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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well we teach people the health benefits of physical activity school but many don't continue with it.

A lot of bad tech policy seems to come from judging a proposal only by its stated intent

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.

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.

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.

> "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.

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

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....

Well people that have been hearing of the slippery slope fallacy their whole life might end up biased against such an approach

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.

“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.

Do you (or anyone else) have a good resource for learning systems thinking? I might have some from working in SE and just observing the world, but I've never studied it

What’s the alternative? How do you solve the problem of not allowing children into online spaces where they shouldn’t be allowed in?

Journalists are supposed to be helping the people by doing it.

Most people just want to blame someone else of their problems

And those that are keen to make some noise about it are labelled as being conspiracy minded or against the safety of children.

It causes a situation where because of the potential backlash, even if they are right, few people will come to the defense for fear of being ostracized as well.

Nth order effects are unpredictable. You can only observe them after the fact. Systems thinking is a debugging methodology, not at all a crystal ball. Witness: your comment makes a bunch of predictions that are very unlikely to be true.

Nth order effects are unpredictable. You can only observe them after the fact. Systems thinking is a debugging methodology, not at all a crystal ball.

Look, this is just a baseless opinion because we restrict things from various groups all the time. Gambling, tobacco, alcohol, drugs, firearms, pornography, voting, driver’s licenses, classified material, the list goes on.

Yet people will employ lazy slappery slope fallacies for this one issue in particular.

You can exploit both ways.

Give me a break - tech is not remotely interested in comprehensive “systems” thinking about the problems that motivated these age verification policies

have you considered that maybe the "elites/beneficiaries of such laws" - would find it disadvantageous to teach systems thinking to the unwashed masses. an example look at how slavery is taught in the southern united states.

most people that learn systems thinking is coz life forces them to.

Classic STEM guy thinking that STEM is the cure for everything

In other words, without a solid, fundamental, national level of education, democracy just will not work. And any democratic institution which does not codify the right to education in very specific terms is inherently weak to degradation over time due to subverted interests in the ruling class.

How do we solve this problem? I wish I readily had an answer. But as we witness our democratic institutions crumble in real time, it's hard to imagine the average voter becoming more educated in our lifetime.

>> 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

Does this not imply we also wouldn't get the internet because people would have considered the damage it would also cause?

That's by design. Bringing up any kind of systemic issues, or applying a materialist reasoning to anything will get you taxed with communism. This is a classic strategy of the capital class, and is at the foundation of neoliberalism. In Thatcher's own words:

> There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.

They have to keep the population blind to any kind of systemic thinking to rob them blind.

I know systems thinking, and am in favor of a version of these types of legislation. Give me your best argument from systems thinking, and I'll give you a thoughtful reply.

Almost anything can be a slippery slope to almost anything. We'd never get anything done.

> 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.

What about climate change and the current mass extinction?

> 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.

But why would we do that?

If we taught people how to think, they wouldn't sit their toddlers down in front an iPad for 8+ hours a day to entertain (read: keep them occupied and quiet) them with YouTube videos, sign them up for a Facebook account before they could wipe their own butts, etc.

The sad irony of this age verification thing is that if we had a decent society and parents with common sense, age verification wouldn't even be a topic.

One day we'll need remote attestation to even get an internet connection. "Untrusted" devices that have been "tampered with" need not apply.

Little by little, everything I hold dear is getting destroyed. Computers of our own, that we control, that we can freely hack on. Everything the word "hacker" stands for. How I wish I could turn back the clock...

Every time age verification comes up, it’s shocking how many comments here start proposing schemes where we use government-issued tokens combined with secure device attestation to solve the problem.

Some people get so focused on providing a technical solution to the problem of age verification without revealing your full ID to the website that they forget that they’re proposing we start requiring only government-approved devices and operating systems.

AI mass surveillance is another. The powerful are just ceasing opportunities to accumulate power and capital, seeing that right now it is not good enough for them.

Age verification is the visible, easy-to-sell layer. Device attestation is the more structural one...

> making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system

Will be interesting to see if this leads to more Linux systems being deployed. Then again with systemd supporting age sniffing (https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954), evading this becomes harder and harder.

That might be an argument if it wasn’t already happening. US social media platforms already kowtow to domestic and foreign policy and you need look no further than the suppression by Google and Meta of content about Palestine.

What’s fascinating to me of that there are people who win vehemently oppose age verification yet have no absolutely no problem with anti-BDS laws, Gaza suppression, etc. Or worse, they’ll support those things.

I agree. But it's not clear to me that the downsides of this outweigh the upsides.

The government has control over many areas of life, and in most cases I feel that to be on balance a good thing, even though governments can be corrupt or inefficient.

