Fighting the age-gated internet
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None of these laws are actually about protecting children. That's not the real goal. The real goal is the complete elimination of anonymity on the web, where both private companies and the state can keep tabs on everything you do.
Not being able to be at least pseudo-anonymous has a real chilling effect on speech and expression. Even if there are laws in place protecting such rights, people will self-censor when knowing they are being watched.
It's how freedom of speech and expression dies without actually scratching that part off of the bill of rights.
yes, I believe the term for them is "useful idiots"
They use assets to influence people and achieve certain goals. In this case here, terrorism or child pornography is used as cop-out rationale for censorship, surveillance and so forth. It's never about those topics really, perhaps 5% at best, the rest is just sugar-coated decoy to restrict people and keep them as slaves and pets.
> Since both PR campaigns and any action on policy tends to cater to extremes, there's always pressure that is shrinking the middle
This only works on people who are susceptible to this. I understand how propaganda works so I am never fooled by "this is because of terrorists". This is also why I am for 100% transparency at all times.
Is it just "more ID is bad"? Or is there a specific concern that this bill is a targeted overreach to increase censorship and surveillance.
It genuinely doesn't seem like any more of a threat than age-gating Playboy at the bookstore. What have I missed?
I'll never look at that account again in my ficking life.
https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy2...
> The U.K. Online Safety Act was (avowedly, as revealed in a recent High Court case) “not primarily aimed at protecting children” but at regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse.”
But this did, nonetheless, convince me that british legislators are interested in using this bill to regulate the internet.
If it was really like that, I would have no problem. Simple ID check, in-person only, that's never stored anywhere.
I've proposed this several times. Age-gated websites (social media, random forums, adult websites) should require a one-time use code or token that expires once a year. The token should only be available for purchase at liquor stores or tobacco stores - someplace they check your ID on pain of losing their license. It should be reasonably priced.
Sometimes someone might resell a token they purchased to a minor. Those people should be actively hunted with sting operations and prosecuted.
There's no good reason to make age verification on the Internet more stringent than age verification to buy alcohol or tobacco. Alcohol and tobacco kill far more people.
If they scan your ID for alcohol or tobacco purchases where you live it might be time to fix that with legislation too. Insurance companies would love that data.
From what I've seen, the current wave of ID-gating the internet is a wedge for opening the door to much broader censorship. Specifically, some jurisdictions (Wisconsin, Minnnesota, and the UK) are using recently-passed legislation to argue that we need to make VPNs illegal [0 1 2].
0 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/lawmakers-want-ban-vpn...
1 https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpn-usage...
2 https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2025-09-15/debates/57714...
Speaking for my own beliefs, banning the use of VPNs is a huge problem, and it seems like basically anybody who understands the technology would be against it.
I have no problem with banning or age gating pornography at all. Personally it seems weird to me that that's the red line for people.
But this is a good point, which is that lawmakers who don't have a clue what they're regulating will see VPNs as undermining the laws they've made. Thanks for this
Oh, I'm familiar with the phrase, but I'm specifically disputing how applicable it really is to people that are self-aware about the situation they are facing. Useful idiots are ones that are tricked, especially ones that are evangelical about tricking others. People forced to choose between 2 extremes where both choices are very bad are called.. normal citizens participating in the democratic process.
> This only works on people who are susceptible to this. I understand how propaganda works
What? You can see through propaganda, but you can't just pencil in your own policy options. Unfortunately and by design, the things you can ultimately vote for are "all or nothing" flavored. Censor everything, censor nothing. Track everybody, track nobody. Tons of parents who totally understand the surveillance state probably got flipped by meta's memo about chatbots being "sensual" with children. They'd rather vote to force corporations to be good citizens, but they can't. So they'll vote for an age-gated internet as the best of the bad options. I wouldn't assume all those people are naive, confused, or duped.. they've simply switched from a principled/abstract stance to a convenience-based calculus after they were forced into it. Meta wins either way, as planned. Either they get to build a more addictive platform, or they track more info about more people
Nah, that's just your "democratic" process.
People forced to choose between 2 extreme evils, one (debatably) lesser, are not called "normal", they are called unfree.
The process of making sure people are always in one such situation or another is not called "governance", it's called driving insane.
>I wouldn't assume all those people are naive, confused, or duped.. they've simply switched from a principled/abstract stance to a convenience-based calculus after they were forced into it.
Forced into it under threat of violence, or under threat of denied sustenance and shelter, or "forced" by catering to their naivete, by confusing and duping them, by silently extorting them by enclosure of the commons?
Switching from "principle-based stance" to "convenience-based stance" is not called "being sensible", it's called... cowardice.
>Unfortunately and by design, the things you can ultimately vote for are "all or nothing" flavored. Censor everything, censor nothing. Track everybody, track nobody.
If voting changed anything they'd ban it.
>Tons of parents who totally understand the surveillance state
If you truly understood how the surveillance state feeds on human life, you would deny it sustenance by - yes: - refusing to breed in captivity.
That's one of the few meaningful political actions available to the individual. At least until advances in reproductive medicine get turned on us, same way it happened with the mind-bicycles. A society with the technical capacity to go Gattaca might rather go all-in on Plato's Republic.
Type of beat like yall can have the world to yourselves if yall want it that bad, but believe me, you will choke on it.
That's not how it works.
- anything that mentions "terrorists" (or the nouveau "narco-terrorists")
- "think of the children" / "we must protect the children"
- "we need to create jobs" / "job creators"
- "they're turning the frogs gay"
- "we need to protect America"
tbh if you're fooled by any of that (and there's no delicate way to say this) you're dumb. Even a cursory glance at history would reveal the obvious deception and it's on you that you haven't bothered.
This doesn't explain why they would support privacy-invasive ID requirements instead of the RTA header.
> People that were pro-guns for decades may watch several years of failure to adopt basic and uncontroversial gun-control regulation, then eventually become anti-gun.
I want to call this a bad example because the only people who call the rules that don't pass "basic and uncontroversial" are the people who were on the other side to begin with, but maybe it's a good example because the analogy lines up so well with exactly the same scenario:
People who are anti-X propose rules with low effectiveness against actual harms but that impose significant burdens on innocent people who are pro-X, persistently insist that their proposal is fine and supported by everyone even as it demonstrably lacks enough support to pass and then point to the period of nothing being done to try to garner enough support from independents to squeak over the line instead of considering less burdensome alternatives, because burdening the pro-X people is the point. And then the people who fall for it are the useful idiots.
Age-gating porn doesnt seem problematic to at all. In fact it's far less worrisome than any of the former, which are kind of important for commerce. What am I missing?
But personally, I'm much more concerned about it in regular commerce.
A huge swath of the population thinks that porn is inherently harmful. An even bigger swath thinks that it should be completely separated from both. I agree with both of these things.
I'm also strongly against censorship, so I'm trying to figure out how people are worried this is being used. I do not, at all, consider age-gating Playboy at the gas station to be censorship.
If you think your porn habits are not already being logged and tracked by intelligence agencies, I think you are fully delusional.
The whole "know it when you see it" doesn't work when there's a significant group out there who would love to see queer people at large go away from society. With this, you now have teenagers being blocked from actual educational material because Carol from the "burn everyone but me" church down the street believes anything regarding sexuality is "adult" material.
The thing with the porn habits being logged by intelligence agencies, is that data has a large risk-reward for actually being used. They wouldn't burn the secret of their capabilities for something small. Most of the metadata wouldn't be admissible in court assuming courts don't go full kangaroo. The usage of the metadata is general intelligence to point investigations, or parallel reconstruction to get warrants for someone they don't actually have anything on, but want to search.
Doing KYC American style for porn/adult content means mass data leaks are a matter of "when", because there's no consumer protection and this data will be retained indefinitely because ads make money. The leak means real people are put in real danger.
Flashing your ID at the store to buy a playboy doesn't go into a data set for years to come. Sure your credit card will, but you can opt to pay cash.
