Goodbye device ownership, and the last vestiges of free speech will die with this bill as well.
The last vestiges of free speech always have and always will be offline.
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2026
1043 points (97.4% liked)
Technology
83893 readers
2841 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
That bill had just been introduced. It is a loooooong way from passing. No need to panic. This is not our doom yet.
Now is the time to give those representatives a call, mention the bill number, and tell them in a few logical and polite sentenses why this bill is a terrible idea.
Fuck this bill. And it's not going to be too late to use the less polite methods later. We lose nothing by trying to be polite first.
Motherfuckers want this so they can more easily find kiddies to groom and rape.
Start selling the narrative folks, this is not gonna be a clean war
Fair.
-
This bill is being pushed by Meta and they are NOT going to stop with age verification. It is not about "protecting children" and it never has been. It's always been about surveillance and control. Meta wants to know who you are, where you are, what you buy, what you download, who you associate with and what your politics are.
-
If Meta succeeds in putting all this on your computer at the operating system level, then what is the point of even having a VPN anymore? Also Meta will sell this information to anyone who asks for it.
Meta is pushing this because their platforms are overrun by bots. Ironically because partly of the AI tools they have created. And advertisers have caught up and aren’t willing to pay top dollars anymore on Meta’s platforms. Hence why Meta desperately wants a way to proof that their traffic comes from real people.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Parents ALREADY decided. They decided they didn't give enough of a shit to use the parental controls already available to them. No legitimate reason to push this shit on everyone else.
These companies made parental controls abysmal to use, so they can count children's traffic as adult viewers for ad revenue(on both sides of the bill).
Also, children are a valid target for advertising as well.
Almost like it's an excuse. Focus on their reasons, not their stated reasons.
USA being USA! Bravo!
Using parental control is too hard so leave it to the government huh
what a fucking joke
Kids are always the excuse for draconian surveillance/stripping away your freedoms. This has nothing to do with parental controls at all
Children are an excuse. Difficulty of parental control is irrelevant.
Precisely. People are so fucking lazy.
If this thread is any indication, we’re cooked. If this many people are willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt, after what we’re dealing with…
This will not be benign, it will seem innocent at first, but we’ll have given up yet another seemingly simple thing that will eventually be used against us.
evidently Palantir wasn't able to use all available data and a few glaciers to find out who was saying mean things about Important People With Money. This oughta fill in those gaps.
"...and for other purposes."
Disgusting. This is my representative, I unfortunately voted him in.
Our president is a pedophile and we still get the "for the children" bullshit. How about making a law requiring tracking the data on the Epstein class phones instead?
I sent a letter to him, hopefully enough people do.
Lately, it seems like bottles of incendiary liquid are the vogue medium of communication, rather than sternly-worded letters. I think it's like toggling that "flag as urgent" setting on an email.
I disagree with all of you. Now that our benevolent theocratic autocratic overlords have decided to track everything we say and do and escape is impossible, I completely support their brave new dystopian agenda. All hail the wonderful leaders!
load more comments
(2 replies)
Donate here: https://www.eff.org/ https://epic.org/ https://cdt.org/ https://www.aclu.org/
Get off Android if you can: https://grapheneos.org/ https://lineageos.org/ https://e.foundation/e-os/
Pick a Linux distro to try on a beater laptop (save yourself some trouble and just use Ubuntu to start): https://distrowatch.com/
I don't wish to live on this planet anymore :/
maybe for you...but not for me.
I'll switch back to a dumb phone and run a Linux distro so obscure nobody's seen it for 25 years.
fuck em. I'll never comply with this shit.
Step 1: make some kind of surveillance & control system that is voluntary
Step 2: make life for those who dont want it less convenient (you are here)
Step 3: make non-participation in the system be in itself suspicious and a cause for further investigation
load more comments
(2 replies)
Obligatory: the Democrats are not here to save you.
Fascism with a smug smile instead of a sneer.
They can’t even arrest the pedophiles in government but they want to mass surveil us for everything.
load more comments
(15 replies)
Or a parent could, I don't know, just parent their own kids instead of expecting the government to.
load more comments
(10 replies)
No it wont. Because we're gonna light shit on fire until this goes away, ICE melts, and the hostages are released from the internment camps. Right?
load more comments
(61 replies)
And written by a Democrat. They really have become useless. First they regularly forget that they are opposition for a reason, and now they even betray their voters with the most stupid law humans can cook up.
load more comments
(4 replies)
This might be the most anemic open ended bill I have ever read. On its face, it has no teeth. The most well defined portions of the bill are to make sure that applications have access to age data. Making this look more like a way for corporations to gather data and verify real people as opposed to online personas.
There is zero regulation actually defined and instead they have a 180 day period to define the regulation and a year for it to be contacted and implemented. The bill could pass tomorrow and we still wouldn't know what age verification looks like.
As scary as these efforts are, they are also a bit humorous to me. By and large software exists independently of its creator, especially in the FOSS space. There would be no way to require an individual to install an OS that supported this or even use an updated browser that supported it.
Ultimately, the only way to really enforce any sort of age verification system is to force all content providers to have an age verification step. This presents as OS level, but you have to give people a reason to upgrade in order to implement. If Wikipedia suddenly required some sort of OS based age verification protocol to access its content, it would become a lot harder to avoid.
They are putting this at the OS level, but I think this is a way to back into removing anonymous access to the Internet.
they have a 180 day period to define the regulation and a year for it to be contacted and implemented.
This has a familiar smell. The 3d printer "gun printing prevention" bill(s) that are floating around have the same "we'll figure out the actual law after the bill is approved." And here I thought that punting congressional authority to executive agencies was bad. Now they're not writing laws, but instead, blank checks for vague things within even more vague legal outlines.
In a more general sense, it also resembles the work being done to level this requirement at online services as well.
Ultimately, the only way to really enforce any sort of age verification system is to force all content providers to have an age verification step.
My biggest fear here is that this will have teeth, and will be crafted so that the only feasible way to make it work is to be 100% cloud connected behind federally approved vendors (e.g. Apple and Microsoft).
load more comments
(1 replies)
This is how the democrats lose the next election.
GJ snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Again
load more comments
(4 replies)
"Parents Decide Act"
Yet text of it has basically nothing about parents in it, just government data collection lol
In fact this is the opposite of parents deciding. Parents can already decide.
load more comments
(5 replies)
This coming up not a fortnight after his floundering interview with The Bulwark is some Curb Your Enthusiasm level comedy, there's not even really an "at best" to look for in American politics, a handful of progressive anomalies that came about after MONTHS of tireless campaigning that we can only pray result in a trend toward some kind of wave but that's it, pay the right Democrat just enough money and they'll be dancing like a GOP worm.
more laws from people who have no idea about anything. let’s say for a sec this isn’t even for mass surveillance (which it is) does verifying your age prevent you from actually being addicted to social medias? it’s the same experience no matter what…this whole thing just shifts onus of social media addiction from big tech companies to us. i implore everyone reading who’s in america to please contact your local representatives.
http://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative
They're gonna call it The Super Duper American Act
view more: next ›