10 ms·

Anybody else think it is weird that suddenly all Western countries suddenly want to lockdown the internet to "protect the children"? There is surely an internat

by bArray 3mo ago

Anybody else think it is weird that suddenly all Western countries suddenly want to lockdown the internet to "protect the children"? There is surely an international special interest group lobbying for this?

HDBaseT 3mo ago
Oh jeez, I wonder who on Earth could be behind this mass push for surveillance?
- Hnrobert42 3mo ago
  That's what GP is asking, except without the unhelpful sarcasm.
jeroenhd 3mo ago
Facebook has been documented for sponsoring these bills in the USA. But we also have years of research about how social media and other internet phenomena are ruining kids' lives. I don't disagree with the principle of a lot of these laws, but many implementations are too flawed to be a mistake.
- sph 3mo ago
  That Facebook story is an AI generated attempt at astroturf that has gone viral, but we shouldn’t probably continue perpetuating it. It is not Meta working across the globe because they’re too lazy to implement age verification. Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708278
  - rockskon 3mo ago
    Meta is publicly posting ads in Europe promoting age verification, so yes Meta is a part of the problem.
    - sph 3mo ago
      What does Meta get out of enacting mass surveillance of the entire Western world (not even for their personal benefit)? That they can avoid spending 6 months implementing ID checks like porn sites have done? Also can I see an example of those ads? Google isn’t surfacing anything relevant
      - Telaneo 3mo ago
        This article[1] gives some examples, but annoyingly, no relevant pictures. > Denmark’s digital affairs minister criticized Meta for an advertising campaign promoting regulations on age checks for social media in an interview with POLITICO. [1] https://www.politico.eu/article/denmark-digital-minister-slams-meta-campaign-children-social-media/ https://www.politico.eu/article/denmark-digital-minister-sla...
      - testfrequency 3mo ago
        Do you not understand who is part of the money and power circles? Think about it
      - hoppyhoppy2 3mo ago
        I don't think it's so much about the cost of doing age verification themselves, it's about who has liability for letting kids see stuff they're not supposed to have access to. Facebook would love to be able to point at operating system companies or device manufacturers and say it's their fault for letting little Timmy through the adult gate, it wasn't Facebook's mistake.
      - odyssey7 3mo ago
        Answering this point directly, not the full argument. If Meta bans young people from their platforms, young people will just go to a different platform, and then Meta loses a generation of customers. But if the age blocking affects all platforms, then the playing field is kept equal with respect to age blocking.
        sph 3mo ago
        Which other platforms? Age verification affects everyone equally. Any alternative platform that caters to young people that grows large enough will get the ban hammer, unless somehow someone manages to run a Facebook alternative out of Russia for people (kids?) to flock to. I still don’t think that is the case.
  - monegator 3mo ago
    Meta is actively sponsoring the bills in my country. They go as far as ads on TV and Radio, something that never happened before
    - _AzMoo 3mo ago
      But in Australia they're actively fighting against it. Why?
  - MSFT_Edging 3mo ago
    It's still in their interest to offload the responsibility to legislation so they're not held accountable for frying kids brains.
- munksbeer 3mo ago
  >But we also have years of research about how social media and other internet phenomena are ruining kids' lives. That's not the question. Some group is obviously pushing this agenda globally. Who?
- dormento 3mo ago
  Its so good Meta is sponsoring a bill that removes necessary accountability on their side by pushing responsibility to a third party, while at the same time getting accurate headcounts for the ad platform /s
underlipton 3mo ago
Of course. They meet in Davos every year.
- zmgsabst 3mo ago
  Also in DC, eg, at the Bilderberg meeting. Somehow the US ones always fly under the radar: Bilderberg, Council on Foreign Relations, Jackson Hole banker meetup, Bohemian Grove, etc.
laughing_man 3mo ago
I would have used the word "suspicious", but yeah.
__MatrixMan__ 3mo ago
I think it's because they're afraid of what we might ask AI to help us build.
ars 3mo ago
Why is it weird? Social media has existed for around the same amount of time for all western countries, and people have noticed the harm at around the same time everywhere. Why do you require some special interest? Ordinary people are seeing the harm and demanding help. Tech companies did themselves no favors by locking down phones and accounts to the point that it's impossible for parents to police and/or check their kids phones. So now that parents have been blocked from parenting, who else is going to do it?
- winrid 3mo ago
  It's not about the kids. It's so Facebook can prove to advertisers the views are not bots/AI.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- vlian2088 3mo ago
  >people have noticed the harm at around the same time the harm being us proles being able to communicate and organize. they don't give a fuck about kids, algorithmic feeds, or Russian/Chinese/other villains of the week disseminating propaganda to other bots in Facebook comments. they care exclusively about regaining some degree of control over the flow of information. consider this: how many people in Europe would be against the ongoing replacement migration if it was still 1999 and 95% of people were still getting news exclusively from the TV and papers, where most incidents of cultural enrichment would never ever be mentioned? and on the other end of the spectrum, consider this: would the BLM protests of 2020 have the same scale and impact if there was no medium for people to spread the video and organize? TLDR: Arab spring good, American/European spring bad.