I really don’t care about what’s on the internet, until my kids get exposed to it. How grownups talk to other grownups in private isn’t my concern.
But when kids - and I mean my kids - enter the loop it becomes my business, and ideological concerns go out the window.
I’ve ranted and raved about how terrible filtering software is, and how school provided computers contain massive workarounds.
The real concern isn’t porn sites — the real concern is poorly moderated social media sites. Ones where kids post things other kids see. And guess what the kids post?
But a lot of the nasty content shared in these poorly moderated sites gets it start elsewhere.
I’m cynical about any law, but my bias toward legal action is only increasing as the online situation is only getting worse.
Why not install root certs on all your kids' devices and then force them through your home proxy so you can run content classification and proactively block and get reports of what you've blocked? A little privacy-invasive, but if your kids are young enough, it makes sense to get alerts when they've attempted to access boobs or gore so you can have a convo about it.
But this is not the way to go about it.
Given that kids need a device for school in a lot of areas (mine included) and the tools for stopping kids getting either access or bombarded by such stuff are either shit, require deep technical knowledge, or predatory, I can see why people are asking for it.
I presently hate the current system of handing over biometric data in exchange for tits. I don't want some shading startup having my biometrics so that when they go bust, pivot or get hacked, can be used to steal my stuff.
The middle ground is a system that _normal_ people can us to make sure kids who have access to devices can't easily access nefarious shit.
None of that is useful idiots.
When it get fun is the all or nothing crowd. The internet is going to be age gated, whether you like it or not. If you continue to go "INTERNET MUST BE FREEEEEEEE" without accepting that the tools that the populace _want_ don't exist means you get porn bans, or worse.
I'm in the UK and so far the only thing I've noticed age wise is Reddit asked me for a webcam selfie, which could easily have been faked by a kid with an accomplice but if the aim of this is to stop actual vulnerable kids that kind of thing is maybe enough. If they are with it enough to use VPNs and stuff they are probably old enough to see porn etc.
Like in the old days people used to avoid the kids looking at porn by putting the porno mags on a high shelf so they couldn't reach them. I don't think you need passport control level ID for this kind of thing.
I 100% whole heartedly agree.
For uk mobile ISPs there is already a system that stopped most of the nasty stuff from getting past. It was pretty difficult to circumvent, hence why I turned it off for me. If that could have been rolled out wider, with an account password for turning it off, that would have been more than enough.
"useful idiots" was a Stalinist term for people willing to cover up for the murder of millions on the grounds that communism was good and would never do the holodomor.
I don't think it's good to conflate them really.
The problem is normies don't operate under assumed anonymity. So when the hordes of unwashed regular people joined the internet they wanted their face everywhere. People were shamed out of their handles. Some people gave up their anonymity to make yet another faceless bullshit blog-as-a-resume. Look at most of the top karma farmers on HN. Most of them post their personal information in the their bio. Pathetic.
> people will self-censor when knowing they are being watched.
This has been happening both in public and on the internet for over a decade now.
> Not being able to be at least pseudo-anonymous has a real chilling effect on speech and expression.
The normies would argue you have nothing to hide if you aren't doing anything wrong. The average voter, regardless of party, will happily surrender every ounce of freedom for the thought of security. Hell, I remember sometime around 2007 DEFCON became a first-name-basis conference!
> bill of rights
It's more of a bill of privileges given NGOs and PACs are regularly paying to erode the core rights granted to citizens. Either through lawfare by circumventing the courts and suing companies into bankruptcy, or by directly purchasing congressmen via donation.
What I have found in general is people who cry and complain about this kind of thing were, at one point, happy to have it happen to their political enemies. The laws that are paving the way for age-gated deanonymized internet were at one point used as a cudgel to beat their political enemies down. When the tables finally turn after the Nth "protect the children" bill, it's the other people left crying and now suddenly its a "problem".
Some time between Facebook opening to the general public (mid 2006) and the launch of the iPhone (early 2007).
"Online" was no longer a meaningful distinction from there on out.
I'm ok with running this experiment (not sure how it really turns out) BUT only if everyone participates. Governments and businesses get to watch me... I get to watch them. If the death if anonymity is inevitable, as unpleasant as that sounds, the goal to shoot for then is universal application
My pet theory is that this requirement is part of a mob war and porn and whatever else the MindGeek people are involved with is being attacked for the much of the same reasons Ukraine attacks Russian oil refineries.
I fear that for 90% of the supporters of such laws (just like with chat control) this statement is wrong, and they truly do want to protect minors from harm. But that only makes it worse, because this type of argument completely misses the mark while the other 10% get to laugh up their sleeves while continuing to manipulate public opinion.
This supposed golden era of communication lasted for a very short period. Why is is so important that freedom of speech also be anonymous? What you're asking for is the right to talk to anyone with all societal, cultural, and interpersonal contexts removed.
Because it is a shortcut for an otherwise extremely hard to enforce freedom.
Can you afford to defend your speech in court?
Can you prove that an action taken against you by someone in power is retaliation against your speech?
Can you handle social ostracism by a majority that disagrees?
If the answer to some is no, your freedom of speech has practical limits.
This is not to say that a world with anonymous speech is necessarily better, I’m just saying that in terms of guarantees it has a clear advantage.
Case in point: will you answer a workplace questionnaire the same way whether or not it is anonymous?
People long ago used to have to hide that they're gay, not only because they could be ostracized, but that people they associate with could also be under scrutiny.
Being able to track one's movements, or who they associate with, could reveal information that said person would want kept secret.
They won’t be dismissed (consciously or not) due to gender, background, look, or anything else if no one knows anything beyond their words.
This is one type of connection that would be unlikely to form if superficial anonymity is lost. That kid probably would be off in some "safe" walled garden.
This doesn't even touch on more obvious forms of discrimination like gender, religion, etc.
And political affiliation / speech isn't protected in the US, so an employer could term you anytime for policy disagreement. Such a policy would destroy the exploration of ideas overnight, as outrage mobs would try to get any dissident sacked.
The technical barriers to entry to that early internet effectively made it a "safe walled garden" for nerdy types.
Repeating that experiment now - meeting up with anonymous posters from a given platform - I'm sure would have very different results.
And of course freedom of speech has practical limits. It's that very tempering that stops non-virtual discourse from turning into a cesspool. I worked for a company that permitted anonymous comments to the leadership team, which they would then review in front of the company. It was a total shit show, and I attached my name to any comments I made.
If you are not happy filling in your workplace questionnaire unless it's anonymous, then something needs to change about your company (and something that probably can't be fixed with anonymous comments).
I'm not asking for anything, I was merely pointing out the advantages of anonymity. You don't need to consider a decision the best one to see its upsides.
I don't really get the rest of that argument. What other mediums are legally deanonimised? Privacy in mail and telephone was a commonly supported right, Watergate was a scandal for a reason.
>If you are not happy filling in your workplace questionnaire unless it's anonymous, then something needs to change
That's the point I was trying to make, that it is a shortcut, but an improvement. Preaching a 'good option' that doesn't survive the real world is a common failure of justice systems.
Example: 'Anonymous tip off for sexual abuse' is a very flawed system. Tell the victims 'no, see, what you need is proper handling of abuse by authorities'. Is that useful when we know for a fact that alternative never worked?
Shortcuts should only be removed _after_ the proper alternative is in place and working. Otherwise, you're just making people lives worse.
> It's that very tempering that stops non-virtual discourse from turning into a cesspool.
Agreed, anonimity introduces many problems we haven't been able to solve properly yet. It can platform abusers. It can empower legitimately wrong behavior. It can make people less willing to take ownership of their actions, or less empathic.
Those are all legitimate points to consider and balance, I'm just not ok with pretending it's a no-brainer.
You haven't given any yet. You've pointed out that anonymous messages in some circumstances can be beneficial (which they can), but haven't given any advantages for a widespread, anonymous communications network with open access.
