Wouldn't it be great if we could just legislate fixes for everything? /s
This seems to be a result of what people call the uniparty system, but that's not really an accurate term:
This actually embodies what the establishment on both sides of the aisle want: CONTROL
They want this for many different reasons: they have an unbridled lust for power, or perhaps they are willing to burn down fair elections for the good of all mankind, but actually let's be more generous!!
Most likely because they are afraid, unjustly or not:
* of real terrorists that they think, sometimes correctly, are using E2EE
* of children's immature minds having neural pathways being changed by things they're not quite ready for, or perhaps becoming addicted to the very real and powerful nature of porn)
* or, you know, whatever! Maybe they're parents and want to protect their kids and everyone else's kids.
Really, why doesn't actually matter too much.
The fact is that they just don't understand the technology and the FUNDAMENTAL TRADE-OFF BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND FREEDOM, that tension between privacy/human rights/dignity and technological "bad things" that are always in the news.
They get told one simple thing by lobbyists or even well-meaning constituents, and then they form their worldview around it. And THEN they write legislation (or, more likely, get handed ready-made legislation by lobbyists with an axe to grind)
We, the knowledgeable in this area (regardless of our party persuasion -- I'll work on my people, you work on yours!) should start to educate our non-technical legislators. We have to be the trusted voice of reason when it comes to tech, because they're hearing a lot of things from a lot of different voices.
How? By getting involved. Get involved at the LOCAL level, because THOSE people are the ones that serve as the feedramp for national or international politics. After 20 years, your education might percolate upwards to the people who are actually writing new laws. You don't need to be a "crazy" sounding activist or conspiracy theorist: in fact, that works against you (usually). Just be an adult, try to understand what they're trying to accomplish, and explain how they can accomplish it or that it can't be done that way for specific and reasonable reasons.
These are all just my opinions as I see increasing amounts of this sort of legislation being pushed by Meta and other actors. This comment also has a very US-centric bias, so please correct me if you're in another country where things work differently.
Just put the age verification in the browser already.
Then introduce some new headers the browser sends to servers with some proof that the user was verified and the browser would need a response (like CORS) for it to work.
What about services for AI agents? I don't mean services where the agents use a human's account, but one where they use a permissionless or a dedicated account that they self-registered. By politician grade logic, I guess it won't be long before AI agents are mandated to have a separate annual registration, permit, and fee, not that we should agree to any of it.
Yep, it'll either be connected through your own internet passport, or it'll be connected through a separate permit which is tied to your own passport.
In the end the monopolies will be the big winners.
I'm sure the perspective is something like: If we don't do this, the web just gets flooded with bots and nobody ever knows if they're speaking to a human or not. How do you trust reviews, social media posts, advertiser statistics, and so on?
The issue with this approach, though, is that there's such a large blackmarket for stolen identities that all of the actors who already do this sort of activity will be able to continue doing it anyway.
Doesn't really seem like there are any good solutions to be found. Every solution involves some loss of freedoms.
That sounds like a reasonable aim. Online services should be responsible for implementing age verification checks on content that children shouldn't be accessing, just like vendors of alcohol and nicotine products are responsible for age verification.
The EFF likes to frame everything that might even slightly rein in online service providers as being a terrible assault on online freedom and therefore, in their view, shouldn't be done. But I don't see them coming up with any better solutions. Just endless complaints, while soliciting donations to keep generating these endless complaints.
Oh for goodness’ sake, can’t the government (federal or states) create a service that will simply give out a token when someone has passed the age they want (eg 18), and provably goes through a multipart mixer, or just give you a zero-knowledge proof on the device of your choice, anytime you need?
On a related note, if they will require a specific kind of ID to vote, can’t they just make sure everyone can receive that ID?
Of course they can. They don’t want to. And they pretend like they don’t know how to. What this government is lacking, is a distribution system.
To be fair, they will need digital IDs or NFC chips in IDs since deepfakes can now fake the physical IDs next to your face in real time.
> The term was coined by Timothy C. May in 1988. May referred to "child pornographers, terrorists, drug dealers, etc.".[1] May used the phrase to express disdain for what he perceived as "think of the children" argumentation by government officials and others seeking to justify limiting the civilian use of cryptography tools.
> The phrase is a play on Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Digital rights activist Cory Doctorow frequently cites "software pirates, organized crime, child pornographers, and terrorists".[2][3] Other sources use slightly different descriptions, but generally refer to similar activities.
So, the mafia now reveals its evil face. It wants to censor young people's
way to access information, without conforming to an "age check". This is the
first step, the next is to require of this of everyone else.
This is the biggest attack on personal freedom since decades. It is time to
crush those lobbyists that push for this.
By the way, even ignoring the propaganda by the lobbyists here, at which point
did the "discussion" suddenly become to deny young people access to information?
