The one and only method I will participate in is server operators setting a RTA header [1] for URL's that may contain adult or user-generated or user-contributed content and the clients having the option to detect that header and trigger parental controls if they are enabled by the device owner. That should suffice to protect most small children. Teens will always get around anything anyone implements as they are already doing. RTA headers are not perfect, nothing is nor ever will be but there is absolutely no tracking or leaking data involved. Governments could easily hire contractors to scan sites for the lack of that header and fine sites not participating into oblivion.
I a small server operator and a client of the internet will not participate in any other methods period, full-stop. Make simple logical and rational laws around RTA headers and I will participate. Many sites already voluntarily add this header. It is trivial to implement. Many questions and a lengthy discussion occurred here [1]. I doubt my little private and semi-private sites would be noticed but one day it may come to that at which point it's back into semi-private Tinc open source VPN meshes for my friends and I.
That's a good idea. There could be two headers, the existing RTA header that adult sites use today [1] and another static header that explicitly states there shall be no adult content.
What is adult content? I know parents who have no problem with their kids seeing porn. I know parents who give their kids a beer. I know parents who take their kids to violent movies. I used to know parents who will give their kids cigarettes. Most parents I know will disagree with their kids doing one of the above. I know songs that were played on the radio in 1960 that would not be allowed today, even though today we allow some swearing on the radio.
Then those parents can turn off their browser/client’s age protections. I think that’s actually a decent argument for the solution posed by this thread.
That's between parents and their local governments. Yes when I was a kid my mom let me watch whatever and go wherever. The parent in my example ultimately decides what a kid may or may not do which is in alignment with existing laws. If the parent is endangering their kid that is up to them and their government to sort out.
Point being, put the controls entirely into the hands of the device owner. Options can be to default to:
- Block everything by default unless header states otherwise.
- Block only sites that state they are adult.
- Do nothing. Obey the operator.
Back in the late 90s or so, there was a proposal to have sites voluntarily set an age header, so parents/employers/etc could use to block the site if they wish. People said it would never work, because adult sites had a financial incentive not to opt in to reduce their own traffic.
What, in the same way movie studios wouldn't comply with the Hayes Code, or comic book publishers wouldn't comply with the CCA, or games publishers wouldn't comply with the ESRB? The financial incentive is to police yourself, because government policing is much, much worse.
Quite true. The US corporations act like a giant global rabid dog. Fake legislation appears in the USA - lo and behold, it is copy/pasted into the EU. At the least lobbyists are getting rich right now.
At least the EU has GDPR. In the US, our personal data is collected by every app and website and company and packaged, sold and sifted through by a vast collection of private data brokers which the government already ingests.
You’d think that one could simply block sites that don’t have the age header set on child computers. This may block kids from hobbyist sites that don’t bother to set their headers as kid-friendly, but commercial sites would surely set their headers properly. Over time sending proper rating headers would become more normalized if they were in common use.
This still isn’t perfect, as it creates an incentive for legislators to criminalize improper age header settings and legislate what is considered kid-appropriate. But it’s still better than this age verification crap.
Yes, that's how parental filters already work. They use a combination of rta tags and external data to block pages. Even works with Google safe search, firewall devices, etc. The rta ecosystem is already built out and viable.
We pay money online mostly through credit cards. Credit card transactions can be reversed. If children spend money on porn, those payments are likely to be reversed. This is really bad for the ability of the porn sites to continue receiving credit card payments, and continue making money.
An age header is a trivial step that can reduce the odds of the adult site receiving payments that later get reversed. Win, win.
But if someone is willing and able to pay, then the adult industry wants the choice of whether to access content to be up to them. If government tries to regulate them, they'll engage in malicious compliance - do the minimum to not be sued, in a way that they can still reach customers.
For example Utah tried to institute age verification. The porn industry blocked all IP addresses from Utah. Business boomed for VPN companies in Utah. Everyone, including porn companies, knows that a lot of that is for porn. But if you show up with a Nevada IP address, the porn's position is, "You're in Nevada. Utah law doesn't apply." Even if the credit card has a Utah zip code.
If you live in Utah, and you're able to purchase a VPN, the porn companies want your money.
If someone is willing and able to pay, they have a source of money. If they aren't allowed to buy something, that control should be applied at the level where they get the money. If the child is using an adult's credit card, responsibility lies with the adult. If children need to have their own credit cards, the obvious point of control is the credit card itself.
But also, most porn is ad-supported, pirated or free. Directly paid content is a small fraction. So all of this is moot for porn.
What I am suggesting could address most of that. If they do not participate they get fined. The government loves to fine companies. This assumes they put enough "teeth" into a law that prevents companies from accepting fines as the cost of doing business. This would also require legislation that could block sites that operate from countries that do not cooperate with US laws. Mandatory subscriptions to BGP AS path filters, CDN block-lists which already exist, etc... People could still bypass such restrictions with a VPN but that would not apply to most small children. Sanctions and embargoes are always an option.
Exactly. If you’re hurting kids to make more money selling porn videos, straight to jail.
I’m glad there are solutions that won’t ruin the Internet. Now the uphill battle to convince our legislators (see: encryption & fundamentally technically ignorant calls for backdoors).
PICS was very complicated and attenpted to cover all possible "categories" of adult content. It was confusing, incomplete and only a handful of sites voluntarily labelled their sites with it. RTA is one simple static header that any site operator could add in seconds unless they get more complicated with it by dynamically adding it to individual videos say, on Youtube which means in that case the server application would need to send that header for any video tagged as adult.
I added PICS to my forums but it was missing many categories of adult content. I ended up just selecting everything as I could not predict what people may upload which made for a very long header.
Agreed though in my example the point would be to set the header in the case the child is logged in but for whatever reason the site does not know their age. Instead of a third party site, a header is sent with the video tagged as adult that triggers parental controls if they are enabled by the device owner.
Servers can then infer user’s ages by whether or not the client renders pages given those headers or not no? See if secondary page requests (e.g images, scripts) are made or not from a client? A bad actor could use this to glean age information from the client and see whether the person viewing the page is a small child. That should be scary
I disagree. The ability to render a page could simply mean that parental controls were not enabled on the device. Some parents have assessed the situation and trust their children to be psychologically ready for adult situations. The client could be literally any age.
Today devices do not default to accounts being child accounts. Some day this may change and may require an initial administrator password or something to that affect but this can evolve over time.
The point and overall goal should be to not signal anything to the server operator unless a credit card is being used. Everyone is whomever they claim to be as far as anyone is concerned, until payments are required which today means sharing identity and age.
In the case of RTA the only signalling taking place is a server header being transmitted to the client. The client could be anyone at any age. Nothing to explicitly leak or disclose. Server operators can guess all they desire as some do using AI based on user behavior of which they sometimes get wrong.
I disagree. The legal requirement to apply a warning label is a well known, understood and accepted process that is applied to a myriad of hazards to children and adults. As just one example businesses in some states, most notably California are compelled to add warning labels to foods and other products that could cause cancer.
That's not the best example, since the levels set for Prop 65 warnings are so low that the warnings are effectively useless; every single commercial building in CA now somehow causes cancer.
Surely we both understand the point I was making in that labels are already compelled by laws today.
Fine, cigarettes must be labelled as being a risk of causing cancer. The punishment for failing to do this is both civil and federal penalties including massive fines and federal prison time.
I never implied an internet license. Rather if a server operator a business has content that may be adult in nature they must label their site. Businesses require a license already but that is unrelated to this.
Clients could refuse to show content that does not have headers set.
On other hand servers might choose to lie. After all that is their free speech right.
So maybe you need some third party vetting list. Ofc, that one should be fully liable for any damages misclassification can cause... But someone would step up.
One possible method [1] though I am sure the network and security engineers here on HN could come up with simpler methods. Just blocking domains on the popular CDN's would kill access for most people as by default most browsers are using them for DoH DNS.
The question was about fining entities outside of the original jurisdiction, so I am not sure what you have in mind that could be done by network/security engineers here.
In terms of fines if they do not pay the fine their country is at risk of sanctions or embargoes which is probably a bit heavy handed but may incentivize their government to also enforce the rules, collect fines keeping some for themselves and passing the original fine back to the countries implementing child safety controls.
This is extremely naive and short-sighted. There is a literal example of this happening rn, and hopefully you will see why your approach isn't that good.
UK's OFCOM is currenly issuing legal threats to 4chan, for allegedly serving adult content and not willing to implement age verification. 4chan's lawyer tells them to pound sand[0], on the basis that 4chan is hosted in the US and has zero business presence in the UK, and UK is more than welcome to ban the website on their end through UK ISPs. The saga has been ongoing for a while, and the lawyer has been pretty prolific online talking about the case.
Anyway, following your approach, UK should embargo US over 4chan not willing to implement age verification as required by UK law? I plainly don't see this happening, or even being considered, ever.
This doesn't address the wider array of age-verification related problems that people want to solve, like social media where age verification is needed to police interactions between users.
I could be misunderstanding the context but to me that sounds like a moderation issue assuming we even want small children on social media in the first place. There should probably be a dedicated child-safe social media site that limits what communication can take place for small children and has severe punishments for adults pretending to be children for the purposes of grooming.
Moderation is like law enforcement, it doesn't prevent crimes from happening it just punishes the people they can catch. There exist severe punishments for the kinds of behavior I'm talking about, but unsurprisingly, this does not stop kids from being harmed and it doesn't undo it.
This isn't hypothetical, by the way. There are adults catfishing kids into producing CSAM [0], kidnapping and assaulting minors [1], [2], and in the most extreme case, there's a borderline cult of crazy young adults who do terrorize people for fun [3].
It is a constant game of whackamole by moderators/admins to keep this behavior out of online spaces where kids hang out.
I recognize that this is a "think of the children" argument, but indeed that's the point. The anonymous web was created without thinking about the children, just like how all social media was created without thinking about how it could be used to harm people. Age verification is the smallest step towards mitigating that harm.
Now I disagree very strongly with the laws proposed (and indeed, I've been writing/calling/talking with state reps about this locally, because I don't want my state's bill passed). But the technical challenge needs to address the real problems that legislators are trying to go after.
In my opinion this is getting too far into whataboutism. I am only interesting in protected the majority of children which I believe my proposal more than covers. There will always be exceptions. Today teens share porn, warez, pirated movies and music with small children in rated-G video games. I am not proposing anything for that. It is up to businesses to detect and block such things.
Point being, there will be a myriad of exceptions. I am not looking to address the exceptions. Those can be a game of whack-a-mole as they are today. I am proposing something that would prevent the vast majority of children from being exposed to the trash we today call social media and of course also porn sites.
We need a truly distributed point-to-point internet asap. Politicians going to do everything to limit free speech and free ideas in the name of protecting children while they already got all the powers to investigate and stop child abuse.
Mandatory age surveillance everywhere is only going to result in massive, normalized ID fraud. You thought fake and stolen IDs were a problem before? You haven't seen anything yet.
And half of it will be from adults trying to avoid privacy invasion.
Not so sure about that. Handing an ID to a bouncer at a bar or similar is not logging anything. Mainly it's some big man that you can see gears turning to see if the date is correct and a cursory glance to see if the photo matches. Sophisticated places might have a scanner that does what ever validation it does, but again, it's just another cursory check of the photo. Most of these people really don't care.
A tech company doing scans for validation could actually connect to a state database to verify the ID is legit and is not already being used for a different account. It would then be saved. I don't think real world vs tech world usage of fake IDs are the same at all.
They also use them to flag people who've been previously banned and the systems work across venues. The idea that verification in the real world is cursory is not accurate.
I have long thought that all content (local and remote) should be properly labeled with metadata. Just like the cans of soup in the supermarket, you don't have to open it to find out if it has peanuts, lactose, or MSG in it; you should be able to filter data before accessing it.
You could define a set of 5 or six categories (nudity, sex, drugs, violence, etc.) and have a scale from 1 to 10 for each. Each content producer would rate each category according to defined criteria.
Then each user, or their parent, can set what their own acceptable level is. If you set your violence level at 4 then nothing level 5 or higher will load.
THe government shouldn't be raising anyone's children, that's what parents are for. If you're a bad parent, your kids will get access to bad things and could become an adult failure.
The future of your family and your legacy is up to you, not the government. We don't need age verification to restrict the social darwinism of raising children.
