Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech
nonogra.ph888 points by arkhiver 14 hours ago
888 points by arkhiver 14 hours ago
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.
In fairness, the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control and the will to push it through tends to come from the political circles more than popular belief it is a good idea. I expect that if the measure itself went to a general vote, the majority would be against it once they have to deal with a specific proposal. It takes repeated pushes by the authoritarians looking for an opportunity to get things like speech controls or privacy violations through and the politicians mysteriously give up trying to roll it back no matter what the public pressure might be.
That being said, any expectation of thoughtfulness at all makes politics frustrating. Even basic things like why people keep making small random changes when most of these problems and solutions haven't changed in more than 2 millennia. And there is a pretty easy consensus to come to about what works. The repeated failures of authoritarianism to get to a good place are so consistent it is wild that people keep trying it.
The problem is that "the authoritarians" (read: almost every politician at every level of government, but a drastically increasing percentage the higher you go) only need to get something passed once then it is there forever.
Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing.
Increasingly wishing for this from a fictional constitutional convention:
> I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent — the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it?
Add money to politics - more accurately add even more money to politics - and see how this works out.
I love that book, and its teachings of cell structures for decentralized rebellion. But it is a libertarian fantasy. And we've seen in the US, particularly due to the voting-system-imposed two party cap, that bad faith actors will sabotage good government as a goal in itself. I'm not confident that we need to make it even harder to pass laws in the US. We need to have voting reform in the country to allow a real free market of political parties that accurately represent the will of the people, and hold true to the values that we have in our Bill of Rights such as freedom of speech and freedom to privacy and civil rights.
>Increasingly wishing for this from a fictional constitutional convention:
There's an interesting, one-time shakeup that we could actually accomplish. While it's true that there will never again be another constitutional amendment... there's already one out there that will never expire, partially ratified. Completely beyond Congress's ability to rescind it or cockblock it. Article the First.
Were it to be ratified, nearly immediately (whenever the next Census is), the House of Representatives has over 6000 seats. So many that the existing party apparatus wouldn't be able to vet candidates or manipulate. Lobbyists, even, would have a hard time allotting the slush funds to bribe them all.
And what would it take to do all of this? Maybe 10 or 12 people hammering (gently) on some state legislator in Nevada or Kansas. Convince him or her to pass the resolution to ratify. Nothing more than that. A single state even attempting to ratify it would start the ball rolling, and no one would be able to stop it.
> Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing.
The burden of ever-changing law landscape will be carried by ordinary people, not by legislators. That's second.
In the saga period of Iceland, 1/3rd of the laws had to be recited orally each year in a public assembly. If we had something like that then our legal code would be a lot slimmer.
Slim is not always better once people find exploits and loopholes which helps them but hurts society at large. Sunsetting is better.
But clearly what's going on now with omnibus bills that no one has read in its entirety are ok?
That would indeed solve many problems. It would also focus legislative minds now and in the future. Not sure it would be beneficial for the judicial branch.
Also beneficial perhaps would be to have it be necessary that the law spells out the technical implementation. Sort of like patents do.
I remember the patriot act.
In this very comment I started talking about the patriot act two or three times but kept deleting it because I didn't want to ramble. But yeah that's exactly what I was thinking of - for people who care about privacy and freedom it was really one of the worst pieces of legislation in modern US history, and permanently changed the country for the worse.
The Patriot Act is perfect example of the adage, "Never let a crisis go to waste."
Or rather "Always construct crises proportionate to the desired delta of the current Overton window's position".
I emailed my local TD minister in Ireland about the inherent dangers of chat control. They had some lacky respond with an email that framed the conversation in a way that made it look like I was interested in the illegal content and not privacy/control or nefarious future governments.
This is what I fear the most. It is gas lighting and just manipulation. The idea of privacy will become associated with crime.
Further down the line technical solutions that are private will become illegal and in general not being pro survailance will get you in trouble
Do you acknowledge that for many people and practically e2ee and crime are connected? e2ee is a very useful tool for crime and combined with crypto useful tool for monetizing crime. Criminals used to speak in code, meet clandestine, use burner phones and websites were easy to shut down. Now they don't need to.
The solution to privacy problem is not to shout while closing your ears but to make it clear that you see their side, how new tech create new problems, and help solve it in least privacy invasive ways.
Otherwise you will always be seen as somebody who has shady agenda. It's just reality. Ordinary people do not care about e2ee. Gotta read the room.
But chat control and age verification are different things.
> But chat control and age verification are different things.
Although they appear to be different different things at first sight, they share the same agenda and objective, mass surveillance and identification of the citizens. Once the door is opened, it can be expected that things will not end there; Politicians and their patrons will exploit this data under "committees" (and of course be excluded from such surveillance as an aggravating factor).
Nowadays it's needed a court order to access legally to the privacy of citizens, and this must be done by the Police or the Interpol, nevertheless someones want to break this.
If they were really worried by the citizens security, they would increase the number of police and judges working in this digital divisions, among other things related to this.
Well, here's a case when police did their work. A massive international bust happened because the police was able to trick gangs to use an app that was not actually e2ee. And chances that it happens again are almost zero.
I have some faith in the lack of wisdom of (most) criminals. Most of them aren't geniuses, aren't super sophisticated, aren't good at following technical rules with 100% discipline.
So it's likely to work again - not as often as a law-abiding citizen would like, but not never.
And yet another notorious international bust just didn't happen recently despite the fact that the island loungers not only didn't use e2ee but actively made their crimes abundantly obvious to the public.
True. They didn't trade drugs and I guess the legal system doesn't look at their crimes with the same strictness...
> Ordinary people do not care about e2ee. Gotta read the room.
It's a matter of phrasing things. Moxie had this illustrative take: If your chat is not e2ee, it'a a group chat. It's you, your mom, every secret service in the world and some ISP employees as well. If we could clarify to our social circles and broader society that every non-e2ee chat can be browsed by some overpaid freckled 20-something borded out of his mind at a FAANG or an ISP then the viewpoint could change.
Tons of people use IG and I think they pretty much know that it's them, the other guy and whatever number of contractors monitoring chats. They just don't care.
Maybe one of the most helpful parallels is with mail. I think US and other countries have strict laws about mail communication privacy. Someone can in theory open your mail but it's strictly regulated and not done in a total way.
Also I do think talking about future malicious government prosecuting people based on what was collected previously is actually a good one. But just talking about privacy may be a little too vague.
I suspect a lot of people don't mind/care that the list is expanded to those groups. That's really a big part of the issue. It's better framing, regardless though.
More than that. Who cares if the state can read your chats/etc, when you believe you aren't the kind of people the state wants to persecute. Why deny the state ever more tools to go after people, as long as you think it's going to use them against the people you want it to go after.
I would add though that the opinion is not entirely irrational.
For many people the state is inefficient, illogical, evil and goes after them without any reason (ex: think COVID restrictions). Then why do you care about another way to label you, if you think they already do it, but randomly.
I feel that the privacy discussions do not acknowledge at all there are many other structural society issues. Sure it would make an evil-intelligent government have a harder time, but will not improve at all life with an evil-idiot government, and to me it seems those are a bit more prevalent (note: idiot = implementing solutions that will not solve the problems they claim they do, while them honestly thinking they do solve them)
Ordinary people tend to care about privacy from government intrusion when you talk to them about it, and e2ee is so prevalent for lots of everyday communication that it isn't something they think about.
Discord recently introduced e2ee for voice chat. Apple has iMessage and Facetime. Whatsapp and to a lesser extent Signal are massively popular.
If you asked and ordinary person "Should the government be able to retroactively access your voice and written communications?" most people would probably react negatively.
Sure, in the pre-computer world, the US could possibly intercept letters and phone calls, but the complexity of that was high enough that it meant it could only happen with really strong cause and cost. With the barrier to scraping up unencrypted communications at near-zero (for governments and hyperscalers), the need for everyday citizens to have protected communications is higher.
I think the below comments answer rather well for me. But of course you are rigth that criminals use technology... I just don't see it as the main issue here.
I think that most common currency for criminals are still just cold cash... But maybe some use crypto yes. And maybe criminals use e2ee. And Marybe you are rigth that it is a problematic thing for law enforcement. That is not the point though.
