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United States law that would require all operating systems to implement mandatory age verification is now available to read.
The bill is ironically titled the Parents Decide Act rather than the Government Decides Act. It applies to all operating systems; Windows, Linux, embedded systems, even smart refrigerators. Developers will have full access to all relevant personal data.
The bill doesn't even specify how age verification will work and instead delegates this task to the FTC, which will also specify data storage/protection requirements. The law wiould be considered in effect one year from date it is enacted and violations will be handled under the Federal Trade Commission Act.
„Child protection“ laws like this have no good justification and simply amount to destroying anonymity on the internet. What benefit does anybody get from such a law anyway? I can't see any. If operating systems are so bad for 17 year olds, why don't parents just take their kids' phones away? How does 17 year olds using operating systems create negative externalities for other people? I'm not seeing what I'm supposed to be gaining from these laws. It seems like lazy parents have teamed up with law enforcement who hate anonymous internet usage to demand that governments destroy internet privacy under the thin veneer of protecting teenagers from nothing.
The steelman is that it will incentivize minors to run custom operating systems so they can watch porn, and they might learn something in the process both about tech and the government.
More seriously, the only reason besides utterly incompetence anyone could have to enact such a law is that they want to create a dystopia out of RMS's worst nightmares.
This law would be moot as long as people have the freedom to decide what software they run. At the moment, there are both walled gardens and platforms which with you can mess as much as you want. While anyone can buy a Raspberry Pi for a couple of bucks and run whatever software they want, kids can simply opt for a distribution which does not try to babysit them. Or run
systemctl disable babysitd, for that matter. So you would need to mandate TPM chips in every device with more than four kilobytes of address space or something. Good luck with that.And of course this would be required, but not yet sufficient on its own. How can an operating system know if the person in front of it is a minor or not? With AI, facial recognition can be tricked. Of course, the government could helpfully implant RFID chips in citizens to help the poor OSes figuring out who is who. I think the traditional location would be the forehead.
The internet has the advantage over real life that if you find yourself in a situation which makes you uncomfortable, you can just turn off the screen without having to learn how to dissociate first. Nor is this the purpose of such laws -- someone who prefers not to see unsolicited dick picks can use messenger apps which have options to block those. The purpose of such laws is to control what kind of content minors are allowed to search for. Like the internet, reality is not safe for children. Any ten-year-old riding a bike in traffic is just one bad decision away from a life-altering accident. However, kids (or those who make it, anyhow) thrive in conditions which are not entirely safe.
This is the direction the wind blows. I think it's almost inevitable. Phones, tablets and laptops are basically there already (TPM/secure boot/ect.), the one thing missing is that the boot loader on a few phones and most laptops isn't locked yet. But it will be, soon, just like the phones. The industry wants it that way, and politics wants it, too.
The next steps are easy. The only bootable OS on those devices comes with age checks and a locked app ecosystem. The only browsers available will cooperate. Then websites will be required to implement hand shakes dependent on keys in the TPM, and only serve data to valid devices.
And sure, you'll be able to get around it for a while, especially on niche hardware. But if industry and politics cooperate, getting onto Instagram will soon be as difficult as getting a 4K Netflix stream on a "custom operating system" (i.e. only by the grace of Usenet/torrents).
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Nevertheless, it's bipartisan and it's coming. We should have full 1984 by 2034, so not bad for a government program.
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Neither did the Australian social media ban, which didn't even delegate to the eKaren; it just set a 12-month deadline in the legislation and told industry to figure it out.
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I've been getting ads against this act on some podcasts. I would say that it is absolutely in the category of a bad law. "Think of the Children" is the alleged reason. Huge delegation to agencies. Almost no specifics.
If you wanted to actually help children, you'd withhold federal funds from any school that allows cell phones inside the building.
Not giving money to schools is the third rail of American politics. Like cutting social security.
All the best stuff!
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If we gas ourselves up on hopeium, in theory this could be a positive step in the right direction.
Internet anonymity is already a mixed bag. If you are anonymous but make enough impact there are plenty of avenues for those who want to out you to do so. Just recently Howling Mutant got doxed. He joins a long list of 'doxxed' folks who have had their lives upended in worse ways.
You are not anonymous because people can't find you. You are anonymous because you don't matter. Those who matter get doxxed and the veil of anonymity now harms them, since they are now alone and exposed whilst everyone else is allowed to hide. If there was no anonymity people would take their rights to express themselves more seriously. And then maybe one day the 'freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences' line could die the painful death it deserves.
Outside of that there's plenty of potential utility in ID verification over the internet. Be that to do business with the bank or government offices that would have required you to go there in person, but can now be solved with a few swipes or clicks. I would in fact be quite partial to the idea that certain demographics would never see a gambling ad ever again. Which would otherwise be hard to achieve. On the flipside I'm not really sold on the utility of a low barrier of entry for kids to see porn or fall victim to psychologically manipulative 'gaming' schemes.
To put it another way: If what kids see on the internet matters so much that parents should revoke access to it, why isn't what's on there a bigger deal? We've already seen fine posts on here regarding the subject of foreign interference in media with the recent forced sale of TikTok. That, on top of the promulgation of hard and soft pornography, should be dealt with head on rather than being excused away under the guise that this is all somehow a meaningful avenue of anonymous expression whilst your ability to express your political views is a total sink or swim predicament based entirely on the whims of billionaires and the political extremists they bankroll, who can revoke your ability to meaningfully express yourself at will.
If we are to elevate the internet to be a free market place of ideas then it should be that in totality. Not piecemeal where sometimes our rights are sacred but other times not.
Theoretically your identity could be veiled to the public on certain platforms in a formalized manner, and unneeded breaches of information could be prosecuted similar to a libel suit. The big companies could now properly curate content based on a very firm 'don't show porn to under 18's' criteria. Meaning the government has a foot in the door of their algorithms. Maybe we could finally stop pretending that technology is all too complicated to legislate. And maybe, just maybe, this will lead to my YouTube frontpage sucking less. Maybe.
