Em 2d ago

When you read about Bans of Social Media for Teens and Age Verification, you must remember what it truly means:

• Official identification of every adult using social media.

• Deanonymization of every account, endangering groups that often rely on pseudonymity for safety, such as victims of domestic violence, victims of stalkers, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people.

• Putting every adult at great danger of exploitation, fraud, and identity theft by forcing them to share their official ID with a for-profit third-party company with no incentive to protect it. Breaches have already happened.

• Constructing a system of mass surveillance to attach every comment on social media to a legal identity. Effectively allowing authoritarian governments to silence their critics and opposition.

• Potential for dystopian censorship and cutting off means of organization for groups of resistance to oppressive regime and organizations.

• Endangering children online by putting a clear identification beacon over every child or family with children online.

• Endangering the data of children who will inevitably try to pass as adults, and have their information collected by the third-party for-profit company.

• Diminishing the value of official identification due to the inevitable data breaches, eventually pushing the system to require even more intrusive identification techniques, such as iris scans and fingerprints.

• Installing a system of mass surveillance capable of attaching even more information to everyone's legal identity. With a potential to built list of people in certain groups, and scale-up state censorship and discrimination in unprecedented ways.

• The list goes on and on.

This isn't about protecting the children.
It never was.

Do not be duped by this excuse used to convince you to let go of your human rights. They are only trying to manipulate people lacking information.

Stay informed on the issues related to Age Verification, and push back for your rights to privacy and democracy.

The future depends on us.

#AgeVerification #Privacy #HumanRights #MassSurveillance #Authoritarianism

Show threadAnton ⁂ 1d ago
@Em0nM4stodon if they cared about the well-being of children and developmental problems with being exposed to the the internet they'd be talking about different thing.

You'd want to make the internet less addictive and dangerous, by limiting ad-tracking and algorithmic systems the incentivize mass data harvesting. Force public-facing spaces to effectively moderate to keep from being dangerous to children.

You'd want to make the material environment more hospitable to doing anything other than sitting inside on a computer all day. Limiting cars so it's safe to be outside, promoting public parks, social programs and child-friendly public events.
Show threadJeff Atwood1d ago
@anton @Em0nM4stodon ok but what about our complicity here? Everyone wants “free” services that they don’t have to pay for. What is the actual price for that?
Show threadViolet Madder1d ago

@codinghorror @anton @Em0nM4stodon

What about it? The moral injury of getting roped into being "complicit" in our own oppression is just one more way they damage us and try to convince us we somehow brought this bullshit on ourselves.

Imagine, for a moment, a world where people could easily get their basic needs met. If disposable income was an actual thing, people would not be in nearly such a hurry to jump for the dangerously predatory "free" shit on offer from the people who helped make sure we're poor in the first place.

Show thread💥meta physical deflationist💥1d ago

@violetmadder @codinghorror @anton @Em0nM4stodon and frankly "people only want free stuff" was never true.

people were always willing to pay a reasonable price for media or software. its just always been priced as a luxury to maximize profits for middlemen. also the shift to free wasnt consumer or creator driven but seller driven as the growth over profits practice is how we got here.

Show threadViolet Madder1d ago

@glassresistor @codinghorror @anton @Em0nM4stodon

You got it.

Show threadJeff Atwood1d ago
@violetmadder @glassresistor @anton @Em0nM4stodon I don’t agree. People, statistically speaking, have an insane bloodlust for “free”. I have met the enemy and it is me.
Show threadJeff Atwood1d ago
@violetmadder @glassresistor @anton @Em0nM4stodon I don’t know how to change human nature but I do know it is folly to work against it rather than acknowledging our collective weaknesses and work alongside them, with them, redirecting and guiding. It is a very difficult path, and the easy way out is constantly, incessantly beckoning to us every damn step of the way.
Show thread💥meta physical deflationist💥1d ago
@codinghorror @violetmadder @anton @Em0nM4stodon human nature is something race scientists made up at the turn of the last century. stop projecting your own shortcomings on to the world and actually study history
Show threadAnton ⁂
@glassresistor @codinghorror @violetmadder like.... yes you can have an understanding of "human nature" as a concept and the political motives of social scientists of the 1900s to make this position reasonable in a vaccum

but that is not a reasonable statement to make in this context. having studied history does not make people automatically agree with you nor automatically have the correct opinions
Apr 13 at 4:30amWeb
Show threadViolet Madder1d ago

@anton @codinghorror @glassresistor

Observing humans under capitalism and saying it is in their nature to be greedy, is like observing humans underwater and saying it's in our nature to drown.

Humans can be shockingly malleable, in terms of what we can be conditioned to accept as normal. Huge amounts of social engineering went into giving us the desperate impulse to grab for whatever we can reach. That's a compulsive behavior, very much like the food hoarding of a person who's experienced starvation. Or the junk-hoarding behavior of people who've had everything taken away from them multiple times-- sweeping the homeless compounds their trauma and makes them that much more likely to cling to anything and everything they can.

Artificial scarcity is DESIGNED to make us act like this. Torture programs research learned helplessness and addiction and more, for this purpose. Blame the victims, convince everybody this is just a dog eat dog world where everybody is a selfish bastard deep down and.. actually, what IS the point of that line of reasoning??

Show thread💥meta physical deflationist💥1d ago

@anton @codinghorror @violetmadder its funny how little content this reply had. its almost like instead of a point or counter argument you went for the claasic dodge of "haha just because my opinion is unfounded, ahistorical, and lacks even shallow analysis doesnt mean people shouldnt value my opinion" and "your not always right"

please explain to me your historical context for why freemeium became the norm

Show threadAnton ⁂ 1d ago
@glassresistor my point was there wasn't any claim made @codinghorror that warrants so much hostility from you. Yea he was being dismissive and annoying. But whats the core disagreement here? Funding models for media outlets? do we really need to be so dogmatic about it instead of just.... talking about the many, many problems with ad-supported models
Show thread💥meta physical deflationist💥1d ago
@anton @codinghorror i mean to he for clear coding horror is a POS for many prior reasons so im not jumping into this contextless
Show threadAnton ⁂ 1d ago
@glassresistor not surprised, libertarian reply guys tend to have a recognizable pattern

But obviously I, as someone without said context has no reason to be compelled by it. You're undermining your position against the need for ads by making a bunch of vague and inflamitory non-sequiturs