Simon BrookeMar 15

Guess who's behind the sudden rush of age verification legislation?

In the US, #Meta is spending $26.3 Million to hire at least 86 Lobbyists from 40 lobbying firms, and lobbying in at least 45 states. It is confirmed that Meta wrote the Louisiana age verification bill.

In the EU, Meta is spending ten million euros annually on lobbying, retaining 18 lobbying firms.

Edit: this article is based on LLM generated material, and I haven't spent the time to check its sources

https://tboteproject.com/

Age Verification Lobbying: Dark Money, Model Legislation & Institutional Capture

Investigative research into age verification lobbying, dark money, and model legislation

The TBOTE Project
Show threadTom Parker-Shemilt
@simon_brooke There's also the moat question. As has been shown already with UK regulation, adding age gate requirements screws over the little sites. Meta's costs to do age verification aren't even a rounding error on their profits, where as it makes it harder for anything competing with them to get off the ground.
Mar 16 at 12:51pmWeb
Show threadSimon BrookeMar 16

@palfrey Indeed. If there was age verification legislation, I'd probably have to implement age verification on my blog, which would make it substantially more expensive to run a personal blog.

Which is about trying to price people out of maintaining their own independent websites, since Meta, Google et al find it much harder to monetise independent websites.