It's all caused by a Meta lobbying initiative across multiple countries as documented in https://tboteproject.com/ (sadly, the website is down right now), but you can find references e.g. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/the-tbote-project/

This has all been brewing for years. Remember the TikTok ban and all of the debates around it? We’ve been hearing news headlines about social media and kids for many years. The state level laws around porn site ID checks have been rolling in gradually for years, too.

There are always claims that is a shadowy cabal of world leaders coordinating in secret or that a specific corporation is lobbying to do it all, but the fact is that ID checking is oddly popular in theory to a lot of people who haven’t thought through the consequences. Check any thread on this topic on Hacker News where the idea is discussed in a way that makes it feel like it’s only for kids or only for Facebook and there’s a huge outpouring of support for the idea.

The topic only becomes unpopular when the actual consequences become apparent. For the Hacker News audience the popularity of these ideas does a complete U-turn as soon as the concept of ID checking extends to platforms we might use, like Reddit, Discord, or YouTube. When commenters think it’s only going to impact Facebook and TikTok they welcome ID checking laws with enthusiastic support.

Global meetings (whether secret or not) where select people decide what to do next to minimize potential threats to their power. There isn't much more to it, really.

Nefarious actors will always attempt to institute these programs via well-meaning stooges

AI coming along is another “great opportunity” to try and force these programs

Rich people are panicking because they’ve seen a capital-poor country win a war with cheap drones and want to lock down as many technologies as they can, lest the ruled realize they can actually do something about their rulers.

Imo it definitely has to do with politicians and governments trying to appear strong on the topic of protecting kids from the harms of social media. I also believe a lot of it is well intentioned, albeit poorly executed

It's because of Jonathan Haidt's book

What has changed is that there's now a market for data that maps addresses to apparent ethnicities (for use by palantir to sell to governments, in support of ethnic cleansing programmes).

It is particularly bizarre given the increasingly frightening array of designer drugs available at gas stations and convenience stores.

You probably have seen them if you live in the US, and had little idea about them.

there's an epidemic of authoritarianism in a lot of countries these days. didn't use to be quite this bad in the last couple of decades.

Do not for a split second operate under the assumption that there aren't coordinating forces working on this. I know this trips the "conspiracy theories!!1!" flag in most people, but you can literally come up with organizations dedicated to things like this in mere seconds of googling. Here's a comment about US state-level coordination I made earlier, with a challenge to produce some examples that I then produced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065492

It happens at the national level too. I just did a simple Google search for "united nations committee to harmonize" [1] (no quotes in my search itself) and I count 5 or 6 committees explicitly dedicated to "harmonization" in the first ten results. And that's just the committees, you can count on each of them to have factions within (because politics, politics never changes) and outside forces competing and vying to get the "harmonizations" to favor them and disfavor their competitors. And as politics, politics never changes, paging Ron Perlman, these harmonization committees are unlikely to flinch away from "harmonizing" entirely new rules into existence... which, again, with not all that much searching you can easily find examples of them stating outright.

And the forces trying to influence those committees, are not all just sitting out in the public with some .org website with their true mission stated clearly above the fold. And I just use these UN committees, which are themselves literally the result of one search and a few seconds scrolling through the search page and anything but a complete list, as plain and obvious public examples operating in public for at least nominally good purposes. Nothing stops anyone from buying politicians in multiple countries at a time to push through something like age verification directly, without being open about who they are.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=united+nations+committ...

I'm maybe a bit of an outlier here in that I do think that this is a genuine grassroots good faith effort to "protect the children" that does not have sinister ulterior motives. I know plenty of parents who have expressed enthusiasm for the idea of age-restricting websites.

"Why now" I think is pretty obvious -- the age limitations that exist currently are easily circumvented, but have given enough of a plausible deniability aspect that politicians have been able to skate by. There has been increasing research and media dedicated to the idea that there are aspects of the internet which we should be shielding children from. While many of this research is dubious, there's a rising moral panic around it.

The core of the problem is that there is no possible implementation of age verification that does not also require identity verification. In this I am in strong agreement with the article, but the use of paranoid and dramatic language as in this article only alienates people who find the conspiratorial tone to be reverse polarizing.

I don't think you have spent much time researching. TLDR: Social media bad for kids.

Facebook was never allowed to let in kids under 13. It's now only being enforced.

Making it more difficult to access social media for Adults to access social media isn't detrimental.

Crowd-based analysis of "the files" nearly went out of control, and they noticed how hard it is to identify social media users.

Only trust fund nepo kids from old money are allowed to have vanity social security numbers, multiple identities and scrubbed Wikipedia articles. The plebeians shall have only a single ID and use it to authenticate with every website.

