very likely not true.
I disagree, if anything the last 12 years or so have shown that there are groups on both sides of the political spectrum that are quite willing to engage and justify censorship. From "Muh freeze peach" to the actual government requested censorship during COVID everyone is rushing to get a new shiny stick they can use to beat their political opponents with.
> The repeated failures of authoritarianism to get to a good place are so consistent it is wild that people keep trying it. Lee Kuan Yew would like a word. The world is complicated. There may be more than one way to get to a good place, if we can even agree on what good looks like. Most people, even libertarians, think that some kind and degree of authoritarianism is beneficial in a government, we just disagree on the details.
But it’s not about critical thinking or governing well it’s about getting re-elected. So the argument will go to “think of the children” which is a guise for more control and then pretty soon we are living in the dystopian future of 1984 or the UK where the film V for Vendetta took place. This same kind of thinking gets idiots like Trump elected because people don’t have any sense of the commons and become single issue voters (sic). “Oh just reduce my taxes on my carried interest… reduce my taxes… I’m a xenophobe I hate immigrants let’s not do anything systematic let’s just hard close the border or the world is flat America only exists we don’t need allies or trading partners (JD Vance) … and so on”
I think there are many arguments for and against this type of regulation. Good arguments on both sides take into account nth-order effects. But both sides have different priorities, and have different weighing of the trade-offs. Calling one side effectively "thick" isn't really taking part in the debate. (And cause and effect are taught pretty early on in school; not sure you need to learn "systems thinking" to understand nth-order effects.) What are the nth-order effects that you think are not being considered or weighted accordingly by proponents of this regulation?
There are no good arguments for this type of regulation, but there are some very good arguments to not let kids to use proprietary software. You know, nothing is worse than a half-truth.
Violation of rights to privacy — age verification ties an identity to the request, so if you’re surfing porn or browsing controversial threads, you could be flagged by law enforcement or the other third parties that the state might be sharing data with, such as insurance companies that might infer the wrong things about you. You could be blackmailed, too. And then there’s also the leakage of those data points to rival nation states, in case of a security breach. Plenty of bad nth order effects if you just think about it
What right to privacy do you have online? For the record, I am fully against this but people just throw the word "right" around. In another thread here people had a "right" to Anthropic's latest model. It almost becomes a joke. You have a right not to use the internet, but if you do the government can make laws, however shitty, if they want to. Relying on "rights" as an argument fails quickly in my opinion. You have a right to buy a gun, but a lot of places require verification. You have the right to be alcohol or porn, but that requires age verification. What right do you have to go online without providing verification? If you can't provide a legal basis, come up with a better argument because yours is easily dismissed.
This is Whataboutism. Maybe the wolf has good reasons for leaving the stockyards gates open, it is a different perspective, yeah, but for the stock it is pretty clear good vs death. Now of course, no one is going to “directly” dir from these laws but so much meaning that comes with freedom will be lost, but maybe the wolfs see it under a different light.
I agree with your broader point but I'm always skeptical of the claim "we should teach xyz in schools!" Because, well, choose your least favourite subject at school. A language, history or geography, mathematics perhaps. How much do you remember? The reason you don't remember is because you weren't motivated to learn, since you didn't, at the time, think it worth learning. If you think kids are champing at the bit to learn systems thinking, or how to file taxes, or law or anything else really then you are unfortunately wrong.
And I agree with the commenter’s well-meaning, but we are technically teaching systems theory already in schools. If you’ve had classes in any of the natural sciences, you’ve had systems thinking. If you don’t remember a whit, well then, proves your point—it’s probably not that great of an idea afterall.
The question however is if students are ever challenged or encouraged to apply their learnings beyond the classroom and in daily life. In my experience, the answer is usually “no”.
To me classes being boring and forgettable has more to do with the method of teaching than the subject. Just about anything can be made interesting with the right approach, and often that approach isn’t the typical textbooks, tests, and rote memorization. Perhaps I’m biased, though. I learn best when provided with working practical examples and hands-on exercises that allow me to develop my own internal models. They can make a concept “click” where I’d be beating my head against a wall with traditional methods for a much longer period of time to achieve the same revelation.
I've long held that Logic should be a part of the core high school curriculum. Understanding basic if/then propositions and a handful of axioms form a robust foundation for reasoning in any domain.
Well we teach people the health benefits of physical activity school but many don't continue with it.
Sorry, this is going to be a rant. :) Admittedly it's a long time since I was in school, but when I was there the notion of teaching the benefits of physical activity was limited to being told to run about for some 'sport', and absolutely nothing about why that's a good idea. Everyone was expected to do the same thing with no consideration for ability, disability, or motivation. Kids were punished with detentions for refusing to endure painful exercise that they couldn't do as well as their more capable peers. The very obvious second order effect of poor physical education is fat unmotivated adults who don't exercise. Maybe educators need some systems thinking training too.
I'd add that not only were we not taught about health benefits in PE classes, the punishment for non-participation was not only detention but also potentially failing the entire grade. I ended up dropping out in my first year of high school due to a culmination of similar issues. I loved and still love learning, but my school was not an environment for learning. It was an environment for teaching rigid obedience to authority, and nothing more. My particular favorite thing to rant about is how, on the first day, I was held in detention for the entire day and made to skip the introduction to my classes because I unknowingly wore the wrong shade of blue for the dress code. Like the middle school in the same district, the dress code required a white, red, or blue polo (FUCK YEAH AMERICA!!!!), but the shade of blue from the middle school uniforms was not allowed, something I was never aware of but instead got arbitrarily punished for along with dozens of others, with my parent being made to buy a new set of uniform shirts after school. It is no wonder that the US is in a state of decline given how horrid the schooling is. I can't imagine a worse environment for stifling intellectual curiosity than the one I was in.
