Two things can be true, and I am in the same boat. Should the next generation have their brains fried by ad-tech corporations and their algorithms? Absolutely not. Should the overdue off-ramp from this trend be the on-ramp to mass-surveillance and government overreach? Also a firm no.

That's because we should be regulating the social media industry rather than regulating social media users.

Unfortunately, social media users don't have billions of dollars to spend on lobbying and related activities around the world.

Governments always want censorship and speech control. That never changes. The only difference is that now the general populace has accumulated enough disgruntlement to social media to be used against themselves.

given that it's happening simultaneously with the war on E2EE and general purpose computing, their goals are as transparent as it gets. the West is at this point only a decade behind China.

I’m deeply worried by how uncritical these responses are. Meta is removing end-to-end encryption specifically because these lawsuits are trying to claim end-to-end encryption is a tool for child abuse.

The “think of the children” angle is the perfect angle to pressure companies to make communications readable by the government. And here tech audiences are welcoming it and applauding because they couldn’t read past the headline and they think anything that hurts Zuck is good.

How anyone can see this happening and not draw the connections to Discord and other services also pushing ID checks is beyond me. Believing that this will only apply to services that don’t effect you is short sighted.

A lot of the ID verification stuff is coming FROM those companies

because it is a false dilemma

Meta is lobbying to push age verification to the OS level.

I have read the OSINT report from Reddit. The data it has is being interpreted as Meta orchestrating a global lobbying scheme.

However the data is equally if not more supportive of Meta simply taking advantage of global political sentiment to position itself better.

I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but the HN zeitgeist seems to be resistant to the idea that tech is the “bad guy” today.

I work in trust and safety, and have near front row seats to all the insanity playing out today.

Really? You still think you're the one looking at it all wrong? It's exactly what you think it is. Stop giving blatant malice the benefit of the doubt, especially the doubt they've directly instilled.

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Tech bros deliberately made digital crack for kids and corporations refuse to moderate online content.

There is no conspiracy the general public is faced with a crisis and they are desperate for a solution.

The teen suicide statistics do not lie.