Decentralized social network Mastodon says it cannot comply with age verification laws, like in Mississippi and elsewhere, and says it's up to individual server owners to decide.
So guess what? Investment firms saw a load of moral panics and calls for digital ID. They invested in firms like YOTI (they are not required to say who invested in them, nice and convenient) and started doing research for the government through their think tank arms to convince the government that the OSA is a good idea.
You have a very loose definition of conspiracy. If you don’t define conspiracy as something you actively hide, then the word “conspiracy” becomes like the word “Woke” in Right wing circles, that is, “something I do not like or approve of”. When I think of “Conspiracies” I think of things like the Business Plot, an act, by a group of politicians and business men, done in secret, to install a Fascist Dictator in the United States as a coup. We only know of this because the person they wanted to be the Dictator (Smedley Butler) told them to fuck off and spoke about it to Congress under oath.
Everything about this was out in the open. The moral panic over the internet has been going on since I was a child. We have had repeated calls to censor the internet to stop Porn, Terrorism, Media that Ofcom can’t control, Hate Speech, extremist content, pro ana content, and the like since the PS1 was the top selling console. We have had data brokers successfully argue that they should be able to take our data and sell it legally in front of parliament many a time. Carnegie UK have published papers that became the OSA that were PUBLICLY VIEWABLE. Newspapers advocated for this on the front page, Hansard and BBC parliament recorded the debates, the only reason you think it’s a conspiracy was because you personally wasn’t aware of it.
It’s business as usual and it is a conspiracy.
You have a very loose definition of conspiracy. If you don’t define conspiracy as something you actively hide, then the word “conspiracy” becomes like the word “Woke” in Right wing circles, that is, “something I do not like or approve of”. When I think of “Conspiracies” I think of things like the Business Plot, an act, by a group of politicians and business men, done in secret, to install a Fascist Dictator in the United States as a coup. We only know of this because the person they wanted to be the Dictator (Smedley Butler) told them to fuck off and spoke about it to Congress under oath.
Everything about this was out in the open. The moral panic over the internet has been going on since I was a child. We have had repeated calls to censor the internet to stop Porn, Terrorism, Media that Ofcom can’t control, Hate Speech, extremist content, pro ana content, and the like since the PS1 was the top selling console. We have had data brokers successfully argue that they should be able to take our data and sell it legally in front of parliament many a time. Carnegie UK have published papers that became the OSA that were PUBLICLY VIEWABLE. Newspapers advocated for this on the front page, Hansard and BBC parliament recorded the debates, the only reason you think it’s a conspiracy was because you personally wasn’t aware of it.
The Tories, Labour, and to an extent even UKIP/Reform have been calling for censorship of the internet for a while, they just didn’t agree to what should be censored, where and how. Want an actual British Conspiracy that we know is a thing? The British Government have been destroying documents from the Empire days that show that the British Empire committed atrocities to avoid having people sent to the Hague. They’ve hid that fact, they even today sometimes deny this fact.
It’s like saying that Donald Trump’s election was a conspiracy because you don’t watch the news and didn’t know the US was having an election.