The assertion is not that something will inevitably happen because of this other than the further normalization of government authority over individual autonomy. That is an inherent result of this, as well as the prohibition of sale of alcohol and drugs to kids. You can argue on and on whether or not these are good, righteous, moral laws, but you cannot deny the intrinsic fact that widespread acceptance and even support of widening the scope of government control normalizes government control

Well I should have worded it "A big reason the say they are banning it is Cyberbullying" , I don't believe that at all, but you are 100% correct, they hate big tech as it always beats our corrupt, biased and inept traditional media.

> Bullying is not new and was performed via sms before the internet.

Pretty sure the internet was a thing well before kids got dumb phones.

I remember when a bully would have to go up to you themselves to mete out whatever harassment, and you could avoid a lot of it by just being aware and avoiding that particular person.

Juxtapose that with today, where any one bully can create dozens of accounts to bully in a swarm, and the bully has constant access to you from your own pocket. Also, a person in Minsk or Timbuktu or whatever couldn't just come up to your house in the middle of the night to harass you out of boredom.

This "we could do X before computers, why are we trying to ban X-with-computers now?" line of arguments is just intellectually lazy. If a bad behavior was well moderated in the past because it was labor or resource intensive, the sudden removal of those constraints is a material change that demands revisiting. Put another way, if a constraint stops working, we should change constraints, not just do the old constraint with a confused expression on our faces.

> Bullying is not new and was performed via sms before the internet

I seem to remember real bullies would do it to your face before the internet. Not just anyone behind a keyboard.

Funny enough, adults are also prone to bullying in large groups online. This does not go away later in life.

> That’s a choice made by those services. They can change it.

Why do these services have to lose? That's a choice made by this country's government. They can change it.

A penalty unit is an inflation-indexed, revenue-indexed fine.

It's different. You show an ID card to a human if you don't look old enough. They look at it and return it. The ID card doesn't get scanned or tied to all your future recreational drug purchases - you don't have an account or a trail that identifies you.

When uploading ID documents, your account gets tied to your real world identity. That's not a precedent the government should be setting, because private entities having an excuse (the law) to require identification erodes privacy, and because in the future other services could be required to ask for an identification, too. Yes, it's the slippery slope (aka "boiling the frog") argument, but that's how laws that erode privacy evolve - step by step.

Now it's account for social media, then it's porn sites, then it's forums where you might see porn or discussions on suicide, drugs or anything deemed morally hazardous. They might require an ID just to view the site or require the site to not make it public. If (or "when", if we don't oppose such laws) enough countries mandate something like this, most sites will likely require an account for all content, regardless of where the person is located, as otherwise they'll likely have to prove that they've not only geolocated the IP of the visitor, but checked that they weren't using VPNs, Tor or similar services.

As for using zero-knowledge proofs and similar technology to make it less infringing on privacy - I very much doubt the government (any government) to implement this with 100% privacy and security.

Yes, but those are in the physical world. [1] In digital realm, having to verify your ID has way more consequences. My passport has been leaked and I have a “quick cash loan” in my name as a result of that.

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[1]: Tangentially, those are trivially circumvented in many countries. When I was a teenager in St. Petersburg, we’ve used a “duty free delivery service”, which (I suppose) just stocked liquor at the duty free shop on the border with Finland, and then sold it. Not sure how legal was the core premise (probably not), but we used it because their couriers didn’t even pretend they need to check our passports (definitely illegal).

In many countries, alcohol is available in grocery delivery services. Couriers happily leave your order at the doorstep even though they are supposed to check your ID. In many other countries, even buying in-store is possible (e.g. Japan, where in any konbini you can just press a button on screen saying “yes, I’m 21”).

No. What is this revisionist nonsense? Where the hell did you think the meme of "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog" came from? Conventional wisdom was alias up, or maintain a well-known handle. Do not use or share personal info. Ever.

I don't have to scan my face, upload my ID and share my biometric data with multiple 3rd parties, who will then lose and leak my private data, every time I drive a car.

