I'm going to restate my proposed age verification system here. I've posted it several times as a comment on this website. It works as follows:
1. A private company, let's call it AgeVerify, issues scratch-off cards with unique tokens on them. They are basically like gift cards.
2. AgeVerify's scratch-off cards are sold exclusively in IRL stores. Preferably liquor stores, adult stores, and/or tobacco/vape shops. Places that are licensed and check ID.
3. Anyone who wants to verify their age online can purchase a token at a store. The store must only demand ID if the buyer appears to be a minor (similar to alcohol or tobacco purchases). The store must never store the ID in any form whatsoever.
4. Giving or selling these tokens to a minor is a criminal offense. If a store does it, they lose their liquor or tobacco license. Treat it just like giving a minor alcohol or tobacco.
4a. Run public service announcement campaigns to communicate that giving an AgeVerify token to a child is like handing them a cigarette. There should be a clear social taboo associated with the legal ban.
5. The buyer of the AgeVerify token enters it into their account on whatever social media or adult website they want to use. The website validates the code with AgeVerify.
6. Once validated, the code is good for 1 year (or 6 months or 3 months, adjust based on how stringent you want to make it) - then it expires and a new one must be purchased.
7. A separate token is required for each website/each account.
8. The website is responsible for enforcing no account sharing.
No identifying information is stored anywhere. Kids find it very hard to access age-restricted materials online, just like the vast majority of kids don't easily have access to alcohol or cigarettes.
No disrespect but paying to verify age feels absurd, let alone putting a private company in charge of what should be an essential function of the government.
How about when you turn 18 or whatever the government gives you a signed JWT that contains your DOB? Anyone who needs to verify your age can check that and simply validate the signature via a public key published by the government.
Simply grab a new JWT when you need it, to ensure privacy.
And sure, sprinkle in some laws that make it illegal to store or share JWTs for clearly fraudulent intents.
> the vast majority of kids don't easily have access to alcohol or cigarettes
This feels like it comes from an affluent perspective, where I grew up it was trivial to acquire these things and much worse, there will always be someone’s older brother etc who will do this for $20 because he’s got nothing to lose.
So they give you their jwt for 20 instead
And I am going to restate how it’s an absolutely terrible idea, and will always fail with its perverse incentives. This does not solve any problems and creates many more.
Your idea will create a massive black market for “adult validation tokens”, handing billions of dollars to criminal groups reselling these things.
And then where such a system goes in 5-10y. Sure it’s sorta anonymous today, but then new government decides - “let’s make it mandatory to be sold with a binding identity and credit card.” Suddenly you need that token to log in to any public website. And Chinese, European and American authorities demand realtime access to the global logs.
Every censorship system you build, even if it seems “good”, will eventually censor you and the things you care about. Don't design or build oppression technology.
The very idea that you can realistically enforce Point of Sales age checks at scale is not sensible.
I think your objection regarding future governments is valid. The others I don't think are valid. For the record I agree with your conclusion that any effort like this is doomed to fail. But we already enforce point of sale age checks at scale across multiple domains. And as for perverse incentives, part of the proposal is more or less identical to how scratch cards for gambling work. There probably is a black market for these and there probably have been attempts at fraud. But they aren't very large, not enough to tank the system anyway.
> Your idea will create a massive black market for “adult validation tokens”,
No bigger than the current black market for beer and cigs for kids. Adults have no need to resort to black markets. They can buy this stuff legitimately.
> Sure it’s sorta anonymous today, but then new government decides - “let’s make it mandatory to be sold with a binding identity and credit card.”
They're already trying to do that right now! If we can head them off with a system that's as robust as age verification for alcohol we take away the moderate voter's support for making everyone upload passports to access FaceTok.
> Every censorship system you build, even if it seems “good”, will eventually censor you and the things you care about
Hasn't happened to cigs or booze so far. How long is "eventually"?
> The very idea that you can realistically enforce Point of Sales age checks at scale is not sensible.
This needs strong evidence. My evidence is that we already do it for many products.
> Suddenly you need that token to log in to any public website. And Chinese, European and American authorities demand realtime access to the global logs
If you treat everything as a potential slippery slope you won't get anything done. Right now the threat is governments mandating actual ID and destroying everyone's anonymity under the guise of protecting the children. I fear they have the votes to ram it through. Unless we find a good enough alternative that preserves privacy.
> No bigger than the current black market for beer and cigs for kids.
I don't think this part is true. Kids are currently used to having access to all of these services. And there is a lot more utility to having access to the whole internet, than having a a few packs.
To say nothing of the fact that these codes can be distributed digitally once they have been purchased. So it's harder to deter.
> these codes can be distributed digitally once they have been purchased
How do the kids pay for them?
Crypto, dah. Are you living in the 90s?
A ten year old raised/scammed $10k in crypto meme tokens last week.
Join us in the 21st century.
credit card, prepaid visas, gift cards, crypto atm, csam.
Hell, pay in cash and get the codes digitally separately.
Everything is a slippery slope. Better nothing be done than keep inventing new ways to oppress humanity. Why does something need to be done anyway?
You can’t nerd harder and solve this problem. You have to fight these ideas at the root, and you my friend are being the so called “useful idiot” by raising and supporting such oppression and censorship.
It's coming either way. I prefer a future where I don't have to upload my passport for every website.
If you think you can fight it you're the "useful idiot" for the people who would prefer that we all upload our passports.
Some other near-term negatives of the planned idea:
- forces people to go to stores that primarily sell addictive substances
- prices out poor people, who can't afford adult websites, _or_
- even more money meant for bills / food is spent on addictions
- will have a stigma attached (why is that preacher in the liquor store? For porn or whisky?)
> Every censorship system you build, even if it seems “good”, will eventually censor you and the things you care about
Nobody is being censored. We regulate who can buy alcohol or tobacco, gamble at casinos, or operate a motor vehicle without it turning into a slippery slope.
Politically, the free speech argument might have had a point if Silicon Valley’s most-visible “free speech” advocates hadn’t lined up behind an authoritarian who’s creating diplomatic tension (and thus domestic political capital) the world over.
> The store must only demand ID if the buyer appears to be a minor (similar to alcohol or tobacco purchases). The store must never store the ID in any form whatsoever.
