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

#641

Post by starik36 » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 3:41 PM UTC

jmyeet wrote: post #559

starik36 wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 la…

You are cherry picking. The sale of TikTok conversation goes way back and has little to do with Israel and more to do that they were caught spying on our phones.

> saying "we have a Tiktok problem"

All the more proving my point that TikTok is filled to the brim with anti-semitic content and "Palestine" content is in no way restricted.

> Twitch updated it's Hateful Conduct Policy to say "Zionist" is "hate speech"

Good. Calling for destruction of Israel is hate speech. Which is how "Zionist" is used most of the time.

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

#642

Post by kbelder » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC

DrScientist wrote: post #353

pc86 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

A consequence of democracy means average people get a vote. 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. So any system needs to blend that common sense, with specific expertise. In theory that's what a representative…

"I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University." (William F. Buckley)

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

#643

Post by ClayShentrup » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 6:44 PM UTC

abecedarius wrote: post #608

unethical_ban wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Really I'm not married to that proposal, I agree some voting reforms like approval voting should help, and I don't think any formal changes are enough on their own to get our political culture out of the current pit. What I like about this idea is bringing attention to the repeal problem as worth attention and imagination. Achieving a setup with some powerful people with a career interest in simplifying the infinite…

approval voting would be absolutely massive in impact, i think far beyond what you're imagining.

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

#644

Post by arendtio » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 7:05 PM UTC

Credit where credit is due: Mr. Trump does a good job of showing the world why you should not give the state too powerful surveillance systems.

The problem is not if you have done something ethically wrong ('I have nothing to hide'), but if you can trust the people who will have control over those systems in the future. Who will be in control in 10 years?

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

#645

Post by thesz » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 7:43 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #589

thesz wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

  > You say that like it's a bad thing?

I am saying that politicians will get around the sunsetting rule, if any, that's first.

Constitution, then, will serve as what regular law does right now, without anything that makes something Constitution. That's second.

I also am strongly suspecting that hundredths of thousands of pages of codes and laws will not get leaner at all. There is no point in ceding regulatory capture, because the capability to capture regulations is the point of governance, as I see it.

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

#646

Post by krferriter » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 8:02 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #338

roenxi wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opp…

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.

> Every law should have

The problem is that there isn't really this clean discrete sense of 'a law'. There is the federal code, and the federal register, and bills or rules enacted over time which amend those things. Often times those bills are collections of amendments which do things like add a phrase or swap out a word or add a bullet point to a list. They're like diffs. You can't just have those things sunset individually or you end up with a incoherent code and you end up creating a state of the code which is not what was intended by anyone, at any point along the way. And these can be significant things, like a substantial bill which makes a significant change to federal law may be just like adding a bullet point to a couple lists, or adding a parenthetical to a paragraph.

If you make it so all of the federal code and register has to be voted on every 1-10 years, then you'll just make it so everyone always votes to pass all of it, because no one is sitting down and reading all of it, because almost no one even sits down to read all the bills proposed in a year, which are much smaller in text volume.

The real underlying problem is that legislators are not responsive to the demands of their constituents. Ideas which have supermajority support among the public are not valued or prioritized. And none of the legislators suffer for it, because the elections are not generally competitive among candidates who understand policymaking, and there is a strong incumbency bias where people just vote for the person they recognize as long as they don't have major complaints and as long as they can't explicitly identify a reason that another candidate is clearly better across all measures.

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

#647

Post by husamia » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 10:52 PM UTC

There is almost no mention of cryptographic frameworks like Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs). Technologies exist that can mathematically prove a user is over 18 without revealing their date of birth, name, or identity to the website or the state.

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

#648

Post by teiferer » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 12:03 PM UTC

epihelix wrote: post #279

teiferer wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

If you ask me personally, then no, we don't need to have such a vote.

But if the point is that country wide referendums should only be held for important questions but then exclude Brexit because "it's stupid" then that's an inconsistent argument. Surely the question whether the UK should leave the EU was a very important decision to make. That the vote went a certain way which you don't like does not make it less important of a decision.

Unless the actual point is "referendums should only be held for questions that are important and will go the way I like". You can have that opinion but then please be honest about it instead of disguising it with supposedly neutral musings about democracy. (Hint: Democracy does not mean that only what you want will happen.)

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

#649

Post by teiferer » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 12:09 PM UTC

vladms wrote: post #500

AgentOrange1234 wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than that. Who cares if the state can read your chats/etc, when you believe you aren't the kind of people the state wants to persecute. Why deny the state ever more tools to go after people, as long as you think it's going to use them against the people you want it to go after.

I would add though that the opinion is not entirely irrational. For many people the state is inefficient, illogical, evil and goes after them without any reason (ex: think COVID restrictions). Then why do you care about another way to label you, if you think they already do it, but randomly. I feel that the privacy discussions do not acknowledge at all there are many other structural society issues. Sure it would mak…

> For many people the state is inefficient, illogical, evil and goes after them without any reason (ex: think COVID restrictions).

And that is an argument for agreeing to give more ways to go after you to that supposedly evil government?

I'd understand if people have high trust in government and argued "Yeah it could be misused, but I trust the government not to do that". That still misses the part that governments can change, but at least it's somewhat consistent.

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

#650

Post by teiferer » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 3:00 PM UTC

nextaccountic wrote: post #325

teiferer wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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:…

> representative democracy can't work in a post-truth world either.

Truthful public debate is a central ingredient to democracy. If you don't have that then you are severely lacking in democratic qualities.

In other words, your statement is akin to saying "democracy can't work in an undemocratic environment", which is obvious.

If anything then the Brexit vote shows that democracy is lacking in the UK. Not having asked the people would not have made that better though.