If you make law-abiding sites like Pornhub hard to access, consumers will move to black markets like the Dark Web, which hosts illegal content.
As the article mentions, kids are able to bypass the age verification with ease, so it doesn't even fulfil its stated purpose. We didn't even need age verification, because parental controls have been an option the entire time.
Not really because nearly every adult has a phone with unlimited calling, and will allow you to make a call from their phone. I don't want my kids to be someplace where there are not some responsible adults around (drunk adults are not responsible)
Note that I agree with your point overall. My kids have phones for times when they are away and might need to contact me. I'm just saying it isn't as bad as it sounds.
If one parent forbids their child then their child becomes a pariah. If no child is able to access social media then they will all interact without it. So yeah, a parent needs their peer's children to also not use social media so that their child is not left out.
In general I'm against age based bans. I think there are alternatives where we would identify and just generally regulate the harmful features of social media. In the meanwhile, I feel empathetic towards the difficulties of parenting in this era.
There are more angles on this, not exactly easy. The easiest way to make a kid to do something, is to forbid that very thing.
If you are the one cutting it off, while your kid's whole school is very much up to date with latest brainrot content, then you still lose.
Your kid is the outcast, while it will be exposed to it anyway, through peers. Meanwhile you are the bad one, making it much harder to have an actual conversation on the topic.
I am vividly interested in this, as my kid is growing up. I hear how a bit older kids play and what they talk about on the playground and feel that I have very little time left to react (kid is still just now starting to show interest in phones and such). A ban on all social media for kids would make this so much easier.
Yeah, this I will seriously never understand. When I was a kid, if my mother didn't want me doing something then she would make sure I couldn't do it. Is nobody parenting their children anymore? Do they just let them do whatever they want these days? I've got a 2 year old of my own and can't imagine just handing him an iPad and ignoring him all day like I see other parents do. I can't tell if it's laziness, or ignorance, or some combination of the two.
Uh-huh. For me, that meant that I didn't do something At Home, and was pretty much unsupervised other places. My mother was strict at a time when a lot of kids had freedom. I couldn't do much that other kids did. When I could, I had to jump through hoops.
I lied to my mother a lot. My mother still isn't in the loop with my life - I'm in my late 40s now. It would have been much better to have been able to talk to my parents honestly about stuff I went through. It would have been much better to talk to me about things and get honest information about dangers.
You fail to understand just how good kids are at getting around restrictions. This despite having been a kid yourself who would have found ways around it.
Often we don't really have the power we want either. It is easy to say ban everything. However realistically that isn't the correct answer, too much school work really is on devices - often provided by the school so I can't lock them (except for the limited controls the school gives to us - if the correct app works on our devices that then we are expected to have). Every week some new hole in their block app gets spread around school - until the school figures it out and blocks it all the kids have it.
The only think unique about the above is devices. I guarantee if you go back 3000 years in history you will find parents complaining about their kids in similar ways.
Those can only work if there is some way to ensure that everyone uses them correctly. I guarantee there will be many sites that don't - every single week the kids will discover a new one and spread it to all their friends (in their school)
I believe we could solve a lot of these problems by making it illegal to advertise to minors.
I'm reminded of the settlement with Facebook where it was illegally allowing racial targeting in ads for housing, which is illegal [1]. If platforms were suddenly liable for allowing or failing to stop the targeting of minors, they'd suddenly have a lot of incentive to figure this out.
The beauty of this is that they already do it. Your profile with FB, Google, etc has a lot of implied demographic information based on your activity because they want to sell audiences with certain demographics.
As an aside, whenever I see "think tank" my first question is "who is funding this?" and I learned something I didn't know previously. In the UK, these bodies often aren't legal charities. Instead they are non-profit companies limited by guarantee [2]. One consequence of that is that they don't have to reveal their funding like a 501(c)(3) would (and, yes, US think tanks are generally 501(c)(3)s).
I didn't see any obvious red flags in the trustees for Foundation for Information Policy Research for what it's worth and it's an almost 30 year old organization.
