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Comment by gary_0 | Hacker News Reader

This worldwide push for online ID verification is absolutely not in good faith, and I'm shocked at how few people on "Hacker" News are seeing it for what it is. Imagine going on 1990's or 2000's Usenet and telling those folks they'd have to upload government ID to prove they weren't children and keep using the system. Virtually everyone would have shouted this Big Brother shit down until it was their dying breath.

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Parts of Usenet actually mandated real names. The idea was to make discussions more civilised. It didn't. And on top of that people were now subject to stalking and doxxing. I remember a poster who had a link to a defamation site in his signature. The site was targeted at another frequent poster in that newsgroup, detailing his address and his alleged intellectual failings.

America had all the access to free information and voted in an authoritarian anyway so what’s it matter ?

I don’t care anymore about this emotive argument that you’re putting forward. The government knows everything about you because you pay for internet. Maybe you pretend to yourself you’re someone anonymous because you use a VPN but if they want to know who you are, they know.

At least maybe this ban will stop some of the idiocy bleeding into the next generation.

America has been subject to a thirty-year propaganda war by foreign actors.

Information in America is free as in speech, not free as in beer: money talks louder than truth. That has let billionaires unravel the stabilizing features adopted after the Great Depression that kept capitalism limping along for an extra century.

But think of the children! Or the terrorist! Or communists! Whichever makes you accept the surveillance state.

The nanny-state control freaks used "think of the children" so often over the years that it became a meme, and yet here we are. What a workhorse!

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