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.

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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.

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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.

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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.