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.
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@txtx "It's not working so let's try more fascism!" is the brainworms of lots of voters. And it's always an utterly horrible idea.
@dalias So calling me a brainwormed fascist, this is what you use anonymity for? Really nice. Great argument.
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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 there are other technical ways to do only and just age veification that have been so carefully avoided that at this point it's fair to say it's entirely on purpose and that the goal is "papers, please".
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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
Glory to #Arstotzka! -
@passenger @mhoye The UK/Brexit are perfect examples of foreign dictators influencing citizens via social media disinformation campaigns, anonymous & bot accounts etc.
This is not something I want to see further replicated anywhere in the EU.
Being an 'anti-facist' on X is a contradiction. It's like hating on Mickey Mouse at Disneyland.
@txtx @passenger @mhoye This has existed since before widespread internet and social media use. Just look at the propaganda papers like The Sun and The Daily Mail have been spewing for decades.
These opinions of Brexit-eers have existed for decades in the countryside in the UK, which is the regions of the UK which voted for Brexit.
You are using strawman arguments to push your opinion/agenda..
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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.
@passenger @txtx are you a monochromatic horse in real life
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@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.
@txtx @mhoye the "veri" part is already problematic*
having these centralized authorities to establish identity is indistinguishable from having these centralized authorities dictate identity
there are better models of steering people away from abuse that do not involve creating more systems that become more chokepoints for abusers to exploit once they find their way in (as they have now, and curiously just in time for these chokepoints to be promoted)
*EDIT: and also the "fication" part
https://www.etymonline.com/word/verify
> from Medieval Latin verificare "make true," -
@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.
@txtx@mastodon.social @mhoye@cosocial.ca it's not social media, its a network of elite child rapists and their sympathizers who coordinated a plot to push back the gains that marginalized groups made via the internet, especially trans people. there's also a lot of right wing freakouts like this that didn't involve the internet, the book "when the clock broke" goes into a lot of detail on this in the context of early 90s USA, in a similar vein the nazis used radio to score a lot of their political gains.
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@txtx@mastodon.social @mhoye@cosocial.ca it's not social media, its a network of elite child rapists and their sympathizers who coordinated a plot to push back the gains that marginalized groups made via the internet, especially trans people. there's also a lot of right wing freakouts like this that didn't involve the internet, the book "when the clock broke" goes into a lot of detail on this in the context of early 90s USA, in a similar vein the nazis used radio to score a lot of their political gains.
@foxbops The Nazis were defeated by countries that generally banned nazis and nazi propaganda in their own countries.
In western democracies, today, we're opening our doors to them. We're saying, please, flood us with the firehouse of nazi garbage information. It makes no sense.
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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@libramoon @mhoye That sounds fine until you realize that some of the main ways that they hurt these kids is through doxxing, blackmailing, and other methods that are only made easier by de-anonymizing them. Also the fact that people - from the companies themselves to governments and hackers - are using the data in ways that are harmful to people.
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@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.
@txtx @mhoye if those democracies were working, people wouldn't just start believing what a random person on the internet says. it didn't use to be like this and it doesn't have to now, but it's affected by the same social issues as everything else. whereas the earlier internet contributed a lot to social progress and there's no telling that things wouldn't be even worse without it. also, if an open internet was fundamentally a threat to democracy, dictatorships wouldn't be working so hard to destroy it, and it wouldn't be people opposed to democracy as a concept pushing for tighter government control. -
@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.
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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 I am sure other reply guys also told you in Europe with a e-wallet you can prove your age without uploading anything. https://edri.org/our-work/showing-your-id-to-get-online-might-become-a-reality-a-closer-look-at-the-eus-new-age-verification-app/
still doesnt make age verification for websites a good idea
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@txtx@mastodon.social @mhoye@cosocial.ca 1. why not just ban nazism and far-right parties instead of locking down social media and enabling nazi tech firms like palantir to implement more surveillance? 2. that is just not what happened especially pre-ww2, the united states didn't crack down on fascists until they entered the war, the french had a strong far-right movement, the USSR heavily collaborated with the nazis right up until the invasion. britain was the only major combatant which lacked a robust pre-ww2 far-right movement and that was more down to luck than anything else, the USSR was the only country that banned naziism but that was more of a side effect of them banning anything that wasn't stalinist orthodoxy.