>Privacy in mail and telephone was a commonly supported right
It really wasn't. I don't know of any time or place where mail and wire tapping wasn't legal and/or practiced.
Youtube is user-generated content which is precisely why I would prefer they add an RTA header. Random people uploading videos can claim to be kid friendly when they are not. Take that responsibility away from the uploaders and away from Youtube and hand it to the parents. Less work, liability and cost for Youtube should be a nifty incentive at the risk of blocking some advertising to children which is another loaded topic all together.
The system described still requires action by the webmaster. Their options are: deny the entire site to those sending an RTA header; evaluate the content themselves; or trust the uploader. (Or a combination: have uploaders opt-in to evaluation for a fee, with the content denied to kids by default.)
It is up to the client what to do with the header which right now is nothing. A law would be required to get the snippet of code added to user agents. I estimate it would take an intern one afternoon to get it into the clients they support not counting dev/qa, management approval, etc...
Challenge to FAANG: Show off your interns! There is no harm in adding the code required to detect this header. Example header to detect sent from NGinx. If you detect this header activate nanny controls. To be safe do a separate parental_build to get manager approval.
add_header Rating 'RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA' always;
For fun, search for this on Shodan.
The website owners and operators have to decide which URLs get the header. If the categorization is "either adult or user-generated content", then I already covered that for the case of YouTube: i.e., the entire site is denied to kids (whose parents opt in).
I also covered that here [1]. Indeed if parents do not enable all of Youtube or Youtube does not move most adult content into a unique URL or their server does not send the header for anything flagged as adult the kids will not be advertised to. They would have to go to a kid friendly site that moderates before a video is viewable or Youtube would have to change moderation tactics. Kids need not visit Youtube. There are kid friendly sites.
It is a serious business concern, there are occasional panics triggered by consumers complaining that a brand ad is shown next to and benefits from the attention of some distasteful content, and they start to bleed important advertisers on mass. YouTube then proceeds to get defensive and demonetizes (removes all ads from) or tags as adult-only any video that may be concerning, where avoiding false negatives takes much more precedence over avoiding false positives.
Of course this is not directly tied to protecting children, but this incentive structure is partly aligned and it is a strong one.
I agree that they are not doing a good thing, but one can’t say they aren’t doing massive efforts around it either.
Their app developers unless it is set globally and in that case their network engineering team.
Which resources would have the header and which wouldn’t?
If the app developers send the header on any video flagged as adult then just specific videos. If they created a unique URL that all adult content would reside under then it could potentially be the network engineers. It really depends on how much work they put into it so that more people could view the content assuming user agents become legislated to check for the header.
An aspiring teen could set up an RPi that modifies headers for all traffic on the network that the parental units never even know about. I'd venture there would be plenty of YT, TikTok, Discord threads, etc that would provide a step-by-step set of instructions to do it. Probably just point to an image to download to copy to your SD and voila.
It's probably worth noting that if teens can not view porn, they will likely produce porn making an entirely new tax free underground market on Tor or other networks.
This is just for keeping small children out. Nobody in the history or future of earth have ever or will ever locked teens out of a thing. Archive this comment so we can review it at a later time.
If your kid can figure out how to install a custom certificate on their device and MITM SSL to evade filters, (a) you never secured the device (b) you already lost long ago and (c) let’s get that kid a job or a scholarship.
What I’m saying is you can set rules, you can try your best, but under no circumstances can you build an impenetrable wall for determined kids. Things like this header solution or better controls on the end device would make things safe for the vast majority of kids. So don’t ruin the internet for adults because of a handful of unruly kids who are going to get in trouble no matter what.
1-2 years later, the teacher at school showed us how to program the turtle program, and I got it stuck in an infinite loop in 10 minutes. The teacher started swearing "Your chair is smashing the ethernet cable. The program is good and you fucked it up."
Around that time, I remember going to a barber shop for a haircut and stealing his nude/porn magazines. Even younger, I used to sneak up to my uncle's bedroom where he hid alcohol, and drunk half a bottle of whisky in an hour, and getting knocked out every time.
I used to get involved in fights all the time, since 8 years old, and my favorite activity at that age, was to climb to roofs of abandoned houses at night, and wander around inside of them.
My parents regularly tried to talk some sense into me, and I was beaten up by my father for all the stuff I did.
When I was sixteen, I managed to steal a car by myself, I drove it around for 1-2 hours and I didn't know how to drive, I figured it out at that moment. After that I returned the car where it was at the start, I didn't do anything with it, but when driving it I managed to flat the tire somehow.
When I was at the university, at some point around 20 years old, I downloaded Kevin Mitnick's book from torrents, I read it, and I got inspired to phone to my university, pretend I am a professor and I want pass a student (me) for 2 courses. I passed the courses without even taking the exam.
It was around that time, a friend of mine, while he was playing the guitar at his house, he looked at me at the eyes and said dead serious: "Man, if you go on like this, you will end up in jail." It was actually earth shattering! First time someone talk some sense into me. I thought, this cannot continue, he is right.
If circumventing a measure requires setting up a RPi and modifying headers, I would call it widely successful, that would be less than a thousandth of kids.
An aspiring teen could just have sex with another aspiring teen...
You won't stop teenagers from finding a way to be teenagers. Part of being a teenager is learning how to subvert the rules set by adults to fulfil one's hormonal imperative.
Who cares? Why is this an issue? An aspiring teen can (and will) do many things their parents don't know about. It's part of growing up. Making air tight surveillance systems to prevent teens from talking to friends or looking at boobies is many a bridge too far.
Just like how teens are already bypassing age-gates? The point is to make it the responsibility of the parents and not of the government.
Not all of them.
The solution currently undergoing large scale field testing in the EU uses cryptography (specifically zero-knowledge proofs) to allow you to anonymously prove to a site that your government issued ID shows you are above the site's minimum age, without the site getting any information about your real identity.
____________
We never needed everyone to filter, just parents busy lobbying the government to impose crap onto every possible service and website across the entire world.
Instead, they should purchase devices for their kids that have a child-lock and client-side filters. All sites have to do is add an HTTP header loosely characterizing it's content.
1. Most of the dollar costs of making it all happen will be paid by the people who actually need/use the feature.
2. No toxic Orwellian panopticon.
3. Key enforcement falls into a realm non-technical parents can actually observe and act upon: What device is little Timmy holding?
4. Every site in the world will not need a monthly update to handle Elbonia's rite of manhood on the 17th lunar year to make it permitted to see bare ankles. Instead, parents of that region/religion can download their own damn plugin.
This is society though, hence it is an issue of law and people trying to tell other people what to do.
The Elbonia rite crowd don't just want this for themselves. They want to ensure that their vision of "what is right" is put onto everybody. And the AnkleShowers want their vision of "what is right" put onto everybody. And everyone else has their opinion too.
And the shit-shouting continues until finally someone says "But we can ALLLLLL agree that we want to protect our children yes?"
The issue has never been technical. It is how society has it's debates. Things like each issue becoming a two party extreme. Things like media rules that "both sides get equal airtime" even if one is a tinfoil hat wearing idiot.
As a society, we won't get properly better until we debate better and can accept middle grounds.
Making it more sophisticated does not change this problem.
The problem is that some want to control other people. I am against this. For similar reasons I stopped using reddit - I finally had enough of random moderators censoring me and others.
If you are a small child it is indeed up to your parents to censor adult content and I am all for that. Kids will be upset but that is part of growing up. When the parents believe the kids are emotionally ready for adult content then I am sure they will get parental controls disabled. Even if that should not come to pass the kids once they are teens will bypass it anyway.
If you are an adult and your followers are adults then this does not really apply to you or your device. This would only hurt groomers, most of whom use video games for that purpose.
Let's say your website mentions the MLK assassination. Or maybe the 9/11 attacks. Just a mention; no disturbing details. Is some government entity now going to force the RTA label? Who gets to decide? An RTA label would be a death sentence to educational sites.
