511–520 of 750 posts
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The reason is that this whole push for age verification is nothing to do with actually stopping kids seeing the content. If it was then this kind of solution would be being legislated for. It’s just about making everyone identifiable.
If it is about making everyone identifiable how come California's version doesn't require providing any identifying information when setting it up on a child's device?
It’s not online age verification. It’s online identity verification. Would you vote for that? Prove who you are to visit this website? Would you do it to access Hacker News? Your newspaper? Didn’t think so.
THe government shouldn't be raising anyone's children, that's what parents are for. If you're a bad parent, your kids will get access to bad things and could become an adult failure. The future of your family and your legacy is up to you, not the government. We don't need age verification to restrict the social darwinism of raising children.
It was difficult enough back 20 years ago when you have TV advertising that just shot gun out the messaging in the hope of landing a target, now it is algorithmically targeted. Even if you can keep this stuff under control in the home, outside of the home these influences can still bleed in from others.
But having the government use mandatory age restrictions, that is a wild over correction. They shouldn't be parenting kids in the same way corporations shouldn't be doing it either.
Alas we are walking into the wild contradictions of libertarian thinking and authoritarianism. Liberal companies have no checks and balances, authoritarian governments take peoples freedoms in the name of "safety".
The deeper questing is to all of these technologies that have have imbalanced positive and negative outcomes. If you cannot balance it, you either have the worst outcomes happen or you end up with an authoritarian reflex to control the technology and those that use it. Rarely do we take the middle path, that being government control of the businesses.
That is seen as touching the political third rail, but that instinct is now by design.
You can see the thinking that goes, the best solution was to never invent it to begin with, but that is just wishful stuff that doesn't really contribute.
I have no solutions and barely any responses other than, this is some predicament we find ourselves in.
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Yeah, right. So the government is going to spend billions on “porn tokens”. That’s going to get through the legislature. I’m sure there wouldn’t be a brisk illicit trade in these tokens either. Certainly no one would be incentivized to sell these tokens to teenagers for easy profit.
Further, "porn tokens" are the pointy end of the wedge, because it's easy to misconstrue any opposition as advocating for "kids should have access to porn, actually". The broad end that is being hammered towards is "kids aren't allowed on social media because it's harmful to them" AKA "free speech tokens".
Why is it always “think of the children” used to abrogate the rights of adults?
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> These are facts, whether you like them or not. [Citation Needed] As I understand it, the debate on whether social media is responsible for actual harms in kids is still open and ongoing. Social media has been found to do both harm and good for kids, and for some kids the good outweighs the harms [0]. Scientists are hoping to get some verification from the actual social experiments that we're conducting in the UK an…
> Mandating OS-level age verification effectively means not allowing kids access to OSS platforms, a step way too far in my opinion. For instance, we would have to outlaw Steam Decks for kids. This is entirely false scare tactic nonsense, and you really need to look at where you sourced that idea and no longer use them as a reference point. There isn't even a concept of a method of doing this that would make that tru…
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If you wouldn’t make a political statement in a town hall setting where you’re going to show ID, then you probably shouldn’t say it on the internet. But keep in mind that these laws don’t result in your identity being public. They will ultimately result in the sites you’re posting on know that you’re an enumerated individual. The ultimate benefit as I see it is removing outsized leverage over public opinion by bottin…
I disagree. I won't repeat my comment, but it carries all the information you need to know.
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I’m betting that bot activity plummets once accounts are tied to real identities. That’s a discourse benefit. I’m also betting that discussion will become a lot more rational once people have to put their names on what they are saying. Death threats also become more easily prosecutable.
Also becomes a lot easier to target people for speech you don't like, especially if you're the government.
I’m in the UK and we recently got the Online Safety Act. We failed, this legislation is very popular with voters and not getting rolled back. Those that dislike it use a VPN and aren’t interested in fighting. I’d say most of the public here is exhausted with cost of living and internet freedom just isn’t relevant to their voting habits. I grew up around a lot of the hacker ethos, open internet, Information Wants To B…
You can win the battle but lose the war. By the time the average folk realize the extent of these issues it will be way too late.
I think back to how the technology space was 25 years ago. When the biggest privacy fear was that a Pentium 3 had a processor ID and Windows XP would send your system specs to get a security update. Look at how far we have fallen since then and the pace is only speeding up.
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An outstanding idea. Those lobbying for age verification hate it though, because they want to be the arbiters of age, and all that juicy PII that they can analyze and resell.
What PII? They get a boolean "old enough"