I think all of this has gone overboard, even though I agree that children should not be exposed to pornography, I don't know what to do about it because I expect parents to monitor their child's Internet usage, which is a losing ideal. Are there better alternatives?
If we had a way to prove age without revealing any other identity that could be used for tracking/profile building. I don't see that being supported by the tech industry though, as they are almost completely reliant on tracking to earn money.
So it is up to me to monitor your child? I don't work in porn or an even remotely related field but I have to implement age verification now because of Texas's law. Someone explain to me how this is protecting any children.
Why do we need to do something? Is there really such a problem that needs to be solved? Because I see so many people who grew up with unrestricted access to the internet and did not go around watching every beheading or BDSM porn video around like everyone seems to think kids do today despite them being easily available at the time, and when they were come across they certainly didn't get everyone fucked in the head because of it. Everyone knew rotten.com, everyone was using napster/kazaa/mirc that was full of porn and BDSM and snuff videos. If we were going to have problems, people 40 years old now would have signs of it and be messed up, except they aren't.
Guess at some point in the future it will come out who bankrolled all this because multiple countries in Europe and America don’t just roll something like this out in 8 months organically without someone paying off politicians to push it
> The SESTA-FOSTA law is a combination of two bills: the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act; and the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act. It passed Congress in March, and President Donald Trump signed it into law in April.
> ...
> The biggest companies say they can manage the risks. Match Group—owner of Match.com, Tinder, Ok Cupid and Plenty of Fish—says any potential legal issues give “huge advantages” to those with enough size to comply. “We are able to have a big legal team, a big customer care team,” Chief Executive Mandy Ginsberg said.
In the last couple years we've seen the internet version of "Vietnam war being televised made it unpopular at home".
After Vietnam, it was easier for journalists to embed with the terrorist groups than it was to embed with US forces, as the US learned that people seeing how the sausage is made immediately cuts the support for said sausage making.
Massive political weight was thrown behind getting control of TikTok because of the sheer amount of reporting from Gaza. Politicians are still trying to tell people that they're essentially wrong for forming their views on actual images of violence they're seeing.
The world at large was shown the brutality against the people of Gaza, and the plot was lost at home.
If the "enemies" aren't shown, it's easy to go along with "good guys" and "bad guys", but when you see 100s of children missing limbs, mourning their family members, and begging on to not be killed over the course of a few months, suddenly the fairy tale that allows some countries to brutalize others falls apart.
I consider myself lucky to have grown up before the internet, but after local BBS' were a thing. My parents had absolutely no idea what went on in those systems, and I found the freedom incredible. Being able to explore and spread my wings a bit was a huge part of my childhood and teen years, and it wouldn't have been possible if my parents were hovering over my shoulder, or if I were unable to make an account because I wasn't 18.
That said, I was mostly dealing with griefers in Trade Wars or LoRD, and the worst thing I could find locally was GIFs of women in bikinis (and waiting for them to download was an excellent way to learn patience). I didn't have to worry so much about the threats that exist today online.
I am so grateful that I grew up when I did and got to experience that.
My feelings of freedom in that era, as a teen in a small 90s US city, were what fueled me to co-found one of the organizations (Fight for the Future) cited in the article!
(No longer in the trenches, just on the board, deserve zero direct credit for any of this work--it's all them!)
I feel like we've always been living on borrowed time, due to the historical accident of the internet being built by academics and public institution employees. If internet protocols had been built by for-profits, HTTP requests would include credit card # as a mandatory header.
Ha, I remember finding the adult section of the file uploads. It took fourteen year old me thirty minutes to download one jpeg of boobs.
LoRD was fantastic, as were the turn based games that other people would dial in to take part of. It was such a different era, but we made it work by setting time limits and cooperating.
I was on some kind of local BBS in 1995 from my local ISP.
I found a guy selling a gamepad of some kind. Agreed to buy it. Talked to him for a decent amount of time. Finally set time to meet at local Kmart near my house.
