The internet is an essential resource for young people and adults to access information, explore community, and find themselves—both inside countries and across continents. Yet government…
If it was actually about age verification, the government could easily provide a system to verify that independently. All of these countries has some sort of unique identifier for people that can verify basic info like age. And there are zero trust architectures that can be copied to do that verification without leaving individually identifiable information to the website, and without the government knowing exactly who requested it to link to the individual on that end.
The technology already exists to do this correctly. But it’s not actually about age verification, so none of that is being done.
The EU is planning to do something along those lines, as I understand it.
But that’s completely beside the point because it’s not a good idea in the first place to prohibit young people from participating in online communities. Participating in online communities is a fun, fulfilling and mostly harmless activity that improves many young people’s mental health, creativity, communication skills, and probably has other benefits too. I wouldn’t be the person I am now if I hadn’t started doing that regularly at age 10.
We shouldn’t be talking about “actually it’s about surveillance” or thinking about less privacy-invasive ways to achieve the same goal. We should be saying “if your goal is to reduce the amount of young people on social media, or the time they spend there, then your goal is wrong”.
Participating in online communities is a fun, fulfilling and mostly harmless activity that improves many young people’s mental health, creativity, communication skills, and probably has other benefits too.
It should be, it was, but thanks to a bunch of billionaire technofeudalists it’s now infested with dark patterns, engagement algorithms running on fear and anger to drive addiction, propaganda, segmentation into unhealthy ‘echo chambers’ and whatever else they’ve cribbed from tobacco marketers and evil psychologists. There is significant scientific evidence that it is indeed harmful to children especially, but also adults.
The needful target is not keeping it away from children. It is fighting to bring down the Metas, the Xitters, the TikToks and YouTubes, ban the algorithms that they know full well are harmful to all. We need hold the companies responsible for those harms and fine them until there eyes bleed, but most importantly we need to hold the individuals in charge personally responsible, take away that ‘the company did it’ excuse. Have them rot in jail for the term of their natural lives as an example to all who would follow.
I agree with much of that, but not the things after “bring down the [list of companies]”.
I agree we need to bring them down, but not through governmental regulations and fines, but by us (the general public) building replacements for them. Like the thing we’re using here.
All that state regulation will do is make that harder because that regulation will also apply to those replacements and make sure nobody can ever operate anything that replaces them unless they have enough revenue to comply with those regulations.
That’s fair. It doesn’t have to be regulation, could be simple fines without regulation as is often done, or law specifically targeting some definition of evil algorithm.
IMO justice demands accountability for the individuals responsible. No more get out of jail free card for CEOs. Without that it’ll just spring up in another form, with it as precedent we can consider going after Oil, Pharma executives etc.
Without either there will be blood, sooner or later.
If it was actually about age verification, the government could easily provide a system to verify that independently. All of these countries has some sort of unique identifier for people that can verify basic info like age. And there are zero trust architectures that can be copied to do that verification without leaving individually identifiable information to the website, and without the government knowing exactly who requested it to link to the individual on that end.
The technology already exists to do this correctly. But it’s not actually about age verification, so none of that is being done.
The EU is planning to do something along those lines, as I understand it.
But that’s completely beside the point because it’s not a good idea in the first place to prohibit young people from participating in online communities. Participating in online communities is a fun, fulfilling and mostly harmless activity that improves many young people’s mental health, creativity, communication skills, and probably has other benefits too. I wouldn’t be the person I am now if I hadn’t started doing that regularly at age 10.
We shouldn’t be talking about “actually it’s about surveillance” or thinking about less privacy-invasive ways to achieve the same goal. We should be saying “if your goal is to reduce the amount of young people on social media, or the time they spend there, then your goal is wrong”.
It should be, it was, but thanks to a bunch of billionaire technofeudalists it’s now infested with dark patterns, engagement algorithms running on fear and anger to drive addiction, propaganda, segmentation into unhealthy ‘echo chambers’ and whatever else they’ve cribbed from tobacco marketers and evil psychologists. There is significant scientific evidence that it is indeed harmful to children especially, but also adults.
The needful target is not keeping it away from children. It is fighting to bring down the Metas, the Xitters, the TikToks and YouTubes, ban the algorithms that they know full well are harmful to all. We need hold the companies responsible for those harms and fine them until there eyes bleed, but most importantly we need to hold the individuals in charge personally responsible, take away that ‘the company did it’ excuse. Have them rot in jail for the term of their natural lives as an example to all who would follow.
I agree with much of that, but not the things after “bring down the [list of companies]”.
I agree we need to bring them down, but not through governmental regulations and fines, but by us (the general public) building replacements for them. Like the thing we’re using here.
All that state regulation will do is make that harder because that regulation will also apply to those replacements and make sure nobody can ever operate anything that replaces them unless they have enough revenue to comply with those regulations.
That’s fair. It doesn’t have to be regulation, could be simple fines without regulation as is often done, or law specifically targeting some definition of evil algorithm.
IMO justice demands accountability for the individuals responsible. No more get out of jail free card for CEOs. Without that it’ll just spring up in another form, with it as precedent we can consider going after Oil, Pharma executives etc.
Without either there will be blood, sooner or later.
Even on its face, it is identity verification, not age verification. And thats before we get conspiratorial.