Age verification was already risky — now it’s downright dangerous.

At the end of June, the Supreme Court torched a two-decades-old precedent protecting the right to online anonymity. It declared that requiring age verification for adult websites posed a negligible speech burden and was permissible under the First Amendment, allowing such laws to proceed in nearly half of US states, including America’s second-most-populous state, Texas. While it’s easy to get behind the idea of keeping 13-year-olds off Pornhub in theory, the decision brushed off real concerns about throwing up barriers to legal speech.

In mid-August, the court went even further: it at least temporarily allowed Mississippi to extend this age verification to social media, which is to say, the vast majority of spaces where people communicate with each other in 2025. Numerous other states have similar designs on the internet. South Dakota and Wyoming have started enforcing their own laws that demand services with any sexual content verify ages, covering not only sites like Pornhub but Bluesky and other all-purpose web platforms that don’t outright ban porn. New York just proposed rules that could see age-verification rules implemented on social media within the next couple of years. Texas and Utah passed rules that will soon require app stores to verify users’ ages; a similar bill awaits California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature.

This is even more problematic. Civil liberties advocates have warned for years that there’s essentially no way to verify ages without eroding privacy or chilling speech to some extent. The response from politicians has largely been that the downsides are minimal and justified to keep children safe. Early chaotic results of the UK’s Online Safety Act — which requires age-gating for a variety of content — suggest otherwise.

And over the past week, things have gotten yet markedly worse. The US government — including immigration authorities, the military, and the Department of Justice — has barreled into the business of sniffing out people who made social media posts it finds objectionable and threatening them with the force of the law. They’re riling up a snitch state that will hunt down targets for them to prosecute or strip visas from, a process that could be made infinitely easier by inevitable Tea-style data leaks from social media sites.

While all this is happening, Donald Trump’s administration is directly coordinating the transfer of one of the biggest social media platforms to administration-friendly tech moguls. A monthslong negotiation process has produced a tentative deal to spin off TikTok from its Chinese parent company; the rumored buyers include Larry Ellison-owned Oracle and Andreessen Horowitz, and the whole process has given Trump tremendous leverage over the service. That adds TikTok to the stable of businesses owned by heavily conservative-aligned figures, following X, owned by Elon Musk — who is currently doing his part to ferret out online undesirables too.

These businesses are highly unlikely to resist demands for information on users, even if verification laws are written with privacy protections built in — someone like Musk might well dox users without being asked. They’re also, incidentally, the ones with the most resources to comply with age verification laws or escape legal penalties for flouting them, while smaller services like Bluesky and Mastodon struggle. And increasingly, big platforms are the ones least sympathetic to vulnerable minority groups targeted by Trump.

  • Korkki@lemmy.mlEnglish
    31·
    20 hours ago

    Anonymity is dangerous because it let’s the little people think they can have have ideas and talk about them freely and possibly not face any consequences for it.

    • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      3·
      1 hour ago

      This is right, though in our situation we can only speak of “illusion of anonymity”, which lets little people think they should have anonymity and all those ideas and conversation opportunities, even if they don’t have these in fact.

      Some things are so powerful that even illusion thereof affects the societies.

      If we think about Soviet examples - during the Thaw, after Stalin’s cult of personality official condemnation, there has been plethora of cultural sprouts, so to say - poets of the 60s, Soviet science fiction, ideas of peace and how should the humanist and peaceful and kind future be built.

      Much of that was based on the picture of the Civil War that was complete fiction, but the concept itself was important - that there really is some idea of decency, and some 40 years of going maybe the wrong way are not enough to undo it. Yes, in reality repressions basically started with the Soviet state, and slowly built up to the level of the 30s. Yes, in reality in the Civil War the main approach to communism wasn’t what people in the 60s dreamed of, it was Trotsky’s war communism. And yes, in reality what Stalin did what pretty much what was planned since early 20s - with the nuance that Lenin himself judged that there should be a long, 50 years at least (so there shouldn’t have been planned economy in the USSR till 80s, when IRL said economy was crumbling), pause, which was NEP, before trying anything radical, but when Lenin died, those who had power judged that there’s a new war coming and they have to build the heavy industries and the military at any cost. Maybe, if NEP were allowed to last for longer, the USSR would simply be much stronger overall, enough to survive WWII. And maybe that lack of modernization focus would lead to it being a much weaker country by 1941. But the point is, that eventually the (imperfect, but really far more functional and culturally rich, and sufficiently alive to be one of the two main offerings of civilization for a couple of decades) society was born from all this that nobody had been building intentionally, but it was present in the illusions given to people.

      This is also why while I’m certain that the widespread awe before the Internet is misguided, it was from the beginning built basically as what it’s become, - that despite this some of the ideas it helped spread are worth that awe. What the Internet was advertised as, from its beginnings, is not what it is. But that nonexistent thing has been advertised, and people around us want it, and they will perhaps have it at some point.

      If we talk politics, this is also true for “rules-based order”, which was a nice way of saying “American/colonialist order”, but made enough people around the world believe that there should be rules, and now it’s backfiring, because said system doesn’t support doing anything by the declared rules. Say, Putin is basically committing the same international law violations that the USA has. He’s pretty open about it. He’s doing terrible things, but the overall situation is one big response to the order not being in fact rules-based, making it closer to rules-based. Meaning that the fake thing becomes real.

      Sort of like Aule created dwarves in Silmarillion, as soulless toys, and Eru made them living creatures. Let’s hope that it happens to the world network as well.