The look on his face when a 10 year old rode up on a bicycle to buy his gamepad. I don't have a good memory but I still remember that scene ha.
Something that is way worse today in my opinion is that back then everyone has nicknames, talks even for deep topics somewhat generically.
Nowadays everyone wants you to put your real name, expects a real photo of you, track every step you take.
I think it would be nice to go back to how you could talk openly, just like you were able to have "discussion forums" in newspapers pseudonymously without it being trivially abused for identity theft, etc.
I'm grateful as well. While I was born after the early internet, I still got to experience the true internet. Truly one of the wonders of humanity. It will be missed.
Internet Gatekeeping, ID Cards, New Facial Recognition Powers, Secret government talks have identified a huge problem, planned all this during the covid years is my guess. Something is going down and this is their safest bet i reckon. Possibly to do with unregistered recent inhabitants and improving the capability to identify them. That movie Scarface in the first 25 minutes tells you something.
It won't be a week until online posting identities will be sold for relative pocket-change to the new 'botnet masters'. Whether through hackers or just offering $50 to get grandma's ID from her no-good grandson who knows he can get away with it as she doesn't go online anyway.
Corporations and center-left/center-right liberal governments support now and have always supported mass immigration because it lowers wages. Nobody especially cares about identifying them, the reason they flooded in recently (over the past couple decades) is because they were deliberately let in through written policies. They did this despite public objections. In the US, we know exactly who they are; we issue illegal immigrants special IDs and business licenses. They get bank loans; they're homeowners. They get in-state tuition at colleges.
Starmer is currently using anti-immigrant sentiment to push his digital IDs, but that's because he is a cynic. He does whatever he needs to do to satisfy his bosses.
> That movie Scarface in the first 25 minutes tells you something.
It tells you that the US puts nations under siege for decades for committing the crime of self-determination, then lets in with absolutely no obstacles all of the economically destroyed and desperate, the extremely right wing, and the participants in CIA-financed death squads who flee, then uses them as a voting block (and a resource) to support the continuation and escalation of those sieges.
edit: immigrants commit less crime in the US than natives. Their children commit more crime, because they rise to the level of natives at their socioeconomic bracket.
Damaging in different ways. I'm not sure you can say one is worse.
Sure most kids can look at naked people and not be too affected, we all have the same parts. But beyond that, a lot of really harmful behavior is depicted in some porn and kids are not really mature enough to understand that in real healthy relationships people don't actually have sex like that.
Both porn and social media can be addictive and unhealthy if they become a substitute for interacting with real people. And this also happens with adults not just kids.
> a lot of really harmful behavior is depicted in some porn
and movies, and kids shows, and in fast food ads and in sitcoms and in comics and even in some churches, even in children's books and school books, and famously in Disney movies
I am sometimes wondering if the whole "shielding" can be counterproductive. If you look at perpetrators and victims backstories it was either absolute lack of parenting (nobody to talk to) or it was households where everything was taboo. Eg. "hardcore Christians" and such.
And I worry that the whole "everything is taboo" might turn out badly.
Sure, I totally wished it was like "shield till they are 16/18/21" and then it will all be fine, but then we will end up with 16/18/21 year olds who will lose all hope when they first come across anything that might make them uncomfortable or in general cannot deal with.
I also dislike the notion of other people deciding how to love each other. Sounds scary. But I really would wonder if children who cannot judge stuff end up watching some BDSM and suddenly think it's normal to be violent. Like even relatively young children witness or are involved in fights in kindergarten. Doesn't mean they'll end up having issues with violence.
Different story if they learn it's the only way to get respect. But I really don't think you can equate that with a child coming across porn or non vanilla porn.
It feels like the same story as "ego shooters will make everyone think it's okay to shoot people". Pretty sure that a big part of people here played ego shooters.