I was in school for 12 years and for 11 of those years I was told I was bad at sports. It was only in the last year of high-school that I finally had a PE teacher that actually tried to teach us that sports is about doing what we like and moving our bodies. I had top grades that year and finally learned that I liked (some) sports. Turns out I was just bad at football (soccer) which was what we were forced to do 90% of the time.
It’s been 25 years since I was in school and this was my experience. Unsure if it’s changed…
Ironically when I was in high school I was fat and hated pe but biked about 20 minutes to school every day. Now in middle age I still bike everywhere and am in better shape than most of my peers.. Turns out I just really really hate running.
Having grown up through the early-ish days of the web, I'm still surprised the internet in general didn't get an 18+ age rating almost immediately. Though I suppose that may have something to do with households in the early days having at most one internet connected device even if they were well off, so society could get away with blaming parents for not monitoring kids' use.
Don’t underestimate the impact of AOL - the main experience boomers and greatest generation had of the early internet was moderated and mediated. My parents were not on IRC.
A lot of bad tech policy seems to come from judging a proposal only by its stated intent
carefully crafted stated intent
No, not everyone exploits that. But those that reject these controls are often ridiculed because the thought about any side effect is too alien. Yet I don't think age verification will work with national IDs for that matter. I generally use social media sites that won't implement it. But yes, the normal insta/tiktok user will be affected and not think too much about it. Others will have true freedom of speech.
> I generally use social media sites that won't implement it. Which social media sites won't implement it?
Most of them are more insignificant than Twitter, Insta, TikTok. And while they do employ advertising here and there, profit is only interesting for keeping up with server costs.
Unfortunately, I don't think systems thinking alone would help much. One could present the case in favor of Internet age verification to the nth-order effects, while downplaying the effects in the case against. So, in addition to presenting the cases with foreseeable effects, we need ways to compare the impact of worst-case scenarios in the two cases, and make a decision or compromise based on that.
Concur. Systems thinking is one thing. One sided systems thinking is another. If you disregard the challenges kids and their parents, or adults as a whole, are facing with just social media, you can easily make a case against age verification. Yet, the whole reason we are at this juncture, is because there are actual injuries being felt by people. Not because privacy isn’t valued or hasn’t been defended regularly.
I was asking the Google llm search about why iterative games don't reach their competitive equilibrium the round after revealing the theory. In my example, it was the "guess 2/3 the average game", and I asked it why my class didn't immediately converge to zero after it was explained. The llm said people are lazy and I have autism because I couldn't identify or understand the stopping criteria used by my classmates. I'm still confused.
How people play those games has to do with cultural norms and expectations, not just mathematics and logic. Same for age verification.
But shouldn't the extension of logic be the same in either case, even if there is some premature convergence criteria? I have yet to see someone say age verification is okay because the gov ensure X is the maximum use of the tech. If anything, Public Choice Theory compels the grant that the gov will misuse the data given enough time.
If we taught systems thinking in any educational setting, and it took hold for a significant portion of the population, we would have already transcended into immortal thinking energy beings and age verification debates would be irrelevant....
Devil's advocate - what's the nth-order effect of the current internet / social media setup that we currently have? How much damage is it causing? Who did the analysis on that and decided what ended up with today is the best setup?
> "If we taught systems thinking in schools" In the US, the public school system can barely teach basic reading and math. And the teachers don't appear to understand 2nd or 3rd order thinking themselves so therefore are unlikely to be able to teach it. Teaching systems thinking may be an effective solution but it needs an effective delivery system to test it.
Alas, the teachers are typically pretty hampered by policies they cannot control. They are not the thing to blame. It's system thinking all the way down.
Have you talked to any high school students or teachers lately? The ones I have (via my kids) are all articulate, thoughtful, and kind. It gives me a lot of hope for the future.
What's the average look like? Are you speaking of Austin proper or Round Rock, West Lake, Cedar Park, or similar?
I mean, not surprisingly, this is entirely geographic and system dependent. Do your high school teachers (or elementary) have to wear body cameras, practice administering narcan, and how to clear the chamber of a discovered gun, or do they get to 3D print parts for their classroom and go on field trips?
This is an excellent point. I'm self educated while my wife holds multiple degrees and a masters. Yet when she saw a news article about age verification (something I've been following for years thanks to HN) she was like "this is good" and I'm like "why" and the ensuing discussion made it clear that she didn't really think about the repercussions of age verification, just that seemingly smart people in positions of power seemed to think it was a good idea. And I think this is dangerous. We have smart people like my wife who would probably vote Yes on this if it came to our ballot, because the smart people who wrote the measure were able to control the narrative. Not that I'm so smart, mind you. I just follow HN and EFF so I'm exposed to this kind of stuff. I'd probably be blind to such things outside of the tech world. I'd love to say that I'd think of nth order effects when at the ballot but honestly maybe I won't.
No, we have any number of social constructs around 'age and responsibility' - driving, alcohol, pubs, porn, excessive violence and so much more. It's bereft to suggest that we wouldn't nominally have those in the digital world. And, people are concerned about nth order effects, it's a huge point of debate. Yes - there is a huge slippery slope argument to be made, but it's an argument ... to be made. There are all sorts of ways of doing this.
