The GOP. This is part of Project 2025. They want to outlaw porn.
> Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should
be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed
as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that
facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
A lot of it would go away if they just stopped consuming it. They consume it at least as much as anybody else. The only difference is the self loathing and belief that they need to be - and are qualified to be - the moral police.
Because in their philosophy sex serves a purpose (procreation and the deepening of the marital union).
Anything that doesn’t support those two aims (contraception, abortion, gay marriage, pornography etc.) is therefore immoral but there’s nothing wrong with sex in its ‘proper’ context.
Their philosophy is extremely inconsistent. In reality it's emotionally driven. Not sure what specific emotions cause one to think sex is wrong except for reproduction, but a lot of the people who push this sort of thing turn out to be closeted gay homophobes.
I’m not supporting it, but how is it inconsistent?
I can speak more to the Catholic view than the evangelical, but if you accept the initial premise that there is a creator God then the rest follows fairly naturally (you can look the ‘the theology of the body’ if you want to read more)
Kids want it themselves. All popular people want it too. Imagine if we don't do this for the kids? Either this or kids will get hurt. All my friends want it too. One eastern country didn't protect their kids and look where it's at. This is the only way to save kids and we need to act fast! You should rather be against child labor than this.
"kids" is just another word for "people" by the way - everyone is a kid, and everyone is an adult, except for people who die very young. We should not make the mistake of thinking of them as two separate independent categories of people.
They lobby for because then they can collect biometrics from kids and then reject them. So they don't serve underage kids , no fines but they do get data.
They will collect it from everyone to prove your age.
The question only that is it worth the gamble by Meta, as in how many people would rather leave the sites (from Whatsapp to Insta to Facebook) than give them their ID
Meta has a long history of breaking the law. I have no doubts Meta will have access to the personal details once you've "verified your age". They'll know WHO you are, as accurately as possible. Can you imagine how much that it worth to Meta, history's largest harvester of personal data? A whole lot more than $2B.
Now, based on their ruthless disregard for the law, do you think they're just going to use it to sell your ads?
Politicians who want to track everyone all the time.
The rare few politicians who want it to be easier to raise healthy children.
Tech CEOs who don't want to be liable for harming children's development.
Tech CEOs who want to track everyone all the time.
The rare few tech CEOs who want to improve the world (by not harming children's development) and whose business model doesn't require it or who compete with one that does (e.g. operators of edutainment websites if those even still exist).
App coders who don't want to train a neural network to check IDs themselves.
Wouldn't it be great if we could just legislate fixes for everything? /s
This seems to be a result of what people call the uniparty system, but that's not really an accurate term:
This actually embodies what the establishment on both sides of the aisle want: CONTROL
They want this for many different reasons: they have an unbridled lust for power, or perhaps they are willing to burn down fair elections for the good of all mankind, but actually let's be more generous!!
Most likely because they are afraid, unjustly or not:
* of real terrorists that they think, sometimes correctly, are using E2EE
* of children's immature minds having neural pathways being changed by things they're not quite ready for, or perhaps becoming addicted to the very real and powerful nature of porn)
* or, you know, whatever! Maybe they're parents and want to protect their kids and everyone else's kids.
Really, why doesn't actually matter too much.
The fact is that they just don't understand the technology and the FUNDAMENTAL TRADE-OFF BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND FREEDOM, that tension between privacy/human rights/dignity and technological "bad things" that are always in the news.
They get told one simple thing by lobbyists or even well-meaning constituents, and then they form their worldview around it. And THEN they write legislation (or, more likely, get handed ready-made legislation by lobbyists with an axe to grind)
We, the knowledgeable in this area (regardless of our party persuasion -- I'll work on my people, you work on yours!) should start to educate our non-technical legislators. We have to be the trusted voice of reason when it comes to tech, because they're hearing a lot of things from a lot of different voices.
How? By getting involved. Get involved at the LOCAL level, because THOSE people are the ones that serve as the feedramp for national or international politics. After 20 years, your education might percolate upwards to the people who are actually writing new laws. You don't need to be a "crazy" sounding activist or conspiracy theorist: in fact, that works against you (usually). Just be an adult, try to understand what they're trying to accomplish, and explain how they can accomplish it or that it can't be done that way for specific and reasonable reasons.
These are all just my opinions as I see increasing amounts of this sort of legislation being pushed by Meta and other actors. This comment also has a very US-centric bias, so please correct me if you're in another country where things work differently.
EDIT: about half to two thirds of the responders didn't catch "I'm not a fan of these proposed solutions." I am not saying I like these solutions. I am trying to explain why they have support among the general public. Many of these responses are the usual "shoot the messenger" response you get online when you point out what the "other side" thinks and why they think it even if you don't necessarily agree. On this issue I think there's a need, but I have yet to see a good proposal to address it.
Once again, the response in places like this pretends everyone is an upper middle class or above tech-savvy nerd.
I'm not a fan of these proposed solutions, which do invade privacy and remove freedom, but the problems are real. These solutions are being pushed because our industry is doing nothing to police itself or provide parents with the tools they need.
In many cases we are doing less than nothing, because the profit motive is to prevent parents from having this control. "Social" media, gambling-adjacent gaming, and other addictionware, which is a huge profit center for our industry, wants to addict kids early. Gotta get those cigarettes into their hands, which means preventing parents from stopping it.
