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Then donate millions in campaign contributions to ensure they actually care at all what you think!

Isn't it interesting how they're doing it in every anglo country simultaneously? How does that work?

We do not need to lose our rights to privacy because people want to control what their kids do and see. (I'm not even convinced this is true - this is likely just a convenient lie told by the politicians, because I don't see parents clamoring for this.)

We're below replacement rate, so it's not like most people are even having kids, anyway. Yet we have to give up our freedom for other people to raise little Christian tots (or whatever the motivation for this is billed as)?

I grew up in a Deep South Protestant household. Having access to the unfiltered internet got me interested in STEM. Bumping into occasional shock sites and porn as a preteen did not turn me into a satanist cannibal.

Keeping "Kids Safe" is a LIE.

This is about putting collars on every US citizen.

They'll filter you into groups.

They'll control what loans and jobs you can get.

They'll use this information to blackmail you should you ever run for office or gain wealth or power.

This is a threat to democracy and personal liberty.

Child safety is a LIE.

and have your children on the phone telling them to not let companies store and leak their information before they are old enough to consent to this.

If they are asking you to leave a message, have your kids leave the message.

sometimes it's true. We ruined the brains of a whole generation of people. Should we stop doing that? If so, how?

It can't, because the government doesn't know shit about technology. Someone who knows tech, is close to the government, and isn't corrupt, would have to propose it and explain what this zorro-proof knowy doohicky is. The government knows ID checks because you get checked at bars.

Banning smart devices from schools seems the way forward.

What kids get to see at home is up to the parents.

same thing most parents did, and here we are... don't expect miracles from massively underpaid profession which should be the opposite, literally the way to prepare the future of the nation, or fuck it up

You mean targeting with ads, sucking into feeds, making kids harm themselves and making money on this with lip service about corporate responsibility?

Sounds about right.

EDIT: about half to two thirds of the responders didn't catch "I'm not a fan of these proposed solutions." I am not saying I like these solutions. I am trying to explain why they have support among the general public. Many of these responses are the usual "shoot the messenger" response you get online when you point out what the "other side" thinks and why they think it even if you don't necessarily agree. On this issue I think there's a need, but I have yet to see a good proposal to address it.

Once again, the response in places like this pretends everyone is an upper middle class or above tech-savvy nerd.

I'm not a fan of these proposed solutions, which do invade privacy and remove freedom, but the problems are real. These solutions are being pushed because our industry is doing nothing to police itself or provide parents with the tools they need.

In many cases we are doing less than nothing, because the profit motive is to prevent parents from having this control. "Social" media, gambling-adjacent gaming, and other addictionware, which is a huge profit center for our industry, wants to addict kids early. Gotta get those cigarettes into their hands, which means preventing parents from stopping it.

Right now if you are not a tech-savvy parent your choices are: (1) deny children access to devices or severely limit that access, or (2) allow your kids to be raised by super-addictive infinite scroll brain rot feeds, brainwashed by propaganda and influencer bullshit, and placed on an on-ramp to future gambling addiction via mobile games with engineered "compulsion loops."

Now imagine you are a non-tech-savvy household with two parents who work. You can't really limit access since you can't supervise it enough, so your choice is now binary: no access, kids raised by brain rot and propaganda. Pick one. You have no control, no ability to whitelist, because not only do you not have time to deal with this but the tools often cost money and are imperfect and ineffective.

Then you catch your 11 year old son watching extreme fetish porn that he lacks the maturity to contextualize, or hear him spouting off Nazi ideology or talking about how he's an "alpha male" and women should be his slaves. Or your daughter becomes anorexic by following influencers. Or you have a child who is questioning their sexual orientation or identity and is targeted by an online bullying ring. These are the commonplace examples. There's a lot of much worse shit too, like sextortion of kids. Search for "764."

That's why this push exists. It's not a conspiracy. It's because we -- our industry -- is an amoral shitshow that engineers addiction and refuses to police itself or provide parents with good tools to do so.

I'd also like to note that for the non-tech-savvy privacy is dead and has been dead for over ten years at least. If you are not tech-savvy your devices are recording everything about you and transmitting it to two dozen ad networks and data brokers.

Only nerds have privacy today and only if they invest the time to police their tech environment. If you're not a nerd there's nothing to lose. You already lost it long ago. We -- our industry -- took it away.

There's a limited amount of radio spectrum, so it has to be managed. Though technically not unlimited in the strictest sense, internet communications don't have a real limit on how many people can communicate with each other, except limits artificially created.

> It's going to be interesting watching nation states fight over how best to do this

As others have said, there is a coordinated push to drive this legislation everywhere. There is no fight in nation states. Just capitulation.

> This is the first step, the next is to require of this of everyone else.

This is the threat day one. They get both groups' information.

Next, they'll start to purge information they don't like because it has been corralled off from the rest of the internet.

