4 ms·

If it was organic the wording and the definitions in these legislations would be wildly different, the timing would be all over the place, the age limits and th

If it was organic the wording and the definitions in these legislations would be wildly different, the timing would be all over the place, the age limits and the methods to provide ID as well. But they are not. edited for tone

austin-cheney 6mo ago
Correlation does not imply causation. Your invented and evidence-less conspiracy theory is an insult to intelligence. I suspect you are seeing something that isn't there to account for an unspoken bias front and center in your mind.
- gslepak 6mo ago
  People use the word "conspiracy theory" as a shield against their own ignorance. "If I don't know about it, if it sounds 'spooky' to me, it must be because it's a conspiracy theory, and therefore it is wrong," is essentially what runs through their minds. The reality is that top-down legislation is the norm rather than the exception, and there is plenty of evidence. It's not written by Joe on the street. It's not organic. It is top-down and imposed. This is what @kdheiwns rightly observes here, and in other fields like how all of a sudden every car manufacturer just up and decided simultaneously that it was a good thing to install spyware into all of their cars.
  - slg 6mo ago
    Who do you think is behind this? That is the question no one is answering here and why people are calling it a conspiracy theory. And the car manufacturers all decided to install spyware because it made them money. That's just capitalism.
    - gslepak 6mo ago
      > And the car manufacturers all decided to install spyware because it made them money. That just capitalism. Yes, you are right, it must be "capitalism" at fault. The sort of capitalism where nobody asks for the product, nobody wants the product, and yet somehow the product is the only choice you have.
      - slg 6mo ago
        It's very noticeable that this is the part of my comment you responded to and not the question of who is behind all this. That is why people consider this stuff conspiracy theories. You aren't analyzing the various parties and what motivates them. You're just seeing a result you don't understand and jumping to the conclusion that it's only possible if there is some unknown shadowy group behind it all. If anyone here is trying to create a "shield against their own ignorance"...
        gslepak 6mo ago
        If that's the conclusion you'd like to walk away with, be my guest. ^_^
        fc417fc802 6mo ago
        There's no requirement to name specific parties in order to make observations. Regardless of motivation it's clear from past examples that laws simply do not form across international borders in this manner. The lobbying is plain as day. What is your motivation for denying the obvious?
        slg 6mo ago
        >What is your motivation for denying the obvious? Comments like this don’t make you folks sound less like “conspiracy theorists”. It’s also a tone that tells me that you aren’t going to approach anything I say in good faith so there is no point in me trying to engage with you on the topic anymore.
        gslepak 6mo ago
        Written by sig a few minutes ago: > It's very noticeable that this is the part of my comment you responded to and not the question How funny you won't answer his question now. I'm also curious, what is your motivation for denying the obvious?
        6mo ago
    - AnonymousPlanet 6mo ago
      > Who do you think is behind this? Anyone who is interested in connecting an identity with every computer on the internet, like a tamper proof license plate for computers. Just ask local law enforcement. There has been a growing awareness for the possibilities of foreign states to manipulate social media and other platforms with fake personas. So any kind of counter intelligence would be interested as well. There have been numerous incidents of politicians trying to go after critical posts using defamation laws. Often enough the investigations find a dead end when the account can't be connected with an ID. Religious advocacy groups have been more and more aggressive in trying to censor the internet, e.g. this Australian one that boasted having pushed Mastercard and Visa to enforce age verification https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/mastercard-visa-backlash-adult-games-removed-online-stores-steam-itchio-ntwnfb https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/mastercard-vis... So the list of suspects is actually long. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a very broad lobbying campaign that very easily finds local interest groups to help them meet the right law makers.
      - slg 6mo ago
        Do you not see how this comment is actually counterproductive to the point you’re arguing? The long list of suspects, most of them being totally independent of each other is evidence of this not being orchestrated by some central group.
        gslepak 6mo ago
        And yet, it is all part of a script. The future, without naming names, without knowing names, without pointing fingers, can somehow still be known and seen. So is that a conspiracy? Even if it looks like many disparate groups, clearly there is a central script, and if there's a central script, there must be a central author of that script.