Your plan requires nuanced implementation details which the general public is ill equipped to understand let alone independently verify. In particular, it is already normalized (in America at least) that liquor and weed stores will ID even the elderly, and scan the barcode on the ID into their computer. Let's say you want to ban the computer part outright; the public won't understand why, because it's already normal to them. So maybe you permit scanning IDs but regulate the way businesses can store/use that data; the public can't see into the computer, they have no idea if the law is being followed or not. This leads to lax attitudes towards compliance and enforcement both, and furthermore, likely results in public cynicism aka low expectations, which will give way to complacency. This is why I don't think your plan will work well, it's doomed to degenerate into surveillance.
> it is already normalized (in America at least) that liquor and weed stores will ID even the elderly, and scan the barcode on the ID into their computer
Then why are y'all so against Digital ID? We don't make you do that in Canada, it's just the clerk eyeballing your ID if you don't look old enough. I can't believe people are letting their ID get scanned and associated with vice purchases. Is it mandatory? Land of the free, eh?
OP is wrong. Most places don’t do ID scans in my city. There was one place that did and I do not patronize them anymore.
I think there are some places where vendors have attempted to sell scanning systems as a way to identify fakes and banned patrons. It probably depends on the area how common it is.
Federal IDs are a political landmine for reasons mostly unrelated to privacy. The American public doesn't understand privacy issues, unless maybe you frame it as "ThE NUmBer OF ThE BeASt" oooo-oo spooky! Otherwise, most Americans just get stupified and say they have nothing to hide.
My point in all of this is that we should not delude ourselves by theorizing about ways this could be implemented in a privacy preserving way, because even if that's technically possible, its unlikely for things to work out that way.
America and the "if you're doing nothing wrong you have nothing to hide" / "police don't need body cameras" duality. You really cannot trust the typical person to be attempting cognition.
I didn't even think about the ID scanning that already takes place. States that have legalized weed still have people who avoid the legal stores because of the scanning. You don't know who has access to that data and how it could implicate you because weed is still illegal on the federal level (e.g. gun owners may be wary of buying from these stores)
I've bought alcohol in many countries, including the US. Never had my ID stored. I am not ID-ed anymore.
But in any case, my proposal would ban ID scanning altogether. There's no good reason to do it for any purchase.
In the three states I've lived in, nobody scanned IDs. They eye balled it and maybe enter birthday into a system.
This is how it should be. If you happen to be 16 and look 19, well, fuck's sake, your body's old enough to drink now. People get so hung up on this kind of think-of-the-children crap like as though every generation before now didn't have plenty of underage drinking and debauchery. I'm more worried about people being shutins and not having any fun than I am about some kid having a beer.
You can do the same thing with online payments combined with a ZKP token system.
The issue is and will always remain reselling the age verification tokens. The entire system is pretty pointless. Kids will just have some hoops to jump through, and they will be very motivated to do so. Criminals will be eager to aid them for some change too.
Either you forget age verification, or you can forget about privacy. Because identity theft is the only hoop big enough for most kids not to make the jump - and even that may not hold, typically identity theft is carried out for financial returns, the age verification requirement will change the calculus on that and will likely expand that particular black market to both kids and people valuing their privacy.
In my opinion it should be the parent's job to police their kid's access to an internet terminal. It's not even that hard. Mitigating the mistakes of parents at the expense of everyone's privacy is a poor trade.
> The issue is and will always remain reselling the age verification tokens. The entire system is pretty pointless.
I forgot to mention in my original post. I'd also rate limit purchases. Maybe only allow purchasing one per visit.
> Kids will just have some hoops to jump through, and they will be very motivated to do so.
Maybe? Kids can just buy alcohol or cigs or drugs from criminals today. But most can't or don't. Some do, and we accept that as a society. And we punish the criminals who enable it.
This isn't like illegal drugs, where criminals have a massive market (adults with cash). A black market catering to only minors isn't very lucrative.
Moreover social media's network effects work in our favor. If most kids can't join, their friends are less motivated to get in.
Just because something can and will be circumvented doesn't make it useless.
People will continue to murder other people. That doesn't mean that criminalizing and punishing murder is pointless.
Now, whether the above scheme is prudent or workable, that's a separate question. But the counterargument to the scheme cannot be "It's all or nothing".
Murder is all but impossible to prevent, the reason the murder rate is kept low is because it's difficult to evade attribution after the fact.
In this instance we are talking about a technology that is impossible to attribute by design, the only way attribution will happen is if the reseller makes a serious mistake. There will be resellers that don't make serious mistakes. And unlike murder, very few successful resellers are sufficient to serve everyone.
Once you're selling them, put a bounty where kids can turn in the cards for money. Then you'll both set a price floor and know which stores are selling them and you can find out who's doing it. Nothing says that a token has to last for a constant amount of time. If kids turn in more than a certain percentage, then that location would have theirs expire early.
What I like here is that you've turned a digital problem into a physical one where we already have solutions and intuition for how to enforce rules.
> Once validated, the code is good for 1 year (or 6 months or 3 months, adjust based on how stringent you want to make it) - then it expires and a new one must be purchased.
That sounds fantastic, were just one step away from making social media entirely controlled by one single party
Perfect to push anyone you don't like into irrelevancy, politicians will love this
Journalists too, finally they can be rid of these pesky YouTubers that show how politically captured they're! Just need to get someone with admin permission in that company and you're golden
> entirely controlled by one single party
Why? Multiple companies could compete in the market of age verification tokens.
Right now we have actual partisans buying actual social media companies (Twitter, TikTok) to control them. That's a much bigger threat vector.
> Multiple companies could compete in the market of age verification tokens
Why do we want this?
The entire proposal sounds designed to tank popularity for keeping kids off Instagram.
Politicians wouldn't know who has which "adult code", so they wouldn't be able to get a singular "adult code" banned/early expired by the (supposedly corrupt) code-keeping company. To know which code a particular Youtuber has, they'd need to be able to get that info from Youtube, and if they "have a man on the inside" of Youtube then they can just ask that person to ban the Youtuber in question.
No need for separate company. Banks know your age. I'd imagine CC companies know or at very least can get age data from the banks they trade.
So it would be
1. Site let's you pick your "age provider"
2. You log to you bank/govt site
3. They only get age as response.
Even easier with CC, shops could just send payment request with minimal age, if it doesn't pass, no sell
> Banks know your age
They also know who you are. This rules them out of a privacy-forward age verification system.
