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

Age verification is just one part of this crackdown.

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

Age verification starts the gating of Internet access by governments.

Any site, with any concern about age of user liability, is likely to adopt the practice. Strong laws, sold on their face value safety benefits, will increase that liability.

You won’t see any laws removing or limiting that liability.

The trend will be many more sites becoming government-gated, than we are imagining now.

Beyond surveillance, it’s a real step into government permissioned internet access, on an individual citizen level.

It gives a new spin to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I thought they were gonna wait until internet is flooded with AI content indistinguishable from human content, i.e. wait until people are begging for a "real human" badge which can only be enforced by ID. Instead they're forcing it early with the "but the children!" thing again.

I hear these alarm bells but what I don't understand is what the solution is to non-human or state actor internet commenting or social media campaigns. Most (maybe all?) sites are full of this. Without any sort of verification - how can this ever be solved?

Do you remember the pipa/sopa protests from like a decade ago?

The internet, as we knew it, is over. It has been dead for a few years, but it is getting clear now only. It had its great moments, while it lasted.

Why participate? Why not just skip any site that wants a photo of ID? Also, those sites run massive liability risk for the inevitable data breaches that will occur.

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

Everyone else can stay anonymous.

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

> These "age verification" laws are - by design - identity attribution systems. They attribute digital identities (accounts) to physical identities (SSN, ID, etc..

No, they don't. The proposed EU verification system provides a proof of age to the service but no physical identity data.

This is possibly a slippery slope, but I don't think it's correct to state the two things are equivalent.

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

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

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

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

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

Politicians keep looking for excuses to break consumer encryption, and the youth social media harms are just the latest excuse that has received broad support. So disappointing.

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

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

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

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

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

I'm honestly amazed that people are only just figuring this out.

I know that reads like I'm being snarky, but I'm not trying to be. Within the last decade in the UK we have had (among others):

- the 2016 Snoopers' Charter

- the 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act

- the 2023 Public Order Act

- the 2023 Online Safety Act

- the 2024 Addendum to the 2016 Snoopers' Charter

Couple that with the whole push to repeal the 1998 Human Rights Act and withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, and the fact we've started imprisoning pensioners for holding up signs, and it's really difficult to _not_ see exactly where this leaves us.

I wish I could look away and get on with my life, but I can't - and I'm starting to realise that that is also part of the design. The increasing reluctance to express controversial opinion online isn't an accidental side effect of all of this legislation. It is intended behaviour, the desired outcome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@DrScience,@theotherhobbes,@frendziz

The title is almost obvious. Surveilance is already 24/7/365. If you're not completely appalled you haven't been paying attention.

With regards to 'democracy', as with jurors, common-sense is a mixed bag... A politician in an area close to mine ran a write-in campaign contacted ~8000+ people, got ~5k votes. The Democrat on the ballot was unknown, signed-up last minute, gave no ballot statment, didn't advertise, or canvas and won; surmisably because they were listed as Democrat.

Another, earlier, was a Democrat state representative who got redistricted out of their seat by their own party for lack of toeing the party line.

Most of my ballot here is single person for each category, Should a challenger come up... well money is speech and thus taxation is censorship, and propaganda costs. When you hear a politician speak they are psychologically projecting from their own affectual experience.

Freedom ended with the concept of allodium. We've all been slaves ever since. Don't believe that, walk nude, spouting nazi, or Stalinist slogans at work or even in your front yard or porch and see if you can pay your property tax or rent for the next period.

Techies have a real blind spot here. This stuff is very popular, like bipartisan support popular. Yes, it's a precursor to terrible things and they will happen but you have to convince people the the harms outweigh the benefits. Just asking "Why can't they tell the point of this" is not helpful or true. "The point of this" is decided by those pushing it, those pushing it are not politicians, they're parents and they're pushing it because they're scared of social media, not because they want to censor you.

You need to explain to and convince those parents that this will result in something worse.

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

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

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

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

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

The bad thing about this:

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

I should probably stop advocating for systematically killing the ultra-wealthy huh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feels like the run up to the "current world" in a Peter Watts novel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

... use Monero. Why author didn't start with this claim? Intention would be more clear

The scary part is not "age checks today, secret police tomorrow". It is that once there is a convenient identity-verification layer for normal internet use, it will be very hard to keep it limited to the original purpose... Every future regulator, prosecutor, platform and "think of the children" campaign will have an incentive to expand it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

age verificiation is throttling of speech. so the internet becomes again like TV or newspaper. u can transmit with license only. not anonymously.

