Decentralized social network Mastodon says it cannot comply with age verification laws, like in Mississippi and elsewhere, and says it's up to individual server owners to decide.
I too have been screaming about private online since the 90s. I have an intuitive reaction that sort of mirrors yours.
But can I ask you a question?
And it’s one that I’m asking because I genuinely wish to learn from others.
Because I can’t quite see the difference and maybe there’s something I’m missing.
Why is it not government overreach to ensure pornography isn’t sold to minors in an adult video store, but government overreach to have the same expectation of online pornography providers?
I would love your enlightened view on this so I can learn from it. Because I can’t quite see the difference.
I understand that many adults go into an adult video store and need not prove their age, because they clearly look like adults.
And so the difference here is that everyone have to prove their age online, even people that are clearly adults by how they look.
But entering a pornography website is the equivalent of entering an adult video store where the clerk cannot see you, cannot hear your voice. In that world I would also expect the clerk to check every purchase as they would have no other means of assessing the buyer’s age.
Or maybe you think that adult videos should be sold to everyone and it’s the very concept that pornography is restricted to minors that you disagree with. I don’t personally hold that view but then I can least understand why you would also reject online age verification.
Or maybe you think it is ineffective and won’t make a difference. That argument I most definitely agree with, but how we choose to implement a law, and whether it’s effective, is two different discussions I would posit.
Edit: I love that I’m getting downvoted for expressing a POV respectfully.
There is no possible way to actually stop teenagers accessing online porn that doesn’t require such a massive invasion of privacy that it leaves no safe way for adults to access it. To go with your adult video store analogy, it’s like if the store staff would have to accompany you home and watch you watching the porn to check there wasn’t anyone standing behind you also looking at the screen, and while they were there, they were supposed to take notes on everything they saw. Even if they had no interest in doing anything nefarious, a criminal could steal their notebook and blackmail all their customers with the details it contained, and there’d be enough proof that there wouldn’t be any way to plausibly claim the blackmailer had just made everything up.
If you want to prove someone on the Internet is a real adult and not a determined teenager, you need lots of layers. E.g. if you just ask for a photo of an ID card, that can be defeated by a photo of someone else’s ID card, and a video of a face can be defeated by a video game character (potentially even one made to resemble the person whose ID has been copied). You need to prove there’s an ID card that belongs to a real person and that it’s that person who is using it, and that’s both easier to fake than going to a store with a fake ID (if you look young, they’ll be suspicious of your ID) or Mission Impossible mask, and unlike in a store, the customer can’t see that you’re not making a copy of the ID card for later blackmail or targeted advertisements. No one would go back to a porn shop that asked for a home address and a bank statement to prove it.
Another big factor is that if there’s a physical shop supplying porn to children, the police will notice and stop it, but online, it’s really easy to make a website and fly under the radar. It’s pretty easy for sites that don’t care about the law to provide an indefinite supply of porn to children, and once that’s happening, there’s no reason to think that it’s only going to be legal porn just being supplied to the wrong people.
Overall, the risk of showing porn to children doesn’t go down very much, but the risk of showing blackmailable data to criminals and showing particularly extreme and illegal porn to children goes up by a lot. Protecting children from extreme material, e.g. videos of real necrophilia and rape, which are widely accepted to be seriously harmful, should be a higher priority than protecting a larger number from less extreme material that the evidence says is less harmful, if at all. Even if it’s taken as fact that any exposure to porn is always harmful to minors, the policies that are possible to implement in the real world can’t prevent it, just add either extra hassle or opportunities for even worse things to happen. There hasn’t been any proposal by any government with a chance of doing more good than harm.
Funny - I assume on one here was actually involved in creating the law that requires identification when buying pornography (or alcohol. Or tobacco) at stores, but we are all considered responsible for it to the point we are hypocrite if we object a similar law?