Can't it be implemented such that the banks give out the age information without knowing the ID of the person on the platform?
> Banks know your age
Why are we pretending Facebook and X don’t?
Start with liability. The age gates will erect themselves.
Japan has a similar system for payments. If you prefer to buy things online with cash they give you a barcode you take to any convenience store. The store scans it and you pay with cash.
Perhaps we should drop age verification and just ban sites that use AI to scam attention for everyone? I would be happy enough if X and FB were banned outright.
Why do you need a private monopoly or physical tokens?
This is trivially solved with national IDs and strict liability.
So a kid just has to get their hands on a token then access is open to restricted websites for a year (or whatever time period) while adults are inconvenienced? The black markets for these things would pop up instantly and you'd deal with secondary effects of that (scams, fraud, etc.)
I think the whole idea of age verification on the internet is dystopian and should be tossed in the garbage.
Nah, EIDAS2 got you covered - you use your european identity wallet.
The beauty of my proposal is you don't need that.
But instead, you need this other thing, which requires elaborate infrastructure and new standards and regulations
The other thing OP presents is very different from any eID scheme in terms of anonymity. You'd show an ID to a human at the counter and even if the seller stores your info somehow, it can't be linked to the token they sold to you. The required infrastructure is minimal and relatively simplistic. The only drawback is that being anonymous means it's easy to resell tokens.
An eID system links your real life identity to any use of the eID online. Anyone who thinks there's a math or technology that fixes this misses the fact that it's the trust in the humans (companies, institutions, governments) who operate these systems is misplaced. Math and technology are implemented by people so there are many opportunities to abuse these systems. And once in place I guarantee, without any shadow of doubt that sooner or later, fast or slow, it will be expanded to any online action.
I will take anonymity and the small minority of kids who will find a loophole to access some adult-only stuff over the inevitable overreach and abuse against the large majority of people whose every online move will be traced and logged.
And who is the biggest winner?
Triceratops Age Verification services, provided a state-sanctioned monopoly on issuing Porn Licenses. Awful, really.
It doesn't have to be 1 company. Ideally it would be many companies competing on price, promotions, and other marketing.
Ok, so grifting for you and your friends?
It’s a really bad idea. It’s not a problem that needs to be solved by building a market for porn licenses.
> elaborate infrastructure
Gift cards are "elaborate infrastructure"? C'mon be serious please.
Instead you give control over chilren to a private company like a silly american.
You underestimate the average American teenager’s shell-buying game (honed for decades by our asinine alcohol laws.) I’m sure kids elsewhere would pick it up pretty fast too.
Plus, this would spawn massive online black markets for the codes, fueled by crypto/gift cards/other shady means of money transmission.
Or we have devices attest user age. On setup, the device has the option to store a root ("guardian"?) email address. Whenever "adult mode" is activated or the root email is changed, a notification must first be sent to the prior root email. That notification may optionally contain a code that must be used to proceed with the relevant action, though the user should be warned of the potential device-crippling consequences.
This setting is stored in a secure enclave and survives factory resets.
I will note that these two systems are not mutually exclusive. There are plenty of ways to "think of the children" that don't trample on everybody's freedom.
Yeah, not doing this on my Linux devices.
So who do you give the private monopoly to? The next lottery winner?
I’m in my 40’s and I’d rather just use a VPN, I can’t imagine that young people will feel any differently. Governments should feel free to take performative measures, and we’re free to circumvent them.
Leave people to their fantasies of digital control and let them learn lessons the hard way. This is not a technical issue anyway.
This is a typical technical solution to a sociopolitical problem. The powers-that-be are not comfortable with the free-for-all that exists on the internet. All these laws are meant to fix that squeaky wheel, one ball-bearing at a time.
"Children" gets the Right to march behind you unquestioningly. "Misinformation/Nazis" does the same for the Left. This is now a perfect recipe for a shit sandwich.
While this can work I just don’t want any bans on speech for any age. These social media bans are going to next lead to porn restrictions and ultimately they will mainstream Christian theocratic values in public policy through an ever shifting morality goal post. That’s how it always goes. Enabling it through such solutions feels like a risk.
It's arguable, even if you're right, that the net loss to humanity is still far greater without these restrictions than with. Modern social media is leading to multiple generations of emotionally stunted, non-verbal children. Many of whom literally struggle to read.
If you haven't seen it in person, it is now incredibly common for children as young as 1 or 2 to be handed an iPad and driven down an algorithmic tunnel of AI generated content with multiple videos overlaid on top. I've seen multiple examples of children scrolling rapidly through videos of Disney characters getting their heads chopped off to Five Nights at Freddy's music while laughing hysterically. They do this for hours. Every day. It's truly horrifying.
Parents are just as poorly equipped at dealing with this as the children are, the difference being that at least their brains have already fully developed so that there is no lasting permanent damage.
Anti Israel speech will be the first to be banned
It already is. Comments are shadow banned across social media, videos across Tiktok are shadow banned if they include certain mix of words.
There are cases of UK police turning up to homes for anti-zionist comments.
We're already there.
I am sure that they will not lead to “Christian theocratic values in public policy” in France. That value system is fringe in France, one of the most irreligious and historically anti-clerical cultures in the world.
Among people who identify as Christian in France, the ones who could be described as radical or fundamentalist are a very small minority.
My observation is that there is a big resurgence in supremacist politics and the main identity involved is white Christian male. Maybe it’s not yet big in France but that’s what I see gaining momentum in many parts of Europe and North America.
Step 9 i buy my kids this card because this law is dumb
A very important part of the system is a nationwide program of sending homeless people to concentration camps so that teenagers wouldn't bribe them to buy TittyTokens.
Like seriously, do you really think that if currently minors can buy tobacco and alcohol using unlawful means, then your TittyTokens will somehow be magically immune to the same problem because you really really wish they would?
You can't patch this without creating some form of a central database of who exactly buys how many TittyTokens.
> do you really think that if currently minors can buy tobacco and alcohol using unlawful means, then your TittyTokens will somehow be magically immune
No I fully admit some minors will still get access to FaceTok. We accept this failure for alcohol and tobacco. We don't have internet connected beer cans phoning home when you open them, asking to scan your face.
