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 spotting causal links between parts of a system, and people who are good at it exploit that.
“Age verification” isn't a problem in itself, the problem is how it's done. They could issue a physical id card with a cryptographic chip and do the age verification in a zero-knowledge fashion and it would be perfectly fine.
The problem is the lack of thinking about the solution and just handwaving “age verification” as a political posture, which is why we end up with half-baked systems.
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 opportunity to get things like speech controls or privacy violations through and the politicians mysteriously give up trying to roll it back no matter what the public pressure might be.
That being said, any expectation of thoughtfulness at all makes politics frustrating. Even basic things like why people keep making small random changes when most of these problems and solutions haven't changed in more than 2 millennia. And there is a pretty easy consensus to come to about what works. The repeated failures of authoritarianism to get to a good place are so consistent it is wild that people keep trying it.
But Brexit was a vote, by the people. Yes, the pro-leave campaign lied to no ends, but people still made a choice on their own and the majority for leave was quite slim.
This is very different to age sniffing here. Age sniffing is not being queried via public votum - lobbyists push it through without any resistance. It's amazing how this works.
Admittedly it's a long time since I was in school, but when I was there the notion of teaching the benefits of physical activity was limited to being told to run about for some 'sport', and absolutely nothing about why that's a good idea. Everyone was expected to do the same thing with no consideration for ability, disability, or motivation. Kids were punished with detentions for refusing to endure painful exercise that they couldn't do as well as their more capable peers.
The very obvious second order effect of poor physical education is fat unmotivated adults who don't exercise. Maybe educators need some systems thinking training too.
Ironically when I was in high school I was fat and hated pe but biked about 20 minutes to school every day. Now in middle age I still bike everywhere and am in better shape than most of my peers..
Social media age verification is like none of those - social media is the modern public square and age verification is asking everybody to show their papers before participating in free speech in the public. It will have a chilling effect on free speech and will be a tool for authoritarian control
The public square has never been properly anonymous. If you start saying things which contravene laws or the rights of others, the police have been able to capture you and unmask your identity, if concealed.
So the solution for criminals in the public is for everybody to show their papers walking into a public square? It is not, we have requirements for police process like warrants and a process for determining the requirements for urgent conditions of arrest.
Parents are entirely able to overcome any of this if they so choose - including feeding their kids alcohol, guns etc. - and so the freedom does materially exist.
Social Media isn't a place for free expression - it's mostly toxic - like exposing your children to the most vile, inauthentic people.
The more genteel places, frankly, won't have much in the way of age restrictions.
Entire nations are banning social media for kids because it's just not healthy - the teachers want it, the parents want it, the data seems to support it.
I think you're right to be (very concerned) but this is a necessary discussion. As a teacher.
My local librarian did not restrict my books to the kids section when I was a kid. Also librarians have fought civil legal battles to keep reading activities anonymous. Libraries are unlike the restrictions and risks of the proposed legislation being discussed for social media
Was there ever a public square where children could participate anonymously among adults? (I’m imagining three Dickensian urchins in a trench coat giving a speech in Hyde Park.)
Social media as it has become now is a shitshow where a minority of angry and/or disingenuous posters dominate discourse.
Twitter (X) was never the public square, and now it's little more than a playground for propagandists. The rest of us do well to ignore it, and it seems that even the 'legacy' media are starting to realise the days of breathlessly reporting on tweet-storms weren't great for anyone.
In a recent survey of under sixteen year olds in a place where an under sixteen social media ban exists asked how many of them used social media found that 80% were still using it. Do you actually need a login to consume social media? The answer to that is no. You can doom scroll all you want on sites like Reddit with no account whatsoever.
> 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.
But why would we do that?
If we taught people how to think, they wouldn't sit their toddlers down in front an iPad for 8+ hours a day to entertain (read: keep them occupied and quiet) them with YouTube videos, sign them up for a Facebook account before they could wipe their own butts, etc.
The sad irony of this age verification thing is that if we had a decent society and parents with common sense, age verification wouldn't even be a topic.
Parents with common sense comes from teaching children common sense. You have to fix the child education issue first, a lot of adults are too far gone to educate at this point.
How can you fix the child education problem without fixing the parent education? School is but a few hours a day, and kids spend more time with parents and learn from them. I was lucky that my parents liked to read and encouraged me to read, but my friends didn't have the same exposure that I did and never liked to read books.
Uhh imagine you know about countries other than the US that implement age verification. Like the UK, Brazil, Australia, France, Spain, Italy and dozens of other countries with vastly different educational systems. Then perhaps you could begin to understand the magnitude of your own ignorance of actual power and political ideology. Instead of embarrassingly trying to reason yourself a political education from first principle.
Uh dumb law I don't like. Cause people dumb. If people not dumb, no dumb law. Uhh I am very smart. "Systems thinking" oh fucking hell stfu
AI mass surveillance is another. The powerful are just ceasing opportunities to accumulate power and capital, seeing that right now it is not good enough for them.
