What makes me extremely sad and concerned is that more recent generations simply have no idea or expectation of privacy online anymore. There will never be more of a fight against all this Orwellian behavior.
> Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) are a form of equity compensation where employers promise company shares, typically vesting over time, offering a way to align employee interests with company performance
And once you step outside HN, forget it. You can save yourself, but there are thousands of people that do respond to the "think of the children!" nonsense and will call you a creep for objecting to it. It's game over now, you will fight against this for the rest of your life.
Of course, I don’t blame them. They haven’t lived in a context where they need to care. All of the reasons they’ve heard to care have come from stories of people who lived before them. But ignoring warnings for no good reason is still dumb.
A better thing to engage with is whether we can meaningfully change the situation. It might still be possible, but it requires an effective immune response from everybody on this particular topic. I’m not sure we can, but it’s worth trying to.
For example, it seems to me there is a whole lot of worry around megacorporations, often related to capitalism and the inequalities it brings.
In that context, if you don't place privacy as a priority, how are you not either stupid or ignorant? Is my premise just wrong?
At points Louis and whatever absolute scumbag he's with walk around the streets while the guy is filming his own content.
There are kids, literally 11/12 year olds, walking up to these predatory, evil, scammers on the street going "oh my god it's MC" or whatever their name is. Multiple times.
And he hardly gets to spend any time with these men because they clock pretty quickly they're not going to come off well.
In the space of like 3 days, Louis caught on camera at least 10/20 young kids recognizing these toxic people from videos they had watched. Even the ones who'd been banned from most platforms, because their videos get reshared under different accounts and insta/tiktok/facebook aren't bothering to catch these reshares.
It really is about the kids.
And it all comes down to these people convincing young men to spend money on scam courses or invest in scam brokerages.
The unfortunate true is IAC is coming to most countries in the world, no matter how much the Hacker News audience hates it...
Coincidently, that system was provided by IBM.
The way it works: today, social media companies cannot advertise to children under 13 under COPPA. So these companies have to do their best to guess the user’s age, and if it is possibly a child, they can’t advertise and have to lose those profits even though MAYBE the user is an adult. Now they can shift the legal compliance costs and liability to the operating system provider or phone manufacturer and not be responsible for the user’s identity. And then they can advertise much more at that point, without being conservative. This also lets them have a different experience for minors that doesn’t advertise to them, but targets them carefully to keep them as users until they are older, so they start to become a source of advertising profits later.
It’s well known that Meta is behind a lot of funding for nonprofits pushing these laws under a “protect the children” thing. But now even Pinterest’s CEO is shamelessly saying parents don’t have a responsibility to manage their own kids, and is supporting all of this. See https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-user-uncovers-who-is-beh... and https://time.com/article/2026/03/19/pinterest-ceo-government...
Evangelist/theocratic conservatives welcome these laws because they view it as enabling and validating age-based restrictions for other things. For example, Project 2025 called for a ban on porn. And separately, the Heritage Foundation pushed age-verification for porn websites, and has openly admitted it is a defacto porn ban. That should have been ruled unconstitutional on free speech grounds, but the current SCOTUS upheld it unfortunately. They’ll next use age-based verification for all sorts of content - maybe for LGBTQ stuff, maybe for something else.
In the end, everyone else will lose. If you have to prove your identity to anyone, there is a high chance this information can be accessed and surveilled by the government. There is a high chance at some point, no matter what they claim, your identity data will be hacked and sold. And of course if you can be identified online, then anything you say or do can be traced back to you, and that can be used against you by the government. Suddenly, being a protester in these chaotic times will become a lot more risky.
jameskilton•59m ago
mindslight•55m ago