I wish I could upvote this comment harder. I started having unsupervised internet access (with the family computer in the living room) when I was 8. I'm a functional and successful adult because I trusted my parents. When my mother forbade me from registering on online forums I complied. When I read "fellation" in some minecraft chat (albeit somewhat later) I asked my mom what it was and understood that "sex" was something for the grown-ups and that I shouldn't worry about it. All because I would never even conceive that my parents wouldn't do what's best for me, and was unconditionally loved (even though I didn't know about this concept).
I would rather have parenting licenses than online age verification
Also, different kids mature at different rates. I wouldn't give a shit about my kid watching, say, an R rated movie if I understand they'll be able to handle it and understand it's fiction. If I had a 14 or 15 year old and they had a healthy understanding of sex and the dangers of porn, I wouldn't give a shit if they managed to see some poorly drawn tits online. Why? Because if you didn't intentionally seek out lewd content as a teenager you're either very very religious or a liar
Age verification can be achieved without destroying anonymity and privacy online using anonymous credential systems, but it has to be designed that way from the ground up, and no one pushing age verification is interested in preserving privacy.
This comes up in every thread, but the purpose of the laws is not to verify that someone can access an anonymous token. If we had a true anonymous token system then everyone would just share tokens around.
The real world analog would be if you could buy beer at the store with anyone's ID because they didn't make any effort to reasonably check that the ID was yours or discourage people from sharing or copying IDs.
The systems enforce identity checking because that's the only way age verification can be done without having some reason to discourage or detect credential sharing.
The retort that follows is always "Well it's not perfect. Nothing is perfect." The trap is convincing ourselves that a severely imperfect system would be accepted. What would really happen is that it would be the trojan horse to get everyone on board with age verification, then the laws would be changed to make them more strict.
The two methods that seem feasible are making it hard to copy (putting it in the secure element in your phone, for example, which I don't love) or doing tokens that can only be used a limited number of times per day, like in : https://eprint.iacr.org/2006/454
Continuous age verification isn't possible, so you'll have to store some sort of proof of age somewhere, and that proof will always be sharable.
Let's say Facebook has verified my age somehow. I could share my Facebook login credentials, or the token that their authorization server sends back in response. You can create some hurdles to doing that, like requiring a second factor, but I can just share that too.
You might as well go down the route of accepting that possibility. These systems are never going to hold up in the face of a determined enough teenager.
Make it a duplication resistant hardware token that you can get for free then. The stakes just aren't high enough to worry about these kinds of edge cases.
The stakes just aren't high enough for us to implement any of this crap for the Internet in the first place. Let alone an entire government-administered hardware supply chain.
Yeah, right. So the government is going to spend billions on “porn tokens”. That’s going to get through the legislature.
I’m sure there wouldn’t be a brisk illicit trade in these tokens either. Certainly no one would be incentivized to sell these tokens to teenagers for easy profit.
Further, "porn tokens" are the pointy end of the wedge, because it's easy to misconstrue any opposition as advocating for "kids should have access to porn, actually". The broad end that is being hammered towards is "kids aren't allowed on social media because it's harmful to them" AKA "free speech tokens".
No it really can’t. Age verification requires identification.
Even if you could anonymously verify age to issue a “confirmed adult” credential, the whole chain of trust breaks down if one bad actor shares their anonymous credential and suddenly everyone is verifiably an adult.
The solution to that attack is naturally to have some kind of system for sites to report obviously-shared credentials. Which means tracking.
There's already authorities that know your age, so verifying age with them to get the credential isn't the part that needs to be anonymous. The issue is them knowing what you do with your credential, which anonymous credentials solves by making it impossible to track tokens back to the credential holder. As far as sharing, there are some possible mitigations.
Right. And the possible sharing mitigations generally amount to tracking.
This isn’t even getting to the issue that mandating government-issued credentials is the “foot in the door”. If you mandate the use of government creds for accessing websites, it’s an obvious step to turn around and demand that sites report credential use to “fight credential fraud”.
Yep look who is backing these regulations. It's absolutely for no other purpose than to further enable surveillance capitalism and the surveillance state.
Yes, but this is not popular among technologists (see the average sentiment towards age verification here). Legislators aren't going to build technology. This will happen if age verification actually becomes a widespread requirement. But until that point the prospective builders will be fighting the entire premise of such systems.
I don't hold out much hope of meaningful resistance within tech corps. In the nascent dystopian hellscape that we have at present, there are always hungry wage slaves ready to jump on board and implement damn near anything for a paycheck, even if there's no legal requirement for it. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if all the age verification hooks for the vast majority of tech corp sites and products are mostly already built and ready to adapt and ship at a nod.
the EU is. but their verification age process shows the design flaw that preserving privacy means the system can be easily circumvented with a mitm allowing to circumvent the age verification process.
Young people setting up a MITM and getting deeper into tech rather than consuming short-form-content is something I'd appreciate as a nice bonus effect.
Of course the EU solution isn't perfect and there are bypasses (there will always be and have always been), but let's appreciate it that way rather than too many PII, if it must come. I'd prefer the Age/RTA header and parental responsibility too.
AFAIK there are designs in the EU that respect privacy. There is a range of options being pushed around the world, and theres definitely a few of them which are more technically defensible than others.
And they continue to act like opposition just wants a wild west/don't care about kids, which is the oldest trick in the book. We just don't want "protect the kids" leveraged to tear up our rights.
I mean, it's more than that. I _want_ to protect kids' right to be part of the human connectome. The "protect the kids" (by disallowing them their freedom of thought on the internet) is just naked ageism.
I did. Restricting children’s access to certain things is not ageism.
We can argue the merits of restricting children’s access to the internet, or certain books, or alcohol, or pornography, or whatever else. We can debate the merits of those various restrictions based on the benefits and costs to both the children and society at large.
But it is not ageism to attempt to protect children. It is not ageism even of the restriction is a bad idea. To claim it is ageism is an emotional appeal (“ageism bad!”), not a logical one.
Ageism is a legally defined form of discrimination as well as the subject of ethical discussions. It's a real, defined thing. Just because we disagree on what qualifies as ageism doesn't mean you get to call foul and say it's irrational/emotional.
There are lots of ways to implement identity verification while preserving privacy. It's actually a super interesting engineering problem. Estonia has an excellent model to build on. The government can maintain a "traditional" ID system based on documents and in-person verification, and provide you with a device similar to a yubi-key or Bitcoin hardware wallet that could be used to share specific, cryptographically verifiable claims with third parties, like your age, or even just a boolean "over 18", but also your name or other information if you choose, with a way to control the access and audit which parties have verified which claims with the govt.
How are folks recommended to get involved? Contact your local Congress member? I feel this thread has a lot of passion but is missing concrete, actionable steps.
Dumb- BUT immediate links to sites of the right legislators!
Adam B. Schiff
Sorry, this legislator cannot be contacted with our tool. To message them, visit their website instead.
Alex Padilla
Sorry, this legislator cannot be contacted with our tool. To message them, visit their website instead.
I've contacted my congressmen and I would also advocate for telling/explaining this to non technical people you know. They either won't have heard of this or won't know whats bad about it.
I've heard that we could use zero-knowledge ID proofs to show someone is of age without revealing any more but I don't think that's the plan and the demand for age restrictions doesn't feel like a grassroots effort of concerned parents. It feels like an NGO/bureaucrat driven law and I assume its purpose is to de-anonymize people on the internet.
In the age of AI I think it’s only necessary and inevitable to implement some of kind of internet ID system to stop the massive onslaught of AI generated fraud, malicious hacking, and spam. If age verification is a Trojan horse to erase online anonymity, so be it, I see that as a worthy goal.
Humans are inherently social, and social networks are based on trust. Trust is primarily a function of reputation, peer pressure, and legal consequences. Reputation requires tying behavior to a stable identity. Peer pressure only works when you’re not anonymous. For there to be legal consequences for bad behavior, we must identify bad actors. I don’t see why anyone would want to remove any of this. To protect some freelance journalists in Iran?
Also I don’t think that the “pro privacy” activists really understand the scale and severity of harm being done to children through the internet. I as a programmer who makes my living on the internet, would gladly support the shutting down of the whole internet if it would save the life of a single precious child.
We will see how your opinion changes when someone steals your ID and voice and you end up being defrauded due to the government chosing the cheapest Indian shop to mishandle your data
>age verification requires identity verification. Identity verification requires digital IDs. Digital IDs require everyone — not just children — to prove who they are before they can speak...
Not if it's done in a half arsed way. I'm in the UK and so far my age verification has involved doing a selfie with the webcam for Reddit. That's it. No one needing my name, ID number etc. (Apart from banks of course).
Really this is just the modern equivalent of putting the porn mags on the top shelf at the newsagent to stop the kids getting them. We don't need more.
A photo identifies you. This is the digital equivalent of having a photo taken of you upon entering the mag store, stored digitally forever, shared with government, and tied to every magazine you read and purchase.
First, that's easily enough to identify you from biometric data, and it's naive to assume it won't be resold. Second, I kept getting asked for ID into my 40s because I looked young. People don't all age in the same way, so this system will fail for people at the tails of a normal distribution - some 15 year olds will easily pass for 25 and vice versa.
> I'm in the UK and so far my age verification has involved doing a selfie with the webcam for Reddit. That's it. No one needing my name, ID number etc. (Apart from banks of course).
In the US, the plan is to require adults to take a picture of their state ID and upload it to a third party that provides age verification. It's not explicitly part of the proposed law but there are only a handful of companies who meet the qualifications to provide this service (id.me, Persona) and this is how they do it.
I believe if you are a "minor" then you can go the post-a-selfy route.
If someone wanted to be a martyr and just uploaded all their personal documents so they could be accessed by everyone, I wonder if an interesting court case might follow.
I could imagine it ending with a court ruling that people are responsible to protect their own personal documents which... yeah, that would muddy the waters in a world where every website expects to see your ID.
> In the US, the plan is to require adults to take a picture of their state ID and upload it to a third party that provides age verification.
That's not just the plan - that's what's already legally required in many US states.
These laws were introduced by the explicitly religious right-wing groups like Exodus Cry and Morality in Media, as ways to de facto outlaw pornography (in their own words). They've since been laundered into the mainstream so the general public is unaware of the root cause.
Whether it can be done this way is besides the point. It is about how regimes like ours in the US that have demonstrated an interest in spying on their subjects choose to regulate this over time.
Age verification on Australian social media has loopholes. Underage influencers use an agency to manage their social media for them. So anyone with enough followers or money can continue using social media under the age of 16.
If you are going to implement age controls, you should implement a ban on underage influencers as well.
How could one protect the, call it one in 1 million… the speech of the (young) Greta Thunbergs, for example?
I bet there is a 15 year-old much smarter than me making political videos and I wouldn’t necessarily want them to be forced to stop. What if they’re on my “team”! ;) (I kid)
Recalling how we had lots of political debates in high school: if some of those kids made videos and got really popular, and the law made them stop, they would have been incentivized to vote $responsibleParty out.
(Socials bad for kids though maybe they could selfhost their monologues instead)
I believe every government disenfranchises young people because they are young.
Its not about intelligence. Else a whole lot of over-age-of-majority wouldn't pass either.
Theres also no old-age cutoff, when their mental faculties significantly decline.
Yeah, the voting majority keeps 'under age' from voting. But at least in the USA, we have children as young as 11 being tried as adults but with none of the benefits.
You’re right that it shouldn’t be about intelligence! Overall definitely unfair.
—
After posting, I questioned whether political speech is special. Like should fifteen-year-olds who love film be able to make videos about them and get lots of followers… but I couldn’t be thought police. So maybe-
The platform just has to be designed non-addictively.
Is this accurate?: In reality, Facebook was so powerful the regulators could never make them stop at any turn. Now that they finally got sued big time, we finally educated ourselves enough as constituents to raise enough of a stink to trigger straight up bans. (educated ourselves, or politicians legislate based how bad headlines are, or it was so egregious it genuinely ticked them off… …)
>If you are going to implement age controls, you should implement a ban on underage influencers as well.
That just makes it even worse, why deprive the younger generation of one of the few remaining methods they have to make a decent income? We should be encouraging youth entrepreneurship, not making them spend even longer in classrooms learning things that LLMs will do better than them.
People under the age of 16 shouldn't be worried about "making a decent income". They should focus on school.
In the weekends they can stock shelves, deliver pizza, deliver newspapers, wash dishes, babysitting, feed animals or other typical jobs for children in the age range of 12 to 16.
Why? Presumably so they can go to college and get a high paying job that may not exist in 10 years? The direction we give kids coming up always seems to lag behind reality by 10 or 20 years. Perhaps we shouldn't stand in the way of the new generation figuring things out for themselves in this brave new world. The old playbooks to a solid middle class life are increasingly outdated.
