Meta has spent $2B lobbying for Age Verification Tech: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410870

Sounds better in German: https://mises.org/mises-wire/papiere-bitte-papers-please

privacy online is already largely gone

I love the complete lack of reflection of the top comment in the website.

> All those policies are created with one single goal in mind - to catalogue and enumerate ALL human beings on the planet, not just kids.

1. Your government already has you catalogued, you have a birth certificate, you pay taxes don't you?

2. All these platforms are doing exactly that, do you think you are fooling anyone with that nickname? (come on lets face it you have at least one account with your real name).

Feels like identity control is not such a bad thing (prevents bots, identity thefts, cyberbullying, ect...). The questions is not "if it happens", its more a "who controls it?". If an NGO controls it, or a company that has "no political or national ownership", or something that is decentralized like BTC is, it's not a problem, but if it's a huge corp that only belongs to one single company which is backed and "piloted" by a government, that's when problems emerge.

The question no one seems to be asking

Does the www, i.e., its users not its profiteers, need "social media companies"

Singing: nobody wants this everybody hates you! Governments burning their capital hard to try to prove what tough guys they are against the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.

Reading the first paragraph and I’m thinking that in the UK that era is already here!

What scary me a lot, is the amount of people here or in real life that are not concerned about that, and that are like "it is to protect the children, so whatever it is, it worth it. And what else we can do?". And often it goes on with things like "anyway, social media are bad, they ruin people even adult, so good thing". Literally they all look like repeating a carefully crafted propaganda without that much more deep thinking.

Basically, to mean it is brain rot. The problem is that it might concern a big part of the population and that is why we have such laws.

To me, it is exactly what was described in G. Orwell "Animal farm" book. Pigs are now in control and big part of the crowd are "sheeps".

Afterward, we always have hard time to understand how people could have let Nazi, Stasi, or Stalin come in power and do such awful things. But it never came in one day, and with the "i don't care, they probably now better" attitude of the current western country populations, you understand easily how all of that could have happened in a first place.

In the recent, and most recent history, let's not forget what happened to Putin's Russia. Russia was opening and on a very good course for individual freedom and rights, then a ex-KGB officer took control of the power and little by little, year after year, suppressed freedom, privacy, and opposition to reach the point of today where the country is a total nightmare for human rights and liberty.