In fact, if these laws make the requisite infrastructure (ID cards that offer that functionality) a hard requirement then creating an anonymous web that nevertheless has age checks easier, not harder.
What you basically want is an ID card where you as the owner can decide what you want to share with the private business. And for age verification that’s basically just requirement fulfilled yes/no.
So if the law is well written then this could be an advantage, not a disadvantage. Preemptive cynicism isn’t helpful here.
Whereas if I upload my ID to a tech company (that potentially answers to both my own government and foreign governments, as well as having its own ad-related agenda) I am a bit less certain about what will happen to this data.
And if you're suggesting Digital ID (EUDI style); showing ID at the store doesn't share metadata of that purchase with the government.
Prescription drugs are different because those are tied to your name anyway, and that’s why medical information has a different protection standard.
As a parent of 2 I think it’s better to talk to your kids, check what they’re up to, and, you know, be involved in their lives. Also, as a former kid, if there’s something they want to do but you don’t want them to: they’ll do it. Better that they know they can trust you to say “I still want to do X” than have to do it in hiding and without your support if anything goes wrong.
So all Spanish social media users are currently anonymous? I do not think so.
any age identification done online is not anonymous
Meaning: these websites simply need to request 2 pieces of data: a boolean stating whether you are older than 16 or younger, and a UUID. Zero other pieces of identifying information. Where does the mass deanonymisation enter into this? What does it even mean in the context of using algorithmic social media whose entire business model is surveillance of its users?
How is it not deanonymisation when your tax ID is inextricably linked to your social media profile?
Via the UUID. Also via the fact that the authentication service sees what you're logging into, regardless of whether the social media site does or not.
This isn't complicated. It's obvious if you're not desperately trying not to think about it.
I’ve stopped using Facebook a long time ago, but started using a similar locally made social media app/site, which is based on logins tied indirectly to national ID. Holy crap it’s so much better. Only real people. No bots or scams. Even the ads are better. Actual relevant local businesses. And people hesitate before writing nasty comments. Not that I’m using it a lot, I’m still not a big social media guy, but having groups for the neighbourhood or town is nice for becoming aware of events and such happening nearby.
I still have the Facebook account for now. There’s a group or two I need to check in on sometimes. Every time I log in I get so confused why anyone would still use it.
Recent years changed that perception completely. It's a platform where russian oligarchs create discord in Europe cheaply (and the West in general) and American oligarchs profit from it.
I don't have any hopes left that the business will deliver us freedom of speech in any form. Next best bet is democratically elected government.
When you put on top of this how some things like youth suicides, youth grneral mental health decline, number of people killed in school shootings in US correlates with development of social media I will happily see it burn.
Once that’s done we should ban the over the 65+.
Banning advertising targeted at the user rather than the context
Enforcing Do Not Track
Enforcing GDPR (especially sites that use cookie banners)
Drawing that to its ultimate conclusion: people are very susceptible to being influenced and social media may well turn out to be a net negative.
To reiterate what I wrote above: We need to ban addictive dark patterns on ALL platforms for ALL ages.
... and force it first on Zuckerberg, Musk ... and Trump.
So they are taking half measures that are more problematic on different aspect like privacy.
Not to praise China, but it seems they seem to do doing better job against their big companies to prevent such situations (please don't pass the point here).
I think things would be much better if these companies is to be held accountable for their actions beyond the current fines that they just consider it now cost of doing business.
Banning them is in the right direction even at the cost of any deanonym. A dozen entities, both public and private, know us very well already. They know that eveyone watches porn, now they will know how offen.
As a non-user of social media (only have an anonymous Facebook account to check some hobby groups) this doesn't directly affect me but I'm starting to feel like a frog on a pot of what was tepid water and now it's starting to feel kinda hot.
How will they deal with mastodon? If I have an instance in my home server at home, do I need to check people reading my posts are over 16 or is the onus on the servers where they are logged in?