Consider some other domain, like roads. In every country, the government issues licenses that include photographic ID to residents to drive on roads; driving without a license is illegal and can result in fines or even imprisonment. But this level of government control feels normal to people, and most would say the safety benefits outweigh the government interference.

I think we should go one level higher and question when having opinions and being a multi-dimensional human became a professional risk. That has certainly not always been the case.

It's already too late for that but you can at least, by deleting now, reduce the chances they see it.

I've been posting under my real name for over 20 years because this was always going to be the case. Using my real name is a constant reminder to not to post things I might later regret.

I can see it now: boards of directors will only hire CEOs from the amish population, it's the only way to avoid criticism.

I haven’t had any social media accounts since I gave it up for Lent in 2018 and I’m increasingly starting to wonder if that’s a liability for me because there’s no social graph that whatever agency would otherwise use to, idk, confirm I’m not a threat or something. The lack of a digital footprint like that may look weird.

The objective of these digital id laws being pushed through age verification is to be able to easily ! legally ! prosecute the dissidents. That's one thing the intelligence agencies could not do with their illegally collected data.

Isn't that the point of e2e encryption? Maybe I have a privileged US take but I've always not cared much for a border crossing in a round trip. It always seemed like a needless expense to have a full vertical server stack in each country to me.

Wondering if someone can explain the logic

surveillance of foreigners (particularly) with residence in a different country is a different issue from surveillance of own citizens.

We're been doing this for years in the UK. Not just at airports either, but the police actively surveil social media and arrest people for anything that might be considered remotely offensive.

And if you say you don't have any, they'll assume you're lying and deny you.

Parental controls. Client-side blocking of content. Apple's parental controls are so good that parents give young children unsupervised internet access--the entire generation if iPad babies. Current iPads even use on-device AI to detect nudity in photos and prevent them from being taken, sent, recieved, or viewed.

If the server can trust the device, then you don't need the parent, you can use a digital-enabled id card or passport.

This is in fact the EU age verification app

https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/european-ag...

The concern here is the trust in the device appears to be tied to proprietary os/device vendors.

How does the parent prove they are the parent. All you need is to think about the next step, come on now.

You're describing California AB1043 which passed a few months ago and is now the law in California. We all got very angry about it when it passed.

Maybe not the laws, but the systems being built are attribute based.

Mask in real life then, mask in social internet now. Meaning stays the same. I like this analogy.

What happens when federal agents kick down your front door because you ran a free range mom and pop BBS that did not comply with latest ID verification requirements?

Big companies will benefit the most from these regulations. It's just good ol regulatory capture. They will have the most resources to comply with the laws. They have a captive audience that will be more willing to give up their personal info when asked — keep in mind Facebook and instagram is widely used for business. It is your small time forum admin who would rather shut down his hobbyist online community that never made him any money anyway than to ask for IDs. We have already seen stories of websites shutting down due to existing UK regulations. Curiously, all small, personal operations, not the kind of corporate social media they tell you the laws are meant to target.

Such spaces will never scale if there's widespread legal prohibitions.

It is foolish to assume we can innovate our way around the law as opposed to talking with lawmakers to oppose the law before it gets on the books.

That sounds like mistaken optimism due to a mistaken interpretation of the invisible hand.

Mandating age verification and the inevitable implementation requirements are bad for freedom.

Behaviour changes and innovations will mitigate some of the negatives, but bad things are bad.

What we need is more personal spaces. Less feeds, more small group chats with people you actually know. I'm totally fine with destroying Reddit/Twitter/etc

Nope, they just break the law:

https://www.bmj.com/content/393/bmj-2026-363695

> Conclusions: Despite the intent of the Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024 to delay access to social media platforms and reduce the potential for online harms, little evidence was found of immediate substantive reductions in reported social media use by adolescents under 16 years.

We are training teenagers that laws are stupid and can be circumvented easily and without consequences. As well as continuing to subject them to the harms of social media, only now without any means of monitoring them or holding the social media companies responsible.

They already have started right ? Like example - bluesky (bsky.social)

The only thing teenagers are delivering is doomscrolling addiction. Seems improper me that the revert to something like irc en mass

This is like saying you're not concerned about war because people will notice war is bad and stop doing it. It's not a smart position to hold that bad things are good because they may bring on reversals.

You do realize the next step is ISP-level tagging of traffic? And VPNs are already being outlawed in much of the western world.

Unless you expect the teenagers to run underground mesh radio networks and risk FCC's hammer (real jailtime), it's just wishful thinking.

They have this in Germany for copyright. If you torrent, you automatically get a fine letter in your email. If you don't pay, you get a court summons in the post. If you take it to court, you will lose that case and also have to pay court fees.

Imagine a machine mounted on the wall that prints you a ticket every time you swear

It’s a great time to build parallel systems and networks among likeminded individuals.