The point is criminalizing ordinary people for something completely reasonable like wanting to have the ability to talk in private. And talk in private about what they think of the current leadership...
> I think that most common currency for criminals are still just cold cash
It doesn't scale as well. Can't go cross-border easily etc.
I agree that it's wrong but I'm talking about common people (and lawmakers who care about) perception. Until they get burned they won't care and might not take your side like that.
Millions and millions of euro and dollars are being "talen" in white washimg scemes for organised crime ever year. It is a crime-business in it self.
>Criminals used to speak in code, meet clandestine, use burner phones and websites were easy to shut down.
And none of these things were ever made illegal.
>Ordinary people do not care about e2ee.
I am an ordinary person, and I care about the right to be secure and private in my communications. The founders of the United States put it in our Bill of Rights. Mail in America can't just be read without a warrant; it is protected by the 4th Amendment.
> And none of these things were ever made illegal.
Those things are barriers that make it more difficult to be criminal. We're talking about a factor that removes those barriers and makes it easier.
Not sure it's ever been particularly difficult to be a criminal. If anything, the tricky part has always been establishing who you can and can't trust.
You don't need to trust people as much with an e2ee app. Especially if you use it to deliver the goods and use crypto to get paid.
What are you talking about? Thieves' cant, burner phone, clandestine meetings--these are all things that make crime easier, and none of them are illegal. We ban crime, not things that allow crime.
How is it complicated? Having to do these things made crime difficult. There's higher barrier to entry and cost to pay. It's more difficult to scale across borders. Not having to do them makes it easier.
How is it possible to be that level of biased, to not observe that the government is a product of mass violence?
And e2ee/cryptography/bitcoin is just the implementation of free speech which supposed to be guaranted?
It is like saying that killing people is OK but storing photo of oneself nudes is a crime - and keep pretending to be not idiot.
> The idea of privacy will become associated with crime.
The risk is there but it is not a given. The debate is not new, it's been going on for decades. It's a permanent struggle.
Respond and ask them directly if they're accusing you of a crime, or if they intend to address the point of your message rather than making libelous statements that they may later be forced to explain should they persist.
When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes.
In this day and age, probably with a relatively tiny investment into public access points, we could very reasonably have a technically functional direct democracy. The legislative cycle is already authenticated so there's no need to solve "authenticated anonymous vote" problem, European countries already have functional eIDAS systems to back the authentication part and the legislative systems are already to some degree digitized.
On one hand, the problem "what if someone sells their vote" is already present and unsolved, in the shape of lobbying. What's interesting, though, that we have built entire systems to shape public opinion and entrenched them into our daily lives, which are used by corporations and politicians alike.
This begs a question: is there such a thing as unbiased public opinion without authenticated internet access?
inb4: direct democracy does not mean parliamentary systems could be abolished altogether, central spaces for debate would still help solve discussion exchange problems
You are confusing the ability to bring information to people, with the ability of people to consume it.
As has been mentioned elsewhere on the thread - the real issue is often there are complex 2nd and third order effects, often there are devils in the details.
I'm not saying people are not capable of consuming it, I'm saying people don't have the bandwidth.
Direct democracy is best when it's used for very specific proposals with lots of time for debate - not every decision.
If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.
First, my comment is a knee jerk reaction to the idea of representative democracy falling to authoritarianism, don't take it as seriously in favor of direct democracy.
Second, your comment hinges on an interesting hidden assumption. There's implication, that representative democracy selects for a group with inherently higher average bandwidth allocated per proposal and inherently higher average expertise to evaluate the non-immediate, higher-order effects. I'm not going to contest the idea, however, this assumption has to hold quite strictly for the concerns listed to be material.
> If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.
Otherwise this concern is just another side of the lobbying coin. The distinction between professional storytellers curating media in favor of certain party and convincing masses or elected representatives on merit of some law is paper thin anyway.
> There's implication, that representative democracy selects for a group with inherently higher average bandwidth allocated per proposal \
Eh? It's a representatives full time job to consider these things as oppose to the general public doing a full time job and then having to consider legislation.
The difference between lobbying for representatives versus people directly is that representatives have to answer to the people - whereas no-one loses their job as a citizen if they get persuaded by story tellers.
ie both come down to - "it's their job"
> The difference between lobbying for representatives versus people directly is that representatives have to answer to the people - whereas no-one loses their job as a citizen if they get persuaded by story tellers.
I would not be so sure. What's the fundamental difference between convincing general public to vote certain way in a hypothetical direct-ish democracy and convincing that lobbied-for vote by representatives is the good one in a representative system? Quite a large portion of this full time job is already not spent nitpicking legislative initiatives
With humans bandwidth is pretty much always limited - however it's clear that a representative has a higher bandwidth for politics than the average person - because it's their job ( and note they normally have a team of researchers around them as well ).
In terms of persuasion - if a representative votes in a way that's at odds with the people who elect them, then there is a risk of the representative losing their job.
If you have a small group of citizen, selected at random for a particular decision, if they are bribed/lobbied/copted - they aren't at risk from an electorate down the line.
Obviously given that large scale persuasion is now cheap and automatable - even in a representative democracy you might well choose to set the political weather by directly targeting the electorate.
Right now this is a major threat to democracy - you only need a few people skilled int he dark arts, no morals and a sackful of cash to change the political weather currently.
Do you think the average person - ~98 IQ, at most one year of college but likely none, working some sort of retail, home health, or counter food service job - is truly capable of synthesizing third-order effects of a legal proposal and how it interacts with the current environment? If you do, what about someone 10% below average? 20%? Even at 20% below average intelligence we're still talking about one out of every three people, roughly.
I don't think it's just a bandwidth problem.
If I follow your comment, then a politician who is elected based on how they look while eating a bacon sandwich[1] is better at synthesizing third-order effects of a legal proposal because they are a politician?
(i.e. Politicians are selected from average people, often on things like appearance, charm, charisma, voice, snappiness, being less-bad than the other candidates, standing for the voter's preferred party, etc. not based on intelligence or systems thinking; so why would they be better reasoning about 3rd order effects than average people? And they are elected on short terms, so why would they be more interested in spending time trying than others?).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Miliband_bacon_sandwich_pho...
Why would you think I'm making that completely different argument?
If the current scenario is bad, and someone says "we should do this other thing that would be even worse," pointing out that the other thing is worse isn't an endorsement of the current (bad) scenario.
A consequence of democracy means average people get a vote.
However average people are actually pretty good at making the right moral, common sense calls, if not the technical legal detail. I suspect that's in part because they are not living in the Westminister ( or whatever your seat of power is ) bubble.
So any system needs to blend that common sense, with specific expertise. In theory that's what a representative democracy does - however one of the failings currently is the party system ( note designed, in part, to overcome the bandwidth problem - people grouping together to give a single consistent message rather than 100's of independent ones ), where capture of the party by a few people has become too easy and some options that the majority of people want never being offered at the voting time.
This results in an increasingly angry and volatile electorate.
> However average people are actually pretty good at making the right moral, common sense calls, if not the technical legal detail. I suspect that's in part because they are not living in the Westminister ( or whatever your seat of power is ) bubble.
It's easy to make decisions when you are the benefactor and the costs are born by someone else. Unless you are in a country with overall population density approaching that of an urban hub, there are high chances that the benefits afforded and costs born by the seat of power bubble versus an average person barely overlap.
> however one of the failings currently is the party system <...> where capture of the party by a few people has become too easy and some options that the majority of people want never being offered at the voting time.
I'd argue that the fiefdoms within parties come primarily from their corporate likeness. Since the ultimate goal of any party is to capture power and remain in power, the structures that emerge serve this goal first, everything else second.
> I'd argue that the fiefdoms within parties come primarily from their corporate likeness. Since the ultimate goal of any party is to capture power and remain in power, the structures that emerge serve this goal first, everything else second.
If this is true, which doesn't seem that unreasonable, then the crucial factor then becomes what are the key factors in terms of staying in power - responsiveness to the electorate or raising money to persuade the electorate?
Ensuring the latter doesn't take over, in my view, is a top priority to ensure a working democracy - and from the outside, appears to be why the American system is now largely broken.
