KOSA

Please note that this transcript is automatically generated and contains many inaccuracies

Disclaimer

Flora: The zoo than Thou podcast contains adult themes and language and is intended for a mature audience. So if you never had to crack your mom’s pin to unlock the good TV channels, go watch has been in your secret discord instead.

Theme Song

Kynophile: Hey, what can I say?

You’ve got me howlin’ at the moon!

Whoa, don’t you know that love is wild when you’re a zoo?

We’re Zooier Than Thou!

Oh yeah!

Intro/Emails

Aqua: Greetings fellow zoos and welcome to another FIC episode of Zoo Than Thou. I’m Aqua Your round blue Wi Fu edition, ocean themed scent module

Mike: And I’m Mike the dog, and my scent isn’t themed,

Aqua: and we’ll be your host for this episode.

Mike: ocean themed scent module

Aqua: Only true gamers will understand that joke.

Mike: does it? Uh. Do you smell nice?

Aqua: Debatable. Buy me dinner and maybe you’ll find out.

Mike: Ooh, a friendly offer. Well, I don’t think we’re allowed to be friends right now. We’re supposed to be fighting and we can’t be seen together.

Aqua: Yeah, yeah. Sorry, Canada.

Mike: Maybe a rain check. Then, uh, what’s in the mail pile?

Aqua: A whole stack, but this episode we’re only doing a couple because one of them is a super long boy and it has an important postscript.

Mike: Let’s read the other ones first, then.

Aqua: My thoughts exactly. Our first email is from Kma who says, enjoying my vacation sunglasses face emoji. Kma writes, hi Zu crew. I’m currently on vacation, catching up on episodes.

I think my mail got lost in the wash a year or so back with the contact form issues. I don’t remember most of what I said, but it was some highly excited rambling. What I do remember amounted to expressing my obsession with Fully Cooley as Toggle had mentioned, enjoying it in one episode and asking some questions.

The questions I remember when something like, can aromantic zoos exist? Do you consider them to be simply fetishists in the same category as those who watch zoo pornography because they consider it degrading. Thanks for the podcast. It’s been a comforting and thoughtful. Listen, you’re free to use my email on the show if you find space for it, and I sent a separate email for the saw one. ritual. I’d love to meet you all someday, and if I can be less of a loner and use my zoo accounts more LOL. All the best to you.

And your animal loves Kalama.

Mike: Wow.

Aqua: Yeah. That’s sweet.

Mike: Vacations are good.

Aqua: Yeah, I listen to podcasts in the car and when I travel, so I get it. It’s nice to have like long stretches of uninterrupted time.

Mike: Yeah, I tend to get my interrupted uninterrupted time. I get, I get interrupted time in snatches,

Aqua: Yeah, I know that too. too real. But to answer your question, Kalama, yes. aromantic zoos absolutely do exist. I know several. and for some others, we think, zoophilia might be aromantic, in the beginning.

and then the romantic element might develop later. But if it never does, that’s fine too.

Mike: Yeah.

Aqua: when we say that somebody is a fetishist, , sometimes we say best deal list. there’s sort of an understanding among zoos that, fetishists and vestus are not at all concerned with the wellbeing or the feelings of the animal that they might be involved with.

They’re really just sex objects and that’s not how we operate. So, if you’re aromantic, that doesn’t mean that you can’t have really deep and lasting and. Important relationships with other beings. it just means that there’s no romantic element to them, that sounds a lot like a, really deep platonic friendship to me. We talked about this last episode, season seven, episode one. Zoo Sexuality is a continuum. it’s not like you’re a zoo or you’re not a zoo, or you’re exclusively attracted to just a certain kind of animal or not at all.

we think that most people are in the middle somewhere. and it’s, like a separate axis from. your human sexuality, if you experience that at all. so it’s not one or the other.

Mike: Yeah, there’s a lot of overlapping, animal interest in this community. Sometimes you see people who, want to work with other animals, but no other attachments to them, and that’s harder to pin down. Right? And they’ll probably have an easier time of things if they’re not using the zoo label.

But identity is like a fun thing, right?

Aqua: Yeah. If a label helps you. Figure out your identity, that’s fine. You can use a label as long as it makes sense to you. But, it could be that on your Zeus side that your sexuality is different than it is with humans. that’s also pretty common. So, don’t feel like just because.

With other humans, you are a romantic that the same must be true for animals. It may not be.

Mike: And besides the regular definition of zoo is people sexually attracted to animals. So there’s no question about whether people can count themselves as zoos because of the romantic aspect.

Aqua: Yeah. The other thing I hear sometimes that I don’t like is, if you discover your zuo sexuality because of a sexual attraction first, and there was no romantic element. Already then, like somehow you fail this purity test. or like, you don’t have the animal’s best interests at heart. and we just don’t see that happening.

Mike: Yeah.

That question of whether you care about the animals is completely separate, really.

Aqua: Right. Yeah. So, Stay tuned, I guess. I’m pretty sure that’s gonna come up in research at some point.

Mike: Yeah. Oh, it’s starting to,

Aqua: Thanks for riding in. Come dama. Enjoy the rest of your vacation. Don’t glue yourself to a computer screen.

Mike: And now one from a wild blueberry wolf just saying hi. A wild blueberry wolf says, hi. I love your show. You guys are the reason I came out as a zoo to friends I know are also zoo. Love y’all so much. Stay safe.

Uh, thank you. Wild blueberry wolf.

sometimes you just want these little friendly messages. It’s nice. I.

Aqua: Yeah, it does help. You know, we get all kinds of feedback. Most of it’s positive, but we like all of them short messages, you know, just checking in, saying hi, doing a little vibe check. That’s awesome. if you’ve got more to say, absolutely.

Mike: Yeah, we got a lot of these emails, so we don’t usually read them all out on the show, but we appreciate them all the same.

And now the long friend, this one is from not in My Right Mind. That’s not of course of the K

Aqua: Of course.

Mike: Not in my right. Mind. Writes, bursting with Joy, some Zoey updates since my last message. Hello, toggle and the rest of the zoo team. It’s been months since I heard your response to my concerns and months more since I actually sent that same message.

First off, I wanted to thank you for taking the time to respond and help me in my worries. When I first reached out, I felt very confused, helpless, and alone In this aspect of my identity. I really didn’t know what to do other than to reach out and hope with all my heart. I wouldn’t be dismissed or have my fears confirmed to me.

You have no idea how conflicting yet relieved I was to hear that my personal concerns aligned primarily with others’ experiences in the asexual spectrum. Relief from knowing that I was accepted as an Eggo and not needing to be anything more if I wasn’t, but conflicted from realizing that those worries were kind of dumb to focus on in the first place.

that probably seems disparaging, but I realized in my rush to categorize and minimize me sexuality, I completely divorced it from the other important aspects of myself that could have given me better insight if I’d only allowed them to, such as being theon, being a polytheist, being on the arrow, a spectrum for humans as well.

Since hearing your response, I’ve been able to rest easier and more thoroughly reflect on all aspects of my identity Bringing everything together. . I’m glad to say that I actually have some thoughts and an exciting update to share that I hope will bring you and others.

As much joy as it has brought me, this is gonna be long. Feel free to leave out a breakup. Parts of this that make it too difficult to consume through the podcast. Now we’re gonna have the whole thing in the air.

Aqua: All right, my turn. Beginning with being theon, I know the zoo community isn’t exactly a stranger to folks being an animal on the inside. I don’t know the percentage of zoos who are also e theon, but I know it’s not zero. Even just from listening to your podcast and zoo and me, when I have the time, it took a long time to realize what I am and what it really means to me internally.

But recognizing where my soul lies has given me more acceptance and my attraction over time. While I only identify as one of the species I’m attracted to and unfortunately will never be able to engage with them. It helped to remind myself that animals in the wild have sex with other species relatively often.

Humans are the only ones who make a fuss about it. Sure. It might just be outta convenience for them instead of attraction, but the act itself happening means it’s still quite literally natural in the grand scheme of things. That wasn’t my main concern though, as I’ve realized. think what primarily tripped me up in this aspect is that my own assumptions conflicted with letting me figure out my emotions towards animals with humans.

I’m on the ROA spectrum. There’s still some love and attraction there, but it’s pretty weak and fairly specific. The attraction, I feel, doesn’t resonate with others as commercially recognized love. I had accepted this about myself a long time ago, but when I realized I was therion, well, I guess I had assumed that it was the missing link for my attraction. Of course, I was Arrow Ace, who I truly loved and craved were animals, but then when I didn’t get that spark, I expected with them either. I basically just felt like a fraud in that I simply lacked the feelings I was supposed to be born with. It was extremely disheartening and I felt very empty, but I’ve come to realize that me being RO Ace is just part of who I am for all creatures.

Sure, my love and my attraction feel different than it does for a lot of other people, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real or means any less. Besides animals really won’t care whether I think of them as boyfriend in the same way as people do. Or if I consider them a mate in the way animals do, or some odd combination, they just want the connection and the attention.

It’s all the same to them as long as everyone’s happy. That’s what’s really important and I’ve learned to embrace that. I can’t wait to see how uniquely my companionships with both people and animals develop in the future.

Mike: The second concern I hadn’t really articulated to myself was spiritual guilt. While I’m not of any Abrahamic faiths, neither is anyone in my family, I realized that didn’t stop me from absorbing some secondhand Christian concerns from my soul in the event that I do the wrong thing. Thanks society. Being a polytheist of various pagan paths. I don’t really believe in hell at all compared to Christianity. A majority of other faiths don’t have a punishment style afterlife in them whatsoever. Or at least if there is a bad ending one can get in life. It’s that you simply stop existing. So I was genuinely surprised when I reflected on it and realized that I still held onto worry and fear.

That I would upset various deities now or in the event that I die. By allowing myself to explore this attraction, I was anticipating some cosmic retribution for disobeying society’s rules about love and sex and put myself in a spiritual spiral over it. The episode he published about zoo sexuality and different religions helped me a lot in this aspect.

but when I first listened to it, I had written it off as not something I needed to be concerned about. I don’t have a hell. Why should I worry about what God thinks or any bigoted religious folks for that matter. They already spew hate about me being trans to them. This is probably on par all things considered, but the fear was still there, internalized until I took time to really reflect on it and what I believed about the others who had followed these paths before me.

If the Gods would really abandon someone for doing this, then does that mean every person who engaged with an animal back in ancient Greece was also abandoned, even though it wasn’t illegal, even though they had myth after myth about Gods themselves coming down in the form of an animal and sleeping with humans, essentially implying that the union of animal and human was defined, that it could even be sacred, highly unlikely.

What about those in ancient Rome, Scandinavia, Egypt, in the time of the Saxons, all of them had at least one myth of animal human relations. Most of them, divine and union. At the very least, they all had agricultural roots at one time or another. And even basic assumptions on modern day, what happens on the farm stays on the farm sometimes, every single day on the farm, if you catch my drift.

Animals have always been animals, and humans will always act human while ultimately being animals. Why would it be different now? As far as I’m concerned, I’m just a zoo. Im mortal, and what I want to fill my short life with is love, happiness, and inner peace, and I wanna give those things to others in my life, including the animals in my life,

Aqua: my last update is the closest to my heart. In my first message, I neglected to mention that I have a committed human partner of many years going on almost a decade now, who I had been hiding this part of myself from. They’ve been with me through so many realizations and changes throughout my life, like realizing I’m trans and non-binary, discovering I’m most definitely autistic and so are they. and starting hormone replacement therapy. They’ve been the one I go to about everything big and small. But this was the first thing that I felt I truly couldn’t share, even with my soulmate. . I think that made my struggle all the worse. Feeling like even the one I trusted with my life, body and mind wouldn’t understand or accept me if I shared it on forums, their story after story about couples breaking up or someone even getting outed for revealing this to their partner and I was truly afraid. Now, I’m extremely excited to share that my partner not only has been told and accepts me, but is now my fiance And revealed that they are also a zoo.

Mike: Uh.

