It’s because they don’t see 99% of us as people.

When are they gonna ban fake mustaches and makeup?

Moderation systems on social media platforms aim to remove overt extremist propaganda. These systems work imperfectly, but overt propaganda is unlikely to reach mass audiences before being removed.

Instead, far-right actors often use generative AI to mask racial ideology behind seemingly benign tropes from science fiction and fantasy. This allows a “de-demonising” of their ideas. Elf-like depictions of the “Aryan” inhabitants of Agartha, or footage of an underground utopia, make the idea of a white ethnostate seem palatable.

The engaging aesthetic keeps people watching longer. In turn, this triggers the algorithm to push the video to wider audiences.

I may have agreed with this a year ago, but here’s what’s going on with my son school’s phone ban.

The school requires the children to bring in a laptop from home. The laptop mine brings is controlled via parental controls. My child is a stickler for the rules, so the phone is only used to let us know if parental controls need to be adjusted during school hours because of a change in lessons, or to let us know if there’s a problem on the way home (he has a disability and sometimes he needs a lift from a bus stop, and he’s also been late the bus after school before, so I’ll have texts going between me, him, and the bus driver). It’s never been an issue for him and I’ve never had a complaint from the school. One of the administrative personnel also told me that he’s really good about not using his phone and would never use it when he wasn’t supposed to.

The school banned phones because they wanted the children to be more social. I complained to the school about the above and that my son has already had many issues with bullies and taking away their phones might cause more incidents. The school told me not to worry, not many kids are really using their phones and a lot of them are either going to some sort of computer gaming room on their breaks or at lunch time, or they’re gaming on their laptops, and none of that is expected to change. So, what exactly was the point?

My son also raised a complaint about possible theft. They assured him that the phones would be securely stored in a safe. Within a week the kids knew the code and the school said, “well, it was inevitable”.

At this point, all of the kids on phones in school stuff seems mostly like theater to me. I’m sure it’s happening in some places, but it doesn’t seem to have been an issue at my son’s school. To some extent, I wonder how much of it has to do with teachers not wanting to risk being recorded, but they still have laptops so I don’t know what exactly they are doing this for. The whole thing seems like it could’ve been avoided by either giving more punishments to the children that are using their phones inappropriately or giving special dispensation to the students that never use it inappropriately.

Don’t look up how many audits it fails.

Would these tokens be unique per website visit? Are they generated by the user or the government?

I agree with you. My comment is mostly exhaustion, wishful thinking, and self-censorship.

At this point I almost want to say, “sure, do whatever you want” then change the locks and remodel once they’re out the door. Then prosecute like there’s no tomorrow.

Or we can just go after the platforms for knowingly manipulating everyone. And for their invasive data collection. This is probably one reason why Meta spent more on lobbying (primarily for age verification) than Boeing and Lockheed Martin did on lobbying last year. Once the kids are identified, no one gives a shit about the adults so the problem (for them) just fades away.

A parent can do the age verification captcha for Johnny. All of this is bullshit once they start thinking any of this will stop kids who have the help of an adult (actually, already is imo). Anyone ever hear of kids getting adults to buy alcohol for them in the past?

Might be late, but I recently watched a video where the guy (maybe Hank Green?) said he found a company that sells physical bottle cap replacements that track the usage. Seems like this would be ideal and isn’t something I had considered in the past.

Facebook did something like this to me a year or two ago with the AI thing. They told me if I find any of my content being output by their AI and send it to them, they’ll remove it.

Seems more likely he’d be want them in case he can invoke the insurrection act.

I’m sure this will help the economy

There’s a push for companies to constantly increase their profits. That means sooner or later prices must rise. Sooner or later labor must be paid less. In fact, this has been happening for decades. Prices have been rising faster than wages for decades.

Seems to me like labor should get paid more and there should be something (regulations?) to prevent prices from rising when it happens.

I think there could be reasons a government/people would want loot boxes to be not allowed that don’t relate to gambling and/or kids. I know there were some people that said “think of the kids!” when the discussion was going on, but my point is that there may not be direct overlap because the implementation and its effects are greater than simply disabling the ability to buy loot boxes in a particular region.

The loot box issue is more like telling a vape company that they can sell oils as long as they don’t contain THC. This issue is more like saying, “You can sell the THC oils in any market or store, but every market and store in the country must check every item every user wants to buy for the presence of THC by to sending an image of that product to an AI that will tell you whether or not the user needs an age check to buy the item. If they do, the user cannot buy the item unless you take a photo of the user’s ID and send it to some random company that will use the photo to verify the user is allowed to use THC.”

It’s an entirely higher level of complication and risk, so I’d excuse the “think of the kids” people that went after loot boxes in this particular case. But I’d also be curious about how much “think of the kids” overlap there is anyway.

I didn’t mention any other cases because I didn’t know which specific issues you were referencing other than loot boxes. I wasn’t sure which social media content you were referring to, but you can imagine how I’d view it if it’s something like chat control or any other system relying on AI or age verification to control access.

Also, the lower the taboo of the item being accessed, the more generous I am with these things. I still don’t like it, but no one is going to be ashamed if their love of loot boxes is leaked, for instance.

That’s when you take a break and let someone else deal with it until you’re ready again. Or focus on a different fight and let that one go. You’re irreplaceable, but your participation in that specific fight is not essential.

I hope you can find a break. I get tired of it, too. Sometimes just not reading the news or social media for a while is enough to recharge. The news and online commentary makes it impossible to even get small breaks that would’ve been common two decades ago and the consumption of it all can be exhausting enough to prevent us from taking any other actions.

I wonder how much it has to do with the success and subsequent loss of this operation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield

Because it seems like a lot of countries in the west are pushing this kind of thing rover the last several years and there’s a heavy push right now. https://www.privacyguides.org/videos/2025/12/16/taylor-lorenz-on-kosa-the-screen-act-and-repealing-section-230/

I did not downvote but you’re asserting several things that you can’t possibly know. 1. War with China is coming. 2. It will inevitably be nuclear. 3. This is being done to prevent people from protesting when #1 & 2 occur.

None of those other things should require any sort of identity or age verification, though. In the case of loot boxes, government should be able to tell companies, “hey, you can’t sell that here”. In the case of age verification and nudity scanning there’s a whole host of issues from the fact that people don’t find loot boxes to be taboo or embarrassing to the fact that people do find nudity and porn embarrassing, to the fact that any scanning systems will false flag, to questions about who has access to the data that is submitted and how long it is stored, to how easy it could be to misuse the systems to go after disadvantaged groups (we all know LGBT content will intentionally be covered by this, whether they’re open about it or not, right?), to whether or not the system will be used for other purposes that either aren’t being said aloud or won’t be realized until after it’s implemented.