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.
The fact that they haven’t gone for this approach that delivers age verification without disclosing ID, when it’s a common and well known pattern in IT services, very strongly suggests that age verification was never the goal.
I don’t agree. It certainly makes it possible that it isn’t the goal. But I genuinely believe that, at least here in Australia (where our recent age-gating law is not about porn, but about social media platforms, with an age limit of 16), the reason behind the laws being designed as they are is (1) optics: despite what those of us here say, keeping young children off of harmful social media algorithms is very politically popular and they wanted to pass a bill that banned it as quickly as they could. No time for serious discussion about methods. And (2) a complete lack of knowledge. Because they wanted the optics, they passed the bill extremely quickly and without a serious amount of consultation. And I don’t trust that even if they had done consultation, they would have known who is more reliable to listen to, the actual experts and privacy advocates, or the big AI companies with big money promising facial recognition will somehow solve this. Because politicians are, by and large, really fucking stupid at technology.
What is it they say? Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity?
I don’t agree. It certainly makes it possible that it isn’t the goal. But I genuinely believe that, at least here in Australia (where our recent age-gating law is not about porn, but about social media platforms, with an age limit of 16), the reason behind the laws being designed as they are is (1) optics: despite what those of us here say, keeping young children off of harmful social media algorithms is very politically popular and they wanted to pass a bill that banned it as quickly as they could. No time for serious discussion about methods. And (2) a complete lack of knowledge. Because they wanted the optics, they passed the bill extremely quickly and without a serious amount of consultation. And I don’t trust that even if they had done consultation, they would have known who is more reliable to listen to, the actual experts and privacy advocates, or the big AI companies with big money promising facial recognition will somehow solve this. Because politicians are, by and large, really fucking stupid at technology.
What is it they say? Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity?