from LiamTheBox@lemmy.ml to privacy@lemmy.ml on 14 Mar 15:47
https://lemmy.ml/post/44485012
Source: xcancel.com/vxunderground/…/2032600868005310638#m
Yeah, so basically the current prevailing schizo internet theory is that AI nerds have destroyed the internet and created infinite spam.
The advertisement goons are now incapable of determining who is a bot and who is an actual human. The advertisement goons no longer want to pay as much to social media networks.
Social media networks, in full blown panic of losing potential revenue, decided to lobby governments saying “we gotta protect the kids! ID everyone to protect the kids from pedophiles!”.
The social media networks know this doesn’t really protect kids. But, it does two things (and a third accidentally).
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They now can identify who is human and who is AI slop machine, or enough to appease the advertisement goons
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Advertising to children is a general no-no from politicians, or something, so with ID verification they can say with confidence they’re not advertising to children because it’s been ID verification. Basically, they can weed out the children and focus on advertising to adults
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The feds can now tell who is human and who is AI slop. This inadvertently helps them with tracking people and serving fresh daily dumps of propaganda, or whatever they want to do.
It’s a win-win-win for advertisers, social media networks, the government, and any business which does data collections.
It fucks over everyone else.
Chat, I’m not going to lie to you. This is an extremely good conspiracy schizo theory and I unironically believe it.
threaded - newest
Posted on Twitter lmfao
“Advertising to Children is a general no-no…”
Uhh what? Advertising to children is like no1 priority. That’s why Kim K etc is in fortnite, happy meals are bad food aimed at kids and of course standard TV adverts can be heavily aimed at kids, even tho its the parents spending the money.
Not saying it’s right, but only appropriate things can be advertised to children, so in the UK that’s no junk food for example - theguardian.com/…/uk-junk-food-ad-ban-so-diluted-…
In the US, the govt allows cigarettes to be advertised to children.
What? Tobacco is like, the one thing that actually has extremely stringent advertising regulations in the US. When vaping products like Juul came around, they were able to exploit loopholes in those laws, but I think those have pretty much been patched up by now.
What, dear friend, are the ingredients of Juul?
Didn’t they close up the loopholes in advertising regulations that Juul exploited?
Sure, they did. But that just means some ad-exec and lawyers are working to figure out the next loophole.
I feel like that’s pretty meaningfully different from the original claim that the US government allows cigarettes to be advertised to children.
The US doesn’t allow cigarettes to be advertised to children or anywhere where they might see it. This was a Clinton administration thing. That’s why the Winston Cup became the Nextel Cup in NASCAR as just one for instance.
And so JUUL, which is made from all the main ingredients of a cigarette, is not a cigarette? And it’s not advertised heavily on social media like Snapchat, where most youth are? Instead of the fucking nascar?
Unfortunately we live in a time when if the law doesn’t specifically call out something then it doesn’t apply. So no, as far as US law is concerned, Juuls are not cigarettes just like Uber isn’t a taxi service and YouTube isn’t a broadcaster.
But we as common sense people can say that Juul is a cigarette and the govt hasn’t done enough to kill its advertising to children.
Yes and no. Juuls and the like contain nicotine salts that degrade the heating element. There is mounting evidence to suggest that these will need their own awareness campaign as they have very different health risks to original tobacco use. However, there are other kinds of vape pens that don’t contain nicotine salts or that use solids instead of liquids that have already been grouped in with Juuls in legislation. Simply applying common sense is often not enough to cover the whole situation which is why industries like this rely on legislation being too slow to stop them.
Oh, I’m not saying that the law should be “common sense”. Often that has been used to cover all kinds of nonsense. But the fact that the product exists and is one more loophole away from again full scale advertising to children (as opposed to the shadow “influencer” advertising that they’re doing right now) is the problem.
I think you make a fair point here, partially. However, Marlboro could also advertise on snapchat if they wanted. Now there’s no doubt something like that would catch massive eyes, landing them in hot enough water to probably change the law around it. If Marlboro leadership saw Juul as a threat, that would make sense to do. They lose a pittance in advertising and court fees, and cut off a competitor from an advertising stream.
