Mastodawn

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

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Christine Lemmer-Webber Apr 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?

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Christine Lemmer-Webber Apr 15

If *I* were an investigative journalist, this is a piece I'd be pouring a lot of energy into. I know we have a few investigative journalists on here... maybe someone wants to take it up?

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Kow

@cwebber https://tboteproject.com/

It has been(still is being) investigated. From what I recall, Meta is the biggest spender. Makes sense why they suddenly want your OS to verify age. Meta will be able to collect more data and have to do no extra work around it.

Notice of Surveillance Detection - TBOTE Project