Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet? • Hacker News Board

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#481

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 1:56 PM UTC

IAmGraydon wrote: post #263

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This won't down the bot population. There are hundreds of millions of people in poverty who have this digital identity issued by their government that is mostly worthless to them. They'll sell it for $50, and there will be a bot running around with their name.

First of all, having to buy each account for $50 instead of spinning up thousands for free would shut down most botnets as the economics would no longer work. Second, the move toward identity verification will eventually make even selling accounts like this impossible. You can only sell your identity once. I stand by what I originally said, though I admit it was a bit inflammatory. Everyone wants to have their cake a…

>First of all, having to buy each account for $50 instead of spinning up thousands for free would shut

Would cost them chump change. You've added an operating expense. When bot farms have giant walls of smartphones bolted into specially-designed rigs, that means they're already used to operating costs that are non-trivial.

>Second, the move toward identity verification will eventually make even selling accounts like this impossible.

How do you figure that? Even if some scheme is invented where a person can verify that it's them, that will be part of the sale. They will make it possible for the third party to do the verification too. If you've got some genius scheme though where that is impossible, I'd love to hear it. Something that only the person themselves can do, and others can't impersonate them even with permission.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#482

Post by dredmorbius » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC

EarlKing wrote: post #83

2001zhaozhao wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> keeping that alternative clanker-free which brings you right back to verification...

Verification tells you that a human being is behind it, not that a human being made it.

If you can at least attest who is responsible, other tests for AI-generation might be applied, with reputation following from that.

Sadly, that's bullshit most of us didn't ask for, and it's turning up all over the place, e.g., among book and short-story publishers, journalism, academic publishing, as well as blogs and social media.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#483

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 2:01 PM UTC

globular-toast wrote: post #443

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #79

Back to the internet's peer-to-peer roots. Many protocols besides the www The www became infested with so-called "tech" companies acting as intermediaries (middlemen) Lots of folks making money from surveillance ad system on the www. Oversized, unmanageable websites calling themselves "platforms" The www is an ad network. Not a great place for non-commercial activity Fortunately, the internet is more than the www. Th…

That's no good if broad laws are passed that require age verification. It could be interpreted as even SSHing into a server that doesn't verify your age is illegal. Some decades ago it would have seemed too stupid to actually happen. Now I'm not so sure.

"It could be interpreted as even SSHing into a server that doesn't verify your age is illegal."

If the plan is to provide "social media" to millions of people via SSH then yes one could forsee such an interpretation

These laws are targeting so-called "social media" provided by "Big Tech"

But there are anonymous comments across the web trying to portray this as something else. These comments are hilariously nonsensical

The cause of this legislation is the activity of so-called "Big Tech"

If there is collateral damage to others then that is the fault of "Big Tech". This is the cost of the Silicon Valley "business model"

There is no requirement that the internet be used to create "social media" or something else with large audiences^1 for advertising

Although that may be a Silicon Valley VC requirement

1. For example, the Malaysia legislation sets a threshhold of eight million users. List of SSH servers with over eight million users:

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#484

Post by dredmorbius » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

pocksuppet wrote: post #418

tumult wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true at all. Even small, insular, just-a-few-hundred users PHPBB-style forums have to run Cloudflare or Anubis to try to stem DDoS-style scraping, and have a constant patrol of moderators to stop AI spam posts.

Not true. You can also make your code fast enough so your server doesn't get overloaded by three requests per second. Then you can just handle the requests.

There are multiple facets to the problem. Technical site performance is a very small part of those.

The disruption, manipulation, and most of all erosion of trust which bad-faith actors create (AI or otherwise) are the most serious issues in my experience. The concept of "evaporative cooling", in which a platform starting to go bad sees an accelerated departure of well-intentioned, high-value participants.

See the original article from 2010: https://web.archive.org/web/20101012105003/https://blog.bumb...> (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665>).

And an interesting follow-up, 2015: https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporativ...> (HN discussion, from 2025: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42597962>).

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#485

Post by tpdly » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

buzzy_hacker wrote: post #460

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #79

Back to the internet's peer-to-peer roots. Many protocols besides the www The www became infested with so-called "tech" companies acting as intermediaries (middlemen) Lots of folks making money from surveillance ad system on the www. Oversized, unmanageable websites calling themselves "platforms" The www is an ad network. Not a great place for non-commercial activity Fortunately, the internet is more than the www. Th…

My instinct is also to retreat to technical solutions. But, unfortunately, it appears we engineers need to fight back in the legal and political domain to stand a chance.

I like to think someone can come along with Jobs-like charisma and redefine the public's intuition for personal computing again. Foundation models with maximally deterministic harnesses, voice assistants with honest, tasteful amounts of roboticism, maybe data tenancy that doesn't make you feel like a surveilled ecosystem prisoner.