Social media age verification is like none of those - social media is the modern public square and age verification is asking everybody to show their papers before participating in free speech in the public. It will have a chilling effect on free speech and will be a tool for authoritarian control
Social media, as we have it today, has nothing to do with a public square. A public square does not have trolls and bots from across the globe teleporting in and out. A public square does not amplify the most divisive comments and drown out your friends's holiday photos because the former makes the ad space more profitable.
A poor analogy. The public square has never been properly anonymous. If you start saying things which contravene laws or the rights of others, the police have been able to capture you and unmask your identity, if concealed.
Was there ever a public square where children could participate anonymously among adults? (I’m imagining three Dickensian urchins in a trench coat giving a speech in Hyde Park.)
The public square was in communities small enough where townspeople knew each other, and so speech was not anonymous besides those who penned (but not those who distributed) unattributed pamphlets. Moreover, if the speech you were pronouncing was beyond the pale of the community’s values, you could face retribution for it, whether judicial or extra-judicial like tarring and feathering. Even in the nascent USA whose political elite was high on Lockean ideas of natural rights and freedom of speech, the public square was never a free-for-all.
Social media as it has become now is a shitshow where a minority of angry and/or disingenuous posters dominate discourse. Twitter (X) was never the public square, and now it's little more than a playground for propagandists. The rest of us do well to ignore it, and it seems that even the 'legacy' media are starting to realise the days of breathlessly reporting on tweet-storms weren't great for anyone.
Your local library has age and ID requirements. Your local 'town square' has 'some rules'. Parents are entirely able to overcome any of this if they so choose - including feeding their kids alcohol, guns etc. - and so the freedom does materially exist. Social Media isn't a place for free expression - it's mostly toxic - like exposing your children to the most vile, inauthentic people. The more genteel places, frankly, won't have much in the way of age restrictions. Entire nations are banning social media for kids because it's just not healthy - the teachers want it, the parents want it, the data seems to support it. I think you're right to be (very concerned) but this is a necessary discussion. As a teacher.
If social media can be compared to alcohol, violence and other activities causing harm ... maybe it's on the social companies to fix it? Age checking is kind of pretending that these companies can do whatever they want and it's okay
“Age verification” isn't a problem in itself, the problem is how it's done. They could issue a physical id card with a cryptographic chip and do the age verification in a zero-knowledge fashion and it would be perfectly fine. The problem is the lack of thinking about the solution and just handwaving “age verification” as a political posture, which is why we end up with half-baked systems.
I strongly disagree. You're framing this as some desirable thing that could be good except that a bad implementation erodes privacy. That's wrong at every step. These bills originate from big tech such as Meta that literally profit from collecting as much personal info from you as possible. https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rsn1tm/it_a... But even beyond their tainted origins, you can't implement your way out of something badly formed in the first place. You handwave "zero knowledge" but that doesn't do for your privacy what you're hoping it will. That id card will still have a serial number and CCTV of you purchasing it and you will de facto end up trusting some government binary blob to implement this cryptography correctly without backdoors. Snowden was a decade ago. This will have a backdoor. This will be used for surveillance, tomorrow even if by some miracle not today. And finally, this makes the internet worse. There will be a section of people who are, for one reason or another, not able to pass this bar. Much of the goodness of the internet comes from being able to interact with anyone on it.
That Reddit post is feeding more conspiracy thinking than helping. The facts listed also match the actions of a firm aiming to ensure that the burden of verification does not fall on it, for a legislative process that they know is coming. Red flag after red flag has been raised on child outcomes and social media, for a decade. The internet is great for people here on HN, who know enough to avoid getting screwed. The internet is a grotesque horror show for anyone who is stuck on the wrong side of a customer support system. Plus, most people here are thinking from the perspective of someone in the US or EU. They actually get better support than the rest of the world gets. Let me be clear - I hate that we are at this juncture. However willful ignorance of the harms being inflicted on users is palliative care for our feelings. It means that one day, there is going to be a confrontation between a techie advocating for privacy and the people whose lives are being upended by tech. Privacy has to be protected effectively, which means acknowledging the hurt and providing solutions for that.
People fall through the cracks of the system. You suddenly can't use a digital service any more, because it requires you to use a specific technology that you can't obtain, even though you are old enough. You might be a refugee, you might be someone with special characters in their name or you might be someone from a country that simply doesn't provide recognized digital certifications. Or you might want to run a rooted operating system on your phone or computer.
This assumes good faith, which doesn't match reality. It's about control, not protecting children. Also age verification is still a problem in itself. Given your idea of a physical card, kids will find a way to use the card of their parents. Even if the card couldn't be misused by others - you give platforms the knowledge of whom is a minor, which means they can be targeted better.
Kids will simply find a way to circumvent it without any extra steps. To make age verification useful for protecting kids, you'd need to lock down every software on every operating system and put it under tight government control. We're talking about things like every programming language with a networking library, wget, curl, every web browser that was ever developed, etc. All kinds of tools and software would need to be locked down or criminalized. Otherwise, some smart kid is guaranteed to get around the restriction and give that method to others, and if it's at school on a USB stick.
