4 ms·

I'm confused where all of this censorship is originating from. What wave of efforts is culminating? I can't really explain this from any movement I can see.

by shaftoe 5mo ago

OccamsMirror 5mo ago
It's all coming from Meta: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-behind-meta-154717384.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-beh... Big tech wants regulatory capture.
- mannanj 5mo ago
  And Meta is captured by spy agencies. Don't be tricked at any point into thinking this is just a tech thing. And, spy agencies, who captured them?
  - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
    I wouldn't say captured. Zuckerberg has been cutting deals with the new administration so often people were seeing him at the Pentagon. It's a partnership
    - mannanj 5mo ago
      It goes way before that, it isn't recent.
      - iamnothere 5mo ago
        In-Q-Tel
- uncircle 5mo ago
  I keep reading this but I don't understand how a company might want to push censorship on users. What is the economic benefit of censorship? Does Meta's bottom line increase if there is no illegal content and every user is age verified on the site? Would Meta care if you use a VPN? The ones that stand to benefit the most are the governments themselves and their surveillance network.
  - tylerchilds 5mo ago
    Rug pull Ladder pull It’s just that “Move fast, break things, regulate impossible to repair.”
  - luisfmh 5mo ago
    I've read a take somewhere that seemed to make sense. They don't want to get stuck with the liabilities of the content that gets posted on their platforms. So by forcing the age verification onto the users, forcing users to identify and track themselves, they can have a "clean" route to someone who posts illicit content on their platforms. It just sucks that that's all in sacrifice of our privacy.
    - kmeisthax 5mo ago
      The thing that makes this plausible is that the California and Colorado bills are specifically written to either allow or outright require self-attestation. Children will just lie about their ages because if they don't, the computer is basically useless. So it would give Meta the ability to dodge lawsuits, but still actually have kids on their dangerous platforms, with the argument of "well, the law makes us trust this unreliable indicator".
      - bryan_w 5mo ago
        > Children will just lie Not if the parents are setting it up beforehand (like with small children) then their iaccount or Google account will be under parental controls from that point on. It seems reasonable that if a parent enables their child to visit sites after that, then that's just their prerogative (like giving your kid beer)
  - washadjeffmad 5mo ago
    Not that many years ago, Facebook tried to broker a deal to provide free internet to India if all of their web traffic and communications would happen within the Facebook ecosystem. It's long been the dream of more than a few American companies to be the gatekeepers of the web.
- progval 5mo ago
  There is no evidence it is actually coming from Meta. The Reddit researcher the article cites generated their entire "analysis" in three days using Claude: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659552 Their website also added this page since I posted that comment: https://web.archive.org/web/20260411112604/https://tboteproject.com/notice/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260411112604/https://tboteproj... where they claim their website is under "surveillance" because it got a few thousand requests from Google Cloud et al, most of them to a single page. This shows how low their standards are.
  - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
    > There is no evidence it is actually coming from Meta My personal view that social media should be age gated is caused by Meta. But broadly, polling shows a commanding majority (60+ percent) of Americans believe in restrictions for under 14s.
    - davkan 5mo ago
      Is there broad support for digital ID, age verification, etc? Or is it a broad sentiment that kids shouldn’t be on social media. Everyone I know agrees with latter but almost no one supports the former.
      - Avicebron 5mo ago
        The parent commenter is conflating two things. Your right, there can be broad general sentiment that "kids probably shouldn't on social media, or better framed, social media in it's current iteration isn't healthy for people especially kids" but that doesn't imply people are asking for intrusive surveillance or to be monitored at all times when they are online.
        davkan 5mo ago
        Yes, i was asking which one the polling they were citing was about.
2ndorderthought 5mo ago
It looks like a coordinated effort from multiple defense companies like meta, and I believe openai, and I think palantir.
- TiredOfLife 5mo ago
  Also Soros and the lizard people of Venus. Surprisingly lizard people of Mars are against it.
- tailscaler2026 5mo ago
  Yep. I brought this up yesterday on the Roblox thread but HN has been ingesting the propaganda for too long to understand their beliefs about Roblox are misled. Time to adjust your priors y'all. This is a concentrated effort toward surveillance, controlling who we talk to, and what information we're fed.
- red-iron-pine 5mo ago
  palantir got all of the social security numbers in the US and now want to correlate all traffic against them. yalls gonna have "social credit" scores real soon
mvdwoord 5mo ago
Maybe the desire is always there, but somehow the momentum is just in an upswing now?
- 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
  They finally have the tools to mass read everything aka LLMs. Does that make sense?
Guestmodinfo 5mo ago
My guess is bots. Govts and law makers are afraid of the barrage of bots DDOSing them so they are slowly and surely tightening the noose around the internet. I'm all for net neutrality and anonymity on the internet and I don't like the age laws one bit, but I too am afraid of the bots scorching the internet. I still hate these growing dystopian laws but I also want the bots to be driven away from the "human internet" .
verdverm 5mo ago
Heritage Foundation, Meta, and generally the Oligarchy
bilbo0s 5mo ago
It's the inevitable culmination of their plan. Pretend to be anti-censorship. Get voted in. Fast track all of the censorship and surveillance through congress. When I saw certain billionaires talking up anti-censorship and anti-surveillance a few years ago, I knew we would be screwed. (I knew the same billionaires had large positions in censorship and surveillance tech.) No one ever talks against their own book unless they're planning on screwing you.
Aurornis 5mo ago
> What wave of efforts is culminating? I can't really explain this from any movement I can see. Look at any thread about social media, TikTok, smartphones, or porn sites on Hacker News: They are instantly filled with comments claiming that the internet is to blame for all of society's ills with younger generations. The HN threads fill with comments proposing that we ban children from having smartphones until they're 16 or 18 and similar ideas. Abstract ideas about banning kids from social media or porn sites are weirdly very popular even here, mostly from people who haven't thought about what that would mean for privacy for everyone. These ideas have become pervasive, even inside tech communities. It was so easy to blame social media and the internet for everything for years, and now lawmakers are riding that wave for political points. It's "think of the children" built on top of the current moral panics.
- wartywhoa23 5mo ago
  > Abstract ideas about banning kids from social media or porn sites are weirdly very popular even here It's absolutely not weird. HN is the propaganda outlet for the geeks.
wartywhoa23 5mo ago
Easy: from the fascist psychopaths at the whelm of the world. People started to understand too much about who's the real enemy, and are not willing to kill and die in meatgrinders of the new world order for the interests of the unelect 0.001%.

