| ▲ | whywhywhywhy 7 hours ago |
| Guess at some point in the future it will come out who bankrolled all this because multiple countries in Europe and America don’t just roll something like this out in 8 months organically without someone paying off politicians to push it |
|
| ▲ | dfxm12 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Protecting children is one of the four horsemen of the infopocalypse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp... Governments are also getting more conservative recently with regards to domestic surveillance & social freedoms. In this regard, it's not anyone new, it's just the usual suspects: the same people who fund conservative media, the prison industrial complex, etc. |
|
| ▲ | Gormo 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This seems like an attempt to leverage something widely regarded as reasonable (stop kids from accessing pornographic content without parental oversight) as the camel's nose through the tent to establish widespread identity tracking on the internet. |
|
| ▲ | iterance 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The fight for this kind of legislature has been ongoing for many years as part of a broader program that seeks to shape the kinds of information that can be stored, consumed, and propagated on the Internet. Age verification is only one branch of the fight, but an important one to the many who support government control: it is an inroad that allows governments to say they have a stake in who sees what. |
|
| ▲ | matwood 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It has nothing to do with age gating, and everything to do with tracking. While there may be some funding going on behind the scenes, governments love tracking on its own merits. |
|
| ▲ | sfdlkj3jk342a 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think it's possible that there are secretive efforts to destroy permissionless access to the internet, but my guess is that states are simply copying each other and/or global conditions are similar enough that they naturally come to the same conclusions around the same time. A somewhat analogous situation is how landlords raise rents in sync with each other, not because they're intentionally colluding to fix prices, but because nowadays it's easy to see average rental prices in neighborhoods, and the natural strategy is to set your rental prices based on that. |
| |
| ▲ | mhitza 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > my guess is that states are simply copying each other and/or global conditions are similar enough that they naturally come to the same conclusions around the same time. I think that's the wrong guess. Even with chat control, in some previous forms, the proposals came of the back of lobbying. One such case was Ashton Kutcker's startup https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutchers-non-profit-start... The more recent proposals for chat control were drafted by non-public "high level groups", the identity of which wasn't revealed to the public https://mullvad.net/en/why-privacy-matters/going-dark | | |
| ▲ | sfdlkj3jk342a 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Do you think the main force is misplaced good intentions (which I assume is what drives Ashton Kutcher) or more sinister intentional efforts to harm the public? | | |
| ▲ | deltoidmaximus an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Kutcher wrote a letter of support for his friend Danny Masterson who was convicted raping multiple women so if he is truly concerned about abuse of women it doesn't seem to apply when it involves people he knows doing it. When this came to light his defense was that he didn't think anyone but the judge was going to see the letter. | |
| ▲ | pjc50 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Those are heavily co-mingled. Policing and intelligence agencies in particular view themselves as having good intentions which look like harm from the outside. | |
| ▲ | mindslight 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Good intentions misplaced into efforts to control other people are sinister intentional efforts to harm the public. | |
| ▲ | mhitza 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don't think anyone is that naive to not see the negative implications of the things they are proposing, or helping develop. They might feign ignorance, and excuse themselves with "following orders" but the majority know it's not right in principle. I tend to follow information in this space, and could talk about it endlessly (though it would still have minimal effect in the end). From the things I'm seeing right now, in my mind, all this clampdown on privacy is to have better control of the message and discussion in order to preserve the corrupt status quo. To give one example, many leaks and reports initially come in anonymous due to fear of repercussion from those in power. My country (Romania) changed the legislation a couple of years back to prevent people from reporting corruption anonymously (in a highly corrupt state). Maybe that's why Trump said he loves Romanians, recently, he'd like to do that at home as well. > more sinister intentional efforts to harm the public Until recently I wasn't the type of person that would entertain the idea of a shadowy organization that tries to puppetmaster the world. Though with the recent Epstein emails release that in black and white stated about Slovakia's 2018 government "the government will fall this week - as planned" (day prior to mass protests that lead to it falling), makes you wonder about the backroom politics of the western world, and why we need more transparency there, and less control from them. edit: And of course, any change that is put behind a "think of the children" message, should raise everybody's eyebrows to the max. | | |
| ▲ | _factor 32 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Just imagine a capable individual just like yourself, but with such a rotting core that they see the same devious plans you and I do, but lack the backbone/principles and moral/ethical fiber to prevent them from pursuing those ideas. Instead, they full endorse and selfishly benefit from them at the expense of others. With our large population, this individual, and many such like them are guaranteed to exist at all levels of the socio-economic ladder. Solipsism is the root of corruption continuing to sprout. |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | iamnothere 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Off-topic, but actually a number of landlords raise prices in sync with each other because they use price-setting services like RealPage that intentionally try to maximize rents across multiple landlords. They just settled a lawsuit over this: https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-realpage-settlement-r... |
|
|
| ▲ | everdrive 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Do social movements _always_ have people at the top pulling the strings? Is it _never_ the case that even when you can identify thought leaders, the movement itself is organic and broadly supported? |
| |
| ▲ | Larrikin 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Internet comments aren't a social movement Everything that these laws are supposedly regulating has always been there and we have an entire generation now that grew up with it. Everyone was fine just like video games were fine, movies were fine, racy books were fine, and the printing press was fine. The Internet comments make it seem like lazy parents but it's very convenient that the solution is to ID every single person on the Internet. Facebook pushed this hard with their real name policy and then had to back off because people complained about trans people being forced to use their old names. They've been successfully demonized so now it's time to push as hard as they can. It's probably not just Facebook but it's obviously not organic. | | |
