I cant even think of any legit reason to do this. To protect children? The government does not care about children. Its why so many suffer in poverty. Watching tits online is the least of their problems.

The only reasons i can think of is control. Forcing people to give up more information about themselves. Because knowledge is power.

The reason is that we all live in capitalist dictatorships masquerading as "democracy", and are rapidly approaching a time when climate change, wealth inequality, and automation will see widespread revolt of the proles, so the ruling class is tightening its grip, and going all in on fascism.

It's really simple.

The western democracies want to create a universal digital ID wallet and have that be required to access any site.

There are a lot of reasons they could want this. For example, there are probably tens of millions of fake accounts controlled by adversarial nations which are used to sow extremism and disinformation online. It is impossible for counterintelligence to detect these at scale. We can see the corrosive effects that social media is having on society, there are countries actively working to make the problem worse but we have no tools to stop them.

This is also why there is a big push to limit children from accessing social media. They're often the targets for these campaigns because they're easily manipulated and have a lot of free time to spread the misinformation once they're indoctrinated.

I don't think a digital ID is the way to solve this problem. But, we're not being asked or informed about why it is happening. They're, instead, trying to ram these measures through using moral panic about children so anybody opposing them is easily dismissed as "not caring about The Children" or "supporting sex trafficking/pedophiles/predators".

I understand the situation, but they're trying to go around the democratic process by not talking about the problems.

So they're trying to censor any influence from adversarial nations to keep people from voting on politicians that would undermine the countries integrity?

and stay out of the EU, england

The problem of social manipulation via bots isn't limited to intelligence operations, though I would argue that this is the most immediate danger.

We're also seeing a huge spike in advertising bots pretending to be normal users just to push goods and services.

Because of these motives social media has become less about bringing people together and more about extracting information from people in order to more efficiently manipulate them.

It's causing social media to become actively dangerous to society in general. Ensuring that everyone is a human is an essential first step for having ethical online social interactions.

Just look at the difference in conversations on Lemmy vs Reddit. Sure, there are some assholes here and there but it's largely a calm place where you can have an actual conversation.

This is how online discourse used to be from the early BBS days right up until Facebook and algorithmically curated feeds discovered that fear, outrage and anger are the best drivers of engagement.

Now, in addition to the platform's manipulation (which is largely commercially motivated) we have LLMs which let anybody with funding create massive armies of fake people who can dynamically insert themselves into conversations in order to push any messaging you can imagine.

It's a bad situation that needs an immediate solution.

I just don't like that the solution has been decided on, in secret, by western democracies and is being forcefully implemented in a manner that also allows intelligence/law enforcement a backdoor into everything. (A digital ID also makes it very easy to view every users complete Internet history because that data is tagged with the users actual identity).

If a government says they’re doing something “for the children” or “to fight terrorism”, it’s neither of those things - it’s for control. Those are just the got-to reasons they use to push them through because they can push the narrative that anyone against it supports terrorism/child abuse.

the brits really need to learn from the french how to protest. it's been nearly a month and i haven't heard of even a measly car being set on fire, just one petition that got a reply akin to "lol, nah". the french would've set a car on fire for less is all i'm saying

They also get arrested for peaceful protests and stay silent:
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/11/nx-s1-5498378/uk-police-say-more-than-500-people-arrested-in-pro-palestinian-events-over-weekend

Southport was a tinderbox, but the current trends if you're actually from the UK shows that there's a bonfire incoming.

You only have to watch a couple of YouTube live streams.....wait. Tomorrow I wait for age gating to see if Google is that.....nefarious in stopping me watching YTP vids without a passport.

Ima gonna giggle

With regards to this most people are just ignoring the law. VPN use has gone through the roof.

We need to build a decentralised internet quickly using I2P or something similar and scale and decentralise quickly. VPN’s will be the first to go then TOR after they attempt to control the exit nodes .

We need to show the governments that we are allowed to use encryption and Wikipedia and not be treated as criminals for wanting privacy .

yeah and their government is planning on restricting VPN use because of that, they're not going to stop being dickheads, brits need to get their voices heard sooner rather than later

We don’t want this dystopian nightmare either, and just like Brexit we weren’t told what it was before it was too late.
Hopefully you will welcome us back when all the liars are voted out and ignored.

Scotland might finally leave the UK because of this. It has been close before, but this must do it by now.

They've said nothing of the sort.

i will admit, i do not remember where i got that info from, i thought it was part of the reply to the petition that was making rounds a week or so ago but i'm not sure now

I think there was a lot of speculation and jokes about that's what would happen next from people on here and other places.

There has been a petition. And it has received the aforementioned "lol no" response. The thing is though after the French set the capital on fire the age of retirement still went up, nothing changed.

Anyway, all we have to do is use a VPN to get around it and wait for the inevitable data leak, then the whole thing will collapse under the weight of its own stupidity.

England isn't the problem, it's London that's the problem.

London needs to become its own independent city state and then they can do what the hell they want with it and then we'll be governed by someone from Leeds or Manchester or someplace like that, by someone who actually has a grip