[selfhoster1312]

I'd be interested to know how it could be a good thing.

I'm all for shutting down Facebook entirely and jailing their executives, but i don't think age verification is an appropriate answer. It's already common at least here in France for Facebook to request user ID cards (wtf) and that has not at all stopped harassment, nazism, fake news, etc...

[divan]

What age verification has to do with stopping fake news or harassment?

[knorker]

Are you talking about the goal being bad, or the methods being bad, or that the goal inherently cannot be achieved without bad methods?

E.g. I think something pretty uncontroversial would be a goal of blocking kids from the likes of TikTok & Instagram between 22:00 and 08:00.[1] But if I'm an adult, that's a different matter. Ok, so how do I prove I'm an adult, without society turning into a surveillance state, or surveillance capitalism?

Next up: wouldn't it be nice if e.g. someone over the age of 30 couldn't initiate chats (including comments on posts) with 13 year olds? For hobby exceptions (e.g. joining a computer or chess club) it would make sense to either have parental approval, or some moderation requirements for parental approval exempt groups.

[1] I'm here not saying that this is the biggest problem, but it should at least be uncontroversial.

[selfhoster1312]

The goal is good. Like i said, i think those kinds of social networks are evil and their executives should be jailed.

That being said, the methods are really bad. Are they efficient? No. Kids can still access discord despite age verification. And some kids can still max out their parent's credit card despite not being old enough to own a bank account.

Do those methods produce other net negatives? Yes. Standardizing digital identity leads us one step closer to dystopian nightmares from sci-fi books.

Are there better alternatives? Yes. Jail the CEOs. And if your government is too corrupt for that, they could at the very least raise awareness. Governments didn't have to mandate fingerprint readers on cigarettes to fight smoking. They found other ways and there are less kids smoking now than in the previous generation. Also, they could still jail the tobacco CEOs who lied publicly (and under oath) for decades.

[knorker]

Ok, so step one is jailing the CEOs. Then what?

Any time someone builds a social network, they'll be equally liable for any danger for kids that result? De facto making social networks illegal?

Or is a moral/legal social network possible? If so, then it seems we're talking about two different things: 1. jail the CEOs of these companies… for… something (it's unclear to me. Not that I disagree, but you've not made the case). 2. How can we make social networks "a good"?

Surely you can't mean banning all social networks, because HN is a kind of social network.

What is an evil "kind" of social network? "I know it when I see it"?

[selfhoster1312]

> Ok, so step one is jailing the CEOs.

I'm not sure that's step one. But at least it's a good selling point to say we can do something very quickly about that problem, and almost everybody agrees (except for a few tech bros and every government on the planet). Step one is taking back control: empowering alternatives, providing free psychological services for the people who've been harmed by Facebook & such, seizing all the money they have defrauded via tax evasion (double irish sandwich), etc...

And if society wants to put people on trial, don't forget to put the engineers up there. The CEOs/managers may give orders but the engineers also have personal responsibility. They knew what they were doing (a few spoke out), and they certainly make sure their own kids don't use their own products. Technology is not neutral, and following orders is not an excuse for cruelty (see also, Nuremberg trials).

> De facto making social networks illegal?

I think there's a margin for interpretation, though i'm neither a lawyer nor a judge. A few criteria which may already be illegal, to determine whether a social network is evil:

- leading and using research on attention/addiction to keep people hooked

- having platform-controlled advertisement (an incentive to keep people captive)

- having posts on "your" feed not determined by your own subscriptions, but by an opaque algorithm where the platform decides what you see

- mandating a civil identity to join the social network (sometimes even requiring users to submit an ID card), which was promoted 15 years ago as an anti-harassment measure but actually had the exact opposite effect

That's just a few criteria that came to mind. We can probably find more. HN, a mailing list or a forum fills exactly 0 of these criteria.

> What is an evil "kind" of social network? "I know it when I see it"?

I'm not sure. But i'm sure we as a society need to think about it, because the neo-fascist tech-bros running those social networks certainly have.