- Amezarak 3mo ago
  I've yet to meet an ordinary person who supports any of this, though they might agree if vaguely prompted about it without detail. They certainly aren't lobbying their politicians about it. This is top down, not bottom up. > So now that parents have been blocked from parenting, who else is going to do it? I'm a parent. Nobody has been blocked from parenting by tech companies.
ghastmaster 3mo ago
Politics works that way sometimes. It could be a fad. It could be the culmination of years of the intelligentsia, political, and corporate benefactors finding this to be the right time to move forward. There has been a lot of propaganda since the mid teens targeting the social and psychological impacts of social media. It is certainly plausible that some group or the aforementioned entities had a big part of this. Regulatory capture is a real thing that makes companies or breaks companies. This is not the first time media consumption has been labeled and targeted in a negative way and it will not be the last. We as a society have to adapt to changing landscapes. We shouldn't burn books. We shouldn't ban dungeons and dragons. Video games do not make people in general homicidal. History is repeating itself. Anecdotally, I have not ran into a single person who has suggested we need to age-gate social media. It is on the politicians mind, but not the lay-person, as far as I can tell.
- SidewaysView 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - trashb 3mo ago
    who decides what are bad/problematic/unacceptable books?
    - SidewaysView 3mo ago
      Everyone who isn't a dangerous creepy loser, as a rule. We generally call that "society." Change isn't easy. Any particular individual won't necessarily agree with every change when they first see it. But justice and accountability aren't up to the individual - they're up to society. Our duty is only to be decent people and carry that progress forward.
      - account42 3mo ago
        What if we decide that you're the dangerous creepy loser? Or let's say, a witch.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
protocolture 3mo ago
Its Australia. No joke our politicians subject us to something stupid, and then travel around telling their foreign peers how amazing and genius they are for doing so. They help write the legislation for other countries. Of course they later return and have to deal with the results of their stupidity, but its already been sold.
- protocolture 3mo ago
  Just to piss off the downvoters more, here is a link https://www.afr.com/technology/australia-takes-social-media-ban-global-as-expert-warns-of-failure-20260419-p5zp2s https://www.afr.com/technology/australia-takes-social-media-...
  - bArray 3mo ago
    I don't think people should be down voting this without at least providing some context. I know Aus and NZ are quite authoritarian when it comes to this stuff - I have seen it directly for myself. I was at the Christchurch Call public engagement meeting [1] when they were planning some of these things. [1] https://www.christchurchcall.org/ https://www.christchurchcall.org/
nullbio 3mo ago
Feels more like a joint effort given the way the world is going with AI. Likely, everyone who has access to the internet will require a passport to authenticate and access all websites, including AI bots. That way, any illegitimate activity from AI bots can be traced back to individuals.
- SturgeonsLaw 3mo ago
  If there was to be a small silver lining out of all this, then a way to verify human comments would be nice. But it's not worth the privacy impacts and chilling of free speech.
  - nullbio 3mo ago
    Yeah, I have no idea what a good solution is that solves what is coming when malicious actors start flooding the web with agents at hyperscale, because that is certainly going to come. I'm really hoping smart people can figure out a good middleground before the government does something stupid. Because right now, their two cannons are either: - Ban open-weight/open-source models and self-hosted LLMs - Require internet passports to access any website and have everything recorded and monitored for signs of abuse that can be tied back to an individual and enforced in real life What does a good middle-ground look like? I can't think of one. Neither of these outcomes is good and neither of them are enforceable. You ban something for law abiding citizens and only criminals will use it, and if you restrict everything behind internet passports then the criminals will just use the millions of stolen identities they already have access to. Maybe biometrics that generate short-lived tokens that only the government can tie back to an individual? Like a "biometric session". Still though, you can kiss freedoms goodbye. It's no surprise Sam Altman started Orb so long ago, he obviously saw this one coming.
    - account42 3mo ago
      > You ban something for law abiding citizens and only criminals will use it Combine it with harsh enough punishments and few criminals will be willing to risk it. That's how we deal with other crimes that are "hard to enforce" already. And remember, the optimum amount of crime is not zero. Both because the cost of getting it to zero is too high to bear and because sometimes the morally correct thing to do is to break the rules-as-written.
kulahan 3mo ago
A lot of studies came out kinda at the same time showing how harmful it is and people aren’t coming up with alternatives. What else can you do?
- mvdwoord 3mo ago
  Well, I guess there is no other option then. Follow the science.
- wcarss 3mo ago
  Attestation of age should suffice; no one in a building somewhere needs to verify my age. If I tell you to treat me like a minor, you do it. Operating systems and browsers can work together to send this as a header. If you're a concerned parent: set your children's ages in their device accounts. Done. This alternative solves the whole problem and it's been brought up a million times, but it doesn't matter, because this isn't about protecting children or anything about ages. It's about locking down anonymity, and money for a few interests who want to be the verifiers and craft a future where they hold the keys.
