Alright, fine:
Addressing some assumptions you're making
This is true.
This is false. It simply does not reflect reality.
From a legal perspective, some people do want this to be the case, and this is a controversial topic in the United States and has been for a long time. Unless some “parental rights” amendment gets passed, it does not make sense to pretend we live in this reality, which has been affirmatively rejected everywhere else in the world besides the United States and Somalia.
This is true.
This is true, but I think it is obviously ridiculous to everyone on Earth at this point, but nobody bothers changing the rule because it only affects voters for 3 years of their lives.
Regarding the necessity of the internet
The choice between a significantly better option and a significantly worse option is not a real choice. The internet frankly revolutionized society, and it is a fundamental need to many people who cannot move/communicate/etc. without assistance, as it should not be necessary for them to be completely reliant on others when we have the technical solutions here already.
I can’t spend too much time on this opinion because I honestly do not see how it is possible to argue that the internet can be completely ignored in 2025, when it is literally the only way to access most government and private services.
You are naming exceptions in history. Anonymous publication has been the driving force behind much activism since the invention of the printing press. Before printing, using word of mouth to spread ideas is inherently unreliable and thus builds-in some form of anonymity or plausible deniability by default.
The United States was founded on concealed authorship, it is fundamental to this nation. Thomas Paine authored Common Sense anonymously, as it was common among those in the Enlightenment era to believe ideas were more important than identities. Which I believe is true, currently we are too enshrined in irrelevant identity politics which has been the driving factor behind all of these recent conversations. Its publisher was anonymous as well.
There is a role to play in tying a personal identity to a cause. Rosa Parks is a good example of this. Her entire confrontation on the bus was planned by the NAACP and Rosa Parks in advance specifically because they thought she would be a good face for this particular cause, and they were completely correct to do so.
However, there is also a role for anonymous political speech to influence public opinion, and you should not diminish that.
The same does not apply to age verification, because age verification is being applied to whenever you receive information, not when you sharing it. It is not possible for the act of obtaining new knowledge to affect anyone other than yourself.
It currently does:
I think it is a false equivalence to compare a person being a public nuisance with publishing a post on social media.
It is exactly like you said: The internet is merely a library of information, so in this analogy publishing a website or post is more like publishing a book that’s available in a public library. Therefore, for your argument to work you would need to believe that a book in a library could disrupt library operations.
However, you literally cannot disrupt a public library by publishing information in it. It is not the library’s place to judge the books it is offering. I can walk a few blocks away and check out Mein Kampf right now if I wanted to. If sharing the epitome of hate speech is not disruptive to a public library, then information published online should not be disruptive to the internet.
As you acknowledge later, there is a compelling case for anonymity in Tor. I didn’t watch the video you linked, but I would extend that with the historical precedent of concealed authorship that I mentioned earlier. In addition to Thomas Paine, many figures of the Revolutionary war like Benjamin Franklin published pamphlets and letters with pseudonyms or completely anonymously. This is also a pattern you see among similar revolutions and activists in other countries.
Pro-privacy regulation is needed, but worsening privacy with age verification is not the solution. Companies should be forbidden from requesting IDs and other sensitive personal information without a legitimate need, not encouraged to do so.
Ultimately the problem with all possible solutions is government censorship.
Proponents of “zero-knowledge proofs” and similar technologies are too focused on the authentication process between themselves and the websites they are visiting and making that authentication as private as possible, but not on the underlying technologies that make that authentication possible in the first place.
Any age verification system will ultimately derive its knowledge from the government, who will be free to both 1) decide what needs age verification in the first place, and 2) decide who they will grant a digital ID to. The conflict of interest is inherent.
You have stated numerous times that children are being harmed and therefore need protection, but much like the governments pushing for age verification you have not provided any evidence to back up this claim.
