Age verification becomes more common. Australia, France, etc. introduce such laws to ban children below 15 years from social media platforms, to protect them.
Will these laws also be relevant to fediverse/lemmy specifically?
Personally I think these laws will focus on the big platforms at first (facebook/meta, youtube, discord, instagramm), which will force younger users with technical skills onto smaller and niche sites. Over time focus on this question will increase for the fediverse.
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When Facebook and/or Instagram asks for ID (something that have been taking place for years, I myself had to send my driver’s license alongside a selfie holding it when I used to use Facebook several years ago), it needs to be manually checked by Facebook staff. The account stays in a “locked state” before the ID is approved, so it’s essentially a “need-to-apply” situation. I also remember seeing TikTok asking for people’s IDs, way before this age checking thing (part of the process to monetize a TikTok channel), with the account being locked out of the monetization sections of the website before the ID is approved. Google does the same for Youtube and other parts that involve money (such as Google Cloud Platform and Google Ads so to embed ads into a website).
Indeed the number of applications is sheer, but the amount of admins/staff they have at their disposal to check all those applications is also bigger than most Fediverse instances could dream of.
Then there’s also AI (corp-grade, not the average ChatGPT we people have access to) automatizing the flow, not as the ultimate approval, but more as a filtering mechanism (discarding selfies/ID photos that are clearly not a selfie/ID) so the staff has to check just what seems like legit selfies/IDs photos.
Ok so I stand corrected. I guess it is possible but it just requires a lot of man power