For the record, I'm totally in favour of banning social media for kids and, contrary to other people here, I think it can be done without deanonymising anyone. I just don't think it is possible. Ban facebook, x, and bluesky and tomorrow all the cool kids will be using facemagazine, y, and greensky.
It seems quite bizarre to ban it since the vast majority use it safely.
Social media is the double edge sword I avoided MySpace, Facebook etc entirely. But I can understand people finding communities online they can't access in their location.
Oh well. I'm sure those that want to will be able to bypass it, and I've also no doubt that social media at a population level is a net harm. Even if this feels like overreach.
What seems truly harmful is the 12month old who is handed a tablet with YouTube running constantly depriving their brain of the big early exposure to the real world.
I do hope it works out, though. I think Social Media is one of the main reasons for depression.
If we can only ban the bad stuff, great, but it's rarely that easy.
Typically what I call Social Media is akin to things such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Anything that has a personalized "feed" generated by an algorithm.
Old moderates forums had no personalized anything.
Incidentally, as much as I despise Reddit, this would exclude Reddit from being banned. Last time I used it, it didn't really have a personalized feed (unless things changed ever since).
I could subscribe to subreddits and see the activity on what I subscribed, but anyone with the same subscription list (fully controlled by the user) would see the same activity, so it was not a personalized feed per se.
HN, Reddit, PHPBB forums would be excluded. There's no personalization outside the user control on those as far as I am aware.
Last time I used Reddit, I could aee the activity on the boards I was subscribed to, but anyone with the same subscriptions would see the same activity. There's o dark pattern there.
And just to be clear, I absolutely despise Reddit. I don't even like HN all that much to be frank. I would be the last person that would try to protect Reddit. I am just being coherent with my thoughts on the matter.
Autism is a wide-ranging spectrum, I find the idea that I should be “kept away from the Internet” because I have (high-functioning) autism quite patronising. Maybe this is true for some people, but my point is that these social media ban ideas are too indiscriminate
I would agree that addictive platforms are harmful for children, and I haven’t looked into this law so maybe it does make a distinction, but any online communication (e.g. GitHub) is sometimes considered “social media”. A lot of people seem to exclude the platforms they like from what they count as “social media”, as they see social media as the evil thing they look down upon
My hope is that children being banned from the mega platforms would lead to a growth in less harmful online communities for folks who can benefit from it. But I don't know.
Ideologies are cultivated young.
(a) Social media operators choose to do nothing at all against coordinated influencing operations, unless the influencing goes against the interests of very specific countries and groups.
(b) US government most likely has unfettered access to social media data. As if this isn't bad enough, they will probably give them out to Palantir for "data integration" and under uncertain terms.
Social media is seen as a driver for people having opinions deemed a threat to the status quo. Western governments have been fighting a long battle to use these tools to control domestic influence and at times have probably thought they were winning, but recently things seem to be turn a bit.
"Think of the children" is obviously the oldest and most pathetic trick in their playbook. We know it's a bald faced lie because data and studies on social media harms on children has been coming out for well over a decade by now, and not a finger was lifted for years. So we know that is not the reason, and we know they are lying about the reason. Therefore we know the real reason is seen as unpopular with the electorate. And curbing foreign (including US government) influence and access to data is not unpopular anywhere.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187603412... [2] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
They will end up banning sites allowing purely anonymous comments. (This might include HN.) This is the consequence of the ambition that is already clearly anounced by the opposition leader Magdalena Andersson of the social democrats.
These anonymous comments are incidentally their current worst enemy. The are really good at amplifying stories that the 3 (three!) national news publishers (government/public service, Bonnier News, Schibsted) decide to ignore or deamplify for ideoleogical reasons.
And some of us think it doesn't go far enough. I would set limit to 18. Would solve lot more issues. Like make adult content fully allowable by default as everyone can automatically be considered to be an adult then.
Shock at how many people believe Palestinians are human got the ball rolling, but now its prepping for the fallout of the release of more and more Epstein files.
