Damn near every company, organization, and government department under this administration has bent over backwards to comply in advance with harmful or dangerous ideas. EFF is correct, as usual, but they shouldn’t be the only ones saying so.
“Dangerous” and “harmful” aren’t concerns to any company; what matters to them is it’s profitable! Just imagine how much more money they can get with a guaranteed link to your government identity!
Enshitification has far reaching effects.
Somebody say IPO
Even this being implemented regionally is much better than the dumb ass idea of ruining everyone’s privacy globally.
Why can’t they be like Apple and do malicious compliance when they were mandated legally to open up IOS in the EU.
Corrupt governments in the past have been toppled thanks to organizing on discord and now they want to take away that tool, so age verification here we go!
Corrupt governments in the past have been toppled thanks to organizing on discord
Matrix, Signal, Proton/Tuta are much better suited to that purpose.
I agree, however the laws shouldn’t make privacy worse on platforms like Discord.
indeed they should not.
Stoat is the best discord option right now.
not for organizing resistance to corrupt governments, as it doesn’t have E2EE.
That is not really my primary use of a Discord channel I must admit.
I don’t really understand how enshittification like this is better for the IPO. Is it because the company can secretly sell data better or something?
I forget where I read this but one theory is that having a large portion of the gaming market with verified identities on their platform positions them to impose vendor lock-in and extract rents from game companies when these laws start applying to them and they will be looking for turnkey solutions.
No shit
I suspect there are several hundreds of millions of reasons.
I really don’t understand what the hate is about on this. Like Discord’s policy here is really pretty reasonable. Default to teen-mode unless confirmed that you are an adult. Discord, and other social media websites, have a lot of liability and should be held accountable.
It seems like any effort to protect children is hated. This is what annoys me about the EFF’s argument. They say this won’t protect children, but they offer no alternative solutions that would.
2 day account advocating for censorship. Hmmm very convincing.
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They absolutely are. Astro-turfing is a well established and effective practice.
In places with a real audience, sure. I’m not convinced it happens to any meaningful degree here.
In spaces that tend to run leftist where the number of people required to stir shit is infinitely smaller than somewhere like reddit or Facebook? Why? All they have to do is show up and say something stupid and 100 people will parrot them here and on more prominent social media.
They literally get more bang for their buck doing it here.
Because having an insignificantly small group of people stirred up provides an insignificant advantage.
Also much more information about the people posting is publically available here than any corporate owned platform.
Do you have any actual, credible evidence of astroturfing on ActivityPub?
I strongly disagree. Disrupting niche communities on the edge of the left and propagating harmful narratives is an incredibly effective strategy. Look at all the people who were on here around the elections in 2024 encouraging people not to vote. Given how many people echoed that sentiment, it seems like it was pretty effective.
Honestly, believe it or don’t. I don’t really care. I’m not about to make a concerted effort to convince you. It’s not a thesis. To me it seems pretty self-evident that what we know is happening on larger social media would also be happening here, where there’s a much juicer target. Also, like, the effort they put in isn’t exactly stellar. Ducks quack.
It does. Source: The fucking reports screen every time I log in and my instance isn’t even large.
Got a few examples?
Nope, I treat reports as confidential. Well, “every time” was a bit of an exaggeration, cause I mostly get spam or “I disagree with this so I report it” reports, but astro turfing does happen multiple times a month.
Fair. I’m an addict.
But you still didn’t respond to the criticism that there are no other better ideas offered to protect children online.
Because, as it turns out, “protecting the children” is a catchy slogan used to justify censorship and outright harmful bills, just like “antiterrorism.”
Instead of fixating on protecting children, look into what these lawmakers think the children need to be protected from.
First, don’t need to respond to arguments made in bad faith. There’s no net positive outcome possible for the other person who is coming to the conversation in good faith.
Second, not having their own solution does not invalidate anything critical they say about the one under discussion. There doesn’t have to be a “better” solution to justify not implementing something that has no positive impact on the targeted problem and severe negative impacts elsewhere.
