Two things can be true, and I am in the same boat. Should the next generation have their brains fried by ad-tech corporations and their algorithms? Absolutely not. Should the overdue off-ramp from this trend be the on-ramp to mass-surveillance and government overreach? Also a firm no.

That's because we should be regulating the social media industry rather than regulating social media users.

Unfortunately, social media users don't have billions of dollars to spend on lobbying and related activities around the world.

Meta spent $2bn lobbying for this ID verification stuff:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361235

> I'm very suspicious of the current international agreement that it's time to take action

Especially since, when you look at the behavior of younger people, they're way more careful about social media than millennials were. My teenage child an their friends keep all of their conversations in a massive but private group chat. Any social media consumed by them, is basically 'read only'. They don't post online, none of them of have social media accounts where they post pictures of themselves etc.

Same with all of my younger gen-z coworkers. If they have socials the post very selectively and all content is work friendly.

The people I see that need "protection" are aging millenials that don't really understand how wildly they're exposing themselves and families. I cringe when I see the amount of personal photos and information shared by the view millenials I know who still need their ego-boost from these platforms (and that number itself is much smaller).

Younger people don't share their opinion and anything resembling private photos online any more.

given that it's happening simultaneously with the war on E2EE and general purpose computing, their goals are as transparent as it gets. the West is at this point only a decade behind China.

There's no agreement other than maybe that social media is bad for children. To get kids off of there you need to identify who's a kid and who isn't. Same with alcohol and tobacco. Obviously people shouldn't give their ID to Meta and hopefully many will not but those that do, for me, as someone who doesn't use social media, that's a small price to pay to keep kids off. Again, Meta is completely optional, it's a platform to share stupid videos, no one NEEDS to be there.

I’m deeply worried by how uncritical these responses are. Meta is removing end-to-end encryption specifically because these lawsuits are trying to claim end-to-end encryption is a tool for child abuse.

The “think of the children” angle is the perfect angle to pressure companies to make communications readable by the government. And here tech audiences are welcoming it and applauding because they couldn’t read past the headline and they think anything that hurts Zuck is good.

How anyone can see this happening and not draw the connections to Discord and other services also pushing ID checks is beyond me. Believing that this will only apply to services that don’t effect you is short sighted.

Governments always want censorship and speech control. That never changes. The only difference is that now the general populace has accumulated enough disgruntlement to social media to be used against themselves.

A lot of the ID verification stuff is coming FROM those companies

because it is a false dilemma

Meta is lobbying to push age verification to the OS level.

I have read the OSINT report from Reddit. The data it has is being interpreted as Meta orchestrating a global lobbying scheme.

However the data is equally if not more supportive of Meta simply taking advantage of global political sentiment to position itself better.

I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but the HN zeitgeist seems to be resistant to the idea that tech is the “bad guy” today.

I work in trust and safety, and have near front row seats to all the insanity playing out today.

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Tech bros deliberately made digital crack for kids and corporations refuse to moderate online content.

There is no conspiracy the general public is faced with a crisis and they are desperate for a solution.

The teen suicide statistics do not lie.

Really? You still think you're the one looking at it all wrong? It's exactly what you think it is. Stop giving blatant malice the benefit of the doubt, especially the doubt they've directly instilled.