But they’re not a threat, they’re an asset. Altria, the parent company of Philip Morris and NJOY, has a 35% stake in Juul. Altria is incentivized to keep their piles of shit separate.
Vaping has the potential to be healthier than cigarettes, socially and physically. But not when it’s almost entirely controlled by companies that have a history of marketing to children. It’s physically healthier sure, but only 107 countries have laws regulating the age for vaping, vs 188 for cigarettes. The e-waste factor is also huge, something that a lot of people who vape choose to ignore and I wish they couldn’t. I vape myself, have for years, and it’s a shit state of affairs with how popular disposables are. But I don’t know what the realistic solution is. People are going to use tobacco products in a dystopia.
Joe Camel begs to differ
When was the last time any company got prosecuted for violating that? And was the fine less than the profit they made by violating the law?
Facebook has known since over a decade that under 13s are on their networks and instead of booting them, the CEO (whoever he is) decided to make the platforms more addictive to under 13s. Real quote from the LA court case going on right now.
Also, the new CEO of Xbox Gaming is ex-AI Head of Microsoft and the ex-Head of under-13 policy at Facebook. So she did everything the CEO (whoever he is) asked her to do, including making the platforms more addictive and pushing back on govt intervention.
Advertising to children is significantly more tightly regulated, for the very reason that they’re so damn thirsty for it.
I grew up in the 90s and there were some absolutely unhinged ads during saturday morning cartoons. This spoof is only slightly crazier than an actual capri sun liquid cool commercial.
youtu.be/eyd51lvu3xw
Data collection* from children is a general No-No but with this they don’t have to collect the data to know they’re a child and can now specifically target them without having to collect data first. Thereby avoiding coppa fines
YouTube Kids has no ads at all because of this.
Google isn’t doing this because they’re being nice.
Don’t know if it’s so much an issue with detecting what’s what. I think this just wildely opens the door to knowing who people are and being able to easily take even more data. All the while opening new opportunities to sell the tech to institutions that pull the data they want.
It’s not longer capitalism it’s griftalism
I think it’s probably not being pushed because of those things (though they are certainly possible outcomes), and more about the fact that they can just… scrape up a bunch of data about you in general.
Now they know your name, age, race, birthday, and can correlate that all with data brokers if they want more. Ad targeting becomes easier, thus making them more money. Simple as that.
I don’t like this theory because they have already had access to this information with social media. Individuals willingly volunteer this information about themselves and their friends, and data brokers would collect and centralize it from multiple sources. This is why some platforms were trying out AI age verification in countries that hadn’t officially mandated ID verification yet. They were confident enough, with all the info they had already collected, to assume someone’s age. They would hope that the people who fail the check would be few enough to not cause an immediate uproar(“just verify with ID, what’s the big deal?”)
This is most certainly more of an authoritarian power grab to prevent any anonymous criticism what so ever. Id verification will allow them to target any application that does not comply and preserves user privacy. Anyone who does not comply will be implied to be a criminal or enemy of the state. They want to make a system where corporate surveillance cannot be avoided.
The corporations lobbying for this want to benefit from being a part of the fascist state, but don’t want to handle any legal obligation or public scrutiny from the obvious damages that will come from collecting this information. That’s why you have different companies lobbying for different “solutions”; whatever keeps them from facing repercussions but still makes them money for being a part of the surveillance state is what they will support.
Second to make all advertising illegal
I like it; let’s get more support for this! How about an ad campaign?
That actually makes sense.
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Honestly, the only “schizo” part of this is the assertion that people aren’t allowed to advertise to children, otherwise this all makes perfectly sane sense.