Now, what are the odds that OS ID verification leads to any of this? None. But the mechanisms would at least theoretically be in place to make the change. As it stands the situation isn't all that great. And I'd wager this would mostly affect phones anyway, which already have pretty ironclad ways of knowing exactly who you are, where you are and so on.
If you want to start a social media company based on the premise that the users are verified using government IDs, by all means do so. If you want to tell your kids that they are only allowed to use such media, by all means try. If you dislike porn, I hear Disney runs websites which are rather porn-free. By all means lobby Microsoft to add Mandatory User Age verification to Windows Server.
The point being that you compete in the marketplace of ideas. Plenty of companies build walled gardens and gilded cages in the internet. Even the companies which verify identities can generally decide how much they trust operating system and if they require remote attestation of some TPM chip certifying that the video feed used for ID is actually recorded by a tamper-resistant camera.
But to constrain the marketplace of ideas you would have to demonstrate that the options you dislike are actively harmful, and you have done no such thing.
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The problem isn't the content as such, it's what people do with it. The big news stories around "somebody think of the children!" generally turn out to be "14 year old was picked on in school, just this time it's done online instead of face-to-face, and they committed suicide". It's "pervy creeps used photos of kids posted on social media to generate child porn". It's "guy who should be fed into a wood chipper pretended to be 12 year old online, gained confidence of real 12 year olds, then blackmailed them for nudes".
Unless we can solve human nature, all the age verification laws in the world won't solve anything.
I'm not sure we need to solve all of the worlds ills to derive some benefit from OS ID verification. I'd wager it would be easier to account for who exactly the 12 year olds are messaging if every person involved had a verifiable ID. It would at least raise the barrier of entry for pedophiles from being able to make an account on Discord to being able to create an entirely fake identity.
Comically, having such oversight for online messages sounds so oppressive it might even drive the kids to spend more time with each other in person, just for privacies sake.
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Keep in mind, governments and companies are more or less incompetent.
Banks and government offices already have your ID. They still require you to go in person, because 1) people steal each others' IDs, and 2) they haven't upgraded their systems since before the mainstream internet.
Gambling ads and suggestive content are visible even on kids' sites designed to block it. The blocks don't work, because 1) selective blocking is a hard problem, and 2) companies don't invest enough because they want to maximize profit (and governments don't fine them enough).
It is a big deal, but: foreigners steal locals' IDs, and convince them (sometimes by visiting in person) to spread foreign propaganda. Pornography is popular, some pornstars are already public and some viewers have no shame.
Companies already aren't allowed to leak PII: it leaks anyways, they get sued and lose, but the final payout is negligible. YouTube already controls your frontpage and tries not to show porn to under 18s. Technology is already legislated, but governments abuse and/or ignore the legislation and companies find workarounds.
I do suspect mandatory ID would reduce kids exposed to harmful content, foreign interference, and porn (distribution and consumption). But significantly increase political (and non-political petty) speech consequences, which would be worse, because governments and companies will leak the IDs of users with views they dislike, and leaking everyone's views won't work as explained here.
Where I live there's a government ID system you can choose to link up to your phone. It provides access to a lot of basic government services without the need to visit an office. Sure, you have to prove your identity one time. But after that it's fine for years. Your bank can interface with this system to prove your identity and now you have access to a host of banking services. This is a very clear and direct quality of life improvement that could not be possible without some database somewhere that can interface with your phone knowing exactly who you are.
ID theft is hardly a relevant problem here. Because it's a known quantity, there are safeguards and insurances in place to ensure that you can't lose too much if you fall victim to it. It's not much different from the risk of losing a credit card for that matter.
Service providers have plausible deniability since you can't prove or verify a users age beyond just asking the user like they do now. However, if you could prove age, you could start holding service providers that don't adequately respect that age accountable. OS ID Age verification provides the mechanism for that change. I'm not saying things will become perfect, but perfect need not be the enemy of the first steps on a long road to improvement.
Just to add, the government may leak things and pay pittance in return, but that's still better than having your info leaked and nothing happening to those who leaked it.
I think mandatory ID for specific services is fine, my objection is mandatory ID to use the internet.
The problem isn't kids clicking "yes" on "am I over 18?" and seeing porn, the problem is kids clicking "no" and seeing porn anyways, because it's in YouTube Kids. If governments don't hold YouTube accountable for this today, I don't see why they would after mandatory ID.
Also note that OS "age verification" currently implemented in some states is just asking the users' age:
I do think this OS age verification will reduce kids being exposed to harmful content, and mandatory ID would reduce it further. I agree that's a good thing. The problem is these laws may introduce other problems that make them overall negative.
Specifically, I don't really object to the age verification in California and Colorado because it's lackluster: one can enter a fake birth date, and probably use an OS that refuses to implement it without enforcement. But I would object to mandatory ID, because governments and companies have repeatedly failed to secure sensitive data, and people should have an outlet to express views unsavory to those around them (since many people would retaliate against or be deeply hurt by certain views, even mundane views (from a general perspective)).
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I agree it's way harder to hide than the average person thinks but it's definitely not impossible in the slightest. Even Russia and China, with much tighter grips on the Internet still struggle here. And it requires a lot of time, effort, and to some degree talent to go through the normal doxxing methods, whereas "give your ID and link it directly to your accounts" is incredibly easy comparatively.
That's never going to die because "consequences" is vague and in many ways includes other people speech. Just consider a basic premise. John makes a policy that he will insult anyone who insults him first.
John: Hi Rude stranger: hi you ugly fucker John: Ok bitch, go die in a ditch
The rude stranger has suffered a consequence over his speech. To prevent this consequence requires silencing John.
This is particularly silly but highlights an important point. People criticizing you or insulting feels bad, but that is their speech being used. Someone's speech must be suppressed in order to stop this consequence.
