Ask Lemmy

I support Age Verification

(Not to be confused with: I like Age Verification.)

For a few reasons.

• 1. The government already has all of your info and is spying on you from any device with a camera or microphone and wireless connection and without a warrant or meaningful accountability. We know this objectively because the FBI, desperate to look competent, inadvertently publicized footage obtained illegally in the Guthrie case that shouldn't have existed.
• 2. It's not 2014. We have enough information now to know definitively that social media (and increasingly, use of LLM's) is harmful to children's mental health, and that its negative effects are more pronounced on developing brains. (Though they affect adults as well.) These systems harm a person's mental health and cognitive abilities, and while this bit is anecdotal, I know several teachers who struggle to teach kids because they're no longer able to focus on anything for more than sixty seconds. (And the question: "Why do I have to know this if an AI can do it for me?" is becoming a common refrain.)
• 3. Private entities also already have your data. Go look yourself up on spokeo.com or some other background check site if you don't think so. (And be sure to put in a request there to have your info deleted while you're at it.) Or sub to a deletion service that will remove it for you.
• 4. People say that to cut kids off from social media will isolate them, but I grew up in a world where we only had email, chat rooms, snail mail, and land lines, and somehow we magically made friendly connections anyway. It's a nonsense argument, and ignores that social media itself is isolating people to a much greater extent.

Essentially, I think Age Verification is the lesser of two huge evils, and I don't expect the government in my country to force social media companies to disclose and change their algorithms to eliminate the harm being done to kids, so Age Verification becomes a necessary evil. (Hopefully a short-term one, but we'll see.) The social media companies have too much money for any civil suit to meaningfully impact them financially.