An alternative would be to select representatives by lot. It would get rid of a political class, would automatically be representative (so no arguments about whether women, minorities, whoever are fairly represented) and not select for people who want power and it would mean people have the same amount of time as those in the current system.
I heard this idea, or variants of it, quite a lot recently.
Some of the examples I've seen it tried - I've seen the people setting it up trying to fix the outcome by carefully choosing the question, then providing expert advice on options scoped by the question.
Framing of the question is a powerful tool to promote the outcome you want, and avoiding ever asking certain questions is another.
Not saying it doesn't have it's place - you just need to be careful that the process isn't used to try and legitimise what would otherwise be unpopular policies via concentrated persuasion on a small number of people.
Did you reply to the wrong comment? The idea I just put forward does not involve questions, it involves replacing one group of people with another doing the same job.
Framing questions is already a problem with legislation. You can frame "do you want to increase online surveillance" as "do you want to protect children" very successfully!
The parent was around direct democracy - where a particular question is posed - and frequent hybrid is randomly selected people to work on a specific question.
If you are saying choose people at random to be an MP for 5 years ( or whatever ), then sure that's different and it would be an interesting experiment - though that would be a pretty stressful job to pitch people into at random.
It would be interesting to see how those random 600 people would organise to get stuff done. In the current government you have specialisation - home secretary, foreign secretary etc - you wouldn't want to keep that structure and randomly allocate roles - but if you have the 600 vote on everything then you still have a bandwidth problem.
Look at how the American hate jury lottery, I doubt this would be welcomed in the state.
It may work in some other country..
> It may work in some other country..
Jury service in the UK is generally seen in a positive light ( despite having far too much hanging around ).
I suspect the US problems could be easily fixed by forcing employers to pay you while you are doing it.
Juries are unpaid and obscure. I think most people in the UK would be delighted to sit in Parliament for the a £100k an year salary + expenses (what MP's currently get) plus a lot of prestige and the experience. It would be a pretty good thing to have on your CV!
> When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes.
I think there is more to it. A large part of democracy is delegating decision making to people with time and expertise to investigate issues more thoroughly than most individuals can or want to.
I have some broad opinions about the environment etc. but I am by no means an expert in the details, so I am happy to delegate day to day decision making to someone with more expertise who's opinions broadly align with my own.
I'd agree that referendums do make more sense on "issues of conscience" though, like whether to have a death penalty, voting reform etc.
If you make it legal to sell your vote, it’d become very obvious very quickly how much money is in politics.
I am not sure the hard part of direct democracy was ever only the logistics of voting
Representative democracy is rooted in the idea that the average person is kind of a moron. Just look at states where it's incredibly easy to get state-wide referendums on basically anything on the ballot and you'll see the legal landscape there quickly becomes a mess.
> idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy
In the US at least, no it is not. The founders were incredibly concerned about the ‘passions of the mob’ and deliberately built a system that they hoped would temper the excesses of the public.
And after seeing the wacko stuff going on in California, I can’t blame them!
Is there such a thing as "unbiased public opinion" at all though? The memetic effects of language and communication means propaganda and similar tools of rhetoric and leveraged communication will always work, with or without an internet. There's no "solution", only "good enoughs".
Direct democracy is cool, but also impractical. I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance. So what's a level of direct democracy that's "good enough"? How do we make sure we're directly voting in things relevant to our lives? What if "relevant to our lives" is unrelated to our geographic location and is very interests based? If anyone can vote for anything, but most folks don't ever vote for most things, how do you prevent brigading of votes via coordination by groups who see that their group alone can swing what would be a small local vote whatever way they want by virtue of sheer numbers? How do you prevent trolls from going through every vote and just voting no on every "community center paper-and-ink budget" across the entire country?
There are so many questions I have about direct democracy systems! Do you have more information?
> I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance.
The best way to do this is through a combination of subsidiarity and constitutional rights.
You have a central government but its primary purpose is to set out and uphold fundamental rights. It essentially sets out what the local governments can't do, so you can't have ex post facto laws, censor speech, detain people without trial, try to enforce local laws on actions performed in remote jurisdictions, etc.
In particular, the central government should not be in the business of regulating private conduct. Only the local governments do that.
Then you don't have to be worried about appropriations for road maintenance in some other county because you don't live there. Whereas the appropriations in your county are coming out of your pocket, and aren't such a far away thing that your vote is being diluted into irrelevance, so then maybe you want to be paying some attention to that.
A solution is “liquid democracy”, or instantly revocable delegation of your vote. With good UX, you could build a system that allows you to have a nominal representative you trust for different types of votes, with manual override for votes you want to make yourself. It would require some procedural changes to ensure that people have time to read and debate bills.
(This otherwise great in theory idea is mooted by the fact that remote legislative votes are a terrible idea, as security is a shitshow literally everywhere.)
> Direct democracy is cool, but also impractical. I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance. So what's a level of direct democracy that's "good enough"?
This particular question has an extremely simple answer - derived from the decades of practical development of consensus based systems in democratic spaces (art spaces, leftist political groups etc). You vote / participate in the consensus decision making of the issues that are most important to you. It's that simple. Every issue is democratically decided, and you just 'tune in' to the ones that matter to you.
In terms of brigading / trolling are harder. In consensus institutions they're usually dealt with by limiting the amount of blocking (forcing tabling of an issue) and ensuring that voting / consensus participation is limited to those who are actively involved in the community. This is obviously far more complex on a societal level.
Overall this requires a bigger investment of time, but you're in no way required to care about everything. Over time though, the group / institution / society, is forced to grow up. Or at least grow out of the learned helplessness that dominates contemporary representative democracy.
I think everyone can agree that having O(100M) people vote on every local initiative is absurd.
But a lot of countries are somewhere on the "direct" vs "representative" spectrum. The US actually abnormally lacking in direct mechanisms, for example. See
> The US actually abnormally lacking in direct mechanisms
only on a federal level. states like california or texas are more direct than a lot of western europe in some ways. like the fact that ballot props are binding law or sheriffs and state attorneys are elected.
>I think everyone can agree that having O(100M) people vote on every local initiative is absurd.
I'm one of those everyones, and I don't agree.
Except if you mean local initiatives that don't concern 100M people, but e.g. some regional municipality. Of course then just the locals can vote, be they 100K or 1M.
Yes! I meant local issues that don't concern 100M people. Local issues that concern a few thousand people can be (and often are) resolved by direct democracy.
I guess I could argue that putting a stop sign at a particular intersection in rural Kansas could concern me, even though I don't live in Kansas, but I think very few people would make that argument in good faith.
>Is there such a thing as "unbiased public opinion" at all though?
Doesn't really matter except philosophically. There's something close enough to unbiased public opinion when there are no government propaganda campaings, censorship, press owned by conglomerates, and corporate messaging.
In most political systems the two functions of government are rationing and ideological control for the poor and profiteering for the rich. The media provide marketing and propaganda support for both.
It's very hard to have truly independent media.
The Swiss succeeded in this, maybe we should look at their model and improve.
Switzerland is a country with a total population approximately the size of the state of New Jersey. This being too centralized for most things, they then further divided that population into 26 cantons ranging in size from approximately the size of New Hampshire at the high end to "that number of people would be classified as a town rather than a city" at the low end.
The median size looks to be around 200,000 people, so maybe start by dividing the US population into cantons of around that size and doing most of the rulemaking at that level.
The best level of democracy is no democracy. The problem of voting for road repairs is a problem we created by democracy. We voted ourselves into a system we can't escape, just because people back in the days couldn't fully comprehend side effects of their collective decisions.
Very few people realize that there is option to not use government cohersion as a solution to everything.
I know this is unpopular opinion. The system is designed for this to be unpopular opinion.
But the problem is not the democracy, but the level of power we give to the government. If the only power of government would be to pick flag colors and national anthem, no one would care about it.
No one cares about UK having a king, because it doesn't change a thing.
> The best level of democracy is no democracy.
That's a quite fatal view. I'm not going to defend the shortcomings of democracy as a system or the issues all real implementations have. But democracy has a feature that is unique about it: as long as it actually is a democracy, as soon as things go a way that the people don't like, they can do something about it and change course. For better or worse, but they can. That's the main point of democracy.
