Hacker News Reader

Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

Do folks realize how many people would need to be a part of this conspiracy to get these laws passed at the state level? Maybe some people actually want to do good and are just misguided. And responding to those people as if they are evil government stooges certainly isn’t going to help them find the light.

View on HN

The adtech companies need human verification so they can keep selling ads. Age verification is a way to get that under the radar because normal people are pissed off about "the children" and "the social media". You've also got cultural warriors who would love to censor speech on the Internet championing it, too.

This kind of age signalling with no verification whatsoever does not help the adtech companies at all.

You don't think knowing a users self disclosed age-group would be beneficial to adtech? A) they shrug any liability for showing inappropriate things to minors when all the onus is on the OS to provide accurate info, and B) they get a highly-likely to be accurate piece of profiling information to add the the already huge pile they collect from spying on people 24/7 and harvesting microdata from browser APIs and mobile apps.

Every adtech already has a surprisingly accurate age profile on every single user. They genuinely don't have much to gain here.

It helps soften people up for nastier stuff later.

As an example: Decades ago CPUID and a machine readable processor serial number was massively controversial. Today burned-in device IDs being sent to websites is status quo.

This is step one. The next step is to say that it's not working and we need hardware attlestation or some such nonsense.

On the other hand, I don't know a single person or have even heard of people or organizations who are advocating to pass these laws. They want the war in Iran to stop and for costs to go down. How is there so much political willpower for the former and almost none for the latter?

Meta is spending a lot of money on age verification lobbying

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-beh...

> Do folks realize how many people would need to be a part of this conspiracy to get these laws passed at the state level?

Not many.

> Maybe some people actually want to do good and are just misguided

Yes. That's why it doesn't take many to be part of this conspiracy. You can just get people to play a part in the conspiracy by rallying supporters under the guise of good intentions.

> And responding to those people as if they are evil government stooges certainly isn’t going to help them find the light

Most of those people will probably die not finding the light. They are people who won't have to live with the long term consequences. Most of the Illinois House (~70%) is 46+ [1]. The senate statistic is even worse sitting at almost 75% for individuals 46+. If life expectancy in the US is around 80, that means people who are in the first half of their expected life are drastically underrepresented (especially considering Illinois's 46+ demographic only occupies around ~45% [2])

[1] https://cypp.rutgers.edu/age-in-the-2025-illinois-general-as...

[2] https://www.impactdupage.org/demographicdata?id=16&sectionId...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com