Right now if you are not a tech-savvy parent your choices are: (1) deny children access to devices or severely limit that access, or (2) allow your kids to be raised by super-addictive infinite scroll brain rot feeds, brainwashed by propaganda and influencer bullshit, and placed on an on-ramp to future gambling addiction via mobile games with engineered "compulsion loops."
Now imagine you are a non-tech-savvy household with two parents who work. You can't really limit access since you can't supervise it enough, so your choice is now binary: no access, kids raised by brain rot and propaganda. Pick one. You have no control, no ability to whitelist, because not only do you not have time to deal with this but the tools often cost money and are imperfect and ineffective.
Then you catch your 11 year old son watching extreme fetish porn that he lacks the maturity to contextualize, or hear him spouting off Nazi ideology or talking about how he's an "alpha male" and women should be his slaves. Or your daughter becomes anorexic by following influencers. Or you have a child who is questioning their sexual orientation or identity and is targeted by an online bullying ring. These are the commonplace examples. There's a lot of much worse shit too, like sextortion of kids. Search for "764."
That's why this push exists. It's not a conspiracy. It's because we -- our industry -- is an amoral shitshow that engineers addiction and refuses to police itself or provide parents with good tools to do so.
I'd also like to note that for the non-tech-savvy privacy is dead and has been dead for over ten years at least. If you are not tech-savvy your devices are recording everything about you and transmitting it to two dozen ad networks and data brokers.
Only nerds have privacy today and only if they invest the time to police their tech environment. If you're not a nerd there's nothing to lose. You already lost it long ago. We -- our industry -- took it away.
You are missing half of the story. This is not “caring legislators punishing big bad tech”. This IS big bad tech. Meta has spent $2B lobbying for this. More than wanting to get kids addicted, Big Tech and the intelligence community wants perfect observability into online activities.
This is a win/win for big tech. If they don’t get age verification, they can keep getting kids addicted to propaganda and consumerism. If they do get age verification, they get to see what everyone in the world thinks and is interested in, all linked to government ID.
Edit: the one outcome big tech does not want is anonymous age verification. This is technologically extremely possible, but that would be a lose/lose for big tech because they would lose kid (aka future consuming adult) addiction AND lose perfect tracking linked to government IDs.
I'm telling you why ordinary people support this, and I can tell you they overwhelmingly do... at least those with children.
I'm also aware of what you're talking about. That's called regulatory capture. They know this kind of regulation is coming and want to make sure they're the ones writing it so they can use it to entrench their oligopolies.
My point is that something like this will happen unless we find an alternative. The longer it goes on, the worse the backlash will be.
There is no technological fix for the issue you raise. The issue being parents not wanting to bother raising their kids, and thus giving the state and corporations control over what they can and can’t do. That’s a cultural issue. No idea how to solve it.
Rich parents can have nannies, expensive software, or a parent who stays home from work. Poorer parents do not have time or energy to police this stuff or supervise their kids. They're too busy putting food on the table and paying rent or a mortgage.
Absolutely, it's the system failing and predatory actors seeing a crisis they can exploit.
I was at the laundromat and a woman with kids was complaining across the room about how she only had $700.00 in her account. Note, she had a car, wasn't homeless, but this is actual reality for a huge number of people in the US.
For me that would be a crisis. I always want to have at least a few thousands and then if something unexpected happens, that other people will go into a small debt for, I will just be able to spend the money and not go into debt. And it's not like it's hard to save up a few thousand dollars in a time frame of years, so I don't understand people who don't.
I think it may be that people grew up accustomed to having everything constantly taken away from them, so they learn not to save stuff.
> And it's not like it's hard to save up a few thousand dollars in a time frame of years, so I don't understand people who don't.
Seeing this as some sort of moral failing isn't the right way to look at it. It's possible that that this person could have done that, but it's also they they really may not have been able to, low wages, bad environment, health issues, all of these compound until "it's not hard to just" is a gross way to interpret their situation.
Rich parents can not prevent their children from accessing pornography and social media on the internet, and will also not be able to do so after this legislation.
Pornography is often delivered by people who don't care about US legislation, and social media is carefully left undefined, intentionally confounded with algorithms used to surface content (which people actually do object to at least the opaqueness of.)
I, like most, don't think that the totalitarianism is an unfortunate side-effect of the attempt to protect children online. I think legislation, and legislation like this, will only be successful in increasing surveillance and public manipulation, and that it will have virtually no effect on childrens' consumption of pornography and social media. If you really wanted to protect children, there's better legislation to write and technical solutions to implement.
When I was 14 I could just type porn.com into the address bar to see porn. (I remember they had one of those fake customer testimonials - saying basically "wow! this site is so awesome because porn.com is the best address for a porn site" which was very funny. Besides that it was nothing, so next time I googled the word porn).
Should it be that easy or should there be some road blocks? Should I have been able to go into a store at 14 and buy a beer?
> I'm telling you why ordinary people support this, and I can tell you they overwhelmingly do
This is a claim without backing, and if there were backing to be had, it would constantly be thrown in people's faces by the various administrations that suddenly decided this was a problem that had to be stopped now by any means necessary.
They do not need any public support to implement this, they need opposition to sleep for 5 minutes. It is being advanced by the most unpopular governments in the entire histories of the countries that it is being introduced in.
Your children had access to porn 30 years ago, they will have access to porn after this. There is no actual impetus behind any legal blocking of gambling mechanics in games targeted at children, because they are unbelievably profitable (unlike children as a market for pornography.)
I'm telling you that if you fight invisible enemies, like these campaigners for online age verification (who don't exist), you are fighting a senseless battle.