Besides, having votes or electionsor is really just a minor detail of the concept of democracy. There is much more to it, like a free conversation in society, strong independent education, journalism, justice, protection of minorities, etc. The will of the people doesn't fall from the sky or is set in stone. It's a permanent conversation which needs all the other mechanisms. If all that happens is a vote every few years, that's not at all indicative of a democracy. Neither is democracy synonymous with majority rule.
> Very few people realize that there is option to not use government cohersion as a solution to everything.
What is "cohersion"? There are "cohesion" and "coercion". Assuming the latter, what does this have to do with democracy? An autocracy or dictarship or whatever non-democratic system you can imagine also likely has a government, and their coercion mechanisms tend to be worse than in democracies. In a democracy you have an independent judical system that you can use against government overreach.
>There is much more to it, like a free conversation in society, strong independent education, journalism, justice, protection of minorities, etc.
All in theory. Otherwise we wouldn't debate this. Historically none of these traits are unique to democracy, but developed society. US had a civil war over protection of minorities even though it was considered a democracy.
>In a democracy you have an independent judical system that you can use against government overreach.
Which can only follow laws passed by the government. Separation of powers is not unique to democracy. Again the coercion mechanisms doesn’t matter, but the severity of it.
> No one cares about UK having a king, because it doesn't change a thing.
Which is the position the Monarchy absolutely wants you to have, and they definitely don't want you to know that they have veto power over all laws, and regularly intervene and get laws modified so that they're not included in scope.
Meanwhile they just gave themselves a massive pay rise, at a time when government is cutting public spending in all areas.
In theory the King can veto any law he wants. In practice he couldn't without causing a monumental constitutional crisis that would probably end his reign. His unofficial ability to influence government policy is the real issue, but one that is definitely not limited to that one guy with the special blood.
> In theory the King can veto any law he wants. In practice he couldn't without causing a monumental constitutional crisis that would probably end his reign.
His mum Lizzie2 had no problem doing it without causing any problems:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/07/revealed-que...?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vette...
I think it's likely that Chuckie3 is continuing this grand tradition with impunity.
You can benefit much more as a corrupt politician, as the blame is diluted between the whole government. Single king is responsible for it's actions and we even have a word for throwing them out of the window if they misbehave.
It's much rarer for politicians to even get into jail.
The BBC is monarchist to the core. A lot of people say the BBC is biased in one political direction or another, but they often forget about monarchism.
One notable example of their privilege was when Andrew George MP dared to ask a question in parliament about the Duchy of Cornwall, only to be told he wasn't allowed to. (The Duchy of Cornwall is a kind of slush fund for the heir to throne. Charles had it before he became king. It has tax breaks, and also the ability to seize property and mine on people's land.)
Actually quite a few people care about the UK having a king, in the UK. In Northern Ireland, there is a considerable republican (small "r" population) for political reasons.
The BBC promotes the monarchy heavily as it is under royal charter.
There were significant protests at the Queen's funeral cortege and the current king's coronation. The state clamped down hard, in one case arresting someone for holding up a blank bit of paper.
I admit UK wasn't the best example as now it's freedom of speech is maybe worse than in Russia or China. But I feel like public does not trat it as the biggest issue of the UK at the moment.
Let's say Denmark for example.
Thing is that freedom of speech was not good back when I was growing up. There were many groups that were heavily monitored by Special Branch. Some of this has been declassified now. I do not wish to downplay the atrocities of the IRA, but there certainly was another side to the Troubles which the BBC wouldn't report on fairly and tried to claim it was an internal religious conflict.
2 ideas about direct democracy.
Selling your vote becomes a nonissue when everybody is doing it.
An LLM informed by a reddit-style discussion tree might be a good way to implement the policy-creating part of a direct democracy.
> When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes.
REPLACE FED CHAIR WITH DOVE OR HAWK?
BUILD NEW STRATEGIC BOMBERS?
START A WAR WITH IRAN?
VOTE NOW!
Imagine the chaos. Imagine all the ads.
Stupid things like brexit was put to a vote, but really important things such as age verification and mass surveillance are never put to any vote.
In what way was Brexit a stupid thing? It was an extemely important decision, directly affecting everybody's life. If asking people about anything then isn't that what it should be? You might not like the outcome (I don't) but I consider the question of Brexit important.
Analogy:
Cancer surgery is an extremely important decision, directly affecting many people's lives.
What happened with Brexit was a analogous a bunch of salesmen on TV saying "that mysterious ache you have, don't listen to doctors who say it's fine, call our surgical team today! It's cancer! We can fix this quickly and you'll be back to your old self within a week!" for two decades, then the country agreeing, going to surgery, and waking up to find they'd had half their liver removed, the post-surgical biopsy results said it was fine and not cancerous at all, it took 6 months to recover and they could never drink alcohol again. And the ache was still there.
If it had been an honest "we know it will cost X, we are willing to spend this because otherwise what is the point of money", that would have been totally fair.
Instead, problems that weren't caused by the EU were blamed on it for decades, while the benefits of membership were treated as the natural state of the world to the extent that talk of losing them was equated with "being punished".
Should we also have a referendum on reducing the tax rate to zero? It would also be an extremely important decision, directly affecting everybody's life. If asking people about anything, then isn't that what it should be?
Not all referenda that might win a "yes" vote are sensible to propose.
It was put to vote for stupid reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_vote_in_favour_o...
> The referendum was originally conceived by David Cameron as a means to defeat the anti-EU faction within his own party by having it fail.
After that, another issue is that the leave campaign was heavily based on lies and misleading the British voters.
Couple that with a extreme form of policy lock-in / hysteresis: you need just to form a small margin in a majority at a single point of time. After that point of time, the popular opinion doesn't matter anymore because getting back to EU isn't as easy as leaving. So the misinformation campaign need to work just once. By the time voters realize what happened, it's too late.
This situation is a critical failure of democracy. Not just direct democracy, representative democracy can't work in a post-truth world either.
But Brexit was a vote, by the people. Yes, the pro-leave campaign lied to no ends, but people still made a choice on their own and the majority for leave was quite slim.
This is very different to age sniffing here. Age sniffing is not being queried via public votum - lobbyists push it through without any resistance. It's amazing how this works.
The pro-remain campaign lied too and I would argue a great deal more. Take a look at the predictions of the immediate effect of Brexit vote (for 1017-18) on page 9 of the Treasury report: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a80772140f0b...
This whole argument is why we do not have more direct democracy. The people in power and people who benefit from the status quo do not want the hoi polloi taking the "wrong" decisions. We might end up nationalising things or taxing big business effectively or all sorts of terrible things. Better to just give people the illusion of choice by letting them choose between two "neo-liberal" parties.
> the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control
I'm not sure about that at all. All my normies friends have no problem immediately submitting their documents to any KYC service that requests it. And talking about chat control they happily parrot the propaganda points, which is something very normal given that they have no insight as we do.
So unfortunately I believe that the laymen are all in favor of chat control.
I agree that it is not always mass public demand for authoritarianism. Often it is more like institutional persistence plus vague moral framing
I’m not in favour of Chat Control;
> the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control and the will to push it through tends to come from the political circles more than popular belief it is a good idea.
This is quite the statement. What evidence do you have that of this? Here in the UK, the equivalent bills are pretty widely supported across he board.
> I expect that if the measure itself went to a general vote, the majority would be against it once they have to deal with a specific proposal
This is likely true of pretty much anything, though. Imagine suggesting that people collectively fund a national road network by paying 20% of their income to the government (or whatever number your state/country/municipality chooses). All of a sudden it’s a terrible idea!
> the evidence is
I don't believe this. I believe us more tech oriented people live in a dangerous bubble that reassures us that obviously people are against it. But that's very likely not true.
I disagree, if anything the last 12 years or so have shown that there are groups on both sides of the political spectrum that are quite willing to engage and justify censorship.
From "Muh freeze peach" to the actual government requested censorship during COVID everyone is rushing to get a new shiny stick they can use to beat their political opponents with.
> The repeated failures of authoritarianism to get to a good place are so consistent it is wild that people keep trying it.
Lee Kuan Yew would like a word.
