Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech • Hacker News Board

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

#621

Post by realusername » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 2:32 AM UTC

bluegatty wrote: post #62

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…

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 sor…

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

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

#622

Post by cindyllm » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 2:37 AM UTC

dopidopHN2 wrote: post #620

godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I am pushing back against is your exhortations to fatalism. Let's be clear about how you started this thread. Walking your critique back to something more reasonable is appreciated. Best of luck in the councils to come.

Where do I exhort to fatalism? That would mean : "there is nothing to be done, why bother" Let's not turn the table here, I'm the one with a hobby of parsing system logs from surveillance system to prove that police forces are abusing it. That's not exactly the definition of "letting fate decide". I'm taking action to support my beliefs . To both society and the legal system of our country. What you might have confus…

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

#623

Post by godwinson__4-8 » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 2:39 AM UTC

dopidopHN2 wrote: post #620

godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I am pushing back against is your exhortations to fatalism. Let's be clear about how you started this thread. Walking your critique back to something more reasonable is appreciated. Best of luck in the councils to come.

Where do I exhort to fatalism? That would mean : "there is nothing to be done, why bother" Let's not turn the table here, I'm the one with a hobby of parsing system logs from surveillance system to prove that police forces are abusing it. That's not exactly the definition of "letting fate decide". I'm taking action to support my beliefs . To both society and the legal system of our country. What you might have confus…

That is certainly not how you came across earlier.

To answer the question in your first sentence, allow me to quote you:

Have you been to a city council meeting lately ? Ever? I'm trying to push for surveillance regulation where I live. I'm there monthly.

Calling your representative is the best way to realise that they don't give a fuck. Yesterday I was editing a clip of one of them lying overtly. It will be a minor inconveniences.

what we call democracy is a dog and ponies show

and later:

Good luck in your comfort that your country is not broken

I am glad to know after this back and forth that you have a more sensible position. Perhaps I misread you, perhaps you could have articulated your original points with more subtlety. Perhaps we both have something to learn here.

Anyway, one more quote of your's I wish to highlight:

You are cute.

:)

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

#624

Post by vasco » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 3:00 AM UTC

kulahan wrote: post #114

vasco wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no hypothetical, they tried to equate this to basically buying a gun where you do the certification on purchase. Internet connected devices are not planned to be controlled like that but per session. Under that model what they proposed is obviously not going to work.

Comment 1: “maybe it should be this way” Comment 2: “it can’t be that way because of this” Comment 3: “but it can, because it could maybe be this way” You: “There was no hypothetical” Oh my god the comments are getting so stupid. Please, I beg you to stop.

They are indeed

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

#625

Post by dopidopHN2 » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 3:18 AM UTC

godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #623

dopidopHN2 wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do I exhort to fatalism? That would mean : "there is nothing to be done, why bother" Let's not turn the table here, I'm the one with a hobby of parsing system logs from surveillance system to prove that police forces are abusing it. That's not exactly the definition of "letting fate decide". I'm taking action to support my beliefs . To both society and the legal system of our country. What you might have confus…

That is certainly not how you came across earlier. To answer the question in your first sentence, allow me to quote you: Have you been to a city council meeting lately ? Ever? I'm trying to push for surveillance regulation where I live. I'm there monthly. Calling your representative is the best way to realise that they don't give a fuck. Yesterday I was editing a clip of one of them lying overtly. It will be a minor…

My original quote use active verbs like "pushing", and is describing action I'm taking. That does not fit the definition of fatalism

And yeah, I found you cute in your naive view of how politics work."just get in there man"

But I take it back, you are mostly repeating thing back at me and not engaging in this conversation. Not cute, boring. Conversation is about swapping ideas. And I've been waiting for those, I'm still unclear on where you stand. Beside sounding vaguely offended? Maybe ? Hard to tell via text.

Anyhoo. Have a good evening

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

#626

Post by friendzis » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 4:00 AM UTC

DrScientist wrote: post #450

friendzis wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However average people are actually pretty good at making the right moral, common sense calls, if not the technical legal detail. I suspect that's in part because they are not living in the Westminister ( or whatever your seat of power is ) bubble. It's easy to make decisions when you are the benefactor and the costs are born by someone else. Unless you are in a country with overall population density approaching t…

> I'd argue that the fiefdoms within parties come primarily from their corporate likeness. Since the ultimate goal of any party is to capture power and remain in power, the structures that emerge serve this goal first, everything else second. If this is true, which doesn't seem that unreasonable, then the crucial factor then becomes what are the key factors in terms of staying in power - responsiveness to the elector…

It's 100% the money. Tests "would you vote the same as you favorite politician/party" routinely show parties to be way less aligned than the electorate tends to believe. The several few "high steaks" issues get amplified to exhaustion on captured media while the rest of politics go undisturbed.

News channels are generally more subtle about it, but are still quite egregious. Look at e.g. debates. The questions are carefully framed to make certain positions appear positive or for the debater to go into tangents with context and get shut down for supposed demagogy. Look at some high profile TV hosts. They may appear somewhat reasonable-ish on camera, but then their facebook feed mirrors the topic discussed and takes an extremely biased route. They argue it's private vs official comms, but in reality the line is blurry on purpose and this confusion is used to persuade.

If you go into any country, state and ususally city subreddits (fb groups, discord channels), they are controlled by some PR agency. Discussion is carefully curated to fit the narrative. Bot nets are useful, but zealots are crucial. If previously the young recruits were important to distribute flyers around, these days they are crucial in shaping the public opinion on social media.

> Ensuring the latter doesn't take over, in my view, is a top priority to ensure a working democracy - and from the outside, appears to be why the American system is now largely broken.

I have no idea how.

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

#627

Post by friendzis » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 5:28 AM UTC

DrScientist wrote: post #458

friendzis wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference between lobbying for representatives versus people directly is that representatives have to answer to the people - whereas no-one loses their job as a citizen if they get persuaded by story tellers. I would not be so sure. What's the fundamental difference between convincing general public to vote certain way in a hypothetical direct-ish democracy and convincing that lobbied-for vote by representativ…

With humans bandwidth is pretty much always limited - however it's clear that a representative has a higher bandwidth for politics than the average person - because it's their job ( and note they normally have a team of researchers around them as well ). In terms of persuasion - if a representative votes in a way that's at odds with the people who elect them, then there is a risk of the representative losing their jo…

> Obviously given that large scale persuasion is now cheap and automatable - even in a representative democracy you might well choose to set the political weather by directly targeting the electorate.

In "the older days" even blatant propaganda used to work so well, because there were very few points of access to information and those could be easily controlled. Very few had access to independent sources of information and the rest relied on hearsay, at best.

The fact that you believe in this "it's different now" (under a thread about speech control on the internet) is a partial proof of how effective the propaganda had been up till now.

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

#628

Post by hulitu » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 6:04 AM UTC

ffaccount2 wrote: post #551

Atreiden wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> most people in Europe trust their government more than random for profit companies, and are OK with making them a gatekeeper

No.

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

#629

Post by cx42net » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 6:52 AM UTC

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... )

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

#630

Post by bingoMen » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 8:23 AM UTC

raffael_de wrote: post #323

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #38

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.

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.