This law isn't letting anyone use social media freely until they're suspected of not being an adult, at which point they have to age verify. It requires everyone to identify themselves whenever they want to view, interact, reply or share content on the internet.

>Most examples of “failed regulation” like American prohibition were runaway successes as public policy.

You pick one of the worst examples? Prohibition drove a black market for spirits . the 21st amendment repealed it because the government missed out on hundreds of thousands in taxes.

The reason to make the law and repeal it were both awful. The lessons learned were all wrong. It's just awful all around (and I speak as someone that doesn't really drink much).

> The idea that someone is going to make an engaging experience on a “decentralized” network is honestly a bit silly to me. The market potential of this business is low. Decentralized networks with much larger incentives have failed to capture critical mass.

When decentralized networks win, they often win so big that they become invisible. AOL is dead, the web isn't. Email, the global telephone network, the internet itself, these are all decentralized networks.

The hardest part of doing this for social media is actually discovery. It's easier to show people an "engaging" feed when your algorithm has access to the full firehose to select from. But that doesn't mean doing it in a decentralized way is impossible, and if you pass a law that drives people away from centralized services, the incentive to do it goes up.

The “engaging experience” is the entire problem. The fact that it’s harder to do addiction engineering on a decentralized network is a feature.

Aaannd then the mask came off, proving you were a moralistic authoritarian. I suppose you support cartels destabilizing entire nation-states with billions of criminal funds too

>What social networks are these?

well for one: I find it humorous how this law has an exception for Roblox. That really speaks to how up to date lawmakers are on the situation (or worse: how easy it was for Roblox to pay them off). I don't see how it's a slippery slope when the corruption is before our very eyes.

>Slippery-slope arguments,

Slippery slope arguments exist because the act of governing has the tendency to converge on ratchet effects. It never bloody loosens, do every damn inch has to be treated with maximal resistance.

>What social networks are these?

That's the point, there are always fringe social networks you don't know, and they are probably x10 toxic than reddit comment sections.

In discussions similar to this I often see parents expressing their happiness with a state taking the role of a "bad cop" so that the parents can just wash their hands off telling their children it is state's fault they can no longer use TikTok ("I can’t express how much easier it is to restrict it and not seem like a kook when authorities are also on board." from OP) instead of having a proper conversation about harms of social media with the children. This is literally a cop out for them from a proper parenting.

From my point of view I'm already paying for their brats with higher taxes, now I will also have to gradually give my documents to random web sites more and more just to reduce the "burden" of parenting on lazy parents...

Firstly, I'm not from the US. Secondly, I don't agree that forcing bunch of random web sites and apps (i.e. not government or banking sites/apps) to demand ids from their users is a "reasonable environment".

> This is not "offloading parenting of your child to the government" it is acknowledging that a certain action can be far easier to take (getting a child off social media) if the government puts in laws to support those actions.

Compromising my privacy in order to allow you to omit having some tough but needed conversations with your child (i.e. _parenting_) regarding harms of social media is not a sacrifice I'm willing to make. Homer Simpson was supposed to be a parody on a bad father, not a role model with his "You're the government's problem now!".

> Are laws against violence a way of off-loading physical protection to the government?

Of course they are! I support government protecting me from violence in some capacity, although I don't support "chat control"-like laws since the cost/benefit doesn't seem to be favorable.

I mean, it does invite the Government to your household, just like marriage (which is a legal contract) invites the Government into your bedroom. I oppose both.

Parents are supposed to be parenting, without the help of the Government. You do not want your kid to spend their time on Facebook or Instagram? Do something about it yourself, as a parent. I understand that tech-illiterate people may be at a disadvantage here, but we are on HN and I am pretty sure we are able to:

Set up a Raspberry Pi (or any other SBC, or even an old x86 box) running Pi-hole with custom blocklists, configure DNS-level filtering with time-based access rules, or implement iptables/nftables rules on your router to enforce schedules. You can use hostapd with separate SSIDs for children with different firewall rules, set up a transparent proxy with squid + SquidGuard for content filtering and time restrictions, or configure your router's DHCP to assign specific DNS servers per MAC address with dnsmasq managing time windows. If you want more granular control, there's pfSense or OPNsense with packages like pfBlockerNG-devel for domain blocking and traffic shaping, or you could write a simple cron job that modifies your firewall rules based on time of day. These are all straightforward solutions that don't require government-mandated age verification systems with their inevitable privacy nightmares and implementation overreach.