I don't think it truly is, but I do think that the younger generations think it is.
My nieces and nephews really don't know what they are going to do in their futures because so much is uncertain right now.
If it feels like a longshot to expect normal 9-5 office jobs to be around in 5 years, and it's also a longshot being an influencer, then why not go for the influencer thing?
Just requiring it for social media companies is probably enough of a win to not have to pursue any further. We require age verification for sports betting and things like that, I'm not sure why we wouldn't do the same or some variation of that for other massively addicting products that we know as a matter of scientific study have a very bad impact on some number of kids.
Big social media companies are likely overjoyed to be able to get discrete, government issued info of a person's full legal name, date of birth, residential address (as is printed on US drivers licenses) for advertising and demographic profile targeting purposes. And then be able to correlate it with their existing social media history/clicks/profile, browser fingerprinting, IP address, daily usage patterns, geolocation. It's a massive gift to them.
I doubt they need that to identify you. There are also lots of other problems like algorithmic manipulation. But also just stop using these junky websites. Everyone always complains about Meta doing this, TikTok doing that, and it's like if all they do is make you mad, stop being their user/customers?
That's the cynical view, yes, but we can see educational standards and performance going down in the United States, we have seen plenty of scientific and medical studies showing problems with children and more specifically teenagers using social media. I'm not one to want to want to limit someone's rights, but it seems like the trade-off here is in favor of requiring age verification at least for social media companies.
Separately I still don't fully agree with concerns raised regarding social media and identification for everyone. Bots, people who are online just stirring up trouble, &c. are causing pretty significant challenges and problems for society. If you spew a bunch of racist stuff for example I think people deserve to know who you are.
And you know we do this all the time. Folks want gun registries and things like that (and I agree, as a matter of practice, but not principal) so I'm not sure why we're ok with that form of requiring identification to exercise your rights and against this one other than political priorities.
Nothing against Twitter, but I just don't feel like logging in, so that site makes it way easier to read this. Also it doesn't take like 8 CPU cores to render.
Kids will always find ways around regulation. Look at cigarettes, vapes, alcohol, weed; they will just get it from their dealers. Pornography? I expect something like: download a Torrent, get it from a classmate, share HardDrives in school, get it through an older brother.
And porn companies should always be held responsible for not doing their due diligence and freely distributing porn to minors. Which is already illegal in teh US and most places.
I'm not suggesting that actually. I look at my nephews and see them buy cigerettes, vapes, etc from small dealers instead of stores. Not saying we should just let them smoke, just expecting that they will be able to circumvent online age restrictions as well.
My question is: are digital age verifications the best way to protect kids from harmfull effects of pornography? And my worry is: what unwanted side-effects will age verification have for our society as a whole.
Good: some commenters here realize it's an attack on privacy
Bad: some still entertain the idea that we should do age verification using some sort of crypto primitives
There is no reason for age verification at all.
I am from the goatse generation. Rotten.com. steakandcheese. Horrific stuff tbh, I mostly stayed away from it, and I didn't need a helicopter government to protect me from it.
The moment you accept the narrative that kids need to be protected from the Internet you have already lost.
You've already condemned those kids to a life of slavery. So much for protecting them.
What we need is not online verification, but a competent government that does its existing job well.
Who's been arrested over the Epstein files? Who is protecting those kids?
No one.
That same government wants to "protect" your kids by KYCing everyone.
Nah, that already didn't work because corps are very good at creating network effects in children and will set up multi-billion-dollar businesses around them. And then the kids with protective parents become the weird ones in school. I'll die on the hill of curtailing this stuff in a privacy-preserving way.
> I'll die on the hill of curtailing this stuff in a privacy-preserving way.
At some point you'll realize the contradiction in not trusting these "multi-billion-dollar businesses" to the point that you are risking enslaving humanity and "dying on this hill" and yet at the same time trusting those same businesses to implement this dystopian system in a privacy-preserving way.
When that realization hits, it will be a loud sound, possibly heard by nearby telepaths.
Right? I especially don't understand where some of the "think of the children" attitude on porn sites, as they for the most part already ask for your age and if you didn't get some kind of amusement out of seeing tits as a teenager you're a liar
I agree, doxxing yourself to some shady gray-market adjacent data broker is not acceptable as age verification, and age verification was safer using the honor system as before. But for some communities, especially social media communities, some kind of verification is better than none, otherwise what's to stop them from being overwhelmed with alt accounts that are used simply for harassment or other targeted objectives?
People should not be able to misrepresent themselves on the internet, it may have been safe in low volumes but it is scary now and will be outright dangerous as a modality in the hands of AI agents. If you think teen mental health is bad now, wait until social media campaign capabilities previously only available to nation states fall into the hands of ordinary school bullies.
Maybe age verification isn't the way to mitigate this obvious risk, but there has to be something that can be done to stop rampant sockpuppeting.
I'm not a fan of online age verification, but this is completely absurd:
> Every website. Every platform. Every app. Every service. Your children will never know what it was like to think freely online. They will never explore ideas anonymously. They will never question authority without it being logged in their permanent profile. They will never speak freely without fear that every word will be used...
No. Nobody's proposing you need to verify your identity to read articles on the New York Times or Wikipedia or political blogs. And nobody is proposing you need to verify your identity to leave comments on a news article or blog post. And any proposed law around that would run into massive first-amendment constitutional hurdles. It would be struck down easily.
There's always going to be a spectrum of websites that range from open and anonymous (like news and political discussion) to strongly identity-verified (like online banking). I don't like online age verification for particular sites, but at the same time I think it's completely misleading to see it as this slippery slope to a world where anonymous speech no longer exists.
We can have reasoned arguments around how people's usage of sites is tracked and how to prevent that, without making this about free speech and "the hill to die on".
For a forum that supposedly consists of hackers and tech-savvy people, this number of comments supporting age verification is concerning.
The author has said a lot about what kind of future awaits with mass surveillance and AI, but I believe it’s not enough. Technofascism Is not that far away.
Saw it with the UK laws. It just gets rammed through. Whether it’s ignorance, malice, hidden force, a desire for surveillance state, genuine concern for children - doesn’t matter, the forces in favour are substantially more and seemingly motivated to try over and over until it sticks.
Much like brexit or for that matter trump reelection I just don’t have much faith in wisdom of the democratic collective consensus anymore and I don’t think it’ll get any better in an AI misinformation echo chamber world. Onwards into dystopia
Contacting my representatives is about as effective as making a silent wish. Whenever I've done it, I'll either get no response, or a boilerplate reply which basically says "I'm doing this, go fuck yourself". Then I'll be added to their spam list. The truth is that my reps don't represent me and they're going to do what they want regardless. After all, I'm not the one backing the truck of money up to their front door.
Took forever to get a response and likely achieved little, but to their credit the response wasn't entirely canned and did at least give the impression that they understood what I'm saying
So many pieces of law are flawed today, and the reason why should be concerning to all.
I find it disgusting that most laws today are based on creating a perfect world instead of addressing harms in the least intrusive way. There is no balancing of interests, even when they state that there are. Every side complains about the others and potential future abuses, except when it is their plan. Nobody tries to design the law with a devil's advocate perspective to make as effective as reasonably possible (not perfect!) while limiting overreach.
The real problem is the pursuit of perfection. A perfect world does not exist, nor will it ever (laws of nature, physics, etc). One person's view of perfect is not the same as another's. We've lost the capacity for legislative empathy through are impatience and self importance. It's no longer about restricting government and providing people with rights. It's about how we can use government to shove the desires of a majority or plurality onto the total population.
There are ways to do age verification with reasonable anonymity, but they aren't perfect and can create underground markets (see gaming in China). At a certain point, we need to step back and put the responsibilities where they belong - with parents, instead of causing massive negative externalities on everyone else.
Hopefully this will give yet another push towards decentralized, open source services. Platforms where noone and everyone is responsible and the state does not get to decide the rules.
There is a suddenconcerted international push for online age verification, and we do not know where this push originates from. That is the scariest thing about it.
It's not _completely_ shrouded in mystery - it started after Facebook got slapped by the EU for irresponsible handling of underage users, and since began a heavily funded lobbying push to drag competitors down with them. https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings...
Of course, it's probably also been coopted by the neverending stream of nanny-state political power grabs in both the US and EU.
Usually Fear is the realm of governments. Modern republics are basically legitimized around the fears of something terrible happening, it can be communism, narcotics, the ozone hole, corona virus, terrorists, immigration, globalization, unrecycled waste or greenhouse effect.
Private entities being frontrunners in AI Fear either means that these companies have too much unchecked power or that they have are covert instruments of governments.
ironically i think we need more social and stronger local social networks that have high identity validation and are "safe" spaces for the plebs. so that the perceived "threat level" from the free internet gets lower. basically hide the real internet a bit behind a small rock.
its a slippery slope but it might be the better strategy unless some democratic societies achieve to put more modern "freedom guarantees" into their consitution.
It is easy to defend on the motte hill (protection of children, protection against abuse and heinous crimes), and easy to expand and farm on the bailey (universal surveillance, mass data collection, and the erosion of privacy).
It's worth pointing out that full digital identity verification ("doxxing" yourself to an untrustworthy, unauditable, legally unconstrained private company) is NOT the only way to verify adulthood. We have had a system in place which enables adulthood validation without enabling digital surveillance infrastructure, with a degree of false negative risk that society has deemed acceptable for nearly 100 years now. This idea is not my own, but I'm happy to share a reasonable proposal for it.
The Cashier Standard – Age Verification Without Surveillance
The "cashier standard" you advocate for has already crept toward centralized state tracking in places like Utah. When you go to a restaurant and order a drink, the staff are required to take it to the back and scan it for verification. The scanned data is also compared with a state database of DUI offenders. It's not clear whether the database is stored on site, or if that data goes out on the wire for the check; presumably the latter. Scanned data is also stored for up to 7 days by the restaurant, and it's easy to imagine further creep upping that storage bound.
This is not the case in most of the country. Utah is largely influenced by a Mormon / LDS culture that expresses heavy opposition to drinking. I am clearly not proposing that the cards be scanned Utah style, I am proposing that they be glanced at by a cashier, everywhere else style.
Again, the proposal isn't for a system which requires scanning of IDs, it's for a system where the cashier glances at the ID. You're arguing against a strawman. You may argue that the system proposed could evolve into the system you're describing, but still, you're arguing against a hypothetical future fiction. If we're going to be arguing about what the proposal might evolve into in the future, we might as well be arguing about what we should be doing when aliens arrive, since they might arrive in the future, too.
> we might as well be arguing about what we should be doing when aliens arrive, since they might arrive in the future, too.
Did aliens land in multiple states already? Strawman deflections aside, scanning is the natural evolution and has already happened across multiple kinds of exchange (money markers, various ids, various phone apps, etc). Government issue has a benefit of an independent verification system. It's super expensive for various government agencies to integrate into businesses. Constituents and businesses don't want that, leading to a much more comfortable adversarial relationship, imo.
It doesn't prevent it, it just disincentivizes it. As an adult, you can also go buy a beer and sell it to a minor. That said, mandatory age verification with photo ID upload and facial scans doesn't prevent workarounds either - kids use their parents' photo ID and pass facial scans with a variety of techniques, too.
Nobody who understands how adversarial systems like this work is seriously expecting a 100% flawless performance of blocking every single minor and accepting every single adult, the question is how much risk is acceptable, and the risks posed by this system are acceptable for alcohol, cigarettes, and other adult items that can arguably pose much more acute risk of serious injury or bodily harm to kids.
With digital tokens being generated by a user (the seller) on demand, you could have a bond system where the seller places something costly on the line, that the buyer can choose to destroy or obtain. For instance, if Alice gives her age token to Bob, Bob can (if he is a troll) invalidate the token in a way that requires Alice to go to a physical location to reset her ID.
I imagine this could be done with appropriate zero-knowledge measures so that the combination of Alice's age token and Bob's private key creates a capability to exercise the option, but without the service (e.g. a social media site) knowing that the token belongs to Alice, and without the ID provider (e.g. the state) knowing that Bob was the one who exercised it.
While honest customers have no reason to make use of this option, if Alice blindly sells her tokens to anybody willing to pay, there's bound to be some trolls out there who will do it just for the laughs.
This is far from a perfect system since a dishonest site could also make use of the option. But it theoretically works without revealing anybody's identity (unless the option is used, and then only if the service and the ID provider collude).
First - Alcohol and cigarettes can just be resold too. The black market for them is effectively zero because the consequences for giving them to kids are severe and the room for meaningful profit is close to zero, same applies here.