How about a more life impacting example?
John is a CEO of IndustryInc. RandomManager accidently hotmics "And we gotta get these stupid moron customers to accept the price increases somehow". Customers are upset about being insulted and stop buying from Industry Inc. John fires RandomManager to try to bring customers support back and RandomManager can't pay his mortgage.
That sucks for the manager but which thing should we not allow in order to prevent "consequences"? Should customers be forced to buy from companies? Seems silly to me. Should John not be able to fire RandomManager who is hurting his business then?
Freeing the manager of consequences means removing freedom of association from everyone else.
Ok how about John and Joe are friends playing pool at the bar. While drunk, Joe says "John, I really hate your wife and think she's a bitch. She's an ugly fat bitch". John ends the friendship. Joe has now suffered a consequence for his speech, but what is the solution here, state mandated friends?
Yes there are some "consequences" that are obviously BS. Violence, shouting over people, abuse of government. Those things should not be accepted. But a lot of the negative things that happen to someone socially for speech are just the result of others exercising their own basic freedoms. They insult you, they unfriend you, they fire you, they boycott you, whatever because they too are free.
Russia is a particularly interesting example.
Every year they test a rogue version of the TCP/IP stack. It utilizes a Russian National Domain Name System to keep RUNet, which is like a parallel universe to DARPANet back in the days of the Cold War, that’s distinctly different from ICANN’s standards.
IP’s that would originally point to something like Google could instead be replaced with something like Yandex. If they activated that splinternet, hostnames are resolved through RNDNS at any time of Russia’s choosing.
Back in 2019, they passed a sovereign internet law that permits deep packet inspection, mandatory possession of decryption keys, filtering of traffic, content moderation and outlawing VPN’s to the public. The Yarovaya amendments also forced data retention of Russian citizens for 1-year without judicial oversight.
Рунет simply refers to the Russian language Internet. Where are you getting this from?
Since you asked. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)
I'll admit I didn't read every word of these articles but they are mostly discussing content blocking that Russia, China, et al have been doing for decades.
I didn't see any evidence for this claim:
It's also not really clear to me why this would even require a "rogue version" of TCP/IP, what a "rogue version" would mean, or why you'd need to reinvent the TCP/IP wheel to force everyone to use your own DNS servers (which btw usually talk over UDP and not TCP).
I’ll try and dig into the specifics when I have time later. I read that in a book from an infosec practitioner a few years ago.
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My example pertained more to America. If you sign up for or log in to a website you are functionally trackable, as far as I understood things. So yeah, being hidden is possible, but being hidden and being someone that matters in discourse? I think the barrier to entry on that is a bit too high to be considered relevant.
This feels like a very clear motte and bailey.
No one employing the 'freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences' line is defending peoples rights to disassociate over someone being an asshole in private dealings. Instead they are defending exactly the things described here:
Yes, calling the bosses wife fat to his face might get your fired. Voicing support for party X whilst your boss hates party X might also get you fired, but these are clearly not the same thing. You have to see the distinction between them. At risk of sounding like a complete cardboard box: we live in a democracy! Making political statements in a democracy has to be protected. People can play their cards close to their hands in private, but limiting discourse on the public square via fear of reprisals is not a way for a democracy to function. There has to be a way to navigate that.
Voicing support for party X whilst your boss hates party X, in practice, will get you fired. Even if there are laws against it, your boss will assign you annoying tasks, over-scrutinize your mistakes, etc. to evict you for a different official reason. And there's no way to detect this without false positives.
The loss of online anonymity would also damage relationships, and not just ones with irreconcilable political beliefs. People "code-switch" all the time; imagine no code-switching because everything you write online is visible under your ID. Men talking about women around other men, women talking about men around other women, kids talking about their teachers to other kids, teachers talking about kids and parents to other teachers, etc. Austists would love to know everyone's views about them and may easily adjust, but I suspect most people would be turned off by others' behavior in other groups. Importantly, 1) even when they logically know such back-talk was always happening, they would struggle to emotionally handle concrete examples; and 2) some back-talk is criticism aimed at helping the target or those around them.
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Thinking more about it:
Direct P2P would also avoid these problems. While maybe mitigating the social harms of today’s internet, which were less common when in-person and telephone communication were dominant, like social isolation and a certain type of (embarrassing) meannness and brainrot.
If online anonymity were eliminated for everyone, while providing a way for everyone to communicate (with ID) only to who they choose - that may be better than today. People could even make public political statements without repercussion, by privately communicating them to a trusted speaker for their party…so this doesn’t actually eliminate anonymity, just makes it harder…but doesn’t anything?
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You see how you just went "No one is doing that, anyway I'm going to do that" right? I don't see why your boss shouldn't be able to fire you for that. At will employment is the default in the US after all. He can fire you because he doesn't like the color of your shirt, because he doesn't like that your voice sounds annoying, that he saw a picture of your lawn and thought it wasn't taken care of well.
And yet, restricting citizen's freedom of association (which in the US is an implied right under freedom of speech) via fear of reprisals is? If you don't like a company firing John for his speech then you can boycott the company for that, as is your right.
He can't fire you for being pregnant, female, black, Muslim, gay, trans, or disabled, so I don't see why he can fire you for being a Republican, Communist, believer in race IQ differences, or a supporter of Palestinian independence. Especially if you do those things outside of work. Which is always the fear. It's never, I'm going to proselytize to my coworkers, it's always, what if my X account gets doxxed and all these comments I made on the internet outside of work get me fired. We could just make that illegal.
Protection from termination for political views varies by state, and- perhaps counterintuitively but unsurprisingly- it tends to be blue states which have strong protections for political views, theoretically to protect union organizing.
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Maybe they should be able to fire people for the former things as well. Overly irrational amounts of bigotry are eventually solved by free markets. If you pass up too many good candidates just for them being gay or black or Republican or communist, you're going to do worse business wise. And there will be smarter businesses and competition that don't care about those things and just want to win in the market. It's not that irrational amounts of bigotry don't happen at all, but that they aren't really as meaningful.
