[sofixa]

Few pretty good reasons.

First, yes, it has been proven that there are things online children accessing is damaging to their development. From social media to porn.

Second, and much more important to me, proof that you are actually a human from an approved location. Bots and spam are a problem in general, but specifically foreign meddling in critical moments like elections and referenda is extremely dangerous for democracies. Being able to gatekeep participation in public forums based on you actually being a human in that country would kneecap foreign interference. It can't do anything against local interference, but at least it restricts its volume/scale, which is better than nothing.

[JoshTriplett]

> proof that you are actually a human from an approved location

> Being able to gatekeep participation in public forums

And now it becomes clear that what you want is non-anonymity, rather than age.

You should have to prove who you are when voting. Not when participating on the Internet.

(Social media that optimizes for "engagement" (e.g. outrage) needs to die, but that's orthogonal.)

[sofixa]

> And now it becomes clear that what you want is non-anonymity, rather than age.

No. Proving your age anonymously is more than enough to prove you're a human and that is all that is needed.

[JoshTriplett]

Apparently you want "approved location", too.

Precise age and general location is already sometimes enough to completely identify a person. That alone would make it far easier to, for instance, track people down based on their social media posts.

Forced proof of identity is damage, and the Internet should route around it. Every last bit of this should be destroyed, along with the political careers of anyone who supports it.

[sofixa]

> Apparently you want "approved location", too.

Yes, country. Generally proved enough by the ID being issued by that country, or a neighbouring one.

> Forced proof of identity is damage, and the Internet should route around it. Every last bit of this should be destroyed, along with the political careers of anyone who supports it.

Have you heard of the dead internet? The internet is already damaged beyond repair by hostile corporate and political interetests. The only way it becomes for humans again is by enforcing verification of humanness in critical parts of it.

[JoshTriplett]

I am well aware of the problem of election interference. I am also well aware of the problems of forcing everyone involved in a discussion of political topics to be identified. I think we could solve the former without the latter, in a wide variety of ways (e.g. dealing with bots, regulating AI/LLMs, restricting algorithmic content promotion). And you can't have the latter anyway; the cost of forcing people to identify themselves is far too high, and there will always be places to have discussions without doing so, whether you want there to be or not. Again, forced proof of identity is damage, and the Internet will route around it.

[sofixa]

> I am well aware of the problem of election interference. I am also well aware of the problems of forcing everyone involved in a discussion of political topics to be identified. I think we could solve the former without the latter

Again, I'm not talking about identifying people individually, but identifying them as real people over 18. With the planned and starting to exist EU infrastructure around this, with double blind proof of age (and thus humanity), we have that and it's still Anonymous.

> and there will always be places to have discussions without doing so, whether you want there to be or not.

That is actually kind of irrelevant, because people discussing in small numbers is not the problem. Malicious actors twisting public discourse is. So all that's needed is strict guardrails around the big public forums (social media).