If you wanted to actually empower parents in helping their kids, you'd make sites emit some form of standard as TXT, SRV, /.well-known, whatever end points
Then you'd make sure that the owner of the device has the ability to enable this, factoring in some tags for the category
Then I can use my existing parental controls (including on a linux laptop if I don't give my 13 year old root) to apply or not apply rules
If I don't want social media regardless, then I apply a rule "no scoial media". Or I can apply "1 hour max" per day for the category
If I'm happy with my 16 year old spending half an hour on playboy.com or whatever, then that's fine too -- I'd rather they went somewhere like that then some of the shadier sites
This gives no power to large companies, but helps the parents, who can apply "default" profiles -- hell you can distribute default profiles as part of the onboarding process.
FYI for adult content, there's a standard called RTA-Label that already integrates with all parental controls and is already deployed on all major adult sites.
Yes but isn't that limited to only tagging adult sites? That's great and it works but it only applies to a small piece of the stated problem. It seems to be largely social media that's driving popular support for this latest go round.
RTA is an excellent demonstration that a self categorization system can be expected to work provided it's standardized and service operators make use of it. What's missing then is granularity and a way to coerce the vast majority of sites to adopt whatever gets standardized.
Given the current browser duopoly coercing adoption should prove relatively straightforward. So we just need an RFC document and then to somehow gain public support for it.
Simple, sites without a rating are not viewable if parental controls are enabled. That will be motivation for site publishers to get their ratings in order.
No, the browsers would need to reject the sites unconditionally since no one is going to enable parental controls if it breaks everything. Otherwise I expect the current situation of parental controls not working and thus everyone avoiding them and complaining would continue.
Recall that this is exactly what happened with TLS. When browsers started gating all new features behind TLS being active suddenly all the mainstream sites had it working across the board in record time.
The first step is to get Google and Apple to set a date after which adoption is mandated. Provide an easy out for site operators, such as placing a text file at "/.well-known/content-rating" with "tag:all ages" inside to opt the entire site out rather than sending a header per resource or tagging html elements or whatever.
The second step is to approach legislators with this standard and a now very high compliance rate in hand and suggest that they enact a law requiring that such ratings are accurate for certain specific categories (presumably porn, gambling, social media, and user generated content).
The third step is getting governments to do spot enforcement often enough to prevent the system from falling apart.
Sounds good to me. Why didn't Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and the porn industry do this 15 years ago? Why did they pretend to have no responsibility for the content they were publishing? Why did they think clicking "Yes" on an "I am 18 years of age" popup was sufficient?
https://web.archive.org/web/20260215201718/https://www.rtala... seems a bother, nevermind the lack of granularity that RTA has. The competing options seem to have a Christian focus as well, from what I recall. There does not seem to be any good option currently.
There is an unfortunate lack of unity for such things. It would work if governments made it easily understandable how to categorize content, but the vast majority is handled by closed boards of people, so no "case law" exists for the difficult edge cases.
Additionally, some jurisdictions have laws based around religious and cultural values which are not immediately obvious, I'm sure many webmasters would be happy to spend 30 minutes or so writing something for such a framework, but the current subsequent obligation of learning the laws of relevant jurisdictions, the decisions of age rating boards, etc. would blow things out to weeks of research and potentially quite a bit of lawyer money.
> There is an unfortunate lack of unity for such things. It would work if governments made it easily understandable how to categorize content, but the vast majority is handled by closed boards of people, so no "case law" exists for the difficult edge cases.
Who cares if some sites get it wrong? It would still be a better scenario than we have now where people either announce who they are, or they hunt for some other site that doesn't enforce age verification. At least if some sites get it wrong, then they're still better than sites that presently out-right refuse to follow all the different laws of the different lands.
> Additionally, some jurisdictions have laws based around religious and cultural values which are not immediately obvious,
The beauty of the GPs suggestion is that site owns don't need to learn that. They just submit what the site content roughly is, and parents get to chose what they want to expose their children to.