Anti discrimination laws don't really have much of an impact, since in a democracy for them to be passed it requires a population that is already rather anti discrimination! So they're gonna be mostly not doing too much irrational discrimination on their own. At least, not those outside of what society already generally wants.
Make what illegal here? The doxxing or the firing? Doxxing being illegal doesn't really make sense, it's historically considered a form of free speech and free press. Journalists would try to reveal anonymous people all the time in the past.
Only if there's enough competition. Which in most sectors, there isn't. You know, because, there's only so many people.
Their impact is bounded, but not necessarily 0. 60% of people can easily force 40% of people into behaving differently in a Democracy. Which is roughly what happened with Civil Rights.
Firing. That would be the extension of civil rights. Although you could make doxxing illegal too. The precedence for this in the United States would mostly be 18 U.S.C. § 1030. Weev went to federal prison for publishing a list of emails he got from a public HTTP API, because AT&T did not intend for the API to be public. Doxxing works on the same principal; it's the publication of information that was not intended to be public. The onus is not on the doxxee to secure the information 100% properly, because Congress has already rejected pure internet anarchy. If the information is reasonably interpreted to be intended-as-private, access and publication could be said to constitute exceeding authorized access. I just read a doxx on Howling Mutant in fact which used two data breach leaks as proof! That could obviously constitute felony usage of felony-produced data, just like using leaked passwords to break into an account. Morally, doxxing is obviously a crime which has a victim, which the criminal intends to harm, which makes it much more of a crime than probably the majority of so-called computer crimes the United States prosecutes.
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When someone is making a 'this is how I think things should be' argument, it's very annoying to receive a 'well this is how things actually are' response. We're not really playing from the same sheet of music here.
I don't see how I did that unless you are arguing that there is not a difference between hurling personal insults at your boss and publicly voicing a political opinion he disagrees with. I see that distinction clearly, and I also think that expressing political opinions and handling political disagreements is a basic and necessary function of living in a democracy. If you don't see the inherent conflict of serving your democratic duty as an active participant in the political process and being liable to lose your job because of that then I feel we are at an impasse.
Outside of that I feel like we are roaming back to my original point. And I would just directly challenge your conception of 'having rights' in America as you present them here. For example, you can't fire a person because they are black. The Civil Rights Act just doesn't allow that. So you don't really have at will employment by default so we don't even need to act like 'At will Employment' is a point here to begin with.
And that highlights my problem with this predicament. Boycotting a company because they fired an honest and good man for bad reasons is what losers with no rights do. People with actual rights just point the upholder of their rights to the person that violated them and the upholder deals with it.
If you have to uphold your own rights in the immediate sense then you just don't have rights. Like, insofar as rights are real, you have to have an external mechanism that enforces them. Otherwise you are just kind of doing what you want and calling it 'having rights'.
Ok sure, fair enough.
So if you say to your boss "your wife is a bitch" he can fire you because it's private, but if you post on your public work associated Facebook "I think my boss's wife is a bitch", he can't because it's public?
And wait, let me anticipate the "oh that's different it's political" response. Where's the exact distinction? Like extreme example but real political thing that happens in some countries. What if say, his son is gay and the employes tells the boss (or I guess, posts on his public Facebook) "your son is a freak who should be executed by the moral police"? That sounds distinctly political, which people should and should not be executed by government moral police. How about "women shouldn't vote, including your wife"? I think he should be able to find that insulting and fire you. Or hell what if they just say "I hope the president issues an executive order calling your wife a bitch". Can't get more political than your hopes of a particular policy from a politician. Maybe he's really creative and inspired and makes a troll campaign (but he plays it completely seriously) for local waterboard commissioner and while in an interview makes a point to repeatedly say "yeah, part of what inspired me to run is that my current boss's wife is a bitch. I figured maybe something is wrong with the water making her so bitchy".
How are you going to draw the lines in a fair manner, where does "politics" a topic about basically every part of life in at least some way actually begin here? This isn't some gotcha, it's an extremely difficult task to actually make a good overarching definition that isn't able to be abused. Just try with only the examples I gave alone and it'll be hard without making a convoluted mess.
This is some crazy logic, boycotting companies is your right. The government should not be micromanaging your financial decisions like that. Do you want every time you use a different gas station or try a new brand at the store to be open to scrutiny by bureaucrats to make sure you aren't "cancelling" anyone?
On a case by case basis. Like is done all over the world. I'm sure your entertainingly convoluted examples would make it all the way to the highest court of any land. That being said, I don't think they are very realistic. And you can make a mockery of any law with unrealistic examples. But those examples could still be dealt with, even if they are far from being representative.
I would personally make a distinction between political views and assertions made about private individuals in public. Similarly, political views directed against private individuals could easily be deemed to not be in line with the political process. As in, making politically unrealistic wishes of ill towards private persons is a clear enough step over the line. Similar to how saying 'In minecraft' is not actually a legal defense against the preceding threats of violence, saying 'politically' is also not a defense.
If boss' wife was not private, but a public political figure, then assertions against her would be political. But not in the context of her being your boss' wife, since that fact is not politically relevant. If it were politically relevant, and both the boss and wife are politically involved then an employee would have the right to make political statements about both.
All that being said, I'd generally side with employees over employers in any case where the working relationship between the two is not personal. The idea that an employer gets to dictate the public expressions of tens, hundreds or thousands of people goes against fundamental aspects of democracy as I see them.
The point being illustrated by me was that people with actual employment protection rights, like blacks in America, don't have to boycott things, since their rights are upheld by third parties. If your rights are not upheld by third parties then you don't really have rights. Unless you want to contextualize any ability you have to do anything in the world as a 'right', in which case our understanding of the word is not 1:1.