But at least where I live, most kids aren't falling over drunk or puffing away at school bus stops. So if the system is good enough for selling actual poisons, it's good enough to limit most minors' access to online vices.
Moreover social media has network effects. If most kids aren't on it, the rest will likely not bother either.
Many of these "social" media websites increasingly just fling AI-generated disturbing videos at people. I am sure we could build a web that is actually pleasant to use for kids, but we are not building it. youtube for example: https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2006013682472669589
From my experience as a kid
"Pleasant for kids to use is the polar opposite of kids finding it a pleasure to use"
I think that's provably untrue based on the fact Saturday morning cartoons were massively popular as a curated content feed on TVs through the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Kids (including me at the time) loved them and sank many hours into watching them. They were wholly approved by my parents, to the point where sometimes my parents would watch with me. Unless kids have fundamentally changed (which seems unlikely) the differentiating factor is almost certainly that kids simply now have access to far more unsuitable content.
Yep. Kids still love engaging with decent content. As any parent knows. Bluey / Peppa pig / Paw patrol / etc do huge numbers.
Children haven’t changed.
Well, one part of a proper education of a child is to teach them that life isn't about gratification. Neil Postman made this point already in Amusing Ourselves to Death. By educating kids with Sesame street you didn't teach them to love education, you taught them to love television.
When you make learning synonymous with fun people start to believe that if they aren't having fun they aren't learning. Which accounts I think for something that a lot of teachers at all levels have observed, kids are increasingly unable to learn if there's no immediate reward.
Video games from the 90s were actually pleasant as a kid, and I'm happy to see my kids enjoying them today rather than the slot machines that the industry makes for kids these days…
(Unfortunately I'm well aware that it won't last long, because social pressure is impossible to fight at individual scale)
Social pressure is much easier to fight than you think but it involves being an active parent and letting your kids invite friends over to play. Most parents are not willing or are unable to do take that active role for one reason or another.
Not sure why you think this has anything to do with children other than in name.
It’s ID verification.
You will loose this argument because there is a real problem with children and AI slop. Especially because there is a problem with AI slop and handling it by people in general.
Provide a solution which doesn’t require that, like some other top commenter did. Otherwise, you have already lost.
This must kill that platform.
Any kind of social media ban would mean more people consuming "traditional" media, which is much worse.
I would rather have my kid watch nothing but AI slop then get even 30 seconds of FAUX news. Lost my father to actual brain rot, FUCK YOU NEWSCORP!
This has been going on since well before COVID:
If we did build it and it became popular, it would quickly be taken over by the same forces that are destroying the current internet. To get good social media sites (and a better internet as well), you would first have to change the economics of the entire system driving these forces. But as is said "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism".
It's really not that dramatic. Just build it like more classic media. Curated content the company takes responsibility for, closed platform, pay upfront. Or have public programming, that is the oldest model there is.
Ad driven online content is especially bad for kids. But let's not pretend the only way to find an alternative is to end the world.
The fact is the "bad" solution is popular because consumers say they care about these things but then in real life they act like they don't. If no one watched the problem would solve itself. Thus, I'm not sure the solution is even to be found in platforms, if parents are burned out or don't have ways to make better choices for their kids.
That's a reason for these laws, to essentially just take it out of people's hands.
The consumer gets bait & switched. When ad-free pay upfront cable tv first started, people switched over. We showed that yes indeed we like ad-free shows and are willing to pay for them. They said, well that's great, but we can make more money if we show you ads so they did and we ended up paying up front and getting obnoxious ads. Then when online streaming started, we all switched over. We showed that yes indeed we like ad-free shows and are willing to pay upfront for them. They said, well that's great, but we can make more money if we show you ads so they did and we ended up paying up front and getting obnoxious ads. The moment it become sufficient popular and the people get sufficiently locked in, the ads come. Every time.
it doesn't need to be social media, it could be an entirely closed system with some moderators curating content.
Well, that's why we use HN. So far no ads, how long that lasts is anyone's guess.
Devil's advocate: what is the difference between "social media" and a website very much like this one? When can I look forward to having to give a DNA test to read HN?
The main difference in my view is the personalized algorithm that determines what to feed you next.
HackerNews has an algorithm but it's not personalized—i.e. everyone sees the same thing.
My own website has a bulletin board that offers a personalized list of messages after you login: whatever threads you have not yet read. And so do many other websites of this style. So this cannot be a differentiating aspect.
Are you also harvesting teens data and selling it to the highest bidder or using it for target advertisements?
Not intentionally - but in the past I did have advertisements to finance it , which I had to stop since that is enough under a lot of jurisprudence to qualify as running a for-profit, which usually means less leniency from judges.
So it is advertisements where we should draw the line -- websites with advertisements should require age checks?
Why did you cherry pick advertisments from my reply and run with that?
It clearly isn't just a singular data point that is a True or False that would include a site in the ban.
Perhaps it should be, "If I had a 12 year old daughter, do I want her to have easy access to pornography, self harm material and the ability to receive private messages from a 45 year old registered sex offender?"
I get your point - "Where is the line in the sand?" and it's a valid point but no need to argue in bad faith.
Because it is the ad network that I chose 30 years ago that was doing any of the types of tracking you mention. In fact, all of the ad networks from 30 years ago would be considered as doing "teen tracking" today. I do not know how you can do tracking without doing teen tracking, barring precisely I troducing age verification on every single website. And I also do not know if there is any network out there doing advertisements without tracking -- certainly none of the major local news websites use it.
I do think the "wont somebody think of the children" arguments are in bad faith though, and I say this as a father.
> Perhaps it should be, "If I had a 12 year old daughter, do I want her to have easy access to pornography, self harm material and the ability to receive private messages from a 45 year old registered sex offender?"
If parents are concerned about this, why let them on the Internet? Why not use parental control systems? Why not teach your children healthy sex education, how to deal with their feelings, and to tell old creeps to fuck off?
Because parents can't or won't monitor their kids internet usage 24/7.
They are very different.
>So this cannot be a differentiating aspect.
Now explain that nuance to an 80 yr old law maker who hates the damn email.
Not to say that they are technically literate, but the average age of French lawmakers (which are just the members of parliament) is 50 years old.
It's actually the same as the average age of voting-age French citizens, so they are quite representative on this regard.
These 80yo lawmakers have kids and grandkids and advisers. They know how social media works.