> This assumes good faith, which doesn't match reality. It's about control, not protecting children. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” > Given your idea of a physical card, kids will find a way to use the card of their parents. Sure there are kids who have access to their parents credit card with the PIN, but how frequent is that? In every system, fraud will exist, but that doesn't mean the system is worthless. “The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero”: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
But to be effective you need to prove that the person presenting the ID is the person the ID belongs to. In person that falls to a human being, and it's an easy and intuitive task that takes seconds. On the internet this involves some kind of video recording being sent to some agency somewhere being paid a fee, who may later be asked to prove the efficacy of their service. This agency needs a digital copy of the photo from your ID for matching purposes. They'll be tempted to store this for auditing purposes... they'll also be tempted to store correlation IDs etc if the architecture allows. The issue is trust. You just can't trust these first and third parties not to collaborate for commercial gain or at government demand or request. And ultimately you're still exchanging verification at registration for a shareable credentials: I could use my ID to sign up to pornhub premium and then sell the username and password to a 16 year old if I wished, just like those buying alcohol can go and give it to the underage. A black market for digital credentials is even easier to establish than material goods
> On the internet this involves some kind of video recording being sent to some agency somewhere being paid a fee, who may later be asked to prove the efficacy of their service. This agency needs a digital copy of the photo from your ID for matching purposes. That's why I'm talking about an “Id card” using Zero-knowledge proofs in a cryptographic chip, not using a paper ID with your picture on top…
It is a problem in itself. First they want to know your age (they're pretending: of course they want to know your identity, but let's leave that for a moment). What's next? Your US legal status as determined by your ethnicity? Scan your face to prove you're white? Yeah, that sounds absolutely ridiculous but so did the age verification with KYC just a few years ago.
Why are those things naturally "whats next"? We allow bars and car companies to verify age before conducting business. Does that in itself lead to racial discrimination? I think not.
"Age verification" is designed to attribute your identity to your online presence. As such, it's done just right.
> and it would be perfectly fine Unless a tiny chance exists that some system in the middle is not secure. Then you have the problem of those who orient their acceptance to the "oh well" shrug, and then systemic faults get downplayed by default. (Edit: I re-read and notice 'half-baked systems': seemingly, we agree.) > as a political posture Which is the core problem of masses accepting pseudo-heartly and not-brainy unacceptable figures. And again, systemic faults incarnated as administrations get downplayed by default.
And it is focussed on social networks, which require an email address, which usually implies a device. But instead of inserting controls around email addresses (as with paid services) or devices (as with contraband), the requirement is pushed to the application layer. It really makes no sense from a technical POV.
most people simply dont care to control for higher order effects. they enjoy doing things on principle and then dealing with the effects seperately. the principle of protecting children is strong. the solution of verification, no matter how poorly implemented, cannot be struck down while people are interested in persuing the principle it claims to represent. the only other way around it is to come up with another solution that supports the principle and hope it gains more traction. but when the powers at be putting forth the verification may have ulterior motives to begin with, alternative solutions have a way of losing traction
it's not that they're bad at logic in general, it's that the "protecting the children" part gets them emotionally reactive, which bypasses logic. same thing happens when you tell a man who's emotionally reactive about his masculinity that soy will give him tits, just those words are enough to shut down his thinking. people are plenty good at systems thinking. if we made them better at it, their emotional immaturity would still bypass it.
Well people that have been hearing of the slippery slope fallacy their whole life might end up biased against such an approach
Do you (or anyone else) have a good resource for learning systems thinking? I might have some from working in SE and just observing the world, but I've never studied it
Age verification is just one part of this crackdown. Device attestation is another - making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system and apps linked to your ID.
One day we'll need remote attestation to even get an internet connection. "Untrusted" devices that have been "tampered with" need not apply. Little by little, everything I hold dear is getting destroyed. Computers of our own, that we control, that we can freely hack on. Everything the word "hacker" stands for. How I wish I could turn back the clock...
And people called Stallman alarmist. Truth is, if you give them an inch they take a mile every time, so a hardline stance is strictly required.
And always have that phone on you at all times please. This goes way beyond any notion of a "hacker tweaking his electronics". With ID checks, device attestation and a device required for any transaction, and all this data piped in to a central brain (none of which are far fetched), we're all pretty much buggered. It is a matter of time until advertising companies claw their way in, insurances calculate individual premiums based on behaviour, and remember, we're all one legislation away from being governed by lunatics.
Just wait for the brain scan tech to pan out. They'll call you in for a routine scan of your thoughts to make sure you haven't been up to any wrongthink.
Every time age verification comes up, it’s shocking how many comments here start proposing schemes where we use government-issued tokens combined with secure device attestation to solve the problem. Some people get so focused on providing a technical solution to the problem of age verification without revealing your full ID to the website that they forget that they’re proposing we start requiring only government-approved devices and operating systems.
Through the lens of information warfare, it's hard not to view those comments as an astroturfing campaign from the exact organizations who would want device attestation
They are not. Most people in Europe already have a digital government ID (I know I do), and most people in Europe trust their government more than random for profit companies, and are OK with making them a gatekeeper. People who care about rooting their own phones are a minority, even on HN.
Not too shocking. Many people’s jobs here require that they pretend that they’re not coding for fascism.
AI mass surveillance is another. The powerful are just ceasing opportunities to accumulate power and capital, seeing that right now it is not good enough for them.
We already have the mass surveillance, but the scale alone has traditionally been the obstacle to do something with it. But, we've had affordable "big data" processing for 20 years or more now (considering Hadoop) so AI is more of a next or different step to draw conclusions out of data. And it's limited by token consumption / context size, unlike big data stuff.
