Arkansas House wants you to show ID to use social media
arktimes.com
arktimes.com
This will end up with the death of anonymity on the internet.
Signal will require an ID. Hacker News will require an ID. Reddit will require an ID. Stack Overflow will require an ID. 4chan will be illegal to operate. Your google account may eventually require an ID
This is a really slippery slope. Maybe I am overly paranoid, but this seems like really dangerous legislation.
I agree that social media is pretty harmful in its current instantiation, but lets start with banning phones at school rather than removing anonymity for every site that "could harm kids".
Too many parents hate such bans—or even just heavier restrictions—a whole bunch.
Otherwise, districts would already do this. Most of the educators would really, really rather phones were banned or their use heavily restricted, and those restrictions enforced. It's a fucking mess in schools right now, as far as phone use goes. Distractions, cheating, kids taking creep-shots of their peers (or of teachers....) or using photos or videos captured in what should be a safe environment to magnify the effects and scope of bullying (think: the difference between accidentally wearing a stained shirt to school one day and getting laughed at, and the same thing happening but also you become a "meme" image shared around the rest of your school career, as the Stained Shirt Kid—now consider all the things that might apply to beyond a stained shirt, and let that sense of dawning horror sink in).
Parents are the ones preventing bans—things aren't the way they are because schools want it to be that way.
I mean, between the solid decade of right-wing propaganda against social media and HN's general cynical contempt for modernity it shouldn't be surprising. Plenty of people here would gleefully welcome any degree of authoritarianism so long as it hurts social media.
Of course if it's any platform trying to stop child porn or racism or violence against gay and trans people, Hacker News always stands united in the name of absolute freedom, regardless of the consequences. But social media? Burn it all down and salt the earth.
(1) https://citizenlab.ca/2021/04/bill-c-11-explained/
(2) https://www.biometricupdate.com/202206/canada-us-officials-s...
The silver lining is this could encourage more people to use the fediverse which has no ID requirement other than an email address and no tracking.
If this passes, they'll expand it to internet access in general.
They're not claiming that governments will tell everyone running a Mastodon instance to check ID, but instead that they'll tell every ISP to check ID. In such a world, your cable modem may not work if your ISP doesn't know who you are.
More and more it seems that party is loosing its original outlook.
The original outlook was never free speech absolutism. Both sides have always agreed there are limits on free speech, but just have different metrics for where the line should be drawn. Many on the Democratic side would be OK with stricter rules against using "deadnames" or incorrect pronouns deliberately against trans people; while the GOP would be strongly opposed. Likewise, the GOP would likely not rule the Satanic Temple to have any free speech on school campuses if possible, whereas the Democratic side would call that inconsistency.
Forcing more companies to collect ID is going to increase cases of identity theft which can cause extreme suffering and in some cases even suicide. Unfortunately this is never considered when a government mandates ID verification. “Protect the children at any cost even if we have no evidence it will work” seems to be the mantra across the world.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/psychiatry/generalpsychiatry/10...
General teenage happiness also took a beating post-2012.
https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2019/the-sad-state-of-happi...
Maybe lower happines lead to using of social media..
There is not a snowball's chance in hell I am giving my government ID to a social media company that will undoubtedly store that info in their database.
> If an account holder is a minor, the social media company 33 shall confirm that a minor has consent under subsection (a) of this section 34 to become a new account holder, at the time an Arkansas user opens the 35 account.
I don't see any text about how they're suppose to verify that consent.
An excerpt from a Meta Article on the matter reads: "At this time, Meta Verified will only support your real name on your profile. Once your profile is verified, you can’t change the profile name, username, date of birth, or photo on your profile without going through the Meta Verified subscription and verifications application process again."
If paid users are being boosted, more people are led to believe they need to pay the monthly fee to be seen, the user base of ID verified users increases, and Social Media basically becomes ID Verified, without the need for any laws to pass.
However, if the govt decides to push ID verification, the user loses all choice because this will be applied to all social media platforms (like HN).
But beyond that the difference is that with the Arkansas law, users don't have the _choice_ to remain anonymous. With verification, a user can simply sacrifice broader reach to maintain that anonymity.
Social media without the desire to be "seen" or recommended to random people, is just a messaging app.
But even still, for people that do post, social media has many forms. I personally use it to interact with people in my social circle, but not much further.
Take Twitter. I follow friends, and even some random content creators I'm familiar with from other platforms. I post, but with the knowledge that only a select few people will see it (in fact, I remove followers I don't know externally). But I strictly avoid algorithmically "recommended" content, sticking to just my chronological news feed.
Does the ACLU realize they are walking right into a trap? Is their position really going to be that parents don't have the right to parent their kids? This is not a position you will ever convince mom's to agree to. And I think we all know who has been swinging elections lately.
There has been a very strange desire by some to get direct access to kids and to influence them without parental approval or supervision. And here the ACLU is putting into broad daylight this idea that kids have complete agency. They do not.
For the entire history of parenting, parents have tried to control what their kids are exposed to and most importantly, who they are exposed to. You know, the whole "bad influences" thing? And although I personally believe overprotecting kids is ultimately bad for them and that reality is something they need to understand, I respect that other parents may have different limits.
This is also a more bipartisan issue on the ground than we'd like to admit. Both conservative parents and many "radical feminists", for example, both agree pornography should not be used as a tool for teaching oneself about sex. But if you take the ACLU literally here (because of how broad their position is), they think that's just a necessary evil. I think it is not unreasonable as a parent to strongly, strongly disagree with that idea.
No, but it massively reduced it.
Parents can parent all they want without this law. I am a parent, and this law would not help me in my parenting of my kids online. In fact, I would prefer my kids be able to sign up for accounts without having to share any private information about themselves, including their age.
> There has been a very strange desire by some to get direct access to kids and to influence them without parental approval or supervision.
You're veering off into "pizza basement" levels of conspiracy here.
I’ve noticed this as well. One recent instance is opposition to the proposed Parents Bill of Rights Act in the US, which would require elementary schools to obtain parental consent before a minor child’s gender pronouns or preferred name is changed. That seems like a pretty reasonable rule to me.
that doesn't sound great to me.
Rather than, you know, letting them just behave like human beings possessing judgement and at least a little common-sense, which I'd bet has been working out entirely fine in damn near all cases, as far as it relates to this topic. If you want to find an example or five of somethings stupid or bad happening in a country of 330+ million, you can, but is this an actual widespread problem worth legislating, that individual schools and districts aren't manage to handle just fine on their own, overall? I doubt it.
Or just default to they/them? Possible I guess but awkward.
Or just let the teachers assign a gender to start? This will be fun! Can they ask the kids first or do they have to pick without consultation?
I think their position is more children have 1st amendment rights too.
As for enforceability, or "they'll just use a VPN!" I don't really care. It's still a crime to speed even if 25% of the road speeds, and it would still be worse without Speed Limits. Criminals sometimes obtain guns, but it doesn't mean I don't want Gun ID laws.
Also, nobody is proposing that.
Can't wait.
But I'd settle for anything else that hurts them, at this point.
Kill everyones privacy by forcing them to giveup their identity to very bad actors? Good idea (TM)! Every single one of my friends can't wait to do that, myself included.
Adult sites are also supposed to check that, and we all know how effective this is.
Actually I don't know if that's effective at all and I couldn't find any data on that either, care to share?