To me it feels that the age verfication (adult de-anonymisation) push, at least in Europe, is coming more from the increasingly-authoritarian left as a reaction to the rise of the online right and Musk's Twitter.
reply(Maybe some unspoken element of concern over social media bots, too - as they evolve from spamming copy+pasted comments to being near-indistinguisable from actual human accounts?)
If you look at the people pushing these bills it's the anti-trans and anti-porn activists. Not the left.
replyIn the UK we have many people on the left with these perspectives. It comes from the second-wave feminist tradition.
replyBut generally speaking, online age verification is one of those issues where the left-right ideological divide doesn't map neatly. People support and oppose it for various different reasons. Much like the assisted suicide issue.
This issue looks partisan from the outset, but both sides push the same thing. They just use partisan justifications.
replyAge verification efforts in the US have been privacy-attacking (demanding government ID) whereas the system being proposed in europe is privacy-preserving (zero-knowledge proof).
replyIn Europe though? You have those?
replyIt would be interesting to see a similar lobbying breakdown for the EU and UK. I bet it's still Meta with other right wing actors. The left rarely has the money for this kind of lobbying scale
replyHeritage has been laying waste to America my whole life. They basically planned all of Reagan's legislative agenda, too, just like Project 2025 is doing today. In very real ways, they and their vision are America (a system is what it does, not what it says it does).
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