The world is complicated. There may be more than one way to get to a good place, if we can even agree on what good looks like. Most people, even libertarians, think that some kind and degree of authoritarianism is beneficial in a government, we just disagree on the details.
But it’s not about critical thinking or governing well it’s about getting re-elected.
So the argument will go to “think of the children” which is a guise for more control and then pretty soon we are living in the dystopian future of 1984 or the UK where the film V for Vendetta took place.
This same kind of thinking gets idiots like Trump elected because people don’t have any sense of the commons and become single issue voters (sic). “Oh just reduce my taxes on my carried interest… reduce my taxes… I’m a xenophobe I hate immigrants let’s not do anything systematic let’s just hard close the border or the world is flat America only exists we don’t need allies or trading partners (JD Vance) … and so on”
I think there are many arguments for and against this type of regulation. Good arguments on both sides take into account nth-order effects. But both sides have different priorities, and have different weighing of the trade-offs. Calling one side effectively "thick" isn't really taking part in the debate.
(And cause and effect are taught pretty early on in school; not sure you need to learn "systems thinking" to understand nth-order effects.)
What are the nth-order effects that you think are not being considered or weighted accordingly by proponents of this regulation?
There are no good arguments for this type of regulation, but there are some very good arguments to not let kids to use proprietary software. You know, nothing is worse than a half-truth.
Violation of rights to privacy — age verification ties an identity to the request, so if you’re surfing porn or browsing controversial threads, you could be flagged by law enforcement or the other third parties that the state might be sharing data with, such as insurance companies that might infer the wrong things about you. You could be blackmailed, too.
And then there’s also the leakage of those data points to rival nation states, in case of a security breach.
Plenty of bad nth order effects if you just think about it
What right to privacy do you have online? For the record, I am fully against this but people just throw the word "right" around. In another thread here people had a "right" to Anthropic's latest model. It almost becomes a joke. You have a right not to use the internet, but if you do the government can make laws, however shitty, if they want to. Relying on "rights" as an argument fails quickly in my opinion. You have a right to buy a gun, but a lot of places require verification. You have the right to be alcohol or porn, but that requires age verification. What right do you have to go online without providing verification? If you can't provide a legal basis, come up with a better argument because yours is easily dismissed.
This is Whataboutism. Maybe the wolf has good reasons for leaving the stockyards gates open, it is a different perspective, yeah, but for the stock it is pretty clear good vs death.
Now of course, no one is going to “directly” dir from these laws but so much meaning that comes with freedom will be lost, but maybe the wolfs see it under a different light.
I agree with your broader point but I'm always skeptical of the claim "we should teach xyz in schools!" Because, well, choose your least favourite subject at school. A language, history or geography, mathematics perhaps. How much do you remember? The reason you don't remember is because you weren't motivated to learn, since you didn't, at the time, think it worth learning. If you think kids are champing at the bit to learn systems thinking, or how to file taxes, or law or anything else really then you are unfortunately wrong.
To me classes being boring and forgettable has more to do with the method of teaching than the subject. Just about anything can be made interesting with the right approach, and often that approach isn’t the typical textbooks, tests, and rote memorization.
Perhaps I’m biased, though. I learn best when provided with working practical examples and hands-on exercises that allow me to develop my own internal models. They can make a concept “click” where I’d be beating my head against a wall with traditional methods for a much longer period of time to achieve the same revelation.
And I agree with the commenter’s well-meaning, but we are technically teaching systems theory already in schools. If you’ve had classes in any of the natural sciences, you’ve had systems thinking. If you don’t remember a whit, well then, proves your point—it’s probably not that great of an idea afterall.
The question however is if students are ever challenged or encouraged to apply their learnings beyond the classroom and in daily life. In my experience, the answer is usually “no”.
I've long held that Logic should be a part of the core high school curriculum. Understanding basic if/then propositions and a handful of axioms form a robust foundation for reasoning in any domain.
I was asking the Google llm search about why iterative games don't reach their competitive equilibrium the round after revealing the theory. In my example, it was the "guess 2/3 the average game", and I asked it why my class didn't immediately converge to zero after it was explained. The llm said people are lazy and I have autism because I couldn't identify or understand the stopping criteria used by my classmates. I'm still confused.
How people play those games has to do with cultural norms and expectations, not just mathematics and logic. Same for age verification.
Having grown up through the early-ish days of the web, I'm still surprised the internet in general didn't get an 18+ age rating almost immediately.
Though I suppose that may have something to do with households in the early days having at most one internet connected device even if they were well off, so society could get away with blaming parents for not monitoring kids' use.
Don’t underestimate the impact of AOL - the main experience boomers and greatest generation had of the early internet was moderated and mediated. My parents were not on IRC.
Well we teach people the health benefits of physical activity school but many don't continue with it.
Sorry, this is going to be a rant. :)
Admittedly it's a long time since I was in school, but when I was there the notion of teaching the benefits of physical activity was limited to being told to run about for some 'sport', and absolutely nothing about why that's a good idea. Everyone was expected to do the same thing with no consideration for ability, disability, or motivation. Kids were punished with detentions for refusing to endure painful exercise that they couldn't do as well as their more capable peers.
The very obvious second order effect of poor physical education is fat unmotivated adults who don't exercise. Maybe educators need some systems thinking training too.
I'd add that not only were we not taught about health benefits in PE classes, the punishment for non-participation was not only detention but also potentially failing the entire grade. I ended up dropping out in my first year of high school due to a culmination of similar issues. I loved and still love learning, but my school was not an environment for learning. It was an environment for teaching rigid obedience to authority, and nothing more.
My particular favorite thing to rant about is how, on the first day, I was held in detention for the entire day and made to skip the introduction to my classes because I unknowingly wore the wrong shade of blue for the dress code. Like the middle school in the same district, the dress code required a white, red, or blue polo (FUCK YEAH AMERICA!!!!), but the shade of blue from the middle school uniforms was not allowed, something I was never aware of but instead got arbitrarily punished for along with dozens of others, with my parent being made to buy a new set of uniform shirts after school.
It is no wonder that the US is in a state of decline given how horrid the schooling is. I can't imagine a worse environment for stifling intellectual curiosity than the one I was in.
I was in school for 12 years and for 11 of those years I was told I was bad at sports. It was only in the last year of high-school that I finally had a PE teacher that actually tried to teach us that sports is about doing what we like and moving our bodies. I had top grades that year and finally learned that I liked (some) sports. Turns out I was just bad at football (soccer) which was what we were forced to do 90% of the time.
It’s been 25 years since I was in school and this was my experience. Unsure if it’s changed…
Ironically when I was in high school I was fat and hated pe but biked about 20 minutes to school every day. Now in middle age I still bike everywhere and am in better shape than most of my peers..
Turns out I just really really hate running.
Same. In my mid 40's and probably in the top 20% of my age group.
Absolutely hate running!
This is an excellent point. I'm self educated while my wife holds multiple degrees and a masters. Yet when she saw a news article about age verification (something I've been following for years thanks to HN) she was like "this is good" and I'm like "why" and the ensuing discussion made it clear that she didn't really think about the repercussions of age verification, just that seemingly smart people in positions of power seemed to think it was a good idea.
And I think this is dangerous. We have smart people like my wife who would probably vote Yes on this if it came to our ballot, because the smart people who wrote the measure were able to control the narrative.
Not that I'm so smart, mind you. I just follow HN and EFF so I'm exposed to this kind of stuff. I'd probably be blind to such things outside of the tech world. I'd love to say that I'd think of nth order effects when at the ballot but honestly maybe I won't.
A lot of bad tech policy seems to come from judging a proposal only by its stated intent
No, not everyone exploits that. But those that reject these controls are often ridiculed because the thought about any side effect is too alien.
Yet I don't think age verification will work with national IDs for that matter. I generally use social media sites that won't implement it.
But yes, the normal insta/tiktok user will be affected and not think too much about it. Others will have true freedom of speech.
> I generally use social media sites that won't implement it.
Which social media sites won't implement it?
Most of them are more insignificant than Twitter, Insta, TikTok. And while they do employ advertising here and there, profit is only interesting for keeping up with server costs.
> "If we taught systems thinking in schools"
In the US, the public school system can barely teach basic reading and math. And the teachers don't appear to understand 2nd or 3rd order thinking themselves so therefore are unlikely to be able to teach it.