They hate social media because it gives people the power to talk in public about them with near impunity. They want to go back to the old days when if you wrote a letter to the newspaper about potential corruption or wrongdoing among the "more equal animals" you'd get pulled over for a light out whenever you went through that town for the next 20yr.
> They hate social media because it gives people the power to talk in public about them with near impunity.
If you think you have even near impunity on social media, I have a bridge to sell you. Even a town to go with it.
>If you think you have even near impunity on social media, I have a bridge to sell you. Even a town to go with it.
I specifically said "near" impunity. If you do something bad enough they'll come after you but even then if your gripes are legitimate that's likely to amplify it.
Surely you're not honestly claiming that there is not a significant practical difference between modern internet criticism and the old ways when messaging that could reach the broad public was far thoroughly gated by people and things that had more stake in the power structure.
I wouldn’t say it was gated. More like it was costly. And people having the means to do so was a very small set and prone to agree with the status quo.
But even now, a lot of messages are lost on the internet. And the internet is only decentralized for messages propagation, not for access.
Fractionally gated is still gated. At some point a difference in quantity is a difference in quality.
For the record, that is exactly my point . I do not want yet another sword of Damocles for websites, even less if it depends on the mood of a clueless judge.
From a definition standpoint, hn is a social media site. From a legislation standpoint, it's not nearly popular (infamous?) enough to legislate (the mentioned sites have had enough negative coverage to manufacturer consent for this invasion of privacy: cyber bullying, destructive challenges, etc.)
When it is, and when your local government becomes sufficiently captured by the user surveillance industrial complex, you will need real world verification here.
>hn is a social media site
Social media typically implies a website where users are sharing self-created content. If a website with comments counts a social media, than all web2.0 is social media and there's practically no distinction between the web and social media.
[delayed]
> what is the difference between "social media" and a website very much like this one?
Pretty much everything? Not the same intent, not the same usage, not the same business model, not the same users, &c.
Frel free to name something concrete. Remember that Reddit has already been targetted by this in Australia.
Why do you think Reddit is any better than Instagram or X or TikTok, such that it doesn't deserve to be targeted according to the same principles?
I used it to follow some functional programming discussions that had chosen it as it's main bulletin board, as did many other software projects. (I am not a fan of Reddit, which is why it is of paramount importance to me to be able to continue to browse it without an account.)
But fine: if you think Reddit deserves the cut, please let me know why you think this site does not deserve it. Or why Discord (also used by a lot of software projects, to my annoyance ) does not deserve it. In a way that a "80 year old judge which hates computers" can understand.
We should have kept to mailing lists, as I said many times.
Reddit has pockets of sanity, but as a whole it is insane. The same is true of Instagram, TikTok, X, etc.
If Hacker News doesn't improve its moderation (especially of fascist propaganda) I do think it should go the same way. HN openly flaunts the fact that it only follows American law - e.g. the fact that it completely ignores GDPR. It wouldn't happen until HN got big enough to make some politician pay attention though, and HN is kept relatively small by design.
Reddit is a cesspool of bots reposting the best performing images and rage bait of the last 5 years ad nauseam, that and porn makes up the bulk of the traffic. So yes, again, there is nothing in common between reddit and hn
I read several subreddits and see nearly no images, nearly no rage bait (probably less than on Hacker News, in fact), and exactly no porn. My daily Reddit experience is so close to Hacker News that I've been known to forget which one I'm on.
Reddit still has the capacity to show you what you're actually looking for. It still lets you find content by interest, rather than by personalities. It still keeps replies together, still lets you order by time easily, and doesn't stick too much random crap in the middle (none if you use a decent ad blocker). It handles long form content well and doesn't try to force everything to be a sound bite that you have to click on to see more. It's still convenient to use it that way, and most users probably do use it that way.
Compare to, say, Youtube, which fight you ever step of the way if you try not to be drowned in a disordered flood of some combination of what a computer guesses you might want and what it's most profitable for the site for you to see (including what will keep you on the site), with your only control being which "influencers" you uprank by "subscribing" to them.
> Reddit still has the capacity to show you what you're actually looking for.
Reddit has the capacity to manipulate minors and groom them into believing all kind of sick "fictions", endorsed by the admins. It should absolutely be banned for minors.
This lacks hindsight. Whatever you subjectively dislike about Reddit will certainly apply here, if not today then tomorrow. If you want proof, check out Slashdot.
Also, no porn on /r/haskell.
Eh, with user links, user commentary, profiles and votes HN is "basically the same" on several key aspects and there is quite a bit of demographic overlap. It's just reached a very different equilibrium as to what goes on here due to the 2nd and 3rd tier aspects that are different.
Take two cesspools (I'm not gonna pass up the chance to use the analogy, sorry not sorry). Assume they are both serving the same quantity and quality of people. Feed one a bunch of inorganic matter, laundry bleach and only the finest most heavy duty multi-ply shit tickets. Feed the other nothing that shouldn't go down a drain, no bleach and Scott 1-ply. The latter will perform way better and go way longer between needing service despite the only differences being minor differences that don't even matter in system design.
Does HN spread Fake News? Facebook and Youtube do. Do you feel bad after using HN? Insta and Facebook it happens. Does HN collect data to specify marketing? Every other Social Media do.
This is hard to define in laws so e.g. the EU chooses to force concrete measures from the social media pages.
> Does HN spread Fake News?
Yes?
Give me an example of websites on HN, which spread fake news by purpose and it was allowed by the mods even they knew the news / artice / website was spreading fake news.
You have quite an unatenable position (you really think there have never been outright wrong headlines on HN?). Even this very article is (being very generous) clickbait.
> Does HN spread Fake News?
Yes? Even newspapers do that. You have never had Gell-Mann when reading something here outside mainstream topics of interest? (e.g. almost anything from outside the US, or health related).
Is this really the criteria you want to use to decide whether to require age checks for a website?
> the EU chooses to force concrete measures from the social media pages.
This just sidesteps the issue of how a website ends up in the list. Today, Reddit. Tomorrow, Discord. Then Github. Eventually, HN.
My news is almost outside of the US as I am not American. (wow this should be sent to r/USDefaultism). So let's say like this: I do read a lot outside of "American mainstream media".
Most good working journalist try to verify claim and statements. This is the opposite to Fake News, Clickbait and Russian state propaganda spread in Social Media because its their business model.
