You’re going to see more of this heavy-handed response, especially from smaller sites or decentralized services.
As I’ve argued on past threads about these laws: the internet was neither built nor intended for children. Nobody can get online without some adult intervention (paying for an ISP), and that’s the only age check that’s ever needed.
For everything else, it’s up to parents or guardians to implement filters, content controls, and blocks.
There are significant factions who would prefer porn be eradicated in it's entirety and laws like this just use 'protecting children' as the more agreable face to their crusade. Ironically the same people who often crow about parental autonomy and how they should be in complete control of their children's education and lives.
For all the talk about free speech and freedoms, a significant portion of the US doesn’t actually want free speech. They want free speech only for things they agree with.
Something that occurred to me a while back that I can’t stop seeing is that Americans fundamentally do not expect laws to actually be enforced and will get angry if they are, even when they voted for those laws. It’s something baked deeply enough into American society that we don’t consciously notice it, but no American actually expects to actually have to follow the laws they’re voting for.
It's weirder than that. These people are all downloading porn, but they just want to rally against it to seem pious. Like the politicians voting against gay rights who are frequently discovered in restroom encounters.
This concept can be applied to literally everything.
The idea that what folks say in public / online / amongst their friends is a lot different than what they think behind closed doors.
I noticed that none of our human rights are actually in the Bible.
Implying they have actually read the Bible
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2,000 years ago the accepted belief of nearly every culture we have records for was that rich people were morally superior to poor people because they were favored by whatever gods you believed in, and that slavery was justified because you must have done something to deserve it.
But then the books of the New Testament were written with themes like this:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Except if you happen to be a fig tree with no figs.
Trying to use the New Testament as a paragon of enlightened thinking, especially regarding slavery, is going to be a tough sell.
Compare it to the rest of the world in the first century, and it’s extremely enlightened. Compared to most of the world today, even many self-professed “Christians”, the teachings on rich vs poor, pacifism, and forgiveness are downright radical.
In addition the New Testament doesn’t endorse slavery as something that people should do or something that is morally correct.
It instructs people who happen to be slaves to obey their masters in the same way it instructs non slaves to obey their authorities. The principle is the same as when Jesus refuses to fight back against the Roman soldiers arresting him. Jesus isn’t endorsing the Roman soldiers’ behavior. He’s saying that the Christian response is not supposed to be rebellion (in most cases at least).
Wow, talk about a blanket statement.
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This isn't even really it. If you read the section of Project2025 about porn and these sorts of age laws, then barely talk about porn at all. They lead with "transgender ideology" and such. The goal isn't to keep porn away from kids. The goal is to keep anything that offends their desired hierarchy away from kids.
Everybody has a desired hierarchy; and you have one too. Own it; fight for it if you can; and recognize someone has to lose.
This view is the antithesis of the entire, pluralistic, classical liberal project that this country was founded on. Everybody has a hierarchy, and people should, for the most part, be allowed to choose their own hierarchy. The problem isn't that someone dislikes porn or whatever, it's that they try and force it on the rest of us.
With no recognition of what harm the desires result in? This is a fast way to all out war.
Have you considered finding middle ground and compromises? Or is war the only option?
"Let's meet in the middle" says the unjust man.
You take a step towards him. He takes a step back.
"Let's meet in the middle" says the unjust man.
Guess it's about time to water the tree of liberty again.
Of course. I think that theirs is horrible. I'm not saying that having a preferred way of ordering society is bad. I am saying that oppressing LGBT people is bad.
Hierarchies are in and of themselves stupid.
If you think they exist naturally, you're only looking at one of thousands of independent variables. If you average them out, we all tend towards mediocrity.
When someone appeals to hierarchies (e.g., "there's always a bigger fish"), they're just admitting to using a painfully one-dimensional worldview.
To be fair, their concern tends to be a more consistent "Don't push these corrupting agents towards me or my society"
If the school curriculum aligned with their belief system, they won't be talking about a need for control
Except “corrupting” in this case often just means “LGBTQ”. In exactly the same way “corrupting influence” used to mean “music made by black people” or “anything pro-worker”.
Corrupting ideas don’t exist. There is truly no such thing as an infohazard. We, as humans, are capable of making up our own minds about things and we don’t need to give this power of censorship over to people who are not acting in good faith.
I've been convinced for a while that the religious angle against queer folk is just a front.
Instead of honest religious conviction, I think the pearl clutching is the manifestation of the collective paranoia of weak men who are terrified that other men are looking at them the same way they look at women.
> If the school curriculum aligned with their belief system, they won't be talking about a need for control
No they wouldn’t. They don’t want anyone accessing materials they disagree with. Having such materials available on the internet feels like a threat to themselves and their children. They don’t care about collateral damage, they just want more control.
If they had control of the school they wouldn't be talking about needing control of the school?
Well, they would be talking about maintaining control. Control requires constant vigilance to reinforce compliance coupled with making sure there is no disobedience. The latter speaks to "needing control."
Does this make any sense or am I full of hot air?
Just yield and do as they say, and they’ll maybe spare you.
> crow about parental autonomy and how they should be in complete control of their children's education and lives.
Ah yes, those monsters
James Dobson made a career advocating for child abuse including physical abuse for “strong willed children”. Somehow it’s never Focus on the Family that these people want to ban.
If it weren't so often about denying them medical care or a proper education or about their ability to abuse them in various ways I'd be more sympathetic. Kids have rights too their parent's don't own them to get to violate their rights just because they're their kids.
The US fought a whole war with itself over whether people should be allowed to own other people. They shouldn't, we decided, except on certain circumstances.
Some parents, finding themselves owning a child, decide to push the boundaries of what they get to do with their possessions to the point that it runs afoul of other laws against how humans treat one another.
I would not call that a decision; it was the victor's dictate.
So is each decision made by an election winning politician? Different word same thing.
Conflating parenting with slavery and ownership is not only a category error but an offensive one. Parental authority isn’t ownership; it’s a duty to safeguard children’s developing autonomy and vulnerability.
Pretending otherwise betrays an indifference to children’s actual welfare, and a disturbing form of motivated reasoning deeply concerning in its implications.
It might not be consistent with slavery, but children as chattel was a thing.
It wasn't until 1874 that child abuse was documented with Mary Ellen Wilson and then later that rights and protections were accorded children. Now it's true that foster care and congregate care existed before 1874. But it was Wilson who started the ball rolling.
The hardline parental rights arm does actually believe they own their children and have absolute rights to do whatever they want to their children.
I'm conflating slavery/ownership, and certain styles of parenting. Most parents are not described.
If you were offended by my comment, perhaps it felt a little too close to home?
That’s idiotic; as the amount of control parents are allowed over their children has never been lower compared to historical norms. We’re at the point a minor can get an abortion without parents being informed; which would have been unheard of and unthinkable 50 years ago, let alone the idea that a government would even mandate leaving parents unaware of a sexually active child. That idea didn’t even occur to the most rabid of socialist dreams.
No, that's not true at all. There are ample examples from the past of children being both more and less controlled by parents. It's mainly upbto the parents and how they choose to parent.
You're correct that recently the most overbearing, authoritarian parenting styles have received a minor legal haircut, where the worst abuses must be done either in secret or not at all. The parents who feel victimized by this new norm would like things to go back to how they were when no one asked why their kids had so many bruises on their faces.
> We’re at the point a minor can get an abortion without parents being informed
This is a good thing. Imagine a child having to get the permission of her father, who is also her child's father, before she can stop being pregnant.
Children are human beings who need growing autonomy as they mature, not property of parents. I have several (adult, to be clear) friends who have suffered serious damage due to overly authoritarian parenting.
I agree kids need growing autonomy. Not unlimited autonomy though. The law clearly recognizes this.
