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For Spain’s Sánchez, the fight against tech billionaires is personal
(www.politico.eu)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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?
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.
For more than a century. Beginning with hired private detectives and crooked cops, yellow journalism and Bowdlerized books.