Aqua: When I finally got the courage to tell them I was absolutely a mess, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I was waiting and waiting For the moment.

I’d hear they’re disgust and just want to break down crying. That moment never came. They comforted me and let me know they love me and that. This changes nothing but gives us more opportunities in our life together. They told me that they’re also a zoo, Though to a more casual degree than myself, like when human guys say that they’re gay or straight, but they’re not not interested in having a fun time with someone of the sex, they aren’t inclined towards should the opportunity arise and the person’s got a good personality. We had a long conversation that night. We both still kept things kind of vague for the time being. They could tell I was emotionally exhausted after so much stress in such a short period of time. But we did talk about the past. It felt like we were holding a mirror up to each other again and again.

We’d remember something from our past, locked away from being ignored for so long and it was like we shined a light on it for both of us. I realized I’d even accidentally lied in my first message To zoo Earth than thou. Evidently I was a zoo, much, much younger than I had previously recalled, but I was repressing those memories out of stress and fear.

The earliest I had ever been interested in animals sexually was closer to eight or 10 years old with physical attraction towards him coming around During the onset of puberty, far before I experienced any physical attraction to a human.

With my partner. We spoke that night about watching nature documentaries growing up and feeling like we were meant to be there instead of locked up inside, feeling confused and restricted by all the rules that humans put on public decency and expected human behavior. Even the porn that we ended up searching for when we realized our attractions farm animal breeding slash mating videos were a popular pick for both of us. I couldn’t stop laughing when they told me how recently they had still been looking up such things. Apparently at our shared college, they got banned from using the computer lab because that’s where they had the best access to the internet at the time. Obviously a dumb and risky decision, but we couldn’t stop laughing about how bold they were and really how little they got in trouble for doing such a thing. The laughter just kept going. When I realized with a hilarious time delay, I might add that my partner had even casually mentioned being attracted to the exact same species as I am.

sure, dogs and horses are pretty common for the zoo community, but for both of us to be interested in bears of all things, what the fuck are those odds? Obviously a pipe dream from the danger factor, but still our soulmate bond just keeps getting uncannily higher.

Mike: I have never been happier in my life than I am right now. I’m transitioning to be the real me. I’m trying to power through a bachelor’s degree and I have the queer platonic love of my life beside me, maybe with another partner by my side in the future.

For all the zoos out there thinking that they’ll never be able to have a fulfilling life, or that their opportunities have been limited by their attraction to animals, I just want you to know that things can and will get better as you come to understand yourself. Not every path and choice is easy. The risks are still real and can feel overpowering most days, but as long as you take your time to know yourself and proceed carefully, you’ll be able to find the path you need to be happy and fulfilled while not shunning your true self progress is slow, internally and externally, but it’s still being made best wishes and many thanks. Not in my right Mind now. Proudly unperturbed about the K.

Aqua: Awesome. Oh, it sounds like you’re killing it. I’m so happy for you.

yeah. Wow.

Mike: like best case scenario

Aqua: Yeah, that’s a lot. I heard a lot of our message read back to us. and it’s so wonderful to hear it working out for other zoos out there who think it’s impossible. It’s not, it’s difficult. It’s not impossible. so yeah.

Um, I’m very happy to add you to the list of, uh, success stories. Not in my right mind, and I hope it continues for you.

Mike: Yeah, it’s good to hear you doing well Carving a path for the future.

Aqua: And as if all that weren’t enough, not in my right mind continued, with a number of postscripts, two of which we’re gonna save. And, the third one, is actually the topic for today’s episode. So here’s that little bit that they wrote. What are your thoughts about COSA possibly going through and the effect it may have on modern or newer zoos who are unfamiliar with the old ways to find each other? For the old guard who have been around before, forums were the place to be. This might just be disappointing and inconvenient, but for younger zoos, this is likely the only way they’ve ever known to connect with each other.

If COSA goes through as it’s been proposed with a requirement to upload your ID in order to browse the internet, I have no doubt that a large number of zoos will suddenly drop off the face of the internet to maintain safe anonymity if worse comes to worse. What advice would you give younger zoos. Ways to safely find others outside of internet spaces under the assumption that the internet would now be entirely out of question for them.

I know furry conventions are a popular option, but they’re also expensive. And talking about zoo to the wrong, furry can spell just as much trouble in that scenario. Okay, so we’re gonna take the next 90 minutes to unpack this. there’s a, few things right away. , I. One, the internet is not gonna cease to exist.

the manner in which we interact with other people might change,

Mike: cosa, if you haven’t heard about it, is the Kids Online Safety Act. It’s a bill that’s being deliberated on right now. I.

Aqua: , so it hasn’t been introduced in the hundred and 19th Congress, but it was in the hundred 18th and the one before that. With pretty good support and a lot of co-sponsors. And I think the farthest they got with it was, uh, passing the Senate, but it never made it to the house before the term ended.

So now it has to start over again, but we have every reason to expect it will. But anyway, when we read this note at the end about cosa, we knew we had our topic for this month. This is really, really good timing because, it is. Certainly going to be reintroduced and it’s just one of many bills that all aim to accomplish the same thing.

Mike: So today we’re gonna be talking about age verification.

Aqua: Yep. So cosa, the Kids Online Safety Act is the latest and a long sad list of bills introduced to the United States Congress over the last few decades. That attempts to legislate away all of our problems, making sure the internet is a safe place for children, and it’s a mess. So get out your clutch and pearls and let’s talk about what it means for all of us.

It’s important, and it’s not the law of the land just yet, but we’re running out of time to stop it.

So stay tuned for more zoo than thou right after this.

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Topic

Aqua: Welcome back, fellow Zoos, Aqua and Mike back with you. And now we’re joined by Taro

Tarro: Hello.

Aqua: who is gonna help us talk through COSA and, more broadly age verification bills, or legislation in the United States and around the world but hopefully by the end we will be able to answer some of not in my right mind’s questions that they wrote in with.

Mike: Mm-hmm.

Aqua: Sorry if I make you feel old. but 1995 was 30 years ago. And, back then, hypertext had only been a thing for a couple of years. web browsers really hadn’t figured out any features that we would really think are all that remarkable.

Remember

Mike: wow.

Tarro: Was that still dial up?

Aqua: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Tarro: Wow.

Mike: When did DSL become a thing?

Aqua: DSL existed, but, good luck

subscribing to It

Mike: it was a slow ramp up.

Aqua: I mean, in 19 93, 94, 95, it was all dial up.

The internet was brand new, at least, any kind of internet that resembles what we’re used to we had just figured out bookmarks.

Peppers Farm remembers that?

the graphical web was a really teeny, tiny thing. It was barely more than, a research project and early adopters and hobbyists. but all that was gonna change really soon because a.com boom was right around the corner and it was about to turn the internet into, a commerce tool. And we were all very excited about that. there were a lot of search engines and they were just trying their best to work at all.

And, you know, they weren’t doing stupid shit like telling you to eat rocks for breakfast. That’s today’s problems.

Tarro: I will say Glue on Pizza was a pretty great shout out.

Mike: Oh

Aqua: yeah, that was pretty good. Technically not wrong, just not the right, not the best thing. Like, if you use school glue, you’re gonna be fine.

Mike: just don’t leave your glue pizza in the hotel hallway.

Aqua: what else do we have around then? V chipps. Anybody remember those?

Mike: I don’t think we ever

Aqua: Am I the only one?

Mike: we were

good kids, so we didn’t have anything set up.

Aqua: Oh, okay. So they weren’t effective anyway. Yeah. For those who don’t know, V Chipps were, a little, piece of, hardware that was mandated, , to be included in every TV by the year 2000. It worked basically the same way as, , closed captions did. So, , program material would have a rating assignment, , as part of the broadcast, and the v chipp could have a pin. It’s like a four digit pin that you could set that would block whatever unless you entered the pin. It was optional. but that was it. That’s where we were. v Chipps were supposed to solve all our problems, protecting children from violence on TV and music videos. It was a wild time. , But that was then and, the tech is completely different today. The internet is unrecognizable. It’s basically a hellscape. But clutching pearls is still pretty fashionable. I don’t think that’s ever gonna go outta style, sadly. and in the last couple of decades, we’ve had a couple of really big efforts, to try to, solve this intractable problem of safeguarding children from harm, while not inconveniencing adults or violating their constitutional rights, at least in the United States.

So, as of recording this, we’re in a particularly dangerous moment, in time for civil liberties and for natural rights. whether or not you’re in the United States, this will eventually affect you. And this is not a new problem. This one has been in the works for the entire time the internet has existed.

Aqua: any major paradigm shift in technology will probably have a moral panic attached to it as people find new ways to use it or abuse it, that, its inventors could never have imagined, and then we have to respond to it somehow.

So at the root of all of this is age verification.

But as more of our lives end up, in some sort of electronic space, there is a practical need to know something about who somebody is online at least some of the time. And that I think that’s inescapable. and whatever solution we come up with has to respect the rights of adults and kids alike because kids have rights, adults have responsibilities.

It has to help parents and legal guardians, , in their duty of care, , to those children. , and it needs to be fast and reliable and secure and hard to abuse by anybody. And it’s gotta be super easy to do or nobody’s gonna bother. So like, good luck,

Yeah.

It’s not happening at, at least not well.

Tarro: Are you saying that, are you 18? Yes. No. Has not been working out

Mike: It works for me. I just hit yes.

Aqua: I think the only time I’ve said no is outta curiosity

Tarro: Uhhuh?

Mike: I have

accidentally pressed it once.

Aqua: yeah. And then you had to learn how to clear your cookies or something, right? So you could actually do the thing you wanted to. Yeah.

Mike: I thought I was locked out. It taught me useful skills.

Aqua: Yeah. But , I don’t think anybody really expected that to work. I think that was just a legal obligation. we have a website. It’s meant for adults. I don’t know. We’re selling alcohol, we’ve got pictures of titties, whatever it is. we have to at least acknowledge that this is an adult oriented site.

And if you’re not an adult, you should leave. But that was never gonna work, right? Because age fraud is like the easiest thing you could possibly engage in if all you have to do is say yes, and , you don’t have to prove it.

so we have this really big, difficult problem to solve, and it’s already hard enough.

Aqua: and now throw in politics, right? Because some of the competing interests here, they come from bigoted groups or malicious zealots, or. People who think certain other people shouldn’t have rights or exist at all. and oh, by the way, if you call them on their bullshit or you disagree with them, they will try to ruin your career by forcing you to publicly say no to something that protects children. there’s not a lot of politicians who are willing to do this, so it’s really easy for well-meaning legislation, to get rammed through because, criticizing it, becomes really toxic or, it risks your career or your profession or you just don’t wanna be seen being that person.

Mike: Yeah.

Tarro: even outside of politics, think of the children has been a very pervasive argument for basically ever, because as soon as you frame something around, oh, you don’t want to protect kids, suddenly you’re the bad guy every time.

Mike: Mm-hmm.

Aqua: So, anyway, that’s, that’s where I think we should start. all of this. Centers around age verification. but, we’ll talk about why we need it, what it is, what it should be if we have to have it, and why COSA and all the other bills before it are probably not gonna get the job done.

And we still have time to stop cosa, but, we’re running out of it.

Mike: Yeah. So there’s been a whole lot of bills since 2000, I guess.

Aqua: Yeah. So I can think of, , two big ones before COSA happened. The first one is Kapa. and, I think that one was the Children Online Privacy Protection Act. That one’s old.

Tarro: Kapa was 1998, and then came into effect in, the year 2000, which is, uh, kind of cool because it’s celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Shout out. it, first became, a, a sort of real conversation with an FTC investigation into a site called Kids com, which was like a, virtual world for eight to 14 year olds. that. Generally was pretty shady around the kind of practices that it was putting into place. and what the law expected from different sites was to limit the data collection about people under 13 and, require more specific sort of disclosures within their privacy policies. it also was the thing that kicked off the idea of parents needing to consent to what their children were doing online as well as informing parents of the different privacy risks that their kids might be exposed to on different websites. which I’m sure feels very strange looking at this from the modern day, but there was very much a time where, you you were growing up in the right age, the internet was such a wild west kind of place and parents had no idea what, the growing capabilities of the technology were. And, , most of these sites didn’t even really have privacy policies and all the different like TOS you’ve gotta click through. , and while a lot of that is like legalese to get the website out of trouble at the same time, those do have purposes and it is from laws trying to establish more of a structure around the web. So the act generally applied to websites and online services that, operated for commercial purposes that were either directed towards children under 13 or have, knowledge that children under 13 are providing information to the site online. there was a carve out generally for, well-recognized nonprofit organizations.

