Age-Gating Isn’t About Kids, It’s About Control

It is really important to understand that, in the US, the Heritage Foundation has been running a multi-year campaign to push payment processors and everyone else to enforce SESTA/FOSTA in the most anti-queer ways possible. They have been winning. We, the queer community, have slowly become unable to financially support each other. Our own legal non-profits are fighting back, but are massively out-funded.

That is the context in which this new mechanism to restrict speech is being contemplated.

I just... I hope that people realize that.

I don't see how this relates to LGBT people in any capacity. It in fact (3) seems to explicitly carve out an exception for educational material that we'd consider protected speech under the first amendment.

A very large proportion of "reasonable" Americans consider anything LGBT related to be sex, and is definitionally pornographic, prurient, "unnatural", and directly harmful to children. Section (3) does not work here: by their definition anything LGBT material is pornographic and/or harmful and has no merit under any of those categories. Remember a large proportion of Americans have tried to ban children's books that simply contain gay characters. Similarly blocking information and access to abortion.

Of course some are more explicit: Oklahoma's law banned exhibition or description of "sexual conduct", but then a different piece of legislation (which provides the definition of "sexual conduct") explicitly includes any form of homosexuality.

At a federal level the KOSA sponsors explicitly stated the goal of the legislation was “protecting minor children from the transgender [sic] in this culture and that influence.”

This isn't realistic and hasn't been realistic for at least a decade (thinking to when I'd "outsmart" my parents)

Teenagers have always been able to access pornography, and if parents would actually talk about it rather than pretending it doesn't exist, or if schools had actual sex ed rather than classes where girls are told they become worthless if they're not a virgin (my wife's "sex ed" literally compared a girl/woman not being a virgin to new vs chewed chewing gum, and another friend's "education" compared having sex with different people to removing petals from a pure rose).

Instead of pretending this doesn't exist, parents should address it - in fact the refusal to do this makes children more exploitable. The above "you only have value if you're a virgin" is actively, the refusal to actually seriously discuss sex, etc is actively exploited by abusers to prevent victims from telling anyone. Government dictated censorship does not fix this.

In response to "outsmarting parents" - why do you think aggressive censorship is not going to do anything other than "protect" the less technically capable kids?

I didn't say this, I don't think this and explicitly say I don't endorse this misguided approach to age verification.

You did though, even in your reply, you stated that it is unreasonable to expect parents to be able to protect their children, and so it is reasonable for the government to determine what content they must be protected by.

You said you disagree with the method of implementation, but everything else is clearly in support of the concept.

I think the age verification bills are genuinely misguided attempts to get ahead of the internet radicalising and grooming children.

I am surprised that the California law was a lot better written than I thought it would be. Compared to "give us your passport", a basic "is user old enough?" check is probably the least privacy invasive way to write one.

...and parents who don't know, don't care or aren't technologically adept enough to stop their child making bad decisions?

TBH, I think the adults are even worse than the kids when it comes to social media. "Ban it for kids" is a half measure compared to banning it outright, or defanging its impact on society.

It doesnt really matter if the starter reasoning is good or not, the end goal is control. Policymakers know this and will utilize it, no matter what.

What do you do in world of comkids on every game, 764-style grooming cults on social media, weird old predators on these weird unknown chatrooms and parents who don't know, don't care or aren't technologically adept enough to stop their child making bad decisions?

A very widely played game amongst the young generation is Roblox. It is well known for having tons of issues with preventing children from being contacted by groomers and outright sex games in their own sandbox system (a system with a built in economy and relations to real money). None of this is allowed in the EU - if they get reports they have to follow them, which they do not as shown by the press investigating. So does it make the problem go away to enact such a flawed law ? Not at all.

Where is the other movement, then, the one that really believes in it that you would expect to find?

Deeply intertwingled with the first movement, obviously. There's probably a fair component of people with both the reasonable and disingenuous goals, and even more who don't know about or wouldn't care about the harms of the disingenuous goals as long as the reasonable ones get met.

"Lawful intercept" is also a reasonable goal if you define it strictly enough, but the reasonable version of it is actually mathematically impossible to achieve. How much does that absolve the people pushing for an unreasonable version, who may or may not be aware the reasonable version is impossible?

That logic has a counterpart. For every proposed policy change there are people who have a genuine self-interest in the stated outcome. There are also people who have an interest in the unstated but still likely outcomes. In the event that you can only identify one group, is it more probable that only one group exists or that the second group is pretending to be the first group?