this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
399 points (96.9% liked)
Technology
83831 readers
3624 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think the disagreement comes from treating “we have laws” as automatically meaning “we must enforce them everywhere at any cost.” The method matters. This approach flips the burden of proof by treating everyone as a minor unless they prove otherwise. That is a pretty extreme shift from how things normally work in the real world.
We also shouldn’t pretend this actually solves the problem. Kids got access to adult magazines before, and they will get access now through a parent’s phone, shared devices, or older friends. If that’s the target, this kind of system is mostly symbolic while adding friction and control for everyone else.
And more importantly, it normalizes something much bigger. Once you accept that accessing legal content requires proving attributes through some approved system, it becomes very easy to expand that logic. Today it’s age. Tomorrow it can be anything else.
So I don’t see this as a balanced compromise. It’s a disproportionate response to an enforcement gap, with long-term consequences that go way beyond the original problem.
I don't think laws should be enforced at any cost, but if we can reasonably enforce laws I think there is a duty to do so.
Then there is also a different question of whether we agree with the laws on the books, but that is a different matter imo. Personally I don't think we should limit access to pornography as strictly as the laws says we should, and I don't think the ills of social media are solved with a simple age limit.
But that is a separate discussion from the implementation of a (in my eyes) reasonable approach to age verification
I don’t think it’s entirely a separate issue, because how a law is enforced is part of evaluating whether it makes sense in practice.
If a law can only be enforced by treating everyone as a minor until proven otherwise, that’s a strong signal that the law, or at least its scope, may be flawed.