this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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This age verification push is utterly bullshit and I'm shocked to find people carrying water for this on lemmy. It has absolutely nothing to do with age or saftey and everything to do with advertisers no longer having any way to know who is human on the llm-shit-bot infested internet they've created.
Oh come off of it. That's some serious bullshit conspiracy nonsense you're peddling there.
A flag set on your local machine that blocks children from accessing porn, if their parents choose to set the flag correctly on their child's account, is not some big-tech privacy invasion. It's just basic good sense. I'm shocked that people would actually be opposed to it.
Opposing it has no practical effect other than helping strengthen big tech's argument that the onus shouldn't be on them to ensure their platforms are safe to use. That people should have to upload their ID to sketchy third-parties to verify their age before making an account on every website, because that's the only way we could possible know that children aren't accessing dangerous content!
If you're going to disagree with me, fine. But at least actually live in the real world rather than throwing out nonsense conspiracies. And respond to the proposal that's actually on the table. To the single user-configurable field that this guy was trying to put into Linux. Or to the ideas I raised in my comment. Not to some fantasy straw-man you've concocted, or to the big-tech nightmare that I've already explained I disagree with.
Buddy, get your head out of the sand. The Internet isn't half as gruesome as it used to be. Do you know how we used to find all the beheading videos? Just search YouTube! Sure, they are still there, somewhere, but definitely no longer popping up in my recommendation feed. Further, nowadays, content creators won't even use the word Sex on that platform for fear of demonization.
And yet why the sudden push to protect the children? You need look no further than Sam Almans "worldcoin" and similar projects for your answer, my guy.
Ah but think of the positives - we can now get back the death videos and all the pushing of sex content if the producers can theoretically rely on age verification.
Isn't that the whole point of these laws though? They were lobbied for and written by Meta afaik, with the likely purpose being to reduce their legal liability.
Yeah, cos the alternative is having to trust Facebook with even more sensitive data. I don't want to do that. They don't want that. It is possible for interests to align even between two groups that otherwise rarely agree.
I'll give another example of that. In Australia, the Greens are the main party for progressives. Unfortunately they rarely hold very much power compared to the centrist Labor and far-right Liberal National Coalition, but they do exist and have a few seats in Parliament.
In my state, there is currently a petition being circulated to ban advertising of gambling in government-owned assets. It is being supported primarily by two groups: the progressive Greens party, and the extremely socially conservative Christian lobby. I can't think of a single other issue right now where these two would agree, but they'll work together because they do agree on this issue.
I'm happy to agree with Facebook that age verification belongs locally, not via sketchy third-parties who then have to hold on to sensitive data and hope they don't get hacked. And not by uploading sensitive data directly to social media or porn sites who have no business holding on to my photo ID.