Yes I think this is it. News headlines and Tweets and other social media posts mean that trends are much more global than they used to be. "Controlling kids' access to social media" is just trending right now, and that means it's getting attention all over the globe at the same time.

Totally. Today’s social media is not the same as last years etc. Read Meta’s quarterly reports and they brag about Reels increasing time spent on site by 30% in a year. That’s not even considering the other ill effects like giving kids a firehose of all the worlds problems when they’re not yet equipped to handle that information, which causes them to internalize those things, making them feel like things are fucked, that they’re responsible, etc. It’s psychologically devastating. And so many other things! Let kids be kids.

>political movements can be global.

You are saying exactly what OP is saying but just rephrasing it another way.

The more a movement crosses borders, the less likely it is to be based on the needs of any particular country and the more likely it is to be based on the needs of the transnational billionaire class.

Drinking age is not the only example, driving age is another good example and also the old TV rating system. What was considered taboo in America was often at the same time considered to be fine in places like Europe, or vice versa. But we never had a coordinated international push for censorship when it came to TV/movies like we are seeing with social media.

I can remember how much people used to deride mass surveillance and censorship in places like Russia and China and now here we are very quickly catching up to them in every way.

> The world is much more globalized now. Countries are watching each other, political movements can be global.

This is simply not true. The US puts pressure on countries to harmonize their regulations and laws to ours, unless it is to the US's advantage that other countries have different laws than ours. The world didn't suddenly get draconian drug laws through "political movements," it got them through diplomatic and funding pressures. The US often used those laws as excuses for military and intelligence interventions, or to build political organizations in those countries in the guise of antidrug organizations.

All countries do things like this, but the US is rich and dangerous enough to do it hardest. The US has decided that it wants everybody tracked at all times, especially online, and when it explains the advantages of this to the elites of other countries, they also like the idea.

Smaller European countries have also made it a cottage industry to fanatically push US agendas in places like NATO and the EU, because it gives their little homelands outsized influence (and bags of cash) to operate on behalf of the bully. For some reason, everybody in Europe has to care what e.g. Estonia thinks about something, although Estonia is just saying what the US wants Europe to be doing, and the US is financing Estonian candidates for European positions (and maybe even having Trump lobby against them to give them even more credibility.)

This attack on any sort of privacy online is not coming from the churches. There is no lobby group that it pushing it that doesn't get the majority of its funds from any number of governments, which is just government lobbying itself. The way democracy is supposed to work is that the people support something, and they then vote for candidates that will give it to them - but there is no visible constituency lobbying for this other than casual liberal cynics who aren't organized in any way.

As a comparison, in 2015 there was like 65-70% popular support for single-payer health care in the US. There were dozens of organized groups supporting it. It even crossed 50% among Republicans for at least a year. Not a hint of anything happened.

edit: Also Europe, like Japan, is one of those places that had a really emotionally tough time outlawing pedophilia and child pornography. They certainly don't care this much about the sexual aspect of child safety, at least. What Europe has never been behind on is the censorship of political speech. That is what can excite people.