Is it common to have anti discrimination laws based around something as vague and unclear as "political beliefs"? I wouldn't have said it was.
"John's gay son should be hanged" vs "Gays should be hanged by the government" doesn't seem that meaningful of a difference to me.
The employer is not some sort of dictator who is unable to be left. There's tons of jobs that someone can go do, both in their field and out of it. You have the same right of association and can leave your job for the reasons you want, like "my boss has an annoying voice" or "the company had a trans pride picnic and I don't like that".
Civil right laws are largely meaningless, they only get passed when a society (and thus almost always the market of a society) are already in agreement with the general principles. Enshrining them has some effect don't get me wrong, but it's not as potent as it seems.
Market rationality happens a lot without such anti discrimination laws, like how many companies will hire illegal immigrants or with otherwise obviously fake ID under the table simply because it's more economical for them. Despite the exact opposite and almost all the laws on book encouraging hiring the expensive citizens. The Republican voting farmer might not really like illegal immigration as a concept, but he does enjoy doing better in his farm business. There will be plenty of bigots who might not like blacks or Whites or Asians or whatever, who recognize the same thing with race. Or gender. Or whatever. Bigotry has to be overwhelming in the market (and society) to overturn this. And the more cutthroat the market is, the more overwhelming the bigotry has to get.
Firing people unreasonably for their race/religion/sex/political beliefs/citizen status whatever will always be suboptimal compared to "hiring the most economical choice". Some companies might be willing to take the hit and be suboptimal, but plenty of others won't.
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I'm more and more drifting to the view that this abstract principles-based reasoning in a vacuum, where you just assert rights and derive things from it and hold to it, is not where real impact lies. You need a social fabric that holds people together where the political differences are bridgeable and the other political parties are seen as legitimate alternatives. For example if one party says that income tax should be 5 percent higher and another disagrees, or one thinks that public healthcare is more efficient with larger regional hospitals, while another wants to prioritize good care being available closer to everyone's homes, etc. then there is no such danger. In other words, the Overton windows have to overlap enough.
Once you let society fracture so much that they see each other's political opinion as an existential threat to themselves, their identity, their deeply held cultural beliefs etc., the tool to reach for is not rules lawyering some better laws from first principles like free association or free speech, but to try to create social cohesion. Politics is downstream of culture, and culture comes from social interaction and exchange. If you have long-term relations to your co-citizens in ordinary contexts, and you depend on them for general life stuff, if you go to each other's weddings and help each other haul stuff or do some construction work or whatever, seeing each other in many different roles, that results in a convergence of understanding, and some degree of synchronization, and interest alignment.
Of course this is what's getting erased with the increasing individualism. There's nothing that ties you to your neighbors, so you're free floating and can take on any political views, without any connection to whatever other people believe. There's less pressure to compromise and more pressure to stand out by being the purest and most vocal, most righteous version of your chosen side and has very little cost associated with fully condemning the other side as pure evil.
Now, many would say that this kind of cohesion is not really possible and there are inherent conflicts of interest that will always remain. Some would point to class differences, others would point to ethnic ones. But if you identify such unbridgeable differences, the tools are also not really the abstract principles to solve this, but some kind of Bosnia-Herzegovina style regulated representation and explicit design around this social fact, because again, politics has to be designed around the social reality. There's certainly some "backflow" and the rules create incentives that have effects on social relations, but in the end the rules are more a codification and stabilization of what the real emotional connections are. It's like Conway’s Law, stating that "organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." The political rules of what's allowed, what's normal, what freedoms can be afforded, depend on the social (and interest) relation structures of the people themselves. High-trust cultures where most everyone believes in the same fundamental principles and are generally not at each other's throats can afford to allow unrestricted speech because most people anyway don't want to say things that would upset others too much. A society that's split in two tribes, which shout and plot about how to hurt the other tribe to the maximal degree, will find that they need to have some kind of constraints, but it's not very likely to solve the original problem.
Historically, such pent up tension was often released through war, like the Thirty Years War, after which people realized it's better to come to some kind of compromise, or one side is weakened so much that the tension is released that way. I'd hope that it's not a necessary stage to go through, though. Another thing may be the threat of an external enemy, or an external cause to unite around. I think the end-of-history types thought this could be these neutral inert things like space exploration, climate change and environmentalism, generic 90s elementary-school textbook obviously-good UN/UNESCO/UNICEF charities and human rights etc. But it seems that this is not really enough to form cohesion and are turned into wedge issues as well.
I think people are not inherently motivated enough to cooperate, only if circumstances force them, which is generally not pleasant. The village where everyone relies on everyone is not just sunshine and rainbows to live in. Because relying on others also carries dangers, and it limits your choices and there is constant judgment and gossip and observations, you have to care about your reputation, and the emergent judgments are not always fair.
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The Kids Aren't Alright, at least it seems. I constantly hear studies and anecdotes on how Gen Z and α are significantly more awkward, asocial, mentally ill; and evidence suggests social media is why.
Hence I think governments are desperate to get kids and teens off social media, or at least make it less toxic, and/or reduce usage, to fix them. I agree with that goal.
But I'm wary of these bills: they threaten anonymity, can be bypassed, add regulatory burden... Although this YouGov survey rates Australia's ban "cautiously optimistic". Still, I much prefer:
Banning phones in schools (which I think is so obvious, it's surprising and embarrassing many schools haven't already done it)
Encouraging more in-person socialization with after-school activities, kids third-spaces, etc.
Less toxic social media algorithms, better parental controls, cultural encouragement for parents to limit social media - not via laws
I don’t think point three works.
Asking social media platforms to detoxify and make their platforms less compulsive for users more or less is like asking a food company to make their food worse. Their entire business model is “deliver attention-paying eyeballs to a platform where businesses can pay to make them watch ads.” To the product of course they pretend to be about connecting people to things they like, but it’s really not the point. TikTok doesn’t care about your enjoyment, they care about your engagement. So asking a private company to just … stop doing your business model isn’t going to work.