I'm not dismissing the scenario and your illustration of the mindset of these fictional hoards - if I were concocting a biography and argument for age verification activists, I would come up with the same dynamics and resentments. But it's not real. There are no million-mom marches in DC for age verification on the internet, and certainly not ones so advanced that they've decided that no other method will work: that device/OS/browser level verification of identity is the only way from keeping little Kip from accessing Cambridge Analytics's Russian-Chinese hardcore trans pornography.
They don't exist. Or rather, the bulk of them are Keynesian Beauty Contest judges who have concocted a public opinion that they've followed like lemmings, and only update their vision of public opinion based on new claims from politicians and their PR departments currently pushing the legislation. They don't really believe that age verification is a good solution, but they understand why most people do. I claim that the vast majority of people don't. I'm not even sure I could find a single person to support it in real life if given a 2 minute speech about the obvious and basic privacy and civil liberties implications of such a move, and the many alternative ways to attack the same issue. And governments are prioritizing it, with no hint at all that they will see a reward at the polls. In fact, almost all of the people who are pushing it are unpopular lame ducks who have no ability or no reasonable chance to serve again. They're lining up their next jobs and securing their fortunes.
It's not the only way. The California way is much better. If we implemented that ten years ago there would be no excuse for ID verification now. But we didn't do that, did we? Instead we pushed for unlimited social media access for everybody, destroying an entire generation and now we're surprised when the chickens come home to roost?
Enough with this "but they can work around it" argument, too. Kids can get adults to buy cigarettes for them, we still ban them from buying cigarettes because it's a very useful roadblock.
Big Tech, most of all, wants a liability shield for the people it turns into school shooters. Because if Big Tech had to pay for the consequences of its algorithms it would be bankrupt.
This is just the latest incarnation. They’ve already used the same tactic successfully to remove other freedoms not related to tech. Just compare the stories from older people about their childhood experiences (when they’re being completely open and honest) with the way children are raised now. My own parents did things that would get them on a terrorist watch list nowadays like building explosives and home made mortars or even just walking through town with a shotgun to go down to the creek for duck hunting at the ripe old age of 13 (with no adult supervision).
Personally I find everything you listed here safer than letting a kid have unfiltered unlimited access to TikTok.
You know a gun or a bomb is dangerous, so you'll probably be careful with it. The gun and the bomb are not engineered on purpose to hook you by exploiting your dopamine pathways and get you to shoot yourself or blow yourself up.
EDIT: I'm being a little hyperbolic here, but I'm also talking about aggregate harm and intent to harm. I'm really being hyperbolic to bash what I consider to be the key villain in this story: addiction engineering, a.k.a. "maximizing engagement." This is the root of all evil.
> Personally I find everything you listed here safer than letting a kid have unfiltered unlimited access to TikTok.
This sounds like you have a media addiction. This is the kind of extreme hyperbole that we spent a year or two saturated with when a bunch of states and a bunch of billionaires decided that American people were saying too much on Tiktok about Israel, and something something China evil.
A lot of people including a lot of kids do have a media addiction. Should we do something about it? Remember that today's kids will be your caretakers when you're 80.
> Or you have a child who is questioning their sexual orientation or identity and is targeted by an online bullying ring.
It is far more common for that child to be targeted by parents, and maybe by people they know in person, especially because of the lousy social environment their parents have pushed them into, and therefore to have limited offline support systems, and you are now trying to take away all they do have.
that much is true, but there are also online bullying rings. Note that this happens on social media but the opposite - information about being trans - is not only on social media.
The logical conclusion is to shutdown Meta, Youtube, TikTok, Twitter to name the biggest offenders. And why on earth would algorithmic manipulation, brain washing and exploitation of adults be allowed via the same platforms?
I am not disagreeing with you, but the conversation to be had is far, far wider than "think of the children!". Part of any deal would have to be: privacy of citizens is not a business model. But then you are facing the full might of Corp Inc, including their legislative powers.
This kind of restrictions expects account control to work. For example, parent's account & separate child account on a device. For the same reasons you describe, it will be ineffective: not tech-savvy. Children will use their parent's/grandma's account on TV and phone, one that has long been verified as "adult" despite the Youtube recommendations consisting of 6-13yo content.
If there were an organic push by parents, they would be happy to buy and promote products today, without waiting for legislation to catch up. Where are these local parental control products?
Speaking of social media and Youtubes of the world, why can't I, as account owner/parent, totally blacklist some "recommendations"?
Age verification is not a fit tool for content filtering. Users want the latter, but get switcheroo'd into the former.
I assume ulterior motives for politicians. It's their PR campaigns that do make it seem like it will solve all children's issues, if only we sacrifice a little privacy for their control. One thing that's never mentioned is increased vulnerability when (inevitably) personal data (of children) leaks.
HN is a venture capital place, we are the ones financially benefiting from destroying children's minds so of course we don't want them to put a stop to it.
Maybe. I see a lot of canned responses to privacy, freedom of speech, "it's not really about protecting children," etc. That might all be true but it doesnt address the problems that people have with the current state of things.
I've said it in other threads but the worst thing you can do is tell people their problems aren't real.
Yeah but don't expect much sympathy on a forum full of uber rich folks whose very income is directly tied to the same revenue streams you mention.
I love freedom as a general principle, but internet 2026 is a undefendable cesspool of amorality, scams and worse. We are not in the 90s or early 00s anymore, and never will be again that era is gone.