  - orthoxerox 3mo ago
    > If you're a concerned parent: set your children's ages in their device accounts. And if you're a concerned government, make OS vendors support it and make parents criminally responsible for not setting it.
    - master-lincoln 3mo ago
      Aren't parents already responsible for protecting their kids well-being legally?
      - ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
        There is nuance here, especially when it comes to schools. And it certainly depends on what country/jurisdiction we're talking about, in terms of actual legal duties of parents. The school admins and teachers act in loco parentis when the child is in their custody, on their property etc. So, schools are often tasked with making difficult parentage decisions for children, and sometimes before the parents themselves can be looped in. A notable tension today exists with gender identity, and whether schools should be compelled to always share the student's secrets with parents, or if the schools have a solemn duty to try and protect children's confidentiality and safety in this regard. Another tension exists with medical care in hospitals. Once a child is admitted to the hospital, do the parents still have 100% control over life-saving treatments? Can the parents withdraw ordinary life-sustaining care? Can the hospital tell the parents when the child is "brain dead" or in a PVS, and can the parents go find a second opinion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Ann_Quinlan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Ann_Quinlan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jahi_McMath_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jahi_McMath_case
CommanderData 3mo ago
Suspicious? Maybe. Benjamin Netanyahuha repeatedly voiced concerns Israel is becoming increasingly unpopular amoung the youth because of social media. His words: “the most important purchase going on right now (Tiktok)” alleging its control could be “consequential.” [1] When kids have alternative news your pointless religious wars or fake democratic freedom wars cannot be fought. [2] [1] Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in September "We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we’re engaged. And the most important ones are on social media. And the most important purchase that is going on right now is TikTok. Number one. Number one.". Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti‑Defamation League, warned last year: “TikTok, if you will, is the 24/7 news channel of so many of our young people, and it’s like Al‑Jazeera on steroids. It’s amplifying and intensifying the antisemitism and the anti‑Zionism with no repercussions.” [2] "There’s an eighth front," he said, describing a struggle "for the hearts and minds of people, especially young people in the West, and for me especially in the United States.
IOT_Apprentice 3mo ago
Protect them from what? The known associates of trafficking associated with Maxwel & Epstein have not been fully exposed or prosecuted, instead their names are hidden. Nothing is happening. This is an attempt to force identity in all things. It should be stopped.
flipbrad 3mo ago
https://avpassociation.com/ https://avpassociation.com/ and a few key individual crusaders.
cultofmetatron 3mo ago
> There is surely an international special interest group lobbying for this? yea, you know who they are, I know who they are and we all knoww what they are tryin to hide. but anyone who spells it out will get downvoted to hell here.
- munksbeer 3mo ago
  I don't know who you're talking about. Am I missing some context here?
ExoticPearTree 3mo ago
Too many people expressing themselves on the internet with nothing that can be done against them... From a government perspective, it is a gold mine to know who's on the internet. For advertisers it is another goldmine - you can target at will without having to figure out first some demographics. An probably there are some angles I don't yet see, but the fact that this is a concentrated effort across the world make my spidey sense tingle. And who doesn't want to protect the children?
- cowboylowrez 3mo ago
  I agree with this especially as these laws specifically still allow kids to carry smartphones and use them away from parents watchful eye. There is no protection here. Get the kids off of the internet, there is nothing good for them there. Now as I've thought this through some, I could see where selected networking could be made kid friendly, you know, like a top level dns where you need to prove yourself to be underage or heavily vetted adult with id verification, and this entire tld could be made kid friendly. I don't doubt that most of today's dns infrastructure is probably not up to the job, but a very tight and heavily vetted registry for .kids for example (or maybe better as kids.<country> as laws vary) would solve all of this. Make a subset of the internet kid safe and serve the kids that. The fact that all these proposed laws still give kids general tcp/ip access at the physical level means we do conclude exactly what my parent commenter says, its not really about the kids, its about the free and unfettered flow of information that must be stopped. In the US, its getting close to illegal to disseminate information but once factual information does indeed become criminal in nature, you need to catch the perps and thus the IDs attached to packets of fact carrying information.
- odyssey7 3mo ago
  For the deep-pocked advertisers, this is a loss. Because big players have systems to fill in those information gaps, they have a moat that protects their position in the market. If the data were instead just handed over, that would weaken those moats.
LunicLynx 3mo ago
