• MasterNerd@lemmy.zip
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    2 hours ago

    Sqw a hypothesis where Facebook and other companies lobbying for this were doing so to keep clank bot accounts out of the data they’re scraping from social media sites. Seems pretty likely to me

  • orca@orcas.enjoying.yachts
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    18 hours ago

    Here’s the take I read elsewhere:

    • Meta is pushing this hard through various lobbyist groups and shell groups
    • The supposed reasoning is that because of the massive flood of bots on the internet, advertisers are now incapable of discerning between bots and humans. This is bad for the advertising industry, so advertisers are apparently bailing on Meta. This means Meta is bleeding income on that front
    • To stop the bleeding, Meta is pushing age verification for a few reasons: 1. It signals that the entity on the other side is indeed a human and this gives advertisers more confidence; 2. It ensures that advertisers are not advertising to children (a big no-no)
    • Next up comes the government buy-in. They see this as a new wedge for pushing mass surveillance and shoving tons of people out of the shadow of privacy.

    Here’s a chart I grabbed from elsewhere that shows how Meta is achieving this and how the money is exchanging hands:

    • Deme@sopuli.xyz
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      16 hours ago

      After they know if the user is human, the logical next step would be to nail down exactly which human. The governments would of course love that and the advertisers would start manipulating people on the individual level like never before. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is also laying the foundations for some universal digital ID that would do just that.

  • Mikina@programming.dev
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    19 hours ago

    I don’t think that"s the reason for the absird lobbying, which is why it’s getting through.

    Governments aren’t that competent to get this through at scale, but corporations can and have a very good reasob to do so.

    I believe that it’s a lot more probable that the reason is profit - social networks have a problem with bots. Advertisers don’t want to pay if 90% of impressions are bots, and you can’t really solve that problem easily.

    Age verification by ID solves this, and if they even can lobby hard enough to outsource the costs to mandatory OS level veryfication, so they just call one OS api, it’s even better.

    • well5H1T3@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      This is propaganda buuullshit. This is governments selling mass surveillance pills to the public.

      Just like Iran crack down by the US. Funny how US intelligence had 100% certainty of existence of weapons of mass destruction and 0% certainty of their location in Iranian soil