Each site operator would have to decide what level of legal risk is appropriate based on content rating and that would likely come from their legal team.
An RTA label would be a death sentence to educational sites.
Maybe but not likely. Adult content for the purposes of education used to be protected but that was a grey area and was abused heavily by some art sites such as Deviant art and then social media. CIPA was passed in 2000/2001 and updated in 2011 to provide guidance on content viewed by children. [1] This is of course up to the parents to decide as has been the case for sex education throughout the history of the USA. If a school was going to view content that would be in conflict with CIPA then I would expect they could get parents to sign a permission slip meaning they have adult consent from the parent of each child. Either way I would expect a school to curate content that is appropriate for children and cache/print it locally.
If RTA is not an option then the alternative will likely be to have parents log into a 3rd party site to prove their identiy for each student via some proxy auth site to give the child permission while also sharing personal details of the parent and child to said third party. More laws get involved when logging the child's personal details with a 3rd party but I am thankfully not a lawyer. Here [2] are some more laws specific to states. Laws will vary wildly by country and province or state.
[1] - https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/childrens-internet-prot...
[2] - https://www.ncsl.org/technology-and-communication/social-med...
Like a nutrition label. It’s your choice (as an adult) what you want to do with that information.
At best, you’re defending coordinated disinformation campaigns, though the article is about attempts to make compliance with the propaganda mandatory.
I’m talking about ratings like we have in movies, tv shows, games, music, apps.
Many facets of our lives.
Or nutrition labels.
The natural result is people push their representatives for something to protect themselves.
Some form of social contract will end up existing.
I was a kid before the video game rating system came out. Mom wouldn't let me buy Mortal Kombat.
Sure - Parents should pay attention and the trailers would make it obvious.
However - under your regime, there is no loss to such movies. They get some extra views from an audience segment they weren’t targeting at all.
Replicate this case ad infinitum - people should check and review a multitude of things. Medicines, cosmetics, food, contracts, games etc.
Firms use this as a way to offset risk onto the purchaser.
I hope we can both agree - that the burden of review of regular folk is now impossible.
Remove one more f-bomb and we'll give you that PG-13 rating you're wanting.
Food labels are easier to justify because they have a very tangible effect on one's health. But even those can be misleading in the end.
I say keep the food labels, but reconsider the movie ratings system. What if it went away? The studios and exhibitors would have to *tell us* who the movie is intended for. What's so hard about that? What is this magic benefit we're getting from a rating system?
Well, the only place they’re enforced is you being able to enter a movie theater.
But I can see how that affects the earnings for a movie during its theatrical run.
But even R rated movies, I believe if you’re under 13 you just need someone over 17 to take you.
That said, I was mostly dealing with griefers in Trade Wars or LoRD, and the worst thing I could find locally was GIFs of women in bikinis (and waiting for them to download was an excellent way to learn patience). I didn't have to worry so much about the threats that exist today online.
I am so grateful that I grew up when I did and got to experience that.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I do not think kids should have unrestricted access to the internet, especially if their parents can’t/won’t set limits.
If dad leaves the liquor cabinet unlocked the solution isn’t to ban alcohol.
A free and open internet is non negotiable.
Maybe with enough effort you can force the internet to fracture into a centralized TV-style internet and a “shadow” free internet, but you’ll probably kill the economy in the process. Regardless, you’ll never stamp out those of us who will maintain the free internet over whatever channels we can find.
We are at that point now with children having unrestricted access to online content that isn’t age appropriate, as well as being influenced by insane weirdos on TikTok and the like at an age where they are particularly impressionable.
The CDC says 4,000 underage drinkers die in the US every year. Maybe we could reduce that with stricter controls, but at what point does that become too burdensome to the rights of legal drinkers?
It's even harder to get the balance right when it comes to free speech issues like online pornography.
That's not quite correct. They count both deaths where the decedent had a high blood alcohol level and deaths where someone else who was responsible for the death had a high blood alcohol level. Because of this many of those in the count were underage but were not drinkers.
For example if I'm driving drunk and you are my sober passenger and I drive us off a tall cliff killing you your death will be included in their count because I was drunk and responsible for it. It also works the other way. If I'm sober and you are drunk, and I drive us off the cliff and you die it counts because you died drunk.
The question, then, is who is responsible for the children in the household? I've always answered this exactly one way: the parents. Power and responsibility must go together, so if the parents are responsible, then the parents must have the power. Parents have been held legally responsible for the crimes of their children, and given the coverage of parents being arrested for letting their kids go on a walk across town, I'd say this sets up incentives pretty well.
But all of that is a sideshow; a narrative. What we actually have is a massive swing towards authoritarianism globally, largely fueled by in increase in the internet allowing for unprecedented surveillance overreach, and the folks trying to seize control of those reins are using children seeing porn as a way to seem benevolent to garner support from folks that don't understand what's actually happening. Huge swathes have been duped into believing the narrative and fighting for age-gating in the worst possible ways, and that's because they're missing the larger pattern.
It's manufactured consent.
You may be right about the authoritarianism; it's a tendency of our species and makes it all the more remarkable that Western freedoms have lasted this long. I think, though, that it's more likely simple greed. The giant tech companies, dependent on ad revenue because nobody would actually pay for what they are offering, must be able to track and profile people.
The "protect kids from porn" lobby has always been around, it has nothing to do with surveillance or the internet. These people would be picketing a bookstore that sold Hustler magazine back in the 1970s, and demanding that customers be made to prove their age.
Then these places should make sure kids are not doing wrong things on the web on their machines. Just like a shop should make sure to not sell alcohol to kids. A library should have some kind of web filter anyway to at least block porn.
Public wifi and smart phones chngaes what can be done and what needs to be done.
Do your best as a parent and that is enough. Perfection is not possible or even desired; kids do have a degree of agency, and if they want to break the rules they are going to do it! And breaking some rules (ideally in a safe-ish way) is one way that we learn how to be independent from parents as we mature.
If you hand power to the state every time people fail to properly handle their responsibilities, you end up in a dictatorship. It is a parent's responsibility to keep their kids away from the dark corners of the internet. Thoughtful regulation would create tools to allow them to do that easily, not hand parenting over to governments.
Killing the wolf saved both the children of busy parents that couldn't be bothered to break their legs, and the children that grew old enough to have their leg fixed but weren't yet adult.
Today instead of chasing predators away from children spaces, we just box the children so at one magic birthday they'd be out in the world untouched by evil. The world will be still evil however, and the not children for a day unprepared for it.
What if, here's a radical idea, we terminate corporation with toxic ads or that let predators use their system to target children.
The state would breed wolves on the island then release them on the mainland to keep the deer in check.
Sorry to ruin your metaphor, but we really need more wolves.
I will be restricting my kids access to the internet.
I judge him worthy of viewing whatever he wants when he inevitably works around those restrictions.
I think it is amusing how these commercial third party intermediaries today are trying to frame things like "chat control" and "age restrictions" as attacks on internet users' rights rather than attacks on their intermediation "business model"
Generally, there is no age restriction on subscribing to internet service. However third party intermediaries that have now occupied seemingly every corner of the web, so-called "tech" companies, want everyone to believe that intermediaries _are_ the internet (as opposed to middlemen who seek to surveil as many internet subscribers as they can)
I am glad I grew up before the internet so that I understand and appreciate the only service that matters is _internet service_. People today take internet service for granted perhaps but I can remember when it was a new frontier
With internet service, there were so many possibilities. Today, so-called "tech" companies portray internet service as a given, apparently useless on its own,^1 whilst they advertise themselves as offering "services" (usually for free, a Trojan Horse for commercial surveillance). They utilise bandwidth paid for by the internet subscriber to transfer encrypted surveillance data to themselves
1. For example, when Mozilla claims something like without an online advertising "ecosystem" the internet would be worthless. The greed and self-entitlement behind this framing is both absurd and hilarious
One can disagree with Mozilla and think advertising sucks, and use tools to block it or FOSS products that don't force it on us, while also seeing how e2ee encryption bans ("chat control") and age verification rules are a restriction of both the rights of service providers and the rights of users.