Second - The codes would be priced on the order of magnitude of pennies per verification - think 10 cents or less, accessible even to low / fixed income folks without really making a dent in their budget.
Third - the proposal explicitly mentions a nonprofit running it as an option, and the idea would be that law codifies the method to be approved, not a specific vendor, so competitive markets could emerge, too. Would you argue that restrictions on the sale of alcohol are creating artificial winners in the private sector of alcohol manufacturing?
You're doing a huge logical jump in your first point. Alcohol and cigarettes are physical goods, digital ID is not, but you're proposing a system that turns it into a physical problem. I'm merely pointing out that's what you're doing and the issues with it.
Second, it doesn't matter what it costs, it's inconvenient and I already spent time (possibly money too) obtaining a government ID... on top of a theoretical mandate that says I need to show the ID on a bunch of websites.
Third, I'm not sure I follow your point on alcohol restrictions creating winners? The non-profit idea could potentially be good, but I'm not hopeful that real world legislation would be crafted that way.
EDIT: also more on #1 and "severe consequences" for re-selling... yes that's exactly what we want to avoid: creating more reasons to put people in prison and a bigger burden on law enforcement and the court system.
"But age verification requires identity verification. Identity verification requires digital IDs."
Um, no? iOS is doing age verification just by your credit card. I never saw people all that upset about giving their credit card info to their phone wallet app or even to a bunch of websites.
It's not necessary to give it to every website. Verification to the website can be a true/false from the OS. In fact that's how it already works now.
I would say it's not really an ID no, which is the point. The post is claiming that a digital ID is necessary for age verification, but clearly it isn't.
If it was the hill to die on, then we should have done a better job of stopping pervasive fraud, abuse and harm to everyone so that we wouldn't have been a need to bring in age verification.
The reason we are up shit creek is because large companies didn't want to spend 2-5% of profits on decent editorial controls to stop bad actors making money from bending societal red lines (ie pile ons, snuff videos, the spectrum of grift, culture of abusing the "other side")
They also didn't want to stop the "viral" factor that allows their networks to grow so fucking fast.
This isn't really about freedom of speech, its about large media companies not wanting to take responsibility for their own shit.
meta desperately want kids to sign up. There are no penalties for them pushing shit on them. If an FCC registered corp had done half the shit facebook did, they'd have been kicked off air and restructured.
So frankly its too fucking late. Meta, google and tiktok will still find ways to push low quality rage bate to all of us, and divide us all for advertising revenue.
Alternative take: The fact that twitter / facebook / whatever allow arbitrary, unverified posting enables large-scale misinformation that led to, among other things, Russia's manipulation the US electorate and ultimate impacting the presidential election.
This one-sided view has some good points, but for goodness sake, don't pretend that the alternative has no downsides.
Really? How many Electoral College votes did Russia's clumsy attempt at manipulation actually change? Please quantify that for us based on hard evidence.
Disagreed. I'm against invasive age verification methods, but to allow innacurate expectations to proliferate often becomes a bubble that pops, causing many to rebound to the other side, even if it's objectively worse. I much prefer to keep the tradeoffs clear, as it prevent betrayed expectations while still showcasing the unnacceptible downsides.
I'm firmly against the idea of Internet arguments presenting an opposing position under the guise of it not being their actual opinion so they can run away from debate. Devil's advocate is a technique that should be used in school to learn how to make stronger arguments.
All it does is covertly promote the idea by presenting it as reasonable and on an equal level to the other idea. While at the same time being able to shut down debate, by pretending they don't actually think that.
Anybody can say something like "but what about the good side of the African slave trade" but they will be debated and the argument shut down if they present it as their actual argument and engage in good faith with the comments. Using the devil's advocate technique is an extremely useful way to argue in bad faith, anonymously on the Internet.
Critique of the author's style is fine. An opposing view should honestly be presented as such.
Because it's very easy for the creeps already thinking of your children to paint these rejecting this type of the laws as those who want to see children hurt.
Regardless how stupid this argument is, rags will always pounce on it.
This is just a dirty trick of the creeps to make the resistance harder.
I think it's because, without further context, it's so hard to argue against. Pretty much every person in every culture cares deeply about their children. So if you can successfully hitch your position to that idea, it too becomes hard to argue against.
It's the same with tough on crime. "What, you want criminals to keep getting away with it?!"
> Pretty much every person in every culture cares deeply about their children.
I would substitute "deeply" for "superficially". Like, if my parents found some way to prohibit porn when I was an adolescent, I wouldn't say they cared deeply about me. I would say they were misguided and authoritary. The "care deeply" idea you are putting forward is just trying to distil whatever societal norm currently is into the youngs.
Because adults remain children. As in, their parent’s kids and therefore property. [edit: I should mention also property of the state beyond that] It’s less explicit in US I guess but in some places that’s very blunt - if you don’t support your parents enough you can be sued for abuse. And there are situations where an adult in us has been declared too irresponsible and forced into conversion camps by parents in the US. It’s insane, yes, and if you’re lucky enough this might be entirely invisible to you. But if you’re gray or trans or autistic and get a but unlucky this can become a very harsh reality.
Protect the children refers to a type of property, not a type of human.
I agree. I don't call it "age verification" though - it is age sniffing. And it has nothing to do with children - that is the lie.
What is fascinating is to see how governments ALL fall for it. There is zero resistance. This is fascinating to me. It shows how little real effort is necessary once you have the lobbyists in place. Kind of scary to witness too.
It is an apartheid system. All apartheid slavery systems will eventually die, so age sniffing will die too. But it will most likely be a long fight as more and more money will be invested by crazy corporations such as Palantir and others.
The whole "debate" is already not logical by the way. Let's for a moment assume the "but but but the kids!" is a real argument rather than a strawman argument, which it is. Ok so ... I am a "concerned parent", for the sake of discussion. I have three young kids. I am not a tech nerd. The kids see "unfitting content" on the antisocial media such as facebook and what not. So, what do I do? Well ... they have a smartphone? Aha, so ... I am not so concerned? Having no smartphone is no option? Ok so ... I say they can have a smartphone, but they may not use antisocial media. Ok. First - in any free society, is it acceptable that this kind of censorship is done on ALL kids? What if I, as a parent, do not agree with this? Well, tough luck - the laws force you into the age sniffing routine suddenly. But, even those parents who want the state to act as totalitarian: why would I want to hand over control to ANY politician for that matter? That makes no sense to me. I am aware that some parents may think differently, but do all parents think like that, even IF they buy into the "we protect the children" lie? I don't want ANY information from ANY of my computers to go into private hands here. So the whole argument already makes zero sense from the get go.
Of course those who know how things work, they know that this is the build up towards identifying everyone on the world wide web at all times AND to make access to information conditional, e. g. if the state does not know you, you can not access information. Aka a passport system for the www. Built right into the operating system too. Windows already complied. MacOSX too. The battle for Linux will be interesting; it may be some hybrid situation, like systemd. And the systemd distributions will all succumb to age sniffing, courtesy of Poettering "this is really harmless if we store your age in the database, just trust me".
>And it has nothing to do with children - that is the lie.
You're not qualified to say that because you aren't a proponent of age verification. That's just imputing motives.
As a proponent of age verification and can tell you it's absolutely about protecting kid from damaging services like porn. It's a common sense control and that's why it has bi-partisan support in the US during a time where there is nearly 0 bi partisan support.
And people should be free to pick and choose whether they want to use sites that do that or not. Whatever hacker news does seems to be fine for me, and I did not need to verify my ID in any way (even though it's very easy to figure out who I am from this profile)
Anonymous in terms of it not being possible to derive the real world identity of the human from the value, sure. Anonymous in terms of providing no durable way to ban that human from the platform? No.
"prepper" is not an identity. I looked up this guy, he has crazy takes he's free to change at any time (so not an "identity" in any way) and id rather not read him.
Right wing is not an identity either. Don't mess around with terms you don't understand. Do some research.
> I'm free to change my name at any time, is my name not considered a part of my identity?
You can change your name to conceal elements of your identity just like you could wear clothes that cover your skin color. So sure, you can hide elements of your identity but changing your name won't change your family history or ethnicity.
Growing up in a Republican family might be an identity but producing lots of blogs, videos, and commercial products within the right wing prepper lifestyle is not an identity.
Just do a little research thanks
Basically every article on this site has a comment complaining that the article is AI. Who knows. Maybe “complaining about AI” is the new AI way of fitting in.
This feels different to me than complaining about the font or whatever. I don’t want to read or comment on anything not written by a human. I also agree with GP here that using AI instead of your own words has bearing on the content itself, insofar as it’s a signal that the author doesn’t care enough to write it themself.
As a corollary, I also want to know if a project posted here is predominantly vibe-coded, since that to me is a signal that it may be of lower quality, have fewer edge cases worked out, and is more likely to be abandoned in the near future.
Caring enough to put in the effort of thinking and writing is not a "tangential issue". Laziness is a substantive defect, and sadly, I think that kelseyfrog has clocked this one correctly. There are borderline cases, but the cadence of this tweet thread is unmistakeable.
We don't have to live like this. We don't have to accept it. We don't have to upvote it even if we agree (as I do) with the explicit point. The medium is the message, and the message that this poster is putting out here is that online age verification isn't actually worth getting that worked up about.
AI-generated content being passed off as human-written is not a tangential issue. HN staff agree, because posting AI generated comments is explicitly forbidden. I suspect the only reason this isn't extended to submissions is because pretty much all articles about AI are also written by AI, and effectively forbidding positive discussion of AI is obviously against the interests of a VC firm.
HN's guidelines were written under the assumption that submitted articles about [thing] would be written by people who care about [thing] and made a good faith effort to write something interesting about [thing], so it's only fair that any comments would be expected to respect the author's effort and discuss the article in equally good faith.
This assumption completely falls apart when you add AI generated submissions into the mix. If the "author" didn't care and thus couldn't be bothered to write about [thing] themselves, choosing to instead outsource that work to an LLM while they supposedly did something they deemed more valuable with the time they would've spent writing, then why should commenters be expected to dedicate more effort into their discussion of the article than the author dedicated to writing it? It's a bit unfair towards the commenters, don't you think?
No, it's because authentic writing on HN has been drowned out in an ocean of slop, in such quantities that calling it out is becoming an exercise in futility
There was an article yesterday where people were complaining about "AI smell", the author showed up in comments to state clearly and unequivocally that he didn't use AI to write it, and people wouldn't believe him.
AI didn't get its tropes and tics ex nihilo. Some people just write in a way that "smells" like AI to others.
It's more likely that they're just virtue signaling about {{current-controversial-thing}}, as evidenced by the fact that they often accuse content of being AI generated when it would only appear that way to the most naive readers.
It doesn't feel like virtue signaling. It feels like pointing out a contradiction in the text: I care deeply about this topic; I don't care enough to write it myself.
> Virtue signalling is a pejorative neologism for the expression of a moral viewpoint with the intent of communicating good character, frequently used to suggest hypocrisy.
What virtue am I signalling and what hypocrisy am I trying to hide?
Holy crap, I only just saw your license agreement. Oh no. We've argued on here before, although this time we're in agreement. Please don't use this hidden license to dox me!
(It's an unenforceable joke, right? There's no way I'm bound by anything here other than maybe the site ToS.)
Seriously, who cares this much about the internet? I for one will be happy if my kids spend less time online than me. Similar to what a smoker would feel seeing cigarettes finally be banned, I suppose.
It's also ironic that this guy is so adamant about protecting the children on xitter. It's like preaching against racism on 4chan.
The Internet pretty much runs our lives now, so: I do.
Lots of things require having Internet access, an email address, being able to visit a website, coordinate with others on a Facebook page for a local group, etc.
No one requires me to buy a pack of cigarettes to register for classes, pay bills, submit something to the government, etc.
The argument being made seems plausible but it’s complete fear mongering. The surveillance mechanisms already exist and are in play and people can be identified in endless ways.
States have broad power to do what is being feared in the thread and haven’t already and to think that they’re waiting for this final piece of the puzzle to enact some insane regime is laughable. They could do that right now without the internet at all.
Social media is probably not healthy and kids should probably not be on social media. Age verification and age limits for social media will be a good thing for kids.
Instead of fear mongering, finding a middle ground, like governments adding some rules and protections on how this information or system is used is probably a better response.
I might be in the minority, but I think incorporating an identity layer into the internet itself should happen with the right protections for users and should have happened at the beginning of the net and is probably a result of lack of foresight by the creators of ARPANET.
