Once you realize it’s not “age verification”, but actually “identity verification”, then it’s easy to understand that the real goal is “papers, please” for the entire internet.

@mhoye classically yes that’s exactly what it is

@mhoye Precisely. And the age cutoff is irrelevant. They could pick any age they want, but *everyone* (above that age) still needs to provide their papers to prove they are above that age.

@mhoye

big tech creates poison social media to trap kids and ends up killing some
instead of going after the sociopath perps, let's keep kids from the friendships and information they have been finding, and make everyone prove their identities, no matter how that might hurt them

@mhoye Unpopular opinion:

Identity verification isn't so unattractive in 2026 — social media is destroying democracies via anonymous armies of bot people steered by aggressive foreign actors like Putin and Musk.

The libertarian model that the Internet was built on is failing societies.

@mhoye
I think it is better to describe these schemes as "surveillance and censorship programs".

@txtx @mhoye Rightfully unpopular. This is not a libertarian position but an anarchist and antifascist one. It's not Ayn Rand bros who are harmed by needing to show ID to participate in public life. It's queer youth, undocumented folks, unhoused folks, dissidents, ppl living under regimes that don't want them having international contacts, etc. who this shit harms.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@dalias/115969305010426018

@libramoon @mhoye This.

@mhoye

We're being bullied by neurotic creeps with too much money

@mhoye No it isn't.

They already have all of your info. We know this because the FBI just inadvertently revealed it by producing video evidence publicly that wasn't supposed to exist.

They have your info and they are feeding it to your government freely and without a warrant.

ID verification is just a simple means of proving you confirmed someone isn't a child.

@mhoye the "goal" of a system is what it does. no matter what the actual intent was.

@txtx @mhoye

Honestly most of the worst people on the internet are unashamed to go by their actual names and faces.

This is obviously true on Facebook and LinkedIn, but if you ever go to fascist Telegram groups, a lot of them are full of people with real names, and profile pics of them with sunglasses and baseball caps sitting in their cars. They aren't ashamed of who they are or what they do, and they aren't afraid of consequences.

@dalias @mhoye Facebook & X are anarchist/anti fascist? I don't agree.

@passenger @mhoye Those worst people are mostly bots or fake. Rarely are they using their real names. ICE wear masks.

The ones who go public: they should be in court facing anti hate laws. But instead they're protected because they don't even live in my country. X and Facebook need to be banned where I am to fix this.

@FlashMobOfOne @mhoye According to your logic, why they would need to check it isn't a child if they already know?

@mhoye
Your papers are not in order.

@mhoye Yup, they are tired of not being able to tell whose a dog and whose a human on the Internet

@mhoye not defending the age verification at all or any of that shit...
But at least they designed in Europe the upcoming EUDI Wallet (digital wallet) they now want to use for that in a way that you can for example just disclose "yup, I'm over 18" not more of your personal information

@dalias @txtx @mhoye 100%. We can’t control how the billionaire class use the media they own to spread crappy propaganda. But the right to anonymity is also about safety and the ability to organise away from hostile surveillance.

@txtx @mhoye

I speak as a somewhat experienced antifascist who started doing infiltrations around 2013-2014, in the start of what was later called the alt-Right; and who has done more than his share of street actions.

There's a myth that these sorts of accounts are mostly bots, and I really don't think that's true. Like yes, some of them are impostors, that is certainly the case. But if you look at the polls, Reform is at 28.6% in the UK and RN is at 35% in France. That means a quarter of Brits and a third of French hold fascist views, and so if you see a quarter to a third of social media accounts being openly fascist, that's about what you'd expect. That's just who Europeans are.

In my infiltration work, one thing I notice is that the hyperonline gommos tend to have anime avatars and stuff like that, but the more scary people, those with jobs and houses and families and blood-and-soil politics, those tend to be the same person online as they are in real life. In antifascist communities we are deeply security-conscious, but these people really tend not to be. If you wear a mask around them they'll get suspicious and, in my experience, will lecture you about how covid is fake. Their security doesn't come from anonymity but from tight social conformity and from knowing that the cops agree with them.

They are the people who try to propel Jordan Bardella and Nigel Farage into office, will queue up to work at Frontex, and who have scary domestic violence records. They are not bots, they are worse than that.