If someone says they are against that law now, years after it’s already established and spread, it won’t be taken as “I’m generally against the government limiting our freedom to consume what we want” but as “I want to push children to consume porn/alcohol/tobacco”. So no one argues against these laws. But it’s much more feasible to argue against the new laws - a ship that’s still in the port.
30 years from now, when they make the law that neural implants must detect illegal thoughts in the users’ biological brains and block them, you’d make the argument that it’s not fundamentally different than blocking the same topics on the internet - a practice that, by that time, will already be accepted by the general populace.
Not OP, but I think the analogy to what is happening to online privacy would be if you were asked to identify yourself at every location: the grocery store, the farmers market, the corner park, the trail along the river; and all of those checkpoints were aggregated and sold, meaning that someone who might not have your best interests at heart could use your travel timeline against you, to advertise to you, to sue you, to charge you with a crime, to destroy your public reputation.
But entering a pornography website is the equivalent of entering an adult video store where the clerk cannot see you, cannot hear your voice.
There’s the problem. I was tempted to call this Boomer logic, but that would extremely unfair to Boomers. We are only seeing this now, that the Boomers are on the way out.
I think the Boomers understood better how this works. It’s not like entering a store. It’s like making a phone call to the store, and the store may be on the other side of the world. The Boomers understood borders, long distance calls, international mail.
Now the digital natives are taking over. And they understand nothing beyond tapping and swiping.
Spoilered is a post I wrote earlier. Just so you know what’s coming.
spoiler
The problem is that meat-space logic is applied to the cyberspace (as it might have been said in the 90ies).
You go into a store and the clerk sees you and knows your age. If it’s borderline, then they ask for ID. They are applying that thinking to internet services.
Where this falls down is that no ordinary Mastodon instance can comply with the regulations of the close to 200 hundred countries in the world. Of course, just like 4chan, many wouldn’t want to out of principle.
The only way to make this work is to introduce another meat-space thing: Border posts. You need a Great Firewall of the [Local Nation]. At physical border posts, guards check if goods comply with local regulations. We need virtual border posts to check if data is imported and exported in compliance with local regulations.
Such a thing, a virtual Schengen border, was briefly considered in the EU about 15 years ago. It went nowhere at the time. But if you look at EU regulations, you can see that the foundations are already laid, most obviously with the GDPR but also the DSM, DMA, DSA, CRA, …
Eventually, the border will be closed to protect our values; to enforce our laws. We will lock out those American and Chinese Big Tech companies that steal our data. We will only allow their European branches and strictly monitor their communications abroad. We will be taking back control, as the Brexiteers sloganized it. Freedom is just another word for having to ask the government for permission when you enter a country. And increasingly, it is another word for having to ask permission for how you use your own computer.
It won’t be some shady backroom deal. Look here. People in this community love these regulations. Europeans here are happy to tell US companies to “FO if they don’t want to follow our laws”. Well, the Great Firewall of Europe is how you do that.
Parents have the ultimate say-so of what their kids have access to.
I don’t believe there needs to be a law that says that, no.
If a parent decides their kid is responsible enough to have their own money, then it’s the parents who are to blame if that kid buys “bad” things with that money.
Same thing online. If a parent decides their kid is responsible enough to have unrestricted internet access, then it’s their fault if the kid then goes to a “bad” website.
It’s not the store’s fault. Nor is it the website’s fault.
We have given away far too much of our parental responsibility over to 3rd parties, and now we don’t know how to parent anymore.
Make illegal? Nope. Not my business to tell other parents how to raise their children.
And that’s exactly the problem here. People like YOU, who think that if I don’t want something illegal, than that of course means I like that thing, or that I personally want to do that thing.
Nope. It has to do with personal autonomy. I’m not your boss, I shouldn’t get to tell YOU what you can do to yourself. Period.
I too have been screaming about private online since the 90s. I have an intuitive reaction that sort of mirrors yours.
But can I ask you a question?
