Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin. People struggle to consider the second-, third-, and nth-order effects of anything so asking them to consider what else might happen if we bring in laws and technical mechanisms to 'protect the children' is unfortunately too a big leap for a lot of them. Most people are bad at spotting causal links between parts of a system, and people who are good at it exploit that.

Age verification is just one part of this crackdown.

Device attestation is another - making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system and apps linked to your ID.

It gives a new spin to:

> Everything you say CAN and WILL be used against you.

Especially when what you said has already been recorded and tied to your identity before you faced the authorities.

Edit: from last week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632269

Cory Doctorow had a very profound talk about it very long time ago (10+years).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

As the internet become the place where people do a lot of things, no government (and especially no security services) will be able to keep themselves from trying to control it or at least monitor it. And with the new LLM features they can automatically do much more than before.

Human nature is a constant and when the government sees an easy way to enforce something, many more bureaucrats will try to do it.

In the intel industry, it is known that metadata is more or less enough to identify people. That's state/military intel. Several countries have already implemented bulk acquisition / collection of data that "crosses the borders", which is a ridiculous concept.

If you're located in, say, Norway - and send someone who is also located in Norway a message via Messenger, there's a good likelihood that message will go to some foreign located Meta server, and back to Norway.

When this was being implemented, there was some noise and protests from experts, but that's about it. For the general population it went quietly and without notice.

This is already happening if you want to visit the US. Customs officers will look at your social media accounts to make sure you are compliant.

I don't like age verification. However I'm not concerned about it.

The internet needs new spaces that are more decentralized and less in bed with governments.

We already lost our freedom when we agreed to move from IRC to Discord, from phpBB to Reddit, etc.

The teenagers who are blocked from mainstream social media will deliver us new free online spaces that are better than what they're blocked from.

If you look at how workers are mistreated in authoritarian corporations and how some people say it is perfectly fine because you get paid a lot of money to be used and abused, I can't imagine what a reality like this would look like. It does not stop with what you post online, we still can't really tell how our phones know about stuff we talk about irl to serve ads.

This is a reminder to curate and prune all your past social media contribution, because when this goes thru, you KNOW they will apply it retroactively. You'd loathe to lose your cushy job over a moment of lucid honesty back in 2011.

I find myself in an odd predicament. For nearly all my life I would have seen all of this as an unconscionable anathema. But having watched what social media has done to our society, the tsunami of bullshit collapsing critical thought, science and reason I just don’t think civilisation can survive this without controls. Too many people are too gullible, too uncritical for it to survive without the state being able to curtail harmful speech at scale. Do I hate it? Absolutely. But I hate the alternative more. And I want the bounds of acceptable speech to be decided by my democratically elected government, not a bunch of American billionaires determined to burn society to the ground so they can pan the ashes for yet more gold.

If I say something illegal during a meeting, people will notice it and will report it to the police. Then I may get arrested or fined.

Why should it be different on the internet ? Provided we live in countries where freedom of speech is enacted.

Of course in Russia or china it's different but surely they already have tools like that.

The irony is AI already have more freedom of speech and maybe reach compared to humans in most "western democracies".

"The Carnival in Venice was first documented in 1296, with a proclamation by the Venetian Senate announcing a public festival the day before the start of Lent. Unquestionably one of the most well-known Carnival festivities in the world, the Carnival of Venice is rife with mystery, adventure, and conspiracy. The day served to break down barriers between people of different economic standings and religious beliefs. During the Renaissance, masked comic performers performed in Venice's piazzas."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_in_Italy#Venice

"The tradition of wearing masks seems to stem from the 13th century. During the ages the Venetians disguised themselves with mask whenever they thought necessary. It allowed them to escape from the rigid rules of the class hierarchy. All classes could mingle, men could be women, women could be men. It also led to unwanted behaviour, from throwing eggs filled with ink to all imaginable kinds of vulgarities. Masks made people unrecognisable, so they could not be prosecuted.