No, they won’t. The schools have internet but they also often don’t even allow phones these days. And those networks block almost everything.
They might still get some content downstream of other kids. However, I doubt a “look at this tiktok” here and there has any harmful effects.
What’s harmful is excessive social media use, especially unmonitored. So, either monitor your kid or do not give them access. It’s perfectly fine to have a family computer in the living room if you’re worried about little Timmy looking up “boobies”. Problem solved, and I saved you some money.
I think a lot of parents do basically nothing and then are unhappy with the results. Yes, if you don’t try, you won’t get your desired result. But you can try stuff out, and you can always pivot if you feel it becomes inconvenient. The reality is we don’t need these complex technological solutions. There are simple, brain-dead solutions like “don’t give your kid a phone for hours on end” or “give your kid a flip phone”.
Just put the age verification in the browser already.
Then introduce some new headers the browser sends to servers with some proof that the user was verified and the browser would need a response (like CORS) for it to work.
Parents would have a better chance at fighting back. Both with the time gained to communicate their disapproval, and a better relationship with their kids to be more likely to disapprove of it.
Coordinated opposition campaigns against misinformed and dangerous legislation has been effective in stopping bad laws [1]. After a website blackout, including a Wikipedia shutdown, lawmakers in Washington decided not to proceed with the Stop Online Privacy Act in 2012.
From your linked Wikipedia articles many corporations including Google were part of that opposite campaign. Exactly the type of people donating untold millions to our legislatures. Had nothing to do with any kind of grassroots pressure.
We do not need to lose our rights to privacy because people want to control what their kids do and see. (I'm not even convinced this is true - this is likely just a convenient lie told by the politicians, because I don't see parents clamoring for this.)
We're below replacement rate, so it's not like most people are even having kids, anyway. Yet we have to give up our freedom for other people to raise little Christian tots (or whatever the motivation for this is billed as)?
I grew up in a Deep South Protestant household. Having access to the unfiltered internet got me interested in STEM. Bumping into occasional shock sites and porn as a preteen did not turn me into a satanist cannibal.
Keeping "Kids Safe" is a LIE.
This is about putting collars on every US citizen.
They'll filter you into groups.
They'll control what loans and jobs you can get.
They'll use this information to blackmail you should you ever run for office or gain wealth or power.
This is a threat to democracy and personal liberty.
Because it is an organized attack. The lobbyists got their orders,
now they pull it through. It is kind of fascinating to see though -
I bet many people don't realise this coordinated attack. To me it
is blatantly easy to notice. I am glad to not be the only one here.
If Facebook, in light of the 2021 "Facebook Papers," believed the legislation inevitable, what kind of legislation would maximize its advantage?
Noteworthily, the legislation moves age verification from individual apps to app-store operators [Apple, Google] which reduces Facebooks legal exposure for inaccurate/incorrect age verifications.
Because the internet is global and the negative effects of the internet are happening everywhere at the same time. Also, politicians look at other countries for ideas.
At global conferences like Davos, where national leaders and policy makers go to schmooze and exchange ideas, this idea has been discussed for years. I’m sure there has been some subsequent cross-border coordination and discussion.
Everyone ignores stuff like this because of people like Alex Jones who make it seem like a lunatic conspiracy theory. But these conferences happen, and they do influence policy. It’s not a “cabal” that issues orders—many participants are national leaders bringing their perspectives (see the link above about Sanchez)—but it does have an impact.
The banal truth is that many different world leaders have talked each other into this after years of discussion on the proper way to “manage” the Internet. They see cyberspace as a threat to top-down technocratic control and view Internet-enabled populism (aka democracy) as something to be quashed.
> [World leaders] see cyberspace as a threat to top-down technocratic control and view Internet-enabled populism (aka democracy) as something to be quashed.
This has been true ever since the creation of the internet and web.
It's what the original 90s crypto wars were about: the right of individuals to access strong encryption to preserve the privacy of their communications from the government.
Absent that, pandora's box opens.
Age KYC is just the next fight against encryption and privacy dressed up in "for the children" clothes.
Strong encryption always has (and always will) facilitate criminal and illegal activity. Tough tits.
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies should work within the bounds of individual rights, not adjust them for convenience.
If the price of individual freedom^ is that it's harder to track and prosecute child exploitation, drug distribution, and mass terror attacks, then that's the way it needs to be.
^ "Individual freedom" as distinct from corporate freedom. Fuck non-human legal entities' rights to access encryption, aside from on behalf of their users.
What about services for AI agents? I don't mean services where the agents use a human's account, but one where they use a permissionless or a dedicated account that they self-registered. By politician grade logic, I guess it won't be long before AI agents are mandated to have a separate annual registration, permit, and fee, not that we should agree to any of it.
Age verification makes it easier for the bad guys to identify and groom children without adults finding out. Sting operations are that much harder if you have to convince the surveillance capitalism machine that you're an actual child, not just your target.
The information leaks: everything causally downstream of the verification is potentially a source of information. Examples include targetted advertising, activity in age-gated communities, etcetera.
Children in adult spaces who do not reveal that they are children are rarely targeted by child abusers; but if children are corralled into "child spaces" (which are functionally ghettos, given how much of society now takes place online), it will be easier to locate and identify them.
Children are far from helpless, when it comes to online threats. For example, when abusive comments are posted on scratch.mit.edu, you will see a flood of warnings and chaff to try to protect other children from the abusive material, while the Scratch Team work through the moderation queue. However, many social media sites are designed to disempower users, so we don't see this kind of thing there: I suspect separating children from adults in those spaces makes children less safe, not more safe.