And it’s one that I’m asking because I genuinely wish to learn from others.
Because I can’t quite see the difference and maybe there’s something I’m missing.
Why is it not government overreach to ensure pornography isn’t sold to minors in an adult video store, but government overreach to have the same expectation of online pornography providers?
I would love your enlightened view on this so I can learn from it. Because I can’t quite see the difference.
I understand that many adults go into an adult video store and need not prove their age, because they clearly look like adults.
And so the difference here is that everyone have to prove their age online, even people that are clearly adults by how they look.
But entering a pornography website is the equivalent of entering an adult video store where the clerk cannot see you, cannot hear your voice. In that world I would also expect the clerk to check every purchase as they would have no other means of assessing the buyer’s age.
Or maybe you think that adult videos should be sold to everyone and it’s the very concept that pornography is restricted to minors that you disagree with. I don’t personally hold that view but then I can least understand why you would also reject online age verification.
Or maybe you think it is ineffective and won’t make a difference. That argument I most definitely agree with, but how we choose to implement a law, and whether it’s effective, is two different discussions I would posit.
Edit: I love that I’m getting downvoted for expressing a POV respectfully.
There is no possible way to actually stop teenagers accessing online porn that doesn’t require such a massive invasion of privacy that it leaves no safe way for adults to access it. To go with your adult video store analogy, it’s like if the store staff would have to accompany you home and watch you watching the porn to check there wasn’t anyone standing behind you also looking at the screen, and while they were there, they were supposed to take notes on everything they saw. Even if they had no interest in doing anything nefarious, a criminal could steal their notebook and blackmail all their customers with the details it contained, and there’d be enough proof that there wouldn’t be any way to plausibly claim the blackmailer had just made everything up.
If you want to prove someone on the Internet is a real adult and not a determined teenager, you need lots of layers. E.g. if you just ask for a photo of an ID card, that can be defeated by a photo of someone else’s ID card, and a video of a face can be defeated by a video game character (potentially even one made to resemble the person whose ID has been copied). You need to prove there’s an ID card that belongs to a real person and that it’s that person who is using it, and that’s both easier to fake than going to a store with a fake ID (if you look young, they’ll be suspicious of your ID) or Mission Impossible mask, and unlike in a store, the customer can’t see that you’re not making a copy of the ID card for later blackmail or targeted advertisements. No one would go back to a porn shop that asked for a home address and a bank statement to prove it.
Another big factor is that if there’s a physical shop supplying porn to children, the police will notice and stop it, but online, it’s really easy to make a website and fly under the radar. It’s pretty easy for sites that don’t care about the law to provide an indefinite supply of porn to children, and once that’s happening, there’s no reason to think that it’s only going to be legal porn just being supplied to the wrong people.
Overall, the risk of showing porn to children doesn’t go down very much, but the risk of showing blackmailable data to criminals and showing particularly extreme and illegal porn to children goes up by a lot. Protecting children from extreme material, e.g. videos of real necrophilia and rape, which are widely accepted to be seriously harmful, should be a higher priority than protecting a larger number from less extreme material that the evidence says is less harmful, if at all. Even if it’s taken as fact that any exposure to porn is always harmful to minors, the policies that are possible to implement in the real world can’t prevent it, just add either extra hassle or opportunities for even worse things to happen. There hasn’t been any proposal by any government with a chance of doing more good than harm.
Funny - I assume on one here was actually involved in creating the law that requires identification when buying pornography (or alcohol. Or tobacco) at stores, but we are all considered responsible for it to the point we are hypocrite if we object a similar law?
If someone says they are against that law now, years after it’s already established and spread, it won’t be taken as “I’m generally against the government limiting our freedom to consume what we want” but as “I want to push children to consume porn/alcohol/tobacco”. So no one argues against these laws. But it’s much more feasible to argue against the new laws - a ship that’s still in the port.
