[gampleman]

What an exceptionally bad faith way to put this whole thing. A five year old watching hours of the most depraved porn available is harmful to that child. Even if you disagree with that statement, you surely must acknowledge that it is an entirely reasonable opinion to hold and one our societies have generally held to this sort of thing for ages.

I also acknowledge that there is a reasonable debate to be had if the disadvantages to adults and businesses from imposing these rules are worth the harms prevented.

There is also a reasonable debate to be had about the merits of various technical and legal schemes being implemented to achieve these goals.

But this take is neither of those. For one, surveillance isn't the number one harm being prevented (even though, a number of legal codes attempt to make this the case).

As has been pointed out previously, there absolutely can be age verification that is without surveillance. The fact that these solutions aren't always legally mandated and therefore age verification can be used to increase surveillance is a reasonable thing to attempt to amend to the implementations of these laws.

[akmiller]

Your example is in bad faith as your example assumes that the only thing blocking a child of 5 from porn is age verification of some type. There are lots of blockers today for 5 year olds to get access to porn.

> I also acknowledge that there is a reasonable debate to be had if the disadvantages to adults and businesses from imposing these rules are worth the harms prevented

Nobody on the "we need age verification" side wants a debate. They want to run face first in to dumb legislation giving governments and companies even more power to track every movement and know exactly who you are.

[dormento]

Disclaimer: I do not agree this take was made in bad faith. I think that raising a kid comes with its own set of expectations around caring and curating experiences of said kid. Therefore, I do think that offloading that responsibility to the state (and by extension, businesses that offer age-gating tech to that state...) is not the right way to do it. And even in the absence of that, my experience taught me it is entirely possible to grow up with unsupervised internet access and turn out an OK adult. The internet is not only "depraved porn". It is also a lifeline for that weird kid who has been bullied and effectively barred from social experiences.

Of course, YMMV.

That said, if such a nanny state is inevitable: zero-knowledge-proof-based age verification would not only be possible, it would further protect these kids from a bad state actor. In that spirit, I agree with your last point. The fact that any other alternatives are even being considered makes it on principle a non-starter to me, because it betrays the actual goals of the political actors involved.

[lern_too_spel]

California's proposal is better than the one you're proposing, so Californian legislators goals are actually to solve GP's problem. Articles like this one that don't consider other proposals like California's are idiotic because voters actually want to solve GP's problem, and pretending they don't exist does not convince voters.

[glaslong]

Who gave the child access to that?

[BigJono]

You can't use the words "reasonable debate" in your post after you've immediately jumped straight to some mythical worst case scenario of a 5 year old being given a device with no supervision and somehow managing to immediately find their way to some sort of super duper snuff porn that will scar them for life.

[farfatched]

I agree going to the worst-case is a weak technique, and this is what the OP does:

> "Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities.

[CPLX]

This comment should not be downvoted. The original article lost me in the first sentence with this:

"The literature on harms to kids from online platforms is complex and nuanced, rife with people citing small, ambiguous studies as iron-clad evidence that kids are being destroyed by the internet"

Sorry, but a firehose of unlimited pornography, violence, racist, misogynist, and divisive content for developing children is bad. You can "well actually..." me all day I don't care at all.

I agree that there's no good solutions here, and I think this is a genuinely complicated and difficult issue for exactly the reasons people often state. But every argument that pretends that it's a one-sided discussion should be dismissed out of hand. There are two sides to this, both thorny.