Near the end of the Republic, the right to wear masks in daily life was severely restricted. By the 18th century, it was limited to three months starting at December 26 and ending on the last day of Carnival, Shrove Tuesday. Masks were also used in ceremonies, eg. when ambassadors arrived and at the five ritual grand banquets offered each year to Venetian dignitaries by the doge. This resembles the Masquerade Balls during Carnival nowadays. Venetian noblemen and noblewomen wore a costume called a bautta consisting of a white mask (volto), a tricorn hat (tricorno), a hood worn under the hat (zendale) and a tabarro, a loose-fitting cloak. There were subtle differences between noble and non-noble (cittadini or popolani), and the popolani were known to wear more colorful, fun masks to festivities like the bull runs."

https://www.carnival-in-venice.eu/venetian-carnival-masks.ht...

My theory is that age verification is just another way to push human verification. These large tech companies need a way to verify a user is a real person and not an AI bot. Both for displaying ads to real users and cutting down on spam.

Nobody would support a "give away my anonymity online so I can be shown an ad for Coca Cola" bill. But it's easier to sell a law to boomers and lawmakers if you use the disguise of "It's for the children ." As if any of these companies care about the well being of children. See Meta confirming their platforms affect the mental health of children and doing nothing about it. Also platforms like TikTok and YouTube optimizing their algorithms for stealing user's attention spans.

Maybe it should be possible for a parent to set a child age in a device.

Everyone else can stay anonymous.

I look forward to hearing why that won't work and what problems it will cause.

"Don't let them win. Don't verify your age. Don't give up your identity. If you absolutely must, find one of the numerous age verification services and pay in Monero."

Better yet, how about - "call your representatives"?

Some nerds, for lack of a better term, think crypto and cryptography are the answers to every privacy problem. The only way to fix society and the law is by engaging with those things. Not sidestepping them with cryptography, an unscalable approach in any case.

I'm deeply pessimistic about the future. The only group competent enough to oppose identity verification has its head in the sand.

Age verification is an excuse to hide the fact that parents have become useless and should have their rights of becoming parents revoked.

If you ask any millenial, none of this bs existed during our time, parents wouldn't think twice to educate you, if you know you know haha

That statement is weird in itself because said parents are yesterday's millenial.

Add to that how companies and governments are trying to become a China. You cannot silence those that you don't know who they are.

Ohh did you say something a politician or a cop didn't like??? Now they can hunt you down and force you to delete the post or whatever.

Sci-fi movies are no longer just si-fi movies, it is easier than never to:

1. Know how you are and all the consequence behind that

2. Be a victim of identity theft. Look at how many millions of personal information including passports have been leaked into the dark web. In 2026, if you have the right skill and like doing the wrong thing, you can be anyone because their name, address, phone, photo, passporte, everything, is right there.

What gives me peace of mind is that by the time everything goes to shit, I am not longer in this world lmao haha

Point number 2 doesn't take that long and is largely automated.

This is the thing that so upsetting with the discourse. Privacy is already eroded, its just by private companies, not the state. All social networks have a gateway for law enforcement that allows getting extra details about users.

There is another gateway with ISPs to correlate IPs with end users.

In the USA you can just buy most of that info through brokers.

Sure, people who takes precautions it takes extra work, but for dave on facebook, its pretty automatic.

I really wish people would foccus on that bit, because the way to get privacy back is to get a handle on social media companies(and google). They are the ones who've eroded our privacy, and if we just say "Oooo age gating is bad mmkay" without a viable alternative, then we'll all get something worse.

The solution is to limit what social media companies can profit from, so _they_ can regulate what shit they put in front of kids eyes. They can totally do it (after all how much porn is actually hosted on youtube? its really really hard, because they put in place systems to stop it.)

You're right. Many countries use the protection of minors as an excuse, but in reality, they just want to strengthen the regulation of speech.

Right now, our identity is kinda tied to a string of letter (password). This password can technically be passed around, created and destroyed at will. Tomorrow, our identity is going to be tied to you as a person. So messages will be signed by YOU as a person.

Automated fines, like traffic radar control for free speech, will also become a norm as they won't be able to put everyone in jail. But I'm not sure the liberal anarcho-tyranny power will be indefinitely immutable. Speech control might be one their last try to keep control in the west. They will crumble like soviet union.

