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Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

nonogra.ph

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Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#221

Post by plastic-enjoyer »

msy wrote: post #213

I find myself in an odd predicament. For nearly all my life I would have seen all of this as an unconscionable anathema. But having watched what social media has done to our society, the tsunami of bullshit collapsing critical thought, science and reason I just don’t think civilisation can survive this without controls. Too many people are too gullible, too uncritical for it to survive without the state being able to…

The problem isn't social media per se, but rather how social media is designed, and this design is driven by profits and big tech. There are, at least in Europe, no alternatives to the big social media platforms. I'm not too keen on social media bans, because this neither elimates the desire for social media, nor social media in itself.

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#222

Post by tancop »

Gigachad wrote: post #22
zarzavat wrote: post #19

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 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

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.

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#223

Post by oarsinsync »

po1nt wrote: post #214
lelandbatey wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

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. T…

> No one cares about UK having a king, because it doesn't change a thing.

Which is the position the Monarchy absolutely wants you to have, and they definitely don't want you to know that they have veto power over all laws, and regularly intervene and get laws modified so that they're not included in scope.

Meanwhile they just gave themselves a massive pay rise, at a time when government is cutting public spending in all areas.

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#224

Post by Nursie »

simoncion wrote: post #126
Nursie wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, there are all sorts of technically interesting ways in which age can be proven without identity being compromised, this link has a good exploration of anonymous credentials, for a start - https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymou... And there are all sorts of reasons governments want to do this, up to and including the stated-on-the-surface reasons they give; a lot of people don't want their k…

> The insistence by so many in tech that there is no honest intent... If there were honest intent, then the regs would be beefing up the "Parental Controls" mechanisms present in every major OS and commanding that there be fines for not respecting those settings. Not only does this mechanism require zero involvement of an unrelated third party, it allows a guardian to protect both a child too ignorant of the dangers…

> If there were honest intent, then the regs would be beefing up the "Parental Controls" mechanisms present in every major OS

Not everyone knows they exist, and there's a huge install base of older and/or cheaper devices that may not be getting updates that could be strengthened like this.

> Not only does this mechanism require zero involvement of an unrelated third party

But what if we do want to regulate the behaviour of those third parties? We know they've been cognisant of the harms and addictive behaviours their stuff promotes (see internal Meta research), and in fact seem to have designed for that. If the controls are only at the consumer side, are we not likely to see an arms race where they continue to try to addict kids around the controls?

You're also assuming a level of technical sophistication on the part of parents, voters and politicians that would necessarily lead them to come to the same conclusions as yourself about solutions. This may simply not be present.

This is what I mean by "good arguments that won't land". We can talk about how solutions should work, whether solutions can possibly work, and even make strong arguments that regulation in this area is wrong in and of itself. Jumping straight to "they're all liars and only want to spy on me" makes the entire thing look like a group of fringe nutters unable to take onboard how people (particularly non-tech people) feel.

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#225

Post by Rebuff5007 »

egorfine wrote: post #215
stymaar wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

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.

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#226

Post by hogehoge51 »

onion2k wrote: post #10

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 spo…

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....

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#227

Post by fyredge »

rockskon wrote: post #210
fyredge wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, and therefore we regulate them

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#229

Post by simoncion »

Nursie wrote: post #224
simoncion wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The insistence by so many in tech that there is no honest intent... If there were honest intent, then the regs would be beefing up the "Parental Controls" mechanisms present in every major OS and commanding that there be fines for not respecting those settings. Not only does this mechanism require zero involvement of an unrelated third party, it allows a guardian to protect both a child too ignorant of the dangers…

> If there were honest intent, then the regs would be beefing up the "Parental Controls" mechanisms present in every major OS Not everyone knows they exist, and there's a huge install base of older and/or cheaper devices that may not be getting updates that could be strengthened like this. > Not only does this mechanism require zero involvement of an unrelated third party But what if we do want to regulate the behavi…

> Not everyone knows they exist...

"Oddly", the laws that demand you enter your birthday (and will eventually demand you scan your ID) seem to require OS producers to make it so that users will not be ignorant of these new features. [0] I wonder if it's possible to do the same thing for Parental Controls...?

> ...there's a huge install base of older and/or cheaper devices that may not be getting updates that could be strengthened like this.

They're not going to be getting updated to be compliant with any of the new state (or Federal) user-identification regs, so I don't see what good-faith reason you could have for bringing them up.

> But what if we do want to regulate the behaviour of those third parties?

You use law and regulation? You mention nothing in your subsequent paragraphs that a "Papers, Please!" mechanism will prevent that a "Beefed-up and difficult-to-bypass Parent Controls" mechanism will not.

[0] For example, AB1043 says (among other things)

  1798.501. (a) An operating system provider shall do all of the following:
  (1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
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