On top of that I think creating the mindset that sex is something bad, to maybe be ashamed of, etc. is a good thing. I really do think that makes people not speak out when something is wrong. It creates that whole taboo. We don't have that with other crimes that we allow children to witness in media. Theft, violence, etc.
No I don't think children should watch pornography. However the whole "you cannot even speak about sex" and it's all way worse than weapons seems to feed the "bad porn" to some degree.
Facebook is over 20 years old and has never enforced its minimum age (13 years.)
I, for one, would have started with legal threats and financial penalties long ago. But it just won't happen. So I'm fine with technical solutions.
Facebook is able to sell you ads based on your favorite shoe lace colour. They ban terrorists, bots, porn and people named "Mark Zuckerberg" all the time. Noone can claim it's too hard for them to ban minors under 13.
Google is suddenly asking to verify my age on an account I have used for five years linked to my credit card. This is about surveillance of all of us, not "protecting kids".
With how harshly HN users have been going at UK and the EU, I was surprised seeing that not only is the mass surveillance build out better in the US, but also the user verification.
I stand by my repeated statements of how this could have been solved simply using an RTA header [1] on the server side and require the most common user agents to look for that header putting the onus on parents where it currently legally resides. It's not perfect, nothing is nor ever will be but using the header solution is entirely private, does not store or leak data and puts the decision into the device owners rather than creating perverse incentives to track everyone. It may actually protect most small children whereas today teens quickly find a work-around and then teach smaller children how to work around these centralized gate-keepers. The current solutions are just about tracking people by real identity and incentivizing teens to commit identity crimes.
Bold of you to assume that legislators know how any kind of implementation works. They just propose general rules like "kids underage can not access this content" and the technical implementation doesn't matter to them.
I think this is the reasons we should vote more technical competent people into politics.
Every single discussion I have with folks on this seemingly goes like this:
“Does the child pay for internet access?”
“No, but they have a device that can access the internet!”
“Oh, so the child bought the device and paid the bill?”
“No, the parents do!”
“Ah, so would you say it’s the parent’s responsibility to monitor their children’s internet usage since they gave them a network-connected device?”
“You obviously don’t want to protect kids!”
Look, I do want to protect kids. I really do, but I also am sick and tired of bad actors using “BuT tHe ChIlDrEn” to recruit idiots and -phobes in a quest to make the entire planet and all of its spaces magically safe for children of all ages - at the expense of the superior number of adults who need our own spaces devoid of kids for community, for socialization, for being our full, human selves.
The internet already has an age gate, and it’s called “the adults paying the damn bills”. Those adults are responsible for making internet access safe for kids, not the entire digital planet dropping what it’s doing to make every single private space safe for kids to access without parental supervision. Bring back curated services like Prodigy and Compuserve, or just don’t give kids internet access until they’re ready for it.
Most of humanity grew up just fine without regular internet access as children, and there’s no reason whatsoever we have to foist net-connected terminals onto kids of any age. That’s parental choice, and I refuse to be punished because of someone else’s bad parenting.
I'm also opposed to this law (mainly I think it is a huge invasion of privacy with near zero chance of actually protecting kids), but there are some realities people should know.
My kids were all exposed to some relatively extreme stuff long before they had a network connected device (starting around 1st grade). This is because other kids at school had network connected devices, and some of those kids show other kids stuff for shock value.
In a more extreme instance, the child did pay for internet access; they got an old phone from a friend and paid cash for a sim card.
As a child I had unlimited time to work out how to access stuff that interested me, a lot of which was forbidden in some way, because that's the most interesting stuff!
In the process I learned about computers and eventually got a modem to access BBSes. It was exhilarating! I would have spent any amount of effort and time to access it.
I basically attribute my entire career to accessing stuff the puritans would have tried to prevent me from accessing.
Also, almost all of the porn I have came from private trackers.
I very much doubt they will be concerned with any of these rules. Things will just move more underground if that happens. And the more underground you go, the more unsavory stuff you might find.
But we all know this isn't actually about protecting children.