> making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system
Will be interesting to see if this leads to more Linux systems being deployed. Then again with systemd supporting age sniffing (https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954), evading this becomes harder and harder.
As the internet become the place where people do a lot of things, no government (and especially no security services) will be able to keep themselves from trying to control it or at least monitor it.
And with the new LLM features they can automatically do much more than before.
Human nature is a constant and when the government sees an easy way to enforce something, many more bureaucrats will try to do it.
What happens when federal agents kick down your front door because you ran a free range mom and pop BBS that did not comply with latest ID verification requirements?
Big companies will benefit the most from these regulations. It's just good ol regulatory capture. They will have the most resources to comply with the laws. They have a captive audience that will be more willing to give up their personal info when asked — keep in mind Facebook and instagram is widely used for business. It is your small time forum admin who would rather shut down his hobbyist online community that never made him any money anyway than to ask for IDs. We have already seen stories of websites shutting down due to existing UK regulations. Curiously, all small, personal operations, not the kind of corporate social media they tell you the laws are meant to target.
If you violate memory protection you get a segfault, consistently. That isn't how the law works. Federal agents only kick down your door if they want to - which in this case probably means your forum users disparaged ICE or Trump.
It seemed unlikely to me that cookie banners would be a thing across the whole internet if nothing else because no website operators would put them in. How wrong was I.
All they need to do is popularize the idea of "if your website doesn't do X, it'll place lower on google" and people will do anything.
My websites still don't have cookie banners and the police still hasn't come to my house. And the websites uses cookies like every other website always did.
You really only need the banners if you're doing privacy-impinging things.
Much like the GDPR notices that a small industry of 'compliance' product companies sold seemingly to everyone as necessary, they aren't if you're only using cookies for functional reasons and not tracking people. Unfortunately that leads to lower margins for advertisers and we can't have that.
What we need is more personal spaces. Less feeds, more small group chats with people you actually know. I'm totally fine with destroying Reddit/Twitter/etc
> Conclusions: Despite the intent of the Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024 to delay access to social media platforms and reduce the potential for online harms, little evidence was found of immediate substantive reductions in reported social media use by adolescents under 16 years.
We are training teenagers that laws are stupid and can be circumvented easily and without consequences. As well as continuing to subject them to the harms of social media, only now without any means of monitoring them or holding the social media companies responsible.
This is like saying you're not concerned about war because people will notice war is bad and stop doing it. It's not a smart position to hold that bad things are good because they may bring on reversals.
This is a reminder to curate and prune all your past social media contribution, because when this goes thru, you KNOW they will apply it retroactively. You'd loathe to lose your cushy job over a moment of lucid honesty back in 2011.
I haven’t had any social media accounts since I gave it up for Lent in 2018 and I’m increasingly starting to wonder if that’s a liability for me because there’s no social graph that whatever agency would otherwise use to, idk, confirm I’m not a threat or something. The lack of a digital footprint like that may look weird.
I've been posting under my real name for over 20 years because this was always going to be the case. Using my real name is a constant reminder to not to post things I might later regret.
Right now, our identity is kinda tied to a string of letter (password). This password can technically be passed around, created and destroyed at will. Tomorrow, our identity is going to be tied to you as a person. So messages will be signed by YOU as a person.
We should actually protect minors, then they won't be able to use it as an excuse. Right now it works as an excuse because minors are being harmed by the unrestricted internet, mostly by social media.
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.
Automated fines, like traffic radar control for free speech, will also become a norm as they won't be able to put everyone in jail.
But I'm not sure the liberal anarcho-tyranny power will be indefinitely immutable. Speech control might be one their last try to keep control in the west. They will crumble like soviet union.
They have this in Germany for copyright. If you torrent, you automatically get a fine letter in your email. If you don't pay, you get a court summons in the post. If you take it to court, you will lose that case and also have to pay court fees.
It's funny how this played out in different countries.
In Australia there is no chance of anything happening, because the courts ruled that payouts were limited to provable incurred losses. You pirated a movie? The maximum awarded at the end of a court case is going to be about $20, and as you can't buy very much lawyer-time for $20, it's never taken to court and the copyright-holders have effectively stopped pursuing people here.
"The Carnival in Venice was first documented in 1296, with a proclamation by the Venetian Senate announcing a public festival the day before the start of Lent. Unquestionably one of the most well-known Carnival festivities in the world, the Carnival of Venice is rife with mystery, adventure, and conspiracy. The day served to break down barriers between people of different economic standings and religious beliefs. During the Renaissance, masked comic performers performed in Venice's piazzas."
"The tradition of wearing masks seems to stem from the 13th century. During the ages the Venetians disguised themselves with mask whenever they thought necessary. It allowed them to escape from the rigid rules of the class hierarchy. All classes could mingle, men could be women, women could be men. It also led to unwanted behaviour, from throwing eggs filled with ink to all imaginable kinds of vulgarities. Masks made people unrecognisable, so they could not be prosecuted.
