alt Hacker NewsSomething remarkable and unsettling is how the age verification debate has popped up almost simultaneously in the US, UK, and EU.
With the same logical fallacies. Pretty telling about how transnational lobbies and their interests work.
Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications.
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Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications.
Spoken as someone who probably hasn't used iOS/Mac parental controls. It is a hot buggy mess that randomly blocks whitelisted applications as well. We use it, but it is a constant pain. Also a lot of applications only work half, e.g., TV apps blocking off all content rather than only content that is not age-appropriate.
By the way, we were initially firm believers of not using parental controls at all, by limiting time and teaching kids about how to use devices in a healthy way. But a lot of apps (e.g. Roblox, YouTube Shorts) are made to be as addictive as crack, making it very hard for a still not fully developed brain to deal with it.
That said, I absolutely dislike the current lobby for age verification because the goal of Meta et al. seems to be to be to absolve themselves of any responsibility by moving verification to devices and to put up regulatory walls to make it more difficult for potential competitors to enter the market. It is regulatory capture.
This reddit thread¹ details thoroughly the connection to Meta (Facebook) and to a lesser extent Discord as being behind the push in the US.
1. https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...
I estimate we have two to three years in the English-speaking world to organize an effective lobby for the rights of the common man before changes to the speech environment and habitual methods of communication make it impossible. There's less than a year before the wave of lock-downs reaches normal internet users through announced policies like the Android software installation ban and through the growing effectiveness of algorithmic "Joy of TikTok"-style discussion selection, and one to two years after that before we run out of other avenues. The latter timeline could be too optimistic if the completion of the TPM-to-cloudflare chain of permission for desktop environments (steps had been made in the past but failed after public pushback) comes without a lot of advance notice. Don't forget - after each new constraint on the public, the next counter-reaction will be smaller, and the next change will be bigger or sooner.
It’s not if you’ve paid attention to political trends for the last 15 years.
Everything is happening at the same time in every country. It’s clearly being coordinated.
Personally I do not believe this is a solved problem. Technically maybe, in practice not at all.
It is quite a job juggling the controls of the different companies. Microsoft even has two, one for Xbox one for windows.
And then your child turns 13 and your only option is to take away the devices entirely.
Another thing already discussed is school provided hardware. I know the schools try, but it is usually one person against 300+ students trying to figure out how to game/hack the system. Eg there's no reasonable way where you can expect one person to maintain a YouTube channel whitelist.
I do agree that we might be solving this issue the wrong way, but there is a definitely a problem here.
> Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications.
This is absolutely not true.
Here in the UK schools are swarming with ipads and shit like that. They're given to primary school children because they're "more engaging". Children are supposed to practice their reading and even handwriting[1] on ipads. Naturally they're on youtube instead. It's really bad. As far as I can tell, private schools are even worse. Currently the only way that I know to escape this is homeschooling.
Saying "it's a solved problem" is incredibly dismissive to parents who do everything right in their homes, but then send their children to school and schools exposed their children in this way.
Saying that phrase in such a definitive manner caters to the interests of the companies who push these shit onto schools. Please stop saying it, it's harmful.
[1] leaving this reference here because I'm certain that people without school aged children won't believe this is actually true: https://www.letterjoin.co.uk/
It's part of a whole bundle of tightening censorship and increasing control in a pivot towards techno-feudalism, and militarization of society...
They don't like what happened to their PR for what they did in gaza and they want to get ahead of the curve and stop us from seeing what they are going to do in IRAN without their SPIN.
Its a poison pull to lay down the infrastructure for controlling narrative on the internet
Might want to explore “Agenda 2030”. I don’t know for certain if it applies to this specific issue. But it does hint at a coordinated effort to build a completely new framework for managing the human species through technology.
Seen today on fedi—
vx-underground • @vxunderground
“Yeah, so basically the current prevailing sch[*]zo internet theory is that Al nerds have destroyed the internet and created infinite spam.
The advertisement goons are now incapable of determining who is a bot and who is an actual human. The advertisement goons no longer want to pay as much to social media networks.