“schizo internet theory.” i’m not surprised this was posted on Twitter this guy is far gone
Governments have been pushing for more censorship and surveillance long before AI came onto the scene
I believe the cat
The main reason for all the censorship and end of privacy is because the world is heading to a major war and free flow of information goes against the interests of those behind the war. See the case with Gaza
Not that the other reasons don’t exist, but advertisers are not the main one
Couldn’t they just implement id verification without a requirement from the law? That way they wouldn’t need to wait for the governments to one by one pass laws
Going with the post’s idea for a moment, by making it law, the companies prevent any new social media from popping up and not requiring ID verification and stealing away all their users. “They can’t say no, it’s out of their hands because it’s law”.
Not to mention, if everyone has to do it in one country because of the law, it makes it easier to push it in other places because now it’s a collective movement.
This isn’t even a conspiracy theory, it’s been investigated and found to be mostly true.
tboteproject.com/git/hekate/attestation-findings
I never thought about it until I clicked on this link, but repositories are actually a really good format for investigative journalism. Allows you to organize all the supporting documents alongside the article in an organized way.
It’s great for most written things in society.
Laws? Oh yes, please.
Any official communication? Thank you.
Even mundane things like cooking guides would benefit from history and versioning. Imagine entire family sending their branches for favourite pie/turkey/whatever else.
Grandma’s brunch grits git branch
I’d argue it also has to do with “AI” training data
They also want to defer the costs of positively identifying users to the various governments, presumably so it doesn’t eat into their advertising revenue even further.
Very likely, LLMs tend to collapse when trained on artificial content.
It’s not even a conspiracy, it’s just corporations and politicians behaving according to individual incentives and communicating about it publicly with a basic level of indirectness to avoid outrage.
That’s actually vx-underground source for this post: https://xcancel.com/vxunderground/status/2032562782248349793#m
I like how they call everything conspiracy theories these days. Yeah, nothing to see here, just wanna protect children… :)
I don’t love the word schizo, but otherwise I am on board
what’s your problem with the word schizo?
Hazarding a guess that they feel OP is using schizo as a shorthand reference for crazy/delusional, given the context is Internet conspiracy theories. They possibly feel that it is being used as a perjorative which disrespects folks who struggle with schizophrenia. In essence, calling something you find crazy “schizo” is the same as calling something you find dumb “retarded”.
I don’t have a dog in the fight one way or the other, but, in the absence of their reply, that’s my assumption.
Lol, I bet removed is gonna be a slur someday.
I thought dumb and removed already was
This is a great answer. It is worth noting that the word “dumb” used to literally mean what we now say is “non-verbal”. Funny how language changes.
See also: “lame”.
Schizophrenia is a real, serious disease. It means a specific diagnosis that isn’t just 🤪
Agree because it’s a real mental illness that some people are tornented with, and that word should not be thrown around playfully.
The word I didn’t love from OOP was “unironically.” I truly don’t love that word.
what’s your problem with the word “unironically” ?
I bet they write a 10 paragraph essay on why the word “unironically” is pretentious.
This is good r/conspiracy (I mean on OG reddit, where people would ironically make up conspiracies (like birds aren’t real (which they aren’t, but it was first discovered on r/conspiracy unironically [wake up sheeple]))) material.
Like any good conspiracy, mixing factual statements into the conspiracy makes the bullshit taste better… so to speak.
Just fyi the word “conspiracy” does not by definition mean it’s bullshit.
Like for example
reddit.com/…/i_traced_2_billion_in_nonprofit_gran…
I mean AI goons are destroying the internet and open source, that much is true.
Seems like the most obvious fucking thing in the world
Want a real schizo theory?
People are going to use the ID verification thing to see which accounts are child accounts, pull all details for those accounts and make a database of children’s accounts, and then sell that information to bad actors who plan to traffic children.
Doesn’t even need to be intentional when there are virtually no consequences for leaking that info
Palantir Orphan Hunter
and we have upcoming android lockdown👌
Plausible considering it’s been shown that meta is the one responsible for lobbying this shit
My theory is its war with China. The US has likely alerted other country that China will do to them that the US does to Iran, using social media to guide elections.
The bad news for the AI goons is that the capitalists have squeezed us so hard that we no longer have any money to spend on the products we’re programmed to lust after. Not sure what the end game is.
