That comment really triggered you didn’t it. Sorry about that.

I don’t know, I think it’s a pretty common refrain.

Maybe not common in progressive social media circles.

Yeah, it would be. And my reply comment would also be the same.

Women: Why didn’t men ask women out anymore?

Also women:

Disney is all: Calling it “Euro”? Let us know how that goes…

You really underestimate the trouble meta and YouTube are in. The specific rulings were barely tickets to them, but if they are upheld then follows flood gates of identical lawsuits are going to be opened up. They had millions and millions of child users in the 2010s that they knowingly served an addictive product to. If the current ruling is upheld, then there will likely be a very large class action settlement to payoff all the past injured users. But instead of changing their product going forward they want to get rid of the responsibility for their product entirely.

Stop making up fake conspiracies and be mad about that.

I don’t agree that Epstein is much of a counter point. There were lots of people taking about him, it really wasn’t that closely held of a secret, and he was arrested and prosecuted and murdered for it. Ultimately, with the files released, there really isn’t much in them that we didn’t already know.

Just to clear something up, my brand new account is only new because lemmings.world is closing and I had to migrate to a new server.

The biggest problem with conspiracy theories like this is always the number of people involved keeping their mouths shut. Anyone that has ever managed a large project knows how impossible it is to keep a large group of people quiet about something. In real life, there are conspiracies. Often very large ones. But they didn’t stay secret for long.

What is easier to believe: (1) that all these people involved, across countries with leaders of many different political varieties, all agreed to stick to a single narrative in order to cover up a deep international conspiracy to build a massive international database of people’s ages online, OR (2) Meta and other orgs are doing a normal business thing and trying to reduce their liability costs.

“There’s no mechanism that the government currently has that can track you as effectively as these age verification laws can.”

I honestly can’t tell if you were serious or not.

The governments just buy your data from Google. Do you have any idea how much information on you Google has?

I didn’t know about that. Maybe that’s plays into it too. But I’m generally a “simpler answer is more likely the most correct” type of guy.

In this case the simple answer is that Meta and others just had their “Tobacco Lawsuits” moment in court and liability floodgates are any to open wide, and they are pushing these laws to divert their liability onto someone else.

Google “Protected Processor Identification Number (PPIN)” to learn more.

It’s so funny to me how badly people want this to be some nefarious governmental conspiracy. Listen, the government already has much better tools to track you online. Your computer has, on a hardware level, sent unique identifiers to ISPs and websites since Pentium IIIs. This age requirement thing isn’t a government conspiracy to track you, they already track you.

It is a *corporate *conspiracy. It’s Meta and other major websites, games, and applications companies that want to off load their liability. Meta and Alphabet just lost major lawsuits for their negligence in protecting kids on their own websites. There is a liability dam about to break for these companies and schools and other advocacy groups start their own lawsuits. That’s what this is about. That’s the real conspiracy.

Almost all “hacks” of modern mainstream software involve users being stupid.

If you hear about a “hack” of a major corporation or hospital or something, the things that is never reported is that it likely started with someone with more user permissions than sense opening a phishing email.

They don’t care. They need their anti-intellectualism as badly as fundamentalist Christians.

I don’t think so. What I’m lamenting is that our society is so far removed from having actual community that people can’t even imagine what life was like back then when parents wouldn’t give any thought to kicking their 9 year old kids out of the house to go run around their cities because the parents knew that everyone in town knew who their kids were and everyone looked after each other, and especially the kids.

That really was normal for most of human history.

We are probably going to disagree on cellphone access being better for the kids.

In 1913, 700 miles was practically across the country. That was further away than most adults traveled from their birth town in their lives.

Yes, the store thing was just an example. The point is that before the 1970-80s basically ALL kids were “free-range”. In the 80s a PSA would come on tv that asked the parents if they knew where their kids were, and often than answer was ‘no’. (That’s literally the moment when parents started being shamed for not being helicopter parents.)

It’s just an uncomfortable fact.