Social media networks, in full blown panic of losing potential revenue, decided to lobby governments saying "we gotta protect the kids! ID everyone to protect the kids from pedophiles!".
The social media networks know this doesn't really protect kids. But, it does two things (and a third accidentally).
1. They now can identify who is human and who is Al slop machine, or enough to appease the advertisement goons
2. Advertising to children is a general no-no from politicians, or something, so with ID verification they can say with confidence they're not advertising to children because it's been ID verification. Basically, they can weed out the children and focus on advertising to adults
3. The feds can now tell who is human and who is Al slop. This inadvertently helps them with tracking people and serving fresh daily dumps of propaganda, or whatever they want to do. It's a win-win-win for advertisers, social media networks, the government, and any business which does data collections.
It fucks over everyone else.
Chat, I'm not going to lie to you. This is an extremely good conspiracy sch[*]zo theory and 1 unironically believe it.”
Mar 13, 2026 • 11:33 PM UTC*
Same in Brazil. Economically and politically not nearly as important, but 250 million people affected by the same discoursem
It reaches far out, not just the West. China remains relatively immune. S. Korea and Japan immune to some degree. Russia, unfortunately, is not immune at all.
To be clear, I don't agree with these laws and think they are very much the wrong way to try to solve the problem.
But it is not a solved problem. From what I've seen parental control software is generally pretty terrible. But this age verification stuff isn't really helpful.
Not sure when exactly that happen but decade years ago or so, people were sharing this spoofed infographic in which the Internet was a cable tv-like service where you'd pick big media sites you'd subscribe to, IPTV/streaming, optional secondary sites - all of this curated and safe, free of any dangers. No lewd content whatsoever.
And honestly, I can't get rid of the feeling that this is where we're heading into. These are last years of the wild Internet and its next iteration will be passive and probably in 99% generated corporate safe slop.
Eshittification (by Cory Doctorov) is a shitty book but it does explain how that dynamic works.
Meta, a multi-national corporation, seems to be behind all of these.
See:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...
https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rsn1tm/it_a...
They all copy each other. Also some of it was set off by the book, Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation.
> Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications.
Doesn't even seem close, but ok.
Indeed. It is too suspicious how legislation gets cross-nation synced.
A few get very rich right now. Pays well to be a lobbyist.
> Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications.
This is just the ruse, the carrot on the stick. They hate us for our freedom.
It’s worse than you think. It’s not even coordinated by someone in the background — it’s just the emergent overton window thanks to technology, see:
https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...
So, firstly, before I dive into your comment; about the topic above, this is the result of a terrible headline gone wrong in a single state in the US. The language never required any changes to Linux, or Windows, or any other operating system, for that matter.
Someone read the text, and made a clickbaity headline, and it went viral. then, another state made a similar bill, and it went viral again.Age verification isn't coming to Linux any time soon, and no, you aren't breaking any laws by either developing for, and/or using Linux if you are a U.S. citizen. It is literally illegal to pass a law like that thanks to the constitution. Outside the U.S.? well depending on the country, you likely experienced something better or worse, Regardless...
It is pretty remarkable that it [age verification] has popped up in multiple countries at once. It is almost as though a certain few billionaires are interested in suppressing speech.I wonder who those folks might be? ;)
The folks trying to shut down the masses via stuff like this should probably read some history, because that never works out...like ever. Doing the same thing over and over again won't make it work. It won't work this time either.
> Something remarkable and unsettling is how the age verification debate has popped up almost simultaneously in the US, UK, and EU.
nothing strange about that. You have higher interests in control of the (national) governments in several countries, planning things at once. This is what you see as a result. It certainly did not involve democracy.
Eh, it really isn’t that surprising. “Activists” in any country are quick to capitalize on a news cycle. You also missed AU. If you squint you would realize that they are all English speaking (or use English as a common exchange language)
Because it's manufactured consent and propaganda driven by deep pockets and ideologues. It was rammed through by the elites.
It’s not a solved problem at all. Your take is very libertarian, which I personally sympathize with, but if we’re being honest it doesn’t align with reality.
