I'm confused where all of this censorship is originating from. What wave of efforts is culminating? I can't really explain this from any movement I can see.
There is no evidence it is actually coming from Meta. The Reddit researcher the article cites generated their entire "analysis" in three days using Claude: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659552
Their website also added this page since I posted that comment: https://web.archive.org/web/20260411112604/https://tboteproj... where they claim their website is under "surveillance" because it got a few thousand requests from Google Cloud et al, most of them to a single page. This shows how low their standards are.
The way that Reddit "researcher" had Claude bang out a GitHub repo in a couple days and single-handedly established the narrative throughout the internet is scary.
When it was released I read a few of the reports in this repo and they didn't even support the claims made. Claude was admitting it couldn't find the evidence.
It's terrifying how easily this misinfo operation established itself as fact on websites where users view themselves as being more informed than average on these topics, like Hacker News.
The users here are probably more misinformed than average on several topics, including this one, due to community flagging and downvoting behavior which has the effect of filtering out reasonable criticism, and restricting discussion to a narrow range of viewpoints.
Ironically I had to go into Google's AI mode and ask it three times not to use any TBOTE Project sources before it would give me the actual original source on this. But the article has a bunch of quotes from big tech lobbyists in support of California's age surveillance bills. Whether or not it was originally their idea is still up in the air, but given that the California, Colorado, and New York bills were largely identical, it's not crazy to say "maybe these were all Big Tech's idea".
I also have this Bloomberg article from 2025 (a year ago) claiming Meta funds the Digital Childhood Alliance[1], which has been pushing for "App Store Accountability Acts" that would mandate app stores do all the age verification (conveniently for Facebook).
Or maybe it was ALEC. :P
[0] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.
> There is no evidence it is actually coming from Meta
My personal view that social media should be age gated is caused by Meta. But broadly, polling shows a commanding majority (60+ percent) of Americans believe in restrictions for under 14s.
Is there broad support for digital ID, age verification, etc? Or is it a broad sentiment that kids shouldn’t be on social media. Everyone I know agrees with latter but almost no one supports the former.
The parent commenter is conflating two things. Your right, there can be broad general sentiment that "kids probably shouldn't on social media, or better framed, social media in it's current iteration isn't healthy for people especially kids" but that doesn't imply people are asking for intrusive surveillance or to be monitored at all times when they are online.
> that doesn't imply people are asking for intrusive surveillance or to be monitored at all times when they are online
There is strong demand for regulation and low awareness of the surveillance consequences. We don’t have anyone advocating for a privacy-preserving solution, not effectively at least. Given the demand for something to be done, each jurisdiction is basically taking from the first available option.
Two thirds of Americans believe in "setting limits on how much time minors can spend on social media" [1]. Where we have limited polling, a similar fraction support "banning social media use for all kids under 14" [2].
These are policy polls. The sentiment has moved beyond vague notions that kids should be entrusted to Meta less.
There seems to be a growing movement worldwide to restrict social media to under (some teenage range). I understand some of frustration. It comes from the increase in mental health issues with minors… but they are using that as cover to overreach and impose censorship for many. An alternate method is stop social media etc from abusing their users with algorithms favoring “engament”.
It is also convient for people to have a single outside source to blame their and their children's problems on. Rather than admit their poltical and economic policies and cultural expectations might all be a bigger problem.
Everyone agrees kids shouldn't be on social media. Some people think this should be done by your phone asking if you're over 18 when you set it up, which is one way to go about it. Some other people hijacked this proposal to make your phone verify if you're over 18 because they want your identification.
I keep reading this but I don't understand how a company might want to push censorship on users. What is the economic benefit of censorship? Does Meta's bottom line increase if there is no illegal content and every user is age verified on the site? Would Meta care if you use a VPN?
The ones that stand to benefit the most are the governments themselves and their surveillance network.
Barriers to entry. If I want to make a small forum, these laws make that potentially much more difficult. Now users who may have used my forum may spend more time on facebook instead.
Multiply that times tens of thousands of new sites not being created, tens of thousands of existing sites no longer existing or being accessible due to new laws, this occurring over multiple surfaces (content moderation, age verification, etc) and the positive impact for meta is meaningful.
