What’s fascinating to me of that there are people who win vehemently oppose age verification yet have no absolutely no problem with anti-BDS laws, Gaza suppression, etc. Or worse, they’ll support those things.
That is an entirely different and less dangerous issue.
The issue is that when you give power of individual attestation to the government, over your ability to access age-gated sites, you have also given them the power to individually withhold or revoke attestation.
Age-gating will spread as sites limit their legal liabilities, and governments saber rattle.
Even child-friendly sites will age-gate to avoid liability issues, by confirming parents set up their child's account.
This isn't theory: Right now, Wikipedia is having to fight to avoid age-gating. [0]
This fine-grained government control over each citizen is an unprecedented expansion of power/control/threat to freedom. Whether used explicitly, or as a tool of fear that operates implicitly no matter who is in power.
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/we-support-wikimedia-f...
That is nonsense. This type of content appears on my TikTok/Reels feeds nonstop even if I don't interact with it.
More evidence: leaked audio from ADL Chief Jonathon Greenblatt saying "we have a Tiktok problem" [5]. Kinda weird that within a few months later Biden signed a hastily passed law to force a sale of Tiktok. Weird.
Need more? Twitch updated it's Hateful Conduct Policy to say "Zionist" is "hate speech" [6]. This is for a political designation not a religious or ethnic one as evidenced by the fact that Christian Zionists outnumber Jewish Zionists in the US by about 30 to 1 [7].
[1]: https://theconversation.com/social-media-platforms-are-compl...
[2]: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/metas-israel-policy-chi...
[3]: https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorship...
[4]: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/hrw-inve...
[5]: https://x.com/snarwani/status/1725138601996853424
[6]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/twitch-changes-hateful-content-...
> saying "we have a Tiktok problem"
All the more proving my point that TikTok is filled to the brim with anti-semitic content and "Palestine" content is in no way restricted.
> Twitch updated it's Hateful Conduct Policy to say "Zionist" is "hate speech"
Good. Calling for destruction of Israel is hate speech. Which is how "Zionist" is used most of the time.