Proper moderation, and - how to say it without sounding elitist? - more mature users.
HN is social media, and if you look at the implementation of the Australian law it's more political than anything else. They banned X but did not list BlueSky, which has an ongoing pedophilia problem. This has nothing to do with protecting kids from social media it's just political maneuvering, like banning children from reading the epoch times but not the NYT
This website is social media.
the services that comply with speech suppression and privacy violation orders will be deemed acceptable, and those who don't won't.
With the caveat that by "speech suppression" you mean "spam suppression" and by "privacy violation orders" you mean "search warrants"
None. HN is a social media since it's an online forum. In fact HN runs afoul of many EU regulations already, GDPR, cookie law, ...
This is just cop out legislation. I wanna see laws targeting addictive design systems and harmful content. Social media is only part of the problem.
There’s so much that falls out of the social media definition. And regardless, kids are not stupid… VPNs, proxies, etc are easy to circumvent with.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of good.
Who cares if many can get around it, if the majority can't or won't, then it kills the network effects.
I don't think this is good though. It's a police state masquerading as "SAVE THE CHILDREN!"
yes, the police state is preventing Mark Zuckerberg from being a trillionaire.
I'm sorry. What?
This legislation is very much giving more power to the government over what its citizens cannot do. The real impetus is control by the powers that be. The ideal citizen for an authoritarian would be fully controllable via digital means. A digital id that is networked with services is a wet dream for authoritarians.
What does this have to do with limiting Zuck's net worth? Because less kids will see less ads? How much will this reduce his net worth? If we took licenses from kids and had them wait until 18, would you be claiming this is to prevent Musk from gaining more wealth?
Step 1 should be to kill the ad based monetization model.
The question is how this is implemented, in particular age verification.
It's usual to say that MPs are old people that don't understand current technologies, but in law preparation committees they appear to be well aware; in particular, they mentioned a "double-anonymity" system where the site requesting your age wouldn't know your name, and the entity serving age requests wouldn't know which site it is for. They are also aware that people walk-around age verification checks with e.g. fake ID cards, possibly AI generated.
I'm not sure if it is actually doable reliabily, and I'm not sure either that the MPs that will have to vote the law will know the topic as well as the MPs participating in these committees.
I would personally consider other options like a one-button admin config for computers/smartphones/tablets that restricts access according to age (6-14, 15-18) and requiring online service providers to announce their "rating" in HTTP headers. Hackers will certainly object that young hackers could bypass this, but like copy-protection, the mission can be considered complete when the vast majority of people are prevented from doing what they should not do.
Alternatively one could consider the creation of a top-level domain with a "code of content" (which could include things like "chat control") enforced by controlling entity. Then again, an OS-level account config button could restrict all Internet accesses to this domain.
Perhaps an national agency could simply grant a "child safe" label to operating systems that comply to this.
This type of solutions would I think also be useful in schools (e.g. school-provided devices), although they are also talking about severely limiting screen-time at school.
For the french speakers, see:
[1] https://videos.assemblee-nationale.fr/video.17950525_6942684...
[2] https://videos.assemblee-nationale.fr/video.17952051_6942761...
Yes, perhaps the most reasonable approach is to tie these restrictions to the specific device (and, where applicable, account).
The ban doesn’t need to catch every single case, it just needs to add enough friction to stop the most frequent and destroy network effects.
Here's my proposal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46447282
It protects privacy while being as robust as any other existing age restriction method.
The only way they could successfully implement it is with constant live video surveillance, otherwise parents who oppose the ban can easily get around it. Which is going to be at least a double digit percentage of the population. And the police don't even have the resources to investigate theft and robbery, let alone go after millions of parents for helping their children create social media accounts.
> parents who oppose the ban can easily get around it
Irresponsible parents are irresponsible parents, and they can do much worse than letting their children wander on the Net alone. IFAIK no law at least here forbids parents from giving alcohol or tobacco to their children, even though it is forbidden to sell those products to them. Toxic social media are mostly the same.
Although the topic is a ban, I think the idea is less about forbidding and punishing, and more about helping - albeit in questionably manner according to some - helping parents with "regulating" the access of their children to the Net. Of course, the easy answer is to recommend giving them dumb phones instead of smartphones, but really a smartphone is too useful to be ignored around high-school age.
That's fine. Adults can buy their kids beer, too.
I'm one of the weirdos that should be on board with this, but I'm against it. This will do harm to marginalized youth and push younger people to lie and find ways around the ban.
Plus, we saw that in Australia that the lobby behind the ban was in fact an ad agency that makes ads for gambling apps.
Here is France, the ban is probably just a way to avoid legislation against companies selling crap that isn't for kids like vape pens and sports gambling apps.
I'm pretty sure it is going to pass.
Too much of a coordinated efforts between western countries, thus it cannot fail. The decisions have been made and your voice pretty much doesn't matter.
> The decisions have been made and your voice pretty much doesn't matter
Source for these bans being unpopular?
The confusion you are displaying is because you are not cognizant of whats going on throughout the world particularly in advanced economies that have opened their doors to all forms of migration legal and illegal.
The timing of this coincides with countries in particular have seen a major rise in anti-migration sentiments which have become very fashionable and popular among young men in particular as polls show a global trend of men under 30s are shifting towards right wing with women towards leftwing.
Suddenly, they decide NOW is the time to stop despite the fact that they've allowed young people to be exposed to all sorts of "dangerous content" and algorithms for decades, in the late 90s and early 2000s as teenagers we had uncensored access to the internet, warez, anarchy, shock as they have circumventions widely shared among each other today.
In short, these countries are so concerned about a civil unrest in particular between religious groups that are perceived to have "overstayed their welcome" that they are outright trying to shutdown online discourse both legitimate and exaggerated.
Europe, in particular UK, are on the brink of a major civil war as per intelligence reports and the ban for the young won't be the last but that the net would be cast even wider. It's a last ditched effort bandaid solution to keep the dam from bursting. With the backdrop of Keir Starmer's threats to extradite Americans and jail people for posting grievances against the demographic crisis, you can see where Europe and other advanced economies even in places like Korea mirror the trends, conflicts and draconian laws to buy time for the inevitable.