Also we already have a jurisdiction problem here were some countries, or even sub-division of such as US states, are passing law that affect the websites and software of people worldwide.
You can't offer a workable solution to an excuse. Nobody pushing this wants to protect the children, therefore offering a solution that will protect the children is irrelevant.
While the powers pushing this aren't doing it for protecting children, there are many people who want restricting the internet to protect children. This is why it's a good cover instead of an obvious power grab, because parents want to stop their ten year old children from seeing porn or getting addicted to social media, but they don't know much about how to do it, the technology involved or who is pushing it.
You might not want any child control, as many in HN don't, but in general the people do. And if you make parents choose between the current free for all and the government knowing the identity of every user, they will choose the second.
Sure, the government would probably not protect the children even after requiring ID, but by then it would be too late.
Yep, and the social media and other tech companies could have solved this 10 or 15 years ago on their own terms but chose to pretend that it was all just a "parenting" issue and not their responsibility. Now they are facing the heavy and clumsy hand of government regulation.
I'm a parent and will take the second option in a heartbeat.
But it's not because I'm cool with my government "[not] doing it for protecting children" or any other conspiracy theory nonsense.
It's because governments ALREADY have all this information if they want it. Most people freely log in to their favourite services, and corporations will hand over data when asked. There are vast amounts of hacked data available, which any government with a competent intelligence service has a copy of. Then there are all the existing laws and intelligence apparatus that can track people.
Age gates wont help the government find out what porn you watch, or who you message on WhatsApp, they already know if they really wanted. But they will create a social contract that letting your kids loose on social media and unfiltered internet is unacceptable. At the moment bad parents have all the power, drawing the line somewhere and enforcing it will give power back to parents that want to raise their children responsibly.
Raising a generation of kids not addicted to internet brainrot is the real way to make sure democratic governments don't overreach with the data they have.
I have an 11yo. I know a ton of parents. And I don't know a single person - not one - who thinks this is a good idea. And I've asked.
Obviously this is just an anecdote and not a substitute for data. But... is there data on sentiment? I don't think it's actual parents who are pushing for this.
You’re downvoted but you are right. Speaking from experience, buying the rhetoric and offering alternatives in that “framing” doesn’t work. In my country all adults sites are already banned for two decades (for adults as well) yet they implement this exact ID verification scheme and promoting using the exact same rhetoric.
None of this is truly about the people (even though the sentiment is) - it's the elites vying for power against each other.
The internet is not tribal, but humans are. Those seeking to divide are pushing their hardest right now, because they know division will empower them more.
I am shocked, shocked to hear that there are ulterior motives behind age verification and that the stated benefit is in fact exactly the opposite of what happens irl. Shocked!
If you make law-abiding sites like Pornhub hard to access, consumers will move to black markets like the Dark Web, which hosts illegal content.
As the article mentions, kids are able to bypass the age verification with ease, so it doesn't even fulfil its stated purpose. We didn't even need age verification, because parental controls have been an option the entire time.
"with nine out of 10 parents saying they are in favour of a ban in response to a government consultation"
I wonder why those 90% of parents don't cut their children off from social media right now.
They have the power to do it.
I suspect they don't really; once you give a teen a smartphone your control over what websites they visit ends.
(you will reply "don't do that then")
But also: cutting one kid off from social networks ostracises them. The parents recognize it's a collective action problem.
Also, it is arguably dangerous to not let your teen have a phone in a time when payphones (and to a great extent landlines) no longer exist.
Dumbphones are a still a thing
Not really because nearly every adult has a phone with unlimited calling, and will allow you to make a call from their phone. I don't want my kids to be someplace where there are not some responsible adults around (drunk adults are not responsible)
Note that I agree with your point overall. My kids have phones for times when they are away and might need to contact me. I'm just saying it isn't as bad as it sounds.
> Not really because nearly every adult has a phone with unlimited calling, and will allow you to make a call from their phone.
that's not even true for adults. Why would you assume it's true for kids?
