Have you noticed the front page article sharing front page real estate with this one about Big Tech getting in trouble for not doing more to stop scamming and fraudsters?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/14/dating-app-s...

Regulators want Big Tech to stop children from doing various things (such as access certain platforms or content), to stop fraudsters and scammers, to stop foreign intelligence operations or bots from astroturfing social media/manipulating social discourse, and so on.

Failing to so leads to inquiries, new laws or regulations, fines, and so on.

The technical solutions to combat these problems are the exact solutions that also ruin privacy for users, create friction at account creation time, require ever more draconian identity verification methods and so on. It's 1:1.

"I'm not sure what happened in recent years, but they definitely switched their strategy to maximize data collection and make sure privacy-savy users are pressured via technical solutions to reveal their identities."

It's really not any more complicated than that Governments have told them its time to start violating users privacy in order to combat these other problems.