Comment by fzeroracer
8 hours ago
There are some incredibly strange equivalences going on in here that make me think the person in question is indeed quite out of date.
The people pushing for the destruction of privacy and attested software integrity ARE the tech bros. I'm sure there are people here that will vehemently disagree with me, but we see the biggest tech companies pushing for age verification and we see founders and rich folk gleefully giving up their earlier pro-privacy stances in favor of supporting locking down identity. They're building up their moat in real time because not only does it let them kill that pesky FOSS, but also it means they can legally gather even more data from individuals in question.
It also goes hand-in-hand with the increasingly authoritarian bent a lot of those same people have taken and these resources will absolutely be used to crack down on minorities and things they don't like.
I think your head would have to be firmly planted deep underground to somehow not connect the two dots. As another poster here said, they're literally lobbying for these age verification laws because it benefits them.
I was about 50% sure this whole piece is parody when I read through the LLM part, and after I read the whole thing now I'm 99% sure.
> I'm sure there are people here that will vehemently disagree with me, but we see the biggest tech companies pushing for age verification and we see founders and rich folk gleefully giving up their earlier pro-privacy stances in favor of supporting locking down identity.
I vehemently disagree, because this is not what is happening.
The Age verification domino toppled first in Australia, and then other governments found the example was good enough and followed suit.
The issue that HN conversations miss, is that the dominoes were set up over years. People have constantly been trying to deal with the many, many issues thrown up by social media. Issues ranging from the Myanmar genocide, content moderation, fraud, child safety, sextortion, to name just a random grab bag of issues.
Voters, governments, NGOs, victims and even tech firms, have been trying to figure out what to do for a decade+.
Voters, and non-tech-literate society used to complain about the status quo. The political will to change it reached critical mass, and is now in progress.