I really want to know who else has a SSN starting with 1337.

Combination of factors, but mostly because Meta is pushing it globally: https://www.reuters.com/world/meta-lobbies-congress-protecti...

Because it’s been building for a while, and (in my opinion) because it’s not a major traffic generating topic on builder focused sites like HN.

The most proximate domino was the Australian social media ban. Australia was already a country known to experiment with ways to deal with social media - see the news fee they imposed on platforms.

Behind that was the build up of negative outcomes from social media for kids, and adults.

The harms are not something I tend to find actively discussed on HN; I assume because more people are interested in building the next thing, not digging into the trust and safety details.

Customer safety and support are also not going to get anyone promoted in tech. These are cost centers and will often stand in the way of addictive design.

Meta executives were nailed precisely for greenlighting designs their own teams told them were harmful for teens.

At the same time, there is lobbying going on by these firms, to push the burden of verification to someone else.

However, the degree of harm being caused by social media meant we were always going to see voter backlash.

Honestly? I think it's because Elon Musk pissed a bunch of bureaucrats off by buying X and being more permissive about what was allowed. Then came claims that AI porn or something was on X which is a vague claim. People say it was Meta lobbying but that's not it. Meta lobbied to have ID done at the operating system. The lobby for ID was already effective and on its way before that. The actual lobby doesn't seem to be popular at all. It's just some NGOs no one has heard of that support restrictions for porn. The same language popped up on three continents at once. I just don't think this is a grass roots campaign and I don't think corporations drove it either. Ultimately, I think governments decided that unregulated information/anonymity is a threat to their power.

Social media was unleashed onto the world with no harm studies or thought for the long term impact.

Now we’re catching up and realizing how bad it is.

For a similar case, see tasers in Canada after a handcuffed immigrant was killed by one. The question came up “how were tasers certified safe for humans?”. The answer was “they weren’t. A private company just started selling them to police forces who just started using them.”

> ... but can someone explain to me why it's NOW that we have multiple countries (USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and probably others that I am not aware of) all looking at age verification for a technology

I don't know why but governments, nearly worldwide, all teaming up on x continents to push the exact same narrative is recent but not totally new: remember the "masks do not work against SaRS-COV-2" to only then lock us all up and then force people to wear face masks?

Media all pushing the "if you believe it possibly can be a lab-leak, you're just as nuts as conspiracy theorists who believe the moon landing was faked" was honestly quite scary to witness too.

And the speed at which virtually everybody, including on HN, started to then push for that propaganda was quite scary too.

For the record, the report mandated (under Biden) by US Congress concludes that the virus has non-zootropic features and the biggest "expert" on the matter, Peter Daszak, has been debarred and cannot ever again receive funding from the US to work on gain-of-function research on viruses.

I stand my case: the "you're a conspiracy nut if you believe the virus could be man-made" was a coordinated setup.

You're asking why, now, they're teaming up to require face verification.

I'm asking why they all sang the same fake tunes about Covid-19 / SaRS-COV2: "Masks do not work" was repeated worldwide, to then forcing us to wear masks was a lie (one of the two was a complete lie).

And of course the incessant propaganda machine, hard at work, to explain everywhere that it couldn't possibly have leaked from a lab tied to Peter Daszak's research doing gain-of-function research on bat viruses, in the very FUCKING CITY, where it all started, was a gigantic lie.

The absolute worst in all of this is the people believing the lies even when the evidence is right in front of their eyes.

I kept posting here on HN back then about how it was folly to not open your eyes and make your mind work two seconds and I posted about that one independent journalist who found the Peter Daszak link very early on and fought for the truth. But the herds, worldwide, were way too pleased to buy the governments' lies.

Years after the fact we got proven the governments, worldwide, lied and teamed up to hide the truth.

"Despite congressional mandates requiring the declassification of COVID-origin intelligence under both the 2023 law and last year’s National Defense Authorization Act of 2026, substantial portions of the newly released records remain blacked out."

The CIA stated they now believe it's a lab leak.

Oh really?

https://www.whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19...

This, like Goebbels' propaganda technique in nazi Germany, should be studied for years and years: how Goebbels' techniques were used, worldwide, to try to hide the governments' responsibilities in the countless deaths resulting from the virus they funded.

It's the same, worldwide-coordinated, "think of the humans" propaganda they're using for face ID.

> can someone explain to me why it's NOW that we have multiple countries

Because there are actors pushing for this. And they let money flow, so the lobbyists work.

People think lobbyists don't do this? Well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...

These lobbyists were dumb. You can be certain that some lobbyists are so efficient that detecting them reliably is very difficult. Even more so when private media is controlled by a few billionaires who are "in" on the system.

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