That sounds like a reasonable aim. Online services should be responsible for implementing age verification checks on content that children shouldn't be accessing, just like vendors of alcohol and nicotine products are responsible for age verification.
The EFF likes to frame everything that might even slightly rein in online service providers as being a terrible assault on online freedom and therefore, in their view, shouldn't be done. But I don't see them coming up with any better solutions. Just endless complaints, while soliciting donations to keep generating these endless complaints.
I hate this analogy because it isn't true. This isn't like a clerk checking your age before you buy booze this is like a clerk taking a photocopy of your ID and a list of everything you bought and then storing those records forever every time you buy alcohol.
Most stores already have continuously-recording CCTV, which effectively does that too.
At least online there can be a separation between the age verification provider and the online content provider, so that the latter doesn't learn anything from the former except that the user's age is above or below a specific cut-off point. So it can actually be more privacy-preserving than purchasing age-restricted goods over the counter.
they literally do that though. They don't all just look at your ID any more, some scan it with a scanner or phone and that literally does what you just said. Paying with a card also does it.
> vendors of alcohol and nicotine products are responsible for age verification.
You don't wind up in a database for buying alcohol.
This proposal puts your name right next to the category of porn you're into, which will be a great way to coerce all those politicians into voting for the "correct" bill. Would be a shame if they found out a state senator watched porn, so maybe they'd better vote yes on the proposal.
In time, this will be used to shape what people are "allowed" to think. Porn will gradually be purged from the internet and then go away entirely as the US becomes more fundamentalist and Christian.
Then people who are neither of those things will start to be denied jobs and loans. Politicians that don't fit the mold will stop winning.
This is about turning the US to Christianity. (Read: this is really about controlling the massses and using religious fundamentalism as a tool to do so.)
Technology is the perfect tool for control. Just as we were becoming a liberal/libertarian society and letting people live their lives how they wanted, the wrong people started using technology not as an enabler of free minds, but as an inescapable straitjacket.
You've read 1984, right?
The sensors have been widely deployed. The internet will become your Big Brother. You won't be able to buy, sell, or even move between state lines without being in the good graces of the state.
Age verification can be done by a third party, so that the online service isn't provided with any details of your identity, just that you passed an age verification check.
But if you're still worried about online pornographers getting a copy of your identity, maybe don't use their websites? It's an easily avoidable risk. Perhaps use your imagination instead, or read an erotic novel bought in cash from a second-hand bookshop, or something like that.
Do you hear yourself? You're a guy telling people that if they don't want to be put on a list for reading a book, they should read other books.
> erotic novel bought in cash from a second-hand bookshop
Your confidence that this will remain an option probably means that you aren't aware of the many court battles, lives ruined, and leftover frozen conflicts resulting from attempts to publish novels. Its a confidence you could only have developed since the mid-1960s.
There is absolutely no physical reason why the government couldn't record all of the books you buy, arrest secondhand booksellers that don't keep those lists faithfully, and even sit outside of secondhand booksellers identifying everyone walking into the building and putting them on a list of people who are interested in obtaining books through unorthodox methods.
If everyone had been like you, there wouldn't be erotic novels available from bookstores. Or communist novels, or gay novels, etc.. And through the mails, it would become federal. The government mainly opened mail to search for possible birth control information being sent.
> Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
https://web.archive.org/web/20241103190346/https://static.pr...
Here is the list of cosponsors in case anyone was curious if their "representative" is on the list https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/s1748/cosponsors
Anything that doesn’t support those two aims (contraception, abortion, gay marriage, pornography etc.) is therefore immoral but there’s nothing wrong with sex in its ‘proper’ context.
I can speak more to the Catholic view than the evangelical, but if you accept the initial premise that there is a creator God then the rest follows fairly naturally (you can look the ‘the theology of the body’ if you want to read more)
It's for the kids, you understand - to protect the kids.
There is no more noble purpose than to protect the kids.
Only a monster would not want to protect the kids.
[1] - https://nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20230829-Think-Of-The-Chi...
Tried to collect more logical fallacies here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410870
They will collect it from everyone to prove your age.
The question only that is it worth the gamble by Meta, as in how many people would rather leave the sites (from Whatsapp to Insta to Facebook) than give them their ID
Now, based on their ruthless disregard for the law, do you think they're just going to use it to sell your ads?
Plus they are lobbying for it to be someone else's problem they are lobbying for device and OS based age verification.
Politicians who want to track everyone all the time.
The rare few politicians who want it to be easier to raise healthy children.
Tech CEOs who don't want to be liable for harming children's development.
Tech CEOs who want to track everyone all the time.
The rare few tech CEOs who want to improve the world (by not harming children's development) and whose business model doesn't require it or who compete with one that does (e.g. operators of edutainment websites if those even still exist).
App coders who don't want to train a neural network to check IDs themselves.
Watch this "regulate 3d printers because of children" hearing: https://youtu.be/sue88CXzPcQ?t=2285
Normal people that call themselves good names like "moms for actions" drag us into this totalitarian hell.
This seems to be a result of what people call the uniparty system, but that's not really an accurate term:
This actually embodies what the establishment on both sides of the aisle want: CONTROL
They want this for many different reasons: they have an unbridled lust for power, or perhaps they are willing to burn down fair elections for the good of all mankind, but actually let's be more generous!!
