[gslepak]

People use the word "conspiracy theory" as a shield against their own ignorance.

"If I don't know about it, if it sounds 'spooky' to me, it must be because it's a conspiracy theory, and therefore it is wrong," is essentially what runs through their minds.

The reality is that top-down legislation is the norm rather than the exception, and there is plenty of evidence. It's not written by Joe on the street. It's not organic. It is top-down and imposed. This is what @kdheiwns rightly observes here, and in other fields like how all of a sudden every car manufacturer just up and decided simultaneously that it was a good thing to install spyware into all of their cars.

[austin-cheney]

Maybe it is spooky. I don't know and don't care. I will wait for evidence.

[pessimizer]

If you're proud of incuriousness, you'll never see evidence. I think I should be looking for evidence of the push being organic. I don't see it pushed anywhere but from the top down, even at sometimes heavy political costs to the incumbent leaders who are pushing it.

You should always be asking who politicians are serving. You seem to comfortable with thinking that they must be serving some part of the electorate without actually needing to identify that part. A lot of people think social media is bad for teenagers. There are a lot of things that are bad for teenagers that we aren't making any particular, coordinated effort to ban.

[slg]

Who do you think is behind this? That is the question no one is answering here and why people are calling it a conspiracy theory.

And the car manufacturers all decided to install spyware because it made them money. That's just capitalism.

[AnonymousPlanet]

> Who do you think is behind this?

Anyone who is interested in connecting an identity with every computer on the internet, like a tamper proof license plate for computers. Just ask local law enforcement.

There has been a growing awareness for the possibilities of foreign states to manipulate social media and other platforms with fake personas. So any kind of counter intelligence would be interested as well.

There have been numerous incidents of politicians trying to go after critical posts using defamation laws. Often enough the investigations find a dead end when the account can't be connected with an ID.

Religious advocacy groups have been more and more aggressive in trying to censor the internet, e.g. this Australian one that boasted having pushed Mastercard and Visa to enforce age verification https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/mastercard-vis...

So the list of suspects is actually long.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was a very broad lobbying campaign that very easily finds local interest groups to help them meet the right law makers.

[slg]

Do you not see how this comment is actually counterproductive to the point you’re arguing? The long list of suspects, most of them being totally independent of each other is evidence of this not being orchestrated by some central group.

[fc417fc802]

The fact that a bunch of seemingly disparate actors are behaving in a highly coordinated manner is evidence against central orchestration? What an absurd suggestion.

[tzs]

You are assuming without evidence that they are coordinated, then using that to infer central orchestration, and then using that inferred central organization to support coordination.

When there is something that aligns with the interests of several disparate groups it is common for them to all support that something with the need for some central organization.

[fc417fc802]

> You are assuming without evidence that they are coordinated

The evidence is the highly abnormal behavior. The alignment of interests is a red herring.

> it is common for them to all support that something with the need for some central organization.

Sure, as is frequently seen with the conferences and administrative bodies surrounding treaties and the like. Would you care to point out this central organizing body that a bunch of people posting here appear mysteriously determined to deny the existence of?

What exactly is your position? First you object to an alleged lack of evidence on my part, then turn around and seemingly attempt to justify the observed behavior with the argument that coