Okay you are ready to take a stand for freedom!
You are going to use an OS that isn’t going to bend the knee and comply with age verification laws. I solute you, comrade!
Here are the likely consequences of your choice:
The Feds aren’t coming after you. You aren’t going to be out on a watch list.
What will likely happen is that if you try to log into your Facebook account you will get a message that says “Your Operating System is not currently supported. Your user experience will be limited to Groups labeled “Everyone”.”
That’s basically it. Your personal user experience will be limited to “kid friendly” areas of the Internet. (Same with apps and games.)
That’s the real driver of these laws. Facebook and other app producers know that the days where they can just shrug off child predators using their products is coming to and end. Regardless of your opinion on age verification is as a solution, child predators are a real world problem and it’s not just the parents fault. The platforms have some responsibility too.
Which is exactly what Facebook and the others specifically don’t want -responsibility for their own platforms. That’s why they are pushing for these laws that off load their responsibility onto the OS makers. Then they can just say “Oh, we don’t have any responsibility for this child being abused in our platform. We asked the OS what the user’s age was and the OS reported 18+. What else could we have done?”
So, that’s the consequence if you choose to use an OS that refuses to comply. You’ll just be relegated to the kid friendly version of website, games, and applications.
(On the other hand, if your OS chooses to falsely report to a website or an app an age for a child that is abused, then the OS should also be held responsible. But at that point you can go ahead and blame the parents too for letting their child use an OS that isn’t safe for them to use.)
@1dalm@lemmy.today @linux@lemmy.ml
The country I exist in (Brazil) passed an age verification law “Lei 15.211/2025” which, to a certain extent, is even more dystopian than Californian one. Because, at least, the Californian “allows” self-declared age, while Brazilian don’t. This means systems must employ mechanisms such as ID’ing, age estimation by selfie or behavioral analysis.
When UK passed their law, threatening and, to certain extent, effectively sanctioning even even non-UK “disobedient”, something happened: many sites and platforms started to geoblock UK. Many Fediverse instances geoblocked UK.
Brazil has a similar history of legal outreach, we had court decisions trying to enforce and rule over non-Brazilians. Something similar is expected to happen when it comes to this age verification law. So I’d expect a similar widespread reaction of sites and platforms geoblocking Brazil.
In fact, it’s already happening: in mere two days since the law became effective, MidnightBSD geoblocked Brazil, Arch Linux 32-bits (not the mainstream Arch Linux) geoblocked Brazil, and others are expected to follow, both distros and websites as well. Including the Fediverse.
This kind of law will hardly stay in the countries and USian states where they’ve been implemented. It’ll spread, because the narrative it’s wrapped with is too alluring and compelling (from emotional appealing “Think about the children!?” all the way to the strawman “If you disagree with age checking laws, you’re literally a pdf file”). So expect more countries embracing this dystopia. This means fewer and fewer places where it’s not a thing. It reeks of a coordinated agenda, especially because it achieves similar things that intended by projects such as Chat Control, PIPA/SOPA, among many other previous authoritarian attempts. The authoritarian found the correct recipe: wrap 1984 in a cute “children protection” wrapping, rinse and repeat.
Therefore, some Fediverse instances, especially those sitting under the hurricane’s eye (e.g. Lemmy Brasil) may end up implementing age checking, or stopping altogether if they can’t afford the additional costs of age checking (it won’t be a free thing for platforms to do; a trivial cost for giants such as Meta, Google and Microsoft, but unfeasible for, say, Fediverse instances and FOSS projects).
Now, regarding the “kid friendly” limitation: if the Web gets limited to “non-adult content”… what’s “adult content” to begin with? Is it just porn, or it may end up covering several non-pornographic things?
It turns out, and here I’m risking getting too off-topic, many things would end up beneath this purposefully vague terminology “adult content”, content from many vulnerable groups: LGBTQIA+ (check out what happened during the recent itch.io and Steam crusade against “adult games”), women, pagans/occultists, political dissidents and whistleblowers, among others. This is what age verification laws are about: silencing everything deemed non-normative.
It is a coordinated agenda, just not a secret one like people want to think. It’s being pushed by Meta and a string of popular app makers and games to avoid having to be responsible for their own platforms.
That’s a strange argument to me. That’s exactly what Meta is intending to prevent from having to do by pushing these laws. If countries and states pass laws like the California law specifically, then no fediverse instance will need to worry about age verification. They just ask the user’s browser to ask the OS. California’s version of the law would really help small businesses and small developers, because it puts all the child protection responsibility onto the OS.
In this case, “kid friendly content” becomes “any content that the website wants to be responsible and liable for letting users that report being <18 have access to”.