        slg 6mo ago
        >And yet, it is all part of a script. You, AnonymousPlanet, and fc417fc802 are all responding to me in very similar ways and yet I'm not accusing you of reading from the same script or being puppeteered by the same person/group. This is because I can recognize that people can have the same thought process without any active collaboration. And yet I would have just as much evidence to make those accusations as the evidence that you provided here that all these laws have the same shady origin.
    - fc417fc802 6mo ago
      > Who do you think is behind this? I don't recall off the top of my head but in past HN threads the global lobbyists for this were named with evidence. It's intriguing to me how there's seemingly a lot of objections in this thread to the idea that this movement was driven by lobbyists. I realize it's skirting the guidelines but the tone here comes across as some sort of astroturfing particularly when I consider the general tone of past threads on the same topic within the past few months.
      - slg 6mo ago
        Lobbyists don’t lobby just to lobby, they lobby on behalf of someone paying them. So this doesn’t actually answer the question, it just shifts it to “Who is behind the lobbyists?”
        fc417fc802 6mo ago
        No kidding. I'm saying that those parties were mentioned in past threads and that I don't recall the details.
        AnonymousPlanet 6mo ago
        It doesn't matter what you answer, slg will always try to use the way you answered to argue against you, not the substance. This person seems to be only interested in derailing the conversation.
        philistine 6mo ago
        You're decrying this supposed issue, that multiple countries are all copying one another for legislation. You've repeated this multiple times in these comments. And yet, after all this, you're not interested enough to remember who's behind this important issue for you. If someone really cares they should get informed.
        card_zero 6mo ago
        So they don't really care, so what. It's Meta who are supposedly lobbying.
  - austin-cheney 6mo ago
    Maybe it is spooky. I don't know and don't care. I will wait for evidence.
    - pessimizer 6mo ago
      If you're proud of incuriousness, you'll never see evidence. I think I should be looking for evidence of the push being organic. I don't see it pushed anywhere but from the top down, even at sometimes heavy political costs to the incumbent leaders who are pushing it. You should always be asking who politicians are serving. You seem to comfortable with thinking that they must be serving some part of the electorate without actually needing to identify that part. A lot of people think social media is bad for teenagers. There are a lot of things that are bad for teenagers that we aren't making any particular, coordinated effort to ban.
nathan_compton 6mo ago
Yes, people in government famously don't know anyone else in government anywhere else and never communicate with one another or read the same research or look at what other countries are doing.
- AnonymousPlanet 6mo ago
  Is there a precedent where this happened organically and the same similarities were in place in that many legislations around the world inside of half a year?
  - giva 6mo ago
    Freon bans?
    - AnonymousPlanet 6mo ago
      That was openly coordinated beginning with the Montreal Protocol. Those things work top to bottom with international accords in the beginning and don't suddenly pop up left and right inside of much less than a year. Getting a ban on lead in fuel took ages with Europe implementing it a decade later. These kind of laws usually take many years to hone down just right and talk to all parties involved. Unless some lobby group presents a finished piece of work that just has to be waved through, like with the Citigroup scandal.
      - pixl97 6mo ago
        People have been talking about social media bans for quite some time, this isn't something that just showed up out of the blue. It's a problem that's been worsening for years. Then you had the Covid years where kids ended up spending a lot of time on phones and tablets, hence social media, and everyone is seeing the myriad of problems coming out of it. Sometimes it's not a vast global conspiracy, sometimes things just suck. Also, sometimes things suck and particular groups use it to get their way, that still doesn't diminish the thing that sucks.
traderj0e 6mo ago
You've got a point, but why so rude?
- AnonymousPlanet 6mo ago
  You're right, I edited it.
DespairYeMighty 6mo ago
>If it was organic the wording and the definitions in these legislations would be wildly different organic, one at a time, "hey, i wonder if other places considered this, how did they word it?" that's not collusion. don't imagine you know better than aware, organic people who read the newspaper and actually have more life experience and tempered emotion than you do. humans are "young" for about 20 years, parents are parents to young children for about 20 years, and smartphones have been around for about 20 years. the time seems ripe for those with life experience to draw some conclusions.