The technical capability exists; the question is whether parents are willing to invest a few hours to implement it rather than demanding legislation to do their job for them.

This got rejected in the end, btw.

In what country do you need to be shown some of that?

I’m using the word liberal to mean things like liberty, individual rights, democracy, and the rule of law. That’s why I also mentioned hard left authoritarianism.

Also there’s a world of difference between people registering dislike on an online forum and the use of state power. It seems like a lot of people these days draw no distinction between removal from a private space or even people just showing disapproval and actual state force.

While your point (about the potential for liberal authoritarianism) is true, reddit is an example of partisan, not authoritarian, behavior.

> authoritarian

>downvoted out

Erm...

Pretty sure OP means liberal in the sense of "classical liberalism". Ideas like free market, rule of law, private property, etc.

You’re confusing democracy with tyranny.

Bahaha right, so that way dissidents have no way of speaking out. Man, I'm sure they'd hate to see that happen.

Agreed!

I guess the question is, how should citizens communicate with each other? Who should apply the restrictions? If the authoritarian state is applying the restrictions, then it's probably for their own goals.

No. It would be true if the car didn't turn on the engine unless you showed your face and ID to some on-board computer of the car.

The point of laws is to document what everyone in a community has come to agree on, assuming a democracy. Or, in a dictatorship, what the dear leader has decided upon. Any punishments encoded into those laws may serve as a counter-incentive, I suppose.

But baked into that is the idea that enforcement isn't perfect so you can still disappear into the night when you have that urge to do whatever it is that is technically illegal. This allows acceptance of laws that might be considered too draconian if enforcement was perfect. However, it seems in the case of these digital-centric laws that enforcement will become too close to being perfect as, without the need to hire watchful people, there is strong incentive to make it ever-present.

Or maybe not, but that is why the question was asked.

Companies and governments see age verification as an opportunity to hoard data for facial recognition and other ML/AI training sets.

It will always be cheaper to go with a vendor that forces you to scan your face and ID, because they will either be packaging that data for targeted advertising, selling the data to brokers, or making bank off of using it as population-wide training datasets.

Governments will want the data and cost savings, as well.

Both corporations and governments will want to use the platforms to tie online activity to real human beings.

Arguments like these end up like arguments for PGP in email: yes, in a perfect world we'd be using it, and platforms would make it easy, but the incentives aren't aligned for that perfect world to exist.

> a government API could provide the simple assertion

Yes, it could, but we don't have that, do we? They launched the ban without implementing a zero-knowledge proof scheme as you described. In a very short amount of time the providers will have associated millions of people's accounts to their biometric information and/or their government issued IDs.

While this is a good thought.... Do you really trust the Government to implement a cryptographically verified assertion correctly, and not track which website is making the request, for which individual at what time, and then cross reference that with newly created accounts?

Does that work already? If so, how?

If the API asks for a users minimum age at a certain time, how can the government not know which data set it has to check?

It doesn’t have to be impossible to bypass. It just has to create friction so less and less kids end up on social media over time.

"The rest of the world needs similar restrictions on American tech and social media..."

Yes, it does but don't kid yourself, all of Big Tech will cooperate with governments for mutual benefit. Big Tech collects data that governments would otherwise have difficulty collecting, if Big Tech is refrained from collecting data because of regulation and privacy laws then both lose out.

We should never expect governments to maintain our privacy or protect us from Big Tech leaching our data. In short, we're fighting different enemies on two fronts and that's a difficult and invidious position to be in.