> These "age verification" laws are - by design - identity attribution systems. They attribute digital identities (accounts) to physical identities (SSN, ID, etc..). This is government's ideal situation, the ability to quickly (automatically?) get identifying information about inconvenient people regardless if they're a criminal or not.

I'll call it out because your article doesn't, but does reference Australia. Here our eSafety commissioner has set the requirements such that the use of Government ID for verification must not be the only option.

There are other age verification technologies that do not assign identity but use other means as a method to identify age. For example, when our ban came into play I wasn't all of a sudden required to offer my ID.

The bad thing about this:

Can you trust future governments to respect "Nulla poena sine lege"?

I feel we are preaching to the choir here. How do we get this message out to the wider population when it's being corralled so much?

I think this Cloudflare business ties into it, although it is masquerading as bot protection.

The author made an assertive statement without any hint of rhetoric, reasoning, historical parallel, evidence, legislative example etc.

It's also a huge gift to the very surveillance capitalists they're pretending to protect children from. It de-anonymizes everyone, including children, and with the first exploit and dump of of the database (which will absolutely happen), all those children's real identities will be known to every predator in the world in addition to the social media companies who've already shown they can't be trusted with personal data or the ability to track people across the internet.

It is a catastrophically dangerous idea, and it's exactly what the abusive social media companies want.

I think you can look at all things pessimistically, like this article does but at the end of the day we all agree that there are things online we don't want our kids seeing or engaging with and it takes regulators to push how we protect them from those online places. What other options to regulators have?

Age restriction has been around for longer than the internet itself, so its regulators applying that logic to the online world.

Whilst I think age verification has its issues, I don't see what other options they actually have. I'll also make the point that in Australia, our regulations explicitly require that Government ID verification CANNOT be the only way and that companies must adopt an additional approach.

Almost everything in technology used to protect us can be used against us by those want or choosing to do the wrong thing, does that mean we don't do anything?

It doesn't have to be, FWIW. We have all the technology we need to decouple attribution from identity. We can achieve efficient and mathematically perfect unlinkability.

Yet the powerful continue to insist on "papers, please" anonymity-rending personal authentication over anonymous authorization. It's not often that the villains of history so clearly identify themselves.

My bunch is that the people driving this stuff were unaware that age verification could be privacy-preserving and can't exactly back down now.

Calls to mind a quote attributed to Cardinal Richelieu, 16th century Secretary of State for France:

‘If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him”

What would you say to someone who is afraid that a bad actor will find their kids on Discord/Minecraft/4chan and encourage them to commit suicide or shoot up their school?

We do need a decentralized scalable permissionless platform for speech. For it to remain sustainable, there should be a slight cost in Monero to making each post on it, preloadable in batches.

That, and it defines children as perpetrators instead of victims. What right could a citizen ever claim in a world where even children are guilty?

There is a huge difference between protecting children and prosecuting/punishing children. Age verification can only be an implementation of the latter.

Look at W Social. The governments will team up with anyone, no matter how shady, as long as they promise to try to restrict free, unattributed speech. They'll team up with absolute sharks, as long as those sharks are gonna help sack and battle the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48584497

Yup "protecting kids" has a long, long history of being used as an excuse to restrict citizens rights, yet something like Epstein Island was happening with all the proponents of child protection being happy visitors of the said island.

What are you talking about. They already have automated attribution of speech.

Fascism will lose in the long run. Right now the lobbyists coordinate rather effectively, looking at how many democracies already succumbed here. Well, we need direct democracy - the system that we have right now with regard to democracies, is undermined by corruption.

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Disliking data centers, illegal immigration, or taxes is not a crime in the United States, nor is posting inconvenient messages about politicians, nor is getting a little too rowdy in a group chat. And none of these things are likely to be made illegal any time soon.

I always find this form of argument in favor of privacy (which is valuable in its own right to be clear) so roundabout. If you’re concerned about the government impinging on your freedom of speech, then why not write an essay arguing for expansive freedom of speech protections? That seems like a much more direct solution to the problem presented in this essay.