The truth is, there are a lot of bad parents that are, for various reasons, unable to perform these parental duties.
We’ve always restricted children from accessing certain things without relying solely on their parent’s abilities or discretion.
I’m strongly in favour in giving parents as much control as possible. That doesn’t negate the fact that the vast majority of children, for example, currently have completely unrestricted access to hardcore pornography.
Shrugging it off, proclaiming it’s a parental responsibility, doesn’t solve the real world problem.
Previous to the internet we didn’t allow free unrestricted distribution of pornography to children. We stepped in as a society and said, no actually if you’re selling that… fine, but you need to verify the age of the customer.
Ask Zuck about it.
And LATAM probably soon to follow, specially Argentina with Milei and now Chile with their new right wing president
it worked with p(l)andemics, why it wouldn't with online verification? they always come with some noble reason how to force something down the population throat and majority still falls for it
heck I don't see everyone boycotting and embarging US/Israel for their aggression against Iran, because they came up with good story once again, cough...Iraq WMD...cough
That's what I've been thinking this whole time.
If you wanna surveil your children, surveil your own fucking children. You have no say in other people's lives.
Now, as for solutions, it's also simple but unpopular. People shouldn't be so rich they have transnational power. All this is happening because we let a tiny group of mostly anti-social people get so much money the only way they can spend it is this kind of BS.
People discuss policies all the time, and take inspiration from jurisdictions where those policies /appear/ to be implemented and "working"
The idea that there is an age requirement (for certain content) has been around for a very long time (Facebook, for example has a no under 13s rule in their T&Cs, many porn sites have a 18 years or older declaration before allowing access, and so on)
Australia has recently implemented law(s) that take the next step forward, and the other countries in the world that have been wanting something similar are seeing that, seeing that there haven't blowback from corporations or voters that makes the idea of the law unpalatable, and thinking that they too can implement laws that work in similar ways.
If you actually pay attention to global politics you will see that this sort of behaviour occurs fairly regularly (look, for example, and the legalisationg of homosexual marriage, there was a law legalising it in the Netherlands in 2001, then Belgium did similar in 2003... and so on as more countries saw that their own voters were amenable to the idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_same-sex_marri...)
edit: There's no grand conspiracy at play
Another example is the cannabis use laws, cannabis was heavily criminalised in the 70s, there was pressure from the USA for other countries to follow suit.
BUT from the early 2010s several states of the USA legalised recreational use - this has also bought the debate back to the fore for many countries, with reassessments and changes occuring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cannabis_by_U.S._j...
> how the age verification debate has popped up almost simultaneously in the US, UK, and EU
It's because of a mix of Barroness Kidron's lobbying [0] and companies trying to meet legislators halfway [1] due to latent legislative anger due to disinformation incidents that arose during the 2016 election, January 6th, January 8th in Brazil, the New Caledonia unrest, and a couple others.
Civil and digital libertarianism is not a mainstream view outside of a subset of techies.
Sadly, building and deploy a truly private and OSS authentication service was not on the radar in the early 2010s - that would have staved off the current iteration.
[0] - https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/14/british-baroness-on...
[1] - https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2025/11/exclusive...
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Different people observed the same problem at the same time, and came to similar conclusions about how to solve it.
This is literally about making parental control applications work better. Nothing in the law requires a child setting up their own system to set their real age. It just lets a parent creating a limited account for a child.
I'm completely baffled why anyone still engages with the "official" framing around this. Obviously, it's not for protecting children. Obviously, it's a technocratic trojan horse for increasing surveillance capabilities on digital systems. This is so cynically anti-democratic that they obfuscate the real purpose, don't even bother to make it plausible, and everyone is left talking about how "awful it is" that it's already legislated.
I swear to God, if someone replies to this talking about how we need to protect the children I'm going to start requiring "age verification" from commenters, and I'll do a little background check to find out w̵h̵e̵r̵e̵ ̵t̵h̵e̵y̵ ̵l̵i̵v̵e̵ if they're over 18.