Maybe this is about time. It’s pretty clear that the internet as such is not and never has been for children. But the way it is done is weird for sure. But how do you do it in a way that it isn’t a burden on the parents or peer pressure the issue that breaks the intent? Or is your point that the internet should be used by children? If so how do you propose restricting the harmful content? From my point of view we are in the digital Middle Ages. We do not yet understand if this global connection is actually being good or bad in the long run. The only thing that starts to crystallize is that it isn’t great for children. Specifically social media, especially especially people gaining access to children on troves to spread ideology. So how to solve it. And „I don’t like the current approach“ without having a better idea is not a solution.
- lbnzuni 3mo ago
  > But how do you do it in a way that it isn’t a burden on the parents Yea wouldn’t want to have parents be involved and managing what their kids interact with. What?
- spicyusername 3mo ago
  I don't think it's a given that this can't be partly or mostly policed by parents if they were provided good tools to do so. As it is all of the parental controls on all devices, apps, and services are extremely lackluster. So I'd argue legally required, granular, parental controls and empowering parents would be a much better start to resolving this issue compared to blatant government privacy overreach.
  - like_any_other 3mo ago
    Nonsense. They've already passed so many laws giving parents easy-to-use tools to manage their kids internet access, and other laws that make unlocking internet access for children that aren't yours just as illegal as buying them alcohol. It was only after all of that failed, with no measurable effect, that our governments, reluctantly and as a last resort, proposed these privacy-destroying measures. And even then, they respected their citizens' rejection of these proposals [1]. I mean I didn't actually check that this is how it went, but with all the lecturing about "democracy" from our rulers, surely that's how they went about it, right? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48707719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48707719
patrickk 3mo ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_billion_in_nonprofit_grants_and_45/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...
- Tade0 3mo ago
  I originally read it as EVIL/UPDATE. Anyway, Meta, really? Just to have more of our data? For the absolutely pedestrian explicit purpose of providing more information to advertisers? This is why I don't buy into conspiracy theories. The truth is typically really boring and predictable - evil corporations will evily corporate. I half wish for a more exciting villain that would give people a noticeable reason to stand up against - not just annoying people with intrusive ads.
  - odyssey7 3mo ago
    Meta can figure out the information about users that helps it target ads. That’s one of their moats. Giving advertisers demographic information outright would actually weaken Meta’s moat.
drob518 3mo ago
It’s not for the kids. That’s just the excuse. In order to validate kids, they really need to identify everyone. That’s the real play.
- _AzMoo 3mo ago
  In Australia, the government has certified OAuth2 Identity Providers which act as a broker between social media sites and a provider that can verify your age, such as a bank. This allows age to be verified by a provider, with the social media provider having no access to your identity. If the social media companies chose to support this, they would be complying with the legislation. It's not the government forcing you to identify yourself.
  - asah 3mo ago
    can these banks/brokers sell the data? can these banks/brokers get hacked? I'd love to see a way for people to revoke/replace their personal info, kinda like rotating passwords or changing their names - but for street address, birthday, government ID numbers, etc. Penalties (of any scale) are insufficient to ensure absolute security.
  - norman784 3mo ago
    Are these providers private owned?
  - OkayPhysicist 3mo ago
    This gives the identity brokers full insight into what sites you are visiting. Worse yet, it consolidates the information in one, easily leaned-on place: If I provide an ID to 3 non-Australian companies, sure, those companies know who I am, but the government or other companies would need to extract that information from each one. With an OAuth scheme, all that information is in one convenient place for the surveillance freaks.
    - rolandog 3mo ago
      It should be written into law that they (the intermediary identity brokers) cannot sell or share any information with data brokers. They should be an independent organization funded by the government, but without its funding tied to yearly renewals (otherwise they would need to curry favor on a yearly manner to whomever is in power).
dev_l1x_be 3mo ago
They read the Epstein files and reacted quickly.
captainbland 3mo ago
It's like an open conspiracy but people go along with it because they perceive it will make parenting easier.
salemh 3mo ago
[dead]
notabee 3mo ago
I am really starting to think that the Very Smart People (pejorative) holding power think that they can just copy the Chinese mass surveillance and social control model without changing anything else about the economic or cultural models of the U.S. and Europe, and that's going to somehow allow us to compete with them. I'm sure there will be massive exceptions for anyone wealthy and connected, so the panopticon is just a way to whip and threaten the common folk. That's also why it probably won't work. In a way it just reeks of desperation and reaching straight for the most authoritarian approach.
account42 3mo ago
Yes but there are also a lot of politicians excitedly going "wait, you can get away with this?"
feb012025 3mo ago
They've been saying it on stage for a couple years now: https://x.com/HotSpotHotSpot/status/1996018001368563842 https://x.com/HotSpotHotSpot/status/1996018001368563842
DrLindemann 3mo ago
[dead]