Social Media is not a thing at all. Social media is a website. Websites are not health or unhealthy. Food is healthy or unhealthy. Websites are light and potentially sound, not something with health effects.
Go look directly at the sun without any protection or go listen to sounds of 120dB if you want to test your hypothesis that light and sound can't be unhealthy.
Or maybe you aren't being litteral and are just saying that what children see and hear has no influence on their developmemt. Either way, total bullshit.
This is simply false -- the literature is full of discussion about the health effects of social media.
More generally you're committing I believe two separate fallacies of ambiguity? Like one in going from the institution of social media to its reification in the form of specific websites, and then a second fallacy when you go from the specific websites to all websites in general? Like if you said "Gun ownership is not a thing at all. Gun ownership is a piece of metal. Pieces of metal cannot be healthy or unhealthy." OK but, you owning a gun is known in the scientific literature to significantly correlated with a bunch of very adverse health effects for you, such as you dying by suicide or you dying from spousal violence or your protracted grief and wasting away because your child accidentally killed themselves. Like to say that it's impossible for the institution to have adverse health effects because we can situate the objects of that institution into a broader category which doesn't sound so harmful, is frankly messed up.
[1]: Bernadette & Headley-Johnson, "The Impact of Social Media on Health Behaviors, a Systematic Review" (2025) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12608964/ - the content you consume can promote healthy or unhealthy behaviors
[2]: Lledo & Alvarez-Galvez, "Prevalence of Health Misinformation on Social Media: Systematic Review" (2021) https://www.jmir.org/2021/1/E17187/ is notable not just for its content but also like a thousand papers that cite it getting into all of the weeds of health influencers sharing misinformation to make a buck
[3]: Sun & Chao, "Exploring the influence of excessive social media use on academic performance through media multitasking and attention problems" (2024) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10639-024-12811-y was a study of a reasonably large cohort showing correlations between social media usage and particular forms of multitasking that inhibit academic performance -- more generally there's broad anecdata that the current "endless scrolling constant dopamine hits" model that social media gravitates to, produces kids that are "out of control" with aggressive and attentional difficulties -- see Kazmi et al. "Effects of Excessive Social Media Use on Neurotransmitter Levels and Mental Health" (2025) (PDF warning - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sharique-Ahmad-2/public...) for more on the actual literature that has probed those questions
[4]: The APA has a whole "Health advisory on social media use in adolesence" https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advi... which is pretty even-handed about "these parts of social media are acceptable, those parts can maybe even be downright good -- but here are the papers that say that for adolescents, it can mess with their sleep, it can expose them to cyberhate content that measurably promotes anxiety and depression, it has been measured to promote disordered eating if they use it for social comparison..."
> If you love your family, you must stop online age verification.
> If you want the best for your children, you must stop online age verification.
> Your children are being targeted. The infrastructure being built under the cover of child safety is designed to enslave them for the rest of their lives.
Jumped the shark on that one, and really off-color. I'm less inclined to listen to guy, not because of his actual points, but because of how unreasonable he sounds when articulating them. A great lesson in how not to do rhetoric.
When I read those seemingly outrageous claims, I didn't immediately dismiss the author. I allowed him to substantiate the claims and kept reading. I found myself agreeing with his argument and his train of thought of how, once digital IDs are accepted as a norm, they won't be unwound, and all online activity will likely require them and then, as he says,
"Your children will never know what it was like to think freely online. They will never explore ideas anonymously. They will never question authority without it being logged in their permanent profile. They will never speak freely without fear that every word will be used against them.
They will grow up in a digital cage. And you will have to tell them you saw it being built and did not stop it when you had the chance."
So I'm with the author on this one. Under the cover of child safety, digital IDs will cage us (or at least children entering the verification age), and it will probably never be rolled back.
That's the role of rhetoric as a skill: all the true and sufficient syllogisms in the world will be ignored by most readers, if the argument leads with priors-triggering hyperbole and bombast.
The best way to not be in a digital cage is to opt out of the current digital products.
Would that be such a bad thing? Frankly I would welcome a world in which kids are not using Instagram or TikTok. They don’t have to live in a cage if we don’t let them in the cage.
Personally, my plan is that when age verification laws get passed, every service that requires ID is a service I stop using. And I expect my life to be better for it!
Let’s take a basic example: Wikipedia, which hosts pornography, easily could be a target of such legislation. Now there is infrastructure in place to know when you read about “Criticisms of policy X” and maybe it’s handled safely or maybe it’s handed directly to the government.
What about news? It’s a hop skip and leap from “age verify pornography with ID” to “age verify content about sexual abuse or violence.” Now the infrastructure is in place to see the alt-news criticisms you read.
Twitch or YouTube wouldn’t even wait to comply, ID verification is something that these corporations are already perfectly fine with. Now, you watching a history of your government’s crimes is a potentially tracked red flag that you’re a dissident to be watched.
Do you think if this sort of legislation is enacted, it will stop at large websites? It will be an excuse used by the government and supported by big tech firms to shut down any small websites which don’t comply. After all, Google, MS, et al, they would rather that your entire concept of the internet start and end in a service they control.
> The best way to not be in a digital cage is to opt out of the current digital products.
But will your friends and family opt out? Their phones are always listening. They can just as easily listen to you, even if you go to great pains not to expose yourself to technology. They'll make a shadow profile of any avoidant user whether they want it or not.
> The best way to not be in a digital cage is to opt out of the current digital products.
Bullshit. These are all-encompassing monopolies and government services. More likely, they'll ban you and you'll end up having to go to court out of desperation to demand that they service you.
This is very limited thinking. If you lacked this sort of imagination 20 years ago, you wouldn't have been able to predict today.
> Frankly I would welcome a world in which kids are not using Instagram or TikTok.
This is the sort of passive reactionary nonsense that causes the danger that we're in. Everything isn't something to give up lightly, even if you think that it will force your neighbor to turn his music down, or get rid of bad reality television. I don't like kids on social media either. I don't like adults on it. I think kids are suffering more from surveillance than from TikTok.
Nah that’s silly, because Google has been doing all that already for the past quarter century. This “age verification” shit isn’t going to move the needle on the Google-created dystopia we already have.
The time to worry about not having a digital cage was quite awhile ago. Instead tech people pushed Chrome and Android and Gmail and ads onto us.
It's framed as being only for social media. But, really, it's about network access. Without network access, it's difficult to thrive in the modern world.
Are you not alarmed at the possibility that a person's network access could be cut arbitrarily and at-will?
It's mind boggling how far Stallman saw into the future. Saddest part is we're losing this war. They're going to destroy freedom of computation, freedom of information, and it turns out that... Nobody cares. Nobody but a bunch of nerds.
Yeah, calling people "dogs" for pointing out that TFA is a hyperbolic (AI-written) screed without substance would ruffle some feathers.
Edit: yes it is hyperbolic and ridiculous to suggest people will be "enslaved" because they don't have access to the internet. Do you realize that makes everybody who grew up in the 90s or earlier a "slave"?
For a start, child are parents responsibility, and the state should stay out of that as much as reasonably possible.
Nothing more would need to me said on the matter if that’s as far as it went, but it isn’t.
There can be no free speech if the state can imprison you for what you say, and they know everything you say.
I dropped the word ‘online’ from the above paragraph, because on is the real world. Touch grass, but there’s no way online isn’t real. Are these words not real simple because I telegraphed them to you?
And not distributing porn to children is a porn company's responsibility.
You are repeating a very common talking point but its not a good one.
Age verification laws make it possible to hold services providers liable for breaking the law (it's already illegal to distribute porn to minors in many places, like the US).
It's both true and completely irrelevant that parents should do a better job protecting their children from harmful services online.
> For a start, child are parents responsibility, and the state should stay out of that as much as reasonably possible.
Yes
That's why stores let kids buy alcohol and tobacco, of course, because no responsible parent would let them buy that, right?
That's why any kid can go watch any movie in the cinema right?
Yes it's the parents responsibilities. Do you think a middle class single mother has the resources to keep their kids entertained and out of social media for the whole day?
The problem with age verification is 100% the lack of anonymity in its implementation (which I do agree has ulterior motives) - but honestly not the age check in itself
> That's why any kid can go watch any movie in the cinema right?
Yes. At least in the U.S., the federal government does not regulate that, it is voluntary by the MPA (formerly MPAA) and theaters. A kid can buy a ticket for a PG movie and walk into an R-rated movie.
> Do you think a middle class single mother has the resources to keep their kids entertained and out of social media for the whole day?
Mine did. While not everyone has a backyard, things like pencils, papers, books, used toys, etc can be found inexpensively or for free.
Responsible parties like porn companies that distribute porn to minors? Parents are still accountable with age verification laws.
If parents suck at parenting, they will suffer.
If porn companies distribute porn to minors, which is illegal in many places such as the US, they will not suffer. Unless you start holding them accountable.
The kids are our future adults. It should be pretty obvious that getting them used to the state yanking access is a future problem. I don’t see anything off-color or unreasonable.
I’ve been noticing a trend among a lot of HN members where instead of contending with the arguments made in an article, they focus on the “off putting rhetoric” used by the author.
Make no mistake you are engaging in your own form of rhetoric when you respond like this. You are in effect moving the discussion away from the subject at hand, and towards the perceived faults in the author’s communication style. This is a rhetorical slight of hand and it’s highly disingenuous.
"Disingenuous?" Just because someone finds the style irksome, and chooses to share that here, they're deceptively, calculatingly trying to derail the conversation? That's an extremely cynical and uncharitable take.
If I were the author of the post, I'd value the feedback.
Except that is not what this place is for, at all, and flirts with several explicit posting guidelines. It doesn't make for good discussion, doesn't address the topic at hand, etc.
It's important to remember that they're targeting your children. You grew up with freedom from surveillance and constant identification. You were able to communicate anonymously and without the content of your speech being sold to Walmart and the cops. They are putting in effort to make sure that your children will never have that reality as a reference point. The idea of the government and a dozen corporations not knowing everything that they are doing at all times, and not using and selling that information freely, will sound like the ramblings of a delusional old fool.
It's important that you engage with that. Denial is not something to brag about.
Ironic that he's relying on the same ridiculous "think of the children" rhetoric that's being used to promote age verification. Really says a thing or two about online discourse in our day and age.
5 years ago I would have agreed, but seeing how the GOP has been fighting tooth and nail to protect actual child sex traffickers, I don't think so anymore. There's just no possible way that the safety of children is an actual concern to any of them. To these people, kids are little more than sex toys for billionaires.
Im completely OK with verifying someone's age before distributing age-restricted services to them. That's what an age restricted service is, and obviously we shouldnt let porn companies distribute porn to minors (its already illegal most place). Just dont use porn, facebook, online gambling etc. if you dont want to share your identity.
I can see why it's unfortunate but the idea posited that that it's somehow illegal in the US is ridiculous. You have no right to watch porn anonymously at the expense of holding porn companies liable for distributing porn to minors.
Internet 1.0 was largely read only, ephemeral, or decentralized. Chat rooms, IRC, personal webpages, etc. There was anonymity and there were not age restricted services.
Internet 2.0 introduced age restricted services and the enforcement lagged. The enforcement is now catching up. You can still do all the Internet 1.0 things anonymously but you can no longer gamble online as a 14 year old and hopefully soon you wont be able to watch porn either.
Private companies now can link all your online activities to you. Not an advertisement ID, but directly to you and your loans and your health data and whatever they're selling in the black market. Every data breach is a 100 times. It was already almost possible to directly know about you by buying data, now it's easier.
The point of this is not to verify age really. It is to verify identity. There's no way to prove someone is some age without presenting a legal ID.
Also, it's not just porn, facebook, online gambling etc. It is the OS based on some bills. So ALL your activities.
This argument as framed doesn’t make any sense. Porn is (and WAS) Internet 1.0.
There was porn before most everything on the web. Porn is also speech / art.
Anonymous access should be available for any website that wants to share their content on the Internet provided they have the rights to that content.
States that seek to limit that could make a legal argument that they have the right to limit access, but in the end it’s infringing speech. Worse, it’s unenforceable.
And yes, I would make the same arguments for people posting hateful shit or misinformation.
I a small server operator and a client of the internet will not participate in any other methods period, full-stop. Make simple logical and rational laws around RTA headers and I will participate. Many sites already voluntarily add this header. It is trivial to implement. Many questions and a lengthy discussion occurred here [1]. I doubt my little private and semi-private sites would be noticed but one day it may come to that at which point it's back into semi-private Tinc open source VPN meshes for my friends and I.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152074
[1] - https://www.shodan.io/search?query=RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-R... [THESE ARE ADULT SITES, NSFW]
Point being, put the controls entirely into the hands of the device owner. Options can be to default to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Sites_Advocatin...
