Not that NSFW, could do with a trim though ...
Make it your desktop, put it on a t-shirt and wear it to work. See how long until you're ask to remove it
Trying to put this all on Meta with a look at their 2025 lobbying spend is missing the point. The “think of the children” panic about the internet pre-dates this by years. Remember the debate around the TikTok ban? The states instituting laws about porn age checks pre-dates all of this too. I think trying to blame Meta is convenient because it’s easy to think there is just one villain coordinating everything, but the debate about children and the internet has been a spreading moral panic for years.
While the panic is indeed nothing new, Meta could have chosen a path of solidarity across the tech industry, lobbying for the ways age/identity verification makes people of all ages less safe, especially in the context of phishing and data harvesting.
Instead, its strategy has become to advocate for increasing the net levels of tracking and regulatory burden, so long as it is positioned to burden other parts of the technology stack (namely, app stores and operating systems) rather than their social networks.
From the link from a sibling commenter: https://web.archive.org/web/20260429210901/https://tboteproj...
> Meta spent a record $26.3 million on federal lobbying in 2025, deployed 86+ lobbyists across 45 states, and covertly funded a group called the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA) to advocate for the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA).
The irony that their namesake Metaverse was meant to be, itself, an operating system and app distribution platform is palpable. When ambitions shift to regulatory capture, a shark has arguably been jumped.
It's not only Meta though. People need to stop assuming Meta controls everything via its CIAbook. You see several actors behind that; which one contributes the most is an interesting detail, but ultimately it can be simplified to them planning Evil against The People.
Exactly, it's far bigger than Meta when the government's are pushing a larger agenda here.
The assumption is you have to control people to enforce laws. They keep pushing this notion that is a requirement to keep people safe. That somehow if we have big brother AI surveillance everyone will be on their best behavior.
Oracle, Palantir, Meta, and other mega billionaires push this agenda because who is going to stop them from controlling society and getting absurdly powerful and wealthy from it?
Global meetings (whether secret or not) where select people decide what to do next to minimize potential threats to their power. There isn't much more to it, really.
Not just minimize threats, but often to maximize their power.
Lobbyists do not just try to convince a politician that X is a good idea. Lobbyists give the politician money to introduce already drafted legislation, and then give other politicians money to support it. And if they can get the legislation passed in one place, they'll try it again.
The result is that suspiciously similar legislation appears in many places close in time, due to it being pushed by particular interests.
I'm not convinced this is about money as much as it is about blackmail, given how centralized data collection has become and how many intelligence agencies appear to have access to numerous 0-days for routinely gathering additional information. It could be both things as well.
What bothers me most isn't their corruption, but their apparent belief that it won't eventually affect them or their families - perhaps sooner than they think.
Nefarious actors will always attempt to institute these programs via well-meaning stooges
AI coming along is another “great opportunity” to try and force these programs
It is particularly bizarre given the increasingly frightening array of designer drugs available at gas stations and convenience stores.
You probably have seen them if you live in the US, and had little idea about them.
I'm not a fan of age verification(++) discussed here, but it's also extremely obvious that social media is a more significant danger to our society (children and non-) than gas station drugs.
This has all been brewing for years. Remember the TikTok ban and all of the debates around it? We’ve been hearing news headlines about social media and kids for many years. The state level laws around porn site ID checks have been rolling in gradually for years, too.
There are always claims that is a shadowy cabal of world leaders coordinating in secret or that a specific corporation is lobbying to do it all, but the fact is that ID checking is oddly popular in theory to a lot of people who haven’t thought through the consequences. Check any thread on this topic on Hacker News where the idea is discussed in a way that makes it feel like it’s only for kids or only for Facebook and there’s a huge outpouring of support for the idea.
The topic only becomes unpopular when the actual consequences become apparent. For the Hacker News audience the popularity of these ideas does a complete U-turn as soon as the concept of ID checking extends to platforms we might use, like Reddit, Discord, or YouTube. When commenters think it’s only going to impact Facebook and TikTok they welcome ID checking laws with enthusiastic support.
Imo it definitely has to do with politicians and governments trying to appear strong on the topic of protecting kids from the harms of social media. I also believe a lot of it is well intentioned, albeit poorly executed
Rich people are panicking because they’ve seen a capital-poor country win a war with cheap drones and want to lock down as many technologies as they can, lest the ruled realize they can actually do something about their rulers.
Do not for a split second operate under the assumption that there aren't coordinating forces working on this. I know this trips the "conspiracy theories!!1!" flag in most people, but you can literally come up with organizations dedicated to things like this in mere seconds of googling. Here's a comment about US state-level coordination I made earlier, with a challenge to produce some examples that I then produced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065492
It happens at the national level too. I just did a simple Google search for "united nations committee to harmonize" [1] (no quotes in my search itself) and I count 5 or 6 committees explicitly dedicated to "harmonization" in the first ten results. And that's just the committees, you can count on each of them to have factions within (because politics, politics never changes) and outside forces competing and vying to get the "harmonizations" to favor them and disfavor their competitors. And as politics, politics never changes, paging Ron Perlman, these harmonization committees are unlikely to flinch away from "harmonizing" entirely new rules into existence... which, again, with not all that much searching you can easily find examples of them stating outright.