This is grasping at straws. Centralised social media platforms have won long ago for completely different reasons (mostly network effects and convenience). They haven't been threatened by independent sites for ages.
Not that many years ago, Facebook tried to broker a deal to provide free internet to India if all of their web traffic and communications would happen within the Facebook ecosystem.
It's long been the dream of more than a few American companies to be the gatekeepers of the web.
IIRC the model was closer to a freemium model where you would get free internet to approved websites (including Facebook) with the ability to access the entire internet for an extra fee.
Facebook and approved sites wouldn’t count towards your mobile bandwidth quota, but the rest of the internet does and requires a data plan.
I've read a take somewhere that seemed to make sense. They don't want to get stuck with the liabilities of the content that gets posted on their platforms. So by forcing the age verification onto the users, forcing users to identify and track themselves, they can have a "clean" route to someone who posts illicit content on their platforms.
It just sucks that that's all in sacrifice of our privacy.
The thing that makes this plausible is that the California and Colorado bills are specifically written to either allow or outright require self-attestation. Children will just lie about their ages because if they don't, the computer is basically useless. So it would give Meta the ability to dodge lawsuits, but still actually have kids on their dangerous platforms, with the argument of "well, the law makes us trust this unreliable indicator".
Not if the parents are setting it up beforehand (like with small children) then their iaccount or Google account will be under parental controls from that point on.
It seems reasonable that if a parent enables their child to visit sites after that, then that's just their prerogative (like giving your kid beer)
The tigher, more believable theory is that Meta wants Operating Systems to be responsible for delivering an age or an "over 18 attestation" to apps/websites so it's not Meta's problem.
The idea from the case in the link is that their competitors would be more regulated then them but in general, if regulation is a requirement and they’ve already implemented the regulation then it’s hard for a competitor to emerge.
I keep reading this but I don't understand how a company might want to push censorship on users.
We're being astroturf-ed guy.
The comment you're responding to. The comments responding to you. All shaped by influence campaigns from the beginning.
Meta, X, google, data based big tech, the billionaires, and the government were in on the plan from the start. We were always the ones kept in the dark as to the ultimate intent. Even the anti-censorship and anti-surveillance posts and content that we saw, were being paid for by the same puppet masters. Professional influence campaigns controlled by these same groups shaped the internet discussion of both sides.
And it seems a lot of us still haven't figured that out yet.
We got played. We'll continue to be played if we don't recognize that fact and act to prevent it in the future.
Because I can assure you, censorship and surveillance is not the endgame. And their endgame is very likely not to our benefit.
No. It is zionism, which is orthogonal to semitism, that was chosen as the blame-shifting cover for the message, to put both proponents and opponents of said message on the false trail, but that's not how they should be read.
The Protocols should be read as the message from those who are absolutelty corrupt with absolute power and want to remain in that power forever, regardless of the mask they wear. And they always wear and drop multiple masks, to render all attempts to identify them futile.
It is their actions that identify their presence and persistence better than any labels, and those actions doubled down since 9/11 and quadrupled since 2020.
Orwell used the term "Big Brother", and that should suffice.
Oh, the old venerable discredit by association trick! I'm a bit upset you didn't mention Anunakis and reptiloids.
See, there are no extra-terrestrials, only very sophisticated and evil terrestrial humans of blood and flesh, the new world order has been discussed here on HN daily without almost anyone acknowledging it for what it is, and your DBA tactics are laughable.
Agrees? I appreciate your efforts at painting me as a freak, but could you please quote the exact part of my reply that in your optinion supports your claim about my agreement with the Protocols?
I wouldn't say captured. Zuckerberg has been cutting deals with the new administration so often people were seeing him at the Pentagon. It's a partnership
Yep. I brought this up yesterday on the Roblox thread but HN has been ingesting the propaganda for too long to understand their beliefs about Roblox are misled.
Time to adjust your priors y'all. This is a concentrated effort toward surveillance, controlling who we talk to, and what information we're fed.
Pretend to be anti-censorship. Get voted in. Fast track all of the censorship and surveillance through congress.