Most likely because they are afraid, unjustly or not:
* of real terrorists that they think, sometimes correctly, are using E2EE
* of children's immature minds having neural pathways being changed by things they're not quite ready for, or perhaps becoming addicted to the very real and powerful nature of porn)
* or, you know, whatever! Maybe they're parents and want to protect their kids and everyone else's kids.
Really, why doesn't actually matter too much.
The fact is that they just don't understand the technology and the FUNDAMENTAL TRADE-OFF BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND FREEDOM, that tension between privacy/human rights/dignity and technological "bad things" that are always in the news.
They get told one simple thing by lobbyists or even well-meaning constituents, and then they form their worldview around it. And THEN they write legislation (or, more likely, get handed ready-made legislation by lobbyists with an axe to grind)
We, the knowledgeable in this area (regardless of our party persuasion -- I'll work on my people, you work on yours!) should start to educate our non-technical legislators. We have to be the trusted voice of reason when it comes to tech, because they're hearing a lot of things from a lot of different voices.
How? By getting involved. Get involved at the LOCAL level, because THOSE people are the ones that serve as the feedramp for national or international politics. After 20 years, your education might percolate upwards to the people who are actually writing new laws. You don't need to be a "crazy" sounding activist or conspiracy theorist: in fact, that works against you (usually). Just be an adult, try to understand what they're trying to accomplish, and explain how they can accomplish it or that it can't be done that way for specific and reasonable reasons.
These are all just my opinions as I see increasing amounts of this sort of legislation being pushed by Meta and other actors. This comment also has a very US-centric bias, so please correct me if you're in another country where things work differently.
Always remember Hanlon's Razor and the Golden Rule (for the other team too)
It gives the adults the option to be apathetic. In reality, anyone who is a kid now will never know any better.
It just means we're the last generations that had the luxury of a world that remembered what privacy was.
Once again, the response in places like this pretends everyone is an upper middle class or above tech-savvy nerd.
I'm not a fan of these proposed solutions, which do invade privacy and remove freedom, but the problems are real. These solutions are being pushed because our industry is doing nothing to police itself or provide parents with the tools they need.
In many cases we are doing less than nothing, because the profit motive is to prevent parents from having this control. "Social" media, gambling-adjacent gaming, and other addictionware, which is a huge profit center for our industry, wants to addict kids early. Gotta get those cigarettes into their hands, which means preventing parents from stopping it.
Right now if you are not a tech-savvy parent your choices are: (1) deny children access to devices or severely limit that access, or (2) allow your kids to be raised by super-addictive infinite scroll brain rot feeds, brainwashed by propaganda and influencer bullshit, and placed on an on-ramp to future gambling addiction via mobile games with engineered "compulsion loops."
Now imagine you are a non-tech-savvy household with two parents who work. You can't really limit access since you can't supervise it enough, so your choice is now binary: no access, kids raised by brain rot and propaganda. Pick one. You have no control, no ability to whitelist, because not only do you not have time to deal with this but the tools often cost money and are imperfect and ineffective.
Then you catch your 11 year old son watching extreme fetish porn that he lacks the maturity to contextualize, or hear him spouting off Nazi ideology or talking about how he's an "alpha male" and women should be his slaves. Or your daughter becomes anorexic by following influencers. Or you have a child who is questioning their sexual orientation or identity and is targeted by an online bullying ring. These are the commonplace examples. There's a lot of much worse shit too, like sextortion of kids. Search for "764."
That's why this push exists. It's not a conspiracy. It's because we -- our industry -- is an amoral shitshow that engineers addiction and refuses to police itself or provide parents with good tools to do so.
I'd also like to note that for the non-tech-savvy privacy is dead and has been dead for over ten years at least. If you are not tech-savvy your devices are recording everything about you and transmitting it to two dozen ad networks and data brokers.
Only nerds have privacy today and only if they invest the time to police their tech environment. If you're not a nerd there's nothing to lose. You already lost it long ago. We -- our industry -- took it away.
This is a win/win for big tech. If they don’t get age verification, they can keep getting kids addicted to propaganda and consumerism. If they do get age verification, they get to see what everyone in the world thinks and is interested in, all linked to government ID.
Edit: the one outcome big tech does not want is anonymous age verification. This is technologically extremely possible, but that would be a lose/lose for big tech because they would lose kid (aka future consuming adult) addiction AND lose perfect tracking linked to government IDs.
I'm also aware of what you're talking about. That's called regulatory capture. They know this kind of regulation is coming and want to make sure they're the ones writing it so they can use it to entrench their oligopolies.
My point is that something like this will happen unless we find an alternative. The longer it goes on, the worse the backlash will be.
Rich parents can have nannies, expensive software, or a parent who stays home from work. Poorer parents do not have time or energy to police this stuff or supervise their kids. They're too busy putting food on the table and paying rent or a mortgage.
I was at the laundromat and a woman with kids was complaining across the room about how she only had $700.00 in her account. Note, she had a car, wasn't homeless, but this is actual reality for a huge number of people in the US.
I think it may be that people grew up accustomed to having everything constantly taken away from them, so they learn not to save stuff.
Seeing this as some sort of moral failing isn't the right way to look at it. It's possible that that this person could have done that, but it's also they they really may not have been able to, low wages, bad environment, health issues, all of these compound until "it's not hard to just" is a gross way to interpret their situation.
Pornography is often delivered by people who don't care about US legislation, and social media is carefully left undefined, intentionally confounded with algorithms used to surface content (which people actually do object to at least the opaqueness of.)