[flagged]

I'm pretty sure this take is incorrect on multiple accounts. Trans demographics tend to skew towards trans women by about a third, not trans men - at least in all the research I've come across.

And regardless, increased acceptance and awareness of different gender identities can very plausibily explain increased numbers, not "social contagion". Calling it a contagion is pretty indicative of your underlying beliefs here.

To claim there are not really any other candidates for a skew (in that direction or the other) you would have to (like Shrier herself) go out of your way to not bother to talk to trans people, or their doctors, or their families, or sociologists, or talk to any of the people who spend their lives researching gender, what it means, how it affects us, what assumptions we make, whether those ideas stack up when confronted with empirical research, etc etc. I'm not really interested in discussing further with a 30 minute old account.

No plausible explanation? I disagree.

It’s about the social safety of transitioning. The paper you referenced is from the UK, which is famously a TERF island (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). In the TERF island, it’s much less safe to be a trans woman than a trans man. Adolescents can sense the risk of being a trans woman is much higher, so many trans women stay in the closet and don’t come out.

There's not really any plausible explanation as to why so many left-handed students tend to skew towards boys, rather than girls, other than social contagion.

When my parents were kids, there were no left-handed kids. Social contagion is the only explanation for as to why there are suddenly so many left-handed kids today, especially since many of them are boys and not girls.

People assigned male at birth come out later than people assigned female at birth on average. Trans men and trans women receive different stigma. Many AFAB children and adolescents referred to gender clinics identify as non binary. AMAB non binary people reported less acceptance in LGBT circles even. And biology could be a factor.

You are correct. And when they try to undermine you they prove your point. There are more mtf people than ftm people because until recently, the it was not a trend among teen girls.

A wall street journal opinion columnist - Shrier- with zero medical training wrote a book to create a moral panic in the public about trans teens, based on the discredited ideas from Lisa Littman's ROGD "research", where in this case the word "research" actually means: reports from parents recruited from well-known anti-trans websites.

Their comment did not attribute to Shrier any view of sexual orientation. People who consider gender identity illegitimate and people who consider sexual orientation illegitimate overlap.

Twitch & Kick are likely included because they can breed parasocial relationships between streamer & viewer.

The data on social media harms is mixed at best. We know for a fact fast food, cosmetic ads for girls, are strictly more harmful.

This is nothing more than speech control under the guise of "won't someone please think of the children"

I value my kid not being exposed to porn as a child well above your right to privacy while watching it.

The ubiquity of the internet and children’s access to it is something we haven’t reckoned with yet. The differences between pre social media and mobile vs now is immense. The people seeking to capitalize on getting children addicted to something are numerous and well motivated by LTV.

Their incentives and the wellbeing of children are directly at odds. We already regulate things that are addictive for children.

People might give their kids a drink extralegally. Nobody is saying “hey kid, why don’t we watch porn together so you can develop healthier habits.” Nobody is creating a “starter Instagram” with their teenage daughter.

These forms of media are NOT SAFE FOR KIDS. They have observably negative population wide outcomes and are as reasonably banned as lead in pipes.

"Want to provide age information to a site so you can look at porn without any guarantee that information won't be used for additional profit?"

That's the Orwellian payoff: people self-censoring and frightened to act for rear of retribution or their reputation. It's the authoritarian's ideal approach to control.

I think you might be confused here.

Providing age assurance is what banning teens from social media requires. This is already happening in the US in several states.

Regulating social media is the alternative.

Mate for 1000 years priests decided what we could eat on Friday's.

You've never been more free.

I was all for this legislation, thinking the positives outweighed the cost, but after reading the list of affected services, I now disagree.

Why didn't they just legislate that all social media apps content must be like Facebook in 2005. No recommendations, chronological timeline only, and you only see posts from users you explicitly added. That would have benefited everyone forever, and not enabled some small subset of apps to collect your govt id or the law to be irrelevant when the next popular social network comes along.

They effectively banned only the popular cigarette brands, instead of regulating nicotine.

If services would argue this would make them all the same, then add a clause where the user can opt in to have an algorithm shove content at them like now if they are over 18.