When I saw certain billionaires talking up anti-censorship and anti-surveillance a few years ago, I knew we would be screwed. (I knew the same billionaires had large positions in censorship and surveillance tech.) No one ever talks against their own book unless they're planning on screwing you.
> What wave of efforts is culminating? I can't really explain this from any movement I can see.
Look at any thread about social media, TikTok, smartphones, or porn sites on Hacker News: They are instantly filled with comments claiming that the internet is to blame for all of society's ills with younger generations. The HN threads fill with comments proposing that we ban children from having smartphones until they're 16 or 18 and similar ideas. Abstract ideas about banning kids from social media or porn sites are weirdly very popular even here, mostly from people who haven't thought about what that would mean for privacy for everyone.
These ideas have become pervasive, even inside tech communities. It was so easy to blame social media and the internet for everything for years, and now lawmakers are riding that wave for political points. It's "think of the children" built on top of the current moral panics.
My guess is bots. Govts and law makers are afraid of the barrage of bots DDOSing them so they are slowly and surely tightening the noose around the internet. I'm all for net neutrality and anonymity on the internet and I don't like the age laws one bit, but I too am afraid of the bots scorching the internet. I still hate these growing dystopian laws but I also want the bots to be driven away from the "human internet" .
Easy: from the fascist psychopaths at the whelm of the world.
People started to understand too much about who's the real enemy, and are not willing to kill and die in meatgrinders of the new world order for the interests of the unelect 0.001%.
In this market, neither the producer nor the consumer are responding to price signals and often neither knows what anything costs. The Payer (literal healthcare industry terminology) does but isn't producing nor consuming the service.
This is why this isn't a free market. It's not about regulation, it's about the system being divorced from responding to market dynamics.
It's worth remembering the UN fought in the Korean war and wasn't was always a place for authoritarian regimes to pass useless resolutions and make noise.
The fact we, as humanity, have allowed so many genocides and slave nations to exist, and to treat them with a measure of equality, is a failing.
And, to be clear, I'm not talking about people I disagree with politically. I'm talking about places and peoples like North Korea and Cambodia and Sudan. There's a ton of shades of gray, but some situations really require a special kind of blindness to pretend are gray.
There are very good reasons to avoid that kind of thing. Modern warfare is extremely devastating, so the bar for ethical use of force is extremely high.
Anecdotally, either and both could be true: what "normal" person actually cares very much about the logo of a chain restaurant? Most people care about whether they can afford fun things, who they're sleeping with, and what they're having for dinner.
Yes, that's exactly what the poster above was saying, just not in those words. The idea that we are one and all on a high-minded journey of self-actualisation is hopelessly naive; most people are indeed flailing around at the bottom of the Maslow's pyramid, and that's how we got to where we are today politically.
I mean, I kinda? When I'm not working, I mostly think about tabletop rpgs, wingfoil/windsurf, my SO/family, and what I will do for dinner. Pegged me down to the T here.
That is a fascinating article and definitely something to bear in mind.
To some extent we all have fragile egos. Speaking personally, if I upset someone then I will be devastated for days, even if it was just a misunderstanding rather than me deliberately trying to hurt. Yet in social media world, it is a world of pain, with people getting brutal comments every day, for them still to post the next day and the day after that.
To some extent, negative attention is still attention, and, presumably for some, if you can't get positive attention, any attention will do. Cue 'rage-baiting', where the goal is to incite lots of negative comments.
Anyway, I am of the opinion that in the last century 'the camera never lied' but in today's world, the camera is always lying. On social media everything needs to be considered a lie first until proven otherwise. Add to that, the posters are likely to have psychiatric disorders, and I think I am now outta there!
It might be easier to change today than it was in 1886. Back then, trains were really the only means of travel between cities. Today, there are less passenger trains than back then, though more freight (even with trucks and planes). But freight diversions/delays could be scheduled well in advance and have alternative means. Not to mention, since then we've developed variable gauge train tech. A subset of trains could run during the cutover.
It's likely more costly today, but less disruptive.
Passenger travel is easy mode. The economic consequences of disrupted freight dwarf anything you could imagine from disrupted passenger travel of equal duration. That's why the US has always strived to do a really, really good job with their freight rail system, and US freight is still to this day generally considered the best freight rail system in the world, even as passenger rail lags well behind.