I, like most, don't think that the totalitarianism is an unfortunate side-effect of the attempt to protect children online. I think legislation, and legislation like this, will only be successful in increasing surveillance and public manipulation, and that it will have virtually no effect on childrens' consumption of pornography and social media. If you really wanted to protect children, there's better legislation to write and technical solutions to implement.
Should it be that easy or should there be some road blocks? Should I have been able to go into a store at 14 and buy a beer?
This is a claim without backing, and if there were backing to be had, it would constantly be thrown in people's faces by the various administrations that suddenly decided this was a problem that had to be stopped now by any means necessary.
They do not need any public support to implement this, they need opposition to sleep for 5 minutes. It is being advanced by the most unpopular governments in the entire histories of the countries that it is being introduced in.
Your children had access to porn 30 years ago, they will have access to porn after this. There is no actual impetus behind any legal blocking of gambling mechanics in games targeted at children, because they are unbelievably profitable (unlike children as a market for pornography.)
I'm telling you that if you fight invisible enemies, like these campaigners for online age verification (who don't exist), you are fighting a senseless battle.
I'm not dismissing the scenario and your illustration of the mindset of these fictional hoards - if I were concocting a biography and argument for age verification activists, I would come up with the same dynamics and resentments. But it's not real. There are no million-mom marches in DC for age verification on the internet, and certainly not ones so advanced that they've decided that no other method will work: that device/OS/browser level verification of identity is the only way from keeping little Kip from accessing Cambridge Analytics's Russian-Chinese hardcore trans pornography.
They don't exist. Or rather, the bulk of them are Keynesian Beauty Contest judges who have concocted a public opinion that they've followed like lemmings, and only update their vision of public opinion based on new claims from politicians and their PR departments currently pushing the legislation. They don't really believe that age verification is a good solution, but they understand why most people do. I claim that the vast majority of people don't. I'm not even sure I could find a single person to support it in real life if given a 2 minute speech about the obvious and basic privacy and civil liberties implications of such a move, and the many alternative ways to attack the same issue. And governments are prioritizing it, with no hint at all that they will see a reward at the polls. In fact, almost all of the people who are pushing it are unpopular lame ducks who have no ability or no reasonable chance to serve again. They're lining up their next jobs and securing their fortunes.
Enough with this "but they can work around it" argument, too. Kids can get adults to buy cigarettes for them, we still ban them from buying cigarettes because it's a very useful roadblock.
You know a gun or a bomb is dangerous, so you'll probably be careful with it. The gun and the bomb are not engineered on purpose to hook you by exploiting your dopamine pathways and get you to shoot yourself or blow yourself up.
EDIT: I'm being a little hyperbolic here, but I'm also talking about aggregate harm and intent to harm. I'm really being hyperbolic to bash what I consider to be the key villain in this story: addiction engineering, a.k.a. "maximizing engagement." This is the root of all evil.
The statistics on people killed/injured by their kids accidentally discharging firearms in the US disagree[0]
[0] eg. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/unintentional-shootings... "At least 157 people were killed and 270 were injured last year in unintentional shootings by children" (2024)
This sounds like you have a media addiction. This is the kind of extreme hyperbole that we spent a year or two saturated with when a bunch of states and a bunch of billionaires decided that American people were saying too much on Tiktok about Israel, and something something China evil.
It is far more common for that child to be targeted by parents, and maybe by people they know in person, especially because of the lousy social environment their parents have pushed them into, and therefore to have limited offline support systems, and you are now trying to take away all they do have.
... and information isn't really the question. Not that there's actually any good definition for "social media".
I am not disagreeing with you, but the conversation to be had is far, far wider than "think of the children!". Part of any deal would have to be: privacy of citizens is not a business model. But then you are facing the full might of Corp Inc, including their legislative powers.
If there were an organic push by parents, they would be happy to buy and promote products today, without waiting for legislation to catch up. Where are these local parental control products?
Speaking of social media and Youtubes of the world, why can't I, as account owner/parent, totally blacklist some "recommendations"?
Age verification is not a fit tool for content filtering. Users want the latter, but get switcheroo'd into the former.
The public at large have real issues with the current state of the internet and people here don't want to hear it or address it so we get this.
I've said it in other threads but the worst thing you can do is tell people their problems aren't real.
And, more so, that they've had a decade to reduce or mitigate the harms but have consistently (some might think deliberately) failed to do so.
So now we have the sledgehammer of legislation being wielded to do the job instead.
It's not an ideal outcome by any means, but what did people think was going to happen?
Sounds about right.
I love freedom as a general principle, but internet 2026 is a undefendable cesspool of amorality, scams and worse. We are not in the 90s or early 00s anymore, and never will be again that era is gone.
They might still get some content downstream of other kids. However, I doubt a “look at this tiktok” here and there has any harmful effects.
What’s harmful is excessive social media use, especially unmonitored. So, either monitor your kid or do not give them access. It’s perfectly fine to have a family computer in the living room if you’re worried about little Timmy looking up “boobies”. Problem solved, and I saved you some money.
I think a lot of parents do basically nothing and then are unhappy with the results. Yes, if you don’t try, you won’t get your desired result. But you can try stuff out, and you can always pivot if you feel it becomes inconvenient. The reality is we don’t need these complex technological solutions. There are simple, brain-dead solutions like “don’t give your kid a phone for hours on end” or “give your kid a flip phone”.
Then introduce some new headers the browser sends to servers with some proof that the user was verified and the browser would need a response (like CORS) for it to work.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
The only people who think otherwise are terminally online losers who have never organized anything larger than a birthday party.