Kids can’t sign contracts, I’m liable for damage caused by my kids, I go to jail if my kids skip too much school etc…
In legal terms, children aren't full humans. They literally don't have fully formed brains and there isn't an expectation that they can make decisions that consider the consequences of their actions.
In the sense that a phrase like "growing autonomy" doesn't really mean anything, sure they should get that. Practically, they shouldn't have a lot of autonomy. The concept of childhood education is largely predicated on the idea that children have no idea what is going on and someone else should be inculcating knowledge, values and beliefs in them while making long term decisions on their behalf. And there is a pretty good argument that those values and beliefs ought be aligned with their family.
Does the brain form fully all of a sudden at age 18, except in Mississippi where it takes until 21?
No, but the law is not a thing of subtlety and nuance. It is a thing of bright lines. It would be infeasible to have a law that says "children can make adult decisions when their parents think they're ready", so we have to pick a cutoff point which tries to strike a balance between giving too many immature kids power over their lives, and restricting too many mature kids from making decisions with their lives. Some kids will be unfairly held back because they are very mature at 15, some will ruin their lives because they are completely immature at 18. It's imperfect but no perfect solution is available.
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Really? Now do the math on all the kids harmed by overly lax parenting. Many of them are literally dead.
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My point remains unchanged: Strict parenting has killed far less people than lax. Strict parenting can generally be recovered from; lax parenting, you’ll be dead before you even recognize it.
Your assertion is fully contested, and remains unfounded.
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They are monsters because of what they will do to obtain their goals.
I mean yes, treating children as property that you control rather than people you are obligated to care for does make you a monster.
Guardians with a duty of care necessarily exercise control. That's not ownership, it's responsibility.
Evil little fuckers. Who even thinks that the US Federal Government isn’t totally qualified to be in complete control of their children’s education and lives, anyway? Probably some racist Ruby Ridge types (/s)
The hypocrisy is very clearly evident.
And there is nothing on Blue sky that is not appropriate for children over 13-with parental guidance.
They do need to keep the morons, and knuckle dragging lawyers off the platform simply because of their felonious actions and prison records.
There's absolutely porn on there if that's what you're after
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> And there is nothing on Blue sky that is not appropriate for children over 13-with parental guidance.
I've heard that it's full of furry porn and worse. Is that not the case?
It's certainly not "full of", though I'm sure it's there. I never see it, but then I don't follow people who post it.
I certainly see less random pornographically-tinged content showing up in my day-to-day usage than I did when I was on twitter. The default view being literally only stuff I've explicitly followed does rather change that experience.
I wouldn’t say “full of”, but like other mostly uncensored social media sites like Twitter, it’s definitely there if you’re looking for it (and sometimes even when you’re not).
It is. OP has cleverly redefined everything as being age appropriate with guidance, for convenience.
> For everything else, it’s up to parents or guardians to implement filters, content controls, and blocks.
First of, I'd like to be clear, I don't think laws like this are the right way to go.
But to be fair, even if you are tech literate, which most parents aren't, this is actually pretty difficult to do.
And there are really three approaches you can take to this. You can use an allowlist of sites, but that is very restrictive, and limits the ability to explore, research, and learn how to use the internet generally. You can use a blocklist, but then you will always miss something, and it is a game of whack a mole. Or you can use some kind of AI, but that will probably both block things you don't want blocked, and allow things you do want blocked, and will probably add significant latency.
One possible way this could be improved is if websites with adult or mature content, or potential dangers to children (such as allowing the child to communicate with strangers, or gambling) returned a header that marked the content as possibly not suitable for children with a tag of the reason, and maybe a minimum age. Then a browser or firewall could be configured to block access to anything with headers for undesired content. Although, I think that would be most effective if there were laws requiring the headers to be honest.
> even if you are tech literate, which most parents aren't
18 years ago was 2007! If "most parents" of underage children don't understand the internet, where the hell have they been?
For my silly little semi-private sites I will likely shut off the clear-web daemons and stick with .onion hidden services. Some will leave and that is fine with me. It's just hobby stuff for me. I will still use RTA headers [1] in the event that some day law makers come to their senses. Curious what others here will do with their forums, chat servers, etc...
I know people whose kid got a hand me down android from a friend and connects through neighbors open WiFi, public open WiFi etc…
And from what I’ve heard it’s not that uncommon for kids to do something similar when parents take away their phones.
It’s easy to say that parents should just limit access and I think they should. I definitely plan to when my kids are old enough for this to be a problem.
But kids are under extreme peer pressure to be constantly online, and when a kid is willing to go to extreme lengths to get access, it can be nearly impossible to prevent it.
There’s also more to it than what parents should do. It’s about what parents are doing. If something is very hard to do most people won’t do it. As a society we all have to deal with the consequences of bad parenting.
We don’t know the consequences of kids having access to porn, but we have correlative studies that show they probably aren’t good.
I’m more concerned with social media than porn though. The correlation between social media use and the rise in teen suicide rates looks awfully suggestive.
> But kids are under extreme peer pressure
Here's the thing: kids are always going to be under peer pressure, and time and time again we keep falling for the pitfall trap of harming adults under the guise of protecting kids.
When it was the drug scare of the 80s, entire research about the harms of DARE's educational methods were ignored in favor of turning an entire generation of children into police informants on their parents. When it was HIV and STDs in the 90s, we harmed kids by pushing "Abstinence-only" narratives that all but ensured more adults would come down with STDs and HIV as adults due to a lack of suitable education (nevermind the reality that children are often vehicles for new information back into the household, which could've educated their own parents as to the new dangers of STDs if they'd been properly educated). In the 2000s, it was attempts to regulate violent video games instead of literal firearms, which has directly contributed to the mass shooting epidemic in the USA. And now we're turning back to porn again, with the same flawed reasoning.
It's almost like the entire point is to harm adults, not protect children.
There’s some massive hyperbole there. “Turning an entire generation into police informants.”
Sure there’s some stories about that happening but it didn’t happen enough to move the needle in terms of things that actively harmed adults.
It was harmful because it was ineffective as a mechanism to help
Children not because of some nefarious motives against adults.
The same with abstinence only education. Virtually all of the harm was because it was an ineffective policy to help children, not because of some tiny second order effect on adults because children werent educating parents.
Video game regulation was primarily about adding ratings to games which again only harms adults insomuch as children are a big market so developers are less likely to make mature games.
2 of the 3 examples you gave were definitely ineffective at protecting children, but in terms of harming adults, the effects were so minuscule that if that was the goal, the supporters failed severely.
As far as age checks. We have age checks for brick and mortar stores I’m fine with age checks for websites. You also can’t display pornography in public for kids to see.
There’s nothing about “but it’s on the internet” that makes me think it’s inherently ok to treat it differently.
I think there are probably better ways to do it than this Mississippi law, and a law in a single state will probably prove ineffective in general.
> I’m more concerned with social media than porn though. The correlation between social media use and the rise in teen suicide rates looks awfully suggestive.
This problem isn't specific to children. Addictive and often otherwise manipulative too feeds affect people of all ages. Instead of age checks, I'd much rather address this. A starting point for how to do this could be banning algorithmic feeds and having us go back to simple algorithms like independent forum websites with latest post first display order.
Sure I’d rather address addictive app behavior as well. But algorithmic feeds are almost certainly protected under the first amendment, so good luck there.
So you are saying that we should buy stock in VPN companies that serve Missashity?
"As a society we all have to deal with the consequences of bad parenting."
Then why isn't that significantly regulated?
It is. We force parents to send their children to school until they are 16 or educate them themselves—along with many other regulations on how you can raise your kids.
We also put limits on brick and mortar business to help parents. We don’t allow liquor stores to sell alcohol to kids. You could argue that parents should be the ones preventing their kids from buying alcohol, and requiring everyone to submit ID in order to prevent underage drinking is the state doing parent’s job for them.