Another way to put it is, just because a regulation is a restriction of the rights of a service provider does not mean it isn't also a restriction of the rights of a user.
The former does not make the latter true, but in some cases both are true.
I'd also add that if we can't stop bad laws that restrict the rights of (and piss off) both service providers and users , we have no hope of stopping similarly bad laws that only restrict the rights of users.
(Service providers, even small ones if they take the time to speak with their member of Congress, can be very credible, sympathetic, and persuasive stakeholders. When we can fight on the same side--realizing that sometimes we will fight on opposite sides--it's better for user rights that we do so. One of the tragedies of the left and parts of the right in the Trump era is that they see any regulation that hurts Big Tech as a win, even if it also hurts user rights. User rights are safer if we can distinguish between regs that hurt Big Tech and users from regs that don't hurt users.)
My feelings of freedom in that era, as a teen in a small 90s US city, were what fueled me to co-found one of the organizations (Fight for the Future) cited in the article!
(No longer in the trenches, just on the board, deserve zero direct credit for any of this work--it's all them!)
LoRD was fantastic, as were the turn based games that other people would dial in to take part of. It was such a different era, but we made it work by setting time limits and cooperating.
That's a sweetspot if you ask me.
The look on his face when a 10 year old rode up on a bicycle to buy his gamepad. I don't have a good memory but I still remember that scene ha.
Nowadays everyone wants you to put your real name, expects a real photo of you, track every step you take.
I think it would be nice to go back to how you could talk openly, just like you were able to have "discussion forums" in newspapers pseudonymously without it being trivially abused for identity theft, etc.
There's absolutely no way to counter this, or at least to round off the censorship power-grab this is allowing, if we don't admit to ourselves that people have become suspicious of the tech sector (us) and are reaching to clip our wings - starting with access to their kids.
If the politicians keep voting for things their constituents don't (and in these cases actively push back against so hard that the politician are forced to withdraw the push) that seems like strong evidence that politicians are doing something with an external incentive...
Politicians having bad incentives (e.g. campaign donations) isn't conspiracy thinking, it's a documented reality. Hell, we even had a supreme court judge taking a present from somebody who's case he was ACTIVELY OVERSEEING.
UK: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
US: https://issueone.org/press/new-poll-finds-near-universal-pub...
Aus: https://au.yougov.com/politics/articles/51000-support-for-un...
So far as I know there's nothing confounding here - people from across the political spectrum just seem to think it's a good idea to introduce age checks and to restrict children from accessing adult content.
I'm sure social media could say with 99% accuracy whether somebody is a minor already just based on advertising data and if a law prevented facebook from showing diet pill ads to a kid that has absolutely zero with some sort of government tracking bullshit.
The fact that you are citing 3 studies without even reading them apparently really makes me suspicious of your motivation here.
My experiences are all in the UK but everything I've read and everyone I've spoken to (outside of tech circles) reinforces my belief that this is popular. If you disagree then fine but I don't think you can find any polling to support that.
If you can then be my guest - I genuinely would like to see it. I'm not happy with my conclusions.
Or you did read it in which case you'd realize it has nothing to do with people wanting government age verification, and then you also need to back off your claim and owe us an apology.
It creates a divide between people that are looking for a solution to a problem, and people that disregard the problem completely. If you just ignore the actual problem and cynically call it a front for something else, you are just going to be ignored in the actual conversation. The problem is real and it needs a solution, suggest something better or be forced to stay out of the conversation.
For example, if there's a lot of car accidents, and we suggest a speed limit, you might say that it's actually a way for cops and cities to control the population, and make everything slow, and increase city income by charging fines. But the problem still exists despite your cynicism, unless you suggest another solution for the problem, you won't be able to keep your precious speed freedom. Because of course reducing car fatalities is more important than the freedom to go super fast, that's not really under discussion.
This issue is way more nuanced then you are making it. There is no legislation, or anyone enforcing laws to reign in the abuses and therefor the tech is being abused, and will continue to be abused with no end it sight. If you want laws and mechanisms to protect children, first have something in-place that protects people from the abuse that these corporations are encouraging. Until that happens, I do not support any of these initiatives. Its the wrong time for them.
This is being bankrolled.
A somewhat analogous situation is how landlords raise rents in sync with each other, not because they're intentionally colluding to fix prices, but because nowadays it's easy to see average rental prices in neighborhoods, and the natural strategy is to set your rental prices based on that.
I think that's the wrong guess. Even with chat control, in some previous forms, the proposals came of the back of lobbying. One such case was Ashton Kutcker's startup https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutchers-non-profit-start...
The more recent proposals for chat control were drafted by non-public "high level groups", the identity of which wasn't revealed to the public https://mullvad.net/en/why-privacy-matters/going-dark
I tend to follow information in this space, and could talk about it endlessly (though it would still have minimal effect in the end).
From the things I'm seeing right now, in my mind, all this clampdown on privacy is to have better control of the message and discussion in order to preserve the corrupt status quo. To give one example, many leaks and reports initially come in anonymous due to fear of repercussion from those in power. My country (Romania) changed the legislation a couple of years back to prevent people from reporting corruption anonymously (in a highly corrupt state). Maybe that's why Trump said he loves Romanians, recently, he'd like to do that at home as well.
> more sinister intentional efforts to harm the public
Until recently I wasn't the type of person that would entertain the idea of a shadowy organization that tries to puppetmaster the world. Though with the recent Epstein emails release that in black and white stated about Slovakia's 2018 government "the government will fall this week - as planned" (day prior to mass protests that lead to it falling), makes you wonder about the backroom politics of the western world, and why we need more transparency there, and less control from them.
edit:
And of course, any change that is put behind a "think of the children" message, should raise everybody's eyebrows to the max.
None of this requires some draconian regime where it becomes sites' own responsibilities to obtain and verify their users meatspace identities.
Everything that these laws are supposedly regulating has always been there and we have an entire generation now that grew up with it. Everyone was fine just like video games were fine, movies were fine, racy books were fine, and the printing press was fine.
The Internet comments make it seem like lazy parents but it's very convenient that the solution is to ID every single person on the Internet. Facebook pushed this hard with their real name policy and then had to back off because people complained about trans people being forced to use their old names. They've been successfully demonized so now it's time to push as hard as they can. It's probably not just Facebook but it's obviously not organic.
This seems strictly wrong. People talk online. People get their ideas online, and share their ideas online. Internet comments _alone_ are not a social movement, but they certainly do frequently represent social movements.
Internet comments do not represent anything anymore that doesn't manifest in the actual world. They are excellent at having a few influence the many
To your point though, maybe we can no longer reliably tell the difference, and so it'd be better to adopt your view as a rule of thumb.
Google has been bugging me with Android popups for years "please add your birthday to help Google comply with the law". Obtaining that bit of my information isn't something they need to do - it's something they want to do because every bit of personal information they scrape out of me makes their adtech surveillance database joins that much more accurate.
https://www.thecut.com/article/ashton-kutcher-thorn-spotligh...
Governments are also getting more conservative recently with regards to domestic surveillance & social freedoms. In this regard, it's not anyone new, it's just the usual suspects: the same people who fund conservative media, the prison industrial complex, etc.
> ...
> The biggest companies say they can manage the risks. Match Group—owner of Match.com, Tinder, Ok Cupid and Plenty of Fish—says any potential legal issues give “huge advantages” to those with enough size to comply. “We are able to have a big legal team, a big customer care team,” Chief Executive Mandy Ginsberg said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-law-targets-sex-trafficking...