If we want to keep this debate going there has to be an understanding of the political context and direction that can only be realized through inference and intuition. They will never openly announce true motives as that would hinder the objective. The comments I am seeing are awfully similar to the confusion and fierce debate I see around wrestling control of TikTok, which have largely been blamed on China, but the concern around uncensored videos of atrocities committed in the middle east reaching hundreds of millions of young people that has shifted steadfast opinions of a certain country which for decades were positive, now show significant departure among age brackets within the same political camp which shocked a lot of old people from that same side.
Perception is everything and the question "asking for a source on if these bans popular" completely misses the mark and irrelevant, rather the more interesting question is,
"will these bans that limit freedom of information and speech escalate and proliferate in the near future and whether France, Australia, Korea is just the start?"
" will the countries reviewing ban like new zealand, greece, canada invite more countries to join the trend?"
" why are these bans being accelerated in countries that have seen a large wave of migrations that are causing major frictions?"
You've written 6 paragraphs without answering what was asked.
I've provided an answer which requires understanding because if you don't seek to connect the dots any response to whatever question is being asked will be immediately negated or denied making further debate impossible.
Good, social media should be considered a harmful substance. Even for adults it’s probably a bad thing.
It sounds like you don't like social media. With that in mind, why is it good to add a layer of user surveillance on the Internet? Where's the connection between "social media is harmful" and "it is good to add surveillance"?
If you think social media is harmful, wouldn't it be good to regulate social media? What does regulating French (or Australian, or wherever) citizens have to do with it?
> Where's the connection between "social media is harmful" and "it is good to add surveillance"?
There doesn’t have to be one.
> If you think social media is harmful, wouldn't it be good to regulate social media?
Literally what a ban for under-15-year-olds is.
I'm not talking about theory, but what's happening in practice. In case you're unaware, Australian style ban is enforced via surveillance, such as a a mix of methods, such as facial age estimation, behavioural signals and an option to upload government-issued ID.
Literally what a ban for under-15-year-olds is.
If you're going to argue, please do so in good faith by taking my whole post into context. Thank you.
> In case you're unaware, Australian style ban is enforced via surveillance, such as a a mix of methods, such as facial age estimation, behavioural signals and an option to upload government-issued ID
Sure. Australia opted for private compliance. Adults who choose to use social media are subject to more surveillance (because that’s how the social media companies chose to comply). In exchange, not only does that level of surveillance not apply to children, but the default state of surveillance they were under from social media companies (and being normalized towards) is gone.
Thanks for clarifying some of your points. I agree with you that the methods (like ID uploads and face recognition) aren’t the best. But I’m not sure if there are viable alternatives.
A ban on social media for children is a different way of saying ID Verification for the entire population.
They are implicitly the same thing.
You can't exclude children without first verifying _everyone_ and from there excluding people who match age < approved. This is basic logic.
If you were a cynical person you could imagine this is actually politicians wanting to bring in an ID law and using "think of the children" as the social justification for it.
If you're a conspiracy theorist you'd wonder why Apple and Google have now added the ability to upload and link your passport and other real id into their respective app wallets. How long before your phones browser is digitally signing all your social media posts with your ID...
> If you were a cynical person you could imagine this is actually politicians wanting to bring in an ID law
Sounds like a good theory, apart from the minor flaw that France already has ID cards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_card_(France)
Gaming platforms are already doing it.
I'm Australian and neither any Meta platform nor Reddit have asked to verify my ID, as I presume both just inferred that I was over 16 and that was adequate.
Yup the aim is to de-anonymise the Internet for increased policing/spying abilities
> How long before your phones browser is digitally signing all your social media posts with your ID...
Under 10 years I'd say at this rate
If you want to know what is really driving this NOW, listen to this
Any kind of government encroachment into the time of it's citizens is theft.
Many of their citizens chose American social media because they prefer American values. This offended the nationalists so they are simply going to ban American sites and try to make their own inferior ones.
Traditional media (Murdoch) and traditional gambling lobbied the hardest for these laws (of course these are anything but traditional). This is a billion dollar gimme to newscorp, but they will probably still fail to pick up the younger audience because they can't compete.
In America we have freedom of religion and freedom of association, we used to have the freedom to put whatever we please in our own bodies and minds.
> If a child is in a Formula One car and they turn on the engine, I don’t want them to win the race, I just want them to get out of the car. I want them to learn the highway code first, and to ensure the car works, and to teach them to drive in a different car.
Yet computer education in France has been severely lacking for so long. From middle school to even universities (except the courses computer focused obviously) people aren't taught correctly. Teachers themselves are lost to computers and lectures are bad.
The goal is obviously to have tech illiterate people knowing just enough to use computers for the job but not worrying about the digital autoristarism currently being deployed.
> The goal is obviously to have tech illiterate people knowing just enough to use computers for the job but not worrying about the digital autoristarism currently being deployed.
If anything, without social media access, kids are more likely to play/hack around.
Its a weird analogy. Plenty of people have years of racing experience before they get their drivers license.
So it means they got lectures and training beforehand. Which currently neither (the vast majority of) parents nor public education is properly providing for computer usage. Main difference being there's no licence required to access the internet, for the best and the worst.
Incredible. You absolutely eviscerated the argument your comment is founded on.
Either way, you should meet some rednecks.
What are you talking about? I keep saying people aren't correctly taught about computers. I don't care who provides the lectures.
Yeah. F1 drivers in particular start their training from the age of 4-5. By 6-7 they participate in competitions, at 12-13 they are already at the professional level in karting. Verstappen got his F1 license at 17, which technically qualifies as a "child" for the law.
I'd be very surprised if the overwhelming majority of F1 drivers weren't in some sort of go-kart racing league long before they held government licenses.
Ban for children, and mandatory deanonymiziation [1] for everyone else.
[1] At best with a "trust us we won't tattle" "privacy" architecture.
Look, I’m all for not letting children into social media apps. But that’s the job of the parents, not the state.
Besides, like many point out, this is just a way to deanonymize the web for everyone.
Why is the state always meddling with the citizens lives and personal responsibilities, and why do we let them? Do we really appreciate so much this nanny state?
I don't think you've thought through the sentiment "But that’s the job of the parents, not the state" very well. Parents frequently want limited Internet access for their older preteen/early teen children, don't trust the private sector to implement this limited Internet access, and don't have the time to enforce this limited access themselves as they have to go to work and their children have to go to school anyway (and their parents want this limited access for them in school as well).