Parental control is not that great either. Unless you are skilled enough to IP block those sites at the router (which only works for a device using your Wi-Fi anyway) most controls are easily disabled. It’s not something you could rely on.
I think you're right about social media companies not making their sites less toxic on their own. So...I do think we should regulate kids social media more, and maybe adult social media past a certain size. I'm specifically wary of regulating small sites, because for example that hinders hobbyists and startups.
I think parental controls work. Current parental controls aren't good, but better ones are possible; and it's true that particularly smart and determined kids will subvert practically any controls, but not all kids are smart and determined. An example of a better parental control is a phone OS that, without an admin password, blocks sites not in a "kid-friendly" whitelist provided by a third party. I don't see why that's particularly hard to implement or configure.
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How do you make it work? Try it, and somebody will start screaming about how this is harassing 17 year olds who are old enough to [do legal thing] but you are imprisoning and enslaving teenagers yet again; parents will go on radio shows about how they absolutely need to be able to contact little Krissanteemum at any time of the day; a child genuinely will need their phone, not have it, and something bad happens; teachers will be accused of picking on and victimising minority kids, and the list goes on.
Yeah, you get Johnny and Susie to hand over their phone which is kept in a locker in the secretary's office. Haw haw dumb authorities, that was my burner phone! I still have my real one!
Estacada High School in Oregon seems to have succeeded.
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I, uh, am young enough to have gone to high school when smartphones were almost universal and simultaneously old enough for them to have still been banned at school while I was there.
The official policy was they weren't allowed on campus at all, but you can't enforce that. What they did enforce, was if you were caught with it out, you'd get a warning, and after that it would get confiscated. Parents were informed of this policy and understood it. If you needed to call home (which you never needed to do), you could ask to go to the office. It really wasn't that dramatic. I daresay it would work again today if only the school administrations could grow a pair.
Here, the whole province went ahead and did it, starting last fall (they were already banned from classrooms since january 2024).
Not being a teacher, a high school student or a parent of a high school student, and not being in frequent contact with either of these groups, I can't really say if that's the case, but the mainstream reporting I read on it seems that it has had a very positive effect.
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That, and you do need parents to be on board with it. And unhappily, there are always parents who don't give a shit about what the kids do so long as it doesn't involve them, or they will listen to the kids bitching about not having their phones, or they will blow up about "this is racism/discrimination/some other attention-grabbing thing" because you took her phone off my little Chanterelle and she needs that phone!
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We're probably around the same age, I was a young elementary schooler in '07 when the iPhone dropped so they were everywhere by the time I was in high school. We had the same policy.
Except ours was a bit more draconian. Confiscation on sight with no warning, and parents could not retrieve them from the office until after a 3-day waiting period. As much as this pissed me off at the time, this model is probably ideal. Plus I had a collection of old androids I kept for tinkering so I'd just reactivate one of those for the length of the holding period.
So try that today to keep young newport off the Internet and away from undesirable sites, and the same result; they took your phone but you have backups you can just reactivate and keep scrolling that [bad thing children should never see!]
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Most age verification policies continually fail to answer some pretty basic questions.
How do you verify age without invading privacy? There's plenty of neat "tricks" to try to get around it but ultimately there has to be some thread between you and your activities online. Whether it be giving your ID to websites directly or giving your ID to a third party who tells the websites you're of age.
Why would parents who are fine with buying their child a computer/smart phone/etc device and are fine with them using it unmonitored willy nilly not be willing to just use their ID for a kid? What kind of parent gets their child a computer but then says "nvm" at an OS level age verification? How many parents out there are fine with their kids watching YouTube all day unmonitored who won't just do a facial scan for the kid as well?
How do you stop kids from just using other identities anyway? Just go grab an ID online or get it from your parents wallet or whatever. People are literally scanning video game characters even to get past the age restrictions. The more restrictive you get on this, the more you amplify the first problem of linking identity to internet usage.
China a country with far more restrictive policies still largely failed to manage curbing children's gaming, and they don't even have to concern themselves as much with the first problem. As I've said before, that means we have to be super China in order to keep most children off the internet. Maybe you think that is worth it, but I don't want to be super China.
I'm old enough to remember the first attempts at age verification on fanfiction websites and yes, it was trivially easy to tick the "oh indeed I definitely am of legal age in my country to access these mildly spicy stories and not 13 pretending to be 18" boxes.
Verification today will need links to real-world data to make sure that you are not 13 pretending to be 18, and that will open up a whole can of worms (e.g. so what if the site storing all this data gets hacked? now somebody can sell the details of every 15 year old in the USA on the dark web).
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You cannot be super China either. Your state simply does not wield enough power to be super China, and your bureaucracy would not have the competence to pull it off. It's funny that people always say "I don't want to become China" as if that were an option they're deliberately turning down. You don't really have that option.
We can always do a shitty half-assed version with most of the downsides and no upside.
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Well yes that's the point. We're limiting casual privacy and annoying people just to not even really achieve the stated goals because we aren't gonna be Super China and yet that seems to be needed here for success.
People who insist on these stupid and failing half measures to get kids off phones/social media remind me of how environmentalists banned showerheads from using "too much water". They're frustrated that they can't actually do anything meaningful, but they have to do something to feel good so fuck your showers and fuck your casual privacy.
The most central example of stupid and failing half measures is covid lockdown in the US, of course.
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I think the idea is that
The operating system would keep track of users' ages;
This would facilitate porn sites keeping minors out; and
It would also facilitate social media bans for people under whatever age is deemed appropriate.
Anyway, I think there are two answers to your question.
The first is that phones serve various positive purposes, such as being able to call the authorities in an emergency; being able to use the map function to avoid getting lost; and so on. Age verification (if it worked) would allow young people to retain phones for these positive purposes while locking them out of porn sites, etc.
