Posted by smartmic 20 hours ago
- Dox, coerce, blackmail, and ruin political candidates, powerful CEOs, and wealthy people. If they watch a category of porn that is embarrassing or have an affair, suddenly you have leverage against them. You can parlay that to accomplish lots of things.
- Make it impossible to talk about certain things and eventually eliminate those things. Porn today, abortion tomorrow. LGBT, women's rights ... it's a tool to start enforcing an ideology. Eventually these things can be disappeared entirely, not just the discourse. You just cordon off and begin washing it away bit by bit, year by year. Once the control mechanisms are in place, it cannot be stopped.
- Kill anonymous communication. This can pin identities to online comments. You can then punish people of the ideology you don't like by denying them jobs, auditing them, etc. This has a chilling effect on political opposition. This also makes it much harder to leak or report information safely and harms the ability to whistle blow.
- In general, this also pushes society into more religious, more conservative views. With it comes a lack of skepticism and a greater appreciation for authority.
- Ultimately, this is a step into 1984. If we go down that route, we will eventually be owned in whole by the authoritarian powers at top. This entire conversation will be memory holed.
Once a right is lost, we will not get it back. Then it's just one step after another into hell.
We must fight this.
Our lives, our freedom, our future - depend on it.
The right to actual real privacy is the same thing as the right to actual real freedom of speech, and we should harm anyone who is trying to take that most basic foundation of all rights away.
I agree with Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
----
Edit: I can't respond to comments anymore (HN rate limits on downvotes and commenting within a single thread), but I also wanted to respond to a sibling comment:
> "your team"
Just because I believe in personal freedom of people from the government does not mean I'm left-wing. I agree with some democratic party policies, and I disagree with some others.
I'm not strictly a libertarian either, because I believe government regulation is necessary to prevent monopolies. But over-regulation is also stifling to progress.
But it shouldn't matter what my politics are. Social and economic issues are orthogonal, and frankly, not as potentially dangerous as this one issue.
Democrats and Republicans alike should be aligned on their disdain of surveillance and authoritarianism. Either party in power (or any power) can use it against the "other side" (or the entire population outside of the oligopoly).
These tools are nothing but evil and designed to control. Once they start sinking their teeth in, they only sink in deeper. Every free person should hate them.
This is mostly fantasy propagated by works of fiction. In the real world release of any evidence of sins has practically zero impact on the wealthy people and when it very occasionally does have an impact it just happens in cases of people who weren't wealthy enough for the circumstances.
Every single one of those people has a noose around their neck and is being told what to do. They have a gun to their head now.
The intelligence apparatus has been exploiting dynamics like this for a long time.
Don't be fooled that your team doesn't have people with the same impulses. Privacy and civil liberties exist to protect us from abuse of authority on all sides.
- "Oh I see John is connected to this account. I really don't like this HN comment and opinion he posted, I find it deeply offensive. Put him on the bank KYC fail list."
- "We'd love to give you this mortgage backed by the US government, but why didn't you post the right flag in support of the new hip thing?"
- "Before you login to your retirement account, how much wealth are you secretly harboring there from this job we think you unfairly got due to your privilege?"
- "If you just let us monitor your activity and the ideas you see, we'll stop you from wrong-think and will create a utopia"
If you think the heat has started, you're mistaken. We're not even in the fire yet. It can and will get waaaay worse.
We've been able to push back against these efforts time and time again. Don't stop. Call your legislators. Talk with your friends and get them to do the same. Vote against politicians that support it.
It does work.
North America is rooted. There is no recovery plan.
What does this even mean aside from a thinly veiled accusation that such efforts are being pushed by a shadowy cabal of pedophiles elites? I'm sure you can find some overlap between people who want to push age verification laws and people who went to the island, but what about everyone else pushing for the law but who didn't go?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Amendment_(Socia...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-09/government-abandons-p...
...because they're pushing age verification legislation? Did I miss some massive Labor pedophile scandal? If not, this just feels like a tautology. Labor is only pushing age verification because they're pedophiles, and they're pedophiles because they're pushing age verification.