This way everyone can use the basic service for true socializing, but the harmful stuff is actually regulated out by default.

Too much money etc for this to ever happen, but geez they could have done a lot better.

yeah, there's always 4chan.. and rumble might get an uptick in users today, where they can view all the content youtube has banned

Oh, and how do you know it will stop there? Control freaks don't stop at the first step.

First they came for Facebook, and I didn't protest, I was not on facebook.

Here's what's going to happen next: Whatsapp/signal/telegram groups will become wildly popular. Which gives the wannabe-fascists the excuse to ban those as well 'for the children'.

We've seen this salami tactic often enough to know the pattern.

Well that’s kind of my point. If we regulated against that kind of content pipeline, we wouldn’t have an excuse for big brother to be demanding we prove our age to access websites.

How popular is vaping under teens in USA?

Comparatively, sure. I don't think either of those are as addictive or as deadly as tobacco use.

Which means they also do no longer benefit from family-grouped Youtube Premium, which means MORE ADS ... which is exactly what we tried to prevent, right?

No, not really. Any sufficiently motivated state actor already can. I would be unsurprised to be able to dox you as a mildly interested individual. It is usually not very hard.

People usually reference things that they are ashamed about as a reason to justify this fear of ID based services. I don’t find this compelling whatsoever. Every platform I’m on that is even mildly associated with identity is more enjoyable and interesting. The idea that the marketplace of ideas is slowed by identity is not something I’ve seen in practice. In authoritarian regimes we already see ways to circumvent internet anonymity. So no, I don’t see the downside.

Open to being persuaded here though, about 5 years ago I would have agreed with you.

Had no issues.

You know, I am in a country that allows alcohol for children (in different intensities, e.g. beer at age 14 with parents present, age 16 in the supermarket, age 18 for the hard stuff). As it turns out, our kids are alright.

Tobacco and porn have been more strongly regulated lately. In my teenage years, they were easily available to anyone with coins in their hands. Turns out: that didn't destroy us either.

The first beer, the first pack of strong tobacco (Rothändle, the dirtiest, hardest stuff), the first tiddie magazine from the railway station kiosk, those were rites of passages. It was a way for teenagers to push the envelope, realise alcohol makes you wobbly, tobacco causes diarrea (believe me, that Rothändle stuff was more chemical weapon than 'smooth'), and ultimately, all women look about the same undressed, so it is pointless to keep buying. They were small, recoverable mistakes that taught teenagers where their limits were.

Now we have banned all that away - but the teenage urge to self-realization and rebellion found a new way to social media. And: social media is safer: no-one got lung cancer from TikTok. No-one woke up in a hospital for facebook poisoning.

Ultimately, it is the rebellion the fascists dislike, not the fact that people earn money with it. So we ban that, driving teenagers to ever-more-destructive behaviour.

Teenagers need an outlet to be teenagers without living in a state sanctioned panopticum. If society pathologizes every form of adolescent experimentation, if you let control freaks raise your children, do not be surprised if they turn out to be either actual rebels, or something much, much darker.

Yes because it is so hard for kids to get alcohol and cigarettes. Kids have been sneaking and smoking cigarettes forever.

How does this solve the problem of both governments and corporations wanting to implement this in ways that allow them to hoard datasets?

As it stands, the government in the US uses an identity verification vendor that forces you to upload videos of multiple angles of your face, enough data for facial recognition and to build 3D models, along with pictures of your ID.

I use Tor, so I get to see how age verification is implemented all over the world. By large, the process almost always includes using your government issued ID and live pictures/videos of your face.

There are zero incentives to implement zero knowledge proofs like this, and billions of dollars of incentives to use age verification as an opportunity to collect population-wide datasets of people's faces in high resolution and 3D. That data is valuable, especially for governments and companies that want to implement accurate facial recognition and who have AI models to train.

Well, phones and computers have had parental controls for well over a decade.

That doesn't solve the problem: it just defers it. Who's allowed to have a digital ID?