Teaching systems thinking may be an effective solution but it needs an effective delivery system to test it.
Have you talked to any high school students or teachers lately? The ones I have (via my kids) are all articulate, thoughtful, and kind. It gives me a lot of hope for the future.
I mean, not surprisingly, this is entirely geographic and system dependent. Do your high school teachers (or elementary) have to wear body cameras, practice administering narcan, and how to clear the chamber of a discovered gun, or do they get to 3D print parts for their classroom and go on field trips?
It's the outliers that are geographic and system dependent. Rank the schools and exclude outliers at both extremes. The remaining schools aren't filled with teachers acting like prison guards watching over illiterate students.
most people simply dont care to control for higher order effects. they enjoy doing things on principle and then dealing with the effects seperately.
the principle of protecting children is strong. the solution of verification, no matter how poorly implemented, cannot be struck down while people are interested in persuing the principle it claims to represent.
the only other way around it is to come up with another solution that supports the principle and hope it gains more traction. but when the powers at be putting forth the verification may have ulterior motives to begin with, alternative solutions have a way of losing traction
Well people that have been hearing of the slippery slope fallacy their whole life might end up biased against such an approach
If we taught systems thinking in any educational setting, and it took hold for a significant portion of the population, we would have already transcended into immortal thinking energy beings and age verification debates would be irrelevant....
Unfortunately, I don't think systems thinking alone would help much.
One could present the case in favor of Internet age verification to the nth-order effects, while downplaying the effects in the case against.
So, in addition to presenting the cases with foreseeable effects, we need ways to compare the impact of worst-case scenarios in the two cases, and make a decision or compromise based on that.
Concur.
Systems thinking is one thing. One sided systems thinking is another.
If you disregard the challenges kids and their parents, or adults as a whole, are facing with just social media, you can easily make a case against age verification.
Yet, the whole reason we are at this juncture, is because there are actual injuries being felt by people. Not because privacy isn’t valued or hasn’t been defended regularly.
it's not that they're bad at logic in general, it's that the "protecting the children" part gets them emotionally reactive, which bypasses logic. same thing happens when you tell a man who's emotionally reactive about his masculinity that soy will give him tits, just those words are enough to shut down his thinking.
people are plenty good at systems thinking. if we made them better at it, their emotional immaturity would still bypass it.
> If we taught systems thinking in schools ...
This plus methods of narrative steering and psychological manipulation in general.
Though I can't see this happenning while the transnational cartel is still at the helm.
No, we have any number of social constructs around 'age and responsibility' - driving, alcohol, pubs, porn, excessive violence and so much more.
It's bereft to suggest that we wouldn't nominally have those in the digital world.
And, people are concerned about nth order effects, it's a huge point of debate.
Yes - there is a huge slippery slope argument to be made, but it's an argument ... to be made. There are all sorts of ways of doing this.
Social media age verification is like none of those - social media is the modern public square and age verification is asking everybody to show their papers before participating in free speech in the public. It will have a chilling effect on free speech and will be a tool for authoritarian control
Social media, as we have it today, has nothing to do with a public square.
A public square does not have trolls and bots from across the globe teleporting in and out. A public square does not amplify the most divisive comments and drown out your friends's holiday photos because the former makes the ad space more profitable.
A poor analogy.
The public square has never been properly anonymous. If you start saying things which contravene laws or the rights of others, the police have been able to capture you and unmask your identity, if concealed.
So the solution for criminals in the public is for everybody to show their papers walking into a public square? It is not, we have requirements for police process like warrants and a process for determining the requirements for urgent conditions of arrest.
No, obviously not, and this is a completely glib argument.
Who is suggesting people 'show their papers' to go into a public square?
Literally nobody.
It really demonstrates how bad the analogy is - so much so that it's not even analogy.
The 'social controls' on the 'public square' are limited by a few laws (aka directed violence) but apart from that you can say as you like, kids can as well - it's where parents can be parents.
And - don't have problem with kids in the public square.
We have a very real problem with kids on social media, verifiable, scientific.
Kids are depressed, distracted, they bully each other, they're creeped on, and they're not yet in the business having serious discussions about 'Mein Kampf' - they're kids.
Everything in kids lives is introduced in an 'age appropriate' fashion - literally everything.
Given the toxicity of social media, it's a 'primary concern' for one of those gated things.
This is not even an argument - the only argument is 'the slippery slope'.
The science for age bans on social media is weak at best. There were pretty much terrible studies done during Covid and did not attribute all sorts of uncertainty going on at the same time.
If the point were to improve on the mental health of kids there are countless underfunded public programs. Especially in the US, social support programs like food, healthcare basic and mental, actual physical public spaces for kids, arts in curriculum, etc.
For what it’s worth, as an Australian, and as the operator of an online community, I unreservedly approve of the social media ban enforced by our government.
Conversely, I don’t agree with the way some other countries are going about it. Especially the UK with the abysmal way they have physically policed online speech by adults. Incredibly sad to see police prioritise non-violent “speech crimes” because they’re too scaredy-cat to tackle actual violent crime.
There is a reasonable answer to be found, if we're willing to be inventive. It shouldn’t be beyond the imagination of cryptography experts to design a system where only governments can issue an age identification certificate, which individuals can use to generate verifiable proof of age tokens. But where the tokens can’t be used by the government to identify the individual.
This is hauntingly reminiscent of the gun law argument in US:
The government shouldn't infringe on my right to bear arms, mass shooting is a mental health issue anyways, oh but we can't really fund mental health support because my tax shouldn't go towards helping those who put themselves in that situation. Que the same argument for privacy on the internet.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you can't trust the government, then work towards healing it, restructuring it, overhauling it. Subverting the government is such antisocial behaviour, very criminal like.
If that’s how you interpreted my post, I can only hypothesis that you didn’t read it. I can’t think of another explanation.
I actually like the traditional public square model: you have anonymity most of the time, but it’s not some absolute shield you can abuse to be an obnoxious prick. The police can intervene, but the intervention happens in the public square too.
People publish entire books anonymously.
Yes, and plenty of people have spoken in the public square anonymously too, because the police didn't feel the need to arrest them.
Publishing a book anonymously in the public square still means someone has to physically manufacture it, distribute it, convince you to read it, and pay for all of this. All these steps are subject to interdiction by the police.
Was there ever a public square where children could participate anonymously among adults? (I’m imagining three Dickensian urchins in a trench coat giving a speech in Hyde Park.)
The public square was in communities small enough where townspeople knew each other, and so speech was not anonymous besides those who penned (but not those who distributed) unattributed pamphlets. Moreover, if the speech you were pronouncing was beyond the pale of the community’s values, you could face retribution for it, whether judicial or extra-judicial like tarring and feathering. Even in the nascent USA whose political elite was high on Lockean ideas of natural rights and freedom of speech, the public square was never a free-for-all.
My supposedly modern government has problems with all kinds of speech and this is a lazy excuse. Government needs really hard boundaries and not being able to identify someone who perhaps said something controversial is a pretty good one.
You are right about the public square. That is pretty much what governments want to enforce. To silence everyone not in line, like in medieval towns.
Social media as it has become now is a shitshow where a minority of angry and/or disingenuous posters dominate discourse.
Twitter (X) was never the public square, and now it's little more than a playground for propagandists. The rest of us do well to ignore it, and it seems that even the 'legacy' media are starting to realise the days of breathlessly reporting on tweet-storms weren't great for anyone.
In a recent survey of under sixteen year olds in a place where an under sixteen social media ban exists asked how many of them used social media found that 80% were still using it. Do you actually need a login to consume social media? The answer to that is no. You can doom scroll all you want on sites like Reddit with no account whatsoever.
Your local library has age and ID requirements.
Your local 'town square' has 'some rules'.
Parents are entirely able to overcome any of this if they so choose - including feeding their kids alcohol, guns etc. - and so the freedom does materially exist.
Social Media isn't a place for free expression - it's mostly toxic - like exposing your children to the most vile, inauthentic people.
The more genteel places, frankly, won't have much in the way of age restrictions.
Entire nations are banning social media for kids because it's just not healthy - the teachers want it, the parents want it, the data seems to support it.
