Do we know who is funding this? is this one of these things where Meta doesn't want the responsibility for this, so they are pushing to have the OS have the responsibility or something like that?
They also added this page since I posted that comment: https://web.archive.org/web/20260411112604/https://tboteproj... where they claim their website is "under surveillance" because it got a few thousand requests from Google Cloud et al, most of them to a single page. This really shows how low their standards are.
I share your wariness of the LLM garbage, but I believe the conclusions are correct. This has Facebook's stink all over it. I worked there and know of what I speak.
So we should believe the hallucinations because they sound like something that could be true? Does the LLM in the middle somehow makes it more trustworthy than if GP had just shared their own pattern-matching conjecture?
No. I think LLMs are garbage. Separately, and unrelated: I think Facebook is behind these bills. The LLM may be garbage and still sometimes produce a correct result.
Yes, it would be nice to know with certainty who is behind these bills. It sucks how much opaque money influences American politics.
Josh Gottheimer's press release[1] on HR8250 mentions the "Meta Parents Network." I don't know what that is, but it does have "Meta" in the name.
Buffy Wick's noise about AB1043 claimed it was passed with the support of tech companies. I have spoken directly to one person close to AB1043 who told me Facebook argued against AB1043. I have doubts. But if true, I suspect they were not arguing in good faith and had ulterior motives.
In the end, no matter who is secretly lobbying for or against age verification bills all over the planet, the bills are terrible, and we should fight them.
I was relieved to hear it was an emotionless mega-corporation catalyzing this, and not a sudden competence of evil bureaucracies in the USA and Europe.
> is this one of these things where Meta doesn't want the responsibility for this
Very likely, given the legal liability they are already facing from the "addictive" court cases that are turning against them. Moving the liability for "age verification" away means they will not also be facing a huge number of court cases accusing them of showing an underage person adult age content provided they followed the law's proscribed "ask the OS for the user's age" requirements.
Also, note that only a few months ago Zuckerberg was in court testifying that the single best place to perform "age verification" was in the operating system of a device. Now, like mushrooms after a long rain, at roughly the same time up pop bills in nearly every statehouse, Congress, even Brazil, that all read nearly identically and that all are so broad as to require "the OS in anything with a CPU do age verification". The nearly identical text in each highly implies a single lobbying entity is behind all of them (it would be quite the coincidence that 50 state houses, plus Congress and Brazil, all write nearly identical bills independently). And the connection back to Zuck's court testimony of "age verification is best done in the OS" highly implies that the single lobbying entity is Meta, or funded by Meta to obtain this outcome.
Facebook. There's a wave of child endangerment lawsuits incoming and they want to head that off at the pass by having governments shift all that liability over to the OS vendors.
Microsoft just force-updated my operating system (despite declining every option and prompt) and the first thing I noticed working differently was it offering, in an OS popup, to "connect" the computer to "Facebook".
These people have root access to all our webcams.
I don't think we can tolerate these entities to continue to exist.
What can we do about it? The major tech firms have nearly all the power here, including quite obviously full capture of government (not just here but other countries as well).
Basically a mass-protest via network packets. Could we argue sending packets to a server is essentially a form of protest protected by speech similar to a public gathering?
How does that help Facebook? They already have plenty of signals to guess their users' age, what would they do with an other one? They are not going to ban children anyway.
The OS should start labeling everybody as a child by default. Forbid Facebook to show ads and any harming content by default. The OS has little less to lose with this approach than FB.
FB etc. may argue "device says this user is an adult", even though device may say that only because the parents don't set up separate user accounts e.g. shared family iPad, or because the kids being more tech savvy in the first place like we all were when I myself was a kid.
Every one of these age assurance laws basically says:
1. The OS vendor must provide an age bucket using the minimum amount of data necessary
2. App vendors (i.e. Facebook) must use the OS vendor's age buckets to determine age
The idea is that the next time Facebook gets hit with a child endangerment lawsuit, they can say "Well, we used the age buckets the government told us to, and they said the plaintiff was 18+, so we're not liable".
This, of course, assumes that most social media and Internet regulation will continue being targeted at children only, both because courts are reluctant to enforce 1A on laws that censor children[0] and because the current political class actually benefits from the harms Facebook does to adults. Like, a good chunk of government surveillance is just buying data from Google and Facebook.
[0] The root password to the US constitution is "th1nk0fth3cHIldren!!1" after all
with age requirements for use of social media, Meta faces tremendous liability in many countries if they cannot do the verification correctly.
they don't want to do it, nor face the risks, so they'll push it to the OS.
they also know that banning under-16s means a huge market will be gone, so they want an easy-to-bypass OS fix. if their tween market gets around the hardware and OS it's not their problem, but Meta can't it if it's on them.
in other words lets annihilate the free internet and maybe democracy so we can lower our risk profile
If something is codified in law, they can comply with the law fully, and yet not have any real backlash from users. This can also shield them from many lawsuits. Conversely, if they start ratcheting down age-verification on their own, users will become quite upset. If they don't ratchet it down, then... as you can see, potential lawsuit.
And this isn't just about LLMs, once the concept of "a platform is liable for harm" happens, it's about everything. Including content other people slap into an app store. And the US has been talking about section 230 removal, countries around the world are reducing such exclusions, so the wind is blowing towards even more liability for platforms.
If you look at Google's recent moves to identify all developers prior to install on Android, there may even be some of this in that. How can they ban someone from publishing illegal material, or material Google will be liable for, if they don't even know who the publisher is? They'll just slide into a new account.
(Note, I said "some" not "all", there is often not just one reason for an action)
So I suspect that the push is from all online platforms of any size or scope. It will shield them, protect them from liability, whist at the same time redirecting user ire at the legislation, not them. HN types might still brood, but the average person won't have insight. "Protect the children" as a reason works for the average person, it works very very well, and really, that's what a lot of these lawsuits are about.
So I point back to such lawsuits as the start of all of this. And I see it as why there is a push from Apple, Google, Meta and so on. And simply because I'm saying "big corp wants this, not just Meta", doesn't mean I'm saying "Meta isn't doing anything".
Meta can be pushing this, hard, whilst at the same time every other large corp can be working towards the same outcome.
It must be OS responsibility because that’s the only place that allows the next step.
Everyone is so concerned with kids pretending to be adults, what about adults pretending to be kids? Any service that has any kind of private chat or picture sharing option will be a playground for “verified” kids.
Next step, “we must go further with the verifications until everyone is verified everywhere”. This is where the OS part comes in. Wish it was sarcasm.
MS is ratcheting up the 'mandatory Microsoft account' on Windows, probably for this reason. The 'identity strongly bound with the device' stuff on corporate devices is being tested and secured in that environment, and it is almost certainly one step from being forced onto non-corporate devices, once they 'have to' by law.
The "children's version" has to be engineered to assume some adult users anyway-- since you're going to have some types of helicopter parents logging into the same platforms the kids are on to make sure they're all right. So the threat model of "what if a paedophile gets a Club Penguin account" is already wargamed out.
In many cases, this consists of dramatically limiting user-to-user comms, hyper-aggressive filtering, sometimes even to restricting to pre-canned messages only. (I'm sure someone is already encoding morse code ethnic slurs into patterns of friendly gestures, but that's another story).
... which is entirely consistent with his statements.
Here are more of his own words from the same letter:
> And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.
The blood of patriots and tyrants. He never expected rebellion to go unchallenged, he was advocating that we should maintain the spirit of rebellion as a guard against tyranny.