There are also easier options of no personal Internet access, and unrestricted access, but I suppose these are not very good for this stage of development.
As citizens we like to delegate aspects of our lives to the government; for example, I'm responsible for commuting to work on time, but we have delegated the maintenance of roads or public transport to the government, and this is something that could also be done by the private sector (private roads, private transportation), and ends up as a constant negotiation between citizen and government. Some polities like Germany and I think Sweden have subsidized education for children in exchange for mandatory public schooling by an institution either owned by the state or extremely highly regulated by the state.
I remember when I was a kid I listened to radio until very late in to the night.
Unless they want to remove all of technology from 10pm to 8am, this bill is going to be ridiculous. Teenager and kid will always find better things to do than sleep.
Every nation in the world needs this.
Good for France!
I wish my country (USA) would adapt similar laws.
I love the way everything is forced online but you have to use state ID to chat with your friends now.
What do you expect this law will to achieve?
More!
This is such a fools errand, there will always be services popping up faster than regulators can ban them. This won't stop a lot of the kids. So wasteful.
That's not how they think. They will ban everything and only allow that which is explicitly permitted.
I am convinced that the current world wide rise of (right wing ) populist movements is mainly caused by social media. By regulating like this my hope is we can reduce their spread.
So you want to silence your political opponents? Sounds draconian.
It's disturbing how internalized their view of "silencing opposition is good" is that they just blurt it out publicly without further elaboration.
It's such a normalised sentiment that they feel completely comfortable expressing it publicly for everyone to hear.
I'm glad though, it lets me know who to avoid at all costs.
I'm not convinced social media is to blame. Plenty of extremist movements have arisen throughout history without social media. Politics has been bad for a long long time before social media existed.
They did exist, but you had to seek them out. You had to send them a letter and ask for their pamphlets to be mailed back to you.
Now you have right-wing extremists running the sites and deciding what you should view, just look at Twitter/X and Musk.
Consolidation of all kinds of media (social, print, TV, radio, etc.) is a big ingredient in this. Another ingredient is the enshitification of the net, along with the value of unfettered collection of user data.
The problem isn't that people are consuming (social) media, it's that everything is owned by so few people. We shouldn't be punished for this by having to submit to even more surveillance.
What's wrong with right wing populist movements? They come and go just like left wing populist movements. The pendulum swinging across both the political spectrums over election cycles is a thing of beauty.
both are a threat to democracy like we see on Trump.
Because real democracy is using censorship and authoritarian measures to repress political dissent. Is your democracy textbook from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea? What an absolute clown. I don't care where you stand on the political spectrum: what you are suggesting is the exact opposite of democracy.
You're being far too literal here. "Threat to democracy" can be directly translated to "Threat to our hegemony".
Populist movements are the opposite of a threat to democracy; they represent the actual views of the people, not the views of some cultured elite. Real democracy, not some republican elitism.
The flip side of that, is that the same sense of urgency that flings populists into power also compels them to start to bend the systems that got them there in order to maintain power.
After all, if the evil "elites" -- as if populists don't comprise their own elite class -- ever gain power again they could undo all of our "progress".
You can see this tendency in how some red states, like Texas, have tried to furiously redraw their maps to maintain control of the US house. They are doing this because they fear that "the people" will not choose to give them a majority again. They even admit to it openly. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/15/trump-five-seat-pic...
California had a state wide vote to do the same thing. But they were acting in kind. Tit-for-tat is a reasonable strategy what Texas did. Though it remains a shame that it came to it.
Cumulatively, these actions represent a breakdown of the machinery in our system that allows us to course correct. It's not healthy for anyone.
Planned markets lead to bad economic outcomes, why? Because when you fix prices you lose the ability to react appropriately to changing conditions. Managed democracies lead to bad social outcomes for the same reason. You need reasonably fair elections in order to sense the condition of the population and react to it.
Yet, populist rhetoric ups the emotional ante to the point where it starts to convince people that it's a good idea to subvert this. The old "Flight 93 Election" essay from 2016 is the perfect case study in this sort of absurd rhetorical escalation. Where they literally said, if Trump doesn't win America is doomed forever. We have to "charge the cockpit" before the plane crashes, so to speak.
Yet, when he lost in 2020, America didn't end forever. It's all been a farce and a grab for power.
So one variety of extremism is bad but another isn't?
Social media is just decentralised information flow. Populist movements are rising because people are finally seeing how absolutely exploited they are by the elites, because the elites no longer have complete centralised control over the flow of information.
So wait. You upload everything you post to a centralized service, which uses a centralized algorithm to decide which of the billions of available uploads to show to each person, in order to increase the advertising profits that accrue to the centralized corporation that owns the whole thing, and that's decentralized information flow?
Have you considered the possibility that you may be an idiot?
Besides breaking multiple HN rules, your comment also totally misses the point. It is decentralized with respect to governments and politicians. Which was their entire point.
Have you considered the opposite possibility?
Content sourcing is decentralized, sure, content distribution is not. Through curation, one can craft a narrative without even needing to pay propagandists to write copy.
Nothing decentralised about social media. It's centralised everything.
What a coincidence.
HN readers won't be able to find online partners if this accelerates.
The trade war continues. We’ve known these shitty platforms were polluting kids for at least a decade.
I was going to write a comment about how stupid and harmful these bans are for multiple reasons (including being entirely ineffective at their stated goals anyways), but honestly, who cares at this point. It's clear to me that the internet is dying and will either look dramatically different in the next decade or cease to exist as it's overtaken by bots and AI. And I'm starting to think that's a good thing for humans and society. Perhaps we will return to the real world.
(We will still need the internet for communication, but hopefully far less for entertainment etc).
I used to look things up on the internet, now it's looking me up.
Here's the thing though: they're not killing entertainment — at least not in general. They're killing communication.
Are they? I don't see FaceTime, WhatsApp, Apple Messages etc being affected. The idiot politicians might in the future and will need to be fought, but I'm at the point where I want to see Facebook, Youtube, and X die.
It’s all just AI and people slop. Real person to person communication won’t be effected.
Yeah the internet is stupid at this point. I do get a lot of value from YouTube however.
Same - but I've also wasted so much time there I reckon it comes out as a wash (or worse).