[sunaookami]

No, age-verification IS bad and is a slippery slope that will always lead to surveillance. If we don't stop this now everything will get worse. And trying to lump this in with other extreme rhetoric doesn't help. The answer is and always was "better parenting".

[armchairhacker]

Everything good is a slippery slope: every step in the right direction is bad if you overshoot. Maybe age verification isn’t needed, and educating parents is important; but without more, they’d have to be ultra-helicopter parents to stop their kids from accessing social media.

At minimum, parents need other parents in their local community to be educated; and better parental controls, so they can give their kid a phone and computer (for good reasons like safety and education) that won’t let them access social media (even unintentionally, some parental controls are that bad). Both can be done without laws, only social pressure and at least the potential for new (locked-down) devices.

(In theory, kids should also be prevented from buying unlocked devices, like drugs and alcohol. And showing the local cashier your ID to buy a generic device (whose packaging is indistinguishable from other device packing, so it can’t be traced to you afterward) is technically a form of age verification. But in practice this may not be necessary, because hardware is too expensive for most kids.)

[ian_holt]

And in addition to that, it is the role of the parents to be having the say in what their kids should and shouldn't be doing. As far as I am concerned most governments stick their collective noses in where they are not required. And, yeah, I do agree that kids shouldn't be on social media. Having sid that, even some adults shouldn't be on social media...

[p2detar]

> it is the role of the parents to be having the say in what their kids should and shouldn't be doing

The only effective tools parents have is to disallow or remove devices from their kids. It will work at the beginning but as they grow up it will become impossible, since at some point kids get influenced mostly by their friends' circle. So yes, I do agree that parents must talk to their children and explain what social media can lead to, including the dangers of internet predators and so on. But no, I don't agree that parental control is a general solution that will work for all kids out there. It never has.

[ian_holt]

<The only effective tools parents have is to disallow or remove devices from their kids. It will work at the beginning but as they grow up it will become impossible, since at some point kids get influenced mostly by their friends' circle>

Very true & having 6 kids of my own, I know that only too well. I still don't like the idea of Mr Government trying to tell me how to raise my family. Here in Australia the government seems to like that a lot...

[maigret]

Well the thing is that people often love when the government tells other families how to live, and partly for good reasons including enabling basic education for everyone. Partly the wants of the parents and the needs of the kids might be at odds. Society is a complex construct.

[pocksuppet]

Governments are required to enforce that devices must give the choices to parents though, right? Otherwise devices won't give the choices to parents because it's more profitable if you don't.

[jenscow]

I won't disagree with that. And "better parenting" is a solution. However, what about the children who don't have the advantage of "better parenting"?

Rightfully blaming bad parents is reactionary

[platevoltage]

If parents don't want their kids on social media, get them a dumb phone, or use the parental control features. Maybe some parents don't care, and that's their prerogative. None of this is about protecting children, it's about "protecting" adults from "bad ideas".

[djaro]

The problem is many parents will not do that. Do those children then deserve to be taken advantage of by social media corporations?

Generally, things that are harmful and addictive such as alcohol, cigarettes and casinos require age verification. We dont just put the onus on parents because a child with bad or absent parents still deserves to be shielded from alcoholism at 12 years old.

[platevoltage]

Social Media companies taking advantage of people is a whole other conversation, and isn't just an issue with minors.

[chadgpt3]

So are gambling and cigarettes. As a society we've decided a reasonable compromise is that you can get the freedom to harm yourself at a certain age where you're assumed to understand that you're harming yourself.

[coldtea]

>Rightfully blaming bad parents is reactionary

So? Not all reactionary (if you mean "conservative") takes are bad. Sometimes they're better than the alternative: accepting bad parenting as some default and working around it with technological restrictions.

[Nasrudith]

"Reactionary"'s origins as far are pure political DARVO and gaslighting anyway. It originated in the French revolution and basically declared "You are morally wrong for being horrified at my horrific and evil actions." That origin tainted the term for me personally.

The actual modern reactionary meaning of "referrant to a mythical past as a standard" always felt like it deserved a better term. But nobody would get what you were saying if you called them a "fairytaleland resident" or similar.

[pocksuppet]

I always read "reactionary" as "oh no, someone did something! now I have to react by getting angry!" and it seems to fit well enough.

[insane_dreamer]

The slippery slope was ad-sponsored social media in the first place. Ban it at the source rather than trying to fix downstream problems.