What a beautiful world we live in.
(my first ever post in the fediverse lol)
You’ve made the right choice. Just watch out for the crazies, they mask well.
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Just cut off a friend who tried to tell me racism isn’t a choice. Knew him for over a decade but he fell into an algorithm that he became obsessed with. He really believed he was seeing the “truth” finally.
Average Andrew Tate fan
Tell him that thinking white people are genetically predisposed to be racist is Woke 1.0 and belongs in the past. We are on 3.0 now and we call pigs [REDACTED]. (Yes I know you meant he is being turned into Hitler by Instagram, just a joke.)
Bullshit. Social networks track the living shit out of everyone and know exactly what’s human traffic and what isn’t. Device identifiers (user agent, IP ranges, browser fingerprint, (lack of) ad id, etc.) and behavioral patterns (including purchase history) differ wildly.
Bullshit. Even advertising to kids were outlawed (it isn’t), politicians could be just bought off by advertisers to turn a blind eye. This is particularly true for the land of their formerly free and home of the formerly brave where corruption is now an above-the-counter item, practiced out in the open by the president himself.
I thought land of the free and home of the brave was Scotland
Over 80% of Twitter’s accounts are actually bots
The difference now is that paying advertisers are demanding proof that their adverts are reaching humans, not bots.
Why are you given adverts for products you’ve just bought? So that paying advertisers can be tricked by the data into thinking their advert resulted in a sale.
You could return it. They have to make sure that you stick to your choice.
github.com/xvzc/SpoofDPI plus a browser fingerprinting blocker.
If of wasn’t Metas involvement, I was thinking it would be the first stab at a social credit system.
Is definitely a ploy to identify us all and certainly not to protect children.
🧩 Hyper Rationalizing Autistic person here. My condition makes me view reality as systems within systems within systems with infinite recursion.
I have read this post.
I have not detected logical inconsistency in this theory… And all the facts that I know seem to support the hypothesis.
And yes I know I sound like AI. Ironically, AI tools tell me that too. 😅
If anyone wants to introduce a new premise or fact into the hypothetical scenario, I’ll let you know if it makes sense or not (to me).
New premise.
New datacenters are not for AGI and never have been. The are to support the hyper personalisation of advertising that requires a massive surveillance apparatus and data mining operation.
Correct. But not wholly correct. There are legitimate advancements being made by the serious ppl. But 99% yeah, it’s a smokescreen and everyone sees it coming a mile away, and they think we’re fucking stupid. They have no respect for us, the common people.
They are too busy robbing their own children of a future metaphorically, and then finishing up by raping and eating said children on the island.
Why?
Because:
Darkseid
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/68970fca-10e6-4e05-9cc9-c5106213d796.gif">is.
Edit: Which is why I opted out of the system. I play games for fun. Unfair games are inherently not fun, so I stopped playing. Made a straight 🐝 Line to the exit.
Bought a house when the historic market low hit after 2008 recession during 2013.
Paid it down aggressively in 10 years with a cherry 2.3% interest rate.
Solar panels and efficiency upgrades to decrease lifetime cost of living.
Rent 50% of property for supplemental rental income (charging UNDER market rate intentionally because I am not trying to be greedy).
Filled property tax grievance to drive property tax down as much as possible.
In 2024 I retired at age 38 by allowing my unethical employer to walk into a wrongful termination lawsuit because they are morons who think they know more than me.
Litigation in progress but I can confidently predict the outcome.
They will either settle for 1 million, or take my custom package. If they value their pride they will settle. If they value money, they will take my custom package. If they litigate it will likely destroy their company. 1.6 million in fees and defense costs, a humiliating public loss, and then I will go tell local news just to finish them off for fun.
Oh and I did all that with a few emails and a couple forms for $0. Just answering the complaint alone has cost them $60k so far.
FATALITY.
Humans are illogical creatures who hype over irrational things. Some random key players pulling strings to heard the mob just a little but no greater strategy exists then “make money by any means possible fuck everyone else”"
Correct!