austin-cheney 6mo ago

Correlation does not imply causation. Your invented and evidence-less conspiracy theory is an insult to intelligence. I suspect you are seeing something that isn't there to account for an unspoken bias front and center in your mind.

gslepak 6mo ago
People use the word "conspiracy theory" as a shield against their own ignorance. "If I don't know about it, if it sounds 'spooky' to me, it must be because it's a conspiracy theory, and therefore it is wrong," is essentially what runs through their minds. The reality is that top-down legislation is the norm rather than the exception, and there is plenty of evidence. It's not written by Joe on the street. It's not organic. It is top-down and imposed. This is what @kdheiwns rightly observes here, and in other fields like how all of a sudden every car manufacturer just up and decided simultaneously that it was a good thing to install spyware into all of their cars.
- slg 6mo ago
  Who do you think is behind this? That is the question no one is answering here and why people are calling it a conspiracy theory. And the car manufacturers all decided to install spyware because it made them money. That's just capitalism.
  - gslepak 6mo ago
    > And the car manufacturers all decided to install spyware because it made them money. That just capitalism. Yes, you are right, it must be "capitalism" at fault. The sort of capitalism where nobody asks for the product, nobody wants the product, and yet somehow the product is the only choice you have.
    - slg 6mo ago
      It's very noticeable that this is the part of my comment you responded to and not the question of who is behind all this. That is why people consider this stuff conspiracy theories. You aren't analyzing the various parties and what motivates them. You're just seeing a result you don't understand and jumping to the conclusion that it's only possible if there is some unknown shadowy group behind it all. If anyone here is trying to create a "shield against their own ignorance"...
      - gslepak 6mo ago
        If that's the conclusion you'd like to walk away with, be my guest. ^_^
      - fc417fc802 6mo ago
        There's no requirement to name specific parties in order to make observations. Regardless of motivation it's clear from past examples that laws simply do not form across international borders in this manner. The lobbying is plain as day. What is your motivation for denying the obvious?
        slg 6mo ago
        >What is your motivation for denying the obvious? Comments like this don’t make you folks sound less like “conspiracy theorists”. It’s also a tone that tells me that you aren’t going to approach anything I say in good faith so there is no point in me trying to engage with you on the topic anymore.
        gslepak 6mo ago
        Written by sig a few minutes ago: > It's very noticeable that this is the part of my comment you responded to and not the question How funny you won't answer his question now. I'm also curious, what is your motivation for denying the obvious?
        6mo ago
  - AnonymousPlanet 6mo ago
    > Who do you think is behind this? Anyone who is interested in connecting an identity with every computer on the internet, like a tamper proof license plate for computers. Just ask local law enforcement. There has been a growing awareness for the possibilities of foreign states to manipulate social media and other platforms with fake personas. So any kind of counter intelligence would be interested as well. There have been numerous incidents of politicians trying to go after critical posts using defamation laws. Often enough the investigations find a dead end when the account can't be connected with an ID. Religious advocacy groups have been more and more aggressive in trying to censor the internet, e.g. this Australian one that boasted having pushed Mastercard and Visa to enforce age verification https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/mastercard-visa-backlash-adult-games-removed-online-stores-steam-itchio-ntwnfb https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/mastercard-vis... So the list of suspects is actually long. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a very broad lobbying campaign that very easily finds local interest groups to help them meet the right law makers.
    - slg 6mo ago
      Do you not see how this comment is actually counterproductive to the point you’re arguing? The long list of suspects, most of them being totally independent of each other is evidence of this not being orchestrated by some central group.
      - gslepak 6mo ago
        And yet, it is all part of a script. The future, without naming names, without knowing names, without pointing fingers, can somehow still be known and seen. So is that a conspiracy? Even if it looks like many disparate groups, clearly there is a central script, and if there's a central script, there must be a central author of that script.
        slg 6mo ago
        >And yet, it is all part of a script. You, AnonymousPlanet, and fc417fc802 are all responding to me in very similar ways and yet I'm not accusing you of reading from the same script or being puppeteered by the same person/group. This is because I can recognize that people can have the same thought process without any active collaboration. And yet I would have just as much evidence to make those accusations as the evidence that you provided here that all these laws have the same shady origin.
  - fc417fc802 6mo ago
    > Who do you think is behind this? I don't recall off the top of my head but in past HN threads the global lobbyists for this were named with evidence. It's intriguing to me how there's seemingly a lot of objections in this thread to the idea that this movement was driven by lobbyists. I realize it's skirting the guidelines but the tone here comes across as some sort of astroturfing particularly when I consider the general tone of past threads on the same topic within the past few months.
    - slg 6mo ago
      Lobbyists don’t lobby just to lobby, they lobby on behalf of someone paying them. So this doesn’t actually answer the question, it just shifts it to “Who is behind the lobbyists?”
      - fc417fc802 6mo ago
        No kidding. I'm saying that those parties were mentioned in past threads and that I don't recall the details.
        AnonymousPlanet 6mo ago
        It doesn't matter what you answer, slg will always try to use the way you answered to argue against you, not the substance. This person seems to be only interested in derailing the conversation.
        philistine 6mo ago
        You're decrying this supposed issue, that multiple countries are all copying one another for legislation. You've repeated this multiple times in these comments. And yet, after all this, you're not interested enough to remember who's behind this important issue for you. If someone really cares they should get informed.
        card_zero 6mo ago
        So they don't really care, so what. It's Meta who are supposedly lobbying.
- austin-cheney 6mo ago
  Maybe it is spooky. I don't know and don't care. I will wait for evidence.
  - pessimizer 6mo ago
    If you're proud of incuriousness, you'll never see evidence. I think I should be looking for evidence of the push being organic. I don't see it pushed anywhere but from the top down, even at sometimes heavy political costs to the incumbent leaders who are pushing it. You should always be asking who politicians are serving. You seem to comfortable with thinking that they must be serving some part of the electorate without actually needing to identify that part. A lot of people think social media is bad for teenagers. There are a lot of things that are bad for teenagers that we aren't making any particular, coordinated effort to ban.