30 years from now, when they make the law that neural implants must detect illegal thoughts in the users’ biological brains and block them, you’d make the argument that it’s not fundamentally different than blocking the same topics on the internet - a practice that, by that time, will already be accepted by the general populace.
Not OP, but I think the analogy to what is happening to online privacy would be if you were asked to identify yourself at every location: the grocery store, the farmers market, the corner park, the trail along the river; and all of those checkpoints were aggregated and sold, meaning that someone who might not have your best interests at heart could use your travel timeline against you, to advertise to you, to sue you, to charge you with a crime, to destroy your public reputation.
I’m am 100% any form of checks that identify you.
But for what it is worth the European Union’s proposed framework for this legally mandates zero knowledge proofs.
The UK’s implantation sucks. Big hairy monkey balls.
If you buy alcohol at a farmer’s market, the seller has a responsibility to ensure they’re not supplying it to a child. At least in most countries.
There’s the problem. I was tempted to call this Boomer logic, but that would extremely unfair to Boomers. We are only seeing this now, that the Boomers are on the way out.
I think the Boomers understood better how this works. It’s not like entering a store. It’s like making a phone call to the store, and the store may be on the other side of the world. The Boomers understood borders, long distance calls, international mail.
Now the digital natives are taking over. And they understand nothing beyond tapping and swiping.
Spoilered is a post I wrote earlier. Just so you know what’s coming.
spoiler
The problem is that meat-space logic is applied to the cyberspace (as it might have been said in the 90ies).
You go into a store and the clerk sees you and knows your age. If it’s borderline, then they ask for ID. They are applying that thinking to internet services.
Where this falls down is that no ordinary Mastodon instance can comply with the regulations of the close to 200 hundred countries in the world. Of course, just like 4chan, many wouldn’t want to out of principle.
The only way to make this work is to introduce another meat-space thing: Border posts. You need a Great Firewall of the [Local Nation]. At physical border posts, guards check if goods comply with local regulations. We need virtual border posts to check if data is imported and exported in compliance with local regulations.
Such a thing, a virtual Schengen border, was briefly considered in the EU about 15 years ago. It went nowhere at the time. But if you look at EU regulations, you can see that the foundations are already laid, most obviously with the GDPR but also the DSM, DMA, DSA, CRA, …
Eventually, the border will be closed to protect our values; to enforce our laws. We will lock out those American and Chinese Big Tech companies that steal our data. We will only allow their European branches and strictly monitor their communications abroad. We will be taking back control, as the Brexiteers sloganized it. Freedom is just another word for having to ask the government for permission when you enter a country. And increasingly, it is another word for having to ask permission for how you use your own computer.
It won’t be some shady backroom deal. Look here. People in this community love these regulations. Europeans here are happy to tell US companies to “FO if they don’t want to follow our laws”. Well, the Great Firewall of Europe is how you do that.
https://lemmy.world/comment/19119670
People complained about government overreach when seatbelts became a law
Parents have the ultimate say-so of what their kids have access to.
I don’t believe there needs to be a law that says that, no.
If a parent decides their kid is responsible enough to have their own money, then it’s the parents who are to blame if that kid buys “bad” things with that money.
Same thing online. If a parent decides their kid is responsible enough to have unrestricted internet access, then it’s their fault if the kid then goes to a “bad” website.
It’s not the store’s fault. Nor is it the website’s fault.
We have given away far too much of our parental responsibility over to 3rd parties, and now we don’t know how to parent anymore.
So you would also support a child buying alcohol online on account of being given money and access to the internet?
Support? Absolutely not.
Allow? Not my child.
Make illegal? Nope. Not my business to tell other parents how to raise their children.
And that’s exactly the problem here. People like YOU, who think that if I don’t want something illegal, than that of course means I like that thing, or that I personally want to do that thing.
Nope. It has to do with personal autonomy. I’m not your boss, I shouldn’t get to tell YOU what you can do to yourself. Period.