If they get lucky to trap a politician or billionaire in their net (and they will), they'll use that information to control how they vote or fund interests.

Next, they'll start to clamp down of people in the group they don't like. They'll lose jobs, banking, get extra audits, and have friction applied to their lives and chances of success.

Over time the fundamentalist group embraces government monitoring and control. The youth are brought up on it. The oligarchy use it to remove their enemies.

Within two generations we're living in 1984.

> mafia

IMO porn and drug mafia is far more likely to be lurking in reddit and here and spreading misinformation. Russian bots help here too.

Age verification makes it easier for the bad guys to identify and groom children without adults finding out. Sting operations are that much harder if you have to convince the surveillance capitalism machine that you're an actual child, not just your target.

You're distorting pretty hard about what happened there (mister random numbered throwaway account) but even if you weren't, that is not the definition of fascism.

Everything that happened during the pandemic period is an embarrassment most would like to forget. The authoritarians however remember everything and see how little friction there is against them expanding their power, especially if they can wrap it up in a threat.

All governments in the world, both sides of politics.

It's for the kids, you understand - to protect the kids.

There is no more noble purpose than to protect the kids.

Only a monster would not want to protect the kids.

Parents who want to raise healthy children.

Politicians who want to track everyone all the time.

The rare few politicians who want it to be easier to raise healthy children.

Tech CEOs who don't want to be liable for harming children's development.

Tech CEOs who want to track everyone all the time.

The rare few tech CEOs who want to improve the world (by not harming children's development) and whose business model doesn't require it or who compete with one that does (e.g. operators of edutainment websites if those even still exist).

App coders who don't want to train a neural network to check IDs themselves.

Meta has spent $2B lobbying for this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410870

Anyone who wants to centralize power: so big tech, big government, big corporations, and big dummies who think this is progress

Government

These people are around you.

Watch this "regulate 3d printers because of children" hearing: https://youtu.be/sue88CXzPcQ?t=2285

Normal people that call themselves good names like "moms for actions" drag us into this totalitarian hell.

The GOP. This is part of Project 2025. They want to outlaw porn.

> Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

https://web.archive.org/web/20241103190346/https://static.pr...

Anom caught way more E2EE terrorists than any other attack, and it wasn't even an attack on encryption.

Sounds great. What have you done?

agreed

There's a big difference here, in the US anyways, neither alcohol nor nicotine have first amendment protections. Basically all content delivered over the US does.

That's a much thornier legal issue

What content shouldn't children be accessing? Is the content a 7, 11 or 16 year old shouldn't access different between age brackets? Who makes that determination? Is this access restriction at the whole site level, or per-post? Does safe-harbor apply, or is a site-operator liable for age-inappropriate content it hosts for its clients? On S3, for example, is each object tagged with an age category, or would it have to be a totally separate S3, like GovCloud?

Nah, it should be like in California. When you set up an account you should put how old thr user is, and websites should get a header that says whether it's over 18 or not. No ID checks, just good parenting.

Aims aside, did you even read the article? This will mostly end anonymity online and require heavier policing of content.

A child might see something they shouldn't walking down the street, strolling thru the park, visiting the local zoo, or visiting an ice cream parlor. Should those places be requiring identification and hiring extra security guards to wander around making sure nobody is saying it doing anything politically objectionable?

Let's not accept creeping digital tyranny with self-assuring complacency... call or write (preferably snail mail) your congresspeople!!

I hate this analogy because it isn't true. This isn't like a clerk checking your age before you buy booze this is like a clerk taking a photocopy of your ID and a list of everything you bought and then storing those records forever every time you buy alcohol.

> vendors of alcohol and nicotine products are responsible for age verification.

You don't wind up in a database for buying alcohol.

This proposal puts your name right next to the category of porn you're into, which will be a great way to coerce all those politicians into voting for the "correct" bill. Would be a shame if they found out a state senator watched porn, so maybe they'd better vote yes on the proposal.

In time, this will be used to shape what people are "allowed" to think. Porn will gradually be purged from the internet and then go away entirely as the US becomes more fundamentalist and Christian.

Then people who are neither of those things will start to be denied jobs and loans. Politicians that don't fit the mold will stop winning.

This is about turning the US to Christianity. (Read: this is really about controlling the massses and using religious fundamentalism as a tool to do so.)

Technology is the perfect tool for control. Just as we were becoming a liberal/libertarian society and letting people live their lives how they wanted, the wrong people started using technology not as an enabler of free minds, but as an inescapable straitjacket.

You've read 1984, right?

The sensors have been widely deployed. The internet will become your Big Brother. You won't be able to buy, sell, or even move between state lines without being in the good graces of the state.

Be a good citizen and comply.

USB anal probe can be integrated the same way.

What you describe, but at the OS level, is already the law in California. We got angry about it a few months ago when it passed, do you remember?

Or we could have UBI and parents could parent their kids without corporations babysitting for them.