Aqua: So that would be like Merriam-Webster for, Wikipedia, encyclopedia websites, Public broadcasting. . I do know some, under 13, who would’ve been hanging out reading the encyclopedia watching, Sesame Street or something.

Mike: Oh man. We had Britannica,

Tarro: Fancy. Wow.

Aqua: Yeah. I definitely remember a day when, a lot of websites, Suddenly had privacy policies when there just wasn’t one and it felt a little shoehorned in, right? Because it’s just some hobbyist project site with a spinning wireframe skull

Tarro: you said this episode might make people feel old, but you guys make me feel young every time you bring up some weird internet thing I’ve never heard of before, so I appreciate that.

Mike: Um

Aqua: Uh, you’re in for a treat someday.

Mike: hmm.

Tarro: One of the things that I think is really important to take away from Kapa looking towards the future of all this topic is that

the bill carved out, the fact that kids under 13 can disclose personally identifying information with, parental permission. But most sites realized that was gonna be a tricky sort of. tight walk and it was gonna be a lot of effort maintaining that. And so they decided,

screw it. Anyone under 13 just can’t use the site., Nowadays when you see 13 as a, starting point for most

TOS as to how old do you have to be to use websites, it’s important to remember that that’s specifically because COPPA said anyone under 13.

There needs to be more rules and most companies just don’t want to care about the effort.

Aqua: Yeah. I mean, if you had a website like a game site or your Hasbro or Nickelodeon yeah, you’re big enough. You have the resources and the time and the expertise to design your site, and your legal policies to make sure that you’re complying with coppa.

and, you also have the resources to defend against any lawsuits that come your way anyway. But, most websites at the time didn’t. And, and that was one of the criticisms was that, the remedies available were monetary fines. and some of them were, quite huge.

Like it was in the tens of thousands per. Incident, but it scaled up super quickly.

Mike: there were only a few weren’t there.

Aqua: Oh, there have been dozens. most of them have been pretty small, but like the big ones, $5.7 million against by Dance. and that was late. That was in 2019. and that was for allowing kids under 13 to sign up parental consent. and this was before by Dance’s app was called TikTok.

Mike: Wow.

Aqua: Yeah. but part of the agreement, was this fine And then TikTok got a kid’s only mode. I have no idea if anybody uses it, but it’s supposed to be there.

Tarro: I can’t personally say I’ve ever tried out kids. Only TikTok, but I’m sure it’s great.

Aqua: if it’s, half as bad as YouTube kids, then it’s not gonna make any

Mike: Oh my God.

Aqua: Uh, interestingly, this is one of the only times that Kapa was enforced internationally. is not written in a way that you would expect. It has international scope, but, this time, the FTC succeeded,

Mike: right.

Aqua: and that’s not anywhere close to the largest fine.

By the way. We’ve got some others on this list here. $170 million against YouTube for targeted advertising, for, kids under 13. very much not allowed under coppa. and that one was also, pretty controversial because the settlement requires, creators on YouTube to mark their channels, videos as child oriented.

and then of course, YouTube will try to enforce that with automated screening.

Mike: Yeah, I’ve heard about all that happening.

Aqua: yeah, it’s a real pain in the ass when a video gets marked as child oriented, , or it gets taken down or demonetized because, a lot of these channels, they’re not making a lot of money or they can’t absorb a loss, of like more than one video.

But the bigger issue is, , the settlement also includes liability for creators. , I don’t think that the FTC has ever issued a fine against a creator, but it is possible. , if there is a video found to violate, , kapa requirements, it’s not just YouTube that is at legal risk here it is the person who made it, and that can sink a channel.

Tarro: Yeah,

it would have to be pretty egregious from a like channel perspective, considering that the law definitely targets platforms more so. But

the,

carve out is definitely still there.

Mike: if the video itself had targeted advertising or something weird like that, I don’t know what else, what could they, the video itself have in it?

Aqua: so it also concerns like the age appropriateness of the content. There is this whole sliding scale that the FTC established for it, where they consider all of these different factors, to decide whether or not, a piece of media violates the rules. like it would be a really big deal if, like a, children’s YouTube web series or something.

suddenly had adult content in the middle of an episode, or, maybe if one of the bigger creators, went on like a, wildly racist tangent or something while playing a video game. like those would be really big examples that would get noticed.

And then there’s the, biggest fine, I think to date, ready for this 275 million against Epic Games. Yep. for the same illegal, usage and data collection strategy, against miners. For targeted advertising. And on top of that, making it really difficult for parents to get that information deleted.

Mike: oh.

Aqua: But of course, here’s the question. coppa, whoever crafted the legislation might’ve meant, well, and this might be a real problem that we need to solve, but was it ever effective? No. Nope. Never was. I lived through it. I was already an adult, So this gets back to, the age gate. on a website’s landing page, you know, you must be 18 or over or 21 or over enter a birth date. but there’s no proof there. You just put in whatever you want.

sometimes there isn’t even like a, a date box to fill out. You just say yes or no, and that’s the end of it.

Mike: It, it’s a warning if

people are being really nice about it.

Tarro: Mm-hmm.

Aqua: Yeah. That’s all it is. in fact, I’ve seen some labeled as warnings where we’re like, Hey, this is an adult website.

You should leave if you’re not into that. Or also if you’re too young,

Mike: Yeah,

Aqua: the main weakness a COPPA has we’ll call it verifiable parental consent. this is separate from the age gating issue, but it’s still kind of related ‘cause like, how do you do that? It’s very difficult

to implement it.

Mike: I’ve never gotten parental consent for any website I’ve joined.

Aqua: yeah. it’s super difficult to do and if you’re going to, it’s gonna end up being invasive. It’s probably gonna be easy to circumvent. and oh, by the way, at least in the United States, there’s potentially First Amendment problems, in requiring this kind of disclosure.

Mike: And specifically for coppa, wasn’t it mostly for, personal data, like personal info that was being stored. that’s specifically what it was for,

right.

Aqua: it was designed to stop companies from collecting data about children who really can’t give inform consent yet, at least not about that. and re-empower parents to make a better decision for them, or at least be aware of what’s going on.

it makes sense that we would want that kind of protection, at least that level of protection for kids, because I know plenty of adults who are very annoyed about this.

and we don’t want to be tracked constantly by a website or, an invisible pixel on a webpage, , we’re not interested in that either. So that’s a no brainer. It’s just a matter of if we’re going to give special protection to children, now we have to differentiate, between kids and adults, among our website’s visitors, and how do we do that?

that’s where it falls apart. you know, and it gets worse too. If you design some system that requires permission or initials or some kind of private info or whatever, there’s a risk that, anybody confronted with that. barrier is just gonna move on to some other website or some other activity that doesn’t enforce the law.

And that could actually be more dangerous for them.

Tarro: Yeah, it, the same sort of idea where anything that you criminalize, the demand doesn’t go away. It just leads to a secondary market that’s less filled with oversight, where, you have less idea of what’s actually happening in those spaces. And you know, not to say that any sort of efforts are bad, but you have to be careful about the ways that you’re doing restrictions so that it just doesn’t end up creating this secondary market where things are just worse.

But that’s what people are still using.

Aqua: Yes, exactly. and I guess I should mention, kapa the way it’s written, it was never really trying to create a safe environment. It was just trying to, protect kids by informing parents. It didn’t require porn sites to dig a moat around, the perimeter. that’s not what it was for.

The takeaway here is that COPPA was an early example that just like legislating a solution without much industry input, you know, telling the nerds to just nerd harder and figure it out. all that’s gonna happen in reality is that companies are just gonna take the easiest and cheapest and legally safest route toward compliance.

and that usually means just banning whatever the thing is that is a problem. So in this case it was kids under 13, you’re not allowed to use social media

Tarro: , it’s worth mentioning as well that this was established well before any sort of real social media as we imagine it today was even like conceptualized, like

the, problems that exist with social media now are so different from what they were

facing back in 1998.

Mike: Yeah, it was

literally just about collection of personal identification at that point.

Aqua: back when websites were just forums and message boards and, arcades and shopping websites I’m, of course there’s plenty more than that, but, we had just gotten around to inventing like a OL instant messenger. before that we had IRC and we had talkers and, and all of that other stuff, but social media as like a collaborative, huge, huge space that is flat where you can reach millions of people in 10 seconds, like that didn’t exist.

And lawmakers could not have conceived of that. Even happening.

Mike: And it’s worth mentioning the internet itself was smaller at that point. people like it wasn’t all the world on the

internet.

Aqua: So, in its proper context. COPPA was a reactive bill that was trying to be forward thinking, but it was also very much a product of its time and

tech moves so fast that I’m actually amazed that we’re still talking about, we coppa enforcement

Tarro: the epic suit that you were talking about was 2022.

Aqua: 2022 there see now. it is still enforced. It is still relevant. but it’s also kind of a dinosaur.

Mike: Yeah.

Aqua: But they meant well of, I.

Mike: It’s still being referenced in newer laws too.

Aqua: Let’s move on to something a little more recent. oh yeah, we had Fossa Cesta, which was originally two different bills and then they got combined.

Mike: I seem to remember hearing about them, but I can’t remember what they were for

Tarro: In my head, I always remember these as the Craigslist bills.

Aqua: Yes. Yeah, that’s a good way. So Fossa, allow states and victims to fight online Sex Trafficking Act, and then Cesta, which is Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act. yeah, so they were Senate and House bills. these were signed into law in April of 2018, so about seven years ago. these were focused mainly on preventing sex trafficking, especially for underage people.

and yeah, this was, a direct response to, Craigslist, adult section and a site called, back page. Which had been accused of facilitating child sex trafficking for a while. and, it was big enough that was probably happening to some degree, but I never paid attention really to Backpage. this was also, one of the non copyright infringement scenarios where section two 30, the so-called safe harbor provision came under fire for maybe shielding websites from, liability, as they were facilitating, illegal, activity that was exploiting children.

Tarro: Yeah. Uh, so two 30 is one of those things that, is pretty essential to the framework of the way that the internet operates. basically what it carves out is that, sites can classify themselves as a hoster of user made content and then escape a lot of the responsibility for what’s actually posted on the site because there’s no way that they can theoretically be a hundred percent sure that all of the time nothing illegal is being posted on their site. And so all they have to do is make, best effort to try and keep that kind of content off the platform. And that’s a big difference from something that’s more like a, news website or something that’s, curated is the term that’s thrown around, where it is specific content that is being fed, like to the audience that is made by the site itself. and it’s not hyperbolic to say that without two 30 the internet just would not exist in the state that it does today. ‘cause anything like, your social medias, your Reddit, anything that is primarily made up of user content. Just couldn’t exist because anytime anyone posted something on it that was illegal, you could just sue the site itself and none of them would be in operation.

Aqua: Yeah, so, huge swaths of, content and discussions. that might be, I guess we could say lawful, but awful potentially, or just unpopular. so all of that goes away because it’s legally and financially expedient, to just get rid of it than it is to try to defend its right to be there.

it cuts both ways, right? Because this is how we get harassment forums. Like there is some protection afforded to those sites, because of section two 30 and also this may be more of an enforcement problem, but, the fact that we have section two 30 and that we all realize it’s super important, that didn’t mean that companies that have a profit motive are going to treat it with the care and respect that it deserves and actually make a best effort to moderate their sites, to avoid problems.

and then of course sites exploded and became huge. Again, we’re talking mostly about social media, but like YouTube is enormous and

Facebook those sites are so large that without automated tools, trying to moderate that is hopeless. It’s also a terrible job. if you’re a human moderator on one of those sites, , you’re not paid well, there’s a risk of PTSD.

