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Reddit User Uncovers Who Is Behind Meta's $2B Lobbying for Age Verification Tech

Reddit User Uncovers Who Is Behind Meta's $2B Lobbying for Age Verification Tech

doener

Comments (254)

  • cycomanic
    These discussions remind me so much of the US discussions about federal ID documents as verification.There's a vocal portion of people which opposes any solution because "privacy, government overreach, surveillance ...". So instead of a solution like e.g. zero-proof age verification, that tries to minimize intrusions on privacy, the result is the worst of all worlds, maximum surveillance (but I guess it's ok if it is not the federal government, but meta), with minimum utility. Just look at the freaking mess that is trying to proof your identity in the US.
  • XzAeRosho
    I know most of this affects only the US, but I'm wondering where this will go in the EU if the Age Verification Tech goes ahead in America. There's been lots of efforts to increase surveillance disguised as protection for kids in the EU and UK.The Swiss implementation of eID may be hint that governments may/will take the responsibility to implement and maintain the tech, but the multiple intrusions and lobbying by Palantir and friends in the EU gives me the ick.
  • swores
    Discussed a few days ago, 554 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362528(But it's a big enough story that I'm glad to see it on front page again.)
  • redm
    The question I keep coming back to regarding the recent debate around age verification is "Why now?"I'm 47, and I started using the internet in my early teens through BBS gateways. I've seen every age of the Internet, and there's always been widely available pornographic materials. Why all of a sudden is this a crisis?Perhaps I'm missing something?
  • hliyan
    Why can't we handle this the same way we handle knives, guns and chainsaws: require adults to secure the device before letting minors near them? All the devices need is the ability to create limited access profiles. A human adult performs age verification by only providing the minor with creditals to a limited profile. Trying to perform that verification so far away from the minor, after they have got to the last gate, seems like the worst way to do it.
  • rererereferred
    Companies shouldn't be allowed to grow so big that they can manipulate laws as they want.
  • BTAQA
    The zero-knowledge proof angle is interesting but the real barrier is implementationmost platforms won't voluntarily adopt privacy-preserving verification when the surveillance version gives them more data. Regulation would need to mandate the privacy-preserving approach specifically, not just "verify age somehow.
  • pkphilip
    This is an underhand way of mandating digital id at the point of operating system boot or login
  • mwelpa
    has any of upvoters at least opened the article? there's no proof or event screen/link to reddit discussion. It's just comparison to EU's law.
  • Aurornis
    I tried to read the research when it was posted on Reddit a few days ago, but it’s all AI slop. The person who uploaded it admitted that they just had Claude go out and explore their hypotheses, but they didn’t even spend the time trying to get the real documents into Claude. Claude identified documents it wanted but couldn’t access them, so it just proposed hypothetical connections.The research has a lot of these:> LIMITATION: Direct PDF downloads returned 403 errors. ProPublica Schedule I viewer loads data dynamically (JavaScript), preventing extraction via WebFetch. The 2024 public disclosure copy on sixteenthirtyfund.org was also blocked.> Tech Transparency Project report: The article "Inside Meta's Spin Machine on Kids and Social Media" at techtransparencyproject.org likely contains detailed ConnectSafely/Meta funding analysis but was blocked (403)So the “research” isn’t some groundbreaking discoveries by a Redditor. It’s an afternoon worth of Claude Code slop where they couldn’t even take the time to get the real documents into the local workspace so Claude Code could access them. It’s now getting repeated by sites like Theo gadgetreview.com because the people posting to these sites aren’t reading the report either.
  • SpaceL10n
    So Meta's corporate strategy involves manipulating our social lives even more than they already do? I'm tired boss.
  • stevenalowe
    This is key:‘The “child safety” rhetoric masks a competitive strategy that shifts liability from platforms to operating system makers.’
  • daveswilson
    How are Apple and Google reacting to this? Surely these companies aren't ignorant of it.
  • conartist6
    The way the law is written is so utterly shit that I don't think it does what it's meant to do at all.Microsoft has a trillion dollars in liability now because every historical OS is illegal, and every adult user of that historical OS (that you don't ask for their age) is a monetary fine.$2500 fine for Microsoft for letting me continue use Windows 10 in Colorado, cause they never asked my age.Also hilariously the law openly FORBIDS checking the user's identity to verify age. It says you MUST NOT collect any more information than is necessary to comply with the law. And complying with the law only requires that you ASK the user to TELL YOU their age, so my non-lawyer take is that if you do anything else like checking ID you can and probably will be prosecuted
  • Quarrelsome
