This is some boss-level forensic accounting demonstrating that Facebook secretly wrote and is shepherding the various "age verification" bills.
Age Verification Lobbying: Dark Money, Model Legislation & Institutional Capture: How corporate lobbying, think tank infrastructure, competing model legislation, and obscured funding networks are shaping age verification policy across 45 states and Congress...
https://jwz.org/b/yk4c
I have a tendency to believe the conclusions, even if this particular thing might be garbage. This is because another individual went over the records of companies and organizations paying for in particular the California bill on age verification that recently passed.
Many of the usual suspects are there. The real question then becomes finding we’re going through the date that’s available.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @davidrevoy @val @jwz
It's a plausible conclusion.
To me the other likely suspect is the far right christian censors who want to block kids from having access to any information about LGBT people. (and any history that makes the far right look bad)
There's a proposed bill
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/7661/text
that would ban schools from providing any access to any sexually orientated material, and it ends with defining that anything related to gender dysphoria is sexual related material.
The age verification laws certainly seem consistent with their push to censor kids from being able to participate on the internet.
@alienghic @GhostOnTheHalfShell @davidrevoy @val @jwz this is also a bill which censors many works of literature. It uses an edition of Encyclopedia Britannica noted for its narrow focus on Western European / American works written by men, and Compass Education is an explicitly Christian organization
all other works which are not on the list of maybe 150 books and contain "sexual material" may be censored
jwz
val
David Revoy
GhostOnTheHalfShell
Diane
Frank Davies