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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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