The problem is those self-same authoritarian strongmen are very successfully using sockpuppeting to change national discourses in ways that benefit them and are detrimental to the targeted countries. Hybrid war is real and has been ongoing for more than a decade. LLMs make it way more cost effective.

Being able to limit the influence of external bad actors is the main goal of ID verification. Age verification is a useful side effect that makes it easier to sell to the general public.

Big Tech has had at least a decade to fix this, did nothing of note, and is all out of ideas. Privacy advocates had the same time to figure out a "least bad" technical solution, but got so obsessed with railing against it happening at all, that nothing got any traction.

So governments are here to legislate, for better or worse. They know it's a trade-off between being undermined by external forces vs. the systems being abused by future governments, but their take is that a future authoritarian government will end up implementing something similar anyway.

> Being able to limit the influence of external bad actors is the main goal of ID verification. Age verification is a useful side effect that makes it easier to sell to the general public.

How? People already sell their accounts to spammers. Why would that change?

> Being able to limit the influence of external bad actors is the main goal of ID verification.

How does automatically determining your age serve the goal of ID verification? It seems like most sites are choosing this as the first option. If the point was to link your ID, why wouldn't they ask everyone to provide it?

Do you truly believe that ID "verification" will do anything in a world where IDs are leaked by the tens of thousands to the millions?

You are shifting the onus on to the platforms, when the problem is pretty simple; with a few exceptions, we've failed as a species to learn how to think.

Also do you think that the TLAs don't know who the bots most likely are with all the surveillance data they're gathering? That the NSA doesn't have detailed telemetry of the surveillance ops??

Let me ask you the question, what have they done about it? And why not?

Correct.

The choice is between democracy and our current ever worsening sociopolitical hellscape.

If eliminating bots and sockpuppets is the price for restoring some semblance of democracy, then gosh darn.

And if social media, targeted ads, and algorithmic hate machines are collateral damage, than gee double gosh darn.

Those sacrifices are a price I'm willing to pay.

> Being able to limit the influence of external bad actors is the main goal of ID verification.

Then they should say so. Elected officials lying to and misleading the public when their real intentions differ is almost criminal. It's not a behavior anyone should ever support. I will not vote for people who do that.