And the forces trying to influence those committees, are not all just sitting out in the public with some .org website with their true mission stated clearly above the fold. And I just use these UN committees, which are themselves literally the result of one search and a few seconds scrolling through the search page and anything but a complete list, as plain and obvious public examples operating in public for at least nominally good purposes. Nothing stops anyone from buying politicians in multiple countries at a time to push through something like age verification directly, without being open about who they are.
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=united+nations+committ...
I personally don't think there are many people left yelling "conspiracy" when you say that globalized decisions are being pushed, especially if you've been alive for the last 10 years. Nowadays it's more about who is actually making these decisions and that discussion gets muddy quickly.
Crowd-based analysis of "the files" nearly went out of control, and they noticed how hard it is to identify social media users.
Only trust fund nepo kids from old money are allowed to have vanity social security numbers, multiple identities and scrubbed Wikipedia articles. The plebeians shall have only a single ID and use it to authenticate with every website.
I really want to know who else has a SSN starting with 1337.
It's because of Jonathan Haidt's book
I don't know who that is or which book you are talking about, because he has written many, it seems.
By all means don't provide any additional information on what you mean, what book, what it's about, what it has to do with this, or anything else.
I'm maybe a bit of an outlier here in that I do think that this is a genuine grassroots good faith effort to "protect the children" that does not have sinister ulterior motives. I know plenty of parents who have expressed enthusiasm for the idea of age-restricting websites.
"Why now" I think is pretty obvious -- the age limitations that exist currently are easily circumvented, but have given enough of a plausible deniability aspect that politicians have been able to skate by. There has been increasing research and media dedicated to the idea that there are aspects of the internet which we should be shielding children from. While many of this research is dubious, there's a rising moral panic around it.
The core of the problem is that there is no possible implementation of age verification that does not also require identity verification. In this I am in strong agreement with the article, but the use of paranoid and dramatic language as in this article only alienates people who find the conspiratorial tone to be reverse polarizing.
I agree only in the sense that Meta wants the OS to tell them the user’s age - BOTH for the ulterior motive of better ad targeting / fingerprinting, but also because shifting the liability gets the numerous current and future child safety lawsuits off the back.
This would be fine if it was actually done perfectly - ie. Devices get a signed ticket from the government identity provider, device can provides a cryptographically verifiable ticket to the site that its a valid identity and their age is within the $x age range but not tied to the user’s actual identity / document, and the device doesn’t ask the government identity provider to mint a new ticket each time it needs to attest (maybe 500 tickets are minted at a time and you auto renew 500 more each month)
However the likelihood of this actually being done correctly is slim to none.
I've been able to age restrict websites with my childrens' devices for years? Privately, on the device. The website side is pure moatism.
Yes but your approach requires parenting, which is unacceptable to many people with children.
The <meta name="rating"> html tag has existed since like the 90s. If you legitimately just want to 'protect the children' just enact legislation saying that adult content is responsible for setting this tag. Then parents can decide what their children can and can't see via browser settings. No giant biometric database, no invasive user mapping, no leaks, no creeping techno-feudalist state.
Collecting user biometric data and trying it to a nominally anonymous user identity is not required here.
This is 100% 'won't someone please think of the children' pearl clutching to hide what's actually going on - furthering control of the online exchange of ideas.
Making it more difficult to access social media for Adults to access social media isn't detrimental.
One would think that after the Burma genocide the millionaires at Meta would have learned a lesson and keep their fingers out of politics.
Because it’s been building for a while, and (in my opinion) because it’s not a major traffic generating topic on builder focused sites like HN.
The most proximate domino was the Australian social media ban. Australia was already a country known to experiment with ways to deal with social media - see the news fee they imposed on platforms.
Behind that was the build up of negative outcomes from social media for kids, and adults.
The harms are not something I tend to find actively discussed on HN; I assume because more people are interested in building the next thing, not digging into the trust and safety details.
Customer safety and support are also not going to get anyone promoted in tech. These are cost centers and will often stand in the way of addictive design.
Meta executives were nailed precisely for greenlighting designs their own teams told them were harmful for teens.
At the same time, there is lobbying going on by these firms, to push the burden of verification to someone else.
However, the degree of harm being caused by social media meant we were always going to see voter backlash.
Honestly? I think it's because Elon Musk pissed a bunch of bureaucrats off by buying X and being more permissive about what was allowed. Then came claims that AI porn or something was on X which is a vague claim. People say it was Meta lobbying but that's not it. Meta lobbied to have ID done at the operating system. The lobby for ID was already effective and on its way before that. The actual lobby doesn't seem to be popular at all. It's just some NGOs no one has heard of that support restrictions for porn. The same language popped up on three continents at once. I just don't think this is a grass roots campaign and I don't think corporations drove it either. Ultimately, I think governments decided that unregulated information/anonymity is a threat to their power.
Social media was unleashed onto the world with no harm studies or thought for the long term impact.
Now we’re catching up and realizing how bad it is.
For a similar case, see tasers in Canada after a handcuffed immigrant was killed by one. The question came up “how were tasers certified safe for humans?”.
The answer was “they weren’t. A private company just started selling them to police forces who just started using them.”
Tasers are bad is your example? cops should go back to clubbing people over the head I suppose?
- Remember all metaphors are bad.
> can someone explain to me why it's NOW that we have multiple countries
Because there are actors pushing for this. And they let money flow, so the
lobbyists work.
People think lobbyists don't do this? Well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...
These lobbyists were dumb. You can be certain that some lobbyists are so efficient that detecting them reliably is very difficult. Even more so when private media is controlled by a few billionaires who are "in" on the system.