I think you're right to be (very concerned) but this is a necessary discussion. As a teacher.
> Your local library has age and ID requirements.
It literally doesn't (at least not if I don't intend to borrow a book and take it home; if I stay there and read, I can do so without any ID. I only need ID to get a library card, and I don't need that to enter and read a book).
It literally does - and you just admitted it.
The point is that 'even the local library' enacts rules and social conventions - not that they're exhaustively and acutely enforced in all corners.
No 4chan section in the library?
You might wonder why it doesn't have vast array of avant guard adult content, porn or art with really aggressive themes and people calling each other the n-word?
In society we have 'age related' conventions all over the place ... including your Library.
This is the absolute worst of HN, where people dissolve into Reddit-like discussions of bad meatphors and totally out of context hair splitting.
I just can't believe anyone here has any relationship with the reality of children, teaching or parenting whatsoever. It's the same argument made by the 'drugs should be legal and accessible' crowd - completely oblivious to the instantaneous massive health epidemic we'd have with opioids and fentanyl, or the 'anti vaxer' crowd - narrow ideological arguments about expression disconnected from any kind of reality or nuance.
There's a variation of social media that will be fine for the kids, they can be exposed to more into their late teens. Parents that want to opt out, will de facto be allowed to - and there is always a slippery slope with every law.
> It literally does - and you just admitted it.
I can be 9 years old and go to the library and read any book they have without showing ID. Whatever your point is, it escapes me.
> The point is that 'even the local library' enacts rules and social conventions - not that they're exhaustively and acutely enforced in all corners.
Then let us do the same thing on the internet. Age verification is not that (at least in the forms being pushed).
> No 4chan section in the library?
No, but there are 4chan-style books I can read there. Anything that isn't outright illegal (Anarchist's cookbook) is pretty darn available there.
> You might wonder why it doesn't have vast array of avant guard adult content, porn or art with really aggressive themes and people calling each other the n-word?
That'd be because it does have books like that. Your point continues to escape me. Maybe my library is really pushing whatever limits.
> I just can't believe anyone here has any relationship with the reality of children, teaching or parenting whatsoever
I've literally been an assistant teacher for about a year. You probably won't believe me though.
> It's the same argument made by the 'drugs should be legal and accessible' crowd
Who I agree with! Funny how that works!
> completely oblivious to the instantaneous massive health epidemic we'd have with opioids and fentanyl
Imagine a world where we can have that regulated, so people know what they're taking, and can see a doctor to get help without getting the police on their back, rather than the unregulated shitshow we have now.
> or the 'anti vaxer' crowd - narrow ideological arguments about expression disconnected from any kind of reality or nuance.
This comparison escapes me too. Anti-vax started with (or at least got a massive growth boost by) Andrew Wakefield, whose paper was based on science so bad and whose research was so heinous he's no longer a doctor. If the 'drugs should be legal and accessible' stance is based on science that bad, I'd love to see it.
"Then let us do the same thing on the internet. Age verification is not that (at least in the forms being pushed)."
So you prefer the internet be censored to be as civil as the library?
'Age appropriate' content is the easiest and most obvious way to do this, particularly because of the effects of social media on young minds.
---
"No, but there are 4chan-style books I can read there." (at the library)
Nonsense.
This is 4Chan [1] , and your library does not contain stuff like this.
---
"that'd be because it does have books like that."
Again - no - your library contains books in 'avant gard' art that you think is 'avant gard', but it's in the civil sense.
Your library does not contain books or films showing 'rape voyeurism'.
---
"Imagine a world where we can have that regulated, so people know what they're taking,"
They do! It's right on the bottle! In exact quantities and 'high quality ingredients'!
It's made by PURDUE PHARMA, dispensed by doctors, and has caused a vicious national epidemic affecting millions of lives - and is the leading cause of death for ages 18-45 !!
It's truly the litmus test of 'common sense' vs. 'naive ideology'
The 'starting point' for 'harm reduction' is a reasonable reaction to ugly, ham fisted authoritarian 'throw them all in jail' traditional approaches - especially those milder things like 'marijuana' etc.
But in the end 'Harm Reduction' is actually a 'Radical Religious Progressive Cult of Ideology' rooted in the belief that 'Policing' and 'Patriarchy' the the 'Justice System' are the source of all harms, completely oblivious to basic human behaviour, mixed in with a bunch of Libertarian nonsense.
It's not unreasonable to posit that in 'some cases' an addict can have 'controlled access' to a substance 'without judgment' to help them stabilize, and find a path off of heroin on etc.
This is the 'polite' argument, but it's completely effete.
In reality that those cases are surprisingly rare, clinical, and extremely expensive to administer and control.
Reality is 'the alley full of zombies'.
Drugs kill substantially more people than guns - in Canada guns kill about 300 vs 7000 overdose deaths / year.
That's ballpark 40K-80K non-lethal overdoses per year. Every human who has had an 'overdose' is in a very distressed state - their lives may never recover. Each of them has family members who are in distress.
The 'world you are imagining' (where Fentanyl is available over the counter in 'whatever dose') is 5-10% of of the population hospitalized for opioid related problems within 6 months, and a collapse of the medical and law enforcement systems, not to mention all of the other knock on effects aka huge spike in small crime, loss of workforce, taxation, child welfare problems etc..
Singapore, which takes a very aggressive and authoritarian 'zero tolerance' approach has less than 1% of the deaths.
Less than 1%.
99% percent of those dying of overdose, ostensibly are dying because we refuse to actually take action.
And - because they have such a dramatically lower rate of addiction they can afford full rehab for the remaining actual addicts - this is the most damning evidence against the 'harm reduction' approach: it engenders so many addicts that even as 'rich nations' , we can't afford to help, whereas if we could 'contain the problem', we could afford to focus more on actual addicts.
The 'world you need to imagine' is one where we actually are able to restrict fentanyl, definitely restrict doctors from handing out entire bottles, and are able to afford actual rehab for those how need it.
Addiction is a social disease: it's a learned behaviour transmitted from one person to another. The most dangerous thing to society, is not a 'guy with a gun' - it's a fentanyl addict who will teach or induce someone around them into 'walking death'. That form of 'transmission' is actually more dangerous than COVID.
We're not going to expose our kids to free drugs, or guns, or porn, or vodka, and neither will our kids not use Social Media until they're old enough to be properly socialized to ingest and understand the impact of it.
Then they grow to be adults and make their own decisions, watch porn ... drink vodka ... just not fentanyl. That's it.
---
(Warning, this is a 4-chan like to crude content - only to make a point about what 4chan is)
[1] https://boards.4chan.org/soc/thread/35155514/kik-dick-pic-th...
> So you prefer the internet be censored to be as civil as the library?
Given that I can find books that aren't civil there, sure.
> This is 4Chan [1] , and your library does not contain stuff like this.
Finding dick pics at my local library isn't hard, if you know where to look. Ditto 4chan.
> Your library does not contain books or films showing 'rape voyeurism'.
That'd be because it's illegal. Hence my comment about that.
> It's made by PURDUE PHARMA, dispensed by doctors, and has caused a vicious national epidemic affecting millions of lives - and is the leading cause of death for ages 18-45 !!
I'm glad I don't live in the US, where doctors are lobbied (this doesn't seem like the right word, but you get the idea) to push opiates or whatever other drugs on patients, only to then get away with it. Preventing things like that is also included in 'a world where we can have that regulated'. For instance:
> The 'world you need to imagine' is one where we actually are able to restrict fentanyl, definitely restrict doctors from handing out entire bottles, and are able to afford actual rehab for those how need it.
I agree we should restrict doctors from pushing opioids! And rehab should be state sponsored! That too is harm reduction.
> Singapore, which takes a very aggressive and authoritarian 'zero tolerance' approach has less than 1% of the deaths.
Ah, yes, sterile Singapore. I guess 30 years in prison is better than dying.
I'll refrain from commenting on the rest of your post. Have a good day. I know I won't.
My local librarian did not restrict my books to the kids section when I was a kid. Also librarians have fought civil legal battles to keep reading activities anonymous. Libraries are unlike the restrictions and risks of the proposed legislation being discussed for social media
?
--> Your local library fought for your right to read literature of some kind.