I think you mean "seizing". "Ceasing opportunities" means the precise opposite of what I think you intend to say.
Age verification is the visible, easy-to-sell layer. Device attestation is the more structural one...
That's why the politicians need to make it clear that what they're talking about is device attestation. I'm an optimist, but I don't think any age verification laws will gain traction without first solving the device attestation problem.
> making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system Will be interesting to see if this leads to more Linux systems being deployed. Then again with systemd supporting age sniffing (https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954), evading this becomes harder and harder.
Lennart Poettering is here to make sure Linux won't be a safe place for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
Why would it? Such a government would just... not approve Linux, if it interfered with their objectives.
Evading what exactly? If the age verification is a flag sent by the OS and you are the OS administrator, you can do whatever you want.
Sure, but your device won't be able to connect to anything useful.
Systemd changes don’t make it harder, you control the damn OS at the source code level if you choose.
Theoretically, yes, but Gentoo with all their resources couldn't keep even eudev alive. How much free time does one person need to maintain a fork of the entire systemd?
>> These "age verification" laws are - by design - identity attribution systems. At least in the case of the EU, this is not the case. The age verification is performed anonymously based on the eWallet.[0] [0] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EU...
Age verification starts the gating of Internet access by governments. Any site, with any concern about age of user liability, is likely to adopt the practice. Strong laws, sold on their face value safety benefits, will increase that liability. You won’t see any laws removing or limiting that liability. The trend will be many more sites becoming government-gated, than we are imagining now. Beyond surveillance, it’s a real step into government permissioned internet access, on an individual citizen level.
That might be an argument if it wasn’t already happening. US social media platforms already kowtow to domestic and foreign policy and you need look no further than the suppression by Google and Meta of content about Palestine. What’s fascinating to me of that there are people who win vehemently oppose age verification yet have no absolutely no problem with anti-BDS laws, Gaza suppression, etc. Or worse, they’ll support those things.
> US social media platforms already kowtow to domestic and foreign policy That is an entirely different and less dangerous issue. The issue is that when you give power of individual attestation to the government, over your ability to access age-gated sites, you have also given them the power to individually withhold or revoke attestation. Age-gating will spread as sites limit their legal liabilities, and governments saber rattle. Even child-friendly sites will age-gate to avoid liability issues, by confirming parents set up their child's account. This isn't theory: Right now, Wikipedia is having to fight to avoid age-gating. [0] This fine-grained government control over each citizen is an unprecedented expansion of power/control/threat to freedom. Whether used explicitly, or as a tool of fear that operates implicitly no matter who is in power. [0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/we-support-wikimedia-f...
> suppression by Google and Meta of content about Palestine That is nonsense. This type of content appears on my TikTok/Reels feeds nonstop even if I don't interact with it.
Oh we're using anecdotes as evidence now are we? How about more comprehensive and quantitative analysis eg [1]? Former Netanyahu staffer, Jordana Cutler, now Meta's Public Policy Director for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora, just came out and said that's what they did [2][3][4]. More evidence: leaked audio from ADL Chief Jonathon Greenblatt saying "we have a Tiktok problem" [5]. Kinda weird that within a few months later Biden signed a hastily passed law to force a sale of Tiktok. Weird. Need more? Twitch updated it's Hateful Conduct Policy to say "Zionist" is "hate speech" [6]. This is for a political designation not a religious or ethnic one as evidenced by the fact that Christian Zionists outnumber Jewish Zionists in the US by about 30 to 1 [7]. [1]: https://theconversation.com/social-media-platforms-are-compl... [2]: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/metas-israel-policy-chi... [3]: https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorship... [4]: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/hrw-inve... [5]: https://x.com/snarwani/status/1725138601996853424 [6]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/twitch-changes-hateful-content-... [7]: https://www.trtworld.com/article/15656249?_rt=1
I agree. But it's not clear to me that the downsides of this outweigh the upsides. The government has control over many areas of life, and in most cases I feel that to be on balance a good thing, even though governments can be corrupt or inefficient. Consider some other domain, like roads. In every country, the government issues licenses that include photographic ID to residents to drive on roads; driving without a license is illegal and can result in fines or even imprisonment. But this level of government control feels normal to people, and most would say the safety benefits outweigh the government interference.
I can walk those roads, or in many cases use a vehicle that doesn't meet licensing requirements such as a moped. Vehicles that do require licensing requirements do so because they've met a minimum threshold for potential danger. All this to say - none of that is like age gating the internet.
That’s because the consequences of unsafe driving is people dying or being maimed. Other than suicide and that one incident with facebook, people do not die in appreciable numbers due to things that happen on the internet.
> Other than suicide and that one incident with facebook, people do not die in appreciable numbers Is your argument that "no one is dying other than those who are dying"? I became radicalized against social media when I saw the statistics for suicide rates in teenage girls [1]. With Facebook having been found legally guilty of addicting teenagers, I can't in good conscience say "kids will figure it out" when there's clear evidence that the richest men alive are investing millions and armies of behavioral scientist to keep them addicted. There are most definitely consequences for things that happen on the Internet, including depression and death. I don't like that age verification mechanism are raising so many problematic issues, but I also don't like that so far we've tried nothing and are running out of ideas. [1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/05/03/suicide-... or https://archive.is/wY1OH
People die on roads anyway, even with government control. And if there were no official government control, most roads would still not be a free-for-all -- in most places, informal community standards for road use would have developed in their stead. It is only the difference between these two states of affairs that government control of roads buys us. (FWIW I certainly think the difference is likely very large and government control of roads is therefore warranted.) One of the consequences of the government knowing who wrote or said everything on the Internet would be that it would be much harder for organised crime like drug and human trafficking to operate. Of course, another well known consequence is that the opportunity for government corruption is greatly magnified. My point is that the safety improvement is significant enough that the debate is worth having. Attitudes to government involvement vary from place to place. In Germany, you need to register your home address with the local government; while most Americans would chafe at this level of government "surveillance", a majority of Germans are comforted by it.