After Vietnam, it was easier for journalists to embed with the terrorist groups than it was to embed with US forces, as the US learned that people seeing how the sausage is made immediately cuts the support for said sausage making.
Massive political weight was thrown behind getting control of TikTok because of the sheer amount of reporting from Gaza. Politicians are still trying to tell people that they're essentially wrong for forming their views on actual images of violence they're seeing.
The world at large was shown the brutality against the people of Gaza, and the plot was lost at home.
If the "enemies" aren't shown, it's easy to go along with "good guys" and "bad guys", but when you see 100s of children missing limbs, mourning their family members, and begging on to not be killed over the course of a few months, suddenly the fairy tale that allows some countries to brutalize others falls apart.
In the process I learned about computers and eventually got a modem to access BBSes. It was exhilarating! I would have spent any amount of effort and time to access it.
I basically attribute my entire career to accessing stuff the puritans would have tried to prevent me from accessing.
Also, almost all of the porn I have came from private trackers.
I very much doubt they will be concerned with any of these rules. Things will just move more underground if that happens. And the more underground you go, the more unsavory stuff you might find.
But we all know this isn't actually about protecting children.
In a way, I hope that it ends up being a good thing because the whole clearnet should probably be nuked from orbit.
Us nerds can come up with something better. Federated, encrypted, anonymous and unblockable. It's just the spam problem that is the hard thing to solve. Maybe reputation with proof of work could work.
I'll happily leave the normies to their milquetoast, corporate, manipulated existence.
It's dual use. It is about protecting children, but also along the way these other properties happen to come along. Thing is, with enough cryptography, we could get a way that this would work, but it's too complicated, which results in you being right after all.
No amount of cryptography will stop a parent from handing a verified device to a child. Parental controls (however effective you think they might be) have come enabled by default in the UK for the last decade and literally need to be turned off - which is exactly what will continue to happen.
And eventually illegal. That's what we see already.
And if it's not technically illegal then Google, Apple and OpenAI will censor it. Again, we see that already. On YouTube you cannot even talk about important topics such as suicide.
It's also coordinated. As much as I dislike Infowars, the fact that private institutions killed it at the same time is just scary.
Just like it's scary that we now have ethics taught by private entities. Be it what you can search or what ChatGPT or Gemini think.
It feels like a lot of these are strongly locked in place, which if you look at history is extremely bad. Only now private institutions have more power and control than any king ever had.
And all of that is if you don't consider the pockets full of money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift
https://www.reddit.com/r/moviequestions/comments/133gbzl/in_...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/we-talked-to-migrants-about-...
From what i can gather, there was some confusion as to why some nations which clearly and obviously have very high crime/fraud/corruption statistics yet at the same time have incredibly low prison/prisoner statistics (https://www.statista.com/statistics/262961/countries-with-th...) and the governments couldn't figure it out or overlooked it. It turns out that those nations just kick out the trouble and the trouble arrives at other shores, quickly setting up black market trade routes, money laundering shops, heavy violence, and a complete disregard for laws.
Starmer is currently using anti-immigrant sentiment to push his digital IDs, but that's because he is a cynic. He does whatever he needs to do to satisfy his bosses.
> That movie Scarface in the first 25 minutes tells you something.
It tells you that the US puts nations under siege for decades for committing the crime of self-determination, then lets in with absolutely no obstacles all of the economically destroyed and desperate, the extremely right wing, and the participants in CIA-financed death squads who flee, then uses them as a voting block (and a resource) to support the continuation and escalation of those sieges.
edit: immigrants commit less crime in the US than natives. Their children commit more crime, because they rise to the level of natives at their socioeconomic bracket.
No we didn't. That was 2023, and it went into effect in multiple phases, the last of which I believe was July 25th this year.
Also, I can't help but wonder what young people now will think of these laws years later, as adults. In the UK, the OSA tries to prevent 17 year olds from watching porn, even though the age of consent here is 16. How will they remember contradictions like that?
A better approach would be to put your energy into making sure the used methods are _reasonable_.
We don't require every FSK16 game sail to register the buyers name, age, contact info on physical checkouts etc. In most countries a law requiring that would be seen as excessive and in some places unconstitutional.
Instead it's fine to visually look at a id, and if it "obvious" they are adult (e.g. very old person) we don't even require that. And thats fine. Because we don't need a perfect prevention we just need something which helps parents parent "a bit" and helps "a bit" in cases where parents don't parent.
If everyone fight "all age check solutions" the chance that they get fully ignored and some horrible shit gets passed into law is very high.
If everyone fighting also provides a alternative and strict guidelines about what is and isn't acceptable in their opinion there is a chance for reasonable solutions being implemented instead.
(Like e.g. put a age gate header into http responses, like "min-audience-age: region=US, age=123; region=EU, age=456", say OS must have a API where you pass that in and they say yes/no for that account, do NOT require any crypto, signing etc. This is not fraud prevention but parenting helper. The OS then can store `18+|age` internally and have some integrations with country specific age verification services (it must only store 18+|birthday and only birthday iff <18, I guess for US 21). But there is no need to prevent anyone from changing this value with e.g. windows regestry changes, except if it's a child account. So require any widely _sold_ OS to have a parent controls/child account functionality.
But really any solution which effectively requires mass surveillance, exclude hobby OS or similar, require some clever signing scheme involving device attestation etc. is VERY excessive and unneeded.
“Does the child pay for internet access?”
“No, but they have a device that can access the internet!”
“Oh, so the child bought the device and paid the bill?”
“No, the parents do!”
“Ah, so would you say it’s the parent’s responsibility to monitor their children’s internet usage since they gave them a network-connected device?”
“You obviously don’t want to protect kids!”
Look, I do want to protect kids. I really do, but I also am sick and tired of bad actors using “BuT tHe ChIlDrEn” to recruit idiots and -phobes in a quest to make the entire planet and all of its spaces magically safe for children of all ages - at the expense of the superior number of adults who need our own spaces devoid of kids for community, for socialization, for being our full, human selves.
The internet already has an age gate, and it’s called “the adults paying the damn bills”. Those adults are responsible for making internet access safe for kids, not the entire digital planet dropping what it’s doing to make every single private space safe for kids to access without parental supervision. Bring back curated services like Prodigy and Compuserve, or just don’t give kids internet access until they’re ready for it.
Most of humanity grew up just fine without regular internet access as children, and there’s no reason whatsoever we have to foist net-connected terminals onto kids of any age. That’s parental choice, and I refuse to be punished because of someone else’s bad parenting.
This comment should be highlighted on a forum like this. There is absolutely a business opportunity here, and it would double as a public service. You might even be able to get some grants for it!
Maybe there might already be ways to prevent VPNs/apps, but it doesn't seem to be easy and/or publicized.
I think this is the wrong approach, an example is youtube kids. There seems to be a abundance of inappropriate content for kids on there. These companies don't actually care about you or your kids they care about profit.
Only (hopefully most) parents care about their kids. They have the power to push a solution as a collective so the solution should empower them to choose and not not take power away from them and others (for example adults without kids). The age verification mandated on a government level constitutes to limiting access to content, and in my eyes that is censorship.
My soapbox is addressing the crux of the social problem: we have built a society where both parents in most families have to work full-time jobs to have a chance at making ends meet, increasingly taking on extra overtime or gig work to improve their odds of paying the bills. This means children have no consistent adult available in their lives to engage with them: nurture, monitor, teach, mentor, demonstrate, assist, etc.
I want to build a society where only one parent has to work, and the other (whoever they are, I am not advocating a return to “traditional gender role” bullshit) can stay at home full-time. This way someone is always available to engage with the child and ensure their safety at home, with the suite of knock-on benefits that entails for the child’s development.
I don’t want to make a child-safe planet at the expense of children lacking present and available parents; I want a world where parents aren’t so wiped from working multiple jobs and struggling to pay rent or buy food that their children become a forced secondary concern.