If you see tyranny coming, your options (other than silent complicity) are pretty much build a support network or exit.

Britain doesn't need a European court to grant human rights to its own citizens. You know that the human rights act is not preventing government crackdowns on speech and privacy, and you will also know that the intention is to replace it with a human rights bill of our own.

The current act is being used by lawyers and judges to force migration on a country which never voted for it.

Now would we trust the clearly compromised political class we currently have to implement it? Probably not.

We should actually protect minors, then they won't be able to use it as an excuse. Right now it works as an excuse because minors are being harmed by the unrestricted internet, mostly by social media.

> they just want

Because you know their motivations. You've spoken to 'them'.

Have you been to a city council meeting lately ? Ever?

I'm trying to push for surveillance regulation where I live. I'm there monthly.

Calling your representative is the best way to realise that they don't give a fuck. Yesterday I was editing a clip of one of them lying overtly. It will be a minor inconveniences.

what we call democracy is a dog and ponies show.

So maybe cryptography is not that ridiculous, after all

Law alone cannot fix it. Tech alone cannot fix it.

If we wish to preserve the values we grew up with, we need both.

many platform companies probably do not want to verify that a user is real, except in certain niche cases, as bots help them pump their numbers.

The ad companies I think would want the opposite

If they cannot distinguish real people from bots they can just charge more for more ads shown !

Indeed a lot of social media platforms are used by foreign powers to create discord. Human psychology is much more attentive to negative messages and this is too easy to weaponize. A solution against that would probably be world changing. It would have to preserve anonymity still of course.

That's why recaptcha is now doing human verification via mobile phone QR scan

It's not different on the internet. If you commit a crime on the internet it's still illegal and it can still be reported to the police.

What makes you suggest otherwise?

How do you "say something illegal" ?

Its not about saying illegal things. It's mostly about saying things that can get you canceled in future in future culture.

Dark jokes and strong opinions are example - you something filthy - let's say dark Holocaust/Nazi joke but funny in situation In group that accept it and it's ok. But if it's recorded, it'll stay forever and will surface in most unexpected moment, like job interview or some other screening by gov/corpos.

Don't say that dirty jokes should be punished in future if in given situation they were received as ok and only later someone else, not in situation is going to judge it

What if your phone listens to you all the time so it can detect "ok google" or "alexa" 24/7 but you happen to say something illegal with your device ID?

What if you brain storm a book/plot idea with a friend aloud and moments later the police knocks on your door because some system said you are about to commit a crime?

Because perfect law enforcement means society can never change. Imagine if, back when it was illegal to be gay, every gay person was immediately sentenced. Do you think we'd be accepting homosexuality today?

> If I say something illegal

A situation that should be impossible due to freedom of speech.

Because it has been shown that even if freedom is speech is a right that people will still be afraid to speak up if they know they are being monitored. Because the reality is that even if you are allowed to speak you might still be punished through other means.

This is much bigger than saying something illegal on the internet. This is about not being able to criticize your government without fear of retribution. Or how about if this was possible 60 years ago. Gays would have been all caught and gay rights never emerged. Or say you are discussing wanting an abortion and are arrested for arrested for it because at that point in time it is made illegal. The right to have private communication is integral to a free and democratic society. Morals change. Beliefs change. This is good. If you are monitored for everything we will be oppressed and stuck with no way to progress and grow.

> 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.

Thats not true, as displayed by the recent Afroman case.

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/19/entertainment/afroman-law...

> should have their rights of becoming parents revoked.

Ok. So what does it mean to revoke the right for someone to become parents? Be honest and be specific.

Why do you or anyone besides me (and my partner) get to decide what is ok for my kid to see?

If you want your kids to not see porn on the internet, cool. Don't give them Internet access. You don't need to make the internet worse for me and my family to make that rule for your family.

And maybe if you are parenting your child well, at some point you will be able to trust them to use the internet in a responsible way.

I like the California law where the device owner sets the parental controls and apps have to obey them or get fined.

Yep, there are all sorts of technically interesting ways in which age can be proven without identity being compromised, this link has a good exploration of anonymous credentials, for a start - https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymou...

And there are all sorts of reasons governments want to do this, up to and including the stated-on-the-surface reasons they give; a lot of people don't want their kids exposed to internet harms, be that extreme material or addictive services and doom-scrolling, and don't have the technical know-how to effect that themselves.

The insistence by so many in tech that there is no honest intent and that there is no way to practically provide age verification in a thoughtful, anonymous way is frustrating.

It's frustrating to see so many people engaged in effective conspiratorial thinking and it's frustrating because there are many good arguments to be had here, but they won't land if the 'anti' side doesn't address the real concerns that real people have about the safety and mental health of their kids.

What is the clear intention?