Near the end of the Republic, the right to wear masks in daily life was severely restricted. By the 18th century, it was limited to three months starting at December 26 and ending on the last day of Carnival, Shrove Tuesday. Masks were also used in ceremonies, eg. when ambassadors arrived and at the five ritual grand banquets offered each year to Venetian dignitaries by the doge. This resembles the Masquerade Balls during Carnival nowadays. Venetian noblemen and noblewomen wore a costume called a bautta consisting of a white mask (volto), a tricorn hat (tricorno), a hood worn under the hat (zendale) and a tabarro, a loose-fitting cloak. There were subtle differences between noble and non-noble (cittadini or popolani), and the popolani were known to wear more colorful, fun masks to festivities like the bull runs."
What would you say to someone who is afraid that a bad actor will find their kids on Discord/Minecraft/4chan and encourage them to commit suicide or shoot up their school?
I would tell them to not give their children internet access at all until they thick they are ready. Does it sound realistic? I don't know. From technical point of view certainly realistic, a child doesn't have money / devices of his own
My theory is that age verification is just another way to push human verification. These large tech companies need a way to verify a user is a real person and not an AI bot. Both for displaying ads to real users and cutting down on spam.
Nobody would support a "give away my anonymity online so I can be shown an ad for Coca Cola" bill. But it's easier to sell a law to boomers and lawmakers if you use the disguise of "It's for the children ." As if any of these companies care about the well being of children. See Meta confirming their platforms affect the mental health of children and doing nothing about it. Also platforms like TikTok and YouTube optimizing their algorithms for stealing user's attention spans.
Indeed a lot of social media platforms are used by foreign powers to create discord. Human psychology is much more attentive to negative messages and this is too easy to weaponize. A solution against that would probably be world changing. It would have to preserve anonymity still of course.
"Don't let them win. Don't verify your age. Don't give up your identity. If you absolutely must, find one of the numerous age verification services and pay in Monero."
Better yet, how about - "call your representatives"?
Some nerds, for lack of a better term, think crypto and cryptography are the answers to every privacy problem. The only way to fix society and the law is by engaging with those things. Not sidestepping them with cryptography, an unscalable approach in any case.
I'm deeply pessimistic about the future. The only group competent enough to oppose identity verification has its head in the sand.
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.
So maybe cryptography is not that ridiculous, after all
Not every lawmaker is the same and there's more than one way to get a lawmaker's attention.
Get more people with you. Or convince a group that's previously established trust in your jurisdiction to join you in speaking out. Or find out what causes the policymakers do care about and think of a compelling way to frame arguments against age verification in those terms. Heck - if you can get a local government agency to officially back you up, all the better.
There's more to politics than just going to town hall meetings or sending emails or making phone calls!
Of course the system has a rather obvious remediation for that. You could also run for office or find a kindred spirit to support.
Trying to one to one with a representative or a council just sends them a signal to not care. You're one of n constituents. Showing up to the city council meeting without bringing an exponential curve of people with you over a short enough amount of time in support of your cause simply confirms to your representatives your cause is marginal.
If you are already cutting clips you might as well bite the bullet and run for office. Best of luck with your foray in democracy!
As cynical as it sounds given its frequent use in marketing and often inappropriate use in legal circles, securing what data is collected is important too.
Raise the bar for a data breach. It has value. Much more value if the law did a much better job of restricting what is collected in the first place and its dissemination.
It doesn't have to be, FWIW. We have all the technology we need to decouple attribution from identity. We can achieve efficient and mathematically perfect unlinkability.
Yet the powerful continue to insist on "papers, please" anonymity-rending personal authentication over anonymous authorization. It's not often that the villains of history so clearly identify themselves.
My bunch is that the people driving this stuff were unaware that age verification could be privacy-preserving and can't exactly back down now.
We do need a decentralized scalable permissionless platform for speech. For it to remain sustainable, there should be a slight cost in Monero to making each post on it, preloadable in batches.
That, and it defines children as perpetrators instead of victims. What right could a citizen ever claim in a world where even children are guilty?
There is a huge difference between protecting children and prosecuting/punishing children. Age verification can only be an implementation of the latter.
Look at W Social. The governments will team up with anyone, no matter how shady, as long as they promise to try to restrict free, unattributed speech. They'll team up with absolute sharks, as long as those sharks are gonna help sack and battle the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48584497
Fascism will lose in the long run. Right now the lobbyists
coordinate rather effectively, looking at how many democracies
already succumbed here. Well, we need direct democracy - the
system that we have right now with regard to democracies, is
undermined by corruption.
I think you can look at all things pessimistically, like this article does but at the end of the day we all agree that there are things online we don't want our kids seeing or engaging with and it takes regulators to push how we protect them from those online places. What other options to regulators have?
Age restriction has been around for longer than the internet itself, so its regulators applying that logic to the online world.
Whilst I think age verification has its issues, I don't see what other options they actually have. I'll also make the point that in Australia, our regulations explicitly require that Government ID verification CANNOT be the only way and that companies must adopt an additional approach.
Almost everything in technology used to protect us can be used against us by those want or choosing to do the wrong thing, does that mean we don't do anything?