In a way, I hope that it ends up being a good thing because the whole clearnet should probably be nuked from orbit.
Us nerds can come up with something better. Federated, encrypted, anonymous and unblockable. It's just the spam problem that is the hard thing to solve. Maybe reputation with proof of work could work.
I'll happily leave the normies to their milquetoast, corporate, manipulated existence.
> Us nerds can come up with something better. Federated, encrypted, anonymous and unblockable.
And eventually illegal. That's what we see already.
And if it's not technically illegal then Google, Apple and OpenAI will censor it. Again, we see that already. On YouTube you cannot even talk about important topics such as suicide.
It's also coordinated. As much as I dislike Infowars, the fact that private institutions killed it at the same time is just scary.
Just like it's scary that we now have ethics taught by private entities. Be it what you can search or what ChatGPT or Gemini think.
It feels like a lot of these are strongly locked in place, which if you look at history is extremely bad. Only now private institutions have more power and control than any king ever had.
And all of that is if you don't consider the pockets full of money.
I am against all age-verification systems here. These are ways
to try to control the flow of information - aka censorship.
There are a few situations where I can see verification is
necessary; number #1 is in regards to online transactions
involving money from a bank account. But the whole "show your
age to watch pr0n" - that is just rubbish nonsense. Same with
"people of age 14 are too young to use anti-social media". Now,
I think people should quit wasting their time with facebook
and so forth anyway, but I consistently reject these attempts
to restrict freedom by state authorities acting as lobbyists
for control-freaks, dictators or over-eager corporations. The
internet could not have gotten big with those restrictions in
the first place - so let's remove all of those without mercy.
Of course the only comment representing the perspective of the actual "protected group" is near the very bottom of the section and unanswered.
Every time someone says "think of the children", just remember that nobody is motivated by protecting children from their parents; it's all to protect parents from their children. Always has been.
The real story is we are training millions/billions of people to send what is basically biometric data to sources which they should never trust. You think stolen credit cards are bad?
The long term consequence are so dumb and obvious that all I can say is "good luck."
"This year, the UK also passed a mandate for age verification—the Online Safety Act—"
No we didn't. That was 2023, and it went into effect in multiple phases, the last of which I believe was July 25th this year.
Also, I can't help but wonder what young people now will think of these laws years later, as adults. In the UK, the OSA tries to prevent 17 year olds from watching porn, even though the age of consent here is 16. How will they remember contradictions like that?
Why is everyone acting surprised? We’ve had 20-ish years of social media and algorithms being forced upon everyone and everything and any fine that was handed out was essentially paid off by not even a day of revenue.
This is the result of social media companies optimising their feeds for monetisation.
57 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 84.4 ms ] thread> ...
> The biggest companies say they can manage the risks. Match Group—owner of Match.com, Tinder, Ok Cupid and Plenty of Fish—says any potential legal issues give “huge advantages” to those with enough size to comply. “We are able to have a big legal team, a big customer care team,” Chief Executive Mandy Ginsberg said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-law-targets-sex-trafficking...
After Vietnam, it was easier for journalists to embed with the terrorist groups than it was to embed with US forces, as the US learned that people seeing how the sausage is made immediately cuts the support for said sausage making.
Massive political weight was thrown behind getting control of TikTok because of the sheer amount of reporting from Gaza. Politicians are still trying to tell people that they're essentially wrong for forming their views on actual images of violence they're seeing.
The world at large was shown the brutality against the people of Gaza, and the plot was lost at home.
If the "enemies" aren't shown, it's easy to go along with "good guys" and "bad guys", but when you see 100s of children missing limbs, mourning their family members, and begging on to not be killed over the course of a few months, suddenly the fairy tale that allows some countries to brutalize others falls apart.
That said, I was mostly dealing with griefers in Trade Wars or LoRD, and the worst thing I could find locally was GIFs of women in bikinis (and waiting for them to download was an excellent way to learn patience). I didn't have to worry so much about the threats that exist today online.