[intended]

HN is filled with people who are on the other side of an "internet best practices" information divide.

For everyone else, the internet is already a shit show and a half. They want control, because it means putting a stop to being predated upon, or more nihilistically, harming the firms that are harming them.

I don't know how to let other commenters see how bad it is, or make the gulf in view points clear.

[Nasrudith]

Giving up control is always a mistake - they never do what they promised and you never get back the control. There is never a refutation to this fac: just a childish "But I want it!".

[pocksuppet]

I agree. That's why the government shouldn't stop toddlers from buying guns.

[notepad0x90]

How is that the answer when even parents don't have the right tools for this. are parents supposed to surveil their kids 24/7 and monitor their internet traffic?

Why is the internet special, do you also believe physical stores shouldn't check for ID for cigarettes and alcohol, because the solution is better parenting?

[jchw]

I never had to get my ID checked to be able to talk to strangers.

[SiempreViernes]

Did you to talk to the strangers in the night club when you were 11? Or were there several completely separate reasons for why you couldn't?

[jchw]

The internet has explicitly R-18 chats. Random IRC channels are not nightclubs. I am moving the goal posts back, if you touch them again we're escorting you off of the field.

[chadgpt3]

Most things that happen at nightclubs are not R-18 either.

[jchw]

That doesn't make adult spaces equivalent to family friendly spaces, off the field now sir.

[notepad0x90]

in real life people can see you and determine your age at a rough estimate and be able to tell if you're an adult or not. Do you support having to turn on your webcam and show your face in real time then, to talk to strangers on the internet? many age verification sites are doing just that.

[jchw]

Did you mean to reply to me? I evidently do not support the age verification regime, so no...

[notepad0x90]

maybe?

I get that you don't, all I'm trying to do (and failing) is have a discussion, apply critical thinking and be able to articulate a position. I'm neither fully opposed to it, nor fully in support of it. I'm always seeking nuance. I've found out lazy reductionism is the cause of much suffering and loss in the world, I can be bothered with the tedious nuance, especially for a topic I know a thing or two about in my own view.

Unfortunately karma systems on sites like this are not conducive to such a discussion. I want to challenge your opposition to the age verification regime, so that I can be better informed, and you will stand on a more firm ground, articulating your views with solid arguments instead of "i don't like it".

[jchw]

Oh, okay. Well in that case then the answer is no, I don't support any of this.

Of course I'm happy to talk about my positions but there is little nuance to my position tbh: I remain entirely unconvinced by the justification for proposed measures and believe that the entire discussion even happening is essentially a framing error. We're all talking about what should be done about this. About what, specifically? And, well, why now?

I grew up on the Internet. I've had essentially unfettered and unmonitored access to it since I was maybe 11 or 12. Me and my cohort of classmates often talked about sites like Rotten or Motherless at the lunch table, and certainly age inappropriate content like on Newgrounds and Lord help us, Ebaum's World.

Now okay, things have changed. (I'm still quite online for better or worse, so please don't get the idea that I don't see that the modern internet has different child safety concerns than the one I grew up on.) But somehow, the rhetoric is exactly the same as always. It's the same damn thing. No matter how the times change, it's the same "protect the children against the evils of sex and pornography!"

Uh huh. I realize not everyone has a universal shared experience, but from my point of view, the problem with kids and inappropriate content isn't just a story of negligent platforms. It is the story of 1. Hormonally unstable kids going through puberty who will often stop at nothing, 2. Platforms that are more or less indifferent and will do whatever gets them money, and 3. People who take on the immense responsibility that parenthood entails then expect the whole of society to take care of them.

I don't know what to tell people, I get that this is a terribly uncomfortable fact, but the number one reason why adolescents get involved with porn and sex is because they explicitly are seeking it out and want to be. It is nothing to do with the porn industries or lack of Internet regulation, it's their goddamn bodies.

It's absolutely true that I had access to content far more disturbing in all metrics than the old playboys under the mattress of yesteryear. I am not claiming this is ideal or that it should be the case. I'm just saying that it happened and the generation that was there is here right now, and we're fine.

But maybe social media is just simply too much. It puts kids at too much risk and they can't handle it. I think we're selling a lot of adolescents very short here without at least giving them a chance to have a bit of freedom, but fine. Let's fix this.

How? It's simple. When you are a kid, the first computer and phone or whatever kids get these days, is given to you by a parent. What we can do is make decent parental controls. We don't even need strong identity verification. We just need to be able to provide a way for apps and sites to voluntarily block children.

