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:

And censorship.

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.

Big Tech would like to use this to supress open alternatives. Microsoft to stop Linux and that kind of thing.

Surveillance by a government full of pedophiles!

Didn't even try hard to hide itself.

With a big push from Meta

But what about the chiiiildrennnn?? Wont anyone think of them?

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

And they will get away with it.

* government + corporate surveillance

Always has been.

The mask wasn't even very good at concealing. Practically transparent.

Not to mention corporate surveillance. Companies would love to know your age.