Online threats to children are real, but the headlong pursuit of age verification that we’re seeing around the world is unacceptable in its approach and far too broad in scope — and we simply can’t afford to get this wrong.
To be clear, parents’ concerns are valid and sincere. Few people would argue that kids should have unfettered access to adult material, to self-harm how-tos, to social media platforms that manipulate them and expose them to abuse.
But it’s the very depth of those worries that is being cynically exploited. Age verification as is currently being proposed in country after country would mean the death of anonymity online.
And we know exactly who stands to gain: The same tech giants who built the privacy nightmare that the internet is today.
Nobody has better solutions to fight against botnets and targeted misinformation. Like, these are big deals that every Nation needs account for some way some how. A non-anonymous internet for the masses, and anonymous internet for those who know how to get around it should be the standard.
Aaaaand they got you
Did they or is that just my collective opinion after growing up with the internet and seeing what it’s turned into?
Do you not think botnets exist or do you not think those botnets pose as citizens?
Maybe you don’t think that the online narratives from social media (Reddit, Facebook, X, Mastadoon, whatever) are driven by botnets boosting signals? Maybe you think online discussion happens organically?
Do you think the average person can distinguish between an AI image and a real image? Photoshop? Do you think the average person would realize that they’re discussing a topic with an LLM? How about a foreign agent?
I don’t know, maybe you don’t think that governments are using this against one-another’s citizens to shake up democracy and promote distrust in their institutions?
I think that both (ours and rival) governments and wealthy individuals (or cabals) use online discourse to drive narratives and through that action (or inaction). I think that by doing nothing we leave the majority of the uneducated at the mercy of those devices. By removing anonymity discourse can be filtered and blocked easier.
Personally, I’d much rather have a National Firewall so that there’s the Nations Intranet and then the World Wide Web Internet, but if we have to have something and nobody is fighting for anything better, nobody is finding solutions to these social problems we’ve created, then this’ll have to do.
This isn’t just an issue that’s affecting the U.S. - every Nation has to find a solution to this problem. We either have to combat it with better, alternative solutions, or we have to accept it as a solution to an evergrowing problem.