I am so grateful that I grew up when I did and got to experience that.
My feelings of freedom in that era, as a teen in a small 90s US city, were what fueled me to co-found one of the organizations (Fight for the Future) cited in the article!
(No longer in the trenches, just on the board, deserve zero direct credit for any of this work--it's all them!)
LoRD was fantastic, as were the turn based games that other people would dial in to take part of. It was such a different era, but we made it work by setting time limits and cooperating.
That's a sweetspot if you ask me.
The look on his face when a 10 year old rode up on a bicycle to buy his gamepad. I don't have a good memory but I still remember that scene ha.
Nowadays everyone wants you to put your real name, expects a real photo of you, track every step you take.
I think it would be nice to go back to how you could talk openly, just like you were able to have "discussion forums" in newspapers pseudonymously without it being trivially abused for identity theft, etc.
Starmer is currently using anti-immigrant sentiment to push his digital IDs, but that's because he is a cynic. He does whatever he needs to do to satisfy his bosses.
> That movie Scarface in the first 25 minutes tells you something.
It tells you that the US puts nations under siege for decades for committing the crime of self-determination, then lets in with absolutely no obstacles all of the economically destroyed and desperate, the extremely right wing, and the participants in CIA-financed death squads who flee, then uses them as a voting block (and a resource) to support the continuation and escalation of those sieges.
edit: immigrants commit less crime in the US than natives. Their children commit more crime, because they rise to the level of natives at their socioeconomic bracket.
Sure most kids can look at naked people and not be too affected, we all have the same parts. But beyond that, a lot of really harmful behavior is depicted in some porn and kids are not really mature enough to understand that in real healthy relationships people don't actually have sex like that.
Both porn and social media can be addictive and unhealthy if they become a substitute for interacting with real people. And this also happens with adults not just kids.
and movies, and kids shows, and in fast food ads and in sitcoms and in comics and even in some churches, even in children's books and school books, and famously in Disney movies
I am sometimes wondering if the whole "shielding" can be counterproductive. If you look at perpetrators and victims backstories it was either absolute lack of parenting (nobody to talk to) or it was households where everything was taboo. Eg. "hardcore Christians" and such.
And I worry that the whole "everything is taboo" might turn out badly.
Sure, I totally wished it was like "shield till they are 16/18/21" and then it will all be fine, but then we will end up with 16/18/21 year olds who will lose all hope when they first come across anything that might make them uncomfortable or in general cannot deal with.
I also dislike the notion of other people deciding how to love each other. Sounds scary. But I really would wonder if children who cannot judge stuff end up watching some BDSM and suddenly think it's normal to be violent. Like even relatively young children witness or are involved in fights in kindergarten. Doesn't mean they'll end up having issues with violence.
Different story if they learn it's the only way to get respect. But I really don't think you can equate that with a child coming across porn or non vanilla porn.
It feels like the same story as "ego shooters will make everyone think it's okay to shoot people". Pretty sure that a big part of people here played ego shooters.
On top of that I think creating the mindset that sex is something bad, to maybe be ashamed of, etc. is a good thing. I really do think that makes people not speak out when something is wrong. It creates that whole taboo. We don't have that with other crimes that we allow children to witness in media. Theft, violence, etc.
No I don't think children should watch pornography. However the whole "you cannot even speak about sex" and it's all way worse than weapons seems to feed the "bad porn" to some degree.
I, for one, would have started with legal threats and financial penalties long ago. But it just won't happen. So I'm fine with technical solutions.
Facebook is able to sell you ads based on your favorite shoe lace colour. They ban terrorists, bots, porn and people named "Mark Zuckerberg" all the time. Noone can claim it's too hard for them to ban minors under 13.
[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/page.php
“Does the child pay for internet access?”
“No, but they have a device that can access the internet!”
“Oh, so the child bought the device and paid the bill?”
“No, the parents do!”
“Ah, so would you say it’s the parent’s responsibility to monitor their children’s internet usage since they gave them a network-connected device?”
