Btw, it doesn't need to be actively coordinated for this to happen.

Building architectural styles used to be per city and now buildings look roughly the same worldwide. Style is dependent on the year built not the location.

Because every architect is "reading the same magazine" worldwide now that the internet exists, rather than debating in their own city.

Similar monoculture of global thought is happening in all fields.

Looks like it: https://tboteproject.com/

It's almost like a well-monied or well-connected lobbyist is pushing this heavily. Multiple contenders out there as to who it could be. But regardless of who the originator is, the push can be kneecapped. Imagine jurisdictions that have an opposite push - one that criminalizes use of age verification software such as mandating providing government ID or facial scans. It can be done!

Well obviously? It's literally being broadcast in the news when diplomats talk to each other. What do you think they are talking about if not policy discussions?

My guess would be some very influential NGO(s). But I haven't looked into it or thought about it.

The simpler explanation is that we live in a world that is more connected than ever so politicians, campaigners and the rest can get policy ideas almost instantly. There is no grand conspiracy, just a smaller world.

Can you elaborate please?

There's no (state) school giving out tablets that aren't pretty much single-use locked down devices.

That's the parents.

The expectation that "Parenting" is now outsourced to Teachers, to the Government, to anyone else. People seem to expect they just have a kid, and somehow magically they'll grow up to be a perfect person without any work from themselves. So there's over-reach, there's pressure on making "unworkable" soutions, because the people they're trying to force "solving" the problem aren't the people in the best position to do so.

Your comment seems working from that very same assumption.

Yes, all the "technical" part of content filtering etc. is very much a solved problem. The issue is that's not a "zero effort" solution - they still need to be enabled and managed. And I'm not sure that's a "technical" problem than can be solved.

There's huge pressure on teachers etc. to "solve" these sort of problems - just go to any PTA meeting and there's a lot of loud voices asking for stuff like the laws the original post is highlighting. And politicians listen to the loud voices, and feel they have to be "seen" doing something. Even if that "something" is impossible, unworkable, and fundamentally harmful.

>>> Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications. >This is absolutely not true.Here in the UK schools are swarming with ipads and shit like that. They're given to primary school children because they're "more engaging". Children are supposed to practice their reading and even handwriting on ipads. Naturally they're on youtube instead. It's really bad.

And how does that refute what the parent said? Those school ipads could also have YouTube locked or restricted to a whitelist of channels.

Exactly. We've completely lost (actually never had it) any social responsibility on the part of the social media/tech companies. Before we had the internet and all these apps and devices, parents looked after what their kids did but could also pretty much rely on other businesses to not do things like sell their kids cigarettes or pornography, let them in to R-rated movies, or expose them to other age-inappropriate stuff. Did it happen? Yes here and there but it wasn't easy for most kids.

Parents just want to be able to designate a device as belonging to a child---one setting---and have that respected. Not to have to dig into the settings of every account, service, app, and website and figure out how to set it in age-restricted mode (if that's even possible).

The tech companies have made this way too difficult and now they are facing the consequences of their shameful neglect by having to deal with all these new laws (which they will probably ignore, with no consequences, but we'll see).

Checking what the school is exposing the children to is part of parenting, if enough parents demand parental controls on the iPad you'd get that. Also it sounds insane that any school is given children iPads, if anything the studies show worse outcomes with iPads

Since schooling closer to home obviously solves this problem, and a host of many other problems, and doesn't introduce any real problems (bad schools don't save kids from bad parents, which seems to be a rebuttal to home-based education, it would seem to me the answer is obvious:

Return to a single income household economy and bring education closer to the home, if not outright in the home.

But this is ridiculous. The problem was created by the state (which ultimately runs the schools), and now the state wants to impose additional rules on a bunch of totally unrelated adults to (probably fail to) solve their self-imposed problem.

This is true but then why regulate every website instead of regulating... The schools

When people say "parental controls" they obviously don't literally mean "parental controls controlled by PARENTS", they mean "parental controls controlled by parents AND OTHER guardians such as teachers and schools".

If the school can't be bothered to lock down their ipads, why not make a law that schools must lock down the ipads, rather than push this out to everyone universally?

It seems like another shoddy excuse of a panicked panopticon to me. Feel free to try to convince us otherwise.