    > Meta’s backing of DCA, part of a $70 million fragmented super PAC strategy designed to evade FEC trackingWhy is this never relevant politically? Its the same with the Epstein files, terrible things happen and we just hand-wring. It seems like the US electorate, doesn't know, doesn't care or is otherwise distracted. I don't see how the US is ever going to get shit together if it accepts this sort of corruption.
  • SkyeCA
    > organizations like the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA)
  • Aldipower
    Didn't read yet, but "Reddit researcher" struck me. :-)
  • systima
    Follow what Nick Clegg has been saying post-Meta. He might give a big clue.
  • varispeed
    Why "lobbying" is not treated as corruption? This kind of corporate influence should be illegal.
  • Simulacra
    I think this is only the first step towards a license for the Internet. The best example I know of is South Korea, where you have a state issued login. I think it's only a matter of time until the U.S. government knows exactly who you are at all times on the Internet, and this effort is completely agnostic of party or doctrine. This has been building across multiple administrations.
  • SirMaster
    We age gate the movie theater, so why is age gating a website or app any worse?
  • singingwolfboy
  • shevy-java
    So meta acts as a government spy actor. Interesting.When a company such as meta pursues mass-sniffing, is it still a company or is it just a spy-agency? Meta isn't even hiding this anymore. I am glad to finally understand why these "age verification" is pushed globally. Meta pays well.
  • orthoxerox
    If this lobbying forces Microsoft to finally add local child accounts to Windows, I'll consider Meta's money well-spent.
  • bradley13
    The article makes one mistake: praising Europe for having a better approach. Governments here are pushing hard to force ID requirements. Sure, they start by pretending it's "for the children" and they "only want age verification". They also claim that e-IDs will be voluntary. Camel. Nose. Tent.These are the same governments that file criminal charges when you compare lying leader to Pinocchio (Germany). The UK records something like 30 arrests per day for social media posts. Just imagine how much better they could do, if you were not pseudo-anonymous in the Internet!
  • motohagiography
    Even steelmaning the case for age verification, does anyone really think the state is going to re-institute the innocence of childhood by filtering content and services? Of course not. There is no steelman. If you can do age, you can do identity, and the purpose of identity is recourse for authorities against truth and humor.Doing ID or this fake age verification with anything other than a physical secure element is a dumb regulation that going to create its own regulatory arbitrages and spawn very powerful and profitable black and grey markets. Poor laws create criminal economic opportunity, and digital id is just creating a massive one.Between Meta being behind a digital id initiative under the pretext of alleged "age verification" and the Debian project leads pivoting to political objectives, it appears gen Z now has a cause to build tech against and fight for. These are dying organizations that cannot innovate and they've attracted a pestilence that is pivoting them to the easier problem of political maneuvering. as it's easier to militate for what nobody wants than to make something anyone actually wants.The upside is that people get to be hackers again. Tools to cleanse our networks and systems of Meta and other surveillance companies and the influence of these compromised organizations are an OS install and a vibecoding weekend away.
  • mayhemducks
    If Citizens United is not challenged, we will end up being governed by corporate billionaires. Forcing age verification down our throats will be the least of our worries if this continues.
  • badpenny
    It's an important story, and I'm glad it's getting exposure, but this "article" is some really blatant AI slop. Go and read the original Reddit thread by the human being who did the work instead of this lazy regurgitated shit.
  • TZubiri
    >"Here’s where the lobbying gets surgical. The proposed laws hammer Apple’s App Store and Google Play with compliance requirements but reportedly spare social media platforms—Meta’s core businesBecause social media already has the age info exactly?I think an OS and a web platform with accounts are different product categories. Not even sure what an interpretation of the bill that would affect meta would be.
  • soco
    Here's some more technical details of the Swiss new official way (yet to be implemented) of doing age verification and more: https://www.liip.ch/en/blog/swiss-eid-from-a-developer-persp...
  • gethly
    age verification is always a backdoor for some nefarious constitutional rights-infringing policy because every child has their parents legally responsible for their well being and all the legal aspects as well. in other words, parents have the responsibility, and authority, to enforce what devices and what websites their kids are allowed to visit, and no silicon valley epstein pedos run by mosad should have any involvement in any of this whatsoever.
  • intended
    This is how bad journalism results in conspiracy theories.I looked at the original analysis and it was fraught with language that leads to specific conclusions. It was most certainly LLM aided, if not generated.I am not ascribing malice, but the author seems inexperienced with the repercussions of making assertions out of partial knowledge.Also: Good grief, this article is also written via LLM! Human+machine comes up with theory that goes viral, and then Humans+machines amplify it? Is this the brilliant future we have to look forward to?
  • bix6
    [dead]
  • everdrive
    [dead]