The closest thing we have is the stay at home working parent, which has grown after COVID. This is a lot better than neither parent being at home, but unless it’s a very easy job, they still won’t be able to supervise much. I also think some of these newer “email jobs” are facing competition from overseas workers and AI. Unless politicians learn to find value in having a stay at home parent, and supporting that through policy, these jobs may go away as quickly as they arrived.
It's hard playing the long game, but we need more folks to do it. The big, important problems of life are never solved in a single fiscal year, after all.
It worked enough for 1 device to watch a movie or 3 people to do basic tasks, but there was no multiple screens displaying madness at all times. Apps just failed to load and you had to restart, it was absolutely fabulous.
The big problem is that schools require them to have and use the internet. I have no idea why. It's not better, it's not like they use Wikipedia, no it's a mish mash of private companies selling edu-ware to buzzword aficionados in administration.
But having no computers would be fine, at least till high school, at minimum.
In the state I live in, public education is a constitutional. Yet the state can predicate my child’s constitutional rights on using Google Classroom.
Google Classroom also has workaround that expose kids to harmful materials.
While homeschooling is an option, I have a constitutional right to send my kids to public school. The school lends them free notebooks, which they then control.
Some have strict settings - not enough to prevent toxic content - while others let lots of crap in.
All without me spending a dime.
I also flatly refuse the whole “we ID people in real life all the time” argument. The physical world is a default shared space, with finite boundaries and clear obligations. The digital world is the exact opposite: vague, nebulous, ever-shifting and changing, with no clear demarcation between states, or countries, or people. That argument reveals a complete misunderstanding of why physical ID checks work and digital ones never, ever will at scale, and I refuse to entertain anything predicated upon it.
And here’s the dirty, nasty, disgusting little secret that parents don’t seem to realize or care about: bad actors in education are leveraging the fact kids have internet devices to spy on them. I’ve had CIO-equivalents in public and private education ask me to build surveillance tools to scan messages and photos on students’ private devices when connected to school networks under the guise of “safety”, which I refused to do because hell naw does anyone other than parents need full access to a child’s device. I have worked in the education sector, I have seen first hand the mismatch between the goals of parents, the needs of children, and the ambitions of grotesquely underpaid technical talent and the resultant quality of candidates that often seems to attract (or lack thereof - no disrespect to the good ones out there, but ya’ll are the fringe minority based on my experiences).
Website age checks aren’t protecting kids, they’re harming adults. And bad adults are exploiting this knowledge gap to harm kids, too.
My first exception: school homework now done on PC. school requires laptop they can use in classroom. Friends.
Now yeah blame the parents.
But we already restrict alcohol to minors (but what stupid parent gave their kid money!) why not addictive, manipulative apps.
Tldr. Kids need devices of some sort to do life these days. Pare nts will monitor and restrict. But we can also clear the dealers from the corners. That helps too.
That line right there sank your entire argument, because A) you don’t have to have kids to want to protect kids, and B) it makes the position that anyone without kids should have no say in how those with kids rear and raise their children, which could be (and is often) dangerously expanded to oppose Doctors, Teachers, Social Workers, and other people in other professions or knowledge areas solely because they’re childless.
Be better.
Also, a lot of folks are making some assumptions about my person and profession to suit their own arguments, rather than discuss the merits of what I raised. These assumptions ultimately destroy their own arguments by showing a resultant lack of curiosity and a reliance on pre-existing narratives rather than carefully thought out rationale.
That’s why these ID checks keep winning: suckers drinking the Kool-Aid without thinking for themselves and dismissing what they perceive to be opposition, who in reality have more experience with this with kids and in education than they assume when dismissing our positions.
I don’t need to be more understanding of bad actors or bad arguments, they need to be better at discussing their positions rationally or trusting experts who have lived these problems.
They want to protect their kid while being lazy. It's why my aunt bought my cousin an M rated game. That said on the box is was violent and everything else and then presented her ID so she could prove she was an adult in order to buy the videogame. Then she she was upset because that game wasn't for kids. It shouldn't be allowed for kids.
It wasn't. She just didn't pay any attention. And that's how I think of all parents of these lazy initiatives. They want to deny and inconvenience adults because they can't be bothered.
My kids were all exposed to some relatively extreme stuff long before they had a network connected device (starting around 1st grade). This is because other kids at school had network connected devices, and some of those kids show other kids stuff for shock value.
In a more extreme instance, the child did pay for internet access; they got an old phone from a friend and paid cash for a sim card.
This is the result of social media companies optimising their feeds for monetisation.
The fines didn't do anything because they make too much money? Maybe... increase the fines? Maybe... don't just fine them? Maybe... fix the "algorithms being forced upon us"?
Too bad these laws won't be enforced properly because of things like https://www.euractiv.com/news/trump-threatens-retaliation-ag... and other geopolitical reasons.
Sure most kids can look at naked people and not be too affected, we all have the same parts. But beyond that, a lot of really harmful behavior is depicted in some porn and kids are not really mature enough to understand that in real healthy relationships people don't actually have sex like that.
Both porn and social media can be addictive and unhealthy if they become a substitute for interacting with real people. And this also happens with adults not just kids.
and movies, and kids shows, and in fast food ads and in sitcoms and in comics and even in some churches, even in children's books and school books, and famously in Disney movies
I am sometimes wondering if the whole "shielding" can be counterproductive. If you look at perpetrators and victims backstories it was either absolute lack of parenting (nobody to talk to) or it was households where everything was taboo. Eg. "hardcore Christians" and such.
And I worry that the whole "everything is taboo" might turn out badly.
Sure, I totally wished it was like "shield till they are 16/18/21" and then it will all be fine, but then we will end up with 16/18/21 year olds who will lose all hope when they first come across anything that might make them uncomfortable or in general cannot deal with.
I also dislike the notion of other people deciding how to love each other. Sounds scary. But I really would wonder if children who cannot judge stuff end up watching some BDSM and suddenly think it's normal to be violent. Like even relatively young children witness or are involved in fights in kindergarten. Doesn't mean they'll end up having issues with violence.
Different story if they learn it's the only way to get respect. But I really don't think you can equate that with a child coming across porn or non vanilla porn.
It feels like the same story as "ego shooters will make everyone think it's okay to shoot people". Pretty sure that a big part of people here played ego shooters.
On top of that I think creating the mindset that sex is something bad, to maybe be ashamed of, etc. is a good thing. I really do think that makes people not speak out when something is wrong. It creates that whole taboo. We don't have that with other crimes that we allow children to witness in media. Theft, violence, etc.
No I don't think children should watch pornography. However the whole "you cannot even speak about sex" and it's all way worse than weapons seems to feed the "bad porn" to some degree.
I, for one, would have started with legal threats and financial penalties long ago. But it just won't happen. So I'm fine with technical solutions.
Facebook is able to sell you ads based on your favorite shoe lace colour. They ban terrorists, bots, porn and people named "Mark Zuckerberg" all the time. Noone can claim it's too hard for them to ban minors under 13.
Start a local one and give some support to one of the global ones.
Not all porn is like this, but a shocking amount it. I wouldn't want someone who is learning what is acceptable and normal to come across this.
It's already a problem for preteens and teens who consume too much and enter into relationships with unrealistic and sometimes dangerous ideas. Unlike violence, sex is private and privately talked about so kids will not receive correction when they misunderstand.
I think that is a very very long stretch.
We live in a world where ads - also ads specifically targeting children - give wrong impressions of what's acceptable, "normal" and reasonable. We see huge effects of this.
Meanwhile we are in a society where romantic movies with sudden kisses are bordering on "rape" because there wasn't any verbal clear consent.
All while we live in a society where most people had relatively easy access to porn online and offline and that by today's standards was incredibly sexist only a few years ago.
I really think that if you have a child young enough to not understand that is not okay and at the same time looks at porn out of their own free will you have a serious problem in first place.
The whole "sex is something secret and forbidden" does a lot more harm and can also be seen by both perpetrators and victims.