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Isn’t the entire point to “protect” the children from “being corrupted” by that evil porn and other adult content? It’s not about protecting them from pedophiles, it’s about keeping them nice and innocent so it’s even easier for the pedophiles to groom them.
I’m only going to explain this once because this topic, as well as most online topics, is more about emotions than facts. But here we are.
You didn’t understand how this helps because you aren’t trained to think like a child predator. (That’s fine.) I’ve had to take a lot of child safety trainings over the years for professional reasons. Here’s how online child predators work, they start by trying to get the kid into a secret. They say “hey want to see some porn?”, and of course the kid is curious. And the kid is told, “be sure you don’t tell your parents about this.” Then they slowly try to pull into deeper and deeper secrets and start to black mail the kid. They start to demand that the kid send them nude photos. They trap the kids into deeper and deeper secrets and guilt to get more and more out of them. In the worst cases this results in meetups with the predator in person.
The easiest places for the predators to start this process is porn sites where the kids are visiting in secret to begin with. Those are the kids that are most vulnerable.
How how did this protect kids? The goal is to keep the kids out of spaces where they would be targeted to begin with.
So there you go. I’m all ears for how to do this better.
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Some of them, yes.
You see, one thing that child predators really really hate is policies. They want their interactions to be frictionless, so that at the first sign of trouble they can get out. Strong policies really are a strong deterrent.
It won’t make the evil people stop doing the evil things, but it’ll cause a lot of them to move to someone else’s platform that has weaker policies.
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It seems like any effort to protect children is hated.
They say this won’t protect children, but they offer no alternative solutions that would.The second statement is why the first one exists. None of this is about protecting children, it’s all about data gathering and monitoring people. They don’t give a fuck about children. But the idea that they can have a government enforced reason to collect personal data, be able to reliably tie that to accounts and then use that data to sell targeted marketing, that’s something they will bend over backwards for.
This is why there is a meme about “won’t someone think of the children,” which is most often aimed at right-wing actions. They use the idea of helping to further causes that do the opposite.
It’s not just the right. Look way back to the Tipper Gore push for censorship of rock music. The advocates of free speech came out then to show why blocking speech doesn’t work and ends up hurting more than it could ever help. For those too young to remember or who haven’t heard about it, you ought to look into the Congressional hearings videos. Especially where they asked John Denver to speak on behalf of the censorship move, and were shocked when he was fully against it.
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The result of these laws isn’t protecting children. It is deanonymizing the internet and surveiling the population for governments that worldwide are trending authoritarian.
Alternative solution: parenting.
For the first point, proving that you’re an adult under this system requires submitting incredibly sensitive data to Discord, or rather their third party, which recent news indicates they’re not capable of protecting.
It’s not that people hate the idea of protecting children, it’s that “protecting children” is almost always used as an excuse to errode people’s right to privacy.
Just to name you one alternative for most adult content that doesn’t require breaching people’s privacy, DNS filtering. It’s already offered as an option on many routers, and on basically all VPN services.
Why not mandate that ISPs make all routers default to Adult content filtering, and put the controls to undo that behind a protected parental control panel? All that relies on is parents doing their actual job rather than relying on the government to nanny for them.
… And sure a savy enough kid could work their way around it, but at that point they were going to work around whatever you put in their way.
For websites with mixed content like Discord, things get a little murkier, but there’s always a better way. Protecting children does not, and should not, come at the cost of our collective right to privacy online.
Protect them from what?
because their service provider to do the verification just had a huge discord data breach.
So I can start murdering kittens to protect the kids and unless you come up with an alternative, I can continue murdering kittens? Flawless logic.
The alternative solution is parents paying attention to their kids.
Blame the victim.
In the nicest way possible, it’s a fairly basic part of parenting to parent your child.
Nobody is asking parents to be a omnipresent panopticon, but you should absolutely be making use of the tools built into the devices around us to protect your child instead of shirking that responsibility onto the wider world, and relying on the Government to half-arsedly nanny your child for you.
If you don’t have the want, or the time to do that, then you aren’t ready for one in the first place - and if you do have one, grow up and do the job you signed yourself up for.