Not really because nearly every adult has a phone with unlimited calling, and will allow you to make a call from their phone.
This isn't very compatible with also teaching children that they can't trust the majority of adults, and that every stranger is a potential danger.
Network effects from the other side:
If one parent forbids their child then their child becomes a pariah. If no child is able to access social media then they will all interact without it. So yeah, a parent needs their peer's children to also not use social media so that their child is not left out.
In general I'm against age based bans. I think there are alternatives where we would identify and just generally regulate the harmful features of social media. In the meanwhile, I feel empathetic towards the difficulties of parenting in this era.
There are more angles on this, not exactly easy. The easiest way to make a kid to do something, is to forbid that very thing.
If you are the one cutting it off, while your kid's whole school is very much up to date with latest brainrot content, then you still lose.
Your kid is the outcast, while it will be exposed to it anyway, through peers. Meanwhile you are the bad one, making it much harder to have an actual conversation on the topic.
I am vividly interested in this, as my kid is growing up. I hear how a bit older kids play and what they talk about on the playground and feel that I have very little time left to react (kid is still just now starting to show interest in phones and such). A ban on all social media for kids would make this so much easier.
You're a parent. Be the bad guy if you feel it's right.
Wanting the government to levy a society-wide information tracking system because you don't want your child to be upset at you is incredibly selfish.
Yeah, this I will seriously never understand. When I was a kid, if my mother didn't want me doing something then she would make sure I couldn't do it. Is nobody parenting their children anymore? Do they just let them do whatever they want these days? I've got a 2 year old of my own and can't imagine just handing him an iPad and ignoring him all day like I see other parents do. I can't tell if it's laziness, or ignorance, or some combination of the two.
Uh-huh. For me, that meant that I didn't do something At Home, and was pretty much unsupervised other places. My mother was strict at a time when a lot of kids had freedom. I couldn't do much that other kids did. When I could, I had to jump through hoops.
I lied to my mother a lot. My mother still isn't in the loop with my life - I'm in my late 40s now. It would have been much better to have been able to talk to my parents honestly about stuff I went through. It would have been much better to talk to me about things and get honest information about dangers.
I relate to this quite a lot, to be honest. There has to be some happy medium somewhere, though.
You fail to understand just how good kids are at getting around restrictions. This despite having been a kid yourself who would have found ways around it.
Often we don't really have the power we want either. It is easy to say ban everything. However realistically that isn't the correct answer, too much school work really is on devices - often provided by the school so I can't lock them (except for the limited controls the school gives to us - if the correct app works on our devices that then we are expected to have). Every week some new hole in their block app gets spread around school - until the school figures it out and blocks it all the kids have it.
The only think unique about the above is devices. I guarantee if you go back 3000 years in history you will find parents complaining about their kids in similar ways.
https://fipr.org/20260526-GrowingUpInTheOnlineWorld.pdf Actual response, instead of an article reporting on an article reporting on a response.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Information_Pol... Context of FIPR
Obviously? I'm shocked that lawmakers are so okay with giving up their sons' and daughters' personal information.
It's not for the Fortunate Sons, silly.
[delayed]
The nice solution would be <adult age="18"> content </adult> tags, standardized by w3c.
Those can only work if there is some way to ensure that everyone uses them correctly. I guarantee there will be many sites that don't - every single week the kids will discover a new one and spread it to all their friends (in their school)
I believe we could solve a lot of these problems by making it illegal to advertise to minors.
I'm reminded of the settlement with Facebook where it was illegally allowing racial targeting in ads for housing, which is illegal [1]. If platforms were suddenly liable for allowing or failing to stop the targeting of minors, they'd suddenly have a lot of incentive to figure this out.
The beauty of this is that they already do it. Your profile with FB, Google, etc has a lot of implied demographic information based on your activity because they want to sell audiences with certain demographics.