You’re gonna see a whole bunch of stuff that you will never unsee.

Mike: I always

wonder how the moderation works on Telegram, and it just probably doesn’t.

Tarro: uh, yeah.

Aqua: Yeah,

it’s not very good.

Tarro: I’m not sure if you guys remember, , from a couple years ago, the big story around PornHub and how, it got into a lot of legal trouble because, people were accusing it, of hosting, child sexual exploitation material. And the defense that they always used was this sort of carve out to say, well, you know, we take care of it when it’s reported.

We do our best to find it, but, we can’t be held liable for having the stuff.

but then, a big huge report came out about it and there were more sort of legal actions taken and like the bill was getting really pressured. as you’ll see in a recurring trend, pornhub’s solution to this problem was to just make it so that you need to be verified to upload any content to it.

And they got rid of their whole quote unquote amateur program because it was just easier to say, okay, we’re not gonna deal with this risk and this liability that it is to actually fix the problem.

Aqua: I remember thinking, surely that has to be enough. it turns out no, some people are still not satisfied. so we will be revisiting PornHub later on.

Mike: But I just revisited it earlier today,

Tarro: How many times could I visit this site?

Aqua: do you need us to intervene? Mike? Do

Mike: only, only a little

Aqua: you need help?

Mike: I could do it on my own. No, I’m, I’m fine. Thanks.

Aqua: Uhhuh? Okay.

Mike: We’ll take a rain check on that.

Aqua: Oh, another one Yep. Yep.

Tarro: Mike’s like, gimme 15 minutes and then we’ll pick this back up.

Aqua: so there may not really be much more to say about fossa esta other than, the usual concerns and criticisms about scope creep how it would be enforced, who precisely is, defining what certain content is like. Is it defamatory, is it obscene? are children involved? Yes or no?

Tarro: , it’s hard because this is a bill that’s literally about stopping sex trafficking, which is objectively an amazing thing to do,

but. Those people were aware the solution that these sites take isn’t going to be fix the problem. It’s just gonna be remove those personals. And so now they don’t have that section at all on the site anymore.

You can’t visit Craigslist classifieds and, and advertise services in that way.

Aqua: That doesn’t mean that the people go away, it just means they go somewhere else where they might have less protection and it could be much more dangerous for them.

I’m not super familiar with Craigslist at all, but I do know that Craigslist is a pretty big marketplace. And I imagine the same was true for Backpage. it’s almost like, when somebody’s, parents letting you know, their, teenage kid or whatever, have a beer or, smoke a joint or something, and then they say like, we’d rather you did it at home than if you went somewhere else. You know?

it reminds me of that because, you know, you have these large popular sites where there is significant, reputation built into it. which may not exist somewhere else. And, smaller sites that don’t care about enforcing the law, they’re way less visible.

and maybe harder to, keep track. And, gosh, I didn’t even think about the research angle, but like when you scatter, a marginalized group like adult, actors and sex workers, boy, that makes it difficult to learn about them also and maybe design some protections for that industry if it’s ever fully legalized.

Tarro: Mm-hmm.

Aqua: So moving on to cosa, which, is one I think most of our listeners are gonna be aware of. maybe the others predate them, Like it has a formal name, which is very tedious and long, but generally it’s known as the Kids Online Safety Act. And, it exists, because of a Facebook whistleblower named Francis Haugen, who leaked a whole bunch of internal research and documentation, and then later testified before Congress alleging that Facebook was aware that their app design and their platform was addictive and caused harm to users, particularly to minors because they preyed on their insecurities and was designed to keep them engaged longer than they would otherwise have been interested in being on Facebook.

but then Facebook ignored this research and just continued on. So, that was, in 2021. and then, Senator Blumenthal, Democrat, if that matters to anybody, introduced, the first version of COSA in, the 2022 session. but it was met with really, really harsh criticism from over 90 different, organizations, among them, child safety groups and technology and legal experts, L-G-B-T-Q groups, legal scholars, and the criticism was, this is terribly written, it’s overly broad, and it’s basically a censorship bill. to his credit, Senator Blumenthal and the, co-sponsors, revised some of the language and made an attempt to improve it. and they did a little, but it still has some pretty big problems. And, the big one is, the way that Csosa is structured around this idea that, website operators and platform operators have what’s called a duty of care. that is a, a legal obligation protect minors from harmful content and interactions with other

Mike: and we’ll get into what

that all

means in a little bit.

Aqua: yeah. the issue is that there is no clear guidance on how to do it. That probably sounds familiar by now. it was really just a mandate, to prevent a set of harms, which were also not very well defined, and it wasn’t super clear who was in charge of them.

So right away that should raise, red flags and set off alarm bells because who is going to suffer first in the name of protecting children? It’s gonna be marginalized groups, it’s gonna be queer people. and, the combination is really toxic and really dangerous.

Aqua: broadly, if we think about what harmful content is or what harms are, if we’re just talking about information that isn’t strictly illegal, well, that could be very upsetting to someone, but it might actually save somebody else’s life. so if we’re talking about transgender care or mental health diagnoses, that information needs to be available and, CSA was threatening, people’s access to that

Mike: Yeah, these are actually really hot button topics for some people. And, if it’s left not well defined, then they could very well think that they’re in the right to decry what, you know, transgender groups or whoever are posting.

Aqua: Right. and of course, some of the bill’s, loudest supporters are drum roll pleases, the Heritage Foundation,

morality in media, and, a few other groups that have been designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as, hate groups. heritage Foundation is not one of them, but they have, clearly stated goals on their own website.

And one of them is keeping transgender content away from kids. so, here again, we see a bill that means well, but other groups with a particular weirdo hangup or issue are seeing an opportunity to, force, a minority opinion through legislation, that they want.

because the fact that kids are involved, in fact it’s, right in the name of the bill, saying no to them is gonna be really difficult, because of how easy it is to turn it around and say, well, what do you mean you don’t wanna support children?

Tarro: Can’t believe Aqua’s coming out as against kids safety online.

Aqua: there, see, like, I have just been canceled. It’s over. This is it. This is my last podcast. I’m done. I have to go hide. we’re making light of it. and most people see right through this, but it’s deeply cynical and it’s actually very difficult to get people to stand up to this kind of thing.

Mike: So yeah, I crawled through the whole act and, I’m just gonna roll through the definition of kind of what this all is, ,

Aqua: Yeah,

Mike: what.

Aqua: you, dig a little deeper for us?

Mike: Something I noticed in the definitions is that, they specifically define child being under 13 and minor being under 17, which is a fun one there. ‘cause then 17 year olds aren’t minors under this definition. even though they might be classified as minors in other ways, and it probably is relevant for other laws, this law does not discuss anything about them.

and child itself, uh, only comes up a few times in the law. Something about, the default settings and so on when they sign up. So really this is about anyone under 17 is kinda what the law targets. They define sexual exploitation and abuse to be one of four things.

So it’s the, sex tourism, trafficking, trafficking for photos, any child sexual abuse material so that’s pretty obvious. So when we say sexual exploitation and abuse, that’s pretty obvious what they mean. They’re pretty fully encompassing what we would expect. there are some exceptions for the bill for what makes a platform. For instance, not-for-profit organizations are not included.

I imagine they, they mention, uh, that if it is not for profit, but I imagine that’s like an actual company rather than just, you know, if you’re not a profit company, then you are under the bill.

Aqua: Yeah, you need to have nonprofit status. You

Mike: Yeah,

Aqua: recognized.

Mike: Oh yeah, glad on the page actually, it had the old text of the bill, like half of the page was just all crossed out and it was like to be replaced with this thing underneath and then they had the new bill underneath it. So yeah, they had changed a couple things and the old bill is still there, just crossed out on the government website.

so yeah, duty of care, just to condense it down, any online platform that is covered by this bill has a duty to safeguard and prevent like specific harms. They were talking about certain mental health disorders, addiction like behavior, bullying, sexual abuse, drugs, gambling and alcohol or or predatory marketing and scams.

So the harms, they specifically said sexual exploitation and abuse, which in the definitions was one of those four things. So like trafficking and sexual abuse material. So it’s actually pretty specific there. Not like, oh, someone is talking about sexuality around minors.

Aqua: Right. and that was one of the concerns is, , at least with the first draft of the bill, support groups for, sex abuse victims, were potentially at risk, for being taken down.

transgender related healthcare and support forums were also at risk of being taken down. And actually some of the bill supporters wanted to see those sites, taken offline.

Mike: Yeah. So the new bill actually has protections for that enshrined. They aren’t required to prevent minors from deliberately searching for content, first of all.

But then also, it’s not required that, sites will prevent sharing of preventative resources, like evidence informed information, for instance. So if people are distributing preventative materials and resources like that, that’s not required by this law to prevent those things, that those don’t fall under abuse.

Aqua: did you see anything in the text about harm reduction strategies, which is different from prevention? this would be like, you know, if it relates to drug use, for example,

it would be practical advice about, while you are working toward escaping an addiction, for example, here’s how to make sure that, your paraphernalia, like needles or other equipment are, clean and safe to use.

or here’s where you can get, supplies that are clean and safe to use. because That seems like it would be higher risk to host that information, but it’s still super useful.

Tarro: Well, this is where it gets really complicated, right? Because we’re getting into the idea that so much of this is subjective in terms of what different people would consider either harmful or not harmful, useful or not useful. And I think that, we’ve been highlighting through the episodes so far, when faced with these kind of decisions, typically platforms are much more likely to just say, eh, screw it.

We don’t wanna deal with this gray area than they are to actually try and push back and find the legal limits of what they can and can’t do.

Mike: , they word it weirdly ‘cause it’s limitations. So nothing in this subsection shall be construed to require a covered platform or to prevent or preclude the covered platform or individuals on the platform. basically as a limitation, you don’t have to.

Prevent people on the platform from providing resources for mitigation of harms described in subsection. So for instance, mental health disorders like suicide, physical violence. Oh yeah. Promotion and marketing of Of narcotic drugs. if people are distributing resources for the prevention or mitigation of those harms, that’s fine. There’s nothing forcing

anyone to avoid that.

Aqua: Interesting.

That’s something. Anyway,

the reason I bring up harm reduction is because that’s very closely related to what we’re doing.

It’s kind of central to at least what I’m trying to do with the podcast myself or, or it’s what I’m interested in trying to do That is, okay, we are zoos.

bestiality is a thing. It may not be legal where you are, but it might also be not illegal. So be careful. maybe don’t do this, if you don’t know what you’re doing. In fact, please don’t, if you don’t know what you’re doing. But if you’re gonna, then here’s what we think is acceptable and here’s a whole bunch of other stuff that is not, but without really taking a position without promoting necessarily.

Like, we can go back to the zeta principles, you know, we can educate without promoting, the activity.

so it’s interesting that like cosa, is worded in a way that maybe that would not, run afoul of the law. I’m pretty sure it would never make it to the point where it is challenged.

‘cause there’s all kinds of other reasons why a site operator might not wanna host that stuff. But, it’s encouraging to see that in there.

one of the bits that I thought was really important was that they strengthened, what they call the knowledge standard.

so that it actually lines up closer to what Kapa said in the text of the bill. And that is, site operators or platform operators, they’re not liable, unless they don’t take action when they know that kids use the site. before that it was weaker and it said,

it’s not that you didn’t know, it’s that we think you should have.

So you reasonably should know that there are kids on your site. so that’s an important one because it allows a little bit of. Safety buffer where if a platform is surprised at the scope or the scale of the problem of say, miners, suddenly ending up on sections of the app or engaging with it in ways that they didn’t anticipate, they’re not automatically in violation of csa.

But there are still weaknesses, right? So like the mental health diagnosis, sections, they don’t ever seem to refer to a specific definition of a mental health disorder.

Mike: they mentioned the DSM in here, didn’t they?

