this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2025
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The absolute binary inability for children to access social media shouldn’t be the litmus test for whether we should try.
Some children manage to buy lottery tickets or gamble for real money online. Some manage to buy alcohol even when they’re underage. Some manage to buy cigarettes. Inadequate parents will even sometimes support this.
But we aim to create an environment where that is difficult. And by doing so we shape culture. And culture shapes patterns. My aim isn’t to remove the harm social media perpetrated on children, but to reduce it. All law works like this - speed limits are routinely broken but most drive sensibly.
Well we definitely agree pretty much 100% about social media as it stands today, in terms of its ills.
I don’t know what “regulation” of social media would be without requiring identification of users, though. The vast majority of its ills comes from, as you identify, monetised engagement which promotes bots. Therefore it is in social media companies’ interest to allow bots to play, which enables an undermining of our democracy.
Though we will disagree on what “verification” of users mean in terms of privacy risks.
The EU proposal for age verification has a legal requirement for anonymisation. This means that your “age verification” app simply holds signed verification tokens that it hands over to the service. There is no way for that token to be tied back to an identifiable user.
And there’s a million ways that could be circumvented by the state, agreed, but if the state circumvents its own laws (“must be anonymous”) they are already able to circumvent ISP logs, phone records etc. We have laws for dealing with it.
My point being that you either trust your government, in which case the requirement for anonymity will be upheld, or you don’t, in which case this doesn’t increase your risk surface (as you already believe your government circumvents laws and accesses logs illegally).
I'm an anarchist and an anti-capitalist, and usually appeal to the choices that have the best outcomes.
The government and every corporation having a direct personal dossier with my information in it is very specifically against my beliefs.
I think that social media should be designed like the fediverse. Organized around communities and those communities should be obligated to moderate themselves. Meta literally does not moderate any of its platforms. They know that Facebook and Instagram are full of misinformation, pedophiles, scam artists, and they do not care. The websites are designed to harvest money and data. They are not actually designed to create sustainable healthy social communities. There should be laws mandating routine auditing of the entire moderation ecosystem at social media platforms. If child safety is our concern then it should be the law that social media platforms have to actually deal with threats to child safety and make their platforms usable for children.
I don't understand why there exists seemingly a widespread interest in protecting Facebook and TikTok? Why? I dont think the fediverse is bad for you. I wouldn't come here if I believed that. The idea of social media itself being harmful is just a liberal misdirection right? Its all just to distract from the fact that Mark Zuckerberg has more power than most nations and is functionally beholden to no laws. He is entirely ambivalent to these laws because they make really no difference to his bottom line. Kids will still use his platforms. And the platforms themselves are entkrely unaffected. Perhaps even emboldened. Its an "adults only space" after all, which basically let's them fuck off on all moderation of any kind. After all, all their users are adults now right. So why would they need to moderate? They're already starting to do this. And kids are still going to access the sites anyway. So they just get access to a worse platform with even less protections for its users and designed even more aggressively to harvest their money and data.
I just see literally not a single positive in a law like this. I don't get why the answer is to functionally inconvenience every single person and overnight destroy any semblance of human privacy. For nothing. For a net 0 gain. It's all to protect the policies and actions of meta and TikTok and Snapchat and so on.
I’m not an anarchist nor an anti-capitalist but I really appreciate the civil discussion.
I am 1000% aligned that no government nor corporation should have a dossier with your information.
That’s why I’m actually able to support age verification online in the EU, because the proposed system prevents exactly that. Your device will literally be issued with ZKP tokens, which solely verifies “the person handing you this token is above 18”. It is a specific requirement that no knowledge can be inferred about who is passing the token (hence the name “Zero Knowledge Proof”). This is a mathematical possibility we can utilise and which the proposal relies on. The Danish trailblazer system is built exactly to this spec.
I do understand the concern about implementation burden for smaller players (like federated services). In every other case where the burden has been large, open source has sprung to the rescue (eg Let’s Encrypt); I am convicted the same will happen here.
How do you stop me (or hypothetical EU based me if you can't make ZKP tokens from the USA) from making age verified tokens en mass and hand them out to sabotage the system?
You don’t own the signing private key so you can’t - mathematically can’t, not opinion can’t