Because this is implied here. Some people were underage when wikipdia first emerged.
The age sniffing here tries to undermine and revert all of that.
I like to look back in history for parallels. In 1912 the USA required that all radio transmitters be licensed. There were classifications established for commercial and amateur stations. So at that time Feds understood the power of giving citizens the ability to communicate with the masses.
Fast forward to the 1990s and politicians were clueless about what the internet was doing or would do in future. So what is the correct response when every citizen has the power to, using the archaic term, "broadcast" to the world.
The genie is out of the bottle and needs to be managed for the common good, which is always going to piss off some individuals. It's going to be interesting watching nation states fight over how best to do this.
I just listened to a radio program on my local NPR station about the topic of kids and social media. From what was presented, the research shows (longitudinal study) that there is very little evidence of social media impacting mental health--which is shocking because a majority of adults think there is a connection and the politicians are pushing that narrative. I have not personally vetted the research. Has anyone else?
The research is quite confusing. This is because the strongest version of the argument is not "your child uses social media, and that makes them depressed". The strongest version is more like "when a society mass adopts social media, this irrevocably alters the culture in ways that causes massive changes in mental health, most prominently among young girls, including those exposed to the culture who don't even use social media."
This means you get a weird effect where experimental studies of high quality - which are usually the best evidence, are expected by the strong argument to show zero effect.
Correlational studies usually show either a weak effect (stronger in young girls) or no effect (it's extremely rare to see a study showing a positive correlational effect, though).
But even then it's very tricky, as those studies can't exactly be replicated, and we don't know whether changes will actually reverse the cultural artifacts
There's quite a lot of statistics saying currently teens struggle with mental health even more than is historically normal for teenagers. [1, 2] Young people are also spending less time with friends, drinking less, and having less sex than ever before.
Obviously it's difficult to pin a 20-year trend on a single cause. But most parents have the sense their teens spend too much time on their phones; and with social media use as common as it is, almost every kid who commits suicide will have recently used social media. But it's not possible to prove causality in a way that will silence all objections.
I suspect it's particularly easy to convince politicians that social media is bad for mental health because of their lived experience. Consider the experience of being a professional politician on Twitter.
But it's not just teenagers, it's also adults who are harmed by overexposure to algorithmically presented content. Obvs we can't restrict adults from legal content but we can legislate against algorythmic content.
The NPR bit sounds like what I'd imagine I could expect from people who are very good at pushing junk food -they've got good science behind flavoring and light addiction (like you don't get withdrawals from not eating doritoes) and the same with social media. they have very good science behind getting people to spend more and more time viewing their content not matter what. So I take that bit on NPR with a grain of salt. In my experience, NPR often presents studies based on small samples for whatever reason. Maybe to go against the grain, maybe to get people to think, who knows...
Hmmmm that's odd, because everybody I know who has worked (or works) at a major social network (or two or three), including me, thinks it is horrible for mental health of everybody involved.
I'd be very curious what kind of "research" NPR is talking about, and who funded it, because it flies in the face of what all of us at these companies have seen.
Jonathan Haidt's book isn't taken seriously in academia. He also believes that social media turns kids transgender, and that may be part the reason that he's aggressively lobbying for bans enforced with mandatory age verification.
Both claims are probably true in the sense that social media is the main way that kids get exposed to broader society these days but not in the way that forcing kids off of social media will mean that they are no longer affected by the root causes.
Tbh I must admit that while I observe my children, any message on social media (especially Whatsapp) attracts so much attention, they are unable to continue with their normal chores. On the other hand I remember myself procrastinating while watching the TV in their age, which no longer happens as we have no TV. The difference is that anything watched on TV was public, you would need to eject your parents from home somehow, now you can just take your private tv to the other room, and watch horrible things.
This procrastination is why my children have 30mins + 1h bonus, if they do their chores, of the phone limit every day. This is done via family link. There is an exemption to music on Spotify, however recently I noticed they are watching (not listening) to podcasts on Spotify too.
But still this is managed by me on our local ecosystem. It's not government thing. That's super creepy when government says (read in your mind or aloud with a sleazy guy's whisper)
"hey, your kids are unsafe, better allow me read all their and yours communication. Ah and please give me your id so I can protect your children more"
I have not researched this, but I see some 4 to 10 year olds in the family being on the phone every time I see them. Usually they stream "brainrot" on youtube on the tablet while they play roblox on the phone. From time to time there are ads.
In school they still perform ok for what is required there today, but from what happens when you say "oh, wifi doesn't work today in our place" I would argue they behave like addicts... It might be a fun addiction insofar as mental problems are usually not the cause but possibly the result if this runs for years on end.
My pet theory is that these kids will graduate to online-gambling around 12-14 because that's exactly the kind of gameplay they prefer on roblox currently. Even when I was 16 there was a noticable share of classmates gambling online - and this was pre-facebook.