Money matters but a popular movement is more powerful still in some places look up DSA
We're below replacement rate, so it's not like most people are even having kids, anyway. Yet we have to give up our freedom for other people to raise little Christian tots (or whatever the motivation for this is billed as)?
I grew up in a Deep South Protestant household. Having access to the unfiltered internet got me interested in STEM. Bumping into occasional shock sites and porn as a preteen did not turn me into a satanist cannibal.
Keeping "Kids Safe" is a LIE.
This is about putting collars on every US citizen.
They'll filter you into groups.
They'll control what loans and jobs you can get.
They'll use this information to blackmail you should you ever run for office or gain wealth or power.
This is a threat to democracy and personal liberty.
Child safety is a LIE.
2006 is on the other side of the event horizon of "Don't be evil."
If they are asking you to leave a message, have your kids leave the message.
Noteworthily, the legislation moves age verification from individual apps to app-store operators [Apple, Google] which reduces Facebooks legal exposure for inaccurate/incorrect age verifications.
For instance:
https://idtechwire.com/spains-pm-proposes-mandatory-digital-...
https://www.weforum.org/publications/reimagining-digital-id/
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/01/davos-agenda-digital...
Everyone ignores stuff like this because of people like Alex Jones who make it seem like a lunatic conspiracy theory. But these conferences happen, and they do influence policy. It’s not a “cabal” that issues orders—many participants are national leaders bringing their perspectives (see the link above about Sanchez)—but it does have an impact.
The banal truth is that many different world leaders have talked each other into this after years of discussion on the proper way to “manage” the Internet. They see cyberspace as a threat to top-down technocratic control and view Internet-enabled populism (aka democracy) as something to be quashed.
This has been true ever since the creation of the internet and web.
It's what the original 90s crypto wars were about: the right of individuals to access strong encryption to preserve the privacy of their communications from the government.
Absent that, pandora's box opens.
Age KYC is just the next fight against encryption and privacy dressed up in "for the children" clothes.
Strong encryption always has (and always will) facilitate criminal and illegal activity. Tough tits.
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies should work within the bounds of individual rights, not adjust them for convenience.
If the price of individual freedom^ is that it's harder to track and prosecute child exploitation, drug distribution, and mass terror attacks, then that's the way it needs to be.
^ "Individual freedom" as distinct from corporate freedom. Fuck non-human legal entities' rights to access encryption, aside from on behalf of their users.
Children in adult spaces who do not reveal that they are children are rarely targeted by child abusers; but if children are corralled into "child spaces" (which are functionally ghettos, given how much of society now takes place online), it will be easier to locate and identify them.
Children are far from helpless, when it comes to online threats. For example, when abusive comments are posted on scratch.mit.edu, you will see a flood of warnings and chaff to try to protect other children from the abusive material, while the Scratch Team work through the moderation queue. However, many social media sites are designed to disempower users, so we don't see this kind of thing there: I suspect separating children from adults in those spaces makes children less safe, not more safe.
The EFF likes to frame everything that might even slightly rein in online service providers as being a terrible assault on online freedom and therefore, in their view, shouldn't be done. But I don't see them coming up with any better solutions. Just endless complaints, while soliciting donations to keep generating these endless complaints.
At least online there can be a separation between the age verification provider and the online content provider, so that the latter doesn't learn anything from the former except that the user's age is above or below a specific cut-off point. So it can actually be more privacy-preserving than purchasing age-restricted goods over the counter.
You don't wind up in a database for buying alcohol.
This proposal puts your name right next to the category of porn you're into, which will be a great way to coerce all those politicians into voting for the "correct" bill. Would be a shame if they found out a state senator watched porn, so maybe they'd better vote yes on the proposal.
In time, this will be used to shape what people are "allowed" to think. Porn will gradually be purged from the internet and then go away entirely as the US becomes more fundamentalist and Christian.
Then people who are neither of those things will start to be denied jobs and loans. Politicians that don't fit the mold will stop winning.
This is about turning the US to Christianity. (Read: this is really about controlling the massses and using religious fundamentalism as a tool to do so.)
Technology is the perfect tool for control. Just as we were becoming a liberal/libertarian society and letting people live their lives how they wanted, the wrong people started using technology not as an enabler of free minds, but as an inescapable straitjacket.
You've read 1984, right?
The sensors have been widely deployed. The internet will become your Big Brother. You won't be able to buy, sell, or even move between state lines without being in the good graces of the state.
Be a good citizen and comply.
But if you're still worried about online pornographers getting a copy of your identity, maybe don't use their websites? It's an easily avoidable risk. Perhaps use your imagination instead, or read an erotic novel bought in cash from a second-hand bookshop, or something like that.
> erotic novel bought in cash from a second-hand bookshop
Your confidence that this will remain an option probably means that you aren't aware of the many court battles, lives ruined, and leftover frozen conflicts resulting from attempts to publish novels. Its a confidence you could only have developed since the mid-1960s.
There is absolutely no physical reason why the government couldn't record all of the books you buy, arrest secondhand booksellers that don't keep those lists faithfully, and even sit outside of secondhand booksellers identifying everyone walking into the building and putting them on a list of people who are interested in obtaining books through unorthodox methods.
If everyone had been like you, there wouldn't be erotic novels available from bookstores. Or communist novels, or gay novels, etc.. And through the mails, it would become federal. The government mainly opened mail to search for possible birth control information being sent.