Find yourself on the bad side of child protective services (rightly or wrongly) and you'll discover rather quickly how hard the government can come down on your rights as a parent.
I mostly agree with you , except there are plenty of ways for non-adults to get access to the internet without adult intervention. ( libraries, friends, McDonald’s hotspots. )
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> As I’ve argued on past threads about these laws: the internet was neither built nor intended for children. Nobody can get online without some adult intervention (paying for an ISP), and that’s the only age check that’s ever needed.
> For everything else, it’s up to parents or guardians to implement filters, content controls, and blocks.
Well, they are implementing the block through political pressure, and it's working
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> That’s why until legal challenges to this law are resolved, we’ve made the difficult decision to block access from Mississippi IP addresses. We know this is disappointing for our users in Mississippi, but we believe this is a necessary measure while the courts review the legal arguments.
I strongly agree with this. All these jurisdictions and politicians are passing laws that they don't understand the technical foundations for. Second order effects aren't being considered.
Sometimes (only sometimes, I promise) I wonder whether this kind of legislation is being dreamt up by a think tank tasked with planning how to implement some ulterior goal (e.g. massively increased surveillance to fight crime - it's far too easy to unsert something more nefarious here). The politicians then just follow the action plan and repeat talking points from party advisors.
Like the German Socialist Democratic Party did in Germany in 1933? How well did that go?
Very well, until it didn't.
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This is the only mention of "age verification" in all 900 pages of Project 2025:
"In addition, some of the methods used to regulate children’s internet access pose the risk of unintended harms. For instance, age verification regulations would inevitably increase the amount of data collection involved, increasing privacy concerns. Users would have to submit to platforms proof of their age, which raises the risks of data breach or illegitimate data usage by the platforms or bad actors. Limited-government conservatives would prefer the FTC play an educational role instead. That might include best practices or educational programs to empower parents online."
The policy recommendations for "Protecting Children Online" are found on page 875. The two main recommendations they make are:
"The FTC should examine platforms’ advertising and contract-making with children as a deceptive or unfair trade practice, perhaps requiring written parental consent."
"The FTC can and should institute unfair trade practices proceedings against entities that enter into contracts with children without parental consent. Personal parental responsibility is, of course, key, but the law must respect, not undermine, lawful parental authority."
Project 2025 also asserts that porn isn't protected by the first amendment at all and should be banned. It seems disingenuous to ignore that.
I provided what was immediately pertinent, and I linked to the full, searchable document.
That’s not disingenuous.
Yes, they oppose porn. They do not advocate for age verification as the solution to it (or age verification at all), which is what would make their position on porn relevant to the topic at hand.
How can we be sure they don't understand at this point? They'd really have to be morons, how can they even take care of themselves?
Have you seen Congress? It’s like Denny’s on senior appreciation day.
They had to wheel McConnell in not long ago because he physically couldn’t walk.
And like I don’t mean to shit on the elderly (directly anyway) but I dunno just spitballing here, maybe we could get some folks in there who weren’t born yet when the civil rights act was passed???
Why would that matter? There are many young members who congress who also support the same things.
Tell me you've never taken care of an elderly person without telling me you've never taken care of an elderly person.
Have you listened to any legislative debates on technical issues? “A series of tubes” was the high point of political understanding of the internet.
Wait! What? The high point was a stunning display of the Dunning-Kruger effect?
We should pay John Cheese to call them all personally.
> We think this law creates challenges that go beyond its child safety goals, and creates significant barriers that limit free speech and disproportionately harm smaller platforms and emerging technologies.
This is the only correct response to such onerous legislation. Every site affected by such over-reach has a moral duty to do the same. Not that I expect them to do so.
If you think this is bad, you should see the regulatory burden imposed on small manufacturers. This is nothing. The problem is that voters don’t seem to care about regulatory requirements.
The alternate solution is to shutter all US operations and move to another jurisdiction that doesn't require these regulations, in the same way 4chan is ignoring the UK's request.
Harder to implement than an IP ban for a state, though.
They're right to point out that laws like this are primarily motivated by government control of speech. On a recent Times article about the UK's Online Safety Act:
> Luckily, we don’t have to imagine the scene because the High Court judgment details the last government’s reaction when it discovered this potentially rather large flaw. First, we are told, the relevant secretary of state (Michelle Donelan) expressed “concern” that the legislation might whack sites such as Amazon instead of Pornhub. In response, officials explained that the regulation in question was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”, a phrase that rather gives away the political thinking behind the act. They suggested asking Ofcom to think again and the minister agreed.
I can't find the comic I saw but I can't find that notes how we tell people and kids to not give out personal information on the internet because that's unsafe.
Now we demand they give all their information and depending on the situation smile for the camera ...
...And also lets make it so they can't encrypt their messages either. Big Brother needs to make sure they aren't sending nudes to people that shouldn't be seeing them.
Wait! Wait! Is this the same state that wanted welfare recipients to be tested for drugs and it was found that the drug use by legislators was ten times higher?
VPN providers are going to be making out like bandits with all the new legislation coming out.
> The Supreme Court’s recent decision leaves us facing a hard reality: comply with Mississippi’s age assurance law—and make every Mississippi Bluesky user hand over sensitive personal information and undergo age checks to access the site—or risk massive fines.
Given that the opinion states that the law is "likely unconstitutional", isn't it too early to give up and block users?
All arguments about age checks themselves aside, why can BlueSky implement age checks in the UK, but not Mississippi? Seems to me like the only difference would be Mississippi requiring everyone to log in, whereas currently I assume UK requires a login just for age-restricted material. (Although I don't use BlueSky in the UK, so shrugs)
Their wording had me imagining technological schemes that blind BlueSky from knowing but reading again I think what's going on is:
Mississippi: They track "underage" and "adult"
UK: They track "unknown [treated as underage]" and "adult"
I'd prefer all businesses impacted by the draconian Brit legislation block the Brits geo completely.
The UK only requires verification for specific content. Not the entire site. Also, the identification and tracking requirements are very different.
Yes, they explained that the UK's regulations are less aggressive so it's possible to comply with them
They could based on group but you can get around that. Maybe they are concerned that a user using a VPN from Mississippi would cause them to break the law.
Figured I’d ask the HN crowd- what’s the best way around these geofence blocks? Have you had success with a system that can work smoothly on mobile/desktop without any of the disastrous privacy and performance implications that VPN services are prone to?
Just use a lightweight, privacy focused VPN like Mullvad. You don’t have to keep it on when you need top network performance. Ultimately, a VPN of SOME kind is the only option.
I mean anything that circumvents geo-fencing at the IP level is going to be tunneling your traffic through an address that isn't blocked. Your options are all VPNs, the choice is only who's running it—you via a VPS or similar, friends/family/community, a service as you describe, or the public with Tor.
The friends/family option is probably the most broadly effective at circumventing the block since you'll have a residential address but at the cost of a lot of latency and bandwidth. The most performant option will be VPS services but lots of sites will block them as well out of an abundance of caution.
We might need a centralized age verification system. A person verifies their age using an app. The app is on the phone of the user and confirms opening new account.
Then you have accounts that are age verified and accounts that are not age verified. Age verified accounts have the privilege of seeing sensitive content. Unverified accounts don’t have that privilege.
Some might see this as gravitating to bad laws. I see this as an attempt to address a prohibition on doing business.
> Then you have accounts that are age verified and accounts that are not age verified.
Creating an immediate market for age-verified accounts.
18 year old want some spare cash? Create a few dozen age verified accounts on your phone and sell them off for $1-2 each.
The next step is then tying logins to devices, and devices to identities. Then by using a website you must volunteer your identity. Dream come true for ad serving.
That might be a circumvention. But law is not about rooting out all circumventions. It is about intent to creating a certain system. Similar to sales tax. Just because there are ways around it, doesn’t make the law meaningless.
