I can understand why governments would push for something like this after 9/11, though it of course goes without saying that this is a totally unacceptable violation of someone’s basic rights. It also goes without saying that governments always want more control over their citizens, but what exactly are they so worried might happen, right now, in 2025 or the near future?
For those here who didn’t know specifics, as far as I know the EU has announced in July 2025 guidelines, set to come into effect until 2026, that seem to basically be the same as the UK online safety act:
https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/118226
These guidelines say, among other things, check the last link: “Where the provider of the online platform has identified medium risks to minors on their platform as established in its risk review […] and those risks cannot be mitigated by less restrictive measures. The Commission considers this will be the case where the risk is not high enough to require access restriction based on age verification but not low enough that it would be appropriate to not have any access restriction […]” And “Self-declaration is not considered to be an appropriate age-assurance measure as further explained below.”
If you don’t want the Online Safety Act in the EU, call or e-mail your representative now. If you enter your country here, it shows a list: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/#delegates As far as I can tell, unless it’s reversed this will be coming soon. The clock is ticking.
My representatives don’t care. They want it. They are the ones thirsty for power. The only solution is to completely remove them from power. Any letter sent to them is nothing more than toilet paper for these people.
Still worth reminding them some of us will vote them out unless they walk this age check nonsense back. If thousands of people do so, it can be relevant.
Totalitarianism.
People outside Europe doesn’t understand how our governments are speed running getting a totalitarian government. More and more aspects of anyone’s everyday life are getting controlled everyday.
Here they are already starting a system of garbage bags with nfc tags to have our garbage controlled.
At the end of the day they are thirsty for power and control.
Here they are already starting a system of garbage bags with nfc tags to have our garbage controlled.
Sounds like a great way of getting people to throw their garbage in any place other than the bag…
Which country is it?
Spain. They have started in some regions. And they are aiming for a national implementation in a few years.
🫂
it looks like they’re just realizing that they can push it this far and people won’t really fight back about it
It’s definitely due the erosion of living conditions and increasing discontent of the people towards the state as a way to crackdown on criticism and discontent.
It’s due to Palantir and co, lobbying various European governments in recent years. Look at which EU governments are Palantir’s clients.
It’s sadly led to the EU has actually announced a copy of the UK Online Safety Act for 2026, as far as I can tell: https://leminal.space/post/25089051/17854998 It’s received less press coverage than the whole Chat Control thing.
Peter Theil is the #1 most dangerous man in the world right now. Need Luigi #2.
The NWO people in each nation have their own special part to play until we get to one unified world government.
Right but where are the “fuck the NWO” people
Look around at your friends and family. It should be them on the fuck NWO side… If it’s not them then blame them OR understand their naivety. …or worse realize their evil.
European elites are worried about losing control, and they are responding by restricting freedoms.
The Palestine/Gaza issue is one concrete example: European elites are very pro-Israel and pro-Genocide. But they have completely failed to control the narrative and European populations are not as pro-Israel as their elites.
They might also be getting cocerned about people finding out that elites routine participate in sexual abuse of children.
I don’t see how any regime can maintain legitimacy if normies finally grasp the scope of the issue.
They are prepping to rule by force, fuck your consent.
They will rape children and jack shit you can do about it.
The genocide in Gaza and the massive response against it made them realize that they no longer had the ability to control the narrative despite their best efforts to spread Zionist propaganda. The so called “free world” has always relied on being able to sway public opinion and manufacture consent through media when necessary. Now that it’s stopped working because of people’s access to media on the internet that contradicts their claims, they decided it’s time to push a more restrictive regime in order to deal with the issue.
How can we decapitate this system before it strangles us back into the silence of the pre-internet ?
We probably can’t because the political formations that need to be organized take years to develop and grow. Namely, socialist organizations. And the ruling class and its political class lackeys already go after those as well, so it will be full of struggle. But it is the only real path forward for any kind of actually democratic system and is worth pursuing ASAP.
The countries under discussion are democratic republics, aren’t they? If so, then age verification is what the people voted for, not an insidious plot by “they”.
Democratic? That is exactly what the US is and you see how that worked out.
The USA is not a healthy democracy.
I think if you asked the people whattl they voted for none of them would say it was this. And yet it is still set to roll out.
Makes you wonder what liberal democracy really means doesn’t it?
Sometimes policy issues arise after an election cycle, in which case the voters didn’t have an opportunity to vote for or against the candidates based on their position on the policy issue. Was that the case with age verification in the UK?
