These laws aren't about children, that's just a talking point to sell laws that tame the potential anonymity of the internet for private profit.

If American society gave the slightest shit at all about our children, we wouldn't have literally starved our K-12 system into utter ruin for over half a century to cut the taxes of the corporations and already rich assholes killing the planet and those children's future on it for private profit. We wouldn't then say selling public education to for profit industry in the form of charter schools is a solution.

The United States doesn't give a shit about its children. Not one tiny bit. Now our beloved economy? We'd throw all our (non-wealthy) kids into a fucking volcano if Wall Street told us it would protect that.

These laws are dangerous, kids are going to sneak a peek at adult things and when they do going to pornhub is far safer than having to avoid strong filters by joining a private discord group full of creepy old guys.

Honestly these laws are a groomers dream, keeping kids naive and then funnelling them in to poorly moderated or purposely immoral porn sharing communities creates actual dangers which aren't present when a teenager sees some videos from the front page of pornhub.

What we actually need to do it have real conversations about things

I'm a parent and have plenty control over what my kids can access. Most devices have parental controls, and for everything else there is Pi-hole. I don't need anyone else to do my parenting for me, especially when it means that I, the parent, get treated like a child.

"Oh please, daddy gubment, can I see this website?"

No. Not gonna fly.

I love how this "sticking it to big tech" is also funded by big tech. The general goal of someone like Facebook with this legislation is pass a bunch of rules that only large companies like them can comply with, and watch mastodon instances and other attempts to detrown them end in FBI raids and more regulations.

These laws are made by bad parents or those that want to control someone else's children. It's so easy to just talk to your kids about the dangers of the internet and to put on parental controls on all devices.

sounds like some fascist culture war garbage that was never meant to protect children from anything because it doesn't

Spoiler Alert: It's not about protecting children, it's about the GOP keeping the gays off of the internet

This starts with some ambiguous "protecting the children" from porn argument to eventually requiring everyone to be "verified" with a digital ID before they can set foot on a highly controlled internet (or worse). We're already seeing increasing glimpses of this and it's in the government's and big tech's interest.

I'm so tired of the constant barrage of shit from all directions. This isn't the beautiful future of humanity I imagined as a kid. No one will look out for us except for us, the actual people that these out of touch rich and powerful high society clowns try to control and keep occupied with stupid culture wars amongst each other, or placate with bread and circus. Enough already ffs.

I haven't read the article but I assume it's an invasion af privacy under the guise of "protecting the children" as usual

Google has recently started telling me that they don't know if I am >18. But I have been using Google for way more than 20 years.

So, Google is incapable of counting to 18? :-)

Humanity never changes. Teenage me found the entire idea that I might need "protection from harmful content on the Internet" ridiculous. Now I have been an adult for more than ten years, I still find it ridiculous that people younger than me might need that.

It will be interesting to see the politicians responses when their porn accounts are hacked and they all have to explain why their ID is associated with profiles that frequent tranny incest porn

This is the best summary I could come up with:

“It does seem like a very clear backlash to not just tech, but to any sort of movement towards allowing young people to make their own decisions based on the information that they can access,” Jason Kelley, activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), said in an interview earlier this month.

France has proposed similar age verification restrictions on porn in the past, leading its data protection agency, CNIL, to investigate the security of current services on the market, determining that many were “intrusive” and for new, safer models to be developed.

Over the last few years, more than a dozen states, including many that have implemented age verification bills, have passed resolutions identifying porn as a “public health crisis,” arguing that it encourages violence despite little research backing these claims.

“I think progressives had the idea that they wanted to regulate Big Tech without fully appreciating the degree to which they were playing with fire,” Evan Greer, Fight for the Future director, said in an interview with The Verge earlier this month.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued to unravel the language related to pornography and ultimately won in 1997 after the Supreme Court decided that banning the material would infringe on the First Amendment rights of adults.

Without more pushback, age verification bills, just like the ongoing book bans taking place in schools, will continue to fuel the right’s censorship fire all at the expense of speech protected by the First Amendment.

The original article contains 1,875 words, the summary contains 245 words. Saved 87%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

That’s the point, they don’t give two shits about the children.