"It's for the KIDS, you COMMIE!"

It's time we stop accepting that rationalization as valid.

Shocking news! The sky is blue

It bothers me that we know that this bullshit has nothing to do with the kids and is probably being lobbied by the genocide gang and AI companies, even more that it has become obvious that the only value AI has is mass monitoring, but nobody abords the real issue. We are playing their book.

That's exactly what they (billionaires) are trying to achieve. Because they're getting scared of us getting organised and doing more than burning down warehouses.

Kids don't have unfettered access if they are supervised, lol. And age gating will fail regardless. So it's a failure followed by another failure, sigh.

Damn, I think my proton vpn is stopping me from commenting on here

The positive thing about age checks is the technology that will come out to by pass the system.

Could? Will.

If this becomes widespread, I just won't use any websites that require it. There will always be ways around it or alternatives for people opposed to losing their privacy. There already are at least 2 Internets. There's reddit and Facebook and Twitter and all the corporate news sites, and then there's Lemmy and archive.org and the dark web and dev pages and independent websites and piracy. I find I rarely care about the former anyway. It'll just mean being blocked off from all the corporate slop, which may be a blessing in disguise.

"Could" is a funny way of saying "are obviously intended to". Stop playing around, call it out directly. Points where you must have your ID checked are, in fact, ID checkpoints.

Surely it's the death of anonymity for those who want to access stuff which would be age restricted in any other scenario (like a real shop). The rest of the population (most?) don't care to access that stuff & don't want it and can carry on being anonymous.

And yes that gives the likes of Facebook et al a problem because they'll have to categorise their content, but the whole point of this current fad for governments to legislate to restrict stuff is that the big tech companies could have (made efforts to) fix it but chose not to because it's (waves hands and wails) hard.

How long before we get a Meshtastic style, decentralized internet?

Maybe Kaczynski had a point by running off to the woods and living in a cabin.

Man, parents not wanting anything to do with their kids' upbringing will believe anything, huh. They'd rather offload any and all responsibilities to automation than spend one minute teaching kids how to protect themselves.

Then again, they probably don't know, either.

He has a vested interest in saying that, but he's right, and it would be awful

Anyone think that's not the point?

Make social media unprofitable instead of this.

I mean, I've got boxes full of physical books and self hosted movies and Tv. At that point, I'll just stop using the internet. I need to go outside more anyway.

Clearly this man is a genius.

Theres a big wide internet beyond apps and social media.