In a healthy democracy, future elections decide the fate of these policies, which can be reverted. Even the USA’s complete prohibition on recreational alcohol, which was popular with voters at the time, and codified into the constitution itself, later became unpopular with voters, and was repealed. So as long as the democracy remains healthy, there is always an opportunity for bad policies to be repealed.
You should read the rest of the thread to get an understanding of why surveillance and deanonymization is being pushed. It is not to solve some real issue to the benefit of the public, it is a response to the failure of the media systems of control to control narratives.
Your claims about a “healthy democracy” are fairy tales. That’s propaganda about how it works, not how it works in practice. The UK has its current Prime Minister due to a series of coordinated media campaigns against the previous leader of Labour, for examlle, with an internal purge using bad faith claims following his removal. No element of that was democratic and none of the UK governments have been popular for ages.
Question why so-called democracies only produce unpopular governments. Why don’t the parties align with popular interests in reality? Whose interests do they align with?
Now I’m even more confused lol. What’s the motive for media companies to promote candidates who pass laws that require age verification on websites such as porn sites? Are porn websites causing media companies to lose revenue or something?
Media companies oppose left candidates. Left candidates threaten the material interests of the owners of these companies, the ad buyers, the people who fund think tanks and establish or otherwise embed in academic programs like journalism schools.
The remainder is non-left candidates. These are people who work in those interests and therefore receive media support. For example, Reform UK gets inordinate neuteal or positive media coverage as well as volume compared to even the greens who are not much of a threat to capital.
These mass surveillance laws are a reaction to an failure in this overall apparatus to control thought and speech re: Gaza. They want to track and suppress and oppress information and speech that runs contrary to ruling class interests. The ruling class is heavily invested in the genocidal settler colonial project of “Israel” both literally with piles of cash and politically-strategically as a means by which to control and profit from political destabilization in parts of the Middle East.
Their explicit statements about why they want to do this are just a lie, a pretext. They are not personally or politically invested in protecting kids, lol. These are the people that protected Jimmy Saville and impoverished and made food insecure huge percentages of UK children.
The Australian labor government didn’t have age verification as one of their core policies. Also the specifics in Australia is being done by the esafety commission rather than through parliament. This whole age verification stuff is very undemocratic in nature
the people get a choice between a few candidates, all of whom are preapproved in the major parties by the donors, who aren’t really of “the people” in any meaningful sense of the word
There’s no conspiracy of collusion between parties. Any party is free to put forward candidates who favor popular policies. And if that candidates wins, but doesn’t fulfill their promises, then the voters will remember that.
and yet they all have the same donors and the same lobbyists
People don’t vote for policies in a western democratic republic, they vote for candidates that are pre-approved by parties and donors.
It is in the best interests of the parties to put forward candidates and policies who will have voter appeal, in order to prevail over competing parties.
The media is also controlled by those same donors. The people believe what they’re told to believe, and then given candidates that only align with what they’re told to believe. Anyone outside of the norm for the parties and donor’s ideology is systematically portrayed as unserious and delusional. It is not in the interest of a party to win with a candidate that disagrees with their core beliefs. Which is why establishment democrats prefer to lose when the party is forced to run a leftist. You can see exactly this phenomenon in the NYC mayoral race.
are you antisemitism concern trolling or new?
Even if our elections were “democratic” (they aren’t), there is absolutely no chance of voting this shit away before it is foisted onto the population.
Do you have evidence to support the claim that European elections are being rigged?
Most of this was happening or initially attempted long before the current Gaza situation, so it’s not that.
I get the impression that there are a lot of bot answers here. So well articulated, but barely connected to the questions.
Another factor is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Late capitalism has to keep finding more and more shameless ways to squeeze regular people as the easy money recedes. Lobbyists are pushing harder to lock people into a few big services and subscriptions so they are forced to yield more personal data and spending money.
I feel it’s the same vibe with return to office policy in Canada.
These things seem like they come from absolutely no where with no legitimate reason and then all of these executives are on board making it happen.
Like what the fuck is going on
If you’re talking about Toronto and Ottawa, as far as I heard, a huge part of the reason is Downtown businesses are struggling now that way fewer people are commuting Downtown.
But the solution to this is not RTO. If your DOWNTOWN of all places isn’t self sufficient I don’t know what to tell you other than your municipal policies are failing. Just let people live in the office buildings. “Oh they’re too wide and you’ll have to make the units narrow strips that only have a tiny sliver of window on one side” Do that then. Tons of people would still live in those because Downtown should be the most desirable place to live.