Yep, there are all sorts of technically interesting ways in which age can be proven without identity being compromised, this link has a good exploration of anonymous credentials, for a start - https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymou...
And there are all sorts of reasons governments want to do this, up to and including the stated-on-the-surface reasons they give; a lot of people don't want their kids exposed to internet harms, be that extreme material or addictive services and doom-scrolling, and don't have the technical know-how to effect that themselves.
The insistence by so many in tech that there is no honest intent and that there is no way to practically provide age verification in a thoughtful, anonymous way is frustrating.
It's frustrating to see so many people engaged in effective conspiratorial thinking and it's frustrating because there are many good arguments to be had here, but they won't land if the 'anti' side doesn't address the real concerns that real people have about the safety and mental health of their kids.
Disliking data centers, illegal immigration, or taxes is not a crime in the United States, nor is posting inconvenient messages about politicians, nor is getting a little too rowdy in a group chat. And none of these things are likely to be made illegal any time soon.
I always find this form of argument in favor of privacy (which is valuable in its own right to be clear) so roundabout. If you’re concerned about the government impinging on your freedom of speech, then why not write an essay arguing for expansive freedom of speech protections? That seems like a much more direct solution to the problem presented in this essay.
I’m not exactly sure how an abuse of power occurring at a public event relates to the question of privacy or freedom of speech. The law did not allow the officer to arrest the man for the content of his speech so he retaliated by enforcing a different law unjustly. This kind of selective enforcement of the law can be a violation of federal law and the man likely has standing to sue.
For reference, a similar case of selective enforcement against an outspoken critic of the local government in Texas resulted in the critic receiving a settlement of $500k following an unjust arrest
> These "age verification" laws are - by design - identity attribution systems. They attribute digital identities (accounts) to physical identities (SSN, ID, etc..). This is government's ideal situation, the ability to quickly (automatically?) get identifying information about inconvenient people regardless if they're a criminal or not.
I'll call it out because your article doesn't, but does reference Australia. Here our eSafety commissioner has set the requirements such that the use of Government ID for verification must not be the only option.
There are other age verification technologies that do not assign identity but use other means as a method to identify age. For example, when our ban came into play I wasn't all of a sudden required to offer my ID.
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 spotting causal links between parts of a system, and people who are good at it exploit that.
“Age verification” isn't a problem in itself, the problem is how it's done. They could issue a physical id card with a cryptographic chip and do the age verification in a zero-knowledge fashion and it would be perfectly fine.
The problem is the lack of thinking about the solution and just handwaving “age verification” as a political posture, which is why we end up with half-baked systems.
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 opportunity to get things like speech controls or privacy violations through and the politicians mysteriously give up trying to roll it back no matter what the public pressure might be.
That being said, any expectation of thoughtfulness at all makes politics frustrating. Even basic things like why people keep making small random changes when most of these problems and solutions haven't changed in more than 2 millennia. And there is a pretty easy consensus to come to about what works. The repeated failures of authoritarianism to get to a good place are so consistent it is wild that people keep trying it.
Stupid things like brexit was put to a vote, but really important things such as age verification and mass surveillance are never put to any vote.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QFgcqB8-AxE
But Brexit was a vote, by the people. Yes, the pro-leave campaign lied to no ends, but people still made a choice on their own and the majority for leave was quite slim.
This is very different to age sniffing here. Age sniffing is not being queried via public votum - lobbyists push it through without any resistance. It's amazing how this works.
Well we teach people the health benefits of physical activity school but many don't continue with it.
Sorry, this is going to be a rant. :)
Admittedly it's a long time since I was in school, but when I was there the notion of teaching the benefits of physical activity was limited to being told to run about for some 'sport', and absolutely nothing about why that's a good idea. Everyone was expected to do the same thing with no consideration for ability, disability, or motivation. Kids were punished with detentions for refusing to endure painful exercise that they couldn't do as well as their more capable peers.
The very obvious second order effect of poor physical education is fat unmotivated adults who don't exercise. Maybe educators need some systems thinking training too.
It’s been 25 years since I was in school and this was my experience. Unsure if it’s changed…
Ironically when I was in high school I was fat and hated pe but biked about 20 minutes to school every day. Now in middle age I still bike everywhere and am in better shape than most of my peers..
Turns out I just really really hate running.
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 sorts of ways of doing this.
Social media age verification is like none of those - social media is the modern public square and age verification is asking everybody to show their papers before participating in free speech in the public. It will have a chilling effect on free speech and will be a tool for authoritarian control
A poor analogy.
The public square has never been properly anonymous. If you start saying things which contravene laws or the rights of others, the police have been able to capture you and unmask your identity, if concealed.
So the solution for criminals in the public is for everybody to show their papers walking into a public square? It is not, we have requirements for police process like warrants and a process for determining the requirements for urgent conditions of arrest.
People publish entire books anonymously.
Your local library has age and ID requirements.
Your local 'town square' has 'some rules'.
Parents are entirely able to overcome any of this if they so choose - including feeding their kids alcohol, guns etc. - and so the freedom does materially exist.