by bArray 3mo ago

HDBaseT 3mo ago

Oh jeez, I wonder who on Earth could be behind this mass push for surveillance?

Hnrobert42 3mo ago
That's what GP is asking, except without the unhelpful sarcasm.

jeroenhd 3mo ago

Facebook has been documented for sponsoring these bills in the USA. But we also have years of research about how social media and other internet phenomena are ruining kids' lives. I don't disagree with the principle of a lot of these laws, but many implementations are too flawed to be a mistake.

sph 3mo ago
That Facebook story is an AI generated attempt at astroturf that has gone viral, but we shouldn’t probably continue perpetuating it. It is not Meta working across the globe because they’re too lazy to implement age verification. Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708278
- rockskon 3mo ago
  Meta is publicly posting ads in Europe promoting age verification, so yes Meta is a part of the problem.
  - sph 3mo ago
    What does Meta get out of enacting mass surveillance of the entire Western world (not even for their personal benefit)? That they can avoid spending 6 months implementing ID checks like porn sites have done? Also can I see an example of those ads? Google isn’t surfacing anything relevant
    - Telaneo 3mo ago
      This article[1] gives some examples, but annoyingly, no relevant pictures. > Denmark’s digital affairs minister criticized Meta for an advertising campaign promoting regulations on age checks for social media in an interview with POLITICO. [1] https://www.politico.eu/article/denmark-digital-minister-slams-meta-campaign-children-social-media/ https://www.politico.eu/article/denmark-digital-minister-sla...
    - testfrequency 3mo ago
      Do you not understand who is part of the money and power circles? Think about it
    - hoppyhoppy2 3mo ago
      I don't think it's so much about the cost of doing age verification themselves, it's about who has liability for letting kids see stuff they're not supposed to have access to. Facebook would love to be able to point at operating system companies or device manufacturers and say it's their fault for letting little Timmy through the adult gate, it wasn't Facebook's mistake.
    - odyssey7 3mo ago
      Answering this point directly, not the full argument. If Meta bans young people from their platforms, young people will just go to a different platform, and then Meta loses a generation of customers. But if the age blocking affects all platforms, then the playing field is kept equal with respect to age blocking.
      - sph 3mo ago
        Which other platforms? Age verification affects everyone equally. Any alternative platform that caters to young people that grows large enough will get the ban hammer, unless somehow someone manages to run a Facebook alternative out of Russia for people (kids?) to flock to. I still don’t think that is the case.
- monegator 3mo ago
  Meta is actively sponsoring the bills in my country. They go as far as ads on TV and Radio, something that never happened before
  - _AzMoo 3mo ago
    But in Australia they're actively fighting against it. Why?
- MSFT_Edging 3mo ago
  It's still in their interest to offload the responsibility to legislation so they're not held accountable for frying kids brains.
munksbeer 3mo ago
>But we also have years of research about how social media and other internet phenomena are ruining kids' lives. That's not the question. Some group is obviously pushing this agenda globally. Who?
dormento 3mo ago
Its so good Meta is sponsoring a bill that removes necessary accountability on their side by pushing responsibility to a third party, while at the same time getting accurate headcounts for the ad platform /s

underlipton 3mo ago

Of course. They meet in Davos every year.

zmgsabst 3mo ago
Also in DC, eg, at the Bilderberg meeting. Somehow the US ones always fly under the radar: Bilderberg, Council on Foreign Relations, Jackson Hole banker meetup, Bohemian Grove, etc.

laughing_man 3mo ago

I would have used the word "suspicious", but yeah.

__MatrixMan__ 3mo ago

I think it's because they're afraid of what we might ask AI to help us build.

ars 3mo ago

Why is it weird? Social media has existed for around the same amount of time for all western countries, and people have noticed the harm at around the same time everywhere. Why do you require some special interest? Ordinary people are seeing the harm and demanding help. Tech companies did themselves no favors by locking down phones and accounts to the point that it's impossible for parents to police and/or check their kids phones. So now that parents have been blocked from parenting, who else is going to do it?