This sounds eerily similar to California AB 1043, and it is. I think that California AB 1043 is also bad for many reasons. Firstly, I know this is going to be expanded in many uncomfortable directions; it doesn't take a genius to make basic extrapolations. Secondly, I feel it is poorly written and confusing; what's an app store? Why does the law require all apps to request and store the age bracket information? What is an app? Does GNU sed now need to, by law, request the age bracket information from systemd and store it somewhere? And no, it isn't acceptable to just try to "do what they mean", it's a badly written bill. We shouldn't accept badly written legislation, but apparently in the past couple years or so the situation that had been ongoing for the past 3 decades or so with the Internet suddenly became extremely urgent to fix Right Now (in a couple of years) so we had to rush out shitty legislation that makes no sense.

So while I would love to just have sensible parental controls, nobody is actually really trying to enshrine this into law. It seems like they're mostly concerned about lobbying to push the responsibility elsewhere.

So we won't even just get sensible parental controls. We'll get weird parental control like legislation, having to send a live stream of our faces to sketchy companies who pinky swear to not leak it by accident, enter our credit card information into sites that definitely won't get breached, and scan our goddamn government IDs to access basic chat functionality that we already use today, in some cases. Because we can't get a handle on how to stop the 20% of people in the first 20% of their lives from accessing inappropriate content on devices and internet connections that WE FUCKING GAVE THEM! Before we've even attempted to quantify how harmful unfettered Internet access is to adolescents, or hell, how Helpful it is. (It sure was helpful for one of my friends who was gay and could access resources on the internet when his conservative parents were unhelpful. I suppose everyone is allowed to raise their kids how they like, but I can see the duality of how it's also not always the case that the parents know best.)

To say that I think this is all beyond farcical is a massive understatement. So I do apologize for maybe seeming a bit dismissive about this issue, but personally I already know it's coming from the wrong place and I don't like engaging with things that I know are coming from the wrong place. I'm not saying you or anyone in particular actually has bad intent by any means, just that I don't believe this entire movement at all.

[RiverCrochet]

I think minors shouldn't be in any store period unless accompanied by their parent or guardian.

[notepad0x90]

you feel the same way about websites then?

[RiverCrochet]

Yes.

But parents should be penalized/inconvenienced if they can't control their children, not the store/website.

In some states, bounty hunters can find violators of various laws and bring them to the state in exchange for money. Allowing bountry hunters to be on the lookout for underagers trying to enter stores and report them could be a profitable endeavor for both the bounty hunters and the state, providing a market-based incentive to protecting children.

Stores/websites should only be penalized if they are specifically targeting and inviting children to enter.

Certainly there are some types of stores that are very safe for children to enter. So, the exception should be structured like this: "Stores that only sell these items mean that parents will not be fined if children enter it unaccompanied." Additional conditions could be attached, e.g. "a safe store shall verify the ID of anyone purchasing alcohol." And maybe other benefits can be attached to being a "safe" store, like tax incentives, etc. If the store violates that condition, then it should pay a fine or lose any other benefits of being considered a "safe" store. But a business should have a right not to be a "safe store" and the duty to prevent children from entering those should 100% fall on the parents.

[notepad0x90]

But in real life, if you sell cigarettes to a 5 year old, you'll probably go to prison.

Isn't a reasonable approach to the internet, to have a protocol by which individuals can prove they have a state issued identity that proves they are above a certain age, and nothing more than that to the website? That way the website doesn't need to check anything other than presence of a cryptographic identifier and validate it. And parents as you noted are responsible, but only to make sure their state issued cryptographic secrets can't be used by their children. it could be as simple as having an NFC capable state issued IDs that can do a challenge-response with the browser/os. We already sort of do this with EMV payment cards. Websites have to validate a payment card is authentic by asking for the CVV code for example.

[RiverCrochet]

Oh I understand the tech is there to provide zero knowledge proofs, etc. But honestly don't really agree it's a reasonable approach to the Internet. I shouldn't need something issued by the state merely to visit a website.

[djaro]

Age verification has always existed in the physical world, such as at bars and casinos. I just dont see why the internet should be immune to real world rules we decided upon for good reason.

[zrn900]

> "better parenting"

This has nothing to do with parenting. It's surveillance. They failed to do it through child porn argument. They are doing it through 'social media is harmful for children' argument. People did not bite on the former. They ate up the latter out of hate for social media platforms.