It isn't centralized, but the emerging mDL/mID (ISO/IEC 18013-5) + Digital Credentials API (W3C) standards do enable sharing a “this device contains a secure credential for someone over 18 years of age” assertion, cryptographically signed by a government agency. Critically, this doesn't require sharing any other personal information.
> Some might see this as gravitating to bad laws. I see this as an attempt to address a prohibition on doing business.
There is no contradiction, the way you address it is by giving up and gravitating to bad laws
As long as it can be done in the way that it remains accessible to both citizens and businesses and is highly enforceable, I'm in. The problem is that I'm not sure how it can actually be done...
Google and Apple are already building this.
A more appropriate route to that is to create incentives and grants for companies to be created that can accomplish this age verification infrastructure (ideally with its own privacy guarantees, etc), and make a declaration such as “in 5 years, you will be expected to validate and track the age group of all users on your platform. We have created grants to help create technology companies and a platform that will help to implement and privatize this service”.
That way you get both:
* companies that can provide the service (yay capitalism, middlemen and jobs!)
* compliance with the new laws that help to stratify users so that < 18 and > 18 users are identified and segregated.
Or do it like the EU is doing with the EU Digital Identity Wallet, which has been tested in pilot programs since 2023, and which is expected to start being deployed to the general public next year.
Briefly, your government would give you a signed digital copy of your government ID document. This copy would be cryptographically bound to secure hardware you own, typically your smartphone. I'll assume a smartphone for the rest of this.
When you want to reveal some fact from your ID to a site, such as "my ID says that my birthday is at least 18 years in the past", your device and the site use a zero knowledge proof (ZKP) protocol to prove to the site that this is true for the signed digital ID that is bound to your device. Nothing else from or about your digital ID is conveyed to the site.
Once this is out it should be pretty easy for sites to implement age checks for EU users.
The EU system is all open source and they've got a reference implementation on Github somewhere.
The main thing to ensure privacy with these kind of systems is making it so that the entity that issues the digital ID to your device is an entity that you don't mind proving your ID to with your physical government ID. Ideal would be for this to be handled by the same government agency that issues the physical ID.
Second best would be entities like banks that you already trust with your ID.
What a shameful era. These fools delegintize the state, delegitimize the legal system. Engaged in absolute foolery.
The suggestion I saw was that residents of these states need to comb through every government site they can and sue the government for anything that could be harmful to youth that they find. Theres really no practical limit no possible implementation that the state has allowed other than to age verify pretty much everything; return-to-sender-ing the paper bag of flaming dog shit seems like a semi necessary step here.
Assuming mobile platforms weigh in with an API sometime, it's notable that the only people allowed online by default would be minors who are using parental controls, because they would be able to prove (a) age and (b) parental consent on day 1.
I wonder if a business could be successfully sued for denying service to people OVER a certain age.
It's interesting that age seems to be a protected class if you're above a certain age and not below.
The very notion of underage is necessarily arbitrary because there is no direct way to measure one's maturity and thus sensitivity to such materials. As long as the block is not perpetual and lifted after some reasonable cutoff, such blocks are thought to be reasonable in general (yeah some would complain, of course). In comparison the business you have described is the polar opposite, where people are perpetually blocked once they reach a certain age.
The only two things I can l'd think of, is driving and article 25 of the constitution. The latter which has been clearly violated to a large extent. There ought to be a licence to be able to run for office, just a multiple choice question. Are you an 1) Idiot? 2) Fascist? 3) Ted Cruz? 4) pedophilic zoophile? And turn just disqualify them.
Way to blow it, Mississippi
I am curious how many other "social" sites took this stand.
I think what bluesky did is the only way to fight these laws that all it will do is be a boon to people who obtain and sell PI.
For people in Mississippi, you can always get a VPN. You should avoid Free VPNs, but that is your decision.
They're not fighting anything, they've given up a part of their business just to be safe.
Reminder
Republicans, for many years now, have run on "stop big government regulations" without being specific.
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So, does Mississippi's age verification also apply to Twitter, Truth Social, Rumble, etc.? Curious what these right-wing platforms are doing about age verification. Surely Mississippi's attorney general will go after those platforms too...
It does, but almost all the major platforms/companies are members of NetChoice, a trade organization that fights this sort of thing. This presser from Bluesky doesn't mention it, but the case is "NetChoice vs Mississippi", so that's how involved they are to this.
Truth Social, X and Rumble are all backed by the very people who wrote the law, so will not be sued. Get Out Of Jail Free cards.
Notice their stance is that they are not against these kind of checks but it costs too much to implement. Basically if it becomes cheap to implement Bsky will be happy to oblige.
> Unlike tech giants with vast resources, we’re a small team focused on building decentralized social technology that puts users in control. Age verification systems require substantial infrastructure and developer time investments, complex privacy protections, and ongoing compliance monitoring — costs that can easily overwhelm smaller providers.
There's an important hint in the blog post:
> This decision applies only to the Bluesky app, which is one service built on the AT Protocol [...] We remain committed to building a protocol that enables openness and choice.
If someone else builds another app as a workaround, they aren't going to stop them. (Bluesky isn't decentralized enough in practice yet, but someday...)
Answer to the obvious question:
>> "Mississippi’s new law and the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) are very different. Bluesky follows the OSA in the UK. There, Bluesky is still accessible for everyone, age checks are required only for accessing certain content and features, and Bluesky does not know and does not track which UK users are under 18. Mississippi’s law, by contrast, would block everyone from accessing the site—teens and adults—unless they hand over sensitive information, and once they do, the law in Mississippi requires Bluesky to keep track of which users are children."
I don’t know how this works: how can Mississippi compel Bluesky to pay these fines for breaking a state regulation if they’re not based in Mississippi?
Because if they have users in Mississippi they are doing “interstate commerce” and a federal court has the ability and jurisdiction to compel them to pay those fines.
Are users, who are not transacting with the platform, doing commerce? What if the platform were hosted in, say, Europe?
If they're outside the country they can freely tell Mississippi to pound sand—the state might compel entities they do have jurisdiction over (i.e. ISPs) to cut them off but that's the extent of it.
Is there not some way to route Mississippi's Bluesky traffic through a third party (Cloudflare?, etc.?) that can provide age verification and parental consent as a service, so that it doesn't require every individual online service to implement it separately?
I don’t think that service exists yet. These laws are very new.
just... why? why contribute to this nonsense?
I genuinely believe that only such way (regarding "protecting children" from viewing "dangerous/unwanted content") is correct and maximally effective. All others mostly create a theater of security - in other words, they don't actually prevent direct access to "dangerous" content but merely create an illusion of doing so. This ranges from client-side-only checks (like Telegram in the UK) to "privacy-preserving" checks based on ZK or similar technologies, which are currently being promoted in the EU. The first can be bypassed simply by searching for workarounds; the second... well, one person could just verify thousands of others using their own documents, and that's it. Literally a security theater - I hate it, a lot.
And my opinion is that we shouldn't support such ways of doing this, meaning we shouldn't implement or comply with them, but rather protest against them. Either undermine their purpose or create a significant appearance of problems. In other words, either spread methods to bypass them, support such efforts in any way possible, or deny access to services (and so on) in jurisdictions where they're banned by inhumane laws. This is, in a way, a very common practice in the field of "copyright" and I sincerely hope it spreads to everyday matters.
It's deeply sad that nobody addresses the root problem - only its consequences, meaning they try to "hide unwanted content" instead of making it "non-unwanted." And it's even sadder that so few of those who could actually influence the implementation of such "protections" advocate this approach. Off the top of my head, I can only name Finland as one actively promoting educational programs and similar solutions to this problem.
You’re going to see more of this heavy-handed response, especially from smaller sites or decentralized services.
As I’ve argued on past threads about these laws: the internet was neither built nor intended for children. Nobody can get online without some adult intervention (paying for an ISP), and that’s the only age check that’s ever needed.