The other issue is that with respect to social media, online games, and so forth, there is kind of a collective action problem. It's difficult to tell your children they can't use some popular social media site if all their friends at school are using it. Even if most of the parents would prefer to keep their kids off of social media, few parents want to be the first one to do it. A blanket rule, for example, that nobody under 16 can use Facebook, would solve this collective action problem.
Anyway, I agree that there is a huge potential cost to age verification, which is that it will undermine anonymity. As someone who has politically unpopular views, that doesn't thrill me.
This narrative is about as compelling to me as there being a deep state conspiracy to destroy privacy. A better narrative is that individual parents feel they would be individually better off if they took their individual kids' phone away, but they feel too weak to do that. So they want the government to discipline their kids for them. Normal people can't identify collective action problems well, it's too complex of a scenario. A well documented collective action problem is credentialism, and people can't grasp it because they just see that they would be better off personally if they consumed more education. Since collective action problems are complex, they also require solid documentation to prove. Bryan Caplan produced this for credentialism, but the data on teenage phone usage doesn't prove a collective action problem. It argues, poorly, that teenagers are individually better off when their individual social media usage is reduced. So the question of „why not parent“ must be answered individualistically. My guess is that individual parents feel weaker than in the past.
The teenagers themselves agree. 68% of them feel worse after spending time online. 50% say a digital curfew would improve their lives, 47% would prefer to live in a world where the internet doesn't exist.
And, pertinent to what we're talking about:
How much data do we need to show that teenagers are stuck in a collective action problem when supermajorities of them are saying 'please help us get out of this collective action problem'?
I have data that says only 16% agree that a total phone ban at school is a good idea, and only 30% agree that any phone restrictions at all are a good idea. Tracks well with my experience in school.
Caused by doom scrolling and algo slop. Fix social media, don't target adult privacy rights and teenagers' access to phones.
Sleep related. Best solution is to delay school start times and encourage parents to give teenagers a bedtime, not this spyware bill.
Not a majority, too abstract a question, just a vibe, also too bad, this bill doesn't make the internet disappear (which would be a disaster), it just attacks internet privacy.
You'd need a book like The Case Against Education. Except, The Anxious Generation was slop and didn't even include most of the data Haidt used on Substack to make the case. He actually dumbed it down for normies. Apparently normies need a fallacious book to accept that there is a problem, but a non-fallacious one can't be produced. Hm.
I would distinguish between school discipline matters and social matters. Clearly, young people aren't happy with the digital first childhood, but all kids like messing around in school. The two positions aren't really in conflict. Although frankly, the idea that we should be consulting children on the kind of discipline they are subject to seems pretty stupid. I imagine a lot of kids would like to be able to bring alcohol into school too.
I mean, I'm 100% behind banning stuff like infinite scroll, but it's not like there's a big button governments can press that says 'make the digital world not addictive'. I mean, really think about what that would entail. You'd have to ban video games, youtube, dating apps, Reddit and a bunch of other stuff I haven't thought of. There's an awful lot of stuff on the internet that is (or can be) addictive. I've dumbed down my phone about as much as possible and I still find myself idly scrolling on the Wikipedia app. Addictiveness is just a characteristic of the digital world. Banning it all for everyone would be far more authoritarian than just preventing teenagers from using the worst offending apps.
Delaying school start times isn't a bad idea, but we had early school start times before and we didn't have kids demanding restrictions on themselves. This is different. Also, bedtimes, really? Do you honestly think that parents haven't thought of 'tell your children to go to bed'? The kids themselves recognise the problem isn't 'lack of bedtimes', it's the addiction machine sitting on the bedside table.
The very fact that such a high number would want to delete a technology that is so integrated into their lives should give you pause for thought. Teenagers in the 1920s didn't want to ban the radio, kids in the 50s didn't wish they lived in a world without television. The internet has clearly damaged the social fabric in a meaningful way, and the fact that young people have noticed too deserves more than a flippant response.
I've read both of these books but I really don't understand what point you're trying to make here. Could you clarify?
Maybe less stupid than consulting the rabble on the kind of laws they are subject to, considering they destroy civilization when they choose wrong, but kids in school just have a little more fun, since school is pointless anyway.
Governments could ban infinite scroll, start at a fine of $10 million per day of any company commanded to remove infinite scroll. I bet it will be gone quickly.
No, you don't have to be any more consistent than your take on schools and democracy. The government is a murderous asshole that goes on random violent rampages over small triggers, it is not a Kantian philosopher attempting to achieve a perfectly Consistent moral Order of Things.
Either-or fallacy. Ponder heroin and cigarettes, if you will.
Maybe it wouldn't replicate.
You don't know that.
How? What's confusing you?
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Do you not remember being 12/14 and arguing passionately that you were now old enough to be allowed stay up late(r)? Maybe you can force 15 year old Teen Kid to go to their bedroom, but you can't force them to go to sleep (and you can't lock them in, either).
Apparently 50% of them now want a bedtime, so why would this be an issue for them?
But you can take their phone for the night, which is what I presume digital curfew means. Or use some kind of parental control so that it locks down.
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I agree that social media is an issue, but this sentence is giving me a stroke. Collecting data on your age and identity isn't what I'd call a "privacy safeguard".
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Just because parents don't know what a collective action problem is doesn't mean they can't identify one. Not everyone works off of formal logic, parents can recognize that instagram is bad for kids at the same time as kids being socially isolated by being the only one not on instagram is bad for kids.
I have a previous thread about very conservative parents being better at their jobs, and my sources overemphasized discipline as a factor. Lots of the commentary was basically about how 'discipline' meant setting limits on social media. Plausibly your theory about parents feeling disempowered is supported therein; but short of spreading the folkways of the rightmost 10-20% or so of the population more broadly(and I have another thread about that), the best way to solve this specific problem of teen social media use is to make a law against it. They won't follow it voluntarily but it will let their parents enforce it.