Aqua: well, it’s not that they didn’t mention the DSM, it’s, they didn’t mention a specific definition in the DSM. They just kind of point at the DSM and say whatever that book says and whatever the most current version is.

Mike: The term mental health disorder has the meaning given in the term mental disorder. I. In the

DSM.

Tarro: Yeah, so

it it a disorder.

Aqua: They don’t call it a specific working definition, to base your response to a new legal requirement on, so if the DSM changes, the scope of the law can change with it.

Mike: Yeah.

Aqua: that’s a really big problem potentially.

Although the DSM, seems to be generally moving in a direction that is favorable, you know, at least for us.

Yeah, so COSA doesn’t say that site operators have to prevent miners from searching for specific material. but , they just have to protect them from it somehow. there’s the figure it out nerds part.

Right?

So we’re, we’re kind of back to that age verification problem then, aren’t we? Because how do you know, right?

Mike: Yeah.

Aqua: cause CSA doesn’t say, or at least it, it’s not clear whether the classic age gate screen that we’re all used to seeing, is enough to comply with cosa, Right.

Tarro: I, think that realistically at this point of the Internet’s existence, everyone is aware of the fact that typical age gate screen we’ve been talking about is not actually a sufficient measure of understanding whether or not someone is a minor accessing the site.

Aqua: Right. So you’re either trusting your users to like, super pinky, swear that they’re old enough, or forcing them to turn over some kind of proof in the form of a government ID or maybe a credit card. or you are doing other stuff, which is potentially illegal under existing laws. Like, tracking everything that a user does and sees and everything they say, and maybe where they go offsite, right?

To try to infer their age. And what do you do then? what if your inference, algorithm or whatever says, oh, that’s a kid. do you just throw away all that data? That’s probably what you should do. or do you present them with a challenge and says, Hey look, actually we think you’re probably a kid.

And it was fine until you were doing stuff that was sort of kid-like, so now we need more documentation from you to get your account back.

and actually we’ve seen that, right? Twitter was doing that for a while. I think Blue Sky is doing that. after an account gets suspended, sometimes they demand, photo id. so is that enough? is that actually the solution that we want here?

Mike: Right.

Aqua: I know people who get really weird when, like a store clerk scans their driver’s license when they’re buying beer

Mike: Oh,

Aqua: now. where is that going? like why was that necessary? Can’t you just look at my ID and then look at me and determine, ah, yes, you’re old as fuck here, have some beer.

Mike: Because you know that everyone’s in the business of data collection these days.

Yeah.

Aqua: oh yeah. We haven’t even touched the commercial side of it. That that goes right back to unification. okay, so that’s cosa.

Mike: On that topic, They mandate some safeguards in these sites that are used by miners, in these platforms that are used by miners. well, there’s a couple things they wanna limit who can contact miners or view the personal information, especially geolocation.

But, they want to limit features like notifications or auto playing media. anything that keeps them, like using the platform. keeps them on the platform for an extended period of time. , they want to limit, screen time as much as they can. Right. Or they

they want options as well, for the parents to control.

Aqua: Are you saying that the infinite scroll

is gonna go away?

Mike: Hopefully it goes away at least when kids

Aqua: Oh my God.

Tarro: Only if you have the child account for TikTok.

Aqua: , I will sign myself. I, yeah. Ship it.

I hate pages that scroll forever.

Mike: yeah, any site, a platform, we’ll say a social media platform or such that has users that are miners

have to have these kinds of safeguards in place.

Aqua: Okay.

Mike: They, they might, yeah. Have identification about like minor accounts and so on. So maybe you would need that I.

Aqua: reasonable and, and desirable.

Mike: I think those options should always be available. There is some, sort of side effect to all this isn’t there because they have to have the feature in there and they have to have it as an option, they might as well give the option to everyone. Just make it ticked by default for miners. And now you can tick it too if you want, and

Tarro: not if they wanna keep

Mike: turn it off.

Oh, there’s that too. I guess maybe the,

Aqua: yeah. oh, and imagine if a bunch of adults just started signing themselves up for

kids accounts.

Oh, that, that will not go well.

Mike: I really wanted that. Not infinite scroll. The finite scroll.

Aqua: Okay. aGain, we’re, confronted with, legislation that appears to have some really good ideas built into it. it’s just not written well enough to protect adults’ rights, , even while facilitating, like their responsibilities, as parents to, keep their kids safe, which is super hard to do.

But like the way it’s written, it also potentially throws a bunch of marginalized groups under the bus. And this has been true for all the other ones we talked about.

Also,

Mike: Mm-hmm.

Aqua: the edge cases, you know, the people who are on the fringes of society or, are members of a group that are currently the subject of a moral panic. You know, so how do we protect them also? I don’t think this is settled yet.

Tarro: I certainly hope not.

Aqua: like I don’t think it’s possible to be settled yet.

this might be unsolvable.

Mike: Yeah,

they’re trying really hard.

Aqua: It also kind of depends on who you’re talking to, right? Because there are some legislators who are like, well, this is how it’s gonna be. Deal with it, nerds, suck it up. Or they will just straight up say, maybe not. Live on television, but they’ll have a website or they’ll be affiliated with a website that says, yeah, actually trans people are terrible and we wish they weren’t real.

but there’s always gonna be some of that. and then you’ll get others who are actually trying. We think, to make this work and respect everybody’s rights and get the balance right, you know, who insist up and down, that the language in the law does not support the concerns that these rights groups, are complaining about and concerned about.

but they’re not responding adequately to, like, they’re not building enough protections against those scenarios. with legislation, you really can’t have loose ends like this or it will be abused. Just like, requiring an age gate in front of a website is super easy to just circumvent or ignore.

if you don’t explicitly say, this is not tolerated, this is not part of the law, somebody’s gonna find a way to do it.

Tarro: I was watching, an interview with, the CEO of Signal, on a British network. , they have their own law that, they’re, they’re putting through about online safety. And it was really interesting ‘cause it was her talking with one of the people who’d proposed the law. And, you know, she kept saying part of the

law, there’s a requirement that, they need to be able to have some kind of way to access encrypted chats. And, the CEO of signal, her point was that if there’s a way to access these chats, they’re no longer encrypted.

Aqua: Yeah, , and the attack on encryption is a whole separate thing that is very serious, but also super hilarious to me right now. I think Signal and Apple and the standards body behind RTS, which is like the end-to-end encrypted version of text messaging and all the others that are trying to protect end-to-end encryption from any kind of backdoor or master key of some kind.

Like they have just been given a gift by Pete Eth and the rest of his clown car, who have just proved that you can have a state-of-the-art end-to-end encrypted messaging platform. And it doesn’t matter that it is unbreakable because the people using it are already broken.

to me, the, the, it’s just amazing.

we have example after example, after example of how insecure and lazy and sloppy people get with the devices at either end.

And you don’t actually need the traffic in flight, you just go get the phone.

Mike: Yeah.

Aqua: Or, you know, if you’re a journalist, you just get accidentally invited into a top secret discussion.

Mike: Wasn’t top secret, just mid secret.

Aqua: So Taro, I think you were about to get into some international examples here.

Were you talking about the online safety Act?

Tarro: I was indeed. And, unlike Mike’s five, page one, the Online Safety Act is, I believe 286 pages and

241 sections. So I’m not gonna get into all of it. but

it does have some,

Aqua: England,

Tarro: it does have some pretty interesting things to note when it comes to the way that, specifically miners are using the internet. there’s a lot of overlap with cosa. they’re both trying to do the same thing, but one of the big differences is that, there’s a lot more structured and strict, penalties that are being levied against the companies that are actually like not handling these issues.

Any companies that aren’t compliant with these rules face fines up to 18 million pounds or 10% of their global revenue if they’re not complying, which is suddenly a, like a pretty serious number.

Aqua: let me guess. It’s whichever is greater

Tarro: it is whichever is greater. Yeah.

Aqua: damn.

Tarro: and then, , similarly it does have, , the same sort of oh, you don’t necessarily need to do ID verification, but you need to enforce age checks significantly, like more seriously, and you can figure out what that means. , and, , it’s got a lot of the same privacy issues in the same way. But, the, the general vibe of the thing is that it defines a bunch of priority offenses that platforms need to be aware of and handle. it also carves out things that are legal but harmful, such as like bullying, violent content, pornography in places that, you know, kids are still able to access such as cross-platform things like Twitter, for instance, where you can find porn, but also anyone can use it and it’s not really like a quote unquote porn site. and then also, there needs to be, like a. Company-wide assessment of how all of the different features might expose minors to harm that needs to be created by any sort of larger scale platform, which then publishes those, to the public so that, if anyone wants to, they can read up on the dangers themselves.

If you’re a parent who’s like, I don’t know if I should, you know, let my kid have an Instagram or something like that. And then, it also empowers the ways that people can report harmful content or it makes those platforms take those reports more seriously than before. A lot of the same stepping stones, but the thing that I’m, really curious to see how it plays out, is the global revenue fines. ‘cause

once we start talking about like real cuts to businesses income, it’s much more likely those places are gonna put in much more strict rules around it because 10% global income is a lot of money

Mike: right? Or can they just leave Britain?

Tarro: It’s good that you bring that up. A lot of different platforms have talked about leaving Britain. I know Twitter has, Facebook I think has,

a ton of these different sites are really, really trying to protest this because this bill is much more firm than the American version and it’s already seeing a lot more support for it It’s already been signed into law as far as I know.

So parts of it are coming in, in stages and each one is facing its own waves of things to get through.

Mike: Ooh.

Aqua: uh, yes. The Find UK tradition of staged rollouts.

Tarro: yep, this one is much more directly on its way. Whereas, over in the States, it’s still something that we’re trying to figure out.

Aqua: yeah, so the Online Safety Act, ossa, yeah, it’s CSA without the K. It might literally just be that, except it’s actually on the books now and, well, I have my usual questions. Right. So, Ofcom, which is, an incredibly dense and impervious bureaucracy.

I’m guessing they’re the ones who are in charge of defining. priority offenses, and, like all the categories. And, I’ll be honest, I tried to read it and I bounced right off the website. it was almost impossible, so good job. But I did get, as far as reading some of the meta coverage, and yeah, it’s something like 130 different offenses, spread across, what 17 different categories. , that, this is all content that platforms have to remove.

Tarro: You’ve got it

Yeah.

Aqua: and it includes, some things that, are open to interpretation, like animal welfare. everybody in this room is capable of reading between the lines there.

they’re probably talking about animal abuse and that almost certainly includes what they call animal sexual abuse.

And then if that doesn’t cover it for some reason, they also, include extreme pornography, not just normal pornography, extreme pornography. So like,

I don’t know, somebody’s wearing a collar with a D-ring.

Mike: it’s when you have sex while skiing

Tarro: Ooh.

Aqua: Oh,

Tarro: Skydiving sex.

Mike: Oh, wow.

Aqua: Well at least for us, zoophilia, bestiality are not spelled out, but they’re definitely covered, right?

Mike: Mm-hmm.

Aqua: They’ve gotta be. , so the, the response was overwhelmingly negative.

and, even before it came into force, there were websites and forums shutting down in response, because they, couldn’t bear the technical or the legal or the financial cost of compliance,

including some forums that they’re just not a problem. Like there was one called L-F-G-S-S, which I think is the London Fix gear.

I forget what the SS is. but it was like a riding club.

yeah. And then there, there was an underlying service called Microcosm, which powered it. it turned out it was just like one guy did this, during lockdown in 2021, and it became this really important, support network, to keep everybody, sane and happy and try to manage the mental health burden of, a global pandemic.

but there wasn’t really much need for moderation other than people just getting testy with each other and, you know, needing a timeout or something. Like nobody was posting porn there. And now it’s gone, So that was a useful resource that a bunch of people really liked and some of their users really depended on.

And it no longer exists because, that site’s, business model such as it was, it, like there was no way for them to accommodate

the the new online safety Act, like I think off com demands, that the site owner, , register, a point of contact, , specifically for content takedowns.

