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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

That Facebook story is an AI generated attempt at astroturf that has gone viral, but we shouldn’t probably continue perpetuating it.

It is not Meta working across the globe because they’re too lazy to implement age verification.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708278

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Meta is publicly posting ads in Europe promoting age verification, so yes Meta is a part of the problem.

What does Meta get out of enacting mass surveillance of the entire Western world (not even for their personal benefit)? That they can avoid spending 6 months implementing ID checks like porn sites have done?

Also can I see an example of those ads? Google isn’t surfacing anything relevant

This article[1] gives some examples, but annoyingly, no relevant pictures.

> Denmark’s digital affairs minister criticized Meta for an advertising campaign promoting regulations on age checks for social media in an interview with POLITICO.

[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/denmark-digital-minister-sla...

Do you not understand who is part of the money and power circles? Think about it

I don't think it's so much about the cost of doing age verification themselves, it's about who has liability for letting kids see stuff they're not supposed to have access to. Facebook would love to be able to point at operating system companies or device manufacturers and say it's their fault for letting little Timmy through the adult gate, it wasn't Facebook's mistake.

Answering this point directly, not the full argument.

If Meta bans young people from their platforms, young people will just go to a different platform, and then Meta loses a generation of customers.

But if the age blocking affects all platforms, then the playing field is kept equal with respect to age blocking.

Which other platforms? Age verification affects everyone equally. Any alternative platform that caters to young people that grows large enough will get the ban hammer, unless somehow someone manages to run a Facebook alternative out of Russia for people (kids?) to flock to.

I still don’t think that is the case.

This might reflect a misunderstanding of my comment.

Meta reads the writing on the wall, and is committing to the position that age verification is inevitable and will come down eventually no matter what.

Meta, understanding that it will likely be the poster child for social media, knows that the laws will be likely written to make Meta enforce age verification on their platforms. This is expensive and ridden with liability traps, lawsuits, and government investigations.

To stem the tide of this before it hits their shores, Meta is actively pushing hard to get age verification legislation in place on the OS level.

This would put Google, Apple, and Microsoft in the hot seat, and Meta can carry on while blaming them when kids get through cracks.

Meta is simply playing a strategy game to make everything shittier for everyone else (everyone uses an OS) in order to protect themselves (not everyone uses Meta).

> Meta is simply playing a strategy game to make everything shittier for everyone else (everyone uses an OS) in order to protect themselves (not everyone uses Meta).

You just summed up regulatory capture.

Meta is actively sponsoring the bills in my country. They go as far as ads on TV and Radio, something that never happened before

But in Australia they're actively fighting against it. Why?

It's still in their interest to offload the responsibility to legislation so they're not held accountable for frying kids brains.

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