For everything else, it’s up to parents or guardians to implement filters, content controls, and blocks.
There are significant factions who would prefer porn be eradicated in it's entirety and laws like this just use 'protecting children' as the more agreable face to their crusade. Ironically the same people who often crow about parental autonomy and how they should be in complete control of their children's education and lives.
For all the talk about free speech and freedoms, a significant portion of the US doesn’t actually want free speech. They want free speech only for things they agree with.
Something that occurred to me a while back that I can’t stop seeing is that Americans fundamentally do not expect laws to actually be enforced and will get angry if they are, even when they voted for those laws. It’s something baked deeply enough into American society that we don’t consciously notice it, but no American actually expects to actually have to follow the laws they’re voting for.
It's weirder than that. These people are all downloading porn, but they just want to rally against it to seem pious. Like the politicians voting against gay rights who are frequently discovered in restroom encounters.
This concept can be applied to literally everything.
The idea that what folks say in public / online / amongst their friends is a lot different than what they think behind closed doors.
I noticed that none of our human rights are actually in the Bible.
Implying they have actually read the Bible
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2,000 years ago the accepted belief of nearly every culture we have records for was that rich people were morally superior to poor people because they were favored by whatever gods you believed in, and that slavery was justified because you must have done something to deserve it.
But then the books of the New Testament were written with themes like this:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Except if you happen to be a fig tree with no figs.
Trying to use the New Testament as a paragon of enlightened thinking, especially regarding slavery, is going to be a tough sell.
Compare it to the rest of the world in the first century, and it’s extremely enlightened. Compared to most of the world today, even many self-professed “Christians”, the teachings on rich vs poor, pacifism, and forgiveness are downright radical.
In addition the New Testament doesn’t endorse slavery as something that people should do or something that is morally correct.
It instructs people who happen to be slaves to obey their masters in the same way it instructs non slaves to obey their authorities. The principle is the same as when Jesus refuses to fight back against the Roman soldiers arresting him. Jesus isn’t endorsing the Roman soldiers’ behavior. He’s saying that the Christian response is not supposed to be rebellion (in most cases at least).
Wow, talk about a blanket statement.
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This isn't even really it. If you read the section of Project2025 about porn and these sorts of age laws, then barely talk about porn at all. They lead with "transgender ideology" and such. The goal isn't to keep porn away from kids. The goal is to keep anything that offends their desired hierarchy away from kids.
Everybody has a desired hierarchy; and you have one too. Own it; fight for it if you can; and recognize someone has to lose.
This view is the antithesis of the entire, pluralistic, classical liberal project that this country was founded on. Everybody has a hierarchy, and people should, for the most part, be allowed to choose their own hierarchy. The problem isn't that someone dislikes porn or whatever, it's that they try and force it on the rest of us.
With no recognition of what harm the desires result in? This is a fast way to all out war.
Have you considered finding middle ground and compromises? Or is war the only option?
"Let's meet in the middle" says the unjust man.
You take a step towards him. He takes a step back.
"Let's meet in the middle" says the unjust man.
Guess it's about time to water the tree of liberty again.
Of course. I think that theirs is horrible. I'm not saying that having a preferred way of ordering society is bad. I am saying that oppressing LGBT people is bad.
Hierarchies are in and of themselves stupid.
If you think they exist naturally, you're only looking at one of thousands of independent variables. If you average them out, we all tend towards mediocrity.
When someone appeals to hierarchies (e.g., "there's always a bigger fish"), they're just admitting to using a painfully one-dimensional worldview.
To be fair, their concern tends to be a more consistent "Don't push these corrupting agents towards me or my society"
If the school curriculum aligned with their belief system, they won't be talking about a need for control
Except “corrupting” in this case often just means “LGBTQ”. In exactly the same way “corrupting influence” used to mean “music made by black people” or “anything pro-worker”.
Corrupting ideas don’t exist. There is truly no such thing as an infohazard. We, as humans, are capable of making up our own minds about things and we don’t need to give this power of censorship over to people who are not acting in good faith.
I've been convinced for a while that the religious angle against queer folk is just a front.
Instead of honest religious conviction, I think the pearl clutching is the manifestation of the collective paranoia of weak men who are terrified that other men are looking at them the same way they look at women.
> If the school curriculum aligned with their belief system, they won't be talking about a need for control
No they wouldn’t. They don’t want anyone accessing materials they disagree with. Having such materials available on the internet feels like a threat to themselves and their children. They don’t care about collateral damage, they just want more control.
If they had control of the school they wouldn't be talking about needing control of the school?
Well, they would be talking about maintaining control. Control requires constant vigilance to reinforce compliance coupled with making sure there is no disobedience. The latter speaks to "needing control."
Does this make any sense or am I full of hot air?
Just yield and do as they say, and they’ll maybe spare you.
> crow about parental autonomy and how they should be in complete control of their children's education and lives.
Ah yes, those monsters
James Dobson made a career advocating for child abuse including physical abuse for “strong willed children”. Somehow it’s never Focus on the Family that these people want to ban.
If it weren't so often about denying them medical care or a proper education or about their ability to abuse them in various ways I'd be more sympathetic. Kids have rights too their parent's don't own them to get to violate their rights just because they're their kids.
The US fought a whole war with itself over whether people should be allowed to own other people. They shouldn't, we decided, except on certain circumstances.
Some parents, finding themselves owning a child, decide to push the boundaries of what they get to do with their possessions to the point that it runs afoul of other laws against how humans treat one another.
I would not call that a decision; it was the victor's dictate.
So is each decision made by an election winning politician? Different word same thing.
Conflating parenting with slavery and ownership is not only a category error but an offensive one. Parental authority isn’t ownership; it’s a duty to safeguard children’s developing autonomy and vulnerability.
Pretending otherwise betrays an indifference to children’s actual welfare, and a disturbing form of motivated reasoning deeply concerning in its implications.
It might not be consistent with slavery, but children as chattel was a thing.
It wasn't until 1874 that child abuse was documented with Mary Ellen Wilson and then later that rights and protections were accorded children. Now it's true that foster care and congregate care existed before 1874. But it was Wilson who started the ball rolling.
More on Mary Ellen Wilson and child abuse, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ellen_Wilson, and the history of child welfare, https://blogs.millersville.edu/musings/a-history-of-child-we....
The hardline parental rights arm does actually believe they own their children and have absolute rights to do whatever they want to their children.
I'm conflating slavery/ownership, and certain styles of parenting. Most parents are not described.
If you were offended by my comment, perhaps it felt a little too close to home?
That’s idiotic; as the amount of control parents are allowed over their children has never been lower compared to historical norms. We’re at the point a minor can get an abortion without parents being informed; which would have been unheard of and unthinkable 50 years ago, let alone the idea that a government would even mandate leaving parents unaware of a sexually active child. That idea didn’t even occur to the most rabid of socialist dreams.
No, that's not true at all. There are ample examples from the past of children being both more and less controlled by parents. It's mainly upbto the parents and how they choose to parent.
You're correct that recently the most overbearing, authoritarian parenting styles have received a minor legal haircut, where the worst abuses must be done either in secret or not at all. The parents who feel victimized by this new norm would like things to go back to how they were when no one asked why their kids had so many bruises on their faces.
> We’re at the point a minor can get an abortion without parents being informed
This is a good thing. Imagine a child having to get the permission of her father, who is also her child's father, before she can stop being pregnant.
Children are human beings who need growing autonomy as they mature, not property of parents. I have several (adult, to be clear) friends who have suffered serious damage due to overly authoritarian parenting.
I agree kids need growing autonomy. Not unlimited autonomy though. The law clearly recognizes this.
