6 ms·

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

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

matwood 11mo ago
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.
iterance 11mo ago
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.
rkachowski 11mo ago
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.
- indoordin0saur 11mo ago
  Those pesky... adults!
jamesbelchamber 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    > 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/2025/07/31/91334/2 https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202... US: https://issueone.org/press/new-poll-finds-near-universal-public-support-for-bipartisan-legislation-protecting-kids-online/ https://issueone.org/press/new-poll-finds-near-universal-pub... Aus: https://au.yougov.com/politics/articles/51000-support-for-under-16-social-media-ban-soars-to-77-among-australians 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 11mo ago
      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.
Gormo 11mo ago
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.
- TZubiri 11mo ago
  I get the sentiment, but just denouncing that the given reason is a facade is not sufficient. It creates a divide between people that are looking for a solution to a problem, and people that disregard the problem completely. If you just ignore the actual problem and cynically call it a front for something else, you are just going to be ignored in the actual conversation. The problem is real and it needs a solution, suggest something better or be forced to stay out of the conversation. For example, if there's a lot of car accidents, and we suggest a speed limit, you might say that it's actually a way for cops and cities to control the population, and make everything slow, and increase city income by charging fines. But the problem still exists despite your cynicism, unless you suggest another solution for the problem, you won't be able to keep your precious speed freedom. Because of course reducing car fatalities is more important than the freedom to go super fast, that's not really under discussion.
  - trinsic2 11mo ago
    So I get it, but you have to include the time frame that this is happening. Its more than just a solution to a problem. This particular idea of age-gating just happens to be pushed forward during the worst time in history for internet freedoms. Freedoms are being attacked on multiple fronts. I look at this more like them introducing license plate cameras to stop crime, or real estate apps that use algorithms to help land lords and renters to get better pricing. Except these corporations that sell this tech are promoting and utilizing the features of this tech to make sure it gets abused. You can see this with the license plate readers, its giving police more control than they need, and for the real estate companies that are pushing algorithmic pricing for rents, they are spending time contacting landlords and asking them what they are charging for rent so they can artificially inflate the market. This issue is way more nuanced then you are making it. There is no legislation, or anyone enforcing laws to reign in the abuses and therefor the tech is being abused, and will continue to be abused with no end it sight. If you want laws and mechanisms to protect children, first have something in-place that protects people from the abuse that these corporations are encouraging. Until that happens, I do not support any of these initiatives. Its the wrong time for them.
sfdlkj3jk342a 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  > 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-up-makes-millions-from-fighting-child-abuse-online 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 https://mullvad.net/en/why-privacy-matters/going-dark
  - sfdlkj3jk342a 11mo ago
    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?
    - pjc50 11mo ago
      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 11mo ago
      Good intentions misplaced into efforts to control other people are sinister intentional efforts to harm the public.
everdrive 11mo ago
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?
- indoordin0saur 11mo ago
  Yeah, this is much more easily explained by the fact that a lot of things on the internet are damaging kids.
  - mindslight 11mo ago
    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.
- tokai 11mo ago
  This isn't a social movement.
  - everdrive 11mo ago
    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.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
- Larrikin 11mo ago
  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.
saubeidl 11mo ago
Plot twist: It's Ashton Kutcher. https://www.thecut.com/article/ashton-kutcher-thorn-spotlight-rekognition-surveillance.html https://www.thecut.com/article/ashton-kutcher-thorn-spotligh...
bparsons 11mo ago
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.
dfxm12 11mo ago
Protecting children is one of the four horsemen of the infopocalypse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse 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.
RunSet 11mo ago
> The SESTA-FOSTA law is a combination of two bills: the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act; and the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act. It passed Congress in March, and President Donald Trump signed it into law in April. > ... > The biggest companies say they can manage the risks. Match Group—owner of Match.com, Tinder, Ok Cupid and Plenty of Fish—says any potential legal issues give “huge advantages” to those with enough size to comply. “We are able to have a big legal team, a big customer care team,” Chief Executive Mandy Ginsberg said. https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-law-targets-sex-trafficking-it-could-also-hit-online-dating-1527672600 https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-law-targets-sex-trafficking...
MSFT_Edging 11mo ago
In the last couple years we've seen the internet version of "Vietnam war being televised made it unpopular at home". After Vietnam, it was easier for journalists to embed with the terrorist groups than it was to embed with US forces, as the US learned that people seeing how the sausage is made immediately cuts the support for said sausage making. Massive political weight was thrown behind getting control of TikTok because of the sheer amount of reporting from Gaza. Politicians are still trying to tell people that they're essentially wrong for forming their views on actual images of violence they're seeing. The world at large was shown the brutality against the people of Gaza, and the plot was lost at home. If the "enemies" aren't shown, it's easy to go along with "good guys" and "bad guys", but when you see 100s of children missing limbs, mourning their family members, and begging on to not be killed over the course of a few months, suddenly the fairy tale that allows some countries to brutalize others falls apart.

matwood 11mo ago

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.

iterance 11mo ago

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.

rkachowski 11mo ago

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.

indoordin0saur 11mo ago
Those pesky... adults!

jamesbelchamber 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  > 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/2025/07/31/91334/2 https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202... US: https://issueone.org/press/new-poll-finds-near-universal-public-support-for-bipartisan-legislation-protecting-kids-online/ https://issueone.org/press/new-poll-finds-near-universal-pub... Aus: https://au.yougov.com/politics/articles/51000-support-for-under-16-social-media-ban-soars-to-77-among-australians 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 11mo ago
    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.

