Lawmakers who draft/enact Age Verification and similar policies insist that said policies are about "child safety." But anyone with even rudimentary critical thinking skills knows that is not true

The true purposes of these policies are as follows:
-Make organizing protests virtually impossible
-Erase marginalized groups from the internet
-Make accessing vital resources much harder, if not impossible
-Erase anything that dilutes the state's ability to brainwash the populace (Palestine, Environmentalism, LGBTQ+ rights, Voting Rights, Reproductive Rights, Immigration, etc.).
-To "return" sexuality and expression in general back to their "proper" place in society and make adult art, sex work, etc. more precarious, more exploitable, and with less recourse to any law or institution
-General petty spite towards people who don't treat lawmakers like deities

Overall, de-anonymization won't make kids safe and it won't result in a more polite internet (just look at Facebook and LinkedIn).

Anyone who advocates for these policies shouldn't complain when their ID/Credit Card/Biometric data is inevitably leaked to the dark web and they have to deal with ID theft and such for years/decades.

They also shouldn't complain when they can't access a vital service and/or get jailed because either 1: The government didn't approve of what they said or 2: The extremely error prone AI that scans their messages thought the innocuous pic of their kids/pets was CSAM/Bestiality.

#Privacy #DigitalRights #FreeSpeech #Censorship #Internet #SocialMedia #US #UnitedStates #EU #Canada #Australia