If it was organic the wording and the definitions in these legislations would be wildly different, the timing would be all over the place, the age limits and the methods to provide ID as well. But they are not.
edited for tone
edited for tone
organic, one at a time, "hey, i wonder if other places considered this, how did they word it?" that's not collusion.
don't imagine you know better than aware, organic people who read the newspaper and actually have more life experience and tempered emotion than you do.
humans are "young" for about 20 years, parents are parents to young children for about 20 years, and smartphones have been around for about 20 years. the time seems ripe for those with life experience to draw some conclusions.
These kind of laws usually take many years to hone down just right and talk to all parties involved. Unless some lobby group presents a finished piece of work that just has to be waved through, like with the Citigroup scandal.
Then you had the Covid years where kids ended up spending a lot of time on phones and tablets, hence social media, and everyone is seeing the myriad of problems coming out of it.
Sometimes it's not a vast global conspiracy, sometimes things just suck. Also, sometimes things suck and particular groups use it to get their way, that still doesn't diminish the thing that sucks.
There’s known issues with bullying, grooming, to mental hygiene issues like screen addiction and poor focus.
Hell, these are the first generations which have lower educational attainment than its predecessors.
It’s been reported on over and over again. It’s a cost center so no one cares about it.
"If I don't know about it, if it sounds 'spooky' to me, it must be because it's a conspiracy theory, and therefore it is wrong," is essentially what runs through their minds.
The reality is that top-down legislation is the norm rather than the exception, and there is plenty of evidence. It's not written by Joe on the street. It's not organic. It is top-down and imposed. This is what @kdheiwns rightly observes here, and in other fields like how all of a sudden every car manufacturer just up and decided simultaneously that it was a good thing to install spyware into all of their cars.
And the car manufacturers all decided to install spyware because it made them money. That's just capitalism.
Yes, you are right, it must be "capitalism" at fault. The sort of capitalism where nobody asks for the product, nobody wants the product, and yet somehow the product is the only choice you have.
What is your motivation for denying the obvious?
Comments like this don’t make you folks sound less like “conspiracy theorists”. It’s also a tone that tells me that you aren’t going to approach anything I say in good faith so there is no point in me trying to engage with you on the topic anymore.
> It's very noticeable that this is the part of my comment you responded to and not the question
How funny you won't answer his question now. I'm also curious, what is your motivation for denying the obvious?
I don't get pretending that no one is behind it. There are definitely people sitting in conference rooms in front of whiteboards trying to come up with ideas on how to do it most effectively. But people compartmentalize so hard, some people in that room would call you a conspiracy theorist for pointing out the meeting that they are currently attending. "I just do social media for a nonprofit. No, there's nothing wrong with us getting 90% of our funding from the US government, you're just a cynic. What evidence is there that we are working on their behalf? Do you think social media is good for teenagers?!"
I cannot help that water seems wet to me but if it seems dry to you I am willing to hear you out.
Anyone who is interested in connecting an identity with every computer on the internet, like a tamper proof license plate for computers. Just ask local law enforcement.
There has been a growing awareness for the possibilities of foreign states to manipulate social media and other platforms with fake personas. So any kind of counter intelligence would be interested as well.
There have been numerous incidents of politicians trying to go after critical posts using defamation laws. Often enough the investigations find a dead end when the account can't be connected with an ID.
Religious advocacy groups have been more and more aggressive in trying to censor the internet, e.g. this Australian one that boasted having pushed Mastercard and Visa to enforce age verification https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/mastercard-vis...
So the list of suspects is actually long.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was a very broad lobbying campaign that very easily finds local interest groups to help them meet the right law makers.
You, AnonymousPlanet, and fc417fc802 are all responding to me in very similar ways and yet I'm not accusing you of reading from the same script or being puppeteered by the same person/group. This is because I can recognize that people can have the same thought process without any active collaboration. And yet I would have just as much evidence to make those accusations as the evidence that you provided here that all these laws have the same shady origin.
For example, if I asked you who killed JFK and you responded with "It could have been Oswald acting alone or the mafia or the KGB or the CIA or Fidel Castro or a misfire from Secret Service...", you didn't actually answer the question, you just gave a list of potential answers. One of those answers could be right, but the way you provided so many answers shows that you can't actually answer the question with any degree of certainty. You effectively answered "what's 2 + 2" with "something between 2 and 10". I'm not going to respond with it's not "2+2 is not 8 because..."
Some questions aren't easy to just answer, even if the answer is known to the person being asked. Some topics are supressed rather well. If you're already acting like someone who is more interested in derailing conversations than having an honest discussion, it's unlikely you'll get the exact list of names of those primarily responsible for driving this push to KYC access to online services. Especially on a website that's heavily moderated and basically a battleground.
What question do you want me to answer that isn't some loaded rhetorical question along the lines of "What is your motivation for denying the obvious?"
Depends on context. Would that be the statistically favored explanation for the behavior you're seeing here?
In the case of international politics it is indeed the highly favored explanation. Particularly when there's such a clear nefarious motive.
When there is something that aligns with the interests of several disparate groups it is common for them to all support that something with the need for some central organization.
The evidence is the highly abnormal behavior. The alignment of interests is a red herring.
> it is common for them to all support that something with the need for some central organization.
Sure, as is frequently seen with the conferences and administrative bodies surrounding treaties and the like. Would you care to point out this central organizing body that a bunch of people posting here appear mysteriously determined to deny the existence of?
What exactly is your position? First you object to an alleged lack of evidence on my part, then turn around and seemingly attempt to justify the observed behavior with the argument that coordination in the open is normal and expected. So do you acknowledge the presence of what appears to be centralized coordination in this instance or not?
What was your purpose in responding here?
This is labelling the behavior as abnormal, and then basing your conclusions on it.
Are you unaware that there’s been decades of reporting on social media impact on children? It’s covered issues from bullying, anorexia, toxicity, attention issues, sleep issues, focus issues to name a few of the topics ? These are separate from CSAM, grooming, stalking, revenge porn and NCII.
It’s he’ll out there. It’s been hell for years.
Do people not know ?
I don't recall off the top of my head but in past HN threads the global lobbyists for this were named with evidence.
It's intriguing to me how there's seemingly a lot of objections in this thread to the idea that this movement was driven by lobbyists. I realize it's skirting the guidelines but the tone here comes across as some sort of astroturfing particularly when I consider the general tone of past threads on the same topic within the past few months.
And yet, after all this, you're not interested enough to remember who's behind this important issue for you. If someone really cares they should get informed.
You're demanding that others spoon feed you peer reviewed evidence that water is wet. As you say, if you really care you should expend the effort to inform yourself. I myself have no need at present for the hazily remembered details. The only thing at issue in the here and now was the absurd claim that there's no centralized lobbying effort involved.
I don't care. Unlike you, I am sufficiently informed about how legislatures around the world operate to know that coordination of this nature is common, anodine, and the way they have enshrined a global economy that has unlocked unfathomable wealth.
I'm getting the same impression.
You should always be asking who politicians are serving. You seem to comfortable with thinking that they must be serving some part of the electorate without actually needing to identify that part. A lot of people think social media is bad for teenagers. There are a lot of things that are bad for teenagers that we aren't making any particular, coordinated effort to ban.