The question is prompted by the age verification app that the EU has just presented.
Some EU countries want to ban social media for young people. If that were to happen, what then?
Not at all.
Protest any age verification laws by not regarding them.
I wonder if a checkbox is enough
[ ] 18 or more?
It’s not up to me to hunt down unlawful people? And if it is so, how on earth can that fly legally?
Law in some (many?) European countries already requires more intrusive age checks. The EU also has some explicit requirements. There is also push to ban social media for people under a certain age (maybe 16).
The EU has just presented an age verification app. That app would become a required standard through new laws. or even through case law from court judgments.
They can try to force me adding that for my single user instance, but I don’t think they can:
- Force the developers of GoToSocial to add this feature
- And force me to add that to my instance (I don’t live in the EU no US)
Do do this, they need to enforce cryptographically verifiable age verification everywhere. It would require forcing big instances to only cooperate with small instances that poof they do age verification and if you’re selfhosting then the hoster needed to verify you? Not really possible.
Of course big applications and servers could choose to add age-verification freely to avoid scrutiny. Won’t be cheered on in the Fedi I’m sure.
I’m more worried about the proposed OS-level verification, which will be harder to circumvent if you’re not using a FOSS OS. Especially since I can imagine a global effort on this by US, EU, China.
Edit: hypotecially, if we ask how could it be added, a zero-knowledge proof that you’re >18, without revealing anything else, would be the way to go.
Move servers to a country without stupid laws and ignoring the notices/threats. Sure, they might block you in that country, but people will find a way.
Pretty sure 4chan still hasn’t paid fines to UK and doesn’t plan to as UK can’t really enforce such things abroad, they can just block you in their own country if you refuse.
Does it require it to be good? Like an audited service working with government databases and some kind of PKI system or is it just heuristics? If it’s the latter, then half ass a local vision model running client side during registration that trys to determine age, and defaults to “sure”. Have the age range the guess falls into (6-12, 13-18, 18-25, 25-999) be random number tables pick a fake number in the guess age range and move on. If a user WANTS to be precise let them. Maybe a test on “adult” questions like what is your favorite brand of toilet paper, what did you last pay for eggs, when cleaning a rug what method do prefer, etc (localized to region maybe just so people unfamiliar with a thing don’t get stressed by these bs questions).
Even better federation if we could have a concept for the federated servers so that they have a concept of what info actually needs passed along (as in above 18) and pass just that info if the user allows. Useful idea for other bits imho anyways. Pick and choose what actor metadata we share, allow servers to share data calculated on metadata without sharing it, etc.
Otherwise as others have said, Tor, i2p, and maybe freenet? The best case is servers in free countries support all three clearweb, tor, and i2p, and local server behind the wire support just the secure one that works in their security environment.
It shouldn’t, just host it somewhere else where legislation doesn’t apply.
It should not. Fuck the police.
Will every website out there start doing age verification? Doubtful
Just the ones we will quit.
A related question that comes to mind is what jurisdiction’s laws should we all be exploring to avoid age verification completely?
I’m not suggesting we all get legal degrees or dispense legal advice, but as conscientious people who are also literate: Should the Fediverse identify lists of these jurisdictions for its community of small to very large instances, and resources to help decide whether those laws of favourable jursidictions should be adopted and some common pitfalls?
We all see the headlines of countries exploring bans on under 16s for social media in the name of improved ad and online surveillance. Which are the countries who are saying no or will resist this?
Implement portable actors and tell them to get bent
Personally I’d want to see at least some instances behind i2p or tor as it’s really the only answer to all the censorship coming.
Doubtful it ever will happen I mean that stuffs had a lot of time to take off and hasn’t as yet.
I wish the fediverse would allow federating with Tor-protected instances
What prevents this? Is it just that you would a need a server that is a bridge on both networks?
This is precisely the point of literally all the recent new laws regulating online platforms, including this.
To kill smaller ones that can’t comply with those laws, so that only large ones remain (if at all) and it is easier to censor and surveil the users there.
I just hope that at some point, people will figure out how wrong politicians of the 2020s were to do all of this, and a new free and open Internet will rise from the ashes as long as any remain.
Unfortunately, the general public has no idea whatsoever of the Fediverse and doesn’t care about the monopoly of information, mega platforms abusing your data, privacy, and so on and so forth. I’m old enough to finally have come to the conclusion that progress is not made by the masses but by smart, motivated and usually underappreciated individuals. Sadly.
I was already posting on web forums (also wikis) before Facebook or Twitter became popular, when the Internet was not yet very established and posting things on it oneself was something only few people thought of doing.
I was outright excited when I saw “social media” becoming more mainstream. I thought at the time, at least more people are using the Internet, even if it’s “just” Facebook or Twitter (which I didn’t and still don’t see much value in), at least it’s the Internet, that’s a good thing because the Internet is a great and exciting thing for society and a wonderful source of entertainment!
Now we live in a world where the general public mostly only knows how to operate social media apps, otherwise has no tech proficiency at all, doesn’t even know what else is out there on the Internet, and doesn’t know or care how the social media apps they’re using are designed to manipulate them. And politicians are busy working to make it harder for good idealistic people to solve those problems. :(
Small platforms are excluded but don’t let that get in the way of your hysteria
Small platforms are excluded today
Yeah that’s how laws work, if it included them it would be a different law or a significantly different proposal.
From some things maybe. Plenty of recent “online safety” style laws around the world have no exceptions based on platform size.
We are talking about a specific thing: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/dsa-vlops
You are talking about the DSA.
There is no reason to believe that future social media bans will have such exceptions. VDL said explicitly that the app means that there are “no more excuses”.
The DSA excludes small platforms from some rules, so as not to overwhelm start-ups with bureaucracy. Clearly, such considerations are to be neutralized in the future.
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I would only ever sign up for an instance that is not subject to it, or does not comply, or at least maliciously complies. And by malicious compliance I mean something where it’s implemented in such a “buggy” way that it’s easy to bypass.
But really I’d just go for instances hosted outside the EU.
How on earth would the EU possibly do this given the entire structure is federated?
They likely don’t even know what Lemmy is.
Good point. European governments keep churning out the digital regulation, but have hardly any qualified people to enforce them. That has protected the Fediverse, so far.
But a straight age-gating requirement would require no particular qualifications to spot. Would you be willing to face a hefty fine just for the privilege of running an instance?