winrid 3mo ago
It's not about the kids. It's so Facebook can prove to advertisers the views are not bots/AI.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
vlian2088 3mo ago
>people have noticed the harm at around the same time the harm being us proles being able to communicate and organize. they don't give a fuck about kids, algorithmic feeds, or Russian/Chinese/other villains of the week disseminating propaganda to other bots in Facebook comments. they care exclusively about regaining some degree of control over the flow of information. consider this: how many people in Europe would be against the ongoing replacement migration if it was still 1999 and 95% of people were still getting news exclusively from the TV and papers, where most incidents of cultural enrichment would never ever be mentioned? and on the other end of the spectrum, consider this: would the BLM protests of 2020 have the same scale and impact if there was no medium for people to spread the video and organize? TLDR: Arab spring good, American/European spring bad.
Amezarak 3mo ago
I've yet to meet an ordinary person who supports any of this, though they might agree if vaguely prompted about it without detail. They certainly aren't lobbying their politicians about it. This is top down, not bottom up. > So now that parents have been blocked from parenting, who else is going to do it? I'm a parent. Nobody has been blocked from parenting by tech companies.

ghastmaster 3mo ago

Politics works that way sometimes. It could be a fad. It could be the culmination of years of the intelligentsia, political, and corporate benefactors finding this to be the right time to move forward. There has been a lot of propaganda since the mid teens targeting the social and psychological impacts of social media. It is certainly plausible that some group or the aforementioned entities had a big part of this. Regulatory capture is a real thing that makes companies or breaks companies. This is not the first time media consumption has been labeled and targeted in a negative way and it will not be the last. We as a society have to adapt to changing landscapes. We shouldn't burn books. We shouldn't ban dungeons and dragons. Video games do not make people in general homicidal. History is repeating itself. Anecdotally, I have not ran into a single person who has suggested we need to age-gate social media. It is on the politicians mind, but not the lay-person, as far as I can tell.

SidewaysView 3mo ago
[flagged]
- trashb 3mo ago
  who decides what are bad/problematic/unacceptable books?
  - SidewaysView 3mo ago
    Everyone who isn't a dangerous creepy loser, as a rule. We generally call that "society." Change isn't easy. Any particular individual won't necessarily agree with every change when they first see it. But justice and accountability aren't up to the individual - they're up to society. Our duty is only to be decent people and carry that progress forward.
    - account42 3mo ago
      What if we decide that you're the dangerous creepy loser? Or let's say, a witch.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

protocolture 3mo ago

Its Australia. No joke our politicians subject us to something stupid, and then travel around telling their foreign peers how amazing and genius they are for doing so. They help write the legislation for other countries. Of course they later return and have to deal with the results of their stupidity, but its already been sold.

protocolture 3mo ago
Just to piss off the downvoters more, here is a link https://www.afr.com/technology/australia-takes-social-media-ban-global-as-expert-warns-of-failure-20260419-p5zp2s https://www.afr.com/technology/australia-takes-social-media-...
- bArray 3mo ago
  I don't think people should be down voting this without at least providing some context. I know Aus and NZ are quite authoritarian when it comes to this stuff - I have seen it directly for myself. I was at the Christchurch Call public engagement meeting [1] when they were planning some of these things. [1] https://www.christchurchcall.org/ https://www.christchurchcall.org/

nullbio 3mo ago

Feels more like a joint effort given the way the world is going with AI. Likely, everyone who has access to the internet will require a passport to authenticate and access all websites, including AI bots. That way, any illegitimate activity from AI bots can be traced back to individuals.

SturgeonsLaw 3mo ago
If there was to be a small silver lining out of all this, then a way to verify human comments would be nice. But it's not worth the privacy impacts and chilling of free speech.
- nullbio 3mo ago
  Yeah, I have no idea what a good solution is that solves what is coming when malicious actors start flooding the web with agents at hyperscale, because that is certainly going to come. I'm really hoping smart people can figure out a good middleground before the government does something stupid. Because right now, their two cannons are either: - Ban open-weight/open-source models and self-hosted LLMs - Require internet passports to access any website and have everything recorded and monitored for signs of abuse that can be tied back to an individual and enforced in real life What does a good middle-ground look like? I can't think of one. Neither of these outcomes is good and neither of them are enforceable. You ban something for law abiding citizens and only criminals will use it, and if you restrict everything behind internet passports then the criminals will just use the millions of stolen identities they already have access to. Maybe biometrics that generate short-lived tokens that only the government can tie back to an individual? Like a "biometric session". Still though, you can kiss freedoms goodbye. It's no surprise Sam Altman started Orb so long ago, he obviously saw this one coming.
  - account42 3mo ago
    > You ban something for law abiding citizens and only criminals will use it Combine it with harsh enough punishments and few criminals will be willing to risk it. That's how we deal with other crimes that are "hard to enforce" already. And remember, the optimum amount of crime is not zero. Both because the cost of getting it to zero is too high to bear and because sometimes the morally correct thing to do is to break the rules-as-written.

kulahan 3mo ago

A lot of studies came out kinda at the same time showing how harmful it is and people aren’t coming up with alternatives. What else can you do?