Just let people live in the office buildings
Yes 👍
“Oh they’re too wide and you’ll have to make the units narrow strips that only have a tiny sliver of window on one side” Do that then.
Some people would be willing to live like that. But the rents per ft^2 or m^2 would be abysmally low. And renovating the buildings would still be very expensive. It may be physically possible to turn those deep floor plate cube farm skyscrapers into housing, but it isn’t financially possible. The money would be better spent tearing the buildings down entirely and just building entirely new residential buildings from scratch.
Ok so how exactly have all these companies all agreed to do this at the same time. That’s not strange to you?
In the worlds of the immortal George Carlin: it’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.
I don’t want to just dismiss this as “business as usual.” What stands out to me is how coordinated the return-to-work push was. Sure, we know there’s a “big club” of elites who share similar goals. But sharing goals isn’t the same as acting in lockstep.
Think about it: I can join a fitness club, but that doesn’t mean all of us show up on Wednesday wearing the same outfit. There’s a difference between belonging to a group and receiving instructions that lead everyone to move together.
That’s why I think this deserves more attention. The inference here isn’t just that the wealthy share values or face the same incentives it’s that they communicate and coordinate globally in ways that go far beyond coincidence. And that, to me, is a much bigger story than just “rich people doing rich people stuff.”
Do you think the ultra wealthy don’t associate and communicate with each other? Why wouldn’t there be private Signal chats composed only of billionaires? It’s not about shared incentives. The “club” part is very literal.
It’s kind of crazy to me how you’re casual with this. First I don’t think it’s a signal chat. What it is though is definitely something we should be talking about. This is Bilderberg type collusion but on a level we can see literally
It’s all rigged, we are cattle
We always use to like say it but holy fuck it seems like a whole new thing. The way these things spread it is freaky.
The Internet has become popular enough that governments care about what happens on it. And it’s not just European countries, US states too (at least for age verification).
More specifically for your two points:
Encryption
It used to be that very little Internet traffic was encrypted, much less end-to-end encrypted. After 2013 (Snowden revelations), this changed, e.g. messengers started to E2EE, many more websites than previously started to use HTTPS. So all we are seeing now is the reaction to those positive changes…
Age verification
This has to do with mobile devices more than anything else. I think a lot of parents now just hand their children smartphones or tablets and may then be surprised that their children can then access things they don’t want their children to access. This was less of a thing in the desktop era because it was easier to see what children were doing online if it was happening on a huge computer in the living room…
Now personally I don’t think anyone (including young people) should ever be prohibited from watching or reading anything they actively want to see. For preventing young people from accidentally accessing porn, an “are you over 18” banner ought to be enough… I don’t think people who want to prevent that kind of access want anything legitimate. But you asked about why it’s happening now and not at another time and I think this is the answer.
Sidenote: I remember reading that when television was newly introduced in East Germany, it was still able to be somewhat critical of the regime; after some years, this stopped because a lot more citizens were able to watch it. The equivalent of that is currently happening to the Internet.
messengers started to E2EE
This is a big deal. I’ve had the archetypal non-technical user, my mother send me a PGP encrypted email. It will probably come as no surprise to anyone who has done so that this did not become our default.
Now the majority of our messaging and calling is via Signal. It’s effortless.
My signal chats will all start with:
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
Soon, I’m guessing.
yup, that is why (if memory serves) the chat control proposal has rules in it that look like they were specifically written for messengers, the authors seem to have no clue that encryption can, you know, just be run on any device using publicly available algorithms…
Once they figure that out, they’ll probably just make any encryption illegal…
Then we will probably just develop encryption algorithms that look like regular text messages, or hide the encrypted content inside some audio, image, video or other normal types of files.
I think this is likely
It’s not only likely, it seems like it already happened and the EU appears to have actually announced a copy of the UK Online Safety Act for 2026 already: https://leminal.space/post/25089051/17854998
Because there’s a surge of fascism and they think they can get it
Centralization tends be self-reinforcing. Social unrest might cause the public to demand more safety measures, which usually come at the expense of freedoms. I’d also wager that the lower the level of trust in government is, the more they want to impose control and authority.
And in the EU specifically it is because lobbyists have been working overtime to try and pass chat control: https://borncity.com/win/2023/09/27/european-union-which-lobby-organizations-are-behind-the-plans-for-chat-control/
If you didn’t know, it seems like the EU has actually announced a copy of the UK Online Safety Act for 2026 too, as far as I can tell: https://leminal.space/post/25089051/17854998
Authoritarianism
