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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

#471

Post by DrScientist »

graemep wrote: post #452
DrScientist wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard this idea, or variants of it, quite a lot recently. Some of the examples I've seen it tried - I've seen the people setting it up trying to fix the outcome by carefully choosing the question, then providing expert advice on options scoped by the question. Framing of the question is a powerful tool to promote the outcome you want, and avoiding ever asking certain questions is another. Not saying it doesn't have…

Did you reply to the wrong comment? The idea I just put forward does not involve questions, it involves replacing one group of people with another doing the same job. Framing questions is already a problem with legislation. You can frame "do you want to increase online surveillance" as "do you want to protect children" very successfully!

The parent was around direct democracy - where a particular question is posed - and frequent hybrid is randomly selected people to work on a specific question.

If you are saying choose people at random to be an MP for 5 years ( or whatever ), then sure that's different and it would be an interesting experiment - though that would be a pretty stressful job to pitch people into at random.

It would be interesting to see how those random 600 people would organise to get stuff done. In the current government you have specialisation - home secretary, foreign secretary etc - you wouldn't want to keep that structure and randomly allocate roles - but if you have the 600 vote on everything then you still have a bandwidth problem.

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

#472

Post by po1nt »

nephihaha wrote: post #259
po1nt wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually quite a few people care about the UK having a king, in the UK. In Northern Ireland, there is a considerable republican (small "r" population) for political reasons. The BBC promotes the monarchy heavily as it is under royal charter. There were significant protests at the Queen's funeral cortege and the current king's coronation. The state clamped down hard, in one case arresting someone for holding up a blan…

I admit UK wasn't the best example as now it's freedom of speech is maybe worse than in Russia or China. But I feel like public does not trat it as the biggest issue of the UK at the moment.

Let's say Denmark for example.

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

#473

Post by jmyeet »

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…

Look, this is just a baseless opinion because we restrict things from various groups all the time. Gambling, tobacco, alcohol, drugs, firearms, pornography, voting, driver’s licenses, classified material, the list goes on.

Yet people will employ lazy slappery slope fallacies for this one issue in particular.

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

#474

Post by MaKey »

intended wrote: post #455
MaKey wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you come to the conclusion that advocating for privacy is at odds with protecting users? I'd argue the opposite is true.

Because the entire reason we are here is due to the fact that harms to kids are on the other end of the scale. There is no “win” here, which doesn’t have the issue coming back. Dismissing the harms only makes privacy advocacy irrelevant to voters. Defending privacy effectively means plugging the root cause it is being encroached. This is being articulated as a defense of privacy when it originates from social media h…

> Because the entire reason we are here is due to the fact that harms to kids are on the other end of the scale.

If that's a "fact", where is the proof? What harms are there that can only be addressed with age verification and not in any other way?

> Dismissing the harms [...]

This is a strawman you've created.

> Defending privacy effectively means plugging the root cause it is being encroached.

Defending privacy means defending privacy, not submitting to nefarious interests and well-meaning but misled followers.

> This is being articulated as a defense of privacy when it originates from social media harms to kids.

Social media can be dangerous to kids, I don't see anyone disputing that. The dispute is around the solution to this issue.

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

#475

Post by microgpt »

derektank wrote: post #369
microgpt wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The 1st amendment has long been understood to protect the content of your speech, not the time, place, or manner of your speech. It guarantees the communicative act, the viewpoint or message conveyed; it does not give you an unlimited right to convey it however you want. The government has been consistently allowed by the Supreme Court to establish noise ordinances preventing people from yelling into a bullhorn at ni…

Why not three seconds or three milliseconds?

There's unreasonable discrimination because the public comment period is only used for speech which disagrees with the government.

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

#476

Post by jmyeet »

Nevermark wrote: post #379

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…

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.

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

#477

Post by superdisk »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #175
RachelF wrote: post #41

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.

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

#478

Post by rini17 »

LtWorf wrote: post #462
rini17 wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom of expression is not absolute and never was. Should everyone just shrug off anonymous hoaxes and hate speech?

Yes, the alternative is that you will only read state propaganda.

By painting everything so black and white you're doing propaganda too, are you aware?

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

#479

Post by coreyburnsdev »

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…

found the nudge unit employee

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

#480

Post by akoboldfrying »

recursive-call wrote: post #463
akoboldfrying wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

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.

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.

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