Christine Lemmer-WebberApr 15

Well this is truly bad. US national level OS-level age verification bill. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/8250/all-info

The text of it isn't out yet.

EDIT: Well the text is now out and it's as bad as you could imagine. It's not even just that you need to verify your age to access a website... operating systems must verify your age to let you *use a computer at all*

EDIT EDIT: Thanks to @Andres4NY for pointing out that it also holds responsible anyone who has any software shipped on the operating system of a computer, meaning FOSS developers eveywhere

Show threadChristine Lemmer-WebberApr 15

We don't know who's funding this stuff for sure, there was the vibecoded analysis that came to the conclusion of Meta, but I suspect that could be true but Meta wouldn't be alone.

Who stands to benefit from this? A lot of forces of centralization, and anti-LGBTQ orgs:

- Microsoft, for sure, since they are seeing Windows' dominance threatened?
- Apple, for similar reasons?
- Peter Theil and similar surveillance company owners and operators?
- Anti-queer orgs and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation?
- Cloudflare, who will probably run the age verification paywalls everyone will be forced to deploy?

Who's behind this? Who's getting politicians so excited about it? There's such a swell of bipartisan support seemingly out of nowhere, and my suspicion is a lot of that enthusiasm is coming from check-writing.

So who's behind it?

Show threadkbal
The name Elon comes to mind
Apr 15 at 12:19pmWeb