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Comment by OhMeadhbh | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that's what this bill is about. I think they want to be able to attach a government issued ID to logins for various services. They tried claiming it was to fight terrorism, but that didn't really work so now they're saying "it's for the children!"

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Someone came up with a good theory a while ago that I'm inclined to believe: The social media companies (esp. Meta as I understand it) were looking at huge fines for showing adult content to under-18s, so they lobbied hard to ensure that the burden of proof for age verification was on anyone else but themselves, hence why the OS vendors are being targeted now.

Ultimately, they seem to have realised that they can't stop adult content from being shared, so the easiest way to get there was to mark anything even vaguely possible of being adult, and require age verification -- which comes with a lot of political cover vs. just deleting it.

Of course, if you stoke up the right people, you end up with lots of support from the puritanical brigades, and label all naysayers as putting children in harm's way.

They could stop adult content from being shown to minors; it would just take effort on their part to do so, so why not shift the effort on to everyone else?

>> They could stop adult content from being shown to minors; it would just take effort on their part to do so

If you voluntarily sensor content, you might be in danger of being held responsible for various things since you control what people see. Phone companies in the US are "common carriers" which means they just connect people, but are not responsible for what people do over the phone (plotting crime or whatever). Social Media is still trying to have it both ways - censor some stuff but not be responsible for anything. IMHO that will eventually fail.

Section 230 allows for as much censoring as you want, you are not liable for user generated content as an interactive computer service provider if you censor or don't.

I'm really quite confident I don't want these companies collecting face and ID scans to prove age, so no I think this being an OS problem is actually a very reasonable solution.

because stock price must go up

Showing adult content to minors is also probably not an insignificant part of their business (certaintly a major part if the classification of social media as adult becomes more widespread), and having age be an os-user property might give children more opportunity to subvert the verification. And if enough applications end up behind the maturity wall, they can count on children to badger their parents into setting their account to adult, and the industry will absolve itself of all responsibility once more.

Yeah, you're probably right. I couldn't find the text of the bill in the link. I'm sure the effort to do this kind of thing goes back to the 90s: like a lot of the really intense copyright bills - the CASE Act (ability for big companies to easily fine people who they think are breaching their copyright for $5,000 + legal fees without anything resembling a trial or evidentiary hearing) has been popping up in different forms for decades - but in its current name they took 5 years of trying to pass it, but the main idea was officially proposed in 2006 - so 14 years to get the bill passed, but then it was a thing long before it was officially proposed by a house comittee too.

I guess they figure if they keep trying they'll eventually get it passed - which is probably true.

Most of these "online safety" acts have been sitting around in congress for half a decade at this point. Mike Johnson keeps blocking them because he has serious doubts about their constitutionality (which keep getting borne out whenever the laws end up in court).

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