So what every website will have to have age verification? Or else if your website lacks such controls you go to jail?
Eventually every USER will have to be identified on the Internet, to prove their age, so that we know they aren’t children, because we want to protect children.
So I have to allow everything I say or do on the Internet to be exposed to the entire world, because parents can’t be bothered to supervise their children’s Internet use.
test
Advertising doesn’t seem like a large enough lever to drive something this globally coordinated.
My read is that governments and large institutions are preparing for the kind of systemic instability climate change is going to produce.
Across the world we’re already seeing laws and policies that quietly restrict the ability to organise, protest, or remain anonymous online, while surveillance capabilities expand at the same time. None of this is particularly popular, yet it keeps happening.
Why?
Because the next few decades are likely to involve continuous pressure from climate-driven problems: migration, water shortages, falling crop yields, energy instability, and the political conflict that follows when resources get tighter.
From that perspective, universal ID verification online isn’t mainly about ads or “protecting the kids”. It’s about mapping who is who, who talks to who, and how information spreads.
If you expect future mass unrest, protest movements, or large-scale political instability, that kind of data becomes extremely valuable.
And historically, elites often choose to invest more effort in managing the consequences of systemic problems than in solving the underlying causes.
So instead of “AI spam broke advertising”, the bigger story might be that institutions are building the infrastructure to monitor and manage populations during a much messier future.
It is the third option. For a schizo conspiracy it makes a lot of sense.
I absolutely believe this
How is this a theory? This is literally what’s happening lol
Even if it’s not advertising itself pushing it, the rest of what was said is true.
Conspiracy theory? It’s not, it’s absolutely true. But they left out the bit about the quasi-alliance between big tech and right-wing extremists.
Tech bro’s want to keep their revenue streams, techno-fascists want to remove privacy barriers that stop them from training AI with your personal data and actual fascists want to crack down on public speech and dissidents.
The political right in both the US and EU are continuously working to remove privacy and surveillance restrictions under the auspices of free markets and innovation.
agelesslinux.org
fedscorposThis is not a conspiracy. Look at who funded the bill, who wrote it, and who funded the opposition to the bill in each state. Every time one of these passes, each legislating body already has the votes the need to pass before the actual bill material surfaces.
Meta has reportedly funneled over $65 million into a network of four primary super PACs to manage this state-by-state strategy. While they appear distinct on paper to “scatter filings” and avoid centralized FEC scrutiny, they are managed by the same leadership: Brian Baker (a veteran GOP strategist) and the Democratic consulting firm Hilltop Public Solutions.
American Technology Excellence Project (ATEP): The national “umbrella” super PAC that serves as the primary funding hub.
Forge the Future Project: The GOP-focused arm, active in states like Texas, Florida, and Utah. It frames the legislation as a “parental rights” and “pro-family” issue.
Making Our Tomorrow: The Democratic-focused arm, active in Illinois and California. It frames the same legislation as “tech accountability” and “corporate responsibility.”
Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across California (META PAC): A California-specific PAC focused on protecting Meta’s interests in its home state, particularly regarding AI and child safety regulations.
The “Shadow” Advocate: Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA)
The group providing the “boots on the ground” testimony for these bills is the Digital Childhood Alliance. Investigations have found that:
Legal Status: The DCA reportedly has no EIN, no IRS registration, and no incorporation records. It is essentially a “ghost organization” or astroturf group.
The Meta Link: Internal filings and investigative reports confirmed the DCA is almost entirely funded by Meta, though its website and testimonies never disclose this.
The Mission: They are launching Proof-of-Personhood for exactly the reasons specified in this post. By integrating a unique identifier at the OS-level, they are effectively killing the VPN. Soon websites will start requiring that unique identifier to view “adult” content in order to comply with the government.
How will this data be used? I’ll let you speculate, but let me reassure you that privacy is dead and a bunch of know-nothing geriatric pigs come up with a new way to destroy democracy every day.