It gives a new spin to: > Everything you say CAN and WILL be used against you. Especially when what you said has already been recorded and tied to your identity before you faced the authorities. Edit: from last week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632269
It seems that age verification (much like chat control) is getting more and more inevitable. Instead of arguing on the bad this brings, we should push our authorities to enforce mechanism that still respect the anonymity of a person. France's "France Identité" started to implement an approach that respect anonymity by using what they call a "double anonymity: a principle that ensures that neither the adult site nor the age-appropriate provider can know who is accessing what. Using advanced cryptographic technologies—digital signatures and zero-knowledge proofs—the system generates proof of age without revealing identity or browsing history." (source: https://entrevue.fr/en/police-justice/verification-dage-sur-...) French's state should already have these informations from us (as a French citizen) so asking them to provide a certificate that guarantee my age seems like an obvious choice, and giving that digital certificate to any site without having to tell the issuer where I'm going is, I think, the best solution for the worst project. (There a lot of news about this, but mostly in French. If you are curious: - https://www.franceinfo.fr/societe/pornographie/l-arcom-impos... - https://www.frandroid.com/culture-tech/web/2962099_france-id... )
Cory Doctorow had a very profound talk about it very long time ago (10+years). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg As the internet become the place where people do a lot of things, no government (and especially no security services) will be able to keep themselves from trying to control it or at least monitor it. And with the new LLM features they can automatically do much more than before. Human nature is a constant and when the government sees an easy way to enforce something, many more bureaucrats will try to do it.
This is a reminder to curate and prune all your past social media contribution, because when this goes thru, you KNOW they will apply it retroactively. You'd loathe to lose your cushy job over a moment of lucid honesty back in 2011.
I think we should go one level higher and question when having opinions and being a multi-dimensional human became a professional risk. That has certainly not always been the case.
I've been posting under my real name for over 20 years because this was always going to be the case. Using my real name is a constant reminder to not to post things I might later regret.
sigh, another typo on my permanent record.
For interpersonal discussion, it's a great way to keep yourself in check. For activism and journalism, that's exactly what "they" want from you. They'd rather you self censor, and live in fear of even just criticizing them by utilizing you own good reputation.
Facebook keeps backups.
I can see it now: boards of directors will only hire CEOs from the amish population, it's the only way to avoid criticism.
I haven’t had any social media accounts since I gave it up for Lent in 2018 and I’m increasingly starting to wonder if that’s a liability for me because there’s no social graph that whatever agency would otherwise use to, idk, confirm I’m not a threat or something. The lack of a digital footprint like that may look weird.
What do you consider social media? Because I'd definitely classify this site as one.
The big ones, like Facebook, instagram, TikTok, twitter, maybe Reddit. But I suppose you’re right, the line between “messaging board” and “social media” is a little challenging to define.
It's already too late for that but you can at least, by deleting now, reduce the chances they see it.
Not your HN account though. They even stopped replying to my annual emails asking if it's "possible" yet. They originally help me change the name, and scrub any replies that mentioned the original name. That's not enough though, thanks to old copies of the site data that still have my original name, linked directly to the real HN post it appears on, showing up in search results.
Dang removing your posts only hurts the flow of conversation and has zero benefit for your privacy. All HN threads are archived by the IA and there's data dumps of the whole thing under 50 GB iirc. Going back and messing with comments will not help. The only way to prevent your posts from being associated with you is to never post or associate them in the first place.
If you're in Europe, you can sue them under GDPR? They won't obey - HN explicitly chooses to disobey European laws - but having an arrest warrant out might be inconvenient enough for them to do it anyway.
In the intel industry, it is known that metadata is more or less enough to identify people. That's state/military intel. Several countries have already implemented bulk acquisition / collection of data that "crosses the borders", which is a ridiculous concept. If you're located in, say, Norway - and send someone who is also located in Norway a message via Messenger, there's a good likelihood that message will go to some foreign located Meta server, and back to Norway. When this was being implemented, there was some noise and protests from experts, but that's about it. For the general population it went quietly and without notice.
The objective of these digital id laws being pushed through age verification is to be able to easily ! legally ! prosecute the dissidents. That's one thing the intelligence agencies could not do with their illegally collected data.
Isn't that the point of e2e encryption? Maybe I have a privileged US take but I've always not cared much for a border crossing in a round trip. It always seemed like a needless expense to have a full vertical server stack in each country to me. Wondering if someone can explain the logic
This is already happening if you want to visit the US. Customs officers will look at your social media accounts to make sure you are compliant.
surveillance of foreigners (particularly) with residence in a different country is a different issue from surveillance of own citizens.
And the neat part is that you can have agreements within a group of countries (say about five) to have them surveil your citizens and share what they find with you while you do the same for them.
or you do like EU and just hand over your own citizens' data to non-EU countries. (for example: https://www.dw.com/en/eu-weighs-giving-us-data-for-fewer-tra...)