Of course it could just be law makers seeing one country do it and then going "wait, you can do that and people will go along with it???". I'm not sure if that's any better than a global conspiracy though.
"A bit less certain" is a really mild way of putting it. I'd be confident that whatever ID I upload to the Internet is going to be stored forever, shared with "partner" companies, linked with as much data about me as those partner companies can find, and then eventually leaked in a security breach, resulting in the company issuing a press release telling everyone they "Take Security Very Seriously."
Zero trust age verification means both sides don’t have to learn anything about each other beyond old enough yes/no. Should mean that.
I’m fine with age verification if it fulfills at least the same criteria that offline age verification does. When you show your ID card in a supermarket to buy alcohol or cigarettes or whatever then the government doesn’t learn anything about what you did and if the cashier doesn’t memorize and write down anything on the card the supermarket doesn’t learn anything about your identity. Here the digital solution can and should do better and close that theoretical deanonymization vector.
But yeah, that‘s the ideal to aspire to.
Well, it doesn't. Absolutely none of the systems people are putting into place, or suggesting putting into place, are actually zero trust. The ones that claim to be are "somewhat lower trust if you don't think hard about how to exploit them". Yes, we know in theory how to do zero trust. The reality of these mandates is that people can easily get de-anonymized to all kinds of actors who should't be able to identify them.
It's also a "solution" to a massively exaggerated problem, one that's not in any way specific to any given age group. But that's unrelated to the fact that nobody is, in practice, doing or planning to do anything privacy-preserving.
It's hardly zero-trust in that case.
Please stop spreading FUD when the actual implementations behind the government initiative are actually open source and have been designed to allow anonymous verification.
[0]: https://ageverification.dev/ [1]: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet
De jure?
https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/de-jure-or-de-iure.4...
The "authentication service" is the national id. The tax man already knows your name, address, date of birth, financial possessions, income, family members, etc etc. There is no further information, apart from which website you logged on and when. This quite literally the standard of Signal [1]. And this is of course assuming the worst from the national id implementation; any sensible law would require the id provider to delete all information as soon as the login is complete.
Which is the whole damned problem, obviously.
> This quite literally the standard of Signal [1].
Yes, Signal is weak in a similar way. Although there is a difference between having to set up a bunch of wiretapping to do traffic analysis, and having the information handed to you on a plate.
> And this is of course assuming the worst from the national id implementation; any sensible law would require the id provider to delete all information as soon as the login is complete.
Assumptions that laws will be followed are out of order. Yes, you have the laws. Yes, you punish violations. But you still deal with the fact that violations will happen.
"How X's new location feature exposed big US politics accounts" https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj38m11218xo
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/23/rightwing-in...
https://weaponizedspaces.substack.com/p/x-just-accidentally-...
or maybe VPN using Canadian secessionist from Thailand?
https://www.cp24.com/news/canada/2025/12/04/rage-or-real-exp...
For Europeans ID is not as big of a deal as losing democracy thru foreign influence manipulating public opinion on a massive scale.
It’s simple really: zero trust age verification should be a strict requirement of any such law and anything else illegal for age verification.
That to me is what has to happen and it’s important to me. That’s my perspective on this – not that‘s never going to happen anyway, so no point in trying to.
Because I really can't recall anything outrageous, and surely nothing on the level of surveilance existing in the UK.
If you set up a system of ID identification linked to your real ID and IP, Hacienda (and the police, and eventually private companies) will be able to backtrack.
The current PM's rother, wife and half of his cabinet are involved in corruption scandals linked to COVID funds given to companies that bribed people. This is the government that will implement such efforts. Would you be able to trust them ?
That’s bold and inaccurate. What you shouldn’t trust is El Corte Inglés, who would code another shitty platform for the Spanish institutions.
Unsealed Court Documents Show Teen Addiction Was Big Tech's "Top Priority" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902512 - February 2026
TikTok’s ‘Addictive Design’ Found to Be Illegal in Europe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911869 - February 2026