I know this topic, as well as most online topics, is more about emotions than facts. But here we are. You probably don’t understand how Discord's new policy is intended to help protect children because you aren’t trained to think like a child predator. (That’s fine.) I’ve had to take a lot of child safety trainings over the years for professional reasons. Here’s how online child predators work.
They start by finding a kid with a secret. Just like a lion will generally choose to attack the weak gazelle, child predators go after vulnerable kids.
They find the kids with a secret and say “hey want to see some porn?”, and of course the kid is curious. They didn't start with anything bad. This is a process for them. But they will tell the kid, “be sure you don’t tell your parents about this. This is our secret." Then they slowly try to pull into deeper and deeper secrets and start to blackmail the kid. They start to demand that the kid send them nude photos. They trap the kids into deeper and deeper secrets and guilt to get more and more out of them. In the worst cases this results in meetups with the predator in person.
The easiest places for the predators to start this process is porn sites where the kids are visiting in secret to begin with. Especially those on Discord where the messaging between users is the main feature. Those are the kids that are most vulnerable.
How how is Discord's policy supposed to protect kids? The goal is to keep the vulnerable kids out of spaces where they would be targeted to begin with.
So there you go. I’m all ears for how to do this better. That's one beef I have with the EFF right now. They offer no alternative solutions to this. They just didn't want any kind of protections at all.
Should every single platform online be compelled to implement age-ID?
I'm open to better alternative ideas, but I really haven't heard any.
But yes. Every single platform that offers the opportunity for kids to interact other users, especially strangers, should have some kind of protections. I think the platforms themselves should be held accountable for what happens on their platforms. Just like the courts have held that the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church are responsible for protecting kids they serve. Discord doesn't get a pass.
Can you tell me how you it is logistically viable to conscript tens of thousands of websites to implement age-ID?
You do realise you're interacting on a platform that would shut down if they had to do this because they can't afford it.
"You do realise you’re interacting on a platform that would shut down if they had to do this because they can’t afford it."
Yes. And I also believe the fediverse community should take this problem more seriously than it currently does, and not just wait until the government forces them to take it seriously.
One big difference is that the fediverse generally isn't broadly working marketing itself to kids to bring them onto the network, as opposed to other networks that directly market themselves to kids to get the kids locked in at young ages.
How would the government do that? The Forumverse has 40k members (which is tiny) and it's split up into over 100 instances.
Who do they try and talk to?
How can the Fediverse "take it seriously" when they simply can't afford to?
Honestly, saying "we can't afford to take it seriously" is exactly what gets organizations in trouble.
You can't afford not to.
The fediverse isn't an organisation.
As I asked: How would the government do that? The Forumverse has 40k members (which is tiny) and it’s split up into over 100 instances.
You wouldn't have to treat it like an organization. Go after individual hosts. If a police investigation found that a forumverse host was providing an opportunity for a child predators to use their system to blackmail kids into sending nude photos of themselves, then I think the host, the individual, should be held responsible for what happens on their server. Just like they would be held responsible if it happened in their house.
You unironically think that governments are going after hosts that have, in many cases, less than 1000 active monthly users purely because they don't have age-ID services on their platform?
100% they would. Yeah.
If child pornography was found to be stored on a host's server by one of their 1000 users, "I didn't think you guys would care about a platform with less than 1000 monthly users" isn't going to be a great argument in courts.
How would they know?
You're talking here specifically about child pornography. Not just not age-verifying users to access 'adult' content. No server, to my knowledge, allows this.
Well, if, and really when, a predator is caught by the police, that police department will do a full investigation and find all the places they are having communications with kids. Sooner or later, one will be found to be using Lemmy. On that day, the host is going to need a good lawyer.
It's not enough to "not allow this". A person that allows anonymous strangers to use their servers to store information in secret is asking for trouble. They need to take much more care than that.
And I never said that age-verification is the only solution to this problem. >>
What extra care should they take beyond deleting it when they find it? Which they do.
Remember, I originally started this chain by asking you if every single site online should be forced to implement age-ID and you said yes.
Fair. But I really meant that every network should have policies in place, where as age-verification is one option. Elsewhere on this thread you'll see that I offer alternative solutions, such as simply keeping everything public and not allowing 1-to-1 messaging.
Everything on the fediverse is publically viewable (although Piefed has private communities capacity now), but banning DMs is pretty unacceptable really.
Not exactly, and not for long. Mastodon, for example, is working on end-to-end encryption in messages. Matrix is also private by design.
And again, it's not that I think end-to-end encrypted one-to-one messaging is bad. But if you are going to offer it then you need to be held responsible for it.
I meant publicly viewable in the sense of being viewable by the wider audience. Excluding private messages specifically here.
So what do you propose then?
ID and age verification for users.
That's not the only solution, and I've offered several others. And I'm also not the only one with ideas. But completely frictionless encrypted anonymous one-to-one communication is probably not going to last much longer. And shouldn't.
Also everyone here unironically thinks you're a shill. You're coming to a federated platform promoting big-tech, big-government controls.
I don't care.
If I can get some people on this site to start thinking about child safety in new ways that will be a win for me today.
So you admit you came here to shill for this
Do I admit that I came here to shill for child safety policies?
Guilty as charged.
Yeah, so people are going to be kinda hostile due to that. You have no real interest in the fediverse.
Unaffordable. Not going to happen. This is what would kill the independent internet.