The state does not make a difference. It is an illusion that the "own" citizens are worth anything to the state. You are workers, aka capital, nothing more. The truth is that 'foreigner' is a term invented by states to create a distinction where there is mostly no difference. I have more in common with a normal citizen from elsewhere than I do with Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.
Technically true but as the commentator below you says, easily circumvented. Perhaps it's better to think of privacy/freedom of thought as a global human right...
We're been doing this for years in the UK. Not just at airports either, but the police actively surveil social media and arrest people for anything that might be considered remotely offensive.
And if you say you don't have any, they'll assume you're lying and deny you.
It's good that I don't have any reason to go to the US.
As you can see, it's quickly coming to other countries near you.
I have wondered that. I have this one and a very VERY bland Facebook that I post something stupid on every 12 months or so. So in a strange way I have accidentally shielded myself.
If you look at how workers are mistreated in authoritarian corporations and how some people say it is perfectly fine because you get paid a lot of money to be used and abused, I can't imagine what a reality like this would look like. It does not stop with what you post online, we still can't really tell how our phones know about stuff we talk about irl to serve ads.
It is interesting how the article frames "opposition to immigration" as a threat for the state or reason to prosecution. Therefore, the state would prefer it if everyone opposed it, especially in a fascist state. What is illegal immigration? I think it's funny that most people who scream about freedom only mean their own freedom. "Age verification" is nothing more as a new law, from a state. You all so naive that the state would stop by their "own" citizens, because... because why?
Maybe it should be possible for a parent to set a child age in a device. Everyone else can stay anonymous. I look forward to hearing why that won't work and what problems it will cause.
Parental controls. Client-side blocking of content. Apple's parental controls are so good that parents give young children unsupervised internet access--the entire generation if iPad babies. Current iPads even use on-device AI to detect nudity in photos and prevent them from being taken, sent, recieved, or viewed.
If the server can trust the device, then you don't need the parent, you can use a digital-enabled id card or passport. This is in fact the EU age verification app https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/european-ag... The concern here is the trust in the device appears to be tied to proprietary os/device vendors.
How does the parent prove they are the parent. All you need is to think about the next step, come on now.
…upon device purchase? Very obviously?
[deleted]
You're describing California AB1043 which passed a few months ago and is now the law in California. We all got very angry about it when it passed.
“it's really just a precursor to attribution of speech, particularly attributing your words to your real identity.” How silly to remember that’s how mankind interacted and verified information and reliability for millennia, before Social Media made sockpuppetry trolling and lynch parties the favorite tools for social change. But I guess most Social Media users must be whistleblowers and/or living in totalitarian states.
Do you remember the pipa/sopa protests from like a decade ago? The internet, as we knew it, is over. It has been dead for a few years, but it is getting clear now only. It had its great moments, while it lasted.
I thought they were gonna wait until internet is flooded with AI content indistinguishable from human content, i.e. wait until people are begging for a "real human" badge which can only be enforced by ID. Instead they're forcing it early with the "but the children!" thing again.
"The Carnival in Venice was first documented in 1296, with a proclamation by the Venetian Senate announcing a public festival the day before the start of Lent. Unquestionably one of the most well-known Carnival festivities in the world, the Carnival of Venice is rife with mystery, adventure, and conspiracy. The day served to break down barriers between people of different economic standings and religious beliefs. During the Renaissance, masked comic performers performed in Venice's piazzas." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_in_Italy#Venice "The tradition of wearing masks seems to stem from the 13th century. During the ages the Venetians disguised themselves with mask whenever they thought necessary. It allowed them to escape from the rigid rules of the class hierarchy. All classes could mingle, men could be women, women could be men. It also led to unwanted behaviour, from throwing eggs filled with ink to all imaginable kinds of vulgarities. Masks made people unrecognisable, so they could not be prosecuted. Near the end of the Republic, the right to wear masks in daily life was severely restricted. By the 18th century, it was limited to three months starting at December 26 and ending on the last day of Carnival, Shrove Tuesday. Masks were also used in ceremonies, eg. when ambassadors arrived and at the five ritual grand banquets offered each year to Venetian dignitaries by the doge. This resembles the Masquerade Balls during Carnival nowadays. Venetian noblemen and noblewomen wore a costume called a bautta consisting of a white mask (volto), a tricorn hat (tricorno), a hood worn under the hat (zendale) and a tabarro, a loose-fitting cloak. There were subtle differences between noble and non-noble (cittadini or popolani), and the popolani were known to wear more colorful, fun masks to festivities like the bull runs." https://www.carnival-in-venice.eu/venetian-carnival-masks.ht...
Mask in real life then, mask in social internet now. Meaning stays the same. I like this analogy.
I don't like age verification. However I'm not concerned about it. The internet needs new spaces that are more decentralized and less in bed with governments. We already lost our freedom when we agreed to move from IRC to Discord, from phpBB to Reddit, etc. The teenagers who are blocked from mainstream social media will deliver us new free online spaces that are better than what they're blocked from.
What happens when federal agents kick down your front door because you ran a free range mom and pop BBS that did not comply with latest ID verification requirements? Big companies will benefit the most from these regulations. It's just good ol regulatory capture. They will have the most resources to comply with the laws. They have a captive audience that will be more willing to give up their personal info when asked — keep in mind Facebook and instagram is widely used for business. It is your small time forum admin who would rather shut down his hobbyist online community that never made him any money anyway than to ask for IDs. We have already seen stories of websites shutting down due to existing UK regulations. Curiously, all small, personal operations, not the kind of corporate social media they tell you the laws are meant to target.