Many of the resources you share from organizations like UNICEF and the Childrens Learning Institute promote the government and schools introducing better technology education and digital literacy programs. They do not propose direct intervention and censorship as a means to protect children from dangerous content.
The resource you shared from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Social Media and Youth Mental Health promotes technology companies making their products less addictive, and making strong privacy regulation so that privacy violations like age verification aren’t normalized. They note that “six-in-ten adolescents say they think they have little or no control over the personal information” being collected about them online, and mandatory ID checks will only strengthen this problem.
One source you shared notes that children of parents with disabilities feel more empowered and independent than their peers, and had higher self-esteem; it also notes that this has been a shift in recent years (they cite papers from 2015-2019 compared to challenges noted in papers from the 90s). It seems logical that this shift could be explained by technology and free access to information, so stunting that access could drag these children down considerably.
Some of the resources you shared address general parenting problems and do not touch on the internet, social media, or age verification at all.
The resources I have read, including many of the ones you shared yourself, indicate that if this is a problem it is not widespread, and it can be largely solved by providing better guidance and education to parents and children alike, without any need for direct government intervention.
At the same time, direct government intervention—in the form of age verification, chat control, etc.—has considerable downsides when it comes to freedom of expression and the freedom to access information. The downsides are so significant that even if children were being harmed to a much greater extent it still would not justify these solutions.
I am a big advocate for digital literacy training and a much, much, much better approach to technology education in general in the schools, and I think such curriculum changes would have a much more significant impact on children’s safety than the government stepping in as a psuedo-parent ever will. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the government is not interested in the best outcomes for children, but only for the outcome that they have the most control over.
I personally believe this is certainly not true, but even if it were this is an extremely uncompelling argument. Two wrongs don’t make a right and all.
Oh, the list that was created by George W. Bush following 9/11 alongside the PATRIOT Act and other completely unconstitutional programs and laws? The ACLU accurately predicted all of these problems since the inception of these programs.
This is the exact problem with granting the government extensive and broad powers. They will be abused.
What you are advocating for right now is basically the creation of another no-fly list, but for the government to ostracize “cyberbullies” on social media with a similar lack of due process and due diligence. If you get your way then you will just be complaining about a Democrat-controlled FCC cancelling a right-wing late night show 25 years from now.
It is our job and our responsibility to prevent the potential abuse of power regardless of who is in power now or what they claim they’re going to do with it.
We need to make a distinction between whether these businesses are refusing to serve certain people, or refusing to say certain things. One is discrimination, the other is legal.
A cake shop not offering their standard wedding cake service to a couple simply because they are gay is discriminatory, and the simple act of providing a good or service by a business is not in itself protected speech.
The reality of this particular case is that they refused to bake a cake that they would have baked for a straight couple, which is unacceptable. If it were a case where they were being asked to offer a brand new cake service out of the norm for their business, or actually publish some pro-LGBT speech, then they would actually be in the right to refuse, but that was not the case here.
For it to be libel there would actually have to be someone being defamed. Who is the subject of defamation in this scenario? It isn’t defaming Kirk to speculate about his killer, and it isn’t defaming the killer to call him MAGA. On the flip side, the examples @anon57441094 gave, and many on the right claiming that specifically Governor Tim Walz hired the person to kill Melissa Hortman 10 minutes away from where I am, are all far more likely to be considered defamatory statements.
Even in cases of defamation and libel though, the bar to clear before it becomes illegal is exceptionally high in the United States. There are very few examples of successful defamation cases (although to be fair the few that were successful are very high-profile).
Plus, I think @stunned832’s assessment that Kimmel didn’t even make a statement about the killer’s identity in the first place is accurate. He was pointing out that the killer has been variously and dubiously characterized by different right-wing outlets as having a very wide and inconsistent variety of beliefs, because they are reporting without having factual information.
Logically, of course “the MAGA gang” wouldn’t claim he’s one of their own, why would they? The real question is why they were instead claiming he was part of some other group without having evidence of those claims.