Addiction is neurological, not chemical. Addiction is the consequence of the rewards centre of the brain becoming dependent on stimulation and that can be from anything.
Do try to make an effort.
Doesn't have to be a credit card. A class III user digital certificate requires a verification firm be certain of a person's identity through multiple proofs. If an age verification service issued such a certificate, but anonymised the name the certificate was issued to to the user's selected screen name, you now have a digital ID that proves your age and optionally can be used for encryption purposes to ensure your account is only reachable from devices you authorise.
And those come with warnings, legal penalties on vendors who sell to known addicts or children, legal penalties for abusers, financial penalties to abusers, etc. There are cars which have their own breathalisers.
So, no, society has said that the responsibility is distributed. Which is correct.
It is possible to verify age to the same degree (or better) than any "age verification service" without any sort of privacy invasion.
A six digit UID is not one that could be remotely considered "old".
*goes off grumbling and looks for anyone he can shout at to get off his lawn.
It is legitimate for any service that constitutes a "common carrier" to be free of consequences for what it carries. But Meta do not claim to be a "common carrier", and that changes the nature of the playing field substantially. As soon as a service can inspect messages and moderate, it is no longer eligible to claim that it is not responsible for what it carries.
Your counter-argument holds some merit, but runs into two problems.
First, society deems any service that monitors to be liable. That may well be unreasonable at the volumes involved, but that's irrelevant. Meta chose to monitor, knowing that this made it liable in the eyes of society. There are, of course, good reasons for that - mostly, society is sick and twisted, and criminality is encouraged as a "good thing" and "sticking it to the man". This is a very good reason to monitor. But Meta chose to have an obscenely large customer base (it didn't need to), Meta chose to monitor (it is quite capable of parking itself in a country where this isn't an obligation), and Meta chose to make the service addictive (which is a good way of encouraging criminals onto the scene, as addicts are easy prey).
Second, Meta has known there's been a problem for a very long time (depression and suicides by human moderators is a serious problem Meta has been facing for many years at this point). Meta elected to sweep the problem under the rug and create the illusion of doing something by using AI. If a serivce knows there's a problem but does nothing, and in particular a very cheap form of nothing, then one must consider the possibility said service is not solving said problem because there's more money to be made by having the abusers there than by removing them.
Can one block every criminal action? Probably not, which means that that's the wrong problem to solve. Intelligent, rational, people do not try to solve actually impossible problems. Rather, they change the problems into ones that are quite easy. This is very standard lateral thinking and anyone over the age of 10 who has not been trained in lateral thinking should sue their school for incompetence.
Well nothing we think of as "critical infrastructure" is using consumer routers - and if it were that could and should be remedied quickly without a ban on consumer routers.
So
The best fit is probably an Internet Drivers License and mandatory packet signing for a surveillance control grid and CBDC coming down the pike rapidly.
When in the course of Human Events....
Yeah, not sure if you remember the Vegan Crossfit Pythonistas.
Instead of saying, "we could write a program to..." they would dogmatically intone, "we could write a Python script to..." in almost every situation.
Not sure who taught them the NLP but their dedication was a fervor.
A whole lot of rewriting of fast, debugged, working code got rewritten by them just because Perl, Ruby, and Bash felt like heresy.. For a while python stacktraces were the error message of common use on Fedora.
Huh. I thought it was because the AI kept sending him out to go make it a cup of tea whilst it ran the company.
Now that we know that Meta lobbied for all of these simultaneous "age verification" laws he's losing what little support he still had.
Have you seen that interview where he just has a bottle of barbecue sauce on his bookshelf?
To make him "relatable" they say?
There's a decades old cartoon that asks, "how would you like your tyranny wrapped, in 'stopping terrorism' or 'protecting the children'?
2025 edit: 'stopping antisemitism' as that's all DoJCRD seems to know about.
Retire it. It is a product with so many defects that it is not meaningfully salvageable.
States have no rights in the American system. They have powers, insofar as they exercise them.
Humans have rights, granted by God, as the default religious basis for the Natural Rights Republic.
You'll notice that Regulating AI appears nowhere in Article I , and Federalist 10 explains why these powers were strictly limited.
Yet the Political/Parasite class is happy to abrogate their power for power and money and ensure a government school child never hears about The Federalist Papers in thirteen years of compulsory schooling.
So we're left with too few Americans who even know they should be livid.
Perhaps letting Robert Maxwell and Howard Zinn be in charge of the textbooks was a massive and fatal mistake.
What kind of dipshit is running an experimental agent outside of a sandbox?
And how overpaid is he?
There are some very conservative religious countries that would do more than fine many UK websites if they had free reign.
Be careful what you wish for.
Universal principles can theoretically keep the peace.
Their idea of an offer you can't refuse is an offer... and you'd better not refuse.
