A proposed amendment to ban under 16s in the UK from common online services

I think the problem you lay out is interesting. Back when the Arab Spring was brand new, the narrative was something like "Twitter has finally given power to the people, and once they had power they overthrew their evil dictatorships."

A decade and some time later, my personal opinion would be that the narrative reads something like this: "access to social media increases populism, extremism, and social unrest. It's a risk to any and all forms of government. The Arab dictatorships failed first because they were the most brittle."

To the extent that you agree with my claim, it would mean that even a beneficent government would have something to fear from social media. As with the Arab Spring, whatever comes after the revolution is often worse than the very-imperfect government which came before.

Counterpoint: Sufficient media control kills a democracy because it enables you to control public sentiment and election outcomes.

A democracy that yields sufficient media control to (single) individuals, corporations or foreign nations is basically commiting suicide.

This isn’t the product of shadowy government figures meeting together and plotting to take over the internet. It’s an obvious byproduct of the current moral panic around social media.

Just look at the HN comments. There are people welcoming this level of government control and using famous moral panic topics to justify it, like Andrew Tate or TikTok.

Maybe. But the thing is that I think there is a legitimate cultural need to minimize mass exposure to these centralized social media platforms. And I think people realised this about now.

I don't advocate legal bans. And people need to stop using it. The risk is great that there will be legal overreach ...

I'd rather my government control the narrative my children are exposed to than Andrew Tate.

Edit: To expand, this is not just a flippant remark. People ignore Andrew Tate because he's so obviously, cartoonishly awful, but they are not the audience. It's aimed at children, and from personal experience its effect on a large number of them worldwide is profound, to the extent that I worry about the long term, generational effect.

Children will be exposed to narratives one way or another, and to want to (re)assert some control that over that isn't necessarily just an authoritatian power play.

From my point of view I see a coordinated effort against age verification probably because money.

"Internet bad, and as parents we don't really want to be parenting, that's extra work, therefore ban" stance

Because it gives governments authority to pick and choose which sites to ban or allow, it’s a mechanism that can accommodate political coercion and subterfuge. The platforms can now be de-platformed.

It’s no longer user-to-user websites, its user-to government-to-user.

> the UK wishes to establish this and not want it to lead to an insane amount of privacy leaks, it should consider developing a technology that makes it work in a privacy-respecting way

They don’t care about the privacy aspect.

A key part of effective age verification is associating an identity with the account. They don’t just want to confirm that the person accessing the site has access to an ID of anyone who is 16+, they want to make an effort to associate the ID with the account. It’s the same reason why when you present an ID to buy alcohol they look at the photo to make sure the ID is actually yours, not just that you have an ID of someone older in your possession.

Even if we keep it at the website level, a government-run solution that allows you to verify your age without revealing your identity would be the logical solution. There is no good reason why they need to know who I am to know how old I am. The EU seems to be headed that way. The UK doesn't seem to care, almost as if associating real names with accounts was the whole point and saving children was just a convenient excuse for them

Breaking privacy is the point, why would the UK government do anything to impede that?

World governments are going to crack down hard on the free internet over the next century. A distributed solution is sorely needed.

To the device ??

That will turbocharge the draconian lockdown of computing. You will never own a computer you buy every again if that is pushed.

In theory, libertarian-type approaches seem reasonable when you model for cooperative actors. In practice, however, you hit tragedies of the commons and severe first-mover disadvantages. Well-meaning parents who ban teenagers from social media at the level of the family rather than at the level of society will mainly just socially ostracize their kids. I'd imagine you'd need to go Amish-mode and build a social network on behalf of your kids for anything like this to work.

If you want to restrict kids from social media (which is an open question), I would much prefer that the laws not gate kids from social media directly as this would require social media websites to ask for ID. Rather, abusive parents who don't lock their kids out of social media websites should be sanctioned. First offenders get all of their Internet accesses taken down for a few months.

Nice opinion. Are you a parent? What if most voting age parents want this law?

We absolutely do need regulation of this harm by the law. It's how we stand together as a society, otherwise one child's rules will seem draconian against their friend's lax parents. There's plenty of precedent in other threshold ages at which children can start indulging in other potentially harmful vices.

The vulnerable elder population is more difficult to define by a simple age threshold. We all decline at different ages and different rates.

This is the worst idea ever.

Adding even more personal information into HTTP headers is NOT the way to go. The web shouldn't require identification. The web shouldn't require segmentation on protected demographics. The business should. If the goal is to "protect the children", sending this information on every request is ANYTHING BUT protecting the children.

Or just lock the DNS' for every teen device. Much cheaper and less intrusive.

If you want to send the net neutrality to /dev/null, please, head on.

Not sure where you are from but it's not exclusive to the UK. People directly quoting the US president following the tragic death of a right wing commentator also found themselves locked up. Not to mention the same president suggesting that people suggesting that the military should refuse illegal orders should be locked up etc.

I think realistically we've grown up in an age where you could say almost anything online, free from any threat of any kind of reprisal. It probably reasonable that, given the internet is key to daily life these days, that we treat it as no different from standing on a park bench and shouting. If you're calling for the death of people based on their religion or some other characteristic then there are consequences to your speech.

Unfortunately the most recent example of this kind of legislation, the laws surrounding age verification on websites, was introduced under a previous government so it really doesn't matter who you vote for on this anyway.

In the UK any topics in regards to politics that are widely spoken about in public is to do with immigration / inflation / housing crisis. Because of these other issues this is happening under the radar and no political party cares.

Exactly. In order to prove you are not 15 online you have to prove you are >=16, even if you are 63.

And there's no "I'm an adult" proof with leaking exactly who you are.

This is thinly veiled "we want to know exactly who is behind every account" legislation. Expect it to be coupled with the usual "If you've nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument.

I am not sure who is going to be interested in the general population amoral interest in a country that is/was OK with well known personal personalities being pedophiles and rags like the mail that will push whatever narratives they feel brings the more dosh.