And there’s like a time limit on how fast you can respond. Does this sound right?

Tarro: No, you a hundred percent. Uh, and it’s a faster, take down limit for larger companies, but it’s

still something like two weeks for smaller companies too, which is like, yeah, that’s, you know, you gotta be pretty on top of it still.

Mike: Interesting. I wanted to contrast this with COSA because they do have the same thing. They specify a digital contact, so probably just an email address and you have like three weeks to, to address it

Aqua: three weeks is pretty generous.

Mike: Yeah, so it’s one week if you’re a large site that’s 10 million active users in the us but otherwise, yeah, it’s 21 days.

Aqua: Can we just all agree that if you’re being doxed, a week is an eternity

Tarro: Oh,

Mike: yeah.

Well this is specifically for, you know, risks to minors safety, and there is an extra point that, there’s an or to it 21 days or as promptly as needed for an imminent threat to the safety of a minor, which is very hand wavy, quite open to interpretation

Tarro: Mm-hmm.

Mike: as promptly as needed, probably right now for an imminent threat to the safety.

But this is the safety act online safety, which defines I guess their safety as like what? Not seeing ads for drugs.

Aqua: So it sounds like COSO was just like, you really need to be careful about who’s old enough to see whatever bullshit you have on your website. And the UK’s version is, here’s a big bucket of stuff that we

Mike: Yeah,

Aqua: see on the internet again,

Mike: yeah,

Aqua: of it or else.

Mike: That one, that one. I so unbounded. It’s insane. I can’t even imagine.

Tarro: It is been getting a lot of pushback, rightfully so. and you know, again, with all of these bills, there’s parts of it where it’s good and it makes sense, like trying to prevent harm to minors and trying to make sure

the sites are doing a better job of taking care of bad things on their platforms is great.

But I do think that the UK’s OSSA a little bit overreaching

and leaves a lot of doors open.

Aqua: Well, I guess there’s nothing left to do, but wait at least for, you know, to see how that turns out.

but if you’re in the UK and you’re listening right now and you didn’t know about this, get on that.

Tarro: And also, sorry, in advance.

Aqua: Yeah. We’re we’re also very sorry,

like we’re, we’re over the whole Brexit thing,

like, now’s your time to shine.

Mike: and if you are in the States, , COSA hasn’t gone through yet, so you could always call up a representative and try to get to change it.

Aqua: Yeah, it’s definitely gonna be reintroduced to Congress in the next session. It just hasn’t happened yet.

Tarro: But aqua, at

Aqua: least we still have porn. Right.

I mean, some of the stuff that I like is like by definition, not porn.

Mike: I know, right? That’s the best

reality.

Tarro: Oh, I was just

trying to give you a clean transition to the next topic.

Aqua: oh, Well, swing and a miss. but that’s okay. , it sounds like Taro is ready to move back, stateside to talk about, state-based age verification laws since that is the theme of the whole thing. Age verification. but we can just shorthand this. It’s anti-porn, and it’s pretty obvious what’s going on.

this one is much more closely coupled to the moral panic around transgender rights and, the so-called Proliferation of extreme pornography and just the general availability of it. I’m a little suspicious that there’s more porn on the internet proportionally to the, the size of the internet over time.

But who knows? Maybe there is. but anyway, this is gonna take us right back to PornHub and some other websites that might be interesting to our listeners here. Certainly to me. here’s the short version. as of recording this, 17 states have passed, , age verification legislation at the state level.

all of the bills that I’ve seen are crap. They are all basically figure it out nerds. You have to start verifying ages of your users or something. Here’s the list of states. See if you notice a pattern. Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia.

Mike: Oh,

they’re all in the United States.

Aqua: yes. Very good.

And oh, by the way, Arizona is about to join that list, we think, but we’ll come back to Arizona and Utah. Utah is interesting too. but yeah, very broadly, these are all states, which tend to wean conservative. and, without delving too far into the politics, because I’m certainly tired of thinking about it . age verification laws are starting to pop up in big numbers around the country at a state and a local level, because there isn’t a good model for federal legislation. And so, state legislation tends to be like the proving grounds for a good law, which might be recommended to, congressional representatives say, Hey, why don’t you model the federal one after this because it’s working out for us.

I. But it’s also a proving ground for the very worst possible ideas. and this kind of works out in the end because, if a law passes and, and then somebody sues usually the ACL U, then it winds its way up through the courts and is found hopefully to be unconstitutional because most of them are,

Mike: Mm-hmm.

Aqua: I’m pretty sure all of them are. in the meantime, website operators, if they succeed in, like getting an injunction, then they can keep doing business as usual. But if they fail, then they have to shut down or change their approach within that state, and then wait for the legal process, which can take years and cost tens of millions of dollars, to, resolve itself. which brings us to PornHub.

PornHub has chosen to block access to their website in all of those states. if you try to visit PornHub, from Alabama or Florida or any of the others, instead of getting welcome to PornHub, have some titties. you get, a very well produced informational video and a bunch of links to your representatives and a couple of phone numbers

to call.

I think.

Mike: they know what I’m into?

Aqua: but it basically says all of the same things that we’ve been saying here, which is this is not the right way to do it. It’s dangerous for everybody. It’s a privacy violation. It causes safety problems. It exposes everybody’s private information to hackers and identity theft and government overreach on and on. And all of that is true, by the way. We have a better idea on how to solve this, but in the meantime, until this is figured out, we’re just not letting you access the website from the state. Sorry, go do something else. Which by the way, is also part of the problem. pornhub’s, CTO or CEO, there’s a little quote here.

so at one point, ALO said, these people did not stop looking for porn. They just migrated to darker corners of the internet that don’t ask users to verify age, that don’t follow the law, that don’t take user safety seriously, and that often don’t even moderate content. In practice, the laws have just made the internet more dangerous for adults and for children, and, one of the immediate, knock on effects that we all saw was that shady VPN services, just boomed. and some of the VPN operators were like, Hey, wow. welcome all you PornHub people. , were real sorry that your state sucks, but, for $10 a month we’ll help you.

Pretend you’re from California.

Tarro: It’s not just , like a little bit, after Florida specifically, had PornHub leave, it was like a 1150% upsurge in VPN demand, after even just like the first few hours that the law was in place.

Like it’s an immediate reaction to this kind of policy.

Mike: Geez.

Aqua: Yeah, PornHub is not messing around. so the other piece of this for PornHub is that they have long advocated for a different approach to this, which we will just call on device age verification or attestation. and we’ll get to that next, the other website I wanna mention is, probably familiar to a bunch of our listeners, E six 20 one.net.

it’s a furry porn gallery. It’s huge. it’s relatively permissive in the content that it allows, but it’s not a free for all. it is very easy actually to get your account banned.

Mike: seen that. Yeah.

Aqua: it’s a big site. They have the same problem that all big sites do, and that is moderators can’t really be empathetic to users.

They have to just be firm. And, you know, a lot of them are jerks. They don’t really tolerate a lot of dissent or arguments about site policy. It is just like, here’s what we’re doing, deal with it, and if you don’t get out,

Mike: Sounds like furries in

general.

Aqua: yeah. but otherwise it’s a big site. It’s well run. they have good take down policies for artists who don’t want their paid content or subscription content to show up there.

they have a way to verify artists. they have, a way to release paid content on there for members. they’ve even got a default blacklist for, anybody who visits a site without logging in.

Tarro: Mm-hmm.

Aqua: so all in all, pretty well run. They take kind of a dim view on zoophilia or zoo activism,

but only if you’re discovered to be a zoo, whether that’s onsite or offsite doesn’t seem to matter.

And only if you produce artwork that, has like a political advocacy or, like a, an activism component. and even then the artwork tends to stay up. So they clearly, they would rather not talk or allow people to talk about Zoophilia at all.

Tarro: Bestiality on E six is at 90 k.

Aqua: 90,000. That’s it.

Tarro: Feral on the other hand is at 650. So

I don’t know where people wanna quote unquote draw that line. But, if you’re getting off to pokey porn, I would argue you’re still looking at some bestiality right there.

Aqua: So, one thing that E 6 21 has been doing right is every time there is state or federal legislation that threatens the site’s existence or the kinds of content that they can host, , because they are trying to be as permissive as they can, they will put a little message and a link about it right on their, , search page.

after you click through the age verification, which is every bit as useless as it is elsewhere on the internet. But they’ve been on top of this because, , their legal presence is Arizona. and I’m sure they have a strategy in place for the worst case scenario, but it’s really, really impractical and expensive for them to offshore their servers, and site ownership and everything else.

So it is a existential problem for them if age verification goes through because they don’t wanna collect that data. yeah, so then for, April 1st, we all got a little treat.

Mike: I love that one.

Aqua: Yeah. So this was very smart. but on April 1st, April Fool’s day, , the landing page on the site, the age verification click through changed. So now you had to, , you had to verify with a photo id, that you were old enough to visit the site. but if you click through it to start that process, what you get is a little drawing canvas and some colors, and you’re like, okay, draw whatever you want.

Draw your id,

Mike: Draw your persona is what it was. Yeah.

Aqua: yeah.

Mike: For

Aqua: Right. And of course you could put whatever you want in there and then click through and you’re fine. But, some of the art is amazing. Like, it’s really impressive to me what people can do with a little canvas that’s like 400 pixels wide.

so we got a couple of days of really excellent, little drawings.

some of them quite funny and some of them really detailed.

but the message was there, right? some people didn’t get it and they’re like, uh, I don’t wanna have to draw my persona. Oh, this is weird. Okay, cool. Have you made the connection yet?

Mike: I knew someone

that, uh, inspected element to delete it.

Aqua: You know, this is about to happen to you, except it will be real,

Mike: Yeah.

Aqua: you know?

so it was a really smart, fun way to draw attention to this issue. COSA has not been reintroduced, but the, Arizona bill is working its way through legislation right now, and has a very good chance that it’s going to pass. So, if you live in Arizona, you know, you don’t have to go to E 6 21, but you should definitely take a look at, and you know what?

I have to go to E 6 21 ‘cause I forget what the bill number is.

Mike: Not Bill 6, 2 1, is it?

Tarro: bill 2 1 1 2.

Aqua: that’s the one.

Tarro: 1 1 2

Aqua: Yeah. So keep an eye on that one and, call your representatives to register your displeasure with it. If you live in Arizona.

Tarro: guys. I promise I had E 6 2 1 open for research purposes,

Mike: Yes.

Is it only websites that have these problems

Aqua: that’s what Arizona’s doing. the other one that we should talk about is Utah, , because they took a different approach and it’s called the App Store Accountability Act, and it’s kind of in the name. what it does basically is shift responsibility onto app store operators, so that’s Apple and Google, , and a handful of other small ones.

And basically requires those platforms to. , strongly verify, , their user’s, , age by whatever means they feel like it. And I don’t think the bill specifies, but it almost, it pretty much only means government id. and the way it’s written is, that information is now part of your account record with them.

And it’s accessible to every app developer that wants to release an app on that app store, , whether or not their app requires access to that information, which is really terrible flaw, in the bill because it doesn’t minimize the data that is collected or who has access to it. so this one is already in force. It was supported by Meta, that is Facebook’s parent company, Snapchat, and also ex formerly Twitter., and all of them are now pushing for a federal version of this bill. So it kind of makes sense to me that all of these social media platforms would be on board with this because it means they don’t really have to do anything.

All they have to do is. Query an API that says, Hey, how old is this person? which is super fast and cheap.

Tarro: and

gives the burden of responsibility to the, platform, the app store platforms and the devices, as opposed to like the, , social media sites, which saves them a lot of liability.

Aqua: yes, correct. as you can probably guess, apple and Google are very mad.

Mike: They’re kind of the app store providers, aren’t they?

Aqua: Yeah. , Google’s play store is the biggest one by far. , apple’s I think is the highest quality, but globally, iOS devices are what, 15%. So, it’s still much smaller.

, but neither one of them is happy about this because they have a bunch of extra work to do.