I'm confused where all of this censorship is originating from. What wave of efforts is culminating? I can't really explain this from any movement I can see.

by shaftoe 5mo ago

I'm confused where all of this censorship is originating from. What wave of efforts is culminating? I can't really explain this from any movement I can see.

OccamsMirror 5mo ago

It's all coming from Meta: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-behind-meta-154717384.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-beh... Big tech wants regulatory capture.

mannanj 5mo ago
And Meta is captured by spy agencies. Don't be tricked at any point into thinking this is just a tech thing. And, spy agencies, who captured them?
- 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
  I wouldn't say captured. Zuckerberg has been cutting deals with the new administration so often people were seeing him at the Pentagon. It's a partnership
  - mannanj 5mo ago
    It goes way before that, it isn't recent.
    - iamnothere 5mo ago
      In-Q-Tel
uncircle 5mo ago
I keep reading this but I don't understand how a company might want to push censorship on users. What is the economic benefit of censorship? Does Meta's bottom line increase if there is no illegal content and every user is age verified on the site? Would Meta care if you use a VPN? The ones that stand to benefit the most are the governments themselves and their surveillance network.
- tylerchilds 5mo ago
  Rug pull Ladder pull It’s just that “Move fast, break things, regulate impossible to repair.”
- luisfmh 5mo ago
  I've read a take somewhere that seemed to make sense. They don't want to get stuck with the liabilities of the content that gets posted on their platforms. So by forcing the age verification onto the users, forcing users to identify and track themselves, they can have a "clean" route to someone who posts illicit content on their platforms. It just sucks that that's all in sacrifice of our privacy.
  - kmeisthax 5mo ago
    The thing that makes this plausible is that the California and Colorado bills are specifically written to either allow or outright require self-attestation. Children will just lie about their ages because if they don't, the computer is basically useless. So it would give Meta the ability to dodge lawsuits, but still actually have kids on their dangerous platforms, with the argument of "well, the law makes us trust this unreliable indicator".
    - bryan_w 5mo ago
      > Children will just lie Not if the parents are setting it up beforehand (like with small children) then their iaccount or Google account will be under parental controls from that point on. It seems reasonable that if a parent enables their child to visit sites after that, then that's just their prerogative (like giving your kid beer)
- washadjeffmad 5mo ago
  Not that many years ago, Facebook tried to broker a deal to provide free internet to India if all of their web traffic and communications would happen within the Facebook ecosystem. It's long been the dream of more than a few American companies to be the gatekeepers of the web.
progval 5mo ago
There is no evidence it is actually coming from Meta. The Reddit researcher the article cites generated their entire "analysis" in three days using Claude: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659552 Their website also added this page since I posted that comment: https://web.archive.org/web/20260411112604/https://tboteproject.com/notice/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260411112604/https://tboteproj... where they claim their website is under "surveillance" because it got a few thousand requests from Google Cloud et al, most of them to a single page. This shows how low their standards are.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > There is no evidence it is actually coming from Meta My personal view that social media should be age gated is caused by Meta. But broadly, polling shows a commanding majority (60+ percent) of Americans believe in restrictions for under 14s.
  - davkan 5mo ago
    Is there broad support for digital ID, age verification, etc? Or is it a broad sentiment that kids shouldn’t be on social media. Everyone I know agrees with latter but almost no one supports the former.
    - Avicebron 5mo ago
      The parent commenter is conflating two things. Your right, there can be broad general sentiment that "kids probably shouldn't on social media, or better framed, social media in it's current iteration isn't healthy for people especially kids" but that doesn't imply people are asking for intrusive surveillance or to be monitored at all times when they are online.
      - davkan 5mo ago
        Yes, i was asking which one the polling they were citing was about.

