A European Union research service publishes a paper about calls for VPN regulation, noting that they’re ‘increasingly used to bypass online age verification.’
A European Union research service publishes a paper about calls for VPN regulation, noting that they’re ‘increasingly used to bypass online age verification.’
While I don’t disagree that most countries ought to be looking for what you imply, I think there’s a somewhat interesting counter point to it. The anonymous aspect of online interactions/actions has contributed to some really negative trends.
One easy recent example: private citizens in the Netherlands, having taken a course on ‘faceless influencing’, used youtube to push out a bunch of videos encouraging the breaking apart of Canada, while pretending to be Canadians. They allegedly did it because the rage-bait clips generated lots of clicks, and ad revenue paid to them by Google, a company which also worked to amplify their fraudulent personas – a company that’s also tied closely with America, given the administration’s ‘tight’ ties with their tech oligarchs, a country which has overtly expressed interest in breaking apart Canada. The anonymity of those users basically allowed America to crowdsource their nation-destabilizing work.
With AI junk, that’s all going in to over-drive. The ability to fake ‘people’ is likely a big part of why govts have changed their tune on trying to ID people online. Demanding transparency is likely viewed as almost a necessary evil to combat the deluge of propaganda that’s coming out of places like America these days.
There’s also the general tone of online interactions, and the breakdown of certain social-communal parts of offline-life. “The male loneliness epidemic” for example, being partly born out of guys being captured by the manosphere, or being isolated ‘in real life’ due to their excessive presence online. Also the generally combative tone most people take on sites like lemmy / reddit – which pairs with the structure of most media content, which tries for sound bite click bait rather than nuanced constructive thought: you get way more upvotes, if you respond to a small out-of-context shock-value clip with your own short one liner type rebuttal, than if you actually engage with the other parties comment more genuinely.
Like the people generally demand transparency on government actions/decisions, because having those decisions exposed, and the people making them accountable for their actions, helps to reduce corruption / bad behaviour. Same general principle when anonyuser204956 is busy spouting nazi shit, if suddenly their friends/family/coworkers can easily see what they’re doing. People keep other people in check.