Moreover even if we ignore that, what does that mean for the rest of their platform items? If Labor is pro net-zero, is it fair to characterize the situation as "the people pushing for net-zero are pedophiles"?
State | Effective Date | Legislature Control
------------------+----------------+----------------------
Alabama | Oct 1, 2024 | Republican
Arizona | Sep 26, 2025 | Republican
Arkansas | Jul 31, 2023 | Republican
California | Jan 1, 2027 | Democratic
Florida | Jan 1, 2025 | Republican
Georgia | Jul 1, 2025 | Republican
Idaho | Jul 1, 2024 | Republican
Indiana | Aug 16, 2024 | Republican
Kansas | Jul 1, 2024 | Republican
Kentucky | Jul 15, 2024 | Republican
Louisiana | Jan 1, 2023 | Republican
Mississippi | Jul 1, 2023 | Republican
Missouri | Nov 30, 2025 | Republican
Montana | Jan 1, 2024 | Republican
Nebraska | Jul 18, 2024 | Nonpartisan (unicameral)
North Carolina | Jan 1, 2024 | Republican
North Dakota | Aug 1, 2025 | Republican
Ohio | Sep 30, 2025 | Republican
Oklahoma | Nov 1, 2024 | Republican
South Carolina | Jan 1, 2025 | Republican
South Dakota | Jul 1, 2025 | Republican
Tennessee | Jan 13, 2025 | Republican
Texas | Sep 19, 2023 | Republican
Utah | May 3, 2023 | Republican
Virginia | Jul 1, 2023 | Divided
Wyoming | Jul 1, 2025 | Republicanhttps://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb25-201
Looks like the CA bill went through though.
https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB1043/id/3269704
I updated the list. Still looks rather tilted to me!
Its a shame that this used to just be a conspiracy theory one could mostly ignore, but we simply can't pretend that there isn't rampant CSA by those in power, because we've had proof of it despite their best efforts. Without wanting to get into politics, the leader of the United States right now was friends with the supposed ring-leader...
> but what about everyone else pushing for the law but who didn't go?
Useful idiots, perhaps? Wanting to protect their own power and gain more?
It's certainly not actually about protecting children. Never has been.
Keep in mind Epstein died in 2017. We had two GOP terms and one Democrat term from then to now.
With what we know from the files that have been released thus far (and how obviously the worst if it has either been shredded or will never see the light of day), the fact they refused to release/prosecute those implicated tells you all you need to know.
* In 2024, they had a choice between pedophiles and not pedophiles and chose the pedophiles.
* In 2020, they had a choice between pedophiles and not pedophiles and chose the pedophiles.
* In 2016, they had a choice between pedophiles and not pedophiles and chose the pedophiles.
There was plenty of evidence of this association in 2016 (bragging about creeping into Ms Teen USA dressing rooms, bragging about being Epstein's best friend in the same sentence as acknowledging he's a pedo, victim testimony under oath that he diddled kids, etc etc), so "I didn't know" isn't an excuse if they cared one iota about the children at any step of the way.
It should be good news that the powerful pedophiles are largely (but not exclusively) concentrated in one party, but those who put them in power will do anything to avoid admitting culpability.
Hillary has not been implicated by the Epstein files. Not today and not by evidence available in 2016.
Biden has not been implicated by the Epstein files. Not today and not by evidence available in 2020.
Bonus: not only was Trump implicated in the Epstein files both today and by evidence available in 2016, he was also in charge of every federal prison and every US spook agency in 2019 when Epstein died under mysterious circumstances.
Who was in charge when Epstein got the sweetheart deal on his first conviction?
Bonus: at no point did I refute Trump being a pedophile or being in the Epstein files.
The overall idea that far too many of those in power politically and economically are involved in CSA isn't though, it seems.
What's "rampant"? The news coverage provides no shortage of people, but ringing off 100 (or whatever) people that are in the files doesn't say much, even if we make the questionable assumption that inclusion in files implies guilt. I'm sure that everyone would prefer the amount of pedophiles that are in power to 0, but if it's the same rate as the general population that can hardly be considered "rampant", or a "conspiracy". Given some neutral inclusion criteria (eg. members of legislative bodies), is there any evidence they have disproportionate amount of pedophiles?
