France Targets Australia-Style Social Media Ban for Children Next Year

Furthermore, France is in the EU. They expect to deploy their implementation of the EU Digital Identity Wallet by the end of 2026.

That allows users do age verification using protocol between the user's smart phone and the site with the age restriction. (Later they are expected to add support for smart cards and security tokens like YubiKey so a smart phone won't be required).

That system works by storing signed identity credentials tied to a hardware security device you provide, and using a zero-knowledge proof based protocol between your device and the site to prove to the site that your identity credentials show an acceptable age without providing any other information to the site.

The EU has been working on this for several years, and it is currently undergoing large scale field trials.

Sure. Australia opted for private compliance. Adults who choose to use social media are subject to more surveillance (because that’s how the social media companies chose to comply). In exchange, not only does that level of surveillance not apply to children, but the default state of surveillance they were under from social media companies (and being normalized towards) is gone.

Unfortunately we have built a world in which people can live stream terrorist attacks or child rape.

It's much worse than just greed, it's about attention. Fundamentally at this point, very few people, including adults are unable to accept boredom or lack of instant gratification. Commercial or non-commercial.

And also, it’s very funny to think that you can force kids to not have unattended internet. Even when you try you will fail. Millennials and younger people should really know this firsthand. This is especially funny on HN, where there are articles about circumventing control routinely.

The key was always to teach kids to handle shit, not hiding it.

And yeah, AI slop is a problem. For kids, especially. And this should be quite obvious from absolutely terrible places like Yotube Kids.

In Holland there's even ISPs that filter porn and stuff, like https://kliksafe.nl . They're used by ultra-religious conservative communities.

I view this as a much better solution. The people that want it can do their blocking and the rest of us aren't bothered with verifications and stuff.

They hate social media because it gives people the power to talk in public about them with near impunity. They want to go back to the old days when if you wrote a letter to the newspaper about potential corruption you'd get pulled over for a light out whenever you went through that town for the next 20yr.

It's actually the same as the average age of voting-age French citizens, so they are quite representative on this regard.

So it is advertisements where we should draw the line -- websites with advertisements should require age checks?

Yes? Even newspapers do that. You have never had Gell-Mann when reading something here outside mainstream topics of interest? (e.g. almost anything from outside the US, or health related).

Is this really the criteria you want to use to decide whether to require age checks for a website?

Yes?

But fine: if you think Reddit deserves the cut, please let me know why you think this site does not deserve it. Or why Discord (also used by a lot of software projects, to my annoyance ) does not deserve it. In a way that a "80 year old judge which hates computers" can understand.

We should have kept to mailing lists, as I said many times.

Reddit still has the capacity to show you what you're actually looking for. It still lets you find content by interest, rather than by personalities. It still keeps replies together, still lets you order by time easily, and doesn't stick too much random crap in the middle (none if you use a decent ad blocker). It handles long form content well and doesn't try to force everything to be a sound bite that you have to click on to see more. It's still convenient to use it that way, and most users probably do use it that way.

Compare to, say, Youtube, which fight you ever step of the way if you try not to be drowned in a disordered flood of some combination of what a computer guesses you might want and what it's most profitable for the site for you to see (including what will keep you on the site), with your only control being which "influencers" you uprank by "subscribing" to them.

After all, if the evil "elites" -- as if populists don't comprise their own elite class -- ever gain power again they could undo all of our "progress".

You can see this tendency in e.g. how some red states have tried to furiously redraw their maps to maintain control of the US house. They are doing this because they fear that "the people" will not choose to give them a majority again. They even admit to it openly.

Actions like that represent a breakdown of the machinery in our system that allows us to course correct. It's not healthy.