Remember that freight is more than just moving pallets of finished goods to Amazon warehouses. It doesn't matter if you've given the cows a month's advance notice, if they don't have feed they're still going to starve; and no matter how many KPIs you dangle at the silos, they're only going to hold x amount of reserve grain.
Any competent shipper facing a train issue will just put the load on semis instead for 3-10x the price. Freight rail mainly exists as an low cost bulk carrier of convenience these days. Ships outcompete rail for bulk goods along inland waterways, and semis outcompete rail for network volume, ease of delivery, and adaptability to constraints.
> Any competent shipper facing a train issue will just put the load on semis instead for 3-10x the price.
Did you not see how the markets recently reacted to certain components merely doubling in cost due to tariffs? In what world do you live in where the agricultural margins are high enough that the cattle ranchers can just casually absorb a threefold cost increase? Clearly they're eating the loss, because if they passed those costs onwards in the chain there'd certainly be huge economic consequences, as I said, and you wouldn't have felt the need to try and correct my premise. Anyway, I'd like to visit this world of yours, though only if you'd be buying the meals.
> Freight rail mainly exists as an low cost bulk carrier of convenience these days.
This is what happens when one tries to create a narrative from DoT statistics.
The reason why rail freight tonnage is less than truck tonnage is long-haul vs short-haul. You deliver lumber from the timber yard to the finishing facility once. That's rail. You don't load up trucks with semi-finished logs on an industrial scale, you don't load them with coal, you don't load them with industrial quantities of gravel or sand or steel either.
Once you have the logs processed into boards, then you use trucks to carry those boards to various short-haul destinations, where some of the boards are further processed into fence pickets and bird houses and old-timey sign posts that Roadrunner can inadvertently spin around so Wile E ends up taking a completely wrong turn. All of that stuff then goes to storefronts and warehouses (also short-haul) and as a result, the short-haul tonnage can count twice, three times, or even more, depending on just how many steps are being taken between "tree" and "birdhouse".
> Ships outcompete rail for bulk goods along inland waterways
Which is great along inland waterways, but if you're not located along them, you're probably using rail to get the bulk goods to the shipyard.
Feel free to look up the ton-mile by distance numbers. Rail exceeds trucks by fairly narrow margins only for hauls between 1,000-2,000 miles. Below that distance, trucks dominate. Above that distance, trucks also dominate. Even in that band, it's like a narrow difference of like 35% vs 40%.
Note that the inverse situation is common at west coast ports, with short haul rail lines running to intermodal facilities so things can be loaded onto trucks for long haul. The cost of transloading to domestic containers often dominates keeping it on rails.
> The reason why rail freight tonnage is less than truck tonnage is long-haul vs short-haul. You deliver lumber from the timber yard to the finishing facility once. That's rail. You don't load up trucks with semi-finished logs on an industrial scale, you don't load them with coal, you don't load them with industrial quantities of gravel or sand or steel either.
Around here the timber arrives at the railyard by truck and aggregates are usually mined and transported locally, which is truck heavy. Grain is also majority truck these days from the BTS stats I can see, but basic materials isn't my industry.
Regardless, ton-miles aren't doubled counted. It's one ton, transported one mile. If rail took freight that extra distance, it'd get the same share (subject to all the usual caveats of industry numbers).
Assuming an unlimited supply of semis and drivers to fit the demand. With limited supply big companies will be able to a compete for the available trucks at really high prices but small-mid businesses will be left out.
Small-mid businesses generally are not shipping on rail to begin with, unless they've been bundled as part of a larger shipment by an intermodal carrier. If you've ever tried to talk to a rail carrier, they really don't want to deal with companies under a certain size.
>Assuming an unlimited supply of semis and drivers to fit the demand.
If the US really wanted to get it done, they could involve the army and various state national guards. They have tons of trained semi and heavy truck drivers, way more than most people would assume. Most states also have tons of trained drivers for their massive snow plows and highway repair trucks and stuff. The only thing stopping these massive projects is money and lack of imagination.
