Online age verification is the hill to die on

eykanal

Alternative take: The fact that twitter / facebook / whatever allow arbitrary, unverified posting enables large-scale misinformation that led to, among other things, Russia's manipulation the US electorate and ultimate impacting the presidential election. This one-sided view has some good points, but for goodness sake, don't pretend that the alternative has no downsides.

wxw

How are folks recommended to get involved? Contact your local Congress member? I feel this thread has a lot of passion but is missing concrete, actionable steps.

anonym29

It's worth pointing out that full digital identity verification ("doxxing" yourself to an untrustworthy, unauditable, legally unconstrained private company) is NOT the only way to verify adulthood. We have had a system in place which enables adulthood validation without enabling digital surveillance infrastructure, with a degree of false negative risk that society has deemed acceptable for nearly 100 years now. This idea is not my own, but I'm happy to share a reasonable proposal for it. The Cashier Standard – Age Verification Without Surveillance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47809795 https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/7fe74381-a683-4f49-9c2b-1...

cvoss

> If you love your family, you must stop online age verification. > If you want the best for your children, you must stop online age verification. > Your children are being targeted. The infrastructure being built under the cover of child safety is designed to enslave them for the rest of their lives. Jumped the shark on that one, and really off-color. I'm less inclined to listen to guy, not because of his actual points, but because of how unreasonable he sounds when articulating them. A great lesson in how not to do rhetoric.

Bender

The one and only method I will participate in is server operators setting a RTA header [1] for URL's that may contain adult or user-generated or user-contributed content and the clients having the option to detect that header and trigger parental controls if they are enabled by the device owner. That should suffice to protect most small children. Teens will always get around anything anyone implements as they are already doing. RTA headers are not perfect, nothing is nor ever will be but there is absolutely no tracking or leaking data involved. Governments could easily hire contractors to scan sites for the lack of that header and fine sites not participating into oblivion. I a small server operator and a client of the internet will not participate in any other methods period, full-stop. Make simple logical and rational laws around RTA headers and I will participate. Many sites already voluntarily add this header. It is trivial to implement. Many questions and a lengthy discussion occurred here [1]. I doubt my little private and semi-private sites would be noticed but one day it may come to that at which point it's back into semi-private Tinc open source VPN meshes for my friends and I. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152074

cft

There is a sudden concerted international push for online age verification, and we do not know where this push originates from. That is the scariest thing about it.

selectively

An attestation-like system to detect humanity at time of post is absolutely for useful online spaces in the era of AI slop. The writing style of the author is very annoying.

semiquaver

Why is it always “think of the children” used to abrogate the rights of adults?

speak_plainly

The argument being made seems plausible but it’s complete fear mongering. The surveillance mechanisms already exist and are in play and people can be identified in endless ways. States have broad power to do what is being feared in the thread and haven’t already and to think that they’re waiting for this final piece of the puzzle to enact some insane regime is laughable. They could do that right now without the internet at all. Social media is probably not healthy and kids should probably not be on social media. Age verification and age limits for social media will be a good thing for kids. Instead of fear mongering, finding a middle ground, like governments adding some rules and protections on how this information or system is used is probably a better response. I might be in the minority, but I think incorporating an identity layer into the internet itself should happen with the right protections for users and should have happened at the beginning of the net and is probably a result of lack of foresight by the creators of ARPANET.

retired

Age verification on Australian social media has loopholes. Underage influencers use an agency to manage their social media for them. So anyone with enough followers or money can continue using social media under the age of 16. If you are going to implement age controls, you should implement a ban on underage influencers as well.

goda90

Age verification can be achieved without destroying anonymity and privacy online using anonymous credential systems, but it has to be designed that way from the ground up, and no one pushing age verification is interested in preserving privacy.

streetfighter64

Seriously, who cares this much about the internet? I for one will be happy if my kids spend less time online than me. Similar to what a smoker would feel seeing cigarettes finally be banned, I suppose. It's also ironic that this guy is so adamant about protecting the children on xitter. It's like preaching against racism on 4chan.

baxtr

Ok, maybe that’s a silly thought, but… couldn’t this be provided by Apple/Google anonymously? When you set up kids devices in your family they ask you to provide the birthday anyway. I’m keen to see the arguments against this.

SirMaster

"But age verification requires identity verification. Identity verification requires digital IDs." Um, no? iOS is doing age verification just by your credit card. I never saw people all that upset about giving their credit card info to their phone wallet app or even to a bunch of websites.

dirtikiti

And the piece nobody is even considering... Responsible parents don't have separate OS accounts for their children.

KaiserPro

If it was the hill to die on, then we should have done a better job of stopping pervasive fraud, abuse and harm to everyone so that we wouldn't have been a need to bring in age verification. The reason we are up shit creek is because large companies didn't want to spend 2-5% of profits on decent editorial controls to stop bad actors making money from bending societal red lines (ie pile ons, snuff videos, the spectrum of grift, culture of abusing the "other side") They also didn't want to stop the "viral" factor that allows their networks to grow so fucking fast. This isn't really about freedom of speech, its about large media companies not wanting to take responsibility for their own shit. meta desperately want kids to sign up. There are no penalties for them pushing shit on them. If an FCC registered corp had done half the shit facebook did, they'd have been kicked off air and restructured. So frankly its too fucking late. Meta, google and tiktok will still find ways to push low quality rage bate to all of us, and divide us all for advertising revenue.

Ritewut

Just a reminder that the YC funds many of the companies pushing these laws and building the surveillance state.

fithisux

We now know all the arguments. No more need to persuade anyone. People will show what they are made of.

ronsor

There's an angle everyone misses. Mandatory age surveillance everywhere is only going to result in massive, normalized ID fraud. You thought fake and stolen IDs were a problem before? You haven't seen anything yet. And half of it will be from adults trying to avoid privacy invasion.