This is coming, eventually, and it will be a rehash of the 90s. Someone will have to be a sympathetic test case, and the EFF will get back into full gear. Then either freedom wins again or freedom-loving individuals move to Soviet-style samizdat, “lying flat”, and clever subversion. And the world continues turning as usual.
If you violate memory protection you get a segfault, consistently. That isn't how the law works. Federal agents only kick down your door if they want to - which in this case probably means your forum users disparaged ICE or Trump.
I mean, social networks already made genocide happen. They they were instrumental in the curren winning march of fascism - in USA, in EU in Asia.
This is why China and Russia are shiny beacons of democracy and liberalism — they heavily regulate their social media! Seriously, do people not look at history or at least the world around them when they make such claims? Genocides have happened before we had internet, or TV, or radio, or any modern technology people attribute genocides to. Hatred and violence are parts of human nature and trying to blame it on technology is just us trying not to make ourselves look bad.
That’s a very dramatic take - and I dare say a counter-factual one too. Which actual genocide would you be talking about? I really don’t think people should water out words like that over what is essentially tiny political differences.
It seems unlikely that running a website without age verification will be illegal across the entire planet.
So if you want to run a BBS for say vintage motorcycle owners, you have to move to a country without such laws and make sure to never set foot in any country that does?
People are downvoting this, but the objective is precisely that.
It seemed unlikely to me that cookie banners would be a thing across the whole internet if nothing else because no website operators would put them in. How wrong was I. All they need to do is popularize the idea of "if your website doesn't do X, it'll place lower on google" and people will do anything. My websites still don't have cookie banners and the police still hasn't come to my house. And the websites uses cookies like every other website always did.
Such spaces will never scale if there's widespread legal prohibitions. It is foolish to assume we can innovate our way around the law as opposed to talking with lawmakers to oppose the law before it gets on the books.
And they absolutely should not scale. Scaling is the root cause of all social media ills. If all you see are the 100 people nearest to you, the village idiot will not be able to spread his gospel so easily
The social media you don't want will continue to scale.
That sounds like mistaken optimism due to a mistaken interpretation of the invisible hand. Mandating age verification and the inevitable implementation requirements are bad for freedom. Behaviour changes and innovations will mitigate some of the negatives, but bad things are bad.
What we need is more personal spaces. Less feeds, more small group chats with people you actually know. I'm totally fine with destroying Reddit/Twitter/etc
Reddit and Twitter can buy their way out of those problems (hell, they can buy their way out of trouble for literally generating sexual abuse content). What makes you think they'll be affected more than the operator of a little Mastodon server do the same?
i want more feeds than centralized services can ever have. on bluesky youre not limited to fyp and following you can install literally hundreds of options. almost all of them are open source and self hostable. theres a place for group chats and tight communities but we also need global spaces where you can reach anyone. you cant promote your new album or start organizing a union or share some really good pics with the world if all you have is individual servers.
Nope, they just break the law: https://www.bmj.com/content/393/bmj-2026-363695 > Conclusions: Despite the intent of the Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024 to delay access to social media platforms and reduce the potential for online harms, little evidence was found of immediate substantive reductions in reported social media use by adolescents under 16 years. We are training teenagers that laws are stupid and can be circumvented easily and without consequences. As well as continuing to subject them to the harms of social media, only now without any means of monitoring them or holding the social media companies responsible.
The law doesn't make it a crime for children to access social media, but for the companies that provided it to allow that child to access it.
They already have started right ? Like example - bluesky (bsky.social)
The only thing teenagers are delivering is doomscrolling addiction. Seems improper me that the revert to something like irc en mass
This is like saying you're not concerned about war because people will notice war is bad and stop doing it. It's not a smart position to hold that bad things are good because they may bring on reversals.
You do realize the next step is ISP-level tagging of traffic? And VPNs are already being outlawed in much of the western world. Unless you expect the teenagers to run underground mesh radio networks and risk FCC's hammer (real jailtime), it's just wishful thinking.
Teens will just pass around micro SD cards full of memes, warez, and porn, like kids did in the old days with floppy disks. Finding creative ways around restrictions is pretty much the definition of being a teenager.
I don’t expect teenagers to do anything but largely be harmed by the internet.
Automated fines, like traffic radar control for free speech, will also become a norm as they won't be able to put everyone in jail. But I'm not sure the liberal anarcho-tyranny power will be indefinitely immutable. Speech control might be one their last try to keep control in the west. They will crumble like soviet union.
They have this in Germany for copyright. If you torrent, you automatically get a fine letter in your email. If you don't pay, you get a court summons in the post. If you take it to court, you will lose that case and also have to pay court fees.
It's funny how this played out in different countries. In Australia there is no chance of anything happening, because the courts ruled that payouts were limited to provable incurred losses. You pirated a movie? The maximum awarded at the end of a court case is going to be about $20, and as you can't buy very much lawyer-time for $20, it's never taken to court and the copyright-holders have effectively stopped pursuing people here.
Imagine a machine mounted on the wall that prints you a ticket every time you swear
> These "age verification" laws are - by design - identity attribution systems. They attribute digital identities (accounts) to physical identities (SSN, ID, etc.. No, they don't. The proposed EU verification system provides a proof of age to the service but no physical identity data. This is possibly a slippery slope, but I don't think it's correct to state the two things are equivalent.
Maybe not the laws, but the systems being built are attribute based.