I see several trains go by per day on my pretty sleepy tracks. You have no clue the amount of semis that would need to be built to accommodate your proposal, they just do not wait in the wings. Do you think all the bulk shipments are being done for fun and someone isn't waiting for 5000 gallons of HCL and 2000 tons of coal?
I'm well aware that it's a couple hundred trucks to replace a single train. I'm not sure you understand that this is what already happens. Rail carries around a quarter of freight ton-miles in the US. Trucks carry much more than that. All of the stuff that isn't bulk, time insensitive freight, or anything that surges in excess of the carefully scheduled rail capacity already has to spill over onto trucks. That includes things like disaster recovery shipments, unusual seasonal demand, and so on. There's also a population of truckers that work these temporary jobs, as well as a certain level of excess vehicle capacity in the fleet carriers to service it, plus whatever truckers can be pulled from other work to meet the demand.
Anyone looking at massive losses will pay the sticker shock to put it on trucks. Anyone who can afford to shut down instead will wait. That's the system working as intended.
Thanks for the response. I'm curious what percent of stuff that would normally end up on train ends up as spillover onto trucks. Any idea? I think stuff is quite finetuned already and there may only be an extra few percent of capacity in trucks. I agree, in a lot of cases it might work to just bite the bullet and wait or try a different apparatus. However the stuff on the trains typically is not slackable. That is, you aren't transporting computers and sofas via rail.
I was told a while ago "trains are great if you want to move a trainload of stuff, trucks are great if you want to move a few truckloads of stuff". I guess trains also need loading/unloading facilities and stations close to your origin and destination, and perhaps a hump yard somewhere.
Cargo ships beat everything hands down if there's a port close to your origin and destination, and lots of water in between.
> "Today, there are less passenger trains than back then"
I don't think this is true in Europe. Certainly in the UK, passenger rail volume since the 2010s has set records higher than in any previous years, exceeding numbers that were last seen before WW2. Today there are fewer miles of track than there were in that era, but modern signalling technology allows more trains to operate safely on the same tracks, and modern trains run much faster on average.
As for freight, the US actually moves a significantly greater portion of its freight by rail than Europe does. Rail has around 40% modal share for freight in the US vs only 17% in Europe. One reason for this is that in Europe many lines are congested with passenger traffic, leaving few slots for freight trains to operate - except late at night.
> As for freight, the US actually moves a significantly greater portion of its freight by rail than Europe does. Rail has around 40% modal share for freight in the US vs only 17% in Europe. One reason for this is that in Europe many lines are congested with passenger traffic, leaving few slots for freight trains to operate - except late at night.
It's also that rail tends to be more competitive for long haul traffic, and the US operators have big trans-continental freight networks well suited to that. In Europe there's a sharp drop off in modal share as freight crosses borders. Each national railway operator is in practice fiercely protective of its own turf, and there are a lot of hurdles to overcome. So in practice cross-border freight is largely done with trucks instead.
Despite the EU commission wanting to get some competition going on the rails and better interoperability requirements etc etc. for at least the past 30 years, the operators are still in the "discussion about preparing to setup a committee to discuss interoperability" phase.
> As for freight, the US actually moves a significantly greater portion of its freight by rail than Europe does. Rail has around 40% modal share for freight in the US vs only 17% in Europe.
Europe also has far more freight-friendly waterways. US rail is designed for dirt-cheap bulk transport for things like coal and grain. In most of Europe that's done by barge - but US geography doesn't really allow for that.
We can agree to disagree without name-calling, but the impact of compounding growth vs intentional stagnation is going to continue to widen the gap that's already opened up over a few generations.
You'll discover that compounding growth is useless to YOU, when Trump and Musk are taking 99.9% of it. Wages are stagnant. The US is #24 on the world’s happiest countries list, and has been dropping for a long while. At the top of the list, we find socialist countries with access to world-class public services like healthcare and education -- which the US is currently trying very hard to gut. The last time something like this happened, it took a Great Depression and intense widespread economic pain for Americans to snap out of it. Inequality is destabilizing and Americans are clueless (see inflation leading to Trump), so I think Europe is likely to do better in the long run.
