Source: https://xcancel.com/vxunderground/status/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.
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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.
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.
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.
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
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 - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/mar/10/uk-junk-food-ad-ban-so-diluted-it-may-be-largely-ineffective-experts-say
In the US, the govt 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.
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.
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.
Joe Camel begs to differ
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
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?
YouTube Kids has no ads at all because of this.
Google isn’t doing this because they’re being nice.
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 actual capri sun liquid cool commercial.
That actually makes sense.
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.
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.
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
Second to make all advertising illegal
I like it; let’s get more support for this! How about an ad campaign?
“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
This isn’t even a conspiracy theory, it’s been investigated and found to be mostly true.
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
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’d argue it also has to do with “AI” training data
Very likely, LLMs tend to collapse when trained on artificial content.
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.
This is just the beginning.
You think it’s just about ID?
Politicians in both the UK and Australia have spoken about banning VPNs, because VPNs have been used to avoid age verification in those countries.
Which is stupid. Kids aren’t using vpns. Most good ones cost money. And kids aren’t very tech savvy these days.
Most grow up with phones and tablets only. They don’t even know how to use a keyboard or a PC.
Hello, this was never about kids. Do you routinely believe what politicians are telling you?
That’s my point. Kids aren’t even at risk of circumventing age restrictions so requiring IDs or banning VPNs is targeting adults privacy. Not protecting kids.
If you want to see where we’re going, look no farther than Russia’s Internet. Which is currently much worse than China’s.
So be prepared for your service to be degraded to unusability.
I don’t think anyone relevant in Australia has yet suggested banning VPNs. Too much gov infrastructure runs on them.
Well, clearly the government would be an exception, there are always “authorized uses” for every banned thing.
It makes more sense than it doesn’t.
Maybe not as shadow cabal type of collusion, but as the path of least resistance that all these entities would find themselves going down independently… at the same time.
I like how they call everything conspiracy theories these days. Yeah, nothing to see here, just wanna protect children… :)