nathan_compton 6mo ago

Yes, people in government famously don't know anyone else in government anywhere else and never communicate with one another or read the same research or look at what other countries are doing.

AnonymousPlanet 6mo ago
Is there a precedent where this happened organically and the same similarities were in place in that many legislations around the world inside of half a year?
- giva 6mo ago
  Freon bans?
  - AnonymousPlanet 6mo ago
    That was openly coordinated beginning with the Montreal Protocol. Those things work top to bottom with international accords in the beginning and don't suddenly pop up left and right inside of much less than a year. Getting a ban on lead in fuel took ages with Europe implementing it a decade later. These kind of laws usually take many years to hone down just right and talk to all parties involved. Unless some lobby group presents a finished piece of work that just has to be waved through, like with the Citigroup scandal.
    - pixl97 6mo ago
      People have been talking about social media bans for quite some time, this isn't something that just showed up out of the blue. It's a problem that's been worsening for years. Then you had the Covid years where kids ended up spending a lot of time on phones and tablets, hence social media, and everyone is seeing the myriad of problems coming out of it. Sometimes it's not a vast global conspiracy, sometimes things just suck. Also, sometimes things suck and particular groups use it to get their way, that still doesn't diminish the thing that sucks.

traderj0e 6mo ago

You've got a point, but why so rude?

AnonymousPlanet 6mo ago
You're right, I edited it.

DespairYeMighty 6mo ago

>If it was organic the wording and the definitions in these legislations would be wildly different organic, one at a time, "hey, i wonder if other places considered this, how did they word it?" that's not collusion. don't imagine you know better than aware, organic people who read the newspaper and actually have more life experience and tempered emotion than you do. humans are "young" for about 20 years, parents are parents to young children for about 20 years, and smartphones have been around for about 20 years. the time seems ripe for those with life experience to draw some conclusions.