And for years now, they have been doing everything possible to convince lawmakers that it’s not their responsibility and that they don’t want anything to do with it. but now their hand is about to be forced. And so Apple and Google, each of them have finally responded with two very similar proposals.

I will make sure a link to, both of them are in the show notes, but. The short version basically is data minimization. So Apple’s solution allows, parent accounts to set up and designate child accounts for, crusty iPad, kids iPad. but instead of putting in their exact birth birthdate, what you give them instead is an age range.

So like under four, under nine, under 16, something like that. But ultimately it’s the parents’ choice whether or not they’re gonna use this at all. And, when to promote their kids to the next, category. And, on Apple’s side, they collect almost nothing new, which is great for them. and then they have a declared age range, API, which is available to app developers to, query, a user accounts information to see whether or not their designated age range matches the expectations for their app, which they have to declare to Apple when they’re submitting their app to the app store. but nobody else has access to this, which is great. It protects kids’ privacy because you’re not. Requiring them to do anything. And it asks parents for the least possible information about their children, in order to, safeguard against, downloading or using apps that are intended for, , more mature, kids or adults.

Mike: Yeah.

Aqua: So, yay, this is the way to do it. it’s not perfect, but a heck of a lot better than the alternatives.

Tarro: I guess the same system would have to work on, like PC desktop as well. Right.

Aqua: Yeah. That’s the part that’s not perfect. so the obvious concern is vendor lock-in. So, it’s fine if you can set an age range and then verify your identity with Apple as long as you’re playing within Apple’s sandbox. and the same is true for Google, by the way.

their proposal is basically the same. the concern here is that unless. Either one of these tech giants opens up their age verification solution to third party app stores and operating systems, or even just to web browsers in general. you’re gonna end up creating something that only works for a small number of people some of the time, which is, never gonna see the adoption it needs, to be effective and to ward off future stupid legislation. this kind of gets into like why we’re talking about app stores at all. Right. an app store isn’t the internet,

Mike: it sounds like a lot of this is kinda, they would expect this to be the natural progression of this kind of thing. Slowly coming to these ideas over time. I don’t know if maybe they expected this in some way, but, uh, Cosa actually has, another part to it that mentions they’ll start , a study on a verification to be released like a year after the law comes into effect.

so they’ll actually have nist, the National Standards Institute. Take a look at how things

Tarro: Well, I mean, it’s

something that they’re doing with the UK version as well, and I, it, one of the things that I actually do think is really good about both of these proposals is that there’s an increased effort to look at the effects of things like social media on children and try to figure out the best ways to

live in this society

that we have created.

That’s not harmful for everyone, it’s just, it comes tagged along with everything else. And I kind of wish we were doing

the research first and then coming to a

Mike: I know.

Tarro: both at the same

Mike: Yeah. It’s interesting that these laws come into effect with a pondering of the law itself, almost included in it. Like, oh, well, let’s just take a look at, see what this law is doing and whether it’s doing it right and get some better recommendations in the future.

And it’s like a year after this law comes in effect.

Maybe some things a bit changing,

Aqua: Do you know if the, if the provision or the requirement to do these studies was like, that a revision added later or was that there from the beginning?

Tarro: I think it was there from the beginning on the UK

side.

Aqua: just curious because if it’s there from the beginning, that’s super cynical.

Like, we’re gonna cram this law through and then,

just in case it doesn’t work, we’re gonna have all of these reporting and study requirements just to

Mike: Yeah.

Aqua: sure.

Mike: I don’t know if this

was like the original, but Yeah, it was in there.

Aqua: wild.

Tarro: it’s good they’re doing it. It just, it feels like such a weird way to implement the rollout.

And I mean, especially because so many of these policies are things that are going to have to be like heavily established, like socially,

immediately. It’s

not like you can walk back from that.

I mean, like the other alternatives to age verification that are out there are things like id.me, which is like a big database of most taxpayers. and it would be, you

would have to like, through their services, connect yourself to verify your identity. there’s been pitches about using credit cards,

they’re better in terms of having a lower age issue, but there’s a lot of economic barriers.

You know, your

credit card can go missing and then suddenly are you just blocked from the internet.

Mike: And id.me was just a shit show. Right.

Tarro: it was a huge

shit show. Yep.

Aqua: it was a mess. Yep.

Everybody hated it.

Tarro: yeah. and then stuff like, if you have a minor who’s you know, say you’re like 16, you’re looking to get onto the internet, but you have family who doesn’t like the fact that you’re queer.

You know, having the ability to hold whether or not you have a credit card over your head as a way to deny you from those things feels like maybe not the way we wanna try and approach things. you can use government IDs, but similarly, you know, you don’t necessarily wanna have to tie your entire legal personhood to what you’re doing online, which is especially true for zoos

and other minorities and like queer folks and whatnot.

Mike: yeah,

Tarro: there, there

just isn’t a really good solution.

Aqua: Yeah. I’m gonna call out transgender people. it is particularly dangerous for them and also for, women who might be pursuing, abortion care.

, it’s dangerous for trans people because if there is now a record in a government database of you visiting a site, you know, that could later be used against you. , it could be what, gets a knock on your door.

Tarro: Yeah. And I mean like if I needed to give my ID to sign up for Zoo Twitter, I don’t know if I would be here. ‘cause I like, I just don’t think that would be like a step that I’d be willing to take.

Mike: And so it’s interesting that, yeah, there, CSA is calling for NIST to study how to best verify age at the device or operating system level.

it looks like they’re gonna consider like a, a few different points actually in their study. Basically, what information might need to be collected.

The accuracy of these systems, their impact on accessibility, how to mitigate the risks of privacy and security, which of course is important to us, the technical feasibility in the first place. And of course, the impact of competition because, you know, capitalism.

Tarro: Yeah.

Aqua: Right. somebody out there is thinking about the same stuff that we are and got loud enough about it to put it in the text of the

bill.

Mike: it probably was the queer groups.

Aqua: I, yeah, I bet it was. oh. There is one more alternative. and that is, the ubiquitous sign in with Google, or really like sign in with Apple. That also is a thing. It’s just kind of rare. but yeah, if you’ve been to any website on the internet, you’ve seen that pop up in the top right corner saying sign in with Google.

And sometimes it blocks the actual sign in link for the website, which is great. But even that is not really a solution here. Like it’s related. To what Apple and Google are proposing, but it absolutely can’t be tied to this because vendor lock-in becomes a major issue. The other worry for queer groups in general, , not just us but all of them, is that you’re creating a single point of failure.

you know, if you’re an activist and you are signing in with Google because it’s easy and it’s more secure than making an account on some forum that might not be well designed or well run or constantly under attack,

yeah, why not sign in with Google? Well, the problem is if you’re doing something that is in violation of Google’s own terms of service and they suspend your account, you lose access to every other service that you signed in through Google to use.

and you can’t get it back unless you unlock your Google account. And that’s, uh,

take it from me. That’s basically impossible.

it’s true that, websites might have a fallback option if you set that up, but a lot of

them

Mike: don’t, yeah.

Aqua: really de-emphasize that.

Tarro: Yeah. The other big concern with this as well is that like you still need to then verify your age in some way to Google. And while Google might be more secure, it’s not like you’re avoiding the step altogether. And in a world where this is like the system, theoretically, it’s gonna be much harder to have like your personal Google account and your private Google account.

And, you know, the logistics are still just as messy. Even if you are theoretically, hopefully giving your ID to a more secure place.

Aqua: Yeah. and if the option exists at all, it may not exist for the site that you need, because the vendor, in this case, Google might decide that they don’t wanna be associated with that site.

Tarro: Can’t imagine Google wanting you to sign into PornHub with Google.

Aqua: I think that would be funny, but you’re right. PornHub has enough, trouble just receiving payments from credit card processors who don’t wanna be associated with, the site’s problems. it stands to reason that Google doesn’t want it either. So maybe, uh, like the worst case I think would be you have the sign in with Google option and you, and you use it, but then Google changes their mind about that site later and, disconnects it, and then leaves a bunch of people, unable to log in or do anything.

Tarro: Mm-hmm.

Aqua: So all these alternatives are like total shit, and we should not do them. And, the solution that Apple and Google were forced to finally present to the world because, you know that they’ve had this idea in their back pocket for years now. they knew this day was coming.

if we have to have a system like this at all, this is probably the one we want. And, the only thing I can think of that would be better than this would be for a standards body, like, the worldwide web consortium, you know, W three C, if they stepped up and they created a standard that worked across devices and across web browsers, and was independent of anything that Apple or Google were doing

Mike: Mm-hmm.

Aqua: company in case they just decide not to exist anymore.

Mike: Yeah. I think we need proper

standards.

Aqua: . So is this a zoo problem?

Tarro: It’s an

everybody problem.

Aqua: yeah,

Mike: Yeah.

Aqua: it’s an everybody problem. I don’t know anybody who wants this. I know some people who recognize that we have to do something different. I don’t know anybody who’s happy with any of the answers, that,

exist right now.

Mike: I like to verify my own age in private.

It’s like, what?

Aqua: I guess.

okay, but let’s examine this from a zoo perspective.

suppose for example that COSA is signed into law

Mike: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Aqua: so is Arizona’s bill. what do we need to do to adapt to it?

Mike: So, there’s a couple different things, right? There’s zoos in general, there’s also, uh, people who run services. So obviously this is more important for someone like me, since I run zoo community.org. I thought a little bit about kind of what I was reading in this law. And for the most part, like I could take all the parts that were reasonable,

the things that seemed like, you know, I should really consider them and implement them. . So there’s certain things that I probably will change about the website just to make sure that it, follows those guidelines.

‘cause they are good guidelines for the most part.

Tarro: For my side, we run the zoo.pub Discord server. And that’s gonna be pretty interesting as well because unlike a self-hosted site, we’re sort of more restricted by the platform that we’re on. And Discord as a platform certainly does have, kids using it. And so, the policy changes that they decide to make are going to be what dictate what we have to do. but a couple of things that are in, cosa are, for instance, discoverability. they have a policy in which, kids aren’t able to stumble into things,

Mike: see, that’s a difficult one, which is why I do like that COSA doesn’t, you know, force that responsibility on everyone.

Aqua: Yeah.

it’s also kind of uncomfortable that we’re at least partially depending on a platform’s inertia and their laziness to do anything that costs money.

Tarro: , basically as much as it’s a safer workspace. There’s minors in it and you know, it, it’s going to be up to, I guess, discord to determine whether or not, a server about zoo sexuality in any capacity is harmful for miners. and then even then, at the very least, it’s for sure gonna make it so that the only way to find the server is with an invite link.

Because right now we have discoverability on, anyone can just search the name or even just scroll through the pages of different servers that might be applicable to them and stumble across us. But, we’re going to have to make sure that things are a lot tighter.

We’re probably gonna have to like, get a lot more strict about, trying to push our rules. Especially because the carve outs are around like, you were saying before, harm prevention, uh, education, those kind of things have specific Ways that you can try and argue yourself to not be problematic. and so if this does go through, which I hope it does not, it’s gonna be a lot of, looking through it and trying to find the very specific wording to try and position ourselves as much as possible as something that can get carved out.

Because as I’m sure everyone listening to this knows, they’re not likely to be lenient towards a zoo server, on the basis of who we are.

Mike: Yeah.

Aqua: outta curiosity, as the administrator on this discord, when somebody finds your discord and joins because it’s discoverable, do you see that? can you track who joins from an invite link and who just finds it on their own?

Tarro: Yep. We have access to, um, all of the data where people are coming from and the ways they got there. We can even see if they use an invite link, what site they were on when they clicked that invite link. It’s, uh, some pretty cool data. We’ve had, uh, more

than a couple people join from, uh, Skyrim mod pages.

and yes, you know which ones they are.

Mike: Oh.

Aqua: I sure do. So when I was

reading through this, other than, like the, the scope of the law as far as whether it can reach internationally, there seemed to be, some minimums for how popular the site is or, whether or not you definitely for sure know that there are children present or. I guess maybe how much money you take in. I don’t know if, if that’s a consideration for COSA or for the UK version. I wonder if maybe, like zoo owned and run websites and forums are just too small, for this to be a worry. is it possible that this is just not going to affect a site like zoo community or, even Ville, which I think is

what, maybe 300,000 people?

