Comment by toofy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toofy | Hacker News Reader

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> It seems like NGOs and IGOs have been pushing for internet restrictions for a long time. There has suddenly been a push for age restrictions allegedly because of abuse material. This happens annually.

we’re seeing some good evidence the most recent pushes were secretly funded and directly written by meta, the corporation. [0][1]

according to the link in there,

> Rep. Kim Carver (R-Bossier City), the sponsor of Louisiana's HB-570, publicly confirmed that a Meta lobbyist brought the legislative language directly to her.

and they’ve put as much as 2 billion dollars into it. and yes, that’s billion, with a B.

corporations openai, meta, and google were absolutely backing the push for the age verification bill in california and ohio. [2][3][4]

[0] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-beh...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361235

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45244049

[3] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/13/california-advances...

[4] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/meta-google-back-differe...

Reading the original research and stripping away the motives implied by the bot, the data is aligned with another interpretation. Namely that Meta is going with the flow and using the opportunity to push for regulation that impact its interests less, while affecting its competitors more.

The original research is riddled with baked in conclusions, and has not been verified independently. Its also mostly LLM generated.

> and they’ve put as much as 2 billion dollars into it. and yes, that’s billion, with a B.

The original report that cited the $2 billion number was AI generated slop. The $2 billion number wasn't from Meta, it was from Arabella Advisors.

The AI-generated report showed only about $20-30 million in lobbying efforts per year across all lobbying.

Even the Show HN post was full of AI slop, claiming things like "months of research" when the Claude-generated report showed it began a couple days prior.

So please stop repeating this AI generated junk. It dilutes any real story and the obvious falsehoods make it easy for critics to dismiss.

> only about $20-30 million

That is still an absurd amount of money

That’s on all lobbying efforts combined. It’s not out of line for a company of that scale that is trying to do things like build data centers and other such activities.

There’s a motte-and-bailey fallacy happening with that “Meta spent $2 billion” report where the $2 billion number is used as a hook but then replaced with a different argument if the other parties are observant enough to see that it’s BS

What's absurd is lying by two orders of magnitude and expecting people not to completely ignore everything you have to say because of that.

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