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

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

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

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

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

The word "China" isn't mentioned once here and that really highlights how shallow this piece is. I've scannned the comments and there's the usual tropes about lack of freedom of speech but let's look at some recent events:

- A 30 year prison sentence for tansporting a box of zines in Texas [1]. To do so they invented "antifa" as an organization out of whole cloth and will now use those convictions as further proof. I've seen this compared to the Salem witch trials;

- Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident, was detained and there is still ongoing deportation proceedings. What for? Organizing a peaceful protest at Columbia against the genocide being committed by Israel [2];

- Renee Good and Alex Pretti who were simply protesting ICE were killed essentially in cold blood and there have been zero consequences;

- Over 700 charged under the Terrorist Act in the UK for expressing support for Palestine. Defenders will argue Palestine Action is a designated terrorism group without asking why. Also, that's how it always works. Slavery was legal once. Freeing slaves was illegal. Does that make the Underground Railroad a terrorist organization? Today it would;

- In ~35 states in the US to work for or in government you have to express varying degrees of loyalty to Israel or at least commit never to boycott Israel eg [3]. To date, the Supreme Court has never substantively taken up these cases as the clear First Amendment violation they are;

- In PA, the Swarthmore 9 are being charged over their protests with the bullshit charge of "defiant trespass" [4];

- In Australia, in the wake of the Bondi shooting, new anti-"hate crime" legislation was passed that is so broad and sweeping that the Greens claim you could be charged with criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu [5].

- Numerous examples of the administration pulling funding and bringing colleges to heel over not cracking down sufficiently on Gaza protests.

So why I find these tired tropes about China so exhausting and lazy is because:

1. Look at what's happening here and in the West at large; and

2. Ironically, China has a system for age verification that actually works and the answer is really simple. The government issues the IDs. It can verify the IDs. We do this all the time with employment (eg E-Verify). You can even do it in such a way that the app doesn't get any sensitive information.

But it's like people say "you can't trust government" (even though the government already has all that data) and then thinks that a private company is the only possible solution (eg Peter Thiel's Persona).

If you've gotten this far you should know that at no point in any of the above have I argued for age verification. So far all I've said is that there is an absolute double standard in the fearmongering around it and that is it possible to create a relatively effective regime for it without handing everyone's data to Peter Thiel.

I think it's inarguable at this point that what we're doing now has been a dismal failure and something's gotta give. I think we should start by attacking the financial incentives here, namely:

1. Tech companies already use behavioural analysis to guess your demographics. If they figure out you're under 18 you should have a restricted experience. That should include no advertising, a much more limited algorithmic feed, etc;

2. Stop tech companies from being able to sell advertising to minors. Don't allow an advertiser to target an audience that includes minors as best as the tech company knows they are minors.

I personally think we could eliminate a bunch of harm just by attacking the advertising incentive here.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Mahmoud_Khalil

[3]: https://www.txdot.gov/manuals/csd/ncp/standards_for_contract...

[4]: https://iacenter.org/2026/06/27/swarthmore-9-on-trial-for-pr...

[5]: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jan/21/criti...

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

Gonna repost this comment I made last week, as no one interacted with its core idea. I am torn. I have bore first-hand witness to the scale of the PsyOps war waged on the American people by institutions near and far. Artroturfing to sew division to one means of another.

In all these operations, anonymity is what drives it.

I was born and raised in the anonymous internet, and tasted its freedoms. I oppose censorship. But, at this point, I have come to wonder it it would be best to always have your real-life personality attached to all you do. At least to any action that feeds an algorithm or creates something someone else can see.

It is the nature of the internet that you could never achieve absolute censorship -- and maybe anonymity should belong to the hackers and tinkers with the will and drive to hunt and craft for it.

I do not like holding this opinion, because it feels as though it is on the similar boat as that of those who 'pull up the ladder after themselves'. Increasingly, I see it as pulling shut the trapdoors to hell.

P.S. This goes without saying -- it's also the only was to defend against "ai" bots.

EDIT: I'm thoroughly convinced that my initial position here was wrong. Yeah -- easy to forget that, with, COINTELPRO, the feds are not bound by the same laws as the people, and that oligarch-controlled media will bend over backwards to give them backdoors. Thanks for all the feedback.

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

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

Note that age verification does not rely on you handing over identifying information to the party requesting it, that's just one possible implementation. Another more privacy conscious one is e.g. iDIN or whatever comes after, which works a bit like oauth in that you're redirected to a trusted 3rd party like your bank which only confirms "this person is 18+" to the requesting party.

The only thing that the requester needs to save is the "this person is 18+ as verified by this party".

Granted, that's still an avenue for law enforcement to find out who you are, but then, so is your internet service provider or VPN (where the VPN is likely already a honeypot)

Count me among those who think publishers should always know who they’re publishing. When law enforcement comes knocking, a warrant should be all they need. Meta can’t shrug and say they don’t know who Batman1964 is.

There’s nothing new in publishing anonymously, just ask George Elliot. What’s new is the notion that publishers have no liability. Social media companies do not claim to speak for themselves. They have no reporters, no sources to protect. They’re one giant “letters to the editor” section. They should know for whom they speak.

Whether or not a writer commits libel is for the courts to decide. Neither the writer nor publisher has the right to avoid responsibility by camouflage.