As an aside, whenever I see "think tank" my first question is "who is funding this?" and I learned something I didn't know previously. In the UK, these bodies often aren't legal charities. Instead they are non-profit companies limited by guarantee [2]. One consequence of that is that they don't have to reveal their funding like a 501(c)(3) would (and, yes, US think tanks are generally 501(c)(3)s).
I didn't see any obvious red flags in the trustees for Foundation for Information Policy Research for what it's worth and it's an almost 30 year old organization.
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
[2]: https://www.funded.team/advice/charity-vs-cic-vs-clg
If you wanted to actually empower parents in helping their kids, you'd make sites emit some form of standard as TXT, SRV, /.well-known, whatever end points
Then you'd make sure that the owner of the device has the ability to enable this, factoring in some tags for the category
us-min-age:21:drinking gb-min-age:18:drinking au-min-age:16:socialmedia us-min-age:13:socialmedia
Then I can use my existing parental controls (including on a linux laptop if I don't give my 13 year old root) to apply or not apply rules
If I don't want social media regardless, then I apply a rule "no scoial media". Or I can apply "1 hour max" per day for the category
If I'm happy with my 16 year old spending half an hour on playboy.com or whatever, then that's fine too -- I'd rather they went somewhere like that then some of the shadier sites
This gives no power to large companies, but helps the parents, who can apply "default" profiles -- hell you can distribute default profiles as part of the onboarding process.
FYI for adult content, there's a standard called RTA-Label that already integrates with all parental controls and is already deployed on all major adult sites.
Yes but isn't that limited to only tagging adult sites? That's great and it works but it only applies to a small piece of the stated problem. It seems to be largely social media that's driving popular support for this latest go round.
RTA is an excellent demonstration that a self categorization system can be expected to work provided it's standardized and service operators make use of it. What's missing then is granularity and a way to coerce the vast majority of sites to adopt whatever gets standardized.
Given the current browser duopoly coercing adoption should prove relatively straightforward. So we just need an RFC document and then to somehow gain public support for it.
Simple, sites without a rating are not viewable if parental controls are enabled. That will be motivation for site publishers to get their ratings in order.
No, the browsers would need to reject the sites unconditionally since no one is going to enable parental controls if it breaks everything. Otherwise I expect the current situation of parental controls not working and thus everyone avoiding them and complaining would continue.
Recall that this is exactly what happened with TLS. When browsers started gating all new features behind TLS being active suddenly all the mainstream sites had it working across the board in record time.
The first step is to get Google and Apple to set a date after which adoption is mandated. Provide an easy out for site operators, such as placing a text file at "/.well-known/content-rating" with "tag:all ages" inside to opt the entire site out rather than sending a header per resource or tagging html elements or whatever.
The second step is to approach legislators with this standard and a now very high compliance rate in hand and suggest that they enact a law requiring that such ratings are accurate for certain specific categories (presumably porn, gambling, social media, and user generated content).
The third step is getting governments to do spot enforcement often enough to prevent the system from falling apart.
Sounds good to me. Why didn't Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and the porn industry do this 15 years ago? Why did they pretend to have no responsibility for the content they were publishing? Why did they think clicking "Yes" on an "I am 18 years of age" popup was sufficient?
https://web.archive.org/web/20260215201718/https://www.rtala... seems a bother, nevermind the lack of granularity that RTA has. The competing options seem to have a Christian focus as well, from what I recall. There does not seem to be any good option currently.
There is an unfortunate lack of unity for such things. It would work if governments made it easily understandable how to categorize content, but the vast majority is handled by closed boards of people, so no "case law" exists for the difficult edge cases.
Additionally, some jurisdictions have laws based around religious and cultural values which are not immediately obvious, I'm sure many webmasters would be happy to spend 30 minutes or so writing something for such a framework, but the current subsequent obligation of learning the laws of relevant jurisdictions, the decisions of age rating boards, etc. would blow things out to weeks of research and potentially quite a bit of lawyer money.
