Comment by bluescrn
20 hours ago
To me it feels that the age verfication (adult de-anonymisation) push, at least in Europe, is coming more from the increasingly-authoritarian left as a reaction to the rise of the online right and Musk's Twitter.
(Maybe some unspoken element of concern over social media bots, too - as they evolve from spamming copy+pasted comments to being near-indistinguisable from actual human accounts?)
If you look at the people pushing these bills it's the anti-trans and anti-porn activists. Not the left.
In the UK we have many people on the left with these perspectives. It comes from the second-wave feminist tradition.
But generally speaking, online age verification is one of those issues where the left-right ideological divide doesn't map neatly. People support and oppose it for various different reasons. Much like the assisted suicide issue.
This issue looks partisan from the outset, but both sides push the same thing. They just use partisan justifications.
Age verification efforts in the US have been privacy-attacking (demanding government ID) whereas the system being proposed in europe is privacy-preserving (zero-knowledge proof).
In Europe though? You have those?
It would be interesting to see a similar lobbying breakdown for the EU and UK. I bet it's still Meta with other right wing actors. The left rarely has the money for this kind of lobbying scale