This still isn’t perfect, as it creates an incentive for legislators to criminalize improper age header settings and legislate what is considered kid-appropriate. But it’s still better than this age verification crap.
We pay money online mostly through credit cards. Credit card transactions can be reversed. If children spend money on porn, those payments are likely to be reversed. This is really bad for the ability of the porn sites to continue receiving credit card payments, and continue making money.
An age header is a trivial step that can reduce the odds of the adult site receiving payments that later get reversed. Win, win.
But if someone is willing and able to pay, then the adult industry wants the choice of whether to access content to be up to them. If government tries to regulate them, they'll engage in malicious compliance - do the minimum to not be sued, in a way that they can still reach customers.
For example Utah tried to institute age verification. The porn industry blocked all IP addresses from Utah. Business boomed for VPN companies in Utah. Everyone, including porn companies, knows that a lot of that is for porn. But if you show up with a Nevada IP address, the porn's position is, "You're in Nevada. Utah law doesn't apply." Even if the credit card has a Utah zip code.
If you live in Utah, and you're able to purchase a VPN, the porn companies want your money.
If someone is willing and able to pay, they have a source of money. If they aren't allowed to buy something, that control should be applied at the level where they get the money. If the child is using an adult's credit card, responsibility lies with the adult. If children need to have their own credit cards, the obvious point of control is the credit card itself.
But also, most porn is ad-supported, pirated or free. Directly paid content is a small fraction. So all of this is moot for porn.
Exactly. If you’re hurting kids to make more money selling porn videos, straight to jail.
I’m glad there are solutions that won’t ruin the Internet. Now the uphill battle to convince our legislators (see: encryption & fundamentally technically ignorant calls for backdoors).
I’m here to die on this hill!
This one: https://www.w3.org/PICS/
I added PICS to my forums but it was missing many categories of adult content. I ended up just selecting everything as I could not predict what people may upload which made for a very long header.
YT already does this. I never watch YT signed in, and I often see videos that require you to be logged in as the video is age restricted.
Today devices do not default to accounts being child accounts. Some day this may change and may require an initial administrator password or something to that affect but this can evolve over time.
Not being able to detect all children doesn't mean that being able to detect 80% of them is somehow less disturbing.
In the case of RTA the only signalling taking place is a server header being transmitted to the client. The client could be anyone at any age. Nothing to explicitly leak or disclose. Server operators can guess all they desire as some do using AI based on user behavior of which they sometimes get wrong.
That would also amount to compelled speech.
I disagree. The legal requirement to apply a warning label is a well known, understood and accepted process that is applied to a myriad of hazards to children and adults. As just one example businesses in some states, most notably California are compelled to add warning labels to foods and other products that could cause cancer.
Fine, cigarettes must be labelled as being a risk of causing cancer. The punishment for failing to do this is both civil and federal penalties including massive fines and federal prison time.
On other hand servers might choose to lie. After all that is their free speech right.
So maybe you need some third party vetting list. Ofc, that one should be fully liable for any damages misclassification can cause... But someone would step up.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47950843
UK's OFCOM is currenly issuing legal threats to 4chan, for allegedly serving adult content and not willing to implement age verification. 4chan's lawyer tells them to pound sand[0], on the basis that 4chan is hosted in the US and has zero business presence in the UK, and UK is more than welcome to ban the website on their end through UK ISPs. The saga has been ongoing for a while, and the lawyer has been pretty prolific online talking about the case.
Anyway, following your approach, UK should embargo US over 4chan not willing to implement age verification as required by UK law? I plainly don't see this happening, or even being considered, ever.
0. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c624330lg1ko
This isn't hypothetical, by the way. There are adults catfishing kids into producing CSAM [0], kidnapping and assaulting minors [1], [2], and in the most extreme case, there's a borderline cult of crazy young adults who do terrorize people for fun [3].
It is a constant game of whackamole by moderators/admins to keep this behavior out of online spaces where kids hang out.
I recognize that this is a "think of the children" argument, but indeed that's the point. The anonymous web was created without thinking about the children, just like how all social media was created without thinking about how it could be used to harm people. Age verification is the smallest step towards mitigating that harm.
Now I disagree very strongly with the laws proposed (and indeed, I've been writing/calling/talking with state reps about this locally, because I don't want my state's bill passed). But the technical challenge needs to address the real problems that legislators are trying to go after.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdnc/pr/discord-user-who-catfis...
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kidnapping-roblox-rcna2...
[2] https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/nebraska-man-charged-wit...
[3] https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/boston/news/ope...
Point being, there will be a myriad of exceptions. I am not looking to address the exceptions. Those can be a game of whack-a-mole as they are today. I am proposing something that would prevent the vast majority of children from being exposed to the trash we today call social media and of course also porn sites.
https://meshtastic.org/
Mandatory age surveillance everywhere is only going to result in massive, normalized ID fraud. You thought fake and stolen IDs were a problem before? You haven't seen anything yet.
And half of it will be from adults trying to avoid privacy invasion.
A tech company doing scans for validation could actually connect to a state database to verify the ID is legit and is not already being used for a different account. It would then be saved. I don't think real world vs tech world usage of fake IDs are the same at all.
They just want a plausible defence should it ever end up in court.
> Sophisticated places might have a scanner that does what ever validation it does, but again, it's just another cursory check of the photo.
Many/most bars do scan IDs now. Ostensibly it's to verify that it's real, but they do use those systems to keep a log of everyone who enters.
You could define a set of 5 or six categories (nudity, sex, drugs, violence, etc.) and have a scale from 1 to 10 for each. Each content producer would rate each category according to defined criteria.
Then each user, or their parent, can set what their own acceptable level is. If you set your violence level at 4 then nothing level 5 or higher will load.
The future of your family and your legacy is up to you, not the government. We don't need age verification to restrict the social darwinism of raising children.
I would rather have parenting licenses than online age verification
The real world analog would be if you could buy beer at the store with anyone's ID because they didn't make any effort to reasonably check that the ID was yours or discourage people from sharing or copying IDs.
The systems enforce identity checking because that's the only way age verification can be done without having some reason to discourage or detect credential sharing.
The retort that follows is always "Well it's not perfect. Nothing is perfect." The trap is convincing ourselves that a severely imperfect system would be accepted. What would really happen is that it would be the trojan horse to get everyone on board with age verification, then the laws would be changed to make them more strict.
The two methods that seem feasible are making it hard to copy (putting it in the secure element in your phone, for example, which I don't love) or doing tokens that can only be used a limited number of times per day, like in : https://eprint.iacr.org/2006/454
Let's say Facebook has verified my age somehow. I could share my Facebook login credentials, or the token that their authorization server sends back in response. You can create some hurdles to doing that, like requiring a second factor, but I can just share that too.
You might as well go down the route of accepting that possibility. These systems are never going to hold up in the face of a determined enough teenager.
I’m sure there wouldn’t be a brisk illicit trade in these tokens either. Certainly no one would be incentivized to sell these tokens to teenagers for easy profit.
Even if you could anonymously verify age to issue a “confirmed adult” credential, the whole chain of trust breaks down if one bad actor shares their anonymous credential and suddenly everyone is verifiably an adult.
The solution to that attack is naturally to have some kind of system for sites to report obviously-shared credentials. Which means tracking.
This isn’t even getting to the issue that mandating government-issued credentials is the “foot in the door”. If you mandate the use of government creds for accessing websites, it’s an obvious step to turn around and demand that sites report credential use to “fight credential fraud”.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47951372
Of course the EU solution isn't perfect and there are bypasses (there will always be and have always been), but let's appreciate it that way rather than too many PII, if it must come. I'd prefer the Age/RTA header and parental responsibility too.
It's addressing a real problem in a bad way.
Or perhaps protecting kids isn’t really ageism at all.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We can argue the merits of restricting children’s access to the internet, or certain books, or alcohol, or pornography, or whatever else. We can debate the merits of those various restrictions based on the benefits and costs to both the children and society at large.
But it is not ageism to attempt to protect children. It is not ageism even of the restriction is a bad idea. To claim it is ageism is an emotional appeal (“ageism bad!”), not a logical one.
Calling it ageism is an emotional appeal, not a principled stance.
In the US at least there’s also no such thing legally as age discrimination against minors so far as I’m aware.
https://www.eff.org/pages/help-us-fight-back#main-content
Perhaps we NYers should organize a rally outside his office in Manhattan like we did for PIPA/SOPA?
Humans are inherently social, and social networks are based on trust. Trust is primarily a function of reputation, peer pressure, and legal consequences. Reputation requires tying behavior to a stable identity. Peer pressure only works when you’re not anonymous. For there to be legal consequences for bad behavior, we must identify bad actors. I don’t see why anyone would want to remove any of this. To protect some freelance journalists in Iran?
Also I don’t think that the “pro privacy” activists really understand the scale and severity of harm being done to children through the internet. I as a programmer who makes my living on the internet, would gladly support the shutting down of the whole internet if it would save the life of a single precious child.
Not if it's done in a half arsed way. I'm in the UK and so far my age verification has involved doing a selfie with the webcam for Reddit. That's it. No one needing my name, ID number etc. (Apart from banks of course).
Really this is just the modern equivalent of putting the porn mags on the top shelf at the newsagent to stop the kids getting them. We don't need more.
First, that's easily enough to identify you from biometric data, and it's naive to assume it won't be resold. Second, I kept getting asked for ID into my 40s because I looked young. People don't all age in the same way, so this system will fail for people at the tails of a normal distribution - some 15 year olds will easily pass for 25 and vice versa.
a convenient record of your face is all we need
I believe if you are a "minor" then you can go the post-a-selfy route.
I could imagine it ending with a court ruling that people are responsible to protect their own personal documents which... yeah, that would muddy the waters in a world where every website expects to see your ID.
That's not just the plan - that's what's already legally required in many US states.
These laws were introduced by the explicitly religious right-wing groups like Exodus Cry and Morality in Media, as ways to de facto outlaw pornography (in their own words). They've since been laundered into the mainstream so the general public is unaware of the root cause.
If you are going to implement age controls, you should implement a ban on underage influencers as well.
I bet there is a 15 year-old much smarter than me making political videos and I wouldn’t necessarily want them to be forced to stop. What if they’re on my “team”! ;) (I kid)
Recalling how we had lots of political debates in high school: if some of those kids made videos and got really popular, and the law made them stop, they would have been incentivized to vote $responsibleParty out.
(Socials bad for kids though maybe they could selfhost their monologues instead)
Its not about intelligence. Else a whole lot of over-age-of-majority wouldn't pass either.
Theres also no old-age cutoff, when their mental faculties significantly decline.
Yeah, the voting majority keeps 'under age' from voting. But at least in the USA, we have children as young as 11 being tried as adults but with none of the benefits.
—
After posting, I questioned whether political speech is special. Like should fifteen-year-olds who love film be able to make videos about them and get lots of followers… but I couldn’t be thought police. So maybe-
The platform just has to be designed non-addictively.
Is this accurate?: In reality, Facebook was so powerful the regulators could never make them stop at any turn. Now that they finally got sued big time, we finally educated ourselves enough as constituents to raise enough of a stink to trigger straight up bans. (educated ourselves, or politicians legislate based how bad headlines are, or it was so egregious it genuinely ticked them off… …)
Anyone who has hone so far as to become an influencer is already a lost cause. No law could save them.
That just makes it even worse, why deprive the younger generation of one of the few remaining methods they have to make a decent income? We should be encouraging youth entrepreneurship, not making them spend even longer in classrooms learning things that LLMs will do better than them.
Children do not need, nor are they entitled to, any kind of "freedom" to work for a living.
In the weekends they can stock shelves, deliver pizza, deliver newspapers, wash dishes, babysitting, feed animals or other typical jobs for children in the age range of 12 to 16.
Why? Presumably so they can go to college and get a high paying job that may not exist in 10 years? The direction we give kids coming up always seems to lag behind reality by 10 or 20 years. Perhaps we shouldn't stand in the way of the new generation figuring things out for themselves in this brave new world. The old playbooks to a solid middle class life are increasingly outdated.
My nieces and nephews really don't know what they are going to do in their futures because so much is uncertain right now.
If it feels like a longshot to expect normal 9-5 office jobs to be around in 5 years, and it's also a longshot being an influencer, then why not go for the influencer thing?
