Imagine you’re a teen dealing with a serious parental abuse issue. You don’t wanna give that info up to just anyone, so you rely on forums for people that are having or have had the same type of problem. Suddenly, under the new law, you are either geoblocked from the site entirely or you must provide some form of age verification.
Your options are either get a VPN ( which could very well be being blocked soon enough ) or you could find a free speech forum on the edge of the web that doesn’t require any of that. For people with even just slightly above average tech skills, a VPN wouldn’t be that hard to get.
For the forum, I can guarantee there are gonna be people looking to make you feel welcome, only to suddenly change once you’re comfortable and start demanding illicit content. Although this probably happens a lot on big platforms like ex-twitter, you have more options to deal with the people on there. The admins/mods of free speech sites probably aren’t gonna care as much if you’re getting abused on their free speech for all forums, so long as you don’t report their site to the government.
If neither of those are a good enough answer, imagine any company responsible for all the age verification stuff. Imagine they keep all the info they collect, whether that’s the verification for adults or minors. You know they aren’t getting rid of that data because it’s worth more kept and constantly being sold than if it was being deleted. What would happen if their repository of age verification data got hacked? A matter of when, not if, they get hacked, and suddenly every single person who submitted an ID, including the IDs of minors, gets stolen and suddenly any minor in their database is now a very likely victim of ID theft and fraud before they’re even considered a legal adult.
Fair enough. The last paragraph, I agree with you. I am 100% against this law (although there are good things in there like a ban on epilepsy trolling). It’s just I was curious about the narrative about the law actively harming children.
So essentially, you are basically saying “keep kids where we can see them”
One way that comes to mind is encouraging the use of either sketchy sites that don’t verify, or potentially sketchy sites to download VPNs (there are good VPNs but finding them might prove difficult for a non-techy child).
The main question I’d have isn’t whether these laws harm children, but whether they do anything to “protect” children. It seems to me like the obvious answer would be no?
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
How would they harm children exactly?
AceFuzzLord@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Imagine you’re a teen dealing with a serious parental abuse issue. You don’t wanna give that info up to just anyone, so you rely on forums for people that are having or have had the same type of problem. Suddenly, under the new law, you are either geoblocked from the site entirely or you must provide some form of age verification.
Your options are either get a VPN ( which could very well be being blocked soon enough ) or you could find a free speech forum on the edge of the web that doesn’t require any of that. For people with even just slightly above average tech skills, a VPN wouldn’t be that hard to get.
For the forum, I can guarantee there are gonna be people looking to make you feel welcome, only to suddenly change once you’re comfortable and start demanding illicit content. Although this probably happens a lot on big platforms like ex-twitter, you have more options to deal with the people on there. The admins/mods of free speech sites probably aren’t gonna care as much if you’re getting abused on their free speech for all forums, so long as you don’t report their site to the government.
If neither of those are a good enough answer, imagine any company responsible for all the age verification stuff. Imagine they keep all the info they collect, whether that’s the verification for adults or minors. You know they aren’t getting rid of that data because it’s worth more kept and constantly being sold than if it was being deleted. What would happen if their repository of age verification data got hacked? A matter of when, not if, they get hacked, and suddenly every single person who submitted an ID, including the IDs of minors, gets stolen and suddenly any minor in their database is now a very likely victim of ID theft and fraud before they’re even considered a legal adult.
fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
The people who write these laws are pro child abuse and want to take away tools to help kids and teens protect themselves on purpose
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Fair enough. The last paragraph, I agree with you. I am 100% against this law (although there are good things in there like a ban on epilepsy trolling). It’s just I was curious about the narrative about the law actively harming children.
So essentially, you are basically saying “keep kids where we can see them”
TehPers@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
One way that comes to mind is encouraging the use of either sketchy sites that don’t verify, or potentially sketchy sites to download VPNs (there are good VPNs but finding them might prove difficult for a non-techy child).
The main question I’d have isn’t whether these laws harm children, but whether they do anything to “protect” children. It seems to me like the obvious answer would be no?
fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
It’s protecting control over children