| ▲ | teroshan 4 hours ago |
| Good news, the end goal that is being pushed by corporate lobbyists is still in sight. Give it a few years (months if you're an optimist?) and you will have to use your Google/Apple hardware device to formally tie your real identity with your digital identity for every site that has even the slim possibility of being a small danger to hypothetical children. I'm sure Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg will gladly join this effort to reduce harm to children as well, I'm sure that's high on their priority list. They may even already have the infrastructure in place to handle that digital ID, what an amazing coincidence. Everything will be fine! |
|
| ▲ | alansaber 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Snooper's charter ring a bell? This is the work of the UK govt, not corporate lobbyists. |
| |
| ▲ | ivanbakel 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > This is the work of the UK govt, not corporate lobbyists. This is not an exclusive or. Corporate lobbyists from social media have a real incentive for pushing age verification and attestation. They benefit from public outcry and popular movements for age restrictions online, while also presenting age verification as the only solutions to the problems causing that outcry (which is to say, largely moderation problems on their own websites). | | |
| ▲ | somenameforme 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Age verification will be a significant loss for social media companies. It's going to push plenty of people away, and it provides no information that they don't already know to a reasonably high degree of certainty. And I think the problems with social media for children have little to do with moderation. It's more about the typical ails that even 'good' social media would entail: FOMO, image crafting, amplification/streamlining all typical stuff that happens at all schools - bullying, rumor milling, and so on. To say nothing of the general effect of people becoming zombies to their phones rather than actually interacting in person as much. | | |
| ▲ | ivanbakel 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The media buzz around the ills of social media are certainly tied to moderation, as well as other problems with the governance of those sites: people are really worried about the kind of offensive content that is easily accessible to, and recommended to, children. There is some recognition that the harmful suggestion algorithms are at fault, but the fact that such content is hosted at all is also a moderation problem. >Age verification will be a significant loss for social media companies. It's going to push plenty of people away, and it provides no information that they don't already know to a reasonably high degree of certainty. It may push some people away (though with the centralisation of the internet, I think this is easy to overstate), but the social media companies probably aren't that worried. Their bigger threat is actual legislation and punishment. Age-gating prevents the government from coming down on them for bad moderation, since they can just block users from accessing anything that might need to be moderated otherwise. The possibility that age verification will actually give them more data or let them track you more easily is a nice little plus, but this is more stick than carrot. | | |
| ▲ | somenameforme 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 'Harmful content' is one small aspect of it. Overwhelming majorities are concerned about addiction, bullying, mental health, academic focus, real life interactions, and so on. None of those are fixed by moderation or by any sort of regulatory constraints that can be reasonably imposed on social media. |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | teroshan 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Officially I'm sure. It gets revived in the 2023 Online Safety Act and is followed by strong EU push for Identity Verification, Chat Control, etc. at the same time. I don't think it's wrong to look at them from the same lens. It's not necessarily nefarious though: the same ideas/fears permeate all society so it makes sense they pop up together. The work may have already been done by some legislators, ready to be used by others. But the corporate lobbying for weakening online anonymity and encryption is not something new either, and the benefits are clear. It wouldn't be the first issue large-scale lobbying has taken place in their interests, and for something as critical as identify verification I genuinely cannot imagine it isn't one of the most important issue in surveillance capitalism. |
|
|
| ▲ | close04 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| A strategy old as time. Implement a weak "foot in the door" measure that pushes people towards incompliance, use the incompliance to justify implementing the strong "break the door and your nose along with it" measure. Companies can benefit from it but this type of control in some form or another has been the go-to for the state since forever. It just recently became feasible to do it so comprehensively otherwise they would have done it ages ago. |
|
| ▲ | formerly_proven 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > Good news, the end goal that is being pushed by corporate lobbyists is still in sight. It's less bigtech corporate lobbying and more evangelical lobbying (exodus cry etc.). This outcome plays along their plans. Create restrictions, which kill off the legal market/actors (good!) and push people into incompliance (excellent!) then push for harsher measures (see what a rampant problem illegal porn sites are). Their main goal is to go full prohibition on adult content. |
| |
