this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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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.