Social Media isn't a place for free expression - it's mostly toxic - like exposing your children to the most vile, inauthentic people.
The more genteel places, frankly, won't have much in the way of age restrictions.
Entire nations are banning social media for kids because it's just not healthy - the teachers want it, the parents want it, the data seems to support it.
I think you're right to be (very concerned) but this is a necessary discussion. As a teacher.
My local librarian did not restrict my books to the kids section when I was a kid. Also librarians have fought civil legal battles to keep reading activities anonymous. Libraries are unlike the restrictions and risks of the proposed legislation being discussed for social media
Was there ever a public square where children could participate anonymously among adults? (I’m imagining three Dickensian urchins in a trench coat giving a speech in Hyde Park.)
Social media as it has become now is a shitshow where a minority of angry and/or disingenuous posters dominate discourse.
Twitter (X) was never the public square, and now it's little more than a playground for propagandists. The rest of us do well to ignore it, and it seems that even the 'legacy' media are starting to realise the days of breathlessly reporting on tweet-storms weren't great for anyone.
In a recent survey of under sixteen year olds in a place where an under sixteen social media ban exists asked how many of them used social media found that 80% were still using it. Do you actually need a login to consume social media? The answer to that is no. You can doom scroll all you want on sites like Reddit with no account whatsoever.
Almost anything can be a slippery slope to almost anything. We'd never get anything done.
Systems thinking?
Dude, more that 2 thirds of black kids can barely read [1]
[1] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/groups/?gra...
That page says most kids can barely read. Are you a kid?
> 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.
But why would we do that?
If we taught people how to think, they wouldn't sit their toddlers down in front an iPad for 8+ hours a day to entertain (read: keep them occupied and quiet) them with YouTube videos, sign them up for a Facebook account before they could wipe their own butts, etc.
The sad irony of this age verification thing is that if we had a decent society and parents with common sense, age verification wouldn't even be a topic.
Parents with common sense comes from teaching children common sense. You have to fix the child education issue first, a lot of adults are too far gone to educate at this point.
How can you fix the child education problem without fixing the parent education? School is but a few hours a day, and kids spend more time with parents and learn from them. I was lucky that my parents liked to read and encouraged me to read, but my friends didn't have the same exposure that I did and never liked to read books.
What? School is basically the same hours as a full time job. How is it but a few hours a day? Did you time travel from the 1800s?
Indeed, and then after school care because both parents are still working until 6 pm, quietly eat dinner, watch cocomelon, and then to bed. Horror.
I don't get why you would start there. Their parents probably didn't have youtube or ipads and they and/or their parents are the ones pushing it.
Uhh imagine you know about countries other than the US that implement age verification. Like the UK, Brazil, Australia, France, Spain, Italy and dozens of other countries with vastly different educational systems. Then perhaps you could begin to understand the magnitude of your own ignorance of actual power and political ideology. Instead of embarrassingly trying to reason yourself a political education from first principle.
Uh dumb law I don't like. Cause people dumb. If people not dumb, no dumb law. Uhh I am very smart. "Systems thinking" oh fucking hell stfu
Age verification is just one part of this crackdown.
Device attestation is another - making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system and apps linked to your ID.
AI mass surveillance is another. The powerful are just ceasing opportunities to accumulate power and capital, seeing that right now it is not good enough for them.
> making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system
Will be interesting to see if this leads to more Linux systems being deployed. Then again with systemd supporting age sniffing (https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954), evading this becomes harder and harder.
It gives a new spin to:
> Everything you say CAN and WILL be used against you.
Especially when what you said has already been recorded and tied to your identity before you faced the authorities.
Edit: from last week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632269
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.
And if you say you don't have any, they'll assume you're lying and deny you.
It's good that I don't have any reason to go to the US.
Cory Doctorow had a very profound talk about it very long time ago (10+years).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
As the internet become the place where people do a lot of things, no government (and especially no security services) will be able to keep themselves from trying to control it or at least monitor it. And with the new LLM features they can automatically do much more than before.
Human nature is a constant and when the government sees an easy way to enforce something, many more bureaucrats will try to do it.
I don't like age verification. However I'm not concerned about it.
The internet needs new spaces that are more decentralized and less in bed with governments.
We already lost our freedom when we agreed to move from IRC to Discord, from phpBB to Reddit, etc.
The teenagers who are blocked from mainstream social media will deliver us new free online spaces that are better than what they're blocked from.
What happens when federal agents kick down your front door because you ran a free range mom and pop BBS that did not comply with latest ID verification requirements?
Big companies will benefit the most from these regulations. It's just good ol regulatory capture. They will have the most resources to comply with the laws. They have a captive audience that will be more willing to give up their personal info when asked — keep in mind Facebook and instagram is widely used for business. It is your small time forum admin who would rather shut down his hobbyist online community that never made him any money anyway than to ask for IDs. We have already seen stories of websites shutting down due to existing UK regulations. Curiously, all small, personal operations, not the kind of corporate social media they tell you the laws are meant to target.
