this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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Fight against billionaires
Look inside
Surveillance and censorship of everyone else
You do realize that the billionaires are already surveilling and censoring everyone? Google sharing info with ICE, Bezos killing Washington Post, Musk modifying algorithms to promote his messages and banning inconvenient accounts, Thiel promoting his crazy agenda through Palantir and so on and so on.
When you say "government should not surveil and censor" you're really saying "only billionaires should surveil and censor".
The proper way forward is to censor the shit out of Russian bot ridden, billionaire controlled propaganda machines that is social media and move discussion back to civilized places. People who think that places like Twitter are net benefit for society are delusional. They gave us nothing but bunch of right wing populists and disinformation while real media is still doing all the actual oversight. The sooner all those places are banned the better.
And the solution to that is to give the billionaires your government ID?
Why are you implying that we would need to do that? The proposed solution in the article is an app that social media apps would need to interact with to get approval. Something like an external verification tool. All the billionaires would get is an "ok, go on" or "stop".
Is it so hard to read the article before criticizing your own hallucinations?
Or the alternative... quit doom-scrolling all day long to an addictive algorithm. No one is forced to use social media.
Its not just about social media, the scope keeps changing and these laws are being used as a framework for mass censorship and surveillance of the entire internet. First it was just porn, now it's social media and next will probably be VPNs. And social media is a loose definition that can be expanded to include whatever you want, I'm sure at one point Australia were going to include github in their age verification law although I don't know if they followed through with that.
And sure for now we can escape to platforms like Lemmy which are free from both age verification and the general shittiness of the big platforms, but guarantee it won't stay that way for long.
It doesn’t work like that… it’s an open source government platform the one doing the id check.
That really doesn't ease my concern that it's just more government surveillance
An app that gets requests to verify access and returns ok/no is minimal surveillance. We are so past that in terms of surveillance that complaining about it seems silly.
I don’t know what country you’re from but in mine one has to produce one’s id to vote, access adult only establishments, go through customs or board a plane. I understand these as the usual procedures of a civilized society.
I don’t understand how verifying one’s identity and age when accessing a regulated site is any different. It fascinates me how rules that are business as usual in the physical world seem not to apply in the digital world for (??) reasons.
In the physical world if you have a business you have to pay taxes, apply for licenses, and are liable for offering illegal or harmful merchandise or services.
In the digital world you can fill a room with children and show them porn and political propaganda for (??) reasons. And not allowing it is “government interference”. So why are children not allowed in brothels or casinos in the physical world? “Government interference”?
Yes. The solution for bots and foreign actors filling social media with propaganda is to identify its users. What's the downside, in EU specifically, to giving social media companies your ID? What are they going to do with it they don't do already?
Get hacked and leak it for starters, as has already happened with Discord. And social media is a loose definition that can be expanded to include whatever you want. Currently Lemmy and Mastodon are not included but it could be. And Lemmy currently has none of my personal information so uploading my ID would be infinitely worse than what we have now. And before you say it's not feasible to force all instances to comply or be blocked that won't stop them trying.
Internet discourse is a public activity, journalists and demonstrators don’t hide their identities when publishing or protesting in Spain or the EU.
Why people want the internet to be any different is beyond me. The public square being anonymous is an asset only for malign foreign actors. I want to know whether people writing stuff are single individuals from my country/the EU or suspicious actors. In a free country, you can tell the government to go fuck itself without a mask, and that’s the only way to separate real criticism from manufactured criticism and foreign manipulation.
I am not sure Spain is the right country to make considering the laws they have and how they have been used (spanish wikipedia).
Oh yes the laws of tyrannical Spain are the ones to be feared and of course take precedent over the risks posed by the FSB, Heritage Foundation et al, and the heartfelt kindness of FB and X.
Sure, sure…
Political infrastructure works well until it is not. U.S. used to have okay political infrastructure in protecting democracy, then patriot's act happened and many of its loophole identified, now president can just kidnap a foreign president as "law enforcement".
I would love a system where people don't have any need to be anynomized, it would make many things much simpler, but that seems hard to imagine for me. And I am not from the U.S. and I have lived in both U.S., U.K., and outside of the west, so it is likely not caused by "U.S. brainwashing".
I am not entirely sure what is the "EU secret sauce" to prevent Politician in utilizing these loopholes or strong centiments to gradually regulate speech. One day, they might be able to make use of these data. People in U.S. protested, they shot protester, and no one can protest forever, unfortunately. I am curious what would prevent EU to replay what US have now, except with much much more targeted data at the government's disposal.
The US is, very precisely, the poster child on how libertarianism doesn’t advance democracy.
The right to bear arms advances no democratic values, because people who are individualistic or distrustful to the point they buy a gun to protect their property won’t fight for democracy, because democracy is a collective enterprise. Where are all those very very brave and very very armed Americans now that the executive is running rampant and shutting down their institutions and agreements? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
Likewise, the right to issue public anonymous opinions advances no democratic values, because if you need them to be anonymous in a free country, either they are malicious/fake and therefore you’re afraid of legal repercussions or you’re lazy/fearful and therefore you would fight no tyranny (same as those who bear arms).
I’m not arguing against the privacy of private communications, that’s an entirely different matter (that’s the point of private/public), but when one issues a public opinion one should be responsible and sensible enough to do it non anonymously. That doesn’t even mean I have to know your name, but we could create an open source encrypted platform that identifies public personas on the internet as a)individuals b)nationals of their countries in the EU. Simply add a check close to the handle and the official verification.
Our freedom to express a public opinion is precious and shouldn’t be weaponized against us by malign foreign actors. As I said before, nobody would go to a political rally by a random Russian in a balaclava. I don’t want to ban political rallies, I just want to expose farms of Russians in balaclavas.