Probably the best way forward would be to make KYC mandatory for large, data-selling public fora like we do with banks. Noone complains there and noone is forced to use platforms.
If you don't want to do KYC (such as on hn or a model train forum) you are liable for any criminal activity you enable (such as pedophiles using your private messages or whatever...).
I haven't vetted the research, but have heard plenty of personal accounts from people I know, and I see it in my own kids -- wrestling with social media addiction is a real thing. We have parental controls on but it's a source of contention.
But social media is already non-anonymous (twitter used to be anonymous but those days are long gone) so I don't have any problems with age checks there -- that's very different than requiring age verification to access the internet or the WWW generally.
If you want to stop this instance of "think of the children", build a working and cheap alternative that respects privacy. It is technically possible, so if you feel as strongly about it as your words suggest, do it. Once it's ready, spread awareness through old-media, new-media, politicians, everything and every means.
Isn't knowing if someone is above or below a certain age already privacy invasive if one chooses they don't want to share that? At least under GDPR age is protected as an indirect identifier.
Dear goverments, if you care about KIDS, provide them a separete internet outside of ICANN with mandatory ID. Let the rest of the people create an anonymous, adult internet with no ID's.
The ongoing refusal for parents to parent necessitates a shift in their legal liabilities.
Giving kids access to social media should have the same criminal penalties as giving them heroin. We have to direct the monopoly on violence against parent who neglect their responsibility. We cannot expect parents to resume their obligations without shifting the incentive landscape to make distribution and access to social media as painful as possible. If parents won't parent, we must force their hand.
82 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 54.1 ms ] threadThis seems to be a result of what people call the uniparty system, but that's not really an accurate term:
This actually embodies what the establishment on both sides of the aisle want: CONTROL
They want this for many different reasons: they have an unbridled lust for power, or perhaps they are willing to burn down fair elections for the good of all mankind, but actually let's be more generous!!
Most likely because they are afraid, unjustly or not:
* of real terrorists that they think, sometimes correctly, are using E2EE
* of children's immature minds having neural pathways being changed by things they're not quite ready for, or perhaps becoming addicted to the very real and powerful nature of porn)
* or, you know, whatever! Maybe they're parents and want to protect their kids and everyone else's kids.
Really, why doesn't actually matter too much.
The fact is that they just don't understand the technology and the FUNDAMENTAL TRADE-OFF BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND FREEDOM, that tension between privacy/human rights/dignity and technological "bad things" that are always in the news.
They get told one simple thing by lobbyists or even well-meaning constituents, and then they form their worldview around it. And THEN they write legislation (or, more likely, get handed ready-made legislation by lobbyists with an axe to grind)
We, the knowledgeable in this area (regardless of our party persuasion -- I'll work on my people, you work on yours!) should start to educate our non-technical legislators. We have to be the trusted voice of reason when it comes to tech, because they're hearing a lot of things from a lot of different voices.
How? By getting involved. Get involved at the LOCAL level, because THOSE people are the ones that serve as the feedramp for national or international politics. After 20 years, your education might percolate upwards to the people who are actually writing new laws. You don't need to be a "crazy" sounding activist or conspiracy theorist: in fact, that works against you (usually). Just be an adult, try to understand what they're trying to accomplish, and explain how they can accomplish it or that it can't be done that way for specific and reasonable reasons.
These are all just my opinions as I see increasing amounts of this sort of legislation being pushed by Meta and other actors. This comment also has a very US-centric bias, so please correct me if you're in another country where things work differently.
It gives the adults the option to be apathetic. In reality, anyone who is a kid now will never know any better.
It just means we're the last generations that had the luxury of a world that remembered what privacy was.
Then introduce some new headers the browser sends to servers with some proof that the user was verified and the browser would need a response (like CORS) for it to work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48711871
In the end the monopolies will be the big winners.
I'm sure the perspective is something like: If we don't do this, the web just gets flooded with bots and nobody ever knows if they're speaking to a human or not. How do you trust reviews, social media posts, advertiser statistics, and so on?
The issue with this approach, though, is that there's such a large blackmarket for stolen identities that all of the actors who already do this sort of activity will be able to continue doing it anyway.
Doesn't really seem like there are any good solutions to be found. Every solution involves some loss of freedoms.
The EFF likes to frame everything that might even slightly rein in online service providers as being a terrible assault on online freedom and therefore, in their view, shouldn't be done. But I don't see them coming up with any better solutions. Just endless complaints, while soliciting donations to keep generating these endless complaints.
btw, what have governments done in the past 2 decades to improve children's mental health?
On a related note, if they will require a specific kind of ID to vote, can’t they just make sure everyone can receive that ID?
Of course they can. They don’t want to. And they pretend like they don’t know how to. What this government is lacking, is a distribution system.