If you violate memory protection you get a segfault, consistently. That isn't how the law works. Federal agents only kick down your door if they want to - which in this case probably means your forum users disparaged ICE or Trump.
It seems unlikely that running a website without age verification will be illegal across the entire planet.
It seemed unlikely to me that cookie banners would be a thing across the whole internet if nothing else because no website operators would put them in. How wrong was I.
All they need to do is popularize the idea of "if your website doesn't do X, it'll place lower on google" and people will do anything.
My websites still don't have cookie banners and the police still hasn't come to my house. And the websites uses cookies like every other website always did.
Ironically 99% of them don’t meet legal requirements. They serve no purpose.
Cookie banners aren't across the whole internet.
You really only need the banners if you're doing privacy-impinging things.
Much like the GDPR notices that a small industry of 'compliance' product companies sold seemingly to everyone as necessary, they aren't if you're only using cookies for functional reasons and not tracking people. Unfortunately that leads to lower margins for advertisers and we can't have that.
I mean, social networks already made genocide happen. They they were instrumental in the curren winning march of fascism - in USA, in EU in Asia.
That’s a very dramatic take - and I dare say a counter-factual one too.
Which actual genocide would you be talking about?
I really don’t think people should water out words like that over what is essentially tiny political differences.
Myanmar?
Such spaces will never scale if there's widespread legal prohibitions.
It is foolish to assume we can innovate our way around the law as opposed to talking with lawmakers to oppose the law before it gets on the books.
That sounds like mistaken optimism due to a mistaken interpretation of the invisible hand.
Mandating age verification and the inevitable implementation requirements are bad for freedom.
Behaviour changes and innovations will mitigate some of the negatives, but bad things are bad.
What we need is more personal spaces. Less feeds, more small group chats with people you actually know. I'm totally fine with destroying Reddit/Twitter/etc
Nope, they just break the law:
https://www.bmj.com/content/393/bmj-2026-363695
> Conclusions: Despite the intent of the Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024 to delay access to social media platforms and reduce the potential for online harms, little evidence was found of immediate substantive reductions in reported social media use by adolescents under 16 years.
We are training teenagers that laws are stupid and can be circumvented easily and without consequences. As well as continuing to subject them to the harms of social media, only now without any means of monitoring them or holding the social media companies responsible.
They already have started right ? Like example - bluesky (bsky.social)
This is like saying you're not concerned about war because people will notice war is bad and stop doing it. It's not a smart position to hold that bad things are good because they may bring on reversals.
You do realize the next step is ISP-level tagging of traffic? And VPNs are already being outlawed in much of the western world.
Unless you expect the teenagers to run underground mesh radio networks and risk FCC's hammer (real jailtime), it's just wishful thinking.
I don’t expect teenagers to do anything but largely be harmed by the internet.
This is a reminder to curate and prune all your past social media contribution, because when this goes thru, you KNOW they will apply it retroactively. You'd loathe to lose your cushy job over a moment of lucid honesty back in 2011.
It's already too late for that but you can at least, by deleting now, reduce the chances they see it.
I haven’t had any social media accounts since I gave it up for Lent in 2018 and I’m increasingly starting to wonder if that’s a liability for me because there’s no social graph that whatever agency would otherwise use to, idk, confirm I’m not a threat or something. The lack of a digital footprint like that may look weird.
I've been posting under my real name for over 20 years because this was always going to be the case. Using my real name is a constant reminder to not to post things I might later regret.
Right now, our identity is kinda tied to a string of letter (password). This password can technically be passed around, created and destroyed at will. Tomorrow, our identity is going to be tied to you as a person. So messages will be signed by YOU as a person.
You're right. Many countries use the protection of minors as an excuse, but in reality, they just want to strengthen the regulation of speech.
We should actually protect minors, then they won't be able to use it as an excuse. Right now it works as an excuse because minors are being harmed by the unrestricted internet, mostly by social media.
Maybe it should be possible for a parent to set a child age in a device.
Everyone else can stay anonymous.
I look forward to hearing why that won't work and what problems it will cause.
You're describing California AB1043 which passed a few months ago and is now the law in California. We all got very angry about it when it passed.
How does the parent prove they are the parent. All you need is to think about the next step, come on now.
…upon device purchase? Very obviously?
The verification is not done per device but per usage session.
This is incorrect, and you have failed to read my mind on how it works. Extremely weird attempt, but I applaud the bravado anyways.
Why are you telling someone else how their hypothetical implementation works?
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.
Automated fines, like traffic radar control for free speech, will also become a norm as they won't be able to put everyone in jail. But I'm not sure the liberal anarcho-tyranny power will be indefinitely immutable. Speech control might be one their last try to keep control in the west. They will crumble like soviet union.
They have this in Germany for copyright. If you torrent, you automatically get a fine letter in your email. If you don't pay, you get a court summons in the post. If you take it to court, you will lose that case and also have to pay court fees.
It's funny how this played out in different countries.