Kids can’t sign contracts, I’m liable for damage caused by my kids, I go to jail if my kids skip too much school etc…
In legal terms, children aren't full humans. They literally don't have fully formed brains and there isn't an expectation that they can make decisions that consider the consequences of their actions.
In the sense that a phrase like "growing autonomy" doesn't really mean anything, sure they should get that. Practically, they shouldn't have a lot of autonomy. The concept of childhood education is largely predicated on the idea that children have no idea what is going on and someone else should be inculcating knowledge, values and beliefs in them while making long term decisions on their behalf. And there is a pretty good argument that those values and beliefs ought be aligned with their family.
Does the brain form fully all of a sudden at age 18, except in Mississippi where it takes until 21?
No, but the law is not a thing of subtlety and nuance. It is a thing of bright lines. It would be infeasible to have a law that says "children can make adult decisions when their parents think they're ready", so we have to pick a cutoff point which tries to strike a balance between giving too many immature kids power over their lives, and restricting too many mature kids from making decisions with their lives. Some kids will be unfairly held back because they are very mature at 15, some will ruin their lives because they are completely immature at 18. It's imperfect but no perfect solution is available.
Really? Now do the math on all the kids harmed by overly lax parenting. Many of them are literally dead.
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My point remains unchanged: Strict parenting has killed far less people than lax. Strict parenting can generally be recovered from; lax parenting, you’ll be dead before you even recognize it.
Your assertion is fully contested, and remains unfounded.
They are monsters because of what they will do to obtain their goals.
I mean yes, treating children as property that you control rather than people you are obligated to care for does make you a monster.
Guardians with a duty of care necessarily exercise control. That's not ownership, it's responsibility.
Evil little fuckers. Who even thinks that the US Federal Government isn’t totally qualified to be in complete control of their children’s education and lives, anyway? Probably some racist Ruby Ridge types (/s)
The hypocrisy is very clearly evident.
And there is nothing on Blue sky that is not appropriate for children over 13-with parental guidance.
They do need to keep the morons, and knuckle dragging lawyers off the platform simply because of their felonious actions and prison records.
There's absolutely porn on there if that's what you're after
> And there is nothing on Blue sky that is not appropriate for children over 13-with parental guidance.
I've heard that it's full of furry porn and worse. Is that not the case?
It's certainly not "full of", though I'm sure it's there. I never see it, but then I don't follow people who post it.
I certainly see less random pornographically-tinged content showing up in my day-to-day usage than I did when I was on twitter. The default view being literally only stuff I've explicitly followed does rather change that experience.
I wouldn’t say “full of”, but like other mostly uncensored social media sites like Twitter, it’s definitely there if you’re looking for it (and sometimes even when you’re not).
It is. OP has cleverly redefined everything as being age appropriate with guidance, for convenience.
> For everything else, it’s up to parents or guardians to implement filters, content controls, and blocks.
First of, I'd like to be clear, I don't think laws like this are the right way to go.
But to be fair, even if you are tech literate, which most parents aren't, this is actually pretty difficult to do.
And there are really three approaches you can take to this. You can use an allowlist of sites, but that is very restrictive, and limits the ability to explore, research, and learn how to use the internet generally. You can use a blocklist, but then you will always miss something, and it is a game of whack a mole. Or you can use some kind of AI, but that will probably both block things you don't want blocked, and allow things you do want blocked, and will probably add significant latency.
One possible way this could be improved is if websites with adult or mature content, or potential dangers to children (such as allowing the child to communicate with strangers, or gambling) returned a header that marked the content as possibly not suitable for children with a tag of the reason, and maybe a minimum age. Then a browser or firewall could be configured to block access to anything with headers for undesired content. Although, I think that would be most effective if there were laws requiring the headers to be honest.
> even if you are tech literate, which most parents aren't
18 years ago was 2007! If "most parents" of underage children don't understand the internet, where the hell have they been?
For my silly little semi-private sites I will likely shut off the clear-web daemons and stick with .onion hidden services. Some will leave and that is fine with me. It's just hobby stuff for me. I will still use RTA headers [1] in the event that some day law makers come to their senses. Curious what others here will do with their forums, chat servers, etc...
[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single
I know people whose kid got a hand me down android from a friend and connects through neighbors open WiFi, public open WiFi etc…
And from what I’ve heard it’s not that uncommon for kids to do something similar when parents take away their phones.
It’s easy to say that parents should just limit access and I think they should. I definitely plan to when my kids are old enough for this to be a problem.
But kids are under extreme peer pressure to be constantly online, and when a kid is willing to go to extreme lengths to get access, it can be nearly impossible to prevent it.
There’s also more to it than what parents should do. It’s about what parents are doing. If something is very hard to do most people won’t do it. As a society we all have to deal with the consequences of bad parenting.
We don’t know the consequences of kids having access to porn, but we have correlative studies that show they probably aren’t good.
I’m more concerned with social media than porn though. The correlation between social media use and the rise in teen suicide rates looks awfully suggestive.
> But kids are under extreme peer pressure
Here's the thing: kids are always going to be under peer pressure, and time and time again we keep falling for the pitfall trap of harming adults under the guise of protecting kids.
When it was the drug scare of the 80s, entire research about the harms of DARE's educational methods were ignored in favor of turning an entire generation of children into police informants on their parents. When it was HIV and STDs in the 90s, we harmed kids by pushing "Abstinence-only" narratives that all but ensured more adults would come down with STDs and HIV as adults due to a lack of suitable education (nevermind the reality that children are often vehicles for new information back into the household, which could've educated their own parents as to the new dangers of STDs if they'd been properly educated). In the 2000s, it was attempts to regulate violent video games instead of literal firearms, which has directly contributed to the mass shooting epidemic in the USA. And now we're turning back to porn again, with the same flawed reasoning.
It's almost like the entire point is to harm adults, not protect children.
There’s some massive hyperbole there. “Turning an entire generation into police informants.” Sure there’s some stories about that happening but it didn’t happen enough to move the needle in terms of things that actively harmed adults.
It was harmful because it was ineffective as a mechanism to help Children not because of some nefarious motives against adults.
The same with abstinence only education. Virtually all of the harm was because it was an ineffective policy to help children, not because of some tiny second order effect on adults because children werent educating parents.
Video game regulation was primarily about adding ratings to games which again only harms adults insomuch as children are a big market so developers are less likely to make mature games.
2 of the 3 examples you gave were definitely ineffective at protecting children, but in terms of harming adults, the effects were so minuscule that if that was the goal, the supporters failed severely.
As far as age checks. We have age checks for brick and mortar stores I’m fine with age checks for websites. You also can’t display pornography in public for kids to see.
There’s nothing about “but it’s on the internet” that makes me think it’s inherently ok to treat it differently.
I think there are probably better ways to do it than this Mississippi law, and a law in a single state will probably prove ineffective in general.
> I’m more concerned with social media than porn though. The correlation between social media use and the rise in teen suicide rates looks awfully suggestive.
This problem isn't specific to children. Addictive and often otherwise manipulative too feeds affect people of all ages. Instead of age checks, I'd much rather address this. A starting point for how to do this could be banning algorithmic feeds and having us go back to simple algorithms like independent forum websites with latest post first display order.
Sure I’d rather address addictive app behavior as well. But algorithmic feeds are almost certainly protected under the first amendment, so good luck there.
So you are saying that we should buy stock in VPN companies that serve Missashity?
"As a society we all have to deal with the consequences of bad parenting."
Then why isn't that significantly regulated?
It is. We force parents to send their children to school until they are 16 or educate them themselves—along with many other regulations on how you can raise your kids.
We also put limits on brick and mortar business to help parents. We don’t allow liquor stores to sell alcohol to kids. You could argue that parents should be the ones preventing their kids from buying alcohol, and requiring everyone to submit ID in order to prevent underage drinking is the state doing parent’s job for them.
Find yourself on the bad side of child protective services (rightly or wrongly) and you'll discover rather quickly how hard the government can come down on your rights as a parent.