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/13/california-advances...
Separately I still don't fully agree with concerns raised regarding social media and identification for everyone. Bots, people who are online just stirring up trouble, &c. are causing pretty significant challenges and problems for society. If you spew a bunch of racist stuff for example I think people deserve to know who you are.
And you know we do this all the time. Folks want gun registries and things like that (and I agree, as a matter of practice, but not principal) so I'm not sure why we're ok with that form of requiring identification to exercise your rights and against this one other than political priorities.
Would you vote for that? Prove who you are to visit this website? Would you do it to access Hacker News? Your newspaper?
Didn’t think so.
Responsible parents don't have separate OS accounts for their children.
And porn companies should always be held responsible for not doing their due diligence and freely distributing porn to minors. Which is already illegal in teh US and most places.
Shall we just abolish all laws? None of them have any effect whatsoever, if they are even slightly imperfect... by your rule.
My question is: are digital age verifications the best way to protect kids from harmfull effects of pornography? And my worry is: what unwanted side-effects will age verification have for our society as a whole.
Bad: some still entertain the idea that we should do age verification using some sort of crypto primitives
There is no reason for age verification at all.
I am from the goatse generation. Rotten.com. steakandcheese. Horrific stuff tbh, I mostly stayed away from it, and I didn't need a helicopter government to protect me from it.
The moment you accept the narrative that kids need to be protected from the Internet you have already lost.
You've already condemned those kids to a life of slavery. So much for protecting them.
What we need is not online verification, but a competent government that does its existing job well.
Who's been arrested over the Epstein files? Who is protecting those kids?
No one.
That same government wants to "protect" your kids by KYCing everyone.
Give me a break.
At some point you'll realize the contradiction in not trusting these "multi-billion-dollar businesses" to the point that you are risking enslaving humanity and "dying on this hill" and yet at the same time trusting those same businesses to implement this dystopian system in a privacy-preserving way.
When that realization hits, it will be a loud sound, possibly heard by nearby telepaths.
People should not be able to misrepresent themselves on the internet, it may have been safe in low volumes but it is scary now and will be outright dangerous as a modality in the hands of AI agents. If you think teen mental health is bad now, wait until social media campaign capabilities previously only available to nation states fall into the hands of ordinary school bullies.
Maybe age verification isn't the way to mitigate this obvious risk, but there has to be something that can be done to stop rampant sockpuppeting.
> Every website. Every platform. Every app. Every service. Your children will never know what it was like to think freely online. They will never explore ideas anonymously. They will never question authority without it being logged in their permanent profile. They will never speak freely without fear that every word will be used...
No. Nobody's proposing you need to verify your identity to read articles on the New York Times or Wikipedia or political blogs. And nobody is proposing you need to verify your identity to leave comments on a news article or blog post. And any proposed law around that would run into massive first-amendment constitutional hurdles. It would be struck down easily.
There's always going to be a spectrum of websites that range from open and anonymous (like news and political discussion) to strongly identity-verified (like online banking). I don't like online age verification for particular sites, but at the same time I think it's completely misleading to see it as this slippery slope to a world where anonymous speech no longer exists.
We can have reasoned arguments around how people's usage of sites is tracked and how to prevent that, without making this about free speech and "the hill to die on".
The author has said a lot about what kind of future awaits with mass surveillance and AI, but I believe it’s not enough. Technofascism Is not that far away.
Saw it with the UK laws. It just gets rammed through. Whether it’s ignorance, malice, hidden force, a desire for surveillance state, genuine concern for children - doesn’t matter, the forces in favour are substantially more and seemingly motivated to try over and over until it sticks.
Much like brexit or for that matter trump reelection I just don’t have much faith in wisdom of the democratic collective consensus anymore and I don’t think it’ll get any better in an AI misinformation echo chamber world. Onwards into dystopia
Exceeding gloomy take I know
Took forever to get a response and likely achieved little, but to their credit the response wasn't entirely canned and did at least give the impression that they understood what I'm saying
I find it disgusting that most laws today are based on creating a perfect world instead of addressing harms in the least intrusive way. There is no balancing of interests, even when they state that there are. Every side complains about the others and potential future abuses, except when it is their plan. Nobody tries to design the law with a devil's advocate perspective to make as effective as reasonably possible (not perfect!) while limiting overreach.
The real problem is the pursuit of perfection. A perfect world does not exist, nor will it ever (laws of nature, physics, etc). One person's view of perfect is not the same as another's. We've lost the capacity for legislative empathy through are impatience and self importance. It's no longer about restricting government and providing people with rights. It's about how we can use government to shove the desires of a majority or plurality onto the total population.
There are ways to do age verification with reasonable anonymity, but they aren't perfect and can create underground markets (see gaming in China). At a certain point, we need to step back and put the responsibilities where they belong - with parents, instead of causing massive negative externalities on everyone else.
Yeah, yeah, but the children...
Kids should not be able/allowed to buy/use devices that are dangerous for them
But the device itself should not care at the fallacious idea “it might be able to”
Of course, it's probably also been coopted by the neverending stream of nanny-state political power grabs in both the US and EU.
Evident when the fight against "hate" was suddenly everywhere, and also during covid.
Private entities being frontrunners in AI Fear either means that these companies have too much unchecked power or that they have are covert instruments of governments.
When you set up kids devices in your family they ask you to provide the birthday anyway.
I’m keen to see the arguments against this.
It is easy to defend on the motte hill (protection of children, protection against abuse and heinous crimes), and easy to expand and farm on the bailey (universal surveillance, mass data collection, and the erosion of privacy).
The Cashier Standard – Age Verification Without Surveillance
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47809795
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/7fe74381-a683-4f49-9c2b-1...
Did aliens land in multiple states already? Strawman deflections aside, scanning is the natural evolution and has already happened across multiple kinds of exchange (money markers, various ids, various phone apps, etc). Government issue has a benefit of an independent verification system. It's super expensive for various government agencies to integrate into businesses. Constituents and businesses don't want that, leading to a much more comfortable adversarial relationship, imo.
It doesn't have to be perfect.
Nobody who understands how adversarial systems like this work is seriously expecting a 100% flawless performance of blocking every single minor and accepting every single adult, the question is how much risk is acceptable, and the risks posed by this system are acceptable for alcohol, cigarettes, and other adult items that can arguably pose much more acute risk of serious injury or bodily harm to kids.
1) the cards can just be re-sold which creates a black market and defeats the "cashier physically saw the person buying the card" angle
2) nickle and dimes people for simply browsing the internet (verification can dystopia anyone?)
3) related to #2, it creates winners in the private sector since presumably you need central authorities handing out these codes
I abhor the idea of digital ID verification, but if we're going to do it, let's not create a web of new problems while we're at it.
I imagine this could be done with appropriate zero-knowledge measures so that the combination of Alice's age token and Bob's private key creates a capability to exercise the option, but without the service (e.g. a social media site) knowing that the token belongs to Alice, and without the ID provider (e.g. the state) knowing that Bob was the one who exercised it.
While honest customers have no reason to make use of this option, if Alice blindly sells her tokens to anybody willing to pay, there's bound to be some trolls out there who will do it just for the laughs.
This is far from a perfect system since a dishonest site could also make use of the option. But it theoretically works without revealing anybody's identity (unless the option is used, and then only if the service and the ID provider collude).
Second - The codes would be priced on the order of magnitude of pennies per verification - think 10 cents or less, accessible even to low / fixed income folks without really making a dent in their budget.
Third - the proposal explicitly mentions a nonprofit running it as an option, and the idea would be that law codifies the method to be approved, not a specific vendor, so competitive markets could emerge, too. Would you argue that restrictions on the sale of alcohol are creating artificial winners in the private sector of alcohol manufacturing?
I don't think it applies, the difference is that codes are digital and can be sold over the internet, anonymously, in a scallable manner.
I still like this solution because all the solutions I've seen have flaws and this one being so easy to explain makes it great to campaign for.
Second, it doesn't matter what it costs, it's inconvenient and I already spent time (possibly money too) obtaining a government ID... on top of a theoretical mandate that says I need to show the ID on a bunch of websites.
Third, I'm not sure I follow your point on alcohol restrictions creating winners? The non-profit idea could potentially be good, but I'm not hopeful that real world legislation would be crafted that way.
EDIT: also more on #1 and "severe consequences" for re-selling... yes that's exactly what we want to avoid: creating more reasons to put people in prison and a bigger burden on law enforcement and the court system.
Um, no? iOS is doing age verification just by your credit card. I never saw people all that upset about giving their credit card info to their phone wallet app or even to a bunch of websites.
I would say it's not really an ID no, which is the point. The post is claiming that a digital ID is necessary for age verification, but clearly it isn't.
The reason we are up shit creek is because large companies didn't want to spend 2-5% of profits on decent editorial controls to stop bad actors making money from bending societal red lines (ie pile ons, snuff videos, the spectrum of grift, culture of abusing the "other side")
They also didn't want to stop the "viral" factor that allows their networks to grow so fucking fast.
This isn't really about freedom of speech, its about large media companies not wanting to take responsibility for their own shit.
meta desperately want kids to sign up. There are no penalties for them pushing shit on them. If an FCC registered corp had done half the shit facebook did, they'd have been kicked off air and restructured.
So frankly its too fucking late. Meta, google and tiktok will still find ways to push low quality rage bate to all of us, and divide us all for advertising revenue.
This one-sided view has some good points, but for goodness sake, don't pretend that the alternative has no downsides.
State your well reasoned opinion where you have considered the facts. Or just say you are in support of this openly.
All it does is covertly promote the idea by presenting it as reasonable and on an equal level to the other idea. While at the same time being able to shut down debate, by pretending they don't actually think that.
Anybody can say something like "but what about the good side of the African slave trade" but they will be debated and the argument shut down if they present it as their actual argument and engage in good faith with the comments. Using the devil's advocate technique is an extremely useful way to argue in bad faith, anonymously on the Internet.
Critique of the author's style is fine. An opposing view should honestly be presented as such.
Regardless how stupid this argument is, rags will always pounce on it.
This is just a dirty trick of the creeps to make the resistance harder.
It's the same with tough on crime. "What, you want criminals to keep getting away with it?!"
I would substitute "deeply" for "superficially". Like, if my parents found some way to prohibit porn when I was an adolescent, I wouldn't say they cared deeply about me. I would say they were misguided and authoritary. The "care deeply" idea you are putting forward is just trying to distil whatever societal norm currently is into the youngs.
Protect the children refers to a type of property, not a type of human.
What is fascinating is to see how governments ALL fall for it. There is zero resistance. This is fascinating to me. It shows how little real effort is necessary once you have the lobbyists in place. Kind of scary to witness too.
It is an apartheid system. All apartheid slavery systems will eventually die, so age sniffing will die too. But it will most likely be a long fight as more and more money will be invested by crazy corporations such as Palantir and others.
The whole "debate" is already not logical by the way. Let's for a moment assume the "but but but the kids!" is a real argument rather than a strawman argument, which it is. Ok so ... I am a "concerned parent", for the sake of discussion. I have three young kids. I am not a tech nerd. The kids see "unfitting content" on the antisocial media such as facebook and what not. So, what do I do? Well ... they have a smartphone? Aha, so ... I am not so concerned? Having no smartphone is no option? Ok so ... I say they can have a smartphone, but they may not use antisocial media. Ok. First - in any free society, is it acceptable that this kind of censorship is done on ALL kids? What if I, as a parent, do not agree with this? Well, tough luck - the laws force you into the age sniffing routine suddenly. But, even those parents who want the state to act as totalitarian: why would I want to hand over control to ANY politician for that matter? That makes no sense to me. I am aware that some parents may think differently, but do all parents think like that, even IF they buy into the "we protect the children" lie? I don't want ANY information from ANY of my computers to go into private hands here. So the whole argument already makes zero sense from the get go.
Of course those who know how things work, they know that this is the build up towards identifying everyone on the world wide web at all times AND to make access to information conditional, e. g. if the state does not know you, you can not access information. Aka a passport system for the www. Built right into the operating system too. Windows already complied. MacOSX too. The battle for Linux will be interesting; it may be some hybrid situation, like systemd. And the systemd distributions will all succumb to age sniffing, courtesy of Poettering "this is really harmless if we store your age in the database, just trust me".
You're not qualified to say that because you aren't a proponent of age verification. That's just imputing motives.
As a proponent of age verification and can tell you it's absolutely about protecting kid from damaging services like porn. It's a common sense control and that's why it has bi-partisan support in the US during a time where there is nearly 0 bi partisan support.