---> They did not fight for your right to gang up on others and call them the n-word, to spread lies and slander about people, to harass children and expose them to creeps and pedophiles, to inundate children with hyper-targeted advertising, or 'Andrew Tate 'how to beat women' seminars'.
Nobody is pushing for a ban on social media so that the kids will be stopped from reading 'Judy Bloom' stories about a girl's 'first period'.
It's disingenuous to suggest that this has anything to do with the causes your librarians stand for.
Literally the opposite - your librarians are creating essentially 'safe spaces' for kids so they can read and be civil.
The past few years have seen attempts to get The Diary of Anne Frank pulled from libraries, along with any mention of LGBT or Black people. What makes you think that this will be used to protect kids from racial, sexual and misogynistic abuse, let alone predatory businesses?
Im not sure of your direction as the age verification legislation also does not address this:
| They did not fight for your right to gang up on others and call them the n-word, to spread lies and slander about people, to harass children and expose them to creeps and pedophiles, to inundate children with hyper-targeted advertising, or 'Andrew Tate 'how to beat women' seminars'.
I think existing laws should be engaged to address pedophiles and incitement of violence in public spaces and social media - no new legislation is really needed. Barring potential victims from a place instead of prosecuting the noxious behavior from the public place seems like an odd approach indeed.
As for libraries - libraries are curated spaces of freedom that are obviously under assault by right wing parties to ban books that support cultural and personal acceptance for other societies as well as out groups like lgbt information, and even basic women's health information. The problem for authoritarians is libraries are too free - not that they are "curated".
“Age verification” isn't a problem in itself, the problem is how it's done. They could issue a physical id card with a cryptographic chip and do the age verification in a zero-knowledge fashion and it would be perfectly fine.
The problem is the lack of thinking about the solution and just handwaving “age verification” as a political posture, which is why we end up with half-baked systems.
I strongly disagree.
You're framing this as some desirable thing that could be good except that a bad implementation erodes privacy. That's wrong at every step. These bills originate from big tech such as Meta that literally profit from collecting as much personal info from you as possible. https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rsn1tm/it_a...
But even beyond their tainted origins, you can't implement your way out of something badly formed in the first place. You handwave "zero knowledge" but that doesn't do for your privacy what you're hoping it will. That id card will still have a serial number and CCTV of you purchasing it and you will de facto end up trusting some government binary blob to implement this cryptography correctly without backdoors. Snowden was a decade ago. This will have a backdoor. This will be used for surveillance, tomorrow even if by some miracle not today.
And finally, this makes the internet worse. There will be a section of people who are, for one reason or another, not able to pass this bar. Much of the goodness of the internet comes from being able to interact with anyone on it.
That Reddit post is feeding more conspiracy thinking than helping.
The facts listed also match the actions of a firm aiming to ensure that the burden of verification does not fall on it, for a legislative process that they know is coming.
Red flag after red flag has been raised on child outcomes and social media, for a decade.
The internet is great for people here on HN, who know enough to avoid getting screwed.
The internet is a grotesque horror show for anyone who is stuck on the wrong side of a customer support system. Plus, most people here are thinking from the perspective of someone in the US or EU. They actually get better support than the rest of the world gets.
Let me be clear - I hate that we are at this juncture. However willful ignorance of the harms being inflicted on users is palliative care for our feelings. It means that one day, there is going to be a confrontation between a techie advocating for privacy and the people whose lives are being upended by tech.
Privacy has to be protected effectively, which means acknowledging the hurt and providing solutions for that.
How did you come to the conclusion that advocating for privacy is at odds with protecting users? I'd argue the opposite is true.
Because the entire reason we are here is due to the fact that harms to kids are on the other end of the scale.
There is no “win” here, which doesn’t have the issue coming back.
Dismissing the harms only makes privacy advocacy irrelevant to voters.
Defending privacy effectively means plugging the root cause it is being encroached.
This is being articulated as a defense of privacy when it originates from social media harms to kids.
> Because the entire reason we are here is due to the fact that harms to kids are on the other end of the scale.
If that's a "fact", where is the proof? What harms are there that can only be addressed with age verification and not in any other way?
> Dismissing the harms [...]
This is a strawman you've created.
> Defending privacy effectively means plugging the root cause it is being encroached.
Defending privacy means defending privacy, not submitting to nefarious interests and well-meaning but misled followers.
> This is being articulated as a defense of privacy when it originates from social media harms to kids.
Social media can be dangerous to kids, I don't see anyone disputing that. The dispute is around the solution to this issue.
? > If that's a "fact", where is the proof? What harms are there that can only be addressed with age verification and not in any other way?
> Social media can be dangerous to kids, I don't see anyone disputing that. The dispute is around the solution to this issue.
It may not be what you intend, but that is how the dispute is going to be rendered.
I have no dispute with you over the conclusion of your comment. The meat and potatoes is in the shape of the solution.
People fall through the cracks of the system. You suddenly can't use a digital service any more, because it requires you to use a specific technology that you can't obtain, even though you are old enough. You might be a refugee, you might be someone with special characters in their name or you might be someone from a country that simply doesn't provide recognized digital certifications. Or you might want to run a rooted operating system on your phone or computer.
This assumes good faith, which doesn't match reality. It's about control, not protecting children.
Also age verification is still a problem in itself. Given your idea of a physical card, kids will find a way to use the card of their parents. Even if the card couldn't be misused by others - you give platforms the knowledge of whom is a minor, which means they can be targeted better.
Kids will simply find a way to circumvent it without any extra steps. To make age verification useful for protecting kids, you'd need to lock down every software on every operating system and put it under tight government control. We're talking about things like every programming language with a networking library, wget, curl, every web browser that was ever developed, etc.
All kinds of tools and software would need to be locked down or criminalized. Otherwise, some smart kid is guaranteed to get around the restriction and give that method to others, and if it's at school on a USB stick.
> Kids will simply find a way to circumvent it without any extra steps.
This is just an argument against any regulation whatsoever. Yes, some people will find ways to do illegal stuff, but that doesn't mean forbidding stuff is useless. For instance gangs members always find a way to get access to weapons even in countries where firearms is regulated, but there are still pretty much zero mass slaughter in schools in these countries.
> To make age verification useful for protecting kids, you'd need to lock down every software on every operating system and put it under tight government control.
No! This should never be implemented at the software or OS level in the first place. You should be handed a chip card that you can use for that purpose, like how the bank rent you a credit card. Any other implementation is a bad one, and should be fought.
But by fighting the very idea of age verification instead, an idea that pretty much nobody else in the society has issues with when it comes to voting rights, driving rights, or alcohol consumption, you are just favoring these poor implementations by moving the debate on a ground you can't win.
> Otherwise, some smart kid is guaranteed to get around the restriction and give that method to others,
You should really read that “The optimal amount of fraud is non zero” blog post I linked above.
Sorry, I don't want to involve the government in anything when I just want to communicate. It is a pretty simple request and it is not comparable to anything that can endanger others directly.
You don't need government ID to talk to people and share info. You don't need government ID to take a dump.
Also the criticism of the article is just ignored while it is a very likely development and lack of imagination isn't an excuse.
Even today government in the EU are already implementing mass surveillance, even by third parties.
Verification wasn't needed in the past, it won't be needed in the future.
Requiring an internet ID is the the opinion of a marginalised minority that has difficulties with technology. Aside from those that are advertisers of course.
You spoke yourself and the status quo.
Parents are speaking for their kids in a group and against the status quo. The status quo is not working for them.
“Parents” are not a monolith. Your group will lose this war. Any temporary wins will be worked around and kids will probably lead the charge.
My “group” is not what you think it is.
I have been beating on this drum to avoid this situation for far longer than it has been the topic of interest on HN for the past few months.
We are here, because difficult conversations were avoided and action which could be taken to stop this from metastizing came in the way of growth.
The “parents” win just by having the laws passed, because it makes it clear what guard rails society expects to have in place for internet use.
If you want, I could give you stories of how KYC rules are not followed in India, enabling fraud. How certain rules in the DSA are toothless, resulting in reduced compliance.
Privacy is going to lose. Correction, it is losing, because the people who think they are defending it don’t understand that the forces at play have changed.