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Comment by metalcrow | Hacker News Reader

Honestly the reason seems quite obvious to me. Most people are getting seriously concerned about how the internet affects children. It's as simple as that. Children are getting cyberbullied and predated on while on platforms like Roblox. They're committing suicide after talking to ChatGPT. They're getting all sorts of mental disorders from tiktok and twitter. When you hear day after day the sorts of traumas that kids are going through (ones that are quite real!), it's hard to just say "well, the cure it worse then the disease, suck it up". A lot of people assume politicians are just greedy for power and are conspiring to give the government more surveillance power, but the simplest explanation here is that politicians are being screamed at to do something, and this is something.

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This reasoning never made sense to me. What the hell are these kids' parents doing and why is this something that needs to inconvenience everyone else? If lazy parents don't want to monitor their children while they spend all day on their ipads, that's their problem--it shouldn't be made mine.

Kids will find a way to sneak around their parents every time, esp. if their friends (or a groomer) introduce them to something "cool". Active parental monitoring alone isn't really a solution.

Automated access control is even worse. Kids explore technology a lot more than their parents do. They will find a work around and share it among their peers. The only real solution is to make them aware of the dangers and hope that it works when combined with parental attention.

Liquor stores shouldn't have to check ID.

Parents should be aware of where their kids are at all times and physically prevent them from entering liquor stores.

That's a disingenuous false equivalence comparison. Checking ID at a store comes with no extra burden. Not so for computing devices. You're talking about everything from fully locking down the boot loader to adding age verification interface on most of the applications. Why do you think people are so worried only about the latter?

Another difference is that internet access has potential advantages for children. There are ways in which they can derive immense value from it. On the contrary, there is no justifiable reason why a child should be allowed to drink.

Please don't rationalize such draconian measures and help them claim legitimacy.

The comment I replied to said:

> If lazy parents don't want to monitor their children while they spend all day on their ipads, that's their problem--it shouldn't be made mine.

This comes up all the time when age verification laws (of any kind) are discussed. Notice that this comment is not concerned with the implementation details of age verification laws, it simply rejects them in principle because the poster believes it is solely the parent's responsibility to monitor their children's Internet usage.

Offline age/ID verification is not a false equivalence comparison. Parents have a responsibility to supervise and protect their children from harm, it's true. But as children get older (esp. in their teens) it's critical for their development to have unsupervised time to interact with the world on their own terms. And for this reason most countries have some form of codified social responsibility to supervise and protect children from harm when they are in public spaces. Liquor stores checking ID is one example of that, but there are many others.

Every thread on HN about this topic has people saying it's solely the parents' responsibility to control their children's access to harmful media. I replied to one with what I believe is a good counter-example of this. As of writing this, 3 of the 5 replies to my comment are shifting the goal posts (criticising implementation details, rather than the concept of age verification). 1 is saying ban all kids from the Internet (requires age verification) and 1 is saying allow kids to buy liquor.

Online public spaces are still public spaces, so they share the social responsibility that offline public spaces have to refuse children access and/or protect them from harm.

In some countries they don't.

Showing your id at a liquor store doesn't have near the same issues of invasion of privacy, and big tech companies sucking down all your information, etc., while knowing your exact identity.

There is a difference between the liquor store checking your ID, and every store you even walk passed, checking your ID just in case you're on the way to try and buy liquor.

this is the solution, make internet 21+ and all these problems go away. kids have no business on the internet, there is nothing useful on the internet for kids.

There is no world where hovering over your kid's shoulders 24/7 is practical. What would help would be robust parental controls, but tech companies would never implement those for obvious reasons.

It’s their problem until it’s the world’s problem. Kids grow up and carry the things that mess them up.

> Most people are getting seriously concerned about how the internet affects children. It's as simple as that.

I'm also extremely concerned about what social media is doing to children's brains and how that manifests in their adulthood. I'm also concerned about how they affect adult brains, because I see it negatively affecting the decisions of even seniors.

But it's not "as simple as that". These sorts of solutions have serious consequences on civil liberty, privacy, security, affordability of general purpose computing, fair-use access to uaeful information, restrictions on state-sponsored information control, etc. This isn't a black-and-white problem.

> it's hard to just say "well, the cure it worse then the disease, suck it up".

Just as the problem is not black-and-white, the solution isn't either. There are a lot of steps to try before that. One is to try an awareness campaign among kids about the dangers of social media. It's a bit arrogant to believe that kids don't care about their own safety. Another is to assist parents with supervision and parental controls. Instead, they just jumped directly to the nuclear option. This kind of rhetorical framing of the opposition hides the likely nefarious intent behind such despotic measures.

> A lot of people assume politicians are just greedy for power and are conspiring to give the government more surveillance power, but the simplest explanation here is that politicians are being screamed at to do something, and this is something.

You paint both parents and politicians as naïve individuals. There are plenty of parents who can see the problem, since they're Gen X and millenials who grew up observing the change. Meanwhile, assumption of incompetence among politicians is defeated by the fact that much public debate about it is missing here. And the fact that multiple states are coming up with similar bills, indicates the influence of lobbyists. Besides, the US politicians are not exactly known for defending the citizen's rights against corporate interests. They deserve a heavy dose of skepticism and criticism, not the benefit of doubt.

*> …awareness campaign…

Do you think this has not been attempted already…?

A token attempt is not enough.

Oh no, the solution is not simple at all! The _reasons_ behind why we've gotten to where we are, however, are simple. Politicians get yelled at, they want to fix this, and they take a simple solution that has seriously bad side effects because they are ignorant/stupid/lack knowledge/don't care/choose your own reasons.

That is not something that should be controlled by an IT company, ISP, or an OS. I think parents have a responsibility to control (or at least influence) their childeren's content consumption. Companies like Google and Apple provide built-in parental controls and digital wellbeing apps, you can also use something like OpenDNS or control it via some other means. If a kid has unrestricted internet access and screen time, the parents are being neglectful. Obviously there should be some regulatory action to force companies to not make their apps addictive or harmful in some ways (including to minors), but not through age checks in an OS... The bill is kind of confusing, but from what I understand, it doesn't require ID checks, so as a convenience to not have to worry about kids having access to things they shouldn't it is not that awful (just put any age number you want when configuring OS). But implementing this is impossible (how do you force all programs to not show things that are not for "a user is in any of several age brackets"). It shouldn't be an OS requirement, maybe an optional feature that the state advises major OSs to have. Also some OSs are not for personal use, and nowadays a toaster may have an OS...

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