mvdwoord 3mo ago
Well, I guess there is no other option then. Follow the science.
wcarss 3mo ago
Attestation of age should suffice; no one in a building somewhere needs to verify my age. If I tell you to treat me like a minor, you do it. Operating systems and browsers can work together to send this as a header. If you're a concerned parent: set your children's ages in their device accounts. Done. This alternative solves the whole problem and it's been brought up a million times, but it doesn't matter, because this isn't about protecting children or anything about ages. It's about locking down anonymity, and money for a few interests who want to be the verifiers and craft a future where they hold the keys.
- orthoxerox 3mo ago
  > If you're a concerned parent: set your children's ages in their device accounts. And if you're a concerned government, make OS vendors support it and make parents criminally responsible for not setting it.
  - master-lincoln 3mo ago
    Aren't parents already responsible for protecting their kids well-being legally?
    - ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
      There is nuance here, especially when it comes to schools. And it certainly depends on what country/jurisdiction we're talking about, in terms of actual legal duties of parents. The school admins and teachers act in loco parentis when the child is in their custody, on their property etc. So, schools are often tasked with making difficult parentage decisions for children, and sometimes before the parents themselves can be looped in. A notable tension today exists with gender identity, and whether schools should be compelled to always share the student's secrets with parents, or if the schools have a solemn duty to try and protect children's confidentiality and safety in this regard. Another tension exists with medical care in hospitals. Once a child is admitted to the hospital, do the parents still have 100% control over life-saving treatments? Can the parents withdraw ordinary life-sustaining care? Can the hospital tell the parents when the child is "brain dead" or in a PVS, and can the parents go find a second opinion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Ann_Quinlan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Ann_Quinlan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jahi_McMath_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jahi_McMath_case

CommanderData 3mo ago

Suspicious? Maybe. Benjamin Netanyahuha repeatedly voiced concerns Israel is becoming increasingly unpopular amoung the youth because of social media. His words: “the most important purchase going on right now (Tiktok)” alleging its control could be “consequential.” [1] When kids have alternative news your pointless religious wars or fake democratic freedom wars cannot be fought. [2] [1] Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in September "We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we’re engaged. And the most important ones are on social media. And the most important purchase that is going on right now is TikTok. Number one. Number one.". Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti‑Defamation League, warned last year: “TikTok, if you will, is the 24/7 news channel of so many of our young people, and it’s like Al‑Jazeera on steroids. It’s amplifying and intensifying the antisemitism and the anti‑Zionism with no repercussions.” [2] "There’s an eighth front," he said, describing a struggle "for the hearts and minds of people, especially young people in the West, and for me especially in the United States.

IOT_Apprentice 3mo ago

Protect them from what? The known associates of trafficking associated with Maxwel & Epstein have not been fully exposed or prosecuted, instead their names are hidden. Nothing is happening. This is an attempt to force identity in all things. It should be stopped.

flipbrad 3mo ago

https://avpassociation.com/ https://avpassociation.com/ and a few key individual crusaders.

cultofmetatron 3mo ago

> There is surely an international special interest group lobbying for this? yea, you know who they are, I know who they are and we all knoww what they are tryin to hide. but anyone who spells it out will get downvoted to hell here.

munksbeer 3mo ago
I don't know who you're talking about. Am I missing some context here?

ExoticPearTree 3mo ago

Too many people expressing themselves on the internet with nothing that can be done against them... From a government perspective, it is a gold mine to know who's on the internet. For advertisers it is another goldmine - you can target at will without having to figure out first some demographics. An probably there are some angles I don't yet see, but the fact that this is a concentrated effort across the world make my spidey sense tingle. And who doesn't want to protect the children?

cowboylowrez 3mo ago
I agree with this especially as these laws specifically still allow kids to carry smartphones and use them away from parents watchful eye. There is no protection here. Get the kids off of the internet, there is nothing good for them there. Now as I've thought this through some, I could see where selected networking could be made kid friendly, you know, like a top level dns where you need to prove yourself to be underage or heavily vetted adult with id verification, and this entire tld could be made kid friendly. I don't doubt that most of today's dns infrastructure is probably not up to the job, but a very tight and heavily vetted registry for .kids for example (or maybe better as kids.<country> as laws vary) would solve all of this. Make a subset of the internet kid safe and serve the kids that. The fact that all these proposed laws still give kids general tcp/ip access at the physical level means we do conclude exactly what my parent commenter says, its not really about the kids, its about the free and unfettered flow of information that must be stopped. In the US, its getting close to illegal to disseminate information but once factual information does indeed become criminal in nature, you need to catch the perps and thus the IDs attached to packets of fact carrying information.
odyssey7 3mo ago
For the deep-pocked advertisers, this is a loss. Because big players have systems to fill in those information gaps, they have a moat that protects their position in the market. If the data were instead just handed over, that would weaken those moats.

