>political movements can be global.

You are saying exactly what OP is saying but just rephrasing it another way.

The more a movement crosses borders, the less likely it is to be based on the needs of any particular country and the more likely it is to be based on the needs of the transnational billionaire class.

Drinking age is not the only example, driving age is another good example and also the old TV rating system. What was considered taboo in America was often at the same time considered to be fine in places like Europe, or vice versa. But we never had a coordinated international push for censorship when it came to TV/movies like we are seeing with social media.

I can remember how much people used to deride mass surveillance and censorship in places like Russia and China and now here we are very quickly catching up to them in every way.

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Barrin92 2 hours ago | parent [-]

>the less likely it is to be based on the needs of any particular country

there has been no such thing in decades. The idea that there are 'organic needs of countries' compared to 'artificial needs of global consumers' in the internet age where digital infrastructure is long post-national is conspiratorial.

We're here on HN right now. I'm German, you might statistically I guess be American, but maybe Indian, maybe Chinese, we likely both consume media made in South Korea or Japan so the fact that legislation emerges kind of in tandem isn't "coordinated censorship", it's reflecting a reality of how information flows. Politics, economics, and media consumption is now horizontally intertwined, we don't live in vertical silo countries any more.

If you made a digital worldmap and connected each person you'd get something that doesn't look at all like the one on your physical globe and if you don't realize that the distances there are a bit different you're going to think spooky coincidences are happening.

	▲	Dig1t 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Are there organic movements in Germany, UK, USA, Norway etc of common citizens agitating for social media controls for kids? Are they actually composed of citizens? Are they funded by grassroots organizations? I can tell you that in the USA there are basically no real grassroots efforts to censor social media, at least none with a real footprint that most people have ever heard of. Despite that, there are a lot of politicians making laws to clamp down on social media use. I think most people can intuitively see that the number of people who talk about this as an issue does not at all match the amount of attention that politicians are giving it. All at the same time, in most western countries simultaneously. It just does not pass the smell test. >you're going to think spooky coincidences are happening. Nothing spooky about it, they are not coincidences, we can see that ideas are spreading between powerful politicians and the billionaire oligarchs across borders without any real input of the governed. Laws are being made, we are being given the "think of the children" line, and they are hoping that we will accept it. Just because we can communicate across borders doesn't mean that countries should stop considering the needs of their citizens as their primary objective. The more we allow these efforts to cross borders without any objection or examination, the weaker the power of citizens becomes and the less effective democracy becomes.