| ▲ | mindslight 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think it's "organic" from the big tech companies looking to pull up the ladder behind them. These laws are straight up regulatory capture to make it much harder to start new Internet businesses, while forcing their users to divulge even more personal info. Google has been bugging me with Android popups for years "please add your birthday to help Google comply with the law". Obtaining that bit of my information isn't something they need to do - it's something they want to do because every bit of personal information they scrape out of me makes their adtech surveillance database joins that much more accurate. | |
| ▲ | everdrive 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >Internet comments aren't a social movement This seems strictly wrong. People talk online. People get their ideas online, and share their ideas online. Internet comments _alone_ are not a social movement, but they certainly do frequently represent social movements. | | |
| ▲ | Larrikin 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Musk in his tit for tat with Trump recently revealed huge numbers of the Internet comments supporting MAGA were foreign plants. He didn't reveal which accounts were bots though. All these comments supporting censorship appear mostly on platforms that would love to ID every person on their platform. Internet comments do not represent anything anymore that doesn't manifest in the actual world. They are excellent at having a few influence the many | | |
| ▲ | everdrive 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I agree with you, and probably more than it sounds. But I think the point you make is still too strong a case. ie, even if the online comments are ~90% foreign influence it doesn't also follow that everything is astroturfing or that real people do not discuss issues online. To your point though, maybe we can no longer reliably tell the difference, and so it'd be better to adopt your view as a rule of thumb. |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | tokai 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This isn't a social movement. | | |
| ▲ | 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | everdrive 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Concern over accessibility of internet pornography is absolutely a social movement. I don't necessarily agree with some of what is being pushed, but there's a large constituency here. |
| |
| ▲ | indoordin0saur 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah, this is much more easily explained by the fact that a lot of things on the internet are damaging kids. | | |
| ▲ | mindslight 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, and that thing is chiefly corporate social media. Which could be fixed literally overnight by parents, over a few weeks by school district policy, and over a few months with sites publishing metadata to aid client side blocking. Phones, the primary independent computing device for kids, are already locked down to the point that an owner has to jump through many (detectable and auditable) hoops to install arbitrary software. None of this requires some draconian regime where it becomes sites' own responsibilities to obtain and verify their users meatspace identities. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | rkachowski 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It would be excellent to know who is pushing this and through what means. There is some unprecedented alignment across borders to restrict access and rights. |
| |
|
| ▲ | jamesbelchamber 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This strikes me as almost conspiratorial thinking, and it's reflected in the article. At one point they say KOSA is unpopular but.. it isn't? These laws (KOSA, OSA) enjoy broad, bipartisan popularity and politicians are jumping on the bandwagon because they want votes. It really is as simple as that. There's absolutely no way to counter this, or at least to round off the censorship power-grab this is allowing, if we don't admit to ourselves that people have become suspicious of the tech sector (us) and are reaching to clip our wings - starting with access to their kids. |
| |
| ▲ | iamnothere 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The laws are only moderately popular in the abstract, but when you show people the reality and the future implications then popularity drops. The key is educating people about the dangers of this type of legislation, including dangers to privacy and authoritarian control over information. In the US especially both major parties hate each other with a passion; this animosity can be leveraged with proper framing. | |
| ▲ | zug_zug 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What do you mean it's not unpopular? How many voters have ever expressed interest in this? If the politicians keep voting for things their constituents don't (and in these cases actively push back against so hard that the politician are forced to withdraw the push) that seems like strong evidence that politicians are doing something with an external incentive... Politicians having bad incentives (e.g. campaign donations) isn't conspiracy thinking, it's a documented reality. Hell, we even had a supreme court judge taking a present from somebody who's case he was ACTIVELY OVERSEEING. | | |
| ▲ | jamesbelchamber 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | > What do you mean it's not unpopular? How many voters have ever expressed interest in this? UK: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202... US: https://issueone.org/press/new-poll-finds-near-universal-pub... Aus: https://au.yougov.com/politics/articles/51000-support-for-un... So far as I know there's nothing confounding here - people from across the political spectrum just seem to think it's a good idea to introduce age checks and to restrict children from accessing adult content. | | |
| ▲ | zug_zug 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's a powerpoint of somebody really trying to push an agenda and has nothing to do with age verification. The 88% support is for "social media platforms to protect minors from online harms, such as the promotion of eating disorders, suicide, substance abuse, and sexual exploitation." I'm sure social media could say with 99% accuracy whether somebody is a minor already just based on advertising data and if a law prevented facebook from showing diet pill ads to a kid that has absolutely zero with some sort of government tracking bullshit. The fact that you are citing 3 studies without even reading them apparently really makes me suspicious of your motivation here. |
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | saubeidl 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Plot twist: It's Ashton Kutcher. https://www.thecut.com/article/ashton-kutcher-thorn-spotligh... |
|
| ▲ | bparsons 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The Christian right has been pushing for this forever. They finally acquired enough political and cultural purchase to get this measure pushed over the line. |