People will show what they are made of.
The writing style of the author is very annoying.
> free to change at any time (so not an "identity" in any way)
I'm free to change my name at any time, is my name not considered a part of my identity?
> I'm free to change my name at any time, is my name not considered a part of my identity?
You can change your name to conceal elements of your identity just like you could wear clothes that cover your skin color. So sure, you can hide elements of your identity but changing your name won't change your family history or ethnicity.
Growing up in a Republican family might be an identity but producing lots of blogs, videos, and commercial products within the right wing prepper lifestyle is not an identity. Just do a little research thanks
I have... (???)
> Just do a little research thanks
Just have an open mind thanks
As a corollary, I also want to know if a project posted here is predominantly vibe-coded, since that to me is a signal that it may be of lower quality, have fewer edge cases worked out, and is more likely to be abandoned in the near future.
We don't have to live like this. We don't have to accept it. We don't have to upvote it even if we agree (as I do) with the explicit point. The medium is the message, and the message that this poster is putting out here is that online age verification isn't actually worth getting that worked up about.
HN's guidelines were written under the assumption that submitted articles about [thing] would be written by people who care about [thing] and made a good faith effort to write something interesting about [thing], so it's only fair that any comments would be expected to respect the author's effort and discuss the article in equally good faith.
This assumption completely falls apart when you add AI generated submissions into the mix. If the "author" didn't care and thus couldn't be bothered to write about [thing] themselves, choosing to instead outsource that work to an LLM while they supposedly did something they deemed more valuable with the time they would've spent writing, then why should commenters be expected to dedicate more effort into their discussion of the article than the author dedicated to writing it? It's a bit unfair towards the commenters, don't you think?
Just a hunch, but it may have something to with the fact that basically every article on this site is AI.
AI didn't get its tropes and tics ex nihilo. Some people just write in a way that "smells" like AI to others.
> Virtue signalling is a pejorative neologism for the expression of a moral viewpoint with the intent of communicating good character, frequently used to suggest hypocrisy.
What virtue am I signalling and what hypocrisy am I trying to hide?
(It's an unenforceable joke, right? There's no way I'm bound by anything here other than maybe the site ToS.)
> How would it read?
Sounds like you don't really care for this idea, so maybe just have Claude write it for you.
It's also ironic that this guy is so adamant about protecting the children on xitter. It's like preaching against racism on 4chan.
The Internet pretty much runs our lives now, so: I do.
Lots of things require having Internet access, an email address, being able to visit a website, coordinate with others on a Facebook page for a local group, etc.
No one requires me to buy a pack of cigarettes to register for classes, pay bills, submit something to the government, etc.
States have broad power to do what is being feared in the thread and haven’t already and to think that they’re waiting for this final piece of the puzzle to enact some insane regime is laughable. They could do that right now without the internet at all.
Social media is probably not healthy and kids should probably not be on social media. Age verification and age limits for social media will be a good thing for kids.
Instead of fear mongering, finding a middle ground, like governments adding some rules and protections on how this information or system is used is probably a better response.
I might be in the minority, but I think incorporating an identity layer into the internet itself should happen with the right protections for users and should have happened at the beginning of the net and is probably a result of lack of foresight by the creators of ARPANET.
> Our freedom is already being eroded, saying that it is being eroded more is just fear mongering.
> They want to hurt you, instead of fear mongering, find a middle ground where they're hurting you differently.
Or maybe you aren't being litteral and are just saying that what children see and hear has no influence on their developmemt. Either way, total bullshit.
More generally you're committing I believe two separate fallacies of ambiguity? Like one in going from the institution of social media to its reification in the form of specific websites, and then a second fallacy when you go from the specific websites to all websites in general? Like if you said "Gun ownership is not a thing at all. Gun ownership is a piece of metal. Pieces of metal cannot be healthy or unhealthy." OK but, you owning a gun is known in the scientific literature to significantly correlated with a bunch of very adverse health effects for you, such as you dying by suicide or you dying from spousal violence or your protracted grief and wasting away because your child accidentally killed themselves. Like to say that it's impossible for the institution to have adverse health effects because we can situate the objects of that institution into a broader category which doesn't sound so harmful, is frankly messed up.
[1]: Bernadette & Headley-Johnson, "The Impact of Social Media on Health Behaviors, a Systematic Review" (2025) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12608964/ - the content you consume can promote healthy or unhealthy behaviors
[2]: Lledo & Alvarez-Galvez, "Prevalence of Health Misinformation on Social Media: Systematic Review" (2021) https://www.jmir.org/2021/1/E17187/ is notable not just for its content but also like a thousand papers that cite it getting into all of the weeds of health influencers sharing misinformation to make a buck
[3]: Sun & Chao, "Exploring the influence of excessive social media use on academic performance through media multitasking and attention problems" (2024) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10639-024-12811-y was a study of a reasonably large cohort showing correlations between social media usage and particular forms of multitasking that inhibit academic performance -- more generally there's broad anecdata that the current "endless scrolling constant dopamine hits" model that social media gravitates to, produces kids that are "out of control" with aggressive and attentional difficulties -- see Kazmi et al. "Effects of Excessive Social Media Use on Neurotransmitter Levels and Mental Health" (2025) (PDF warning - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sharique-Ahmad-2/public...) for more on the actual literature that has probed those questions
[4]: The APA has a whole "Health advisory on social media use in adolesence" https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advi... which is pretty even-handed about "these parts of social media are acceptable, those parts can maybe even be downright good -- but here are the papers that say that for adolescents, it can mess with their sleep, it can expose them to cyberhate content that measurably promotes anxiety and depression, it has been measured to promote disordered eating if they use it for social comparison..."
> If you want the best for your children, you must stop online age verification.
> Your children are being targeted. The infrastructure being built under the cover of child safety is designed to enslave them for the rest of their lives.
Jumped the shark on that one, and really off-color. I'm less inclined to listen to guy, not because of his actual points, but because of how unreasonable he sounds when articulating them. A great lesson in how not to do rhetoric.
"Your children will never know what it was like to think freely online. They will never explore ideas anonymously. They will never question authority without it being logged in their permanent profile. They will never speak freely without fear that every word will be used against them.
They will grow up in a digital cage. And you will have to tell them you saw it being built and did not stop it when you had the chance."
So I'm with the author on this one. Under the cover of child safety, digital IDs will cage us (or at least children entering the verification age), and it will probably never be rolled back.
Would that be such a bad thing? Frankly I would welcome a world in which kids are not using Instagram or TikTok. They don’t have to live in a cage if we don’t let them in the cage.
Personally, my plan is that when age verification laws get passed, every service that requires ID is a service I stop using. And I expect my life to be better for it!
Let’s take a basic example: Wikipedia, which hosts pornography, easily could be a target of such legislation. Now there is infrastructure in place to know when you read about “Criticisms of policy X” and maybe it’s handled safely or maybe it’s handed directly to the government.
What about news? It’s a hop skip and leap from “age verify pornography with ID” to “age verify content about sexual abuse or violence.” Now the infrastructure is in place to see the alt-news criticisms you read.
Twitch or YouTube wouldn’t even wait to comply, ID verification is something that these corporations are already perfectly fine with. Now, you watching a history of your government’s crimes is a potentially tracked red flag that you’re a dissident to be watched.
Do you think if this sort of legislation is enacted, it will stop at large websites? It will be an excuse used by the government and supported by big tech firms to shut down any small websites which don’t comply. After all, Google, MS, et al, they would rather that your entire concept of the internet start and end in a service they control.
But will your friends and family opt out? Their phones are always listening. They can just as easily listen to you, even if you go to great pains not to expose yourself to technology. They'll make a shadow profile of any avoidant user whether they want it or not.
Bullshit. These are all-encompassing monopolies and government services. More likely, they'll ban you and you'll end up having to go to court out of desperation to demand that they service you.
This is very limited thinking. If you lacked this sort of imagination 20 years ago, you wouldn't have been able to predict today.
> Frankly I would welcome a world in which kids are not using Instagram or TikTok.
This is the sort of passive reactionary nonsense that causes the danger that we're in. Everything isn't something to give up lightly, even if you think that it will force your neighbor to turn his music down, or get rid of bad reality television. I don't like kids on social media either. I don't like adults on it. I think kids are suffering more from surveillance than from TikTok.
The time to worry about not having a digital cage was quite awhile ago. Instead tech people pushed Chrome and Android and Gmail and ads onto us.
Are you not alarmed at the possibility that a person's network access could be cut arbitrarily and at-will?
Curious about via Google Chrome versus not
1: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Edit: yes it is hyperbolic and ridiculous to suggest people will be "enslaved" because they don't have access to the internet. Do you realize that makes everybody who grew up in the 90s or earlier a "slave"?
He’s 100% correct.
For a start, child are parents responsibility, and the state should stay out of that as much as reasonably possible.
Nothing more would need to me said on the matter if that’s as far as it went, but it isn’t.
There can be no free speech if the state can imprison you for what you say, and they know everything you say.
I dropped the word ‘online’ from the above paragraph, because on is the real world. Touch grass, but there’s no way online isn’t real. Are these words not real simple because I telegraphed them to you?
That’s not a world I want to live in.
And not distributing porn to children is a porn company's responsibility.
You are repeating a very common talking point but its not a good one.
Age verification laws make it possible to hold services providers liable for breaking the law (it's already illegal to distribute porn to minors in many places, like the US).
It's both true and completely irrelevant that parents should do a better job protecting their children from harmful services online.
Yes
That's why stores let kids buy alcohol and tobacco, of course, because no responsible parent would let them buy that, right?
That's why any kid can go watch any movie in the cinema right?
Yes it's the parents responsibilities. Do you think a middle class single mother has the resources to keep their kids entertained and out of social media for the whole day?
The problem with age verification is 100% the lack of anonymity in its implementation (which I do agree has ulterior motives) - but honestly not the age check in itself
Yes. At least in the U.S., the federal government does not regulate that, it is voluntary by the MPA (formerly MPAA) and theaters. A kid can buy a ticket for a PG movie and walk into an R-rated movie.
> Do you think a middle class single mother has the resources to keep their kids entertained and out of social media for the whole day?
Mine did. While not everyone has a backyard, things like pencils, papers, books, used toys, etc can be found inexpensively or for free.
You want to force us to compromise when we were minding our own goddamn business.
If parents suck at parenting, they will suffer.
If porn companies distribute porn to minors, which is illegal in many places such as the US, they will not suffer. Unless you start holding them accountable.
I haven't heard too many people say these extreme-sounding, yet at least arguably true points out loud.
Someone should be saying them, and the fact that it's not your particular cup of tea may not be the biggest issue here.
Make no mistake you are engaging in your own form of rhetoric when you respond like this. You are in effect moving the discussion away from the subject at hand, and towards the perceived faults in the author’s communication style. This is a rhetorical slight of hand and it’s highly disingenuous.
If I were the author of the post, I'd value the feedback.
It's important to remember that they're targeting your children. You grew up with freedom from surveillance and constant identification. You were able to communicate anonymously and without the content of your speech being sold to Walmart and the cops. They are putting in effort to make sure that your children will never have that reality as a reference point. The idea of the government and a dozen corporations not knowing everything that they are doing at all times, and not using and selling that information freely, will sound like the ramblings of a delusional old fool.
It's important that you engage with that. Denial is not something to brag about.
It seems reasonable to me to hold porn companies responsible for distributing porn to minors.
I can see why it's unfortunate but the idea posited that that it's somehow illegal in the US is ridiculous. You have no right to watch porn anonymously at the expense of holding porn companies liable for distributing porn to minors.
Internet 1.0 was largely read only, ephemeral, or decentralized. Chat rooms, IRC, personal webpages, etc. There was anonymity and there were not age restricted services.
Internet 2.0 introduced age restricted services and the enforcement lagged. The enforcement is now catching up. You can still do all the Internet 1.0 things anonymously but you can no longer gamble online as a 14 year old and hopefully soon you wont be able to watch porn either.
The point of this is not to verify age really. It is to verify identity. There's no way to prove someone is some age without presenting a legal ID.
Also, it's not just porn, facebook, online gambling etc. It is the OS based on some bills. So ALL your activities.
There was porn before most everything on the web. Porn is also speech / art.
Anonymous access should be available for any website that wants to share their content on the Internet provided they have the rights to that content.
States that seek to limit that could make a legal argument that they have the right to limit access, but in the end it’s infringing speech. Worse, it’s unenforceable.
And yes, I would make the same arguments for people posting hateful shit or misinformation.