NVIDIA local AI builds are moving in that direction, but are wildly expensive. I think a lot of the current AI backlash (esp data-centers) comes from the public's accurate intuition that the current centralized, monopolistic, cloud-centric solution disempowers them, and eats any gains this magical technology would've brought them. Plugging a sliver box into the wall and your router, with no recurring fees; that would make people feel different about "taking our jobs" because they would be the unquestionable beneficiary.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#486

Post by roenxi » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

palata wrote: post #480

roenxi wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not sure I get the argument of "it's not finished, but I will pretend that it is because it's convenient for me". > The European Commission has announced that a new age verification app designed to protect children online is ready for deployment. In a recent statement, President of the Commission Ursula von der Leyen, confirmed that the technology is ready and will soon be available for citizens to use. https:…

Please read my original comment again. I said Mullvad had good arguments, I just criticised the way ZKP is generally dismissed, including in their article. You then went for your "this is all authoritarian, that's the definition of authoritarianism, etc". If you want to go back to the origin, sure let's do that. My criticism was really JUST that one could explain privacy-preserving age verification in a constructive…

> Haven't you? I have heard many comments just like yours, implying that "whoever wants to verify the age is an authoritarian".

I have not said that nor have I implied to nor do I believe it. If you read this thread you'll notice I said described some age verification schemes as a non-issue. I believe that people who want to implement authoritarian solutions to their problems are authoritarians. That is a rather reasonable position. In this thread you have:

- Misrepresented the state of ZKP in the EU app because you didn't understand the Mullivad article or what the EU is announcing

- Now you've misrepresented what I've said after a long argument with plenty of clarification.

You might like to sit down with an LLM, copy-paste the text you've read in, tell it what you think was said and ask it to explore the gap between what you're reading and what the you're talking to are likely trying to get across.

> You then went for your "this is all authoritarian, that's the definition of authoritarianism, etc".

Your counterargument to the idea that authoritarian policy is being implemented was to pretend that the people implementing the policies had done something that they have not in fact done. It was ridiculous. And your problem in complaining about the labelling of this is that these policies are basic 101 authoritarian policy. It is hard to get more classically authoritarian than a strong central body implementing an ID system tracking what people are saying and determining who is allowed to communicate. I'm sure the authoritarians don't want to be described as authoritarian because schemes like this sometimes blow up Soviet-style, but maybe they should support better policies instead of trying to complain about being accurately labelled.

If age control was being implemented by liberals there would be far less interest in the topic.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#487

Post by anthonypasq » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

jonplackett wrote: post #365

anthonypasq wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not how any other thing that is banned for children is enforced. It makes no sense. The person selling the age gated item needs to take lawful measures to ensure they arent selling it to a minor. Their parents have nothing to do with it. Your solution would be that if a 14 year old walks into a liquor store and doesnt have a note from their parents saying that they arent allowed to drink alcohol, then the sto…

The proposed solution though is that all adults going into the store have to provide their full name and address and have it recorded by the store to buy alcohol - or any other +18 product they want to buy. These things are not equal.

[dead]

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#488

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 2:30 PM UTC

motbus3 wrote: post #462

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #79

Back to the internet's peer-to-peer roots. Many protocols besides the www The www became infested with so-called "tech" companies acting as intermediaries (middlemen) Lots of folks making money from surveillance ad system on the www. Oversized, unmanageable websites calling themselves "platforms" The www is an ad network. Not a great place for non-commercial activity Fortunately, the internet is more than the www. Th…

Don't worry. Your government is creating plenty of laws to make to blatantly expensive to run anything that can compete with them.

Why would I want anyone to "compete" with so-called "tech" companies if I believe their "business model" is fundamentally-flawed

The cause of this legislation is the proliferation of that "business model"

Namely, creating large audiences for advertising,^1 data collection and surveillance through intermediation, i.e., acting as a middleman, the opposite of peer-to-peer

"Big Tech" does not compete. It acquires potential competitors. It is sometimes questionable whether the "potential competitors" actually intend to compete as they are more than willing to sell out

1. For example, audiences over 8 million people

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#489

Post by ishouldstayaway » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 2:47 PM UTC

techblueberry wrote: post #467

txrx0000 wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no controversy in having drugs, guns, alcohol, porn and other things 'behind the counter' - the intellectual debate over freedom of information is clouded by ideology. The first three are physical things, not information. Porn can be debated, but the current age verification push is trying to impose blanket control on the entire information ecosystem. It's the digital equivalent of requiring ID to go anywhe…

> They're legally mandating you to give away your child's personal info If you don’t want to use social media you don’t have to give away the info right?

If you don't want to use ~~social media~~ any website that could contain content deemed as "adult".

And what's "adult"? Hardcore pornography? Sex ed material? Otherwise-G-rated content that happens to have a gay person in it?

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#490

Post by ishouldstayaway » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 2:47 PM UTC

tardedmeme wrote: post #456

txrx0000 wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no controversy in having drugs, guns, alcohol, porn and other things 'behind the counter' - the intellectual debate over freedom of information is clouded by ideology. The first three are physical things, not information. Porn can be debated, but the current age verification push is trying to impose blanket control on the entire information ecosystem. It's the digital equivalent of requiring ID to go anywhe…

> It's the digital equivalent of requiring ID to go anywhere or do anything, rather than just a few well-defined things. No, it's social media, specifically. That's why it says social media. It's not everything, it's social media.

For now.