> There is an unfortunate lack of unity for such things. It would work if governments made it easily understandable how to categorize content, but the vast majority is handled by closed boards of people, so no "case law" exists for the difficult edge cases.
Who cares if some sites get it wrong? It would still be a better scenario than we have now where people either announce who they are, or they hunt for some other site that doesn't enforce age verification. At least if some sites get it wrong, then they're still better than sites that presently out-right refuse to follow all the different laws of the different lands.
> Additionally, some jurisdictions have laws based around religious and cultural values which are not immediately obvious,
The beauty of the GPs suggestion is that site owns don't need to learn that. They just submit what the site content roughly is, and parents get to chose what they want to expose their children to.
Also we already have a jurisdiction problem here were some countries, or even sub-division of such as US states, are passing law that affect the websites and software of people worldwide.
This would do nothing to prevent sending explicit content within chat apps, which appears to be a big focus at the moment.
Yes but that's not what this is for, it's for boiling the frog of enforcing ID checks online.
I’m pretty certain they understand that and are offering a workable solution instead of just repiping “age tech bad.”
You can't offer a workable solution to an excuse. Nobody pushing this wants to protect the children, therefore offering a solution that will protect the children is irrelevant.
While the powers pushing this aren't doing it for protecting children, there are many people who want restricting the internet to protect children. This is why it's a good cover instead of an obvious power grab, because parents want to stop their ten year old children from seeing porn or getting addicted to social media, but they don't know much about how to do it, the technology involved or who is pushing it. You might not want any child control, as many in HN don't, but in general the people do. And if you make parents choose between the current free for all and the government knowing the identity of every user, they will choose the second. Sure, the government would probably not protect the children even after requiring ID, but by then it would be too late.
Yep, and the social media and other tech companies could have solved this 10 or 15 years ago on their own terms but chose to pretend that it was all just a "parenting" issue and not their responsibility. Now they are facing the heavy and clumsy hand of government regulation.
I'm a parent and will take the second option in a heartbeat.
But it's not because I'm cool with my government "[not] doing it for protecting children" or any other conspiracy theory nonsense.
It's because governments ALREADY have all this information if they want it. Most people freely log in to their favourite services, and corporations will hand over data when asked. There are vast amounts of hacked data available, which any government with a competent intelligence service has a copy of. Then there are all the existing laws and intelligence apparatus that can track people.
Age gates wont help the government find out what porn you watch, or who you message on WhatsApp, they already know if they really wanted. But they will create a social contract that letting your kids loose on social media and unfiltered internet is unacceptable. At the moment bad parents have all the power, drawing the line somewhere and enforcing it will give power back to parents that want to raise their children responsibly.
Raising a generation of kids not addicted to internet brainrot is the real way to make sure democratic governments don't overreach with the data they have.
I'm sorry, what?!
I have an 11yo. I know a ton of parents. And I don't know a single person - not one - who thinks this is a good idea. And I've asked.
Obviously this is just an anecdote and not a substitute for data. But... is there data on sentiment? I don't think it's actual parents who are pushing for this.
You’re downvoted but you are right. Speaking from experience, buying the rhetoric and offering alternatives in that “framing” doesn’t work. In my country all adults sites are already banned for two decades (for adults as well) yet they implement this exact ID verification scheme and promoting using the exact same rhetoric.
It's not about the children, never was.
The goal is to use one ID system for everything.
I sound like Alex Jones, but we already have a system for bank login, and other trusted identity login. They want to use this for everything.
Another instance of pure power games if you track the political "reasonings" and technological "solutions".
It's the same fight with yet another face; we must keep pushing back at the hydra.
The other 'side' is playing the same power games.
None of this is truly about the people (even though the sentiment is) - it's the elites vying for power against each other.
The internet is not tribal, but humans are. Those seeking to divide are pushing their hardest right now, because they know division will empower them more.
I am shocked, shocked to hear that there are ulterior motives behind age verification and that the stated benefit is in fact exactly the opposite of what happens irl. Shocked!
It was never about the children