I mostly agree with you , except there are plenty of ways for non-adults to get access to the internet without adult intervention. ( libraries, friends, McDonald’s hotspots. )
> As I’ve argued on past threads about these laws: the internet was neither built nor intended for children. Nobody can get online without some adult intervention (paying for an ISP), and that’s the only age check that’s ever needed.
> For everything else, it’s up to parents or guardians to implement filters, content controls, and blocks.
Well, they are implementing the block through political pressure, and it's working
> That’s why until legal challenges to this law are resolved, we’ve made the difficult decision to block access from Mississippi IP addresses. We know this is disappointing for our users in Mississippi, but we believe this is a necessary measure while the courts review the legal arguments.
I strongly agree with this. All these jurisdictions and politicians are passing laws that they don't understand the technical foundations for. Second order effects aren't being considered.
Sometimes (only sometimes, I promise) I wonder whether this kind of legislation is being dreamt up by a think tank tasked with planning how to implement some ulterior goal (e.g. massively increased surveillance to fight crime - it's far too easy to unsert something more nefarious here). The politicians then just follow the action plan and repeat talking points from party advisors.
Like the German Socialist Democratic Party did in Germany in 1933? How well did that go?
Very well, until it didn't.
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This is the only mention of "age verification" in all 900 pages of Project 2025:
"In addition, some of the methods used to regulate children’s internet access pose the risk of unintended harms. For instance, age verification regulations would inevitably increase the amount of data collection involved, increasing privacy concerns. Users would have to submit to platforms proof of their age, which raises the risks of data breach or illegitimate data usage by the platforms or bad actors. Limited-government conservatives would prefer the FTC play an educational role instead. That might include best practices or educational programs to empower parents online."
The policy recommendations for "Protecting Children Online" are found on page 875. The two main recommendations they make are:
"The FTC should examine platforms’ advertising and contract-making with children as a deceptive or unfair trade practice, perhaps requiring written parental consent."
"The FTC can and should institute unfair trade practices proceedings against entities that enter into contracts with children without parental consent. Personal parental responsibility is, of course, key, but the law must respect, not undermine, lawful parental authority."
https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeade...
Project 2025 also asserts that porn isn't protected by the first amendment at all and should be banned. It seems disingenuous to ignore that.
I provided what was immediately pertinent, and I linked to the full, searchable document.
That’s not disingenuous.
Yes, they oppose porn. They do not advocate for age verification as the solution to it (or age verification at all), which is what would make their position on porn relevant to the topic at hand.
How can we be sure they don't understand at this point? They'd really have to be morons, how can they even take care of themselves?
Have you seen Congress? It’s like Denny’s on senior appreciation day.
They had to wheel McConnell in not long ago because he physically couldn’t walk.
And like I don’t mean to shit on the elderly (directly anyway) but I dunno just spitballing here, maybe we could get some folks in there who weren’t born yet when the civil rights act was passed???
Why would that matter? There are many young members who congress who also support the same things.
Tell me you've never taken care of an elderly person without telling me you've never taken care of an elderly person.
Have you listened to any legislative debates on technical issues? “A series of tubes” was the high point of political understanding of the internet.
Wait! What? The high point was a stunning display of the Dunning-Kruger effect?
We should pay John Cheese to call them all personally.
> We think this law creates challenges that go beyond its child safety goals, and creates significant barriers that limit free speech and disproportionately harm smaller platforms and emerging technologies.
This is the only correct response to such onerous legislation. Every site affected by such over-reach has a moral duty to do the same. Not that I expect them to do so.
If you think this is bad, you should see the regulatory burden imposed on small manufacturers. This is nothing. The problem is that voters don’t seem to care about regulatory requirements.
The alternate solution is to shutter all US operations and move to another jurisdiction that doesn't require these regulations, in the same way 4chan is ignoring the UK's request.
Harder to implement than an IP ban for a state, though.
They're right to point out that laws like this are primarily motivated by government control of speech. On a recent Times article about the UK's Online Safety Act:
> Luckily, we don’t have to imagine the scene because the High Court judgment details the last government’s reaction when it discovered this potentially rather large flaw. First, we are told, the relevant secretary of state (Michelle Donelan) expressed “concern” that the legislation might whack sites such as Amazon instead of Pornhub. In response, officials explained that the regulation in question was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”, a phrase that rather gives away the political thinking behind the act. They suggested asking Ofcom to think again and the minister agreed.
https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/online-s...
I can't find the comic I saw but I can't find that notes how we tell people and kids to not give out personal information on the internet because that's unsafe.
Now we demand they give all their information and depending on the situation smile for the camera ...
...And also lets make it so they can't encrypt their messages either. Big Brother needs to make sure they aren't sending nudes to people that shouldn't be seeing them.
Wait! Wait! Is this the same state that wanted welfare recipients to be tested for drugs and it was found that the drug use by legislators was ten times higher?
VPN providers are going to be making out like bandits with all the new legislation coming out.
> The Supreme Court’s recent decision leaves us facing a hard reality: comply with Mississippi’s age assurance law—and make every Mississippi Bluesky user hand over sensitive personal information and undergo age checks to access the site—or risk massive fines.
Given that the opinion states that the law is "likely unconstitutional", isn't it too early to give up and block users?
All arguments about age checks themselves aside, why can BlueSky implement age checks in the UK, but not Mississippi? Seems to me like the only difference would be Mississippi requiring everyone to log in, whereas currently I assume UK requires a login just for age-restricted material. (Although I don't use BlueSky in the UK, so shrugs)
Their wording had me imagining technological schemes that blind BlueSky from knowing but reading again I think what's going on is:
Mississippi: They track "underage" and "adult" UK: They track "unknown [treated as underage]" and "adult"
I'd prefer all businesses impacted by the draconian Brit legislation block the Brits geo completely.
The UK only requires verification for specific content. Not the entire site. Also, the identification and tracking requirements are very different.
Yes, they explained that the UK's regulations are less aggressive so it's possible to comply with them
They could based on group but you can get around that. Maybe they are concerned that a user using a VPN from Mississippi would cause them to break the law.
Figured I’d ask the HN crowd- what’s the best way around these geofence blocks? Have you had success with a system that can work smoothly on mobile/desktop without any of the disastrous privacy and performance implications that VPN services are prone to?
Just use a lightweight, privacy focused VPN like Mullvad. You don’t have to keep it on when you need top network performance. Ultimately, a VPN of SOME kind is the only option.
I mean anything that circumvents geo-fencing at the IP level is going to be tunneling your traffic through an address that isn't blocked. Your options are all VPNs, the choice is only who's running it—you via a VPS or similar, friends/family/community, a service as you describe, or the public with Tor.
The friends/family option is probably the most broadly effective at circumventing the block since you'll have a residential address but at the cost of a lot of latency and bandwidth. The most performant option will be VPS services but lots of sites will block them as well out of an abundance of caution.
We might need a centralized age verification system. A person verifies their age using an app. The app is on the phone of the user and confirms opening new account.
Then you have accounts that are age verified and accounts that are not age verified. Age verified accounts have the privilege of seeing sensitive content. Unverified accounts don’t have that privilege.
Some might see this as gravitating to bad laws. I see this as an attempt to address a prohibition on doing business.
> Then you have accounts that are age verified and accounts that are not age verified.
Creating an immediate market for age-verified accounts.
18 year old want some spare cash? Create a few dozen age verified accounts on your phone and sell them off for $1-2 each.
The next step is then tying logins to devices, and devices to identities. Then by using a website you must volunteer your identity. Dream come true for ad serving.
That might be a circumvention. But law is not about rooting out all circumventions. It is about intent to creating a certain system. Similar to sales tax. Just because there are ways around it, doesn’t make the law meaningless.
