| ▲ | kmeisthax 3 hours ago | |
The recent spate of state-level age verification laws, while stupid, are primarily designed to insulate Facebook from lawsuits and not actually crack down on people. You can comply with them by just having a date field and an API to get bucketed age ranges out of them. The reason why they seem like a concerted crackdown is that Facebook can pay people to go to literally every legislature and bug them up and down[0] until they pass a law to make OS vendors provide age buckets. The real shit is happening parallel to the actual legislation. Companies that need to comply with, say, the extremely onerous UK Online Services Act, are forcing everyone to use data-heavy verification paths like facial recognition age estimation or ID scanning. Newgrounds just used your account age or a credit card. A core property of fascism is that, unlike other forms of tyranny, it is specifically a public-private joint venture. The government uses corporations to bypass its own constitutional restrictions, and those corporations then agree to follow rules that don't actually exist, specifically so that those corporations can shut down all their competition and form para-governments that supercede the democratically responsive bits. This has actually been going on for a while, but it's only now that the people are actually noticing it. [0] Inspired by Louis Rossmann's efforts to get R2R bills passed, I've started doing amateur lobbying for the Rio Grande Plan. It's surprisingly easy, but you will almost certainly have to take off from work or sacrifice many a lunch hour to be able to actually get to talk to people. | ||