[zarzavat]

I don't like age verification. However I'm not concerned about it.

The internet needs new spaces that are more decentralized and less in bed with governments.

We already lost our freedom when we agreed to move from IRC to Discord, from phpBB to Reddit, etc.

The teenagers who are blocked from mainstream social media will deliver us new free online spaces that are better than what they're blocked from.

[pibaker]

What happens when federal agents kick down your front door because you ran a free range mom and pop BBS that did not comply with latest ID verification requirements?

Big companies will benefit the most from these regulations. It's just good ol regulatory capture. They will have the most resources to comply with the laws. They have a captive audience that will be more willing to give up their personal info when asked — keep in mind Facebook and instagram is widely used for business. It is your small time forum admin who would rather shut down his hobbyist online community that never made him any money anyway than to ask for IDs. We have already seen stories of websites shutting down due to existing UK regulations. Curiously, all small, personal operations, not the kind of corporate social media they tell you the laws are meant to target.

[zarzavat]

It seems unlikely that running a website without age verification will be illegal across the entire planet.

[pibaker]

So if you want to run a BBS for say vintage motorcycle owners, you have to move to a country without such laws and make sure to never set foot in any country that does?

[vasco]

It seemed unlikely to me that cookie banners would be a thing across the whole internet if nothing else because no website operators would put them in. How wrong was I.

All they need to do is popularize the idea of "if your website doesn't do X, it'll place lower on google" and people will do anything.

My websites still don't have cookie banners and the police still hasn't come to my house. And the websites uses cookies like every other website always did.

[CalRobert]

Ironically 99% of them don’t meet legal requirements. They serve no purpose.

[hdgvhicv]

The purpose is to make people think laws like gdpr are bad for people, rather than bad for the surveillance industry.

[microgpt]

Cookie banners aren't across the whole internet.

[Nursie]

You really only need the banners if you're doing privacy-impinging things.

Much like the GDPR notices that a small industry of 'compliance' product companies sold seemingly to everyone as necessary, they aren't if you're only using cookies for functional reasons and not tracking people. Unfortunately that leads to lower margins for advertisers and we can't have that.

[microgpt]

If you violate memory protection you get a segfault, consistently. That isn't how the law works. Federal agents only kick down your door if they want to - which in this case probably means your forum users disparaged ICE or Trump.

[watwut]

I mean, social networks already made genocide happen. They they were instrumental in the curren winning march of fascism - in USA, in EU in Asia.

[pibaker]

This is why China and Russia are shiny beacons of democracy and liberalism — they heavily regulate their social media!

Seriously, do people not look at history or at least the world around them when they make such claims? Genocides have happened before we had internet, or TV, or radio, or any modern technology people attribute genocides to. Hatred and violence are parts of human nature and trying to blame it on technology is just us trying not to make ourselves look bad.

[josteink]

That’s a very dramatic take - and I dare say a counter-factual one too.

Which actual genocide would you be talking about?

I really don’t think people should water out words like that over what is essentially tiny political differences.

[watwut]

> I really don’t think people should water out words like that over what is essentially tiny political differences.

I really don’t think people should minimize actual historical and current events for political purposes. Knee jerk "bad things are inconvenient, therefore they did not happened" denial is how we got here.

> essentially tiny political differences

The political differences between actual fascism that is on the rise, its actual opposition and those in between are large. Not small. Also, in more recent events there were pogroms in Belfast now. Elon Musk personally contributed to their incitement.

[microgpt]

Myanmar?

[hdgvhicv]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-46105934

Facebook has said it agrees with a report that found it had failed to prevent its platform being used to "incite offline violence" in Myanmar. The independent report, commissioned by Facebook, said the platform had created an "enabling environment" for the proliferation of human rights abuse. It comes after widespread violence against the Rohingya minority which the UN has said may amount to genocide.

[rockskon]

Such spaces will never scale if there's widespread legal prohibitions.

It is foolish to assume we can innovate our way around the law as opposed to talking with lawmakers to oppose the law before it gets on the books.

[kjshsh123]

That sounds like mistaken optimism due to a mistaken interpretation of the invisible hand.

Mandating age verification and the inevitable implementation requirements are bad for freedom.

Behaviour changes and innovations will mitigate some of the negatives, but bad things are bad.

[Gigachad]

What we need is more personal spaces. Less feeds, more small group chats with people you actually know. I'm totally fine with destroying Reddit/Twitter/etc

[pineapple_opus]

They already have started right ? Like example - bluesky (bsky.social)

[marcus_holmes]

Nope, they just break the law:

https://www.bmj.com/content/393/bmj-2026-363695

> Conclusions: Despite the intent of the Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024 to delay access to social media platforms and reduce the potential for online harms, little evidence was found of immediate substantive reductions in reported social media use by adolescents under 16 years.

We are training teenagers that laws are stupid and can be circumvented easily and without consequences. As well as continuing to subject them to the harms of social media, only now without any means of monitoring them or holding the social media companies responsible.

[tompagenet2]

The law doesn't make it a crime for children to access social media, but for the companies that provided it to allow that child to access it.

[vasco]

This is like saying you're not concerned about war because people will notice war is bad and stop doing it. It's not a smart position to hold that bad things are good because they may bring on reversals.

[gigel82]

You do realize the next step is ISP-level tagging of traffic? And VPNs are already being outlawed in much of the western world.

Unless you expect the teenagers to run underground mesh radio networks and risk FCC's hammer (real jailtime), it's just wishful thinking.

[kulahan]

I don’t expect teenagers to do anything but largely be harmed by the internet.