so they can act accordingly is the variable, a simple headcount is one thing, but when it creeps like a census, then it is prone to polyusary.
putting the consiracy hat on, the exploit is to direct as many installed AGs to push for such bills, with no big letdown if they dont pass, why/because, the demographics on dissention are valuable and are, passed to a hostile federal government.
Being active about KOSA won't get you put on a "list of dissenters". This is an issue being pushed by the States and your federal lawmakers, not the executive branch.
"Discord Distances itself from Peter Thiel's Palantir Age Verification Firm" means jack shit if they're still doing business with them.
And Discord has approached this in such a monstrously awful way that I don't know what they could possibly say at this point to make me believe them.
I fully expect Discord will buddy-buddy right back up with some other Thiel-affiliated company if there is a separation if not go right back to them once the heat dies down.
To do the Simpsons quotes like suggested in the article, Discord picking age verification "third party providers" definitely looks like they park various vans across the street.
One of them didn't delete IDs properly and leaked them.
Now Peter Thiel's Age verification truck has been parked across the street for 2 weeks. How long does it take to deliver a pizza ?
They need to replace it with Flowers By Irene van ? Who wants to create that company and try to sell it ?
I'm dumbfounded that a big tech company that says they take age verification so seriously just subcontracts that part to this set of various subcontractor with no apparent vetting.
I do love Discord as a platform and I happily took subscriptions for me and some friends, but I don't understand who steers it.
Executives who focus on the financial side of things and do not care about correctness in operations are the ones steering lots of companies nowadays. Boeing is a good example/case study on how financialisation eats up companies from the inside by emphasising monetary results over actual engineering.
I get the feeling they do not in fact take age verification seriously and just want to do the low effort solution needed to satisfy various countries laws.
> Treating social media design as equal to something that can kill people in excess unnerves me.
As it should, because there's a really obvious "slippery slope" argument right there.
But… it can kill people.
There is a certain fraction of the population who, for whatever reason, can be manipulated, to the point of becoming killers or of causing injury to themselves. Social media… actually, worse than that, all A/B testing everywhere, can stumble upon this even when it isn't trying to (I would like to believe that OpenAI's experience with 4o-induced psychosis was unintentional).
When we know which tools can be used for manipulation, it's bad to keep allowing it to run unchecked. Unchecked, they are the tool of propagandists.
But… I see that slippery slope, I know that any government which successfully argues itself the power to regulate this, even for good, is one bad election away from a dictatorship that will abuse the same reasoning and powers to evil ends.
I've always found the notion of "stochastic terrorism" to be elastic, effectively transforming "speech a given person dislikes" into "danger" so censorship looks like virtue.
Not to mention - you have to account for what happens if someone you hate may be in power and could wield any sort of system to stop "stochastic terrorism" against you. This is often dismissed as an abstract what-if, but....given what's been happening with world leaders these days, it should be a central consideration.
You are worried about the “what if” fallout over the multiple world leaders actually engaging in it. Their followers enact violence on their behalf while the leader maintains plausible deniability/enough perceived distance from the act they can never be explicitly blamed.
You can be worried about more than one thing but clearly one is a bigger issue than the other right now.
I never said "multiple". Just the leader in the jurisdiction you live in.
And I'm genuinely not sure how to interpret your last sentence. In the US we have a President that is increasingly going after people for their speech, in quite a few cases by using the laws and policies put in place to go after dissent. He is going after colleges and businesses who have "bias against whites" using policies put in place to punish hate speech against minorities and women.
I agree with that all that. That is why I am surprised you’re downplaying the idea of “stochastic terrorism” and discouraging the term’s usage. I don’t really get it.
It’s also important to note that the MAGA movement doesn’t care what restraint is shown when they’re out of power, they simply use every tool in their toolbox and bury the sword to the hilt every time.
Yes - and the point I'm making is that their toolbox has a few additional, nasty tools for censorship because they were originally enacted with the belief that only good, honest people would use them.
"Not thrilled with that" is also something they exploit to manipulate you.
Seeing this in black-and-white terms like "robs people of any notion" makes it easier to turn your dislike into a false choice, like any half-decent stage magician, between comfort and "not thrilled".
Humans are not machines. If your goal is to control rather than educate and guide, then we do not have shared values upon which to debate the contours of.
Were this the case, we could survive any poison or injuries, and discern truth from falsehood, simply by willing it so. We would never fall to drugs, nothing would get fetishised (in any sense of the word), political parties would be evaluated on merit alone rather than which name they proclaim.
And a lot of stage magic just wouldn't work. Special offers wouldn't be in exciting colours, gambling done with the same methods wouldn't ruin people; get-rich-quick schemes would fool nobody; photosensitive epilepsy wouldn't be a thing, and neither would the so-called "god helmet" (which, ironically, had one attempt to replicate the god helmet correlated only with suggestibility): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet
> If your goal is to control rather than educate and guide, then we do not have shared values upon which to debate the contours of.
The guidance I offer is only these:
1) you cannot escape a box whose existence you refuse to acknowledge.
It looks to me like you're adding the conflation to "all addictions" because you can clearly distinguish between "sugar" and "cocaine" as both forms of addictions.
Why would you not be willing to include "scrolling" as another form of addiction? Just because it's labeled the same way you yourself are demonstrating that we handle that in different ways.
Social Media is being treated as "sugar" in this instance instead of as "cocaine".
Discord says they'll use some AI garbage tool. Those are prone to mistakes over a large enough userbase. It will not be a rare occurrence for an adult to be labelled a child until they debase themselves with a scan of their face or a copy of their government ID.