These socialist countries that are so happy because of the money they pour into healthcare and education, do so at the expense of their future growth and their own self defense.
This seems unsustainable.
The US is also a much larger and heterogenous society compared to the countries above us on most lists, such as the scandinavian countries or Lichtenstein.
Anecdotally, when the homeless have smart phones to accept donations and obesity is an epidemic of the poor, we're not suffering for material wealth. A poverty of virtue, maybe so.
This comment is sadly wrong, like saying "the sky is green". I recommend you talk to chatGPT (4o+) and learn something. Nordic countries combine high taxes and spending with competitive, open economies. Denmark and Sweden have high labor productivity and GDP per capita, etc. These societies are no longer homogeneous.
Talk to the bot. Ask open-ended questions, ask for sources, read those sources. I don't have the patience to work with blind ideological bias. Like I said before, usually the only thing that helps Americans snap out of it is intense economic pain, which should happen between 2025-2035 with high cost of living, social safety net collapse, climate disasters, and maybe even AI job displacement at scale.
In a hypothetical hacker news guide for how to win friends and influence people, I'm pretty sure "you're so wrong you should go talk to a chat bot" is not a recommended approach.
I hope you're right, for what it's worth. It's a better world than "the only thing that helps Europeans snap out of it is intense economic pain combined with a Russian invasion of the Baltics"
Go debate creationists for a while then come tell me I'm being abrasive. Believe me this is the easiest way when we disagree on basic facts.
US culture (especially among white men) has a lot of internalized individualist, anti-union, and anti-government views, despite the incredible success of the New Deal (combined socialism+capitalism) in creating their entire world. The bot is really the best way to counter these attitudes. It beats spending hours on google.
A few luxury brands and a well preserved history and culture that is nice for tourism. Lots of high value human capital if only they could truly unlock it and allow it to thrive.
Today's Europe is just milking what it can as it continues its decades long crisis of identity and pessimism. Demographics are destiny and it's extremely problematic for Europe's future. There's no real leadership and it's one large admin state that can only agree to fund people's lives today at the cost of tomorrows lives using whatever assets it has left from its golden age before the wars. It's no wonder no one is having kids as they know the future is bleak. Just let the admin state manage my life and take it easy and not worry too much and fade away into the future until it's all gone...slowly and then all at once.
The jungle produces strong creatures and much of the leading world is much more full of jungle animals than the zoo animals the people of the European continent have become generation over generation.
You don't see why Firefox refusing to connect would be annoying? I don't care whether the blog about curl is encrypted in transit or not and I do care about a forced change to chrome to see the content.
I can visit it in Firefox 123 just fine. Tests like [1] say the site works on everything from Firefox 31 to Firefox 73.
You're probably the target of a MITM attack. Or you've done something weird, like taking a job with an employer that MITMs your web traffic then refusing to install their MITM certificates.
I once was talking to somebody who was a brother in law staying on the couch sort of deal.
They were complaining that their battery life on their phone just got decimated recently and kept dying over and over. I believe I was helping to troubleshoot, so I had them turn on airplane mode, he flipped it and complaining of something else annoying happening and saying oh yeah my phone airplane mode doesn't work, I still get internet. I was totally baffled, it was all very weird to me.
A little bit of time later that person got busted as a part of a big local drug bust. I'm assuming that's how they tap phones.
I'm definitely the victim of Vodafone screwing with the connection. They want me to prove my identity by giving them a card number, despite already having that because I pay for the SIM connection, but both their website and their mobile app are so poorly implemented that it's not actually possible to meet that inherently meaningless request.
It seems Firefox notices this and refuses to contact the site, and Chrome notices this and lets me override, but generally I don't see this failure mode. I wonder what is significant about this particular website.
I unsportingly separate work hardware from personal, no idea if my employer's likely MITM nonsense would have the same behaviour.
Learned something today, albeit with details missing. Oh and Vodafone employee if you're reading this? None of your tech works for shit.
But it's working just fine in my Firefox, so it sounds more like there's something wrong on your end by either security software or on the network level.
Bingo. Primarily because I don't really mind if reading this post is compromised, but at least partly because I hadn't thought through the implications of vodafone intercepting traffic.