“You obviously don’t want to protect kids!”
Look, I do want to protect kids. I really do, but I also am sick and tired of bad actors using “BuT tHe ChIlDrEn” to recruit idiots and -phobes in a quest to make the entire planet and all of its spaces magically safe for children of all ages - at the expense of the superior number of adults who need our own spaces devoid of kids for community, for socialization, for being our full, human selves.
The internet already has an age gate, and it’s called “the adults paying the damn bills”. Those adults are responsible for making internet access safe for kids, not the entire digital planet dropping what it’s doing to make every single private space safe for kids to access without parental supervision. Bring back curated services like Prodigy and Compuserve, or just don’t give kids internet access until they’re ready for it.
Most of humanity grew up just fine without regular internet access as children, and there’s no reason whatsoever we have to foist net-connected terminals onto kids of any age. That’s parental choice, and I refuse to be punished because of someone else’s bad parenting.
My kids were all exposed to some relatively extreme stuff long before they had a network connected device (starting around 1st grade). This is because other kids at school had network connected devices, and some of those kids show other kids stuff for shock value.
In a more extreme instance, the child did pay for internet access; they got an old phone from a friend and paid cash for a sim card.
How ironic. Age-gating is immoral, but pay-gating is fine.
In the process I learned about computers and eventually got a modem to access BBSes. It was exhilarating! I would have spent any amount of effort and time to access it.
I basically attribute my entire career to accessing stuff the puritans would have tried to prevent me from accessing.
Also, almost all of the porn I have came from private trackers.
I very much doubt they will be concerned with any of these rules. Things will just move more underground if that happens. And the more underground you go, the more unsavory stuff you might find.
But we all know this isn't actually about protecting children.
In a way, I hope that it ends up being a good thing because the whole clearnet should probably be nuked from orbit.
Us nerds can come up with something better. Federated, encrypted, anonymous and unblockable. It's just the spam problem that is the hard thing to solve. Maybe reputation with proof of work could work.
I'll happily leave the normies to their milquetoast, corporate, manipulated existence.
And eventually illegal. That's what we see already.
And if it's not technically illegal then Google, Apple and OpenAI will censor it. Again, we see that already. On YouTube you cannot even talk about important topics such as suicide.
It's also coordinated. As much as I dislike Infowars, the fact that private institutions killed it at the same time is just scary.
Just like it's scary that we now have ethics taught by private entities. Be it what you can search or what ChatGPT or Gemini think.
It feels like a lot of these are strongly locked in place, which if you look at history is extremely bad. Only now private institutions have more power and control than any king ever had.
And all of that is if you don't consider the pockets full of money.
There are a few situations where I can see verification is necessary; number #1 is in regards to online transactions involving money from a bank account. But the whole "show your age to watch pr0n" - that is just rubbish nonsense. Same with "people of age 14 are too young to use anti-social media". Now, I think people should quit wasting their time with facebook and so forth anyway, but I consistently reject these attempts to restrict freedom by state authorities acting as lobbyists for control-freaks, dictators or over-eager corporations. The internet could not have gotten big with those restrictions in the first place - so let's remove all of those without mercy.
Every time someone says "think of the children", just remember that nobody is motivated by protecting children from their parents; it's all to protect parents from their children. Always has been.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/william-gillis-the-f...
And, on a larger scale, to keep us all infantilized indefinitely.
The long term consequence are so dumb and obvious that all I can say is "good luck."
it’s a cue not a threat, get back into p2p computing
No we didn't. That was 2023, and it went into effect in multiple phases, the last of which I believe was July 25th this year.
Also, I can't help but wonder what young people now will think of these laws years later, as adults. In the UK, the OSA tries to prevent 17 year olds from watching porn, even though the age of consent here is 16. How will they remember contradictions like that?
This is the result of social media companies optimising their feeds for monetisation.
Start a local one and give some support to one of the global ones.