Of course, I would prefer to be a selective libertarian and empower the rightmost 10-20% of the population by not doing anything to prevent the rest of it from self destructing. This is not out of a general commitment to freedom. But it's entirely understandable to me why social media bans that nobody knows how to enforce would be welcomed by parents.
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I disagree with this. Maybe normal people are unfamiliar with game theory; the prisoner's dilemma; nash equilibria; and so on. But definitely a lot of the time they can intuitively sense that there are situations where it would be good if everyone would agree to some X, but in the absence of an agreement, they feel pressured to go along with the crowd.
I disagree with this as well. Sometimes collective action problems are relatively straightforward and sometimes common sense is more than sufficient to recognize that one exists.
I'm not familiar with any formal research, however I'm pretty confident just based on general observations and common sense. Above, you asked why parents don't simply take their children's phones away. I am quite confident that -- part of -- the answer to this question is that parents don't want their children to be the weirdo in class who doesn't have a phone; who's out of the loop; etc.
Common sense in this case is a hammer you got from slate star codex, for which everything is a nail. My common sense says the hammer is a specialty one and it doesn't fit all but a few nails. Alas, rationalists are always trying to use it anyway. Collective action this, game theory that, moloch thing there, prisoner's dilemma here.
I don't think parents implementing common sense social media controls to their under-16 children would make them the weird kid in class. It would not amount to completely depriving them of a phone or the ability to text friends.
Except they fail to do this in the most important cases. Probably because their heuristic is asking whether the thing is individually good. They don't think teen phone usage is individually good, the mainstream argument is not collective action problem, it is individual parenting problem.
For what it may be worth, I was studying game theory when Scott was still in diapers.
You are sort of shifting the goalposts here. Earlier, you referred to completely taking away a child's phone:
But anyway, let's break this down.
Do you agree that many parents perceive that their children's use of social media is harmful?
Do you agree that of those parents, many also perceive that their children are likely to end up being isolated/left out/etc. if their child stops using social media while their children's peers continue to do so?
Well do you think there are ANY situations where normal people can intuitively and correctly sense that there is a collective action problem, even if they are unable to make use of the formal language and terminology?
The collective action problem is other parents. And of course, other kids.
You can't control what happens in other people's houses when your kid goes over to a friend's house. Maybe the parents are lax, maybe they don't care if their 12 year old kid is watching porn, maybe they have no idea. Boys are going to dare one another over "did you see this?"
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No, I think they lack the cognitive capacity for anything beyond „X is bad, because if it happens to me, I won't like it“ and „Y is good, because if it happens to me, I will like it“. That's the basis for all of our laws and our education system and economic system. The masses have failed to accept every well-documented collective action problem I can think of. It's because they require someone to be top 10% literacy to comprehend.
For example, this comment. He argues
But the evidence follows the individual heuristic I just wrote:
„I feel bad after too much time online, so I would be better with less time online. I sleep too little because of phone, so I would be better off putting phone away early. I feel bad on the internet, so I would like the internet to go away.“ And seriously, the last one is preposterous, can you imagine the collective economic damage if there was no internet? Meanwhile, when it comes to actual collective action, I have data that says only 16% agree that a total phone ban at school is a good idea, and only 30% agree that any phone restrictions at all are a good idea. They don't want collective action.
Yes.
No, because I think a solid fix is a screen time limit, and this doesn't lead to complete isolation. I think parents don't do this because they are lazy and weak and won't fight with their teens.
I meant partially, or on a temporary basis for a particular reason.
I disagree. For example, I'm pretty sure most people favor laws against income tax evasion. Even though most people would cheat on their taxes if they could get away with it.
Do you dispute that most people favor laws against income tax evasion?
Ok, and is so preposterous to hypothesize that people might have the following feelings: (1) I feel bad when I am away from social media because I feel left out; and (2) I feel bad when I use social media because I feel inadequate compared to a lot of my connections.
Umm, does that mean "yes" or "no"? I am not asking about screen time limits. I am asking this:
It's a very simple yes or no question.
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What are the common sense social media controls you're thinking of, exactly?
As far as I can guess at teen mindsets, having a dumb phone that is not designed to have apps in 2026 is exactly the kind of thing that would make a kid the weird kid in class.
Parental controls? Time limits? The main harm is scrolling for too long.
I don't know if that's the main harm, but certainly a significant potential harm is the feeling of constantly comparing yourself to other people and feeling that you don't measure up in some way. It's hard to see how this would be prevented with time limits. Or with parental controls other than simply preventing your child from being on social media.
Unfortunately, this is just reality. And it relates to one or two collective action problems the masses don't comprehend. The best documented of these is the eugenics problem; less well documented but probably real is a problem with the economy where too much is based on luck, so people have to watch those with the same or lesser genetic endowment as themselves be much more privileged, which is wrong. But they can only think of the dumbest communism as a solution to this and that didn't work so well, so they have given up. Communism of course is based on the selfish heuristic of I would be better if I had more stuff, and not based on true collective action problem logic. The real solution would use IQ tests and would be enforced meritocracy or something along those lines.
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Why doesn't it? I guess I have to go dig it up, but there's literally surveys with teenagers where they're asked if they think they'd be better off with no social media but don't want to stop using social media if everyone else is still on it.
Literally the definition of a collective action problem.
Yeah, in general I am skeptical of people's self-reporting about their desires, motivations, and feelings. But here, it's basically just common sense, following from basic principles of human nature and social media, among them: (1) comparison is the thief of joy, and the more comparison the less joy; (2) social media facilitates intense comparison; and (3) nobody likes to feel left out, which includes not being the social media site being used by one's peers.
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Because it only argues, poorly, that teenagers are individually better off when their individual social media usage is reduced.
I haven't seen this, I don't recall Jonathan Haidt talking about it. I'm mostly thinking of his work on the topic.
Allowing teens aged 16 to 19 on social media while demanding photo ID from anyone to use any device doesn't appear to solve that problem.
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