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Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

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Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#751

Post by WarmWash »

redm wrote: post #654

The question I keep coming back to regarding the recent debate around age verification is "Why now?" I'm 47, and I started using the internet in my early teens through BBS gateways. I've seen every age of the Internet, and there's always been widely available pornographic materials. Why all of a sudden is this a crisis? Perhaps I'm missing something?

I don't think anyone who still holds up "the dangers of porn" can argue with any credibility anymore. We have a population scale study that lasted 30 years, and millennials turned out fine. Same with violent video games and harsh language music.

What does seem to definitely be having a severe negative impact though is social media.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#752

Post by xvector »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #742
redm wrote: post #654

The question I keep coming back to regarding the recent debate around age verification is "Why now?" I'm 47, and I started using the internet in my early teens through BBS gateways. I've seen every age of the Internet, and there's always been widely available pornographic materials. Why all of a sudden is this a crisis? Perhaps I'm missing something?

its because we hired a generation of the greatest minds to build habit forming and addictive products. So now we're seeing signs of how bad that is for children's mental health prior to their ability to consent to that.

Blocking this is the responsibility of a parent. Spend some time to configure parental controls etc.

Pushing to turn society into a police state because parents are too tired/lazy/tech-illiterate is simply not the solution

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#753

Post by hedora »

swiftcoder wrote: post #731
sieep wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just look at the freaking mess that is trying to proof your identity in the US. Care to elaborate? I'm not sure what's a mess about a driver's license, social security card. I've never once had any issue with my identity.

> I'm not sure what's a mess about a driver's license, social security card Neither of those are accepted by various states' voter id laws, nor can you reliably board an airplane with them since RealID. The only foolproof identity card in the US appears to be a passport (which, you know, global federal identity card... exactly what the folks against universal ids dislike)

The federal government is trying to create problems. For instance, a Real ID won't be good enough to vote this fall if SAVE passes:

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2025/apr/18/byron-dona...

There are also a bunch of other gotchas: Original birth certificates and all currently-issued military IDs are not acceptable, for instance (even though the bill lists birth certificates and military IDs as acceptable, there are carve-outs to ban the common cases).

Good luck getting a passport between now and then.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#754

Post by hosteur »

hliyan wrote: post #538

Why can't we handle this the same way we handle knives, guns and chainsaws: require adults to secure the device before letting minors near them? All the devices need is the ability to create limited access profiles. A human adult performs age verification by only providing the minor with creditals to a limited profile. Trying to perform that verification so far away from the minor, after they have got to the last gat…

Because this is clearly not about children. Children is a pretext.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#755

Post by gaudystead »

nine_k wrote: post #681
redm wrote: post #654

The question I keep coming back to regarding the recent debate around age verification is "Why now?" I'm 47, and I started using the internet in my early teens through BBS gateways. I've seen every age of the Internet, and there's always been widely available pornographic materials. Why all of a sudden is this a crisis? Perhaps I'm missing something?

Missing something? Perhaps. Pornography is a very convenient pretext. The real target is anonymity and pseudonymity. Both have been abundantly available on the early Internet. Both were and are being gradually squeezed out from it. Various law enforcement agencies would love to know more, always more. The more the users are required to identify themselves, link their online identity (maybe pseudonymous for other user…

To add to this, I suspect the data broker industry also has an interest in increasing the legitimacy of the data they sell about anyone they can get their hands on.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#756

Post by rootusrootus »

parineum wrote: post #738
hedora wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is outlined in Project 2025 (which I have not read). As I understand it, the age verification laws are part of a three pronged plan to eliminate privacy, freedom of speech and freedom of expression online. The goals being to expand current police abuses to include LGBTQ++, reporters, democrats, non-whites, non-christians, demonstrators, etc. It all is predictable and makes perfect sense if you assume the goal is…

> This is outlined in Project 2025 (which I have not read). Great sentence. Aside from making me completely doubt everything you're stating, I don't understand why people just take it as a given that Project 2025 is something the current administration gives two shits about. Is war in Iran in Project 2025?

> I don't understand why people just take it as a given that Project 2025 is something the current administration gives two shits about.

Because if you use project 2025 as a scorecard, the current administration is hitting all the salient points very quickly. With a score that high, inferring that the administration does in fact give two shits about it seems reasonable.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#757

Post by otterley »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #680
kakacik wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't just push responsibility for the kids to the parents, where is the world going? This is madness. The next thing you are going to claim kids from young age shouldn't have fully unlocked smart phones, shouldn't install any app and so on. Where is the end of this? Are you telling me parents should spend more time with kids, heck even be their role models although it is much harder compared to just giving up on…

I don’t understand why this sentiment keeps coming up when it’s clear parents are expected to do more than ever now. Are you going to sit here and tell me your parents were aware of every time you touched a computer or turned on the TV? They vetted everything you consumed? It was a lot easier back then to do. I bet your parents couldn’t even figure out how to block a single channel on their tv, nor did they likely ev…

It helped that, at the time, most video was broadcast over the air and thus subject to FCC regulations relating to content, and that advertisers would pull funds from stations and networks that aired content that was too controversial. Other, non-regulated or less regulated (“adult”) content was for pay and the systems had child lockouts.

It’s much easier to relinquish parental control of media exposure when the system helps you out by moderating the content. But the Internet changed everything. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be as a parent to oversee media exposure for their children nowadays without pulling the plug on social media altogether.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#759

Post by furyofantares »

redm wrote: post #654

The question I keep coming back to regarding the recent debate around age verification is "Why now?" I'm 47, and I started using the internet in my early teens through BBS gateways. I've seen every age of the Internet, and there's always been widely available pornographic materials. Why all of a sudden is this a crisis? Perhaps I'm missing something?

I'm the same age as you, started when I was maybe 15 on BBSes. The porn was certainly a lot harder to come by, still images that took a while to download, had to do it when family was out of sight on the family computer and clean up history after. Kids have personal devices and can go down a rabbit hole of content in their room. It seems fairly different. Age ranges are different too, 10 year olds have phones and have maybe been using an iPad their whole life.

But even then, I think if adults knew what we were up to, maybe they would have lobbied for stuff then too.

For my 10 year old, we don't allow youtube or any other algorithm doomscrolling feed. And no voice chat in online gaming. We plan on waiting until 13 for a phone, or behind-closed-doors internet, and we use parental controls.

I'm not presenting this as an argument for age verification, I think it's a naive solution that comes with major drawbacks and won't work anyway.

But the landscape is very different and I think we should try to understand where parents who support this are coming from, because lobbying from Meta or whatever isn't the only issue.

There are parents who have been making choices for their young kids and have to start letting go at some point as the kids age, and maybe, at whatever point parents stop monitoring, they would like the kids to not be fully in the deep end. I think we should acknowledge that and explain why age verification isn't a solution, rather than pretend the world is the same and pretend don't have any legitimate concerns by saying "well we turned out okay".

(edit: reworked the tone in response to feedback)

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#760

Post by sippeangelo »

cycomanic wrote: post #721

These discussions remind me so much of the US discussions about federal ID documents as verification. There's a vocal portion of people which opposes any solution because "privacy, government overreach, surveillance ...". So instead of a solution like e.g. zero-proof age verification, that tries to minimize intrusions on privacy, the result is the worst of all worlds, maximum surveillance (but I guess it's ok if it i…

Please explain how opposition to privacy invasive solutions result in even more privacy invasive solutions being implemented? Is it purely out of spite from the lawmakers? This logic doesn't follow.
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