2ndorderthought 5mo ago

It looks like a coordinated effort from multiple defense companies like meta, and I believe openai, and I think palantir.

TiredOfLife 5mo ago
Also Soros and the lizard people of Venus. Surprisingly lizard people of Mars are against it.
tailscaler2026 5mo ago
Yep. I brought this up yesterday on the Roblox thread but HN has been ingesting the propaganda for too long to understand their beliefs about Roblox are misled. Time to adjust your priors y'all. This is a concentrated effort toward surveillance, controlling who we talk to, and what information we're fed.
red-iron-pine 5mo ago
palantir got all of the social security numbers in the US and now want to correlate all traffic against them. yalls gonna have "social credit" scores real soon

mvdwoord 5mo ago

Maybe the desire is always there, but somehow the momentum is just in an upswing now?

2ndorderthought 5mo ago
They finally have the tools to mass read everything aka LLMs. Does that make sense?

Guestmodinfo 5mo ago

My guess is bots. Govts and law makers are afraid of the barrage of bots DDOSing them so they are slowly and surely tightening the noose around the internet. I'm all for net neutrality and anonymity on the internet and I don't like the age laws one bit, but I too am afraid of the bots scorching the internet. I still hate these growing dystopian laws but I also want the bots to be driven away from the "human internet" .

verdverm 5mo ago

Heritage Foundation, Meta, and generally the Oligarchy

bilbo0s 5mo ago

It's the inevitable culmination of their plan. Pretend to be anti-censorship. Get voted in. Fast track all of the censorship and surveillance through congress. When I saw certain billionaires talking up anti-censorship and anti-surveillance a few years ago, I knew we would be screwed. (I knew the same billionaires had large positions in censorship and surveillance tech.) No one ever talks against their own book unless they're planning on screwing you.

Aurornis 5mo ago

> What wave of efforts is culminating? I can't really explain this from any movement I can see. Look at any thread about social media, TikTok, smartphones, or porn sites on Hacker News: They are instantly filled with comments claiming that the internet is to blame for all of society's ills with younger generations. The HN threads fill with comments proposing that we ban children from having smartphones until they're 16 or 18 and similar ideas. Abstract ideas about banning kids from social media or porn sites are weirdly very popular even here, mostly from people who haven't thought about what that would mean for privacy for everyone. These ideas have become pervasive, even inside tech communities. It was so easy to blame social media and the internet for everything for years, and now lawmakers are riding that wave for political points. It's "think of the children" built on top of the current moral panics.

wartywhoa23 5mo ago
> Abstract ideas about banning kids from social media or porn sites are weirdly very popular even here It's absolutely not weird. HN is the propaganda outlet for the geeks.

wartywhoa23 5mo ago

Easy: from the fascist psychopaths at the whelm of the world. People started to understand too much about who's the real enemy, and are not willing to kill and die in meatgrinders of the new world order for the interests of the unelect 0.001%.