It's also why schools start earlier and earlier about those things. Before there would be first contact with pornography even if there were zero measures and no parenting.
The idea that young children just happen to come across these things and not instantly close or even watch them, and draw morale conclusions from them if there wasn't any age verification is ridiculous.
But even if it wasn't, if parenting is that bad the expectation shouldn't be that this is the one thing that protects them from pornography. Because then it might as well run all day off a DVD or something.
I really dislike the whole "Let's think of the most ridiculous specific scenarios to justify laws" to then say "And if only one child can be saved", when we as a society seem to be arguing about whether it is morally okay to take a dime from a company to guarantee for proper healthcare for children - and parents so they actually can do a good job. And when we don't look at stuff marketed to children. We have Pokemon being a children's version of cockfights and that is evidently okay. We have dozens of fast food chains normalizing living off fat and sugar. We buy children toy guns and show them shows where they learn it's about being the strongest.
We have a mental health pandemic. We teach children that the right thing to do with your life is working for a soulless company at a bullshit job to then get shitfaced in a bar. The stuff that lets suicides skyrocket.
At the same time we are worried that children see two consenting adults having sex.
I think at this point that's "normal", but I really don't think it should be.
Totally willing to change my opinion if anyone can come up with perpetrators or victims become that by having seen porn, and then show it makes sense to do age verification here but not for James Bond, Superhero Movies or McDonalds ads.
I want to see legislation that age gates every social media site. Social media companies have harmed a huge amount of my generation and we should stop them from addicting children.
Privacy preserving methods for age verification exist, and we should use them.
The long term consequence are so dumb and obvious that all I can say is "good luck."
1. No smart phones for the child before the age of NN, me I say 18. A Smart phone makes a great High School Graduation gift.
2. Only internet access from a desktop computer with a hosts file that the child cannot change. That probably means no Microsoft Windows PC. See: https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
eazy-peezy
> Sure Timmy I'll send you porn, but it's illegal and I'm taking a big risk here so you gotta do something for me, also you can't tell anyone
You've failed to solve the porn problem and now you've created a larger grooming/CDM problem.
Peer to peer, or peer to creepy pedo, is how the stuff gets passed around regardless.
Do you have any idea the sorts of things kids send via SMS?
If I didn't know any better I would assume you are spreading misinformation to put children into an unsafe situation
It's impractical in today's world to raise children without access to devices like tablets and smart phones. That's like having a sugar-free, no TV, hand-sewn, ect, ect, household.
What's more important is to know what your kids are getting into, making sure they are comfortable discussing what they see, and teaching them independent decision making skills.
For example, a few years ago, my then seven-year-old complained to me about all of the Jesus videos that were popping up on Youtube. I told her to thumbs down them, and now Youtube no longer suggests them. She also knows that if other kids watch Jesus videos, that's their right and to keep her mouth shut.
We aren't a religious household, but we do occasionally expose our children to religious things because we live in the US and it's a big part of American culture and my extended family. For example, when my oldest was into ancient Egypt, I watched the 10 Commands (Charton Heston Movie) with her, then read Exodus with her. I also explained that this is not literal history but that some people believe it is, and that she shouldn't discuss religion at school.
She saw the videos shortly after we read Exodus, so I wonder if she was searching for for clips from the 10 Commandments or things about Exodus.
And before someone tries to bore me with anecdotes about how your particular kid evaded whatever restrictions you put in place, I think if kids put in thoughtful effort and planning to evade restrictions then parents are off the hook. Same as if a kid stages an elaborate ruse (one that would fool most parents) to get out of the house and drink with friends. That’s not on you. Parents aren’t prison wardens and we shouldn’t ask for a police state to fill in parenting gaps.
Making the state into the parent will affect us all, not just kids. I (and plenty of others) will fight to the end to preserve the last vestiges of the free, open internet. Overlay networks and even sneakernet if necessary. We’re not going to accept authoritarian control of communications no matter how much politicians want it.
Somebody who's 17 choosing to look at porn? Not in America's top 1 million problems.
Do something similar to what we do with video: make a government enforced voluntary rating system (that is, you use if you want, if you use and lie, the government hits you) with a standard where sites can tell their ratings to the clients.
Have the parents decide if they will use the rating for anything.
If startups build parental control it carries the wrong incentives.
Realistically what's needed for proper parental control.
1. Software that parents can install on phones, and computers (which comes as an upside of less lockdown on devices)
2. A way to whitelist websites and applications (particularly for phones).
3. A way to share, reuse and collaborate on whitelists. No enforcement of a central authority.
A while back, in my country parents protested against their daughters getting free HPV shots.
Couldn't handle the idea that their kids are separately embodied beings, you see.
Plus I'd wager the long word "papillomavirus" scared most of those folks.
So now we have higher STD rates and a significant number of young women permanently traumatized by being denied healthcare just because their parents were too obsessed with their private parts.
And that's "thinkin' of the childrin" for ya.
Maybe there is a problem for a tiny number of individuals, OK. A one size fits all approach like this still isn't the solution in these cases, though.
Yup. Me too.
And it goes back much further. Cf. "Pictures of Lily"[0] for a pop culture exposition from nearly sixty years ago. The point being that "porn" isn't anything new, nor was it difficult to obtain (hence a popular song about "porn") even before computer networks.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-PHDR2yhxE&list=RDg-PHDR2yh...
Edit: For those who would cite the current ubiquity of "hardcore" porn on the 'net, I'd say that's a difference in degree, not in kind. Something to consider.
How ironic. Age-gating is immoral, but pay-gating is fine.
There are a few situations where I can see verification is necessary; number #1 is in regards to online transactions involving money from a bank account. But the whole "show your age to watch pr0n" - that is just rubbish nonsense. Same with "people of age 14 are too young to use anti-social media". Now, I think people should quit wasting their time with facebook and so forth anyway, but I consistently reject these attempts to restrict freedom by state authorities acting as lobbyists for control-freaks, dictators or over-eager corporations. The internet could not have gotten big with those restrictions in the first place - so let's remove all of those without mercy.
it’s a cue not a threat, get back into p2p computing
As a parent, here is my perspective: - there is no debate about seat belts in cars. I'm not choosing whether or not my child should or should not wear them - there is no debate about ID checking outside businesses that sell alcohol. No one is debating whether I should get to choose whether my 7 year old has alcohol or not - pornographic content on television is already banned and we have ratings for media content - etc
Why are "privacy" and "freedom" arguments for age-gating of internet content? As a parent, it is impossible for me to gate access or exposure to internet content like 4chan or YouTube conspiracy theorists and what not on my kids' developing brains so some mandated help sounds common sensical. And busy, poor, or uninitiated parents may not have time to invest in something like self-driven internet censoring, and I believe society as a whole benefits when every child is automatically kept safe from unsavory content (by definition a subjective phrase yet a moral choice every society must make).
I can see an argument for mandating that every parent must individually purchase an in home internet age-gating "device" (hardware, software or whatnot) as a compromise so that the gating is still done by the parent (possibly with the help of a third party of their choice) while the mandation is done by the government. But it seems overly heavy handed in the other direction to me to say everything everywhere should be accessible to everybody of every age without gating and left to individuals (often sometimes with poor, underdeveloped, or temporarily ill-advised) judgment.
Looking for someone to change my mind on some of these (or links to studies or articles making the arguments pro-freedom in this context). I'll also virtue-signal for context, that I'm fully aware of and actively mourn the ill effects of corporations like Meta, etc that vacuum up our data and build profiles and sell to data brokers, etc.
That big Mormonny Pornhub landing page puts up a privacy fight worth reading - and the woman on it is fully clothed!
Every time someone says "think of the children", just remember that nobody is motivated by protecting children from their parents; it's all to protect parents from their children. Always has been.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/william-gillis-the-f...
And, on a larger scale, to keep us all infantilized indefinitely.