>the leader of the United States right now was friends with the supposed ring-leader...
You conveniently omit the fact that they broke up 5 years before he was first convicted. From wikipedia:
"Trump had a falling out with Epstein around 2004 and ceased contact. After Epstein was said to have sexually harassed a teenage daughter of another Mar-a-Lago member in 2007, Trump banned him from the club. "
>Useful idiots, perhaps?
So basically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness?
> Wanting to protect their own power and gain more?
How does adding age verification help in that? Are they blackmailed by the shadowy cabal? Are they just doing what the voters/lobbyists want? If so, what makes invocation of this reasoning more suitable than for any other political issue? Is everything from tax policy to noise ordinances just something pushed by pedophile elites, helped by useful idiots and people who want to "protect their own power and gain more"?
I agree this makes him look suspect, but it's hardly conclusive. Moreover Democrats did a similar U-turn a few years before. The only difference is that they weren't bombastically pushing the conspiracy theory during the election campaign, which made it easier for them to backtrack later.
>When Maxwell was charged in 2020, Democrats continued to push for transparency. [...] After Biden took office in 2021, Democrats appeared to dial back their public calls for Epstein records’ release.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/6/fact-check-did-democ...
Another explanation could be the democrats' AIPAC handlers told them to back off because it wasn't the precise time to leverage the material yet.
What claim about Trump? That's he's a pedophile? Based on the rest of your comment it seems like the goalposts are subtly getting moved from "Trump raped kids" to "Trump committed sexual crimes".
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/see-the-alleged-tr...
1. "alleged"
2. I'm not sure what you're trying to refute. I specifically quoted a passage saying that they broke up in 2004, which implies they were together prior to that.
3. For the specific claim that Trump's a pedophile, a "drawing of a curvaceous woman" is hardly proof. At best it's a proof that he's a womanizer, but we hardly need proof of that given the "grab her by the pussy" quote.
Or maybe “the evidence isn’t THAT bad.”
Or maybe “but someone else is bad too!”
And? It doesn’t change the reality of the original statement.
The president of the United States was friends with the alleged ring leader of a large pedophile network.
You're making some leaps logic here here. If someone's outed as a pedophile, everyone who's friends with him should be assumed to be a pedophile? Surely not, given that pedophilia is considered taboo, we'd expect them to hide it, and therefore at least some friends might not be in the know. That's not to say there's no conspirators, but "he was friends with a pedophile therefore he's a pedophile too" is just guilt by association. What you need to prove is that he knew, or ought to have known that his friend was a pedophile. A conviction works decently for this, because it's presumably public knowledge, although even that's questionable because most people don't do a background check on people they met. In the case of Epstien he also hired reputation management firms to suppress his conviction from showing up in the results, which weakens the case even more.
No, you’re just shifting the goalposts.
The original claim was “The president of the United States was friends with the supposed leader of a pedophile ring.”
Your response to that was to imply that over time, they had a falling out. To which my point was, so what? It doesn’t materially change the original claim you challenged.
A falling out in NO way changes that the original statement was correct, the current president of the United States, Donald J Trump, was good friends with the alleged leader of a large scale pedophile network.
> If someone's outed as a pedophile, everyone who's friends with him should be assumed to be a pedophile?
If a given friend had their own history of acting like a creepy sex pest when it comes to young women, had a known and close relationship with the alleged leader of a pedophile network AND knew about “the girls”, would I assume them also to be a pedophile? At a minimum, I may in fact conclude that the odds they are also a pedophile are significantly higher than that of the average individual. Birds of a feather and all…
It’s not to say they are of course and it may in fact be as simple as they are nothing more than a creepy sex pest with a bad taste in friends, but NOT a pedophile. I gotta be honest but, me personally, I’d rather be neither.
It changes the claim in the same way that "he ran over a kid" isn't "materially changed" by the addition of the detail that the kid jumped in front of the car and he had no time to stop. The original statement is still technically true, but it's a massive omission to leave the latter part out. That's doubly true if you're invoking that fact in the context of trying to imply the person did other crimes.