Gormo 11mo ago

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.

TZubiri 11mo ago
I get the sentiment, but just denouncing that the given reason is a facade is not sufficient. It creates a divide between people that are looking for a solution to a problem, and people that disregard the problem completely. If you just ignore the actual problem and cynically call it a front for something else, you are just going to be ignored in the actual conversation. The problem is real and it needs a solution, suggest something better or be forced to stay out of the conversation. For example, if there's a lot of car accidents, and we suggest a speed limit, you might say that it's actually a way for cops and cities to control the population, and make everything slow, and increase city income by charging fines. But the problem still exists despite your cynicism, unless you suggest another solution for the problem, you won't be able to keep your precious speed freedom. Because of course reducing car fatalities is more important than the freedom to go super fast, that's not really under discussion.
- trinsic2 11mo ago
  So I get it, but you have to include the time frame that this is happening. Its more than just a solution to a problem. This particular idea of age-gating just happens to be pushed forward during the worst time in history for internet freedoms. Freedoms are being attacked on multiple fronts. I look at this more like them introducing license plate cameras to stop crime, or real estate apps that use algorithms to help land lords and renters to get better pricing. Except these corporations that sell this tech are promoting and utilizing the features of this tech to make sure it gets abused. You can see this with the license plate readers, its giving police more control than they need, and for the real estate companies that are pushing algorithmic pricing for rents, they are spending time contacting landlords and asking them what they are charging for rent so they can artificially inflate the market. This issue is way more nuanced then you are making it. There is no legislation, or anyone enforcing laws to reign in the abuses and therefor the tech is being abused, and will continue to be abused with no end it sight. If you want laws and mechanisms to protect children, first have something in-place that protects people from the abuse that these corporations are encouraging. Until that happens, I do not support any of these initiatives. Its the wrong time for them.

sfdlkj3jk342a 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
> 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-up-makes-millions-from-fighting-child-abuse-online 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 https://mullvad.net/en/why-privacy-matters/going-dark
- sfdlkj3jk342a 11mo ago
  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?
  - pjc50 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
    Good intentions misplaced into efforts to control other people are sinister intentional efforts to harm the public.

everdrive 11mo ago

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?

indoordin0saur 11mo ago
Yeah, this is much more easily explained by the fact that a lot of things on the internet are damaging kids.
- mindslight 11mo ago
  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.
tokai 11mo ago
This isn't a social movement.
- everdrive 11mo ago
  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.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
Larrikin 11mo ago
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.

saubeidl 11mo ago

Plot twist: It's Ashton Kutcher. https://www.thecut.com/article/ashton-kutcher-thorn-spotlight-rekognition-surveillance.html https://www.thecut.com/article/ashton-kutcher-thorn-spotligh...

bparsons 11mo ago

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.

dfxm12 11mo ago

Protecting children is one of the four horsemen of the infopocalypse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse 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.

RunSet 11mo ago

> The SESTA-FOSTA law is a combination of two bills: the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act; and the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act. It passed Congress in March, and President Donald Trump signed it into law in April. > ... > The biggest companies say they can manage the risks. Match Group—owner of Match.com, Tinder, Ok Cupid and Plenty of Fish—says any potential legal issues give “huge advantages” to those with enough size to comply. “We are able to have a big legal team, a big customer care team,” Chief Executive Mandy Ginsberg said. https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-law-targets-sex-trafficking-it-could-also-hit-online-dating-1527672600 https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-law-targets-sex-trafficking...

MSFT_Edging 11mo ago

In the last couple years we've seen the internet version of "Vietnam war being televised made it unpopular at home". After Vietnam, it was easier for journalists to embed with the terrorist groups than it was to embed with US forces, as the US learned that people seeing how the sausage is made immediately cuts the support for said sausage making. Massive political weight was thrown behind getting control of TikTok because of the sheer amount of reporting from Gaza. Politicians are still trying to tell people that they're essentially wrong for forming their views on actual images of violence they're seeing. The world at large was shown the brutality against the people of Gaza, and the plot was lost at home. If the "enemies" aren't shown, it's easy to go along with "good guys" and "bad guys", but when you see 100s of children missing limbs, mourning their family members, and begging on to not be killed over the course of a few months, suddenly the fairy tale that allows some countries to brutalize others falls apart.