It isn't centralized, but the emerging mDL/mID (ISO/IEC 18013-5) + Digital Credentials API (W3C) standards do enable sharing a “this device contains a secure credential for someone over 18 years of age” assertion, cryptographically signed by a government agency. Critically, this doesn't require sharing any other personal information.
> Some might see this as gravitating to bad laws. I see this as an attempt to address a prohibition on doing business.
There is no contradiction, the way you address it is by giving up and gravitating to bad laws
As long as it can be done in the way that it remains accessible to both citizens and businesses and is highly enforceable, I'm in. The problem is that I'm not sure how it can actually be done...
Google and Apple are already building this.
A more appropriate route to that is to create incentives and grants for companies to be created that can accomplish this age verification infrastructure (ideally with its own privacy guarantees, etc), and make a declaration such as “in 5 years, you will be expected to validate and track the age group of all users on your platform. We have created grants to help create technology companies and a platform that will help to implement and privatize this service”.
That way you get both:
Or do it like the EU is doing with the EU Digital Identity Wallet, which has been tested in pilot programs since 2023, and which is expected to start being deployed to the general public next year.
Briefly, your government would give you a signed digital copy of your government ID document. This copy would be cryptographically bound to secure hardware you own, typically your smartphone. I'll assume a smartphone for the rest of this.
When you want to reveal some fact from your ID to a site, such as "my ID says that my birthday is at least 18 years in the past", your device and the site use a zero knowledge proof (ZKP) protocol to prove to the site that this is true for the signed digital ID that is bound to your device. Nothing else from or about your digital ID is conveyed to the site.
Once this is out it should be pretty easy for sites to implement age checks for EU users.
The EU system is all open source and they've got a reference implementation on Github somewhere.
Google has also recently released in open source library at https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk for building such systems.
The main thing to ensure privacy with these kind of systems is making it so that the entity that issues the digital ID to your device is an entity that you don't mind proving your ID to with your physical government ID. Ideal would be for this to be handled by the same government agency that issues the physical ID.
Second best would be entities like banks that you already trust with your ID.
Yeah, that should have been part of the bill.
Wyoming and South Dakota seem even worse, having passed laws requiring age verification for sites with anything potentially harmful to minors. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/08/book-bans-internet-ban...
What a shameful era. These fools delegintize the state, delegitimize the legal system. Engaged in absolute foolery.
The suggestion I saw was that residents of these states need to comb through every government site they can and sue the government for anything that could be harmful to youth that they find. Theres really no practical limit no possible implementation that the state has allowed other than to age verify pretty much everything; return-to-sender-ing the paper bag of flaming dog shit seems like a semi necessary step here.
Assuming mobile platforms weigh in with an API sometime, it's notable that the only people allowed online by default would be minors who are using parental controls, because they would be able to prove (a) age and (b) parental consent on day 1.
I wonder if a business could be successfully sued for denying service to people OVER a certain age.
It's interesting that age seems to be a protected class if you're above a certain age and not below.
The very notion of underage is necessarily arbitrary because there is no direct way to measure one's maturity and thus sensitivity to such materials. As long as the block is not perpetual and lifted after some reasonable cutoff, such blocks are thought to be reasonable in general (yeah some would complain, of course). In comparison the business you have described is the polar opposite, where people are perpetually blocked once they reach a certain age.
The only two things I can l'd think of, is driving and article 25 of the constitution. The latter which has been clearly violated to a large extent. There ought to be a licence to be able to run for office, just a multiple choice question. Are you an 1) Idiot? 2) Fascist? 3) Ted Cruz? 4) pedophilic zoophile? And turn just disqualify them.
Way to blow it, Mississippi
I am curious how many other "social" sites took this stand.
I think what bluesky did is the only way to fight these laws that all it will do is be a boon to people who obtain and sell PI.
For people in Mississippi, you can always get a VPN. You should avoid Free VPNs, but that is your decision.
They're not fighting anything, they've given up a part of their business just to be safe.
Reminder
Republicans, for many years now, have run on "stop big government regulations" without being specific.
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So, does Mississippi's age verification also apply to Twitter, Truth Social, Rumble, etc.? Curious what these right-wing platforms are doing about age verification. Surely Mississippi's attorney general will go after those platforms too...
It does, but almost all the major platforms/companies are members of NetChoice, a trade organization that fights this sort of thing. This presser from Bluesky doesn't mention it, but the case is "NetChoice vs Mississippi", so that's how involved they are to this.
Here's their write up on the Mississippi case: https://netchoice.org/netchoice-v-fitch-mississippi/
And obligatory Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetChoice
Truth Social, X and Rumble are all backed by the very people who wrote the law, so will not be sued. Get Out Of Jail Free cards.
Notice their stance is that they are not against these kind of checks but it costs too much to implement. Basically if it becomes cheap to implement Bsky will be happy to oblige.
> Unlike tech giants with vast resources, we’re a small team focused on building decentralized social technology that puts users in control. Age verification systems require substantial infrastructure and developer time investments, complex privacy protections, and ongoing compliance monitoring — costs that can easily overwhelm smaller providers.
There's an important hint in the blog post:
> This decision applies only to the Bluesky app, which is one service built on the AT Protocol [...] We remain committed to building a protocol that enables openness and choice.
If someone else builds another app as a workaround, they aren't going to stop them. (Bluesky isn't decentralized enough in practice yet, but someday...)
Answer to the obvious question:
>> "Mississippi’s new law and the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) are very different. Bluesky follows the OSA in the UK. There, Bluesky is still accessible for everyone, age checks are required only for accessing certain content and features, and Bluesky does not know and does not track which UK users are under 18. Mississippi’s law, by contrast, would block everyone from accessing the site—teens and adults—unless they hand over sensitive information, and once they do, the law in Mississippi requires Bluesky to keep track of which users are children."
I don’t know how this works: how can Mississippi compel Bluesky to pay these fines for breaking a state regulation if they’re not based in Mississippi?
Because if they have users in Mississippi they are doing “interstate commerce” and a federal court has the ability and jurisdiction to compel them to pay those fines.
Are users, who are not transacting with the platform, doing commerce? What if the platform were hosted in, say, Europe?
If they're outside the country they can freely tell Mississippi to pound sand—the state might compel entities they do have jurisdiction over (i.e. ISPs) to cut them off but that's the extent of it.
Is there not some way to route Mississippi's Bluesky traffic through a third party (Cloudflare?, etc.?) that can provide age verification and parental consent as a service, so that it doesn't require every individual online service to implement it separately?
I don’t think that service exists yet. These laws are very new.
just... why? why contribute to this nonsense?
I genuinely believe that only such way (regarding "protecting children" from viewing "dangerous/unwanted content") is correct and maximally effective. All others mostly create a theater of security - in other words, they don't actually prevent direct access to "dangerous" content but merely create an illusion of doing so. This ranges from client-side-only checks (like Telegram in the UK) to "privacy-preserving" checks based on ZK or similar technologies, which are currently being promoted in the EU. The first can be bypassed simply by searching for workarounds; the second... well, one person could just verify thousands of others using their own documents, and that's it. Literally a security theater - I hate it, a lot.
And my opinion is that we shouldn't support such ways of doing this, meaning we shouldn't implement or comply with them, but rather protest against them. Either undermine their purpose or create a significant appearance of problems. In other words, either spread methods to bypass them, support such efforts in any way possible, or deny access to services (and so on) in jurisdictions where they're banned by inhumane laws. This is, in a way, a very common practice in the field of "copyright" and I sincerely hope it spreads to everyday matters.
It's deeply sad that nobody addresses the root problem - only its consequences, meaning they try to "hide unwanted content" instead of making it "non-unwanted." And it's even sadder that so few of those who could actually influence the implementation of such "protections" advocate this approach. Off the top of my head, I can only name Finland as one actively promoting educational programs and similar solutions to this problem.