To be fair, they will need digital IDs or NFC chips in IDs since deepfakes can now fake the physical IDs next to your face in real time.
[0] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/eu-age-verific...
[1] https://proton.me/blog/eu-age-verification-app-hacked
> The term was coined by Timothy C. May in 1988. May referred to "child pornographers, terrorists, drug dealers, etc.".[1] May used the phrase to express disdain for what he perceived as "think of the children" argumentation by government officials and others seeking to justify limiting the civilian use of cryptography tools.
> The phrase is a play on Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Digital rights activist Cory Doctorow frequently cites "software pirates, organized crime, child pornographers, and terrorists".[2][3] Other sources use slightly different descriptions, but generally refer to similar activities.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
This is the biggest attack on personal freedom since decades. It is time to crush those lobbyists that push for this.
By the way, even ignoring the propaganda by the lobbyists here, at which point did the "discussion" suddenly become to deny young people access to information? Because this is implied here. Some people were underage when wikipdia first emerged. The age sniffing here tries to undermine and revert all of that.
Fast forward to the 1990s and politicians were clueless about what the internet was doing or would do in future. So what is the correct response when every citizen has the power to, using the archaic term, "broadcast" to the world.
The genie is out of the bottle and needs to be managed for the common good, which is always going to piss off some individuals. It's going to be interesting watching nation states fight over how best to do this.
Now it's "present your personal info when demanded or else".
The research is quite confusing. This is because the strongest version of the argument is not "your child uses social media, and that makes them depressed". The strongest version is more like "when a society mass adopts social media, this irrevocably alters the culture in ways that causes massive changes in mental health, most prominently among young girls, including those exposed to the culture who don't even use social media."
This means you get a weird effect where experimental studies of high quality - which are usually the best evidence, are expected by the strong argument to show zero effect.
Correlational studies usually show either a weak effect (stronger in young girls) or no effect (it's extremely rare to see a study showing a positive correlational effect, though).
And where you get the most juice is looking at population level introduction of social media studies like those discussed here: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
But even then it's very tricky, as those studies can't exactly be replicated, and we don't know whether changes will actually reverse the cultural artifacts
Obviously it's difficult to pin a 20-year trend on a single cause. But most parents have the sense their teens spend too much time on their phones; and with social media use as common as it is, almost every kid who commits suicide will have recently used social media. But it's not possible to prove causality in a way that will silence all objections.
I suspect it's particularly easy to convince politicians that social media is bad for mental health because of their lived experience. Consider the experience of being a professional politician on Twitter.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/publications... [2] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/child-adolescent-and-yo...
The NPR bit sounds like what I'd imagine I could expect from people who are very good at pushing junk food -they've got good science behind flavoring and light addiction (like you don't get withdrawals from not eating doritoes) and the same with social media. they have very good science behind getting people to spend more and more time viewing their content not matter what. So I take that bit on NPR with a grain of salt. In my experience, NPR often presents studies based on small samples for whatever reason. Maybe to go against the grain, maybe to get people to think, who knows...
I'd be very curious what kind of "research" NPR is talking about, and who funded it, because it flies in the face of what all of us at these companies have seen.
However, there are publicists like Jonathan Haidt who have observed the link between kids mental health and use of social media. (among other things) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxious_Generation
This procrastination is why my children have 30mins + 1h bonus, if they do their chores, of the phone limit every day. This is done via family link. There is an exemption to music on Spotify, however recently I noticed they are watching (not listening) to podcasts on Spotify too.
But still this is managed by me on our local ecosystem. It's not government thing. That's super creepy when government says (read in your mind or aloud with a sleazy guy's whisper)
In school they still perform ok for what is required there today, but from what happens when you say "oh, wifi doesn't work today in our place" I would argue they behave like addicts... It might be a fun addiction insofar as mental problems are usually not the cause but possibly the result if this runs for years on end.
My pet theory is that these kids will graduate to online-gambling around 12-14 because that's exactly the kind of gameplay they prefer on roblox currently. Even when I was 16 there was a noticable share of classmates gambling online - and this was pre-facebook.
Probably the best way forward would be to make KYC mandatory for large, data-selling public fora like we do with banks. Noone complains there and noone is forced to use platforms.
If you don't want to do KYC (such as on hn or a model train forum) you are liable for any criminal activity you enable (such as pedophiles using your private messages or whatever...).
But social media is already non-anonymous (twitter used to be anonymous but those days are long gone) so I don't have any problems with age checks there -- that's very different than requiring age verification to access the internet or the WWW generally.
I’ve already stated who I am when I paid.
Giving kids access to social media should have the same criminal penalties as giving them heroin. We have to direct the monopoly on violence against parent who neglect their responsibility. We cannot expect parents to resume their obligations without shifting the incentive landscape to make distribution and access to social media as painful as possible. If parents won't parent, we must force their hand.