Who exactly is influential & organized enough across many western countries to push legislation that no one is asking for? Notice that epstein said he worked for [withheld] in some of his emails.
The anti-social media sentiment has been brewing for a while now, not least due to books like The Anxious Generation (2024). It's also reflected in opinion polls and media coverage. Unless you want to imply there's some massive conspiracy by The Elites™ (ie. not just a few lobbyists Meta hired, but those in academia and media as well), it's probably organic.
why? If age restriction get legislated into the OS, it puts a damper on further attempts on adding restrictions to sites, because they can point to the existing legislation and claim it's enough.
COPPA already exists and they're insisting that it's not enough.
Such an API can then be extended to provide location data to "help the police find bad guys", track purchase histories to "prevent fraud"; all the stuff that Apple and Google blocked fb from sniffing from user devices
It's circumvention of these privacy protections with added vengeance since now Google and Apple will be sitting with the cost of implementation and the liability
/s?
In case this is serious, why do they need an age API to ask for a location backdoor API?
You start with the age verification because "think of the children" is an easy sell, then a year from now, there'll suddenly be a massive worry about criminals using their phones for "crime-stuff", so we need to track where these people are - there's then already a system in-place for easily adding such a functionality
A year after that it'll be online fraud that is apparently rampant
My reason for this conclusion is that there's no good reason that age verification should live at the OS layer. It is technically cleaner and simpler to have it as an external service - just look at the amount of issues it's causing for Linux distributions
FB are not dumb - they know this hurts Linux distributions, but they're an ad business and they need PII to sell those ads
My kid had classmates as young as 8 using it. Facebook knows this.
No, they're pulling up the ladder. Meta is fine losing the app store battle because it can easily afford regulation requiring first-party compliance, and no startup could.
This doesn't mean every device needs to implement child locks. It also shouldn't affect anyone using unlocked devices at all.
I want to protect my child from X type of content -- one of many jobs of a parent, but I will trust all content to self report to be child inappropriate? "Inappropriate" is entirely subjective and can not be defined as some sort universal bool -- and that's before you get to the point of actively malicious actors like Meta and Tiktok actively exploiting children for their content farms generation and ad impression factories.
If the user owns and controls their computers -- as they should -- then that subjective content filtering layer belongs there, in the owners control. If its a child's, then the parent owns the device, not the child.
But there isn't going to be consensus on everything, so content filters are still needed.
Isn't that literally the California law?
It's darkly comedic that the single most toxic experience since the pop up ad - the cookie consent popup was similarly imposed.
The solution is simple. Websites and services (including ISPs) become governed by the country in which they operate not the whims of foreign entities.
The 'nanny state' prevents people from driving cars without a license?
That prevents you from buying myriad substances without a note from the doctor?
That makes it illegal for you to buy a gun?
" become governed by the country in which they operate not the whims of foreign entities"
... is not going to work, at face value, because 'operation' involves the consumer and the producer, each of whom may be in different jurisdictions, and even if they were in the 'same nation' ... this is still a hard problem.
No easy answers, and there are legit concerns.
- Linux distros without age verification (which excludes distros with systemd)
- decentralized/distributed microblogging: Nostr, Bluesky, Mastodon
- decentralized social news sites: Lemmy
- GrapheneOS
For decades policymakers have been trying to sell us the same surveillance state they accuse their adversaries of having, wrapped as either security or protecting children.
There WILL be breaches and those drivers license scans will get loose in the world sooner or later. Fully agree that this is all about access control. No thank you.
Okay it's quite private in the sense that we don't know our friends browsing history but we know somebody, somewhere is collecting data and selling it to their 100 partners.
Do you think there might ever be a moment when someone decides, legally or not, dump enormous amount of info, in a way that allows people to see what google searches other people did or browsing history etc? A moment when people's embarrassing secrets come into light.
IMAGINE A WAR.
Now - wouldn't a government LOVE to know who's saying what? Rather than shutting down the entire $$$$$ corporate internet.
Money concerns as usual.