LunicLynx 3mo ago

Maybe this is about time. It’s pretty clear that the internet as such is not and never has been for children. But the way it is done is weird for sure. But how do you do it in a way that it isn’t a burden on the parents or peer pressure the issue that breaks the intent? Or is your point that the internet should be used by children? If so how do you propose restricting the harmful content? From my point of view we are in the digital Middle Ages. We do not yet understand if this global connection is actually being good or bad in the long run. The only thing that starts to crystallize is that it isn’t great for children. Specifically social media, especially especially people gaining access to children on troves to spread ideology. So how to solve it. And „I don’t like the current approach“ without having a better idea is not a solution.

lbnzuni 3mo ago
> But how do you do it in a way that it isn’t a burden on the parents Yea wouldn’t want to have parents be involved and managing what their kids interact with. What?
spicyusername 3mo ago
I don't think it's a given that this can't be partly or mostly policed by parents if they were provided good tools to do so. As it is all of the parental controls on all devices, apps, and services are extremely lackluster. So I'd argue legally required, granular, parental controls and empowering parents would be a much better start to resolving this issue compared to blatant government privacy overreach.
- like_any_other 3mo ago
  Nonsense. They've already passed so many laws giving parents easy-to-use tools to manage their kids internet access, and other laws that make unlocking internet access for children that aren't yours just as illegal as buying them alcohol. It was only after all of that failed, with no measurable effect, that our governments, reluctantly and as a last resort, proposed these privacy-destroying measures. And even then, they respected their citizens' rejection of these proposals [1]. I mean I didn't actually check that this is how it went, but with all the lecturing about "democracy" from our rulers, surely that's how they went about it, right? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48707719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48707719

patrickk 3mo ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_billion_in_nonprofit_grants_and_45/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...

Tade0 3mo ago
I originally read it as EVIL/UPDATE. Anyway, Meta, really? Just to have more of our data? For the absolutely pedestrian explicit purpose of providing more information to advertisers? This is why I don't buy into conspiracy theories. The truth is typically really boring and predictable - evil corporations will evily corporate. I half wish for a more exciting villain that would give people a noticeable reason to stand up against - not just annoying people with intrusive ads.
- odyssey7 3mo ago
  Meta can figure out the information about users that helps it target ads. That’s one of their moats. Giving advertisers demographic information outright would actually weaken Meta’s moat.

drob518 3mo ago

It’s not for the kids. That’s just the excuse. In order to validate kids, they really need to identify everyone. That’s the real play.

_AzMoo 3mo ago
In Australia, the government has certified OAuth2 Identity Providers which act as a broker between social media sites and a provider that can verify your age, such as a bank. This allows age to be verified by a provider, with the social media provider having no access to your identity. If the social media companies chose to support this, they would be complying with the legislation. It's not the government forcing you to identify yourself.
- asah 3mo ago
  can these banks/brokers sell the data? can these banks/brokers get hacked? I'd love to see a way for people to revoke/replace their personal info, kinda like rotating passwords or changing their names - but for street address, birthday, government ID numbers, etc. Penalties (of any scale) are insufficient to ensure absolute security.
- norman784 3mo ago
  Are these providers private owned?
- OkayPhysicist 3mo ago
  This gives the identity brokers full insight into what sites you are visiting. Worse yet, it consolidates the information in one, easily leaned-on place: If I provide an ID to 3 non-Australian companies, sure, those companies know who I am, but the government or other companies would need to extract that information from each one. With an OAuth scheme, all that information is in one convenient place for the surveillance freaks.
  - rolandog 3mo ago
    It should be written into law that they (the intermediary identity brokers) cannot sell or share any information with data brokers. They should be an independent organization funded by the government, but without its funding tied to yearly renewals (otherwise they would need to curry favor on a yearly manner to whomever is in power).

dev_l1x_be 3mo ago

They read the Epstein files and reacted quickly.

captainbland 3mo ago

It's like an open conspiracy but people go along with it because they perceive it will make parenting easier.

salemh 3mo ago

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notabee 3mo ago

I am really starting to think that the Very Smart People (pejorative) holding power think that they can just copy the Chinese mass surveillance and social control model without changing anything else about the economic or cultural models of the U.S. and Europe, and that's going to somehow allow us to compete with them. I'm sure there will be massive exceptions for anyone wealthy and connected, so the panopticon is just a way to whip and threaten the common folk. That's also why it probably won't work. In a way it just reeks of desperation and reaching straight for the most authoritarian approach.

account42 3mo ago

Yes but there are also a lot of politicians excitedly going "wait, you can get away with this?"

feb012025 3mo ago

They've been saying it on stage for a couple years now: https://x.com/HotSpotHotSpot/status/1996018001368563842 https://x.com/HotSpotHotSpot/status/1996018001368563842

DrLindemann 3mo ago

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