I'm confused where all of this censorship is originating from. What wave of efforts is culminating? I can't really explain this from any movement I can see.
Big tech wants regulatory capture.
The ones that stand to benefit the most are the governments themselves and their surveillance network.
It’s just that
“Move fast, break things, regulate impossible to repair.”
It just sucks that that's all in sacrifice of our privacy.
Not if the parents are setting it up beforehand (like with small children) then their iaccount or Google account will be under parental controls from that point on.
It seems reasonable that if a parent enables their child to visit sites after that, then that's just their prerogative (like giving your kid beer)
It's long been the dream of more than a few American companies to be the gatekeepers of the web.
Facebook and approved sites wouldn’t count towards your mobile bandwidth quota, but the rest of the internet does and requires a data plan.
Which raised net neutrality concerns.
Multiply that times tens of thousands of new sites not being created, tens of thousands of existing sites no longer existing or being accessible due to new laws, this occurring over multiple surfaces (content moderation, age verification, etc) and the positive impact for meta is meaningful.
If there are less sites, meta wins.
Even if they really did support a particular regulation, it could be to prevent a version of the same regulation that actually has teeth.
Or it could mean they hope to be consulted on the details of any regulation, which is more likely to happen if they sound constructive.
Corporations constantly navigate the political and regulatory landscape. You can't just take "supportive" statements like these at face value.
And finally there's the general fallacy of thinking that if B happens and A wanted it to happen then A must have caused B.
There is a massive revenue stream that says this is completely off base.
The data they have is already extremely valuable.
We're being astroturf-ed guy.
The comment you're responding to. The comments responding to you. All shaped by influence campaigns from the beginning.
Meta, X, google, data based big tech, the billionaires, and the government were in on the plan from the start. We were always the ones kept in the dark as to the ultimate intent. Even the anti-censorship and anti-surveillance posts and content that we saw, were being paid for by the same puppet masters. Professional influence campaigns controlled by these same groups shaped the internet discussion of both sides.
And it seems a lot of us still haven't figured that out yet.
We got played. We'll continue to be played if we don't recognize that fact and act to prevent it in the future.
Because I can assure you, censorship and surveillance is not the endgame. And their endgame is very likely not to our benefit.
The antisemitic ones?
The Protocols should be read as the message from those who are absolutelty corrupt with absolute power and want to remain in that power forever, regardless of the mask they wear. And they always wear and drop multiple masks, to render all attempts to identify them futile.
It is their actions that identify their presence and persistence better than any labels, and those actions doubled down since 9/11 and quadrupled since 2020.
Orwell used the term "Big Brother", and that should suffice.
See, there are no extra-terrestrials, only very sophisticated and evil terrestrial humans of blood and flesh, the new world order has been discussed here on HN daily without almost anyone acknowledging it for what it is, and your DBA tactics are laughable.
Anything that makes it harder for a user to escape their dragnet is a win.
Their website also added this page since I posted that comment: https://web.archive.org/web/20260411112604/https://tboteproj... where they claim their website is under "surveillance" because it got a few thousand requests from Google Cloud et al, most of them to a single page. This shows how low their standards are.
My personal view that social media should be age gated is caused by Meta. But broadly, polling shows a commanding majority (60+ percent) of Americans believe in restrictions for under 14s.
There is strong demand for regulation and low awareness of the surveillance consequences. We don’t have anyone advocating for a privacy-preserving solution, not effectively at least. Given the demand for something to be done, each jurisdiction is basically taking from the first available option.
These are policy polls. The sentiment has moved beyond vague notions that kids should be entrusted to Meta less.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/31/81-of-us-...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/poll-most-mass-voters-su...
When it was released I read a few of the reports in this repo and they didn't even support the claims made. Claude was admitting it couldn't find the evidence.
It's terrifying how easily this misinfo operation established itself as fact on websites where users view themselves as being more informed than average on these topics, like Hacker News.
Ironically I had to go into Google's AI mode and ask it three times not to use any TBOTE Project sources before it would give me the actual original source on this. But the article has a bunch of quotes from big tech lobbyists in support of California's age surveillance bills. Whether or not it was originally their idea is still up in the air, but given that the California, Colorado, and New York bills were largely identical, it's not crazy to say "maybe these were all Big Tech's idea".
I also have this Bloomberg article from 2025 (a year ago) claiming Meta funds the Digital Childhood Alliance[1], which has been pushing for "App Store Accountability Acts" that would mandate app stores do all the age verification (conveniently for Facebook).
Or maybe it was ALEC. :P
[0] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.
Time to adjust your priors y'all. This is a concentrated effort toward surveillance, controlling who we talk to, and what information we're fed.
yalls gonna have "social credit" scores real soon
Pretend to be anti-censorship. Get voted in. Fast track all of the censorship and surveillance through congress.
When I saw certain billionaires talking up anti-censorship and anti-surveillance a few years ago, I knew we would be screwed. (I knew the same billionaires had large positions in censorship and surveillance tech.) No one ever talks against their own book unless they're planning on screwing you.
Look at any thread about social media, TikTok, smartphones, or porn sites on Hacker News: They are instantly filled with comments claiming that the internet is to blame for all of society's ills with younger generations. The HN threads fill with comments proposing that we ban children from having smartphones until they're 16 or 18 and similar ideas. Abstract ideas about banning kids from social media or porn sites are weirdly very popular even here, mostly from people who haven't thought about what that would mean for privacy for everyone.
These ideas have become pervasive, even inside tech communities. It was so easy to blame social media and the internet for everything for years, and now lawmakers are riding that wave for political points. It's "think of the children" built on top of the current moral panics.
It's absolutely not weird. HN is the propaganda outlet for the geeks.
People started to understand too much about who's the real enemy, and are not willing to kill and die in meatgrinders of the new world order for the interests of the unelect 0.001%.