I would tell them to not give their children internet access at all until they think they are ready. Does it sound realistic? I don't know. From technical point of view certainly realistic, a child doesn't have money / devices of his own

Listen to your children, give them attention, they are your responsibility, don't give them internet access if you find it unsafe

Have one. Called the internet.

This isn't necessarily true as you'd actually be surprised how easy it still is to go place an anonymous ad in your local newspaper. Not all of them will allow it but quite a few still make it fairly easy.

What makes you think that age verification on the internet wouldn't be wildly popular with the demos?

Jevon McSkimming, the second most powerful person in the New Zealand police, under Jacinda Ardern, was arrested not long ago for viewing extreme kiddie porn involving animals and torture. He had been doing so on his work computer!

Complaints had been made against the man for years and been thrown out because of who he was, and the material was only found by accident.

This same individual had been yet another one of those arguing for tighter controls on the internet and free speech for the peasants.

Another one of these "one rule for me, another for thee" types.

Wouldn't it be better to curtail social media's addictive design choices, and improve things for everyone, rather than force the audience to carry the weight of responsibility?

The problem isn't social media per se, but rather how social media is designed, and this design is driven by profits and big tech. There are, at least in Europe, no alternatives to the big social media platforms. I'm not too keen on social media bans, because this neither elimates the desire for social media, nor social media in itself.

>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.

None of this is new. Every single one of these things has been pointed out millennia ago.

You had already evaluated it and made your decision (against censorship) on this decades ago when you first came across it.

Changing your view now isn't a matter of new information coming to light. It's a matter of you disliking the obvious and inevitable consequences that you had been warned of going into it.

Perhaps it's time you stop changing your mind based on totalitarian propaganda and realize you don't know what you're doing, and stop supporting censorship.

found the nudge unit employee

you just gotta apply like maybe 10-15 seconds of critical thinking here and you too will also realize this is a bunch of nonsense

> In all these operations, anonymity is what drives it.

The most egregious, prolific lies out there have been fully attributed; and perhaps especially because of attribution, people vehemently disagree on which are the lies.

Those who wield outsized power experience attribution of speech asymmetrically. Filtering societal communication supports the concentration of power.

> 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.

If attaching your real self to everything is so important, why does it only seem to restrain those without power, while those with the most influence can say whatever benefits them and face no consequences?

Interesting point, as at one point large internet companies like Facebook and Google/Youtube made real names mandatory - Facebook going as far as asking your "friends" to rat on you.

In theory it was a great way to prevent abuse - are people still horrible on the internet if they use their real name? Turns out they are, because it only took a few years of internet for people to no longer have any shame.

I think I agree, so long as:

- age/identity verification comes with banning of bot traffic posing as human in any communication platform, by law - end to end encrypted communication is declared a fundamental human right, by law

I don't think we'll see that though. Too much money / power left on the table.

If this is the case then I simply won’t engage. 90 % will not engage and you’re left with the 10% who are willing to put everything they do out there publicly and permanently- probably because they have an ulterior motive or commercial reason to do so

>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.

I also had similar thoughts to you, but seeing the election results of the previous decade in the US makes me question the premise that transparency will lead to desirable results because the majority have good intentions.

> I have bore first-hand witness to the scale of the PsyOps war waged on the American people by institutions near and far.

You can be sure that none of those organizations will be affected by it. Especially the domestic ones.

> 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.

No:

https://bianet.org/haber/eu-strips-journalist-huseyin-dogru-...

And that is Europe. The US wouldnt hesitate 2 seconds before shoving you into a federal prison.

> It is the nature of the internet that you could never achieve absolute censorship

Oh yes you can. The only reason you have a 'free' internet now is because the US had to rush its internet out without implementing the censorship and control mechanisms it planned because the USSR was about to release its own internet. Now they are making up for their mistake.

farmer arrested over datacenter debate: https://www.gadgetreview.com/arrest-him-the-moment-police-ha...

> Note that age verification does not rely on you handing over identifying information to the party requesting it

It most certainly does, because it has to:

https://reclaimthenet.org/starmers-social-media-ban-surveill...

"Monday’s headline was a ban on under-16s using social media which, to some, sounds about as sinister as a wholesome ribbon-cutting until you ask the obvious question nobody in Downing Street wants asked aloud: how, precisely, do you stop a fourteen-year-old from opening Instagram without first checking the age of the forty-year-old?

You don’t. You can’t. So everyone gets carded. Britain is lifting the system wholesale from Australia, where a computer first scans your face and guesses your age from your cheekbones, then, failing that, surveils you to death, studies your browsing habits and the hours you keep, and then, when the algorithm throws up its hands, simply demands your passport."

Freedom of expression is inseparable from the right to privacy.

Should journalists be forced to reveal their sources if the subject of a claim sues for defamation?