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@passenger @txtx are you a monochromatic horse in real life
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@DiogoConstantino So? What's wrong with trying harder? Is laziness an excuse?
I want more fellow tech people to step away from the libertarian ideals of the current Internet, and start coming up with ways to help save democracy from aggressive states and their disinformation campaigns.
@txtx @DiogoConstantino @dalias @mhoye
Stepping away from the libertarian ideals of the internet is just an indirect way of saying you want the internet to step towards authoritarian ideals.
And you can take that evil shit and shove it. Have you not noticed what authoritarians do with power yet??
Are you aware that all of our social security information and most of our medical records have already been compromised? You REALLY want to fork over more personal information to some cloud where hackers and data brokers and fascist regimes can just play around with it? Once that data is getting hacked and spoofed, they'll just keep demanding more invasive data to prove ID-- right down to our retinal scans and fucking DNA.
None of this shit is about protecting kids, no matter what pretty claims they put on the tin. NONE OF IT.
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@txtx @DiogoConstantino @dalias @mhoye
Stepping away from the libertarian ideals of the internet is just an indirect way of saying you want the internet to step towards authoritarian ideals.
And you can take that evil shit and shove it. Have you not noticed what authoritarians do with power yet??
Are you aware that all of our social security information and most of our medical records have already been compromised? You REALLY want to fork over more personal information to some cloud where hackers and data brokers and fascist regimes can just play around with it? Once that data is getting hacked and spoofed, they'll just keep demanding more invasive data to prove ID-- right down to our retinal scans and fucking DNA.
None of this shit is about protecting kids, no matter what pretty claims they put on the tin. NONE OF IT.
@violetmadder @txtx @DiogoConstantino @dalias
You might want to read this: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/C.R.C.,_c._1038/FullText.html
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@passenger And the rise of far right parties can be directly attributed to the rise in anonymous bot armies paid and organized by foreign dictators.
I say: tackle the problem at the core.
The core?
The core is cruelty. The core is the enclosure of the commons; the backbone of how capitalism oppresses millions. All rooted in abuse culture and kyriarchy. The cultural premise that some people are superior and thus entitled to control those they deem inferior through coercion. All of this flows from that.
Troll farms are just ONE tool in the toolbox of corruption.
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@passenger I seriously question if following around fascists/racists has done any good for society in the last decade or so.
On the contrary it seems like a bad addiction, and it's only getting worse because we're just injecting more of it into our daily lives. Why do we need to listen to them? Are we their lackeys?
You are seemingly unaware of the huge amounts of organizing that have occurred on social media for positive reasons. I'll grant that social media run by corporate predators is of course warped and untrustworthy, but that is not the inherent nature of social media or the internet as a whole.
Likewise, I'm willing to bet you have NO CLUE what antifascist action even is or how it works, much less what it has accomplished. Even under regimes that are seriously unfriendly to antifa in general, their work has led to the criminal convictions of some truly despicable rings of bastards.
You're jumping to a lot of conclusions in your own brain, so fully confident in your smartness that your blind spots are yawning chasms.
Less self-referential speculating, moar reading.
https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/To-Catch-a-Fascist/Christopher-Mathias/9781668034767
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@txtx @DiogoConstantino @dalias @mhoye
Stepping away from the libertarian ideals of the internet is just an indirect way of saying you want the internet to step towards authoritarian ideals.
And you can take that evil shit and shove it. Have you not noticed what authoritarians do with power yet??
Are you aware that all of our social security information and most of our medical records have already been compromised? You REALLY want to fork over more personal information to some cloud where hackers and data brokers and fascist regimes can just play around with it? Once that data is getting hacked and spoofed, they'll just keep demanding more invasive data to prove ID-- right down to our retinal scans and fucking DNA.
None of this shit is about protecting kids, no matter what pretty claims they put on the tin. NONE OF IT.
@violetmadder @txtx @DiogoConstantino @mhoye "Libertarian ideals" aren't the answer here. We absolutely need to regulate the billionaire platforms, either out of existence or at least into behaving half decently. What we must reject is regulating ordinary ppl into surveillance hell as a faux substitute for that.
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@violetmadder @txtx @DiogoConstantino @dalias
You might want to read this: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/C.R.C.,_c._1038/FullText.html