In Australia there is no chance of anything happening, because the courts ruled that payouts were limited to provable incurred losses. You pirated a movie? The maximum awarded at the end of a court case is going to be about $20, and as you can't buy very much lawyer-time for $20, it's never taken to court and the copyright-holders have effectively stopped pursuing people here.
Imagine a machine mounted on the wall that prints you a ticket every time you swear
"The Carnival in Venice was first documented in 1296, with a proclamation by the Venetian Senate announcing a public festival the day before the start of Lent. Unquestionably one of the most well-known Carnival festivities in the world, the Carnival of Venice is rife with mystery, adventure, and conspiracy. The day served to break down barriers between people of different economic standings and religious beliefs. During the Renaissance, masked comic performers performed in Venice's piazzas."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_in_Italy#Venice
"The tradition of wearing masks seems to stem from the 13th century. During the ages the Venetians disguised themselves with mask whenever they thought necessary. It allowed them to escape from the rigid rules of the class hierarchy. All classes could mingle, men could be women, women could be men. It also led to unwanted behaviour, from throwing eggs filled with ink to all imaginable kinds of vulgarities. Masks made people unrecognisable, so they could not be prosecuted.
Near the end of the Republic, the right to wear masks in daily life was severely restricted. By the 18th century, it was limited to three months starting at December 26 and ending on the last day of Carnival, Shrove Tuesday. Masks were also used in ceremonies, eg. when ambassadors arrived and at the five ritual grand banquets offered each year to Venetian dignitaries by the doge. This resembles the Masquerade Balls during Carnival nowadays. Venetian noblemen and noblewomen wore a costume called a bautta consisting of a white mask (volto), a tricorn hat (tricorno), a hood worn under the hat (zendale) and a tabarro, a loose-fitting cloak. There were subtle differences between noble and non-noble (cittadini or popolani), and the popolani were known to wear more colorful, fun masks to festivities like the bull runs."
https://www.carnival-in-venice.eu/venetian-carnival-masks.ht...
Mask in real life then, mask in social internet now. Meaning stays the same. I like this analogy.
What would you say to someone who is afraid that a bad actor will find their kids on Discord/Minecraft/4chan and encourage them to commit suicide or shoot up their school?
I would tell them to not give their children internet access at all until they thick they are ready. Does it sound realistic? I don't know. From technical point of view certainly realistic, a child doesn't have money / devices of his own
My theory is that age verification is just another way to push human verification. These large tech companies need a way to verify a user is a real person and not an AI bot. Both for displaying ads to real users and cutting down on spam.
Nobody would support a "give away my anonymity online so I can be shown an ad for Coca Cola" bill. But it's easier to sell a law to boomers and lawmakers if you use the disguise of "It's for the children ." As if any of these companies care about the well being of children. See Meta confirming their platforms affect the mental health of children and doing nothing about it. Also platforms like TikTok and YouTube optimizing their algorithms for stealing user's attention spans.
The ad companies I think would want the opposite
If they cannot distinguish real people from bots they can just charge more for more ads shown !
Indeed a lot of social media platforms are used by foreign powers to create discord. Human psychology is much more attentive to negative messages and this is too easy to weaponize. A solution against that would probably be world changing. It would have to preserve anonymity still of course.
many platform companies probably do not want to verify that a user is real, except in certain niche cases, as bots help them pump their numbers.
That's why recaptcha is now doing human verification via mobile phone QR scan
"Don't let them win. Don't verify your age. Don't give up your identity. If you absolutely must, find one of the numerous age verification services and pay in Monero."
Better yet, how about - "call your representatives"?
Some nerds, for lack of a better term, think crypto and cryptography are the answers to every privacy problem. The only way to fix society and the law is by engaging with those things. Not sidestepping them with cryptography, an unscalable approach in any case.
I'm deeply pessimistic about the future. The only group competent enough to oppose identity verification has its head in the sand.
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.
So maybe cryptography is not that ridiculous, after all
Not every lawmaker is the same and there's more than one way to get a lawmaker's attention.
Get more people with you. Or convince a group that's previously established trust in your jurisdiction to join you in speaking out. Or find out what causes the policymakers do care about and think of a compelling way to frame arguments against age verification in those terms. Heck - if you can get a local government agency to officially back you up, all the better.
There's more to politics than just going to town hall meetings or sending emails or making phone calls!
Of course the system has a rather obvious remediation for that. You could also run for office or find a kindred spirit to support.
Trying to one to one with a representative or a council just sends them a signal to not care. You're one of n constituents. Showing up to the city council meeting without bringing an exponential curve of people with you over a short enough amount of time in support of your cause simply confirms to your representatives your cause is marginal.
If you are already cutting clips you might as well bite the bullet and run for office. Best of luck with your foray in democracy!
> Calling your representative is the best way to realise that they don't give a fuck
That just means not enough people did it.
> So maybe cryptography is not that ridiculous, after all
Until they make that illegal. What'll you do then?
It. Doesn't. Scale.
Law alone cannot fix it. Tech alone cannot fix it.