Mike: Yeah. For, for cosa the big one I noticed was that, large sites, again, 10 million users and higher have to file like a yearly report or publish a yearly report. whereas we just don’t have to do that. And so that the report on all the ways that there could be risks and how they mitigated them.

whereas for us, it’s the much simpler concepts of just, you know, not allowing abuse or drugs and stuff.

Aqua: parts of the law definitely still apply, there may not be as much oversight.

Mike: Yeah. And enforcement stuff. COSA is actually enforced for the most part by either, district attorneys or, the FTC, which I don’t know, seems like it’ll be hard for them to cases forward. I don’t know how that works.

Tarro: mean, we’re very small potatoes. Like

even at our largest, I feel like it’s, just not worth going after a zoo site on the basis of, well maybe minors might see drug use. it doesn’t really seem

like something that’s gonna be a huge issue.

My major concern is more so with larger platforms that zoos just happen to inhabit.

Mike: Yeah.

Aqua: Okay. it sounds like it might be mostly business as usual,

maybe.

Tarro: Well, being a zoo on any sort of platform is kind of like standing on the firing line, waiting to figure out when you get hit.

and I think that the big concern is just whether or not something like this is going to be the thing that finally pushes the platforms that are more allow of our existence

to finally say, you know, we don’t wanna take the risk anymore.

Mike: Yeah. Well, the British OSA seems like it does a lot of that.

Tarro: Yeah, no, that’s, that’s the one that I’m, I’m more worried about for sure. But I mean, at the same time, I think if, you know, smaller, decentralized sites are going to have less oversight, then it also might be the chance for, you know, sites like Zoo Community or you know, even other ones that don’t exist right now, to suddenly start building a presence and getting more reach.

And e especially if you’re someone who’s listening to this, who’s on Twitter a lot, or who’s in Discord, who’s worried about it, make a zoo community account, it’s a great platform. There’s so much less risk for this affecting you.

And it is much better to have that established now than to wait for everything to come tumbling down and just sort of like, try and go from there.

Aqua: data minimization seems like the answer.

you know, the less information that you have about a person, and the less data that you collect about their usage, the less that you can infer about that particular user.

I think that probably explains a little bit of apple’s strategy here.

Mike: Yeah.

Aqua: Yeah, so not in my right mind, was asking us, , for our opinion, first, , not in my right mind is convinced that if, a requirement to upload a photo ID in order to browse the internet goes through, that, a large number of zoos will suddenly just drop off the face of the internet.

so, first of all, COSA does not require that. It doesn’t mean it won’t happen, but there’s nothing in the text of the bill that says this is the way it’s going to take place. it’s, it’s not guaranteed. As far as whether or not, a bunch of zoos are gonna disappear, I kind of doubt it. taro, I know you said that if, blue Sky or ex formerly Twitter, required a photo ID for you to make your account that you probably would not do that.

I feel the same way. but that wouldn’t be an end to my presence on the internet. It just means that I would go somewhere else.

Tarro: Mm-hmm.

Aqua: So, it’s worth asking whether or not, certain websites, can and should be trusted to have that information about you, if that is indeed the solution that they come to. Just because the website operators, have verified your identity with, photo id, that doesn’t mean that information is public, right? It’s not like all the users on the site know, exactly who you are and it like, they’re not gonna display it in your

profile.

Mike: Mm-hmm.

Aqua: So, given that zoos mainly run into problems when they are reported by other users, either maliciously or reasonably, kind of depends on what we were doing.

it’s still the site operators and the moderation team’s decision whether or not they’re gonna act on it and having proof of ID really doesn’t add anything to their toolkit unless there is evidence of a crime.

you know, I think the response is probably gonna be the same as it’s always been, which is just to ban the user

Mike: Yeah.

Aqua: and then that’s the end.

Tarro: It is worth mentioning that the idea of having your social media presence more directly tied to your ID and your government identity is something that’s been floated around before, , even by people like Elon Musk, who’s, famously said a couple times that part of the problem with, social media is that there’s so many bots and there’s so many people who can just say whatever they want anonymously. and so as much as it’s definitely not what’s being proposed right now, I do think it is worth considering that this is still a step towards that direction. And that’s something that I think nobody wants.

Aqua: I Agree.

but I wonder if it came to that, if the nature of certain websites would just change. it’s not hard for me to imagine a website that used to be a vibrant forum with a bunch of people in it saying and doing cool shit. now it’s really more of a landing page, that points to some other network of chats, you know, which is not too far off from what we do now anyway, because it’s more fun.

It has a lot of advantages, but, the reality is, most people are moving into Discord and Matrix and Telegram and WhatsApp. even companies are conducting business there and like their support forums have been replaced by it. and it, it’s not really clear to me whether or not those platforms would fall under, like OSA’s scope. I don’t think there’s anything in the law right now that says yes. So it could just be that we do what we have always done, which is work around the problem and go somewhere else and we end up inventing something new. anyway, that’s just my opinion. I don’t think that an ID requirement is necessarily going to cause a bunch of people to just disappear completely.

I hope we never find out. But, I’m old enough to have seen dozens of platforms pop into existence and then find all my friends there, and then oh, they close or they get shut down, or somebody gets bought out or it merges into some other thing. or it pulls a Tumblr and bans all the stuff that I care about.

So I leave, I’m used to finding, all of my old friends somewhere else.

Mike: Yeah.

Aqua: Like we’ve been kind of doing that with Blue Sky anyway. And, I think it’s a, skill that, we grew up well. People my age grew up with that maybe, like younger people are not so accustomed to ‘cause like they’ve never had to deal with it. but they might end up developing that skill and then it just becomes a non-issue. What do you think

Mike: I think, yeah, this is kind of a continuation of certain things we’ve already seen, but it will apply some pressure to us. We already are connected to each other and connecting to each other on various platforms.

I certainly don’t think COSA has much say in what we’re gonna do and how we’re continuing, I should say,

Tarro: Yeah, my

only concerns are about the greater trend and where it it would theoretically lead us to, but

I.

very much agree that as far as this specific bill is written, the concerns are a little bit more limited.

Aqua: ‘cause like we’ve been saying for a long time that as part of building your support network as a zoo, that means forming close friendships with people and, having different ways of communicating with them specifically because, one of those services might just not be available to you anymore.

And that might not have anything to do with you being a zoo. It might just be like a platform dies. but also having that support network and having those deep connections to other friends, that’s something that can exist outside of any one technology. So, I think actually a lot of zoos are gonna be pretty well positioned to, weather this, whatever comes up.

so I guess just keep doing what you’re doing.

Mike: Yeah, pretty much.

Aqua: you know, furry conventions are not gonna be affected. I mean, that’s, that’s a whole separate topic. But, my personal experience, is that they are still the safest and most friendly and most relaxed place where you can meet other zoos,

in relative comfort.

I actually prefer it to online

spaces by a lot. and then there’s the cost attached to it. Of course, it costs money to go to these things and it’s not getting any cheaper. and that is a problem.

But it’s too early to tell.

Mike: Yep.

Obviously we need to watch out for more laws right as they come in. It was good to dive into all this stuff. It was good to see kind of where things are going, the privacy concerns, all this kind of stuff. but it’s not the end, right? this is gonna keep on coming on through.

Aqua: Oh yeah, this is, it is far from over again. , Arizona’s bill, it’s not law yet. CSA is pretty likely to pass, but it hasn’t been reintroduced. So if you’re in the United States, there is still time to talk to your representatives and tell them to vote no and tell them exactly why. the A CLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, , have lots and lots of essays and arguments, against COSA and similar bills that you can pull from if you wanna write your own letter. there are a number of, like grassroots, websites and services and indexes, , that help you find your representatives and then they will give you a pretty good form letter that you can use as the basis for a discussion or that you can modify to make it personal. and I think that probably maybe the place where we should end this is just to remind people that if you feel hopeless about this, that’s kind of the point. America is a mess right now and,, for the last months, , it’s been a lightning fast barrage of increasingly stupid and desperate and weird choices, , that are specifically designed to exhaust and overwhelm you so that you can’t stop all of , these bad decisions.

so like despair is a feature. It’s what they want you to feel.

You still have much more power than you, you realize, and, it doesn’t take much to exercise it. And, from experience, I can tell you. it doesn’t take that many phone calls, to, your representatives before they notice.

sadly, because, not that many people call about anything. You know, we’re talking about maybe, a couple of dozen, , and that’s you and your friends and some family members maybe.

Mike: the past couple months, I suppose, with all the calls about Doge.

Aqua: Oh, yeah. for sure. I mean, the phones have been ringing off the hook now, and everybody is exhausted by that.

you probably won’t get a live person. you might get one of the staff and, , that’s good enough, right? Because you, you know, your name, you will get tallied, in the no column or, , like your opposition will be registered. And yes, your representative definitely looks at that information

because if they don’t, and then they go, advocate for something that their, constituents don’t want, they’re gonna embarrass themselves and they might not get reelected. you know, use the tools you have and, I like to say that you have to meet people where they are. So that means, just like with animal rights. find allies and fight alongside them. And focus on the parts that you agree and don’t worry about your differences just yet.

It’s clear to me that most people don’t want, these bills to go through as written because they don’t sufficiently protect people who need the protection the most. we have some major problems to solve as a society, and, we really can’t afford to put them off any longer, but there is still a balance between protecting kids and preserving, the, privacy and the rights of adults.

and, we have to find it. So,

Call your representatives.

Tarro: At the end of the day, I think like the, big thing for me here is that, you know, there are parts of all of these bills that are really important and it’s just a matter of finding out the right way to do them so that everyone wins.

Aqua: Yeah. and you know you did it right if Absolutely nobody is satisfied with it.

Mike: Yeah, that’s how it goes.

Aqua: Alright. Mike and Taro.

Thank you very much for taking the time to work through this with me. , this was an important one and I’m glad we got to do it.

Mike: Yeah, it was good. , talking about all this. It was good, , reading through that law actually. ‘cause uh, a lot of the other ones I haven’t even read through and it was kind of eyeopening to see , what’s been around that I didn’t even know about. And, , it gave me some new ideas about, yeah, honestly protecting kids, right?

Thinking about the risks to minors and so on platforms.

Tarro: And I think it’s always really important to keep an eye on what’s happening in the future because as zoo, the smallest things that don’t necessarily seem like they’re gonna affect us can end up being really major things for the community. And so staying on top of this news, even if it’s not, you know, necessarily the most super dramatic and exciting, you know, it’s gonna feel a lot more relevant if some of these changes do come into play.

So having the opportunity to talk about it has been really fantastic.

Mike: Yeah,

Talk about it with your friends and family.

Outro

Mike: Thanks friends, for listening to Zoo than thou.

Aqua: Our next episode is on May 12th, and it’s all about constructing canine consent.

Mike: Oh no, not consent.

Aqua: Yep. You can subscribe to the podcast via our zoo RSS Feed. Just point your favorite podcast [email protected]. You can also check out our extensive bonus [email protected]. If you wanna show your support financially, head on over to donate.zoo.wtf and find us on Blue Sky at you Guessed it.

Zoo, wtf. That’s where you’ll find me and Mike. The dog is on Mastodon at dog mike, at feral.cafe.

Mike: Our podcast website hasn’t changed, and you can find a form there that enables anonymous submissions to the podcast. You can also simply email us at Mail at Zoo wtf.

Aqua: Share this podcast with a zoo, someone who might need a little help understanding how their online life could change in big ways. Call your congressional and state representatives if you’re stateside. Every little bit counts.

Mike: I’m Mike, the dog. Not yet Censored by Congressional bills.

Aqua: And I’m aqua, and you’re almost finished listening to zoo than Thou state defiant fellow zoos. We’ll see you next time. You feel like howling at the moon?

Mike: Oh, oh,