For children - this mandate also still makes the decision on behalf of the parents that a child must submit a scan of their face to a third party. Moving to Persona for age verification involves verification data being sent outside of the user's phone - in direct contradiction to Discord's initial promise of keeping facial scan data solely on the phone. Third parties that we've been given no reason to trust will delete the data without using it for an improper purpose such as creating derivative info from the ID or facial scan itself unrelated to the sole purpose of verifying that an individual is an adult.
While we're at it - is there any legitimate reason why Discord is associating a person's actual or estimated age with their account as opposed to storing a value that states if they are or are not an adult? That sort of granularity seems unrelated to the stated purpose.
I don't love what discord is doing, but where are you getting the idea that discord is going to estimate the user's age using "some AI garbage tool"? The article says everyone is on "child" mode by default, and verification is only required if you need to use the features / access content marked as adult only.
> but where are you getting the idea that discord is going to estimate the user's age using "some AI garbage tool"
"Additionally, Discord will implement its age inference model, a new system that runs in the background to help determine whether an account belongs to an adult, without always requiring users to verify their age"[0]
Interesting, since they specifically say they do not use message content in the age inference I wonder if “AI” is smoke and mirrors here and the real way this works might be good old fashioned data buying.
Since they have my email, they could infer my age based on purchase history, credit cards, etc all which is available to buy through the usual ad data brokers
I know of at least one person who's child was flagged as 17 when they were 14. That seems like a mistake that should never, ever, ever happen if your goal is safety. The software sucks. The methodology sucks. The reason is flimsy at best.
never, ever is quite strong wording when you're in an arms race with 14 year olds who want to gain illicit access to something digital. I know everyone's a digital native these days and real life isn't a 90s hacker movie, but 'rarely' already seems like a pretty high bar given how ingenious a 14 year old deprived of their preferred entertainment can get.
if your goal and reasoning is child safety this is a big issue that it can even happen. my point is these tools are unreliable. It is using a problem that cannot be fixed as justification for a big privacy invasion.
I was 14 once too, that’s how I got into what I do now.
Not to mention it introduces different threats to safety when additional personal information of yours is made available to an entity you cannot audit in an industry famous for redefining privacy to mean "your data or derivatives of your data can be infinitely shared and sold and resold with little-to-no consequence".
It introduces the threat of being personally unmasked to anyone and everyone is introduced in the event the verification system (or a component thereof containing your personal info) is hacked and data dumped to the public.
It introduces the threat of your data being sold around with the "ground truth" of your identity and photo associated with it.
And even if these threats aren't realized....it happens often enough with related companies that the uncertainty will forever be there.
The threat of public humiliation.
The threat of losing your job.
The threat of losing your social connections.
The threat of personal assault.
All of these come to mind as concrete threats that have played out when someone has been doxed by a malicious person.
And now the risk and consequence of doxing is made so much worse when your government ID is associated with chats that are ostensibly private.
I’ve mentioned before publicly I got randomly shadowbanned before on linkedin with these invasive “security” checks for no reason. It ended up costing me money because I mostly at that time used that network to actually network and looked for consulting opportunities. and to this day i have no real way to know what they know about me or how they’re using the facial data i did provide. There was nothing from my pov that should have been flagged, but due to the unreliable way they flag users and the invasive id verification checks (that dont work) involved, I had to self opt out of the platform, which is really stupid to me given the fact i was a pro paying user for 10+ years. and all these platforms have the capability to easily do that. whether its triggered by something benign or malicious is irrelevant - the tech simply doesnt work. the people that control how it works have questionable motives. So i must then ask the question, why? you are getting at the reason I think.
Then, out of respect for your view that children’s safety must be the absolute top priority and that false positives must never, ever be tolerated, let’s require people to personally visit Discord’s office in the United States with a government-issued ID, have it inspected, and formally swear an oath.
Of course, Discord will retain the ID and the person’s facial photograph for a semi-permanent period.
Naturally, that’s perfectly acceptable—after all, it’s for the safety of the children, right?
What I read explicitly stated use of AI would be involved in their guesswork of determining if a user is or is not an adult.
Also - the outcry here isn't from people who think they will no longer be able to use Discord in any way, shape, or form without going through an age verification process. That's a bizarre strawman that doesn't represent the main grievances being aired.
One aspect is already implemented, you open your webcame and it uses an AI tool to figure out if you are of age.
This is obviously ineffective but I must admit it's a bit of a boon for privacy enthusiasts as you can pretty easily fake the webcam using a game engine. Presumably someone will make a purpose built tool.
As well, if you aren't going to subvert it, and are willing to tie your identity to the discord account, it is still better than submitting government IDs.
Their website includes a lot of technical details about their system. Including that their granularity they typically return in their API is just "ADULT" or not (per jurisdiction). [1]
They also document all their international compliance standings including their assurances that data really doesn't leave user devices.
At a glance, it seems a much better option than Persona, as k-ID's competition. Though arguably, yes, most of their options are still "AI garbage" under the hood. But that's what countries want right now.
You don’t have to submit a picture of a face to prove you are child, because all accounts are “teen” accounts by default.
If they were age-gating children to make a safe space, that would be one thing, but they are instead making an adults only area where sexual content and flirting is allowed. For many people this is a bonus, because now like in a bar, you always know the person you’re taking to is an adult.
>If it doesn't have enough of the utility, performance, and positive UX, it will never gain enough market share to matter.
That's part of why billionaires will continue to screw people over. They will try and stay in bed with the familiar evil, rather than put up with the temporary inconvenience of freedom.
And it's a negative spiral. Less users means less money to bring in staff which means less means to improve. Discord didn't become discord in a month, but other competitiors don't get that grace period.
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