If we wish to preserve the values we grew up with, we need both.
Law can fix 90% of it. Tech can fix 10%.
As cynical as it sounds given its frequent use in marketing and often inappropriate use in legal circles, securing what data is collected is important too.
Raise the bar for a data breach. It has value. Much more value if the law did a much better job of restricting what is collected in the first place and its dissemination.
It doesn't have to be, FWIW. We have all the technology we need to decouple attribution from identity. We can achieve efficient and mathematically perfect unlinkability.
Yet the powerful continue to insist on "papers, please" anonymity-rending personal authentication over anonymous authorization. It's not often that the villains of history so clearly identify themselves.
My bunch is that the people driving this stuff were unaware that age verification could be privacy-preserving and can't exactly back down now.
The author made an assertive statement without any hint of rhetoric, reasoning, historical parallel, evidence, legislative example etc.
Calls to mind a quote attributed to Cardinal Richelieu, 16th century Secretary of State for France:
‘If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him”
We do need a decentralized scalable permissionless platform for speech. For it to remain sustainable, there should be a slight cost in Monero to making each post on it, preloadable in batches.
Have one. Called the internet.
That, and it defines children as perpetrators instead of victims. What right could a citizen ever claim in a world where even children are guilty?
There is a huge difference between protecting children and prosecuting/punishing children. Age verification can only be an implementation of the latter.
Look at W Social. The governments will team up with anyone, no matter how shady, as long as they promise to try to restrict free, unattributed speech. They'll team up with absolute sharks, as long as those sharks are gonna help sack and battle the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48584497
What are you talking about. They already have automated attribution of speech.
Fascism will lose in the long run. Right now the lobbyists coordinate rather effectively, looking at how many democracies already succumbed here. Well, we need direct democracy - the system that we have right now with regard to democracies, is undermined by corruption.
What makes you think that age verification on the internet wouldn't be wildly popular with the demos?
I think you can look at all things pessimistically, like this article does but at the end of the day we all agree that there are things online we don't want our kids seeing or engaging with and it takes regulators to push how we protect them from those online places. What other options to regulators have?
Age restriction has been around for longer than the internet itself, so its regulators applying that logic to the online world.
Whilst I think age verification has its issues, I don't see what other options they actually have. I'll also make the point that in Australia, our regulations explicitly require that Government ID verification CANNOT be the only way and that companies must adopt an additional approach.
Almost everything in technology used to protect us can be used against us by those want or choosing to do the wrong thing, does that mean we don't do anything?
I like the California law where the device owner sets the parental controls and apps have to obey them or get fined.
Yep, there are all sorts of technically interesting ways in which age can be proven without identity being compromised, this link has a good exploration of anonymous credentials, for a start - https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymou...
And there are all sorts of reasons governments want to do this, up to and including the stated-on-the-surface reasons they give; a lot of people don't want their kids exposed to internet harms, be that extreme material or addictive services and doom-scrolling, and don't have the technical know-how to effect that themselves.
The insistence by so many in tech that there is no honest intent and that there is no way to practically provide age verification in a thoughtful, anonymous way is frustrating.
It's frustrating to see so many people engaged in effective conspiratorial thinking and it's frustrating because there are many good arguments to be had here, but they won't land if the 'anti' side doesn't address the real concerns that real people have about the safety and mental health of their kids.
Disliking data centers, illegal immigration, or taxes is not a crime in the United States, nor is posting inconvenient messages about politicians, nor is getting a little too rowdy in a group chat. And none of these things are likely to be made illegal any time soon.
I always find this form of argument in favor of privacy (which is valuable in its own right to be clear) so roundabout. If you’re concerned about the government impinging on your freedom of speech, then why not write an essay arguing for expansive freedom of speech protections? That seems like a much more direct solution to the problem presented in this essay.
farmer arrested over datacenter debate: https://www.gadgetreview.com/arrest-him-the-moment-police-ha...
I’m not exactly sure how an abuse of power occurring at a public event relates to the question of privacy or freedom of speech. The law did not allow the officer to arrest the man for the content of his speech so he retaliated by enforcing a different law unjustly. This kind of selective enforcement of the law can be a violation of federal law and the man likely has standing to sue.
For reference, a similar case of selective enforcement against an outspoken critic of the local government in Texas resulted in the critic receiving a settlement of $500k following an unjust arrest
https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2025/10/15/i-feel-like-i-can...
it's an example of the government silencing people for speech
No, it's an example of someone being told to leave, not doing so, and then being arrested for trespassing.
> These "age verification" laws are - by design - identity attribution systems. They attribute digital identities (accounts) to physical identities (SSN, ID, etc..). This is government's ideal situation, the ability to quickly (automatically?) get identifying information about inconvenient people regardless if they're a criminal or not.
I'll call it out because your article doesn't, but does reference Australia. Here our eSafety commissioner has set the requirements such that the use of Government ID for verification must not be the only option.
There are other age verification technologies that do not assign identity but use other means as a method to identify age. For example, when our ban came into play I wasn't all of a sudden required to offer my ID.