That dude gives off such slimy vibes. Not like he’s evil. More like he’s unqualified to be in the position he’s found himself in. His presentations on talk shows gives me the impression he knows just enough about the topic of digital effects on society to throw together a book. The he lets people raise him up to the microphone and speaks for the sake of speaking. Hardly an expert, not an operator.

Compare to people who have the means to build, modify, and test the systems they talk about. Maybe no one can be this kind of an expert in the field of sociology. But if that’s the case do not present yourself as confident. Answer most questions with “I don’t know”. Refuse praise. Exude humility.

The things that our politicians want to make illegal for children were already illegal for everyone in China.

That probably has something to do with why China's economically outperforming us so much.

In this case I think the schizos may be right. It makes complete sense. And $2b is peanuts to Meta, on par with the amount they’d authorize their lobbying department to spend over the course of a few years. I’m not surprised at all.

And the groundwork was laid by very well connected think-of-the-children evangelicals, transphobes and sex-work-phobes over years. Never forget this. Meta just added nitromethane fuel to a raging fire.

The text of the law says:

> 1798.501. (a) An operating system provider shall do all of the following: > (1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.

[And some other stuff]. A simple reading says operating systems need to ask the age of the accout holder during account setup. It says the purpose is to provide a signal to a covered app store, but it does not exempt operating systems without a covered app store.

I've looked at the bill and it sure seems like it would apply to Linux. What's your case that it doesn't?

I don't think this is a left- or right-wing issue: Australia was one of the first to ban kids from social media, and Australia is not right-wing by any measure. Canada is hardly right-wing, but age verification is bill S-210 in their parliament.

What you're seeing is a coordinated push by transnational interests; Meta's name has come up in discussions of the funding behind this push. At the very lest, verifying age also verifies that a person is real and not a bot, so advertising firms like Meta will benefit from verification. That's not right-wing or left-wing but rather the influence of business over the political, and neither wing of the spectrum is immune to corruption.

There's 2 axes on the political spectrum. Economic and Social axes. Liberal and Conservative is one dimension (Economic) and Authoritarian and Libertarian is another dimension (Social).

In the US both the Democratic Party (Liberal) and Republican Party (Conservatives) are considered Authoritarian on this 2 dimensional graph.

Milei claims to be a Conservative Libertarian so, in theory, he should be opposed to this. We'll see what he actually does.

Milei is a libertarian, and would be very opposed to such a thing.

You're going to need to provide a source for that outrageous claim.

Also, which sites that are impacted by the age verification laws are involved in grooming in any way?

Please be specific.

Why should that be our problem when we can just tell parents to parent?

If the solution consists on me and my children sacrificing our privacy then I'm sorry, but I don't care about other people's children getting groomed.

Your child, your responsibility, prepare him better for the world or throw the god damn phone to the trash, but please leave me alone.

I had more sympathy for parents with this problem before, but not anymore. If they don't respect my rights, I don't see why I should care about them.

I don’t think software downloads, even downloads of software we might find objectionable, can be considered to be something that is engaging in “grooming.”

That’s simply not what that word means.

If your child takes interest in something you don’t like that they found online, they weren’t inherently groomed by anyone into liking it.

Cite?

Well, this mandatory age input won't help with that, either. The parental controls are a much more powerful version. So I guess you're in favor of more strict version of this, and hope that we'll slippery-slope our way to it eventually? How do you propose to do that without ending internet anonymity for everyone?

Taking for granted that is really the purpose, how does age verification solve this problem? Adults won't have any trouble accessing online spaces meant for kids under these laws. And then why does porn get mixed up in this, it's not exactly a place where kids "hang out."

Are you talking about Epstein, or something else? Epstein largely built his network through word of mouth.

Interesting,are either of those two orgs you linked pushing the age verification policies that the article is rallying against? I would assume so since you posted them here, but it's unclear from the links Wikipedia pages you linked.

Neither of these two groups you mention hold any meaningful power anywhere, and have zero links with the issue of age verification: your comment is pure disinformation.

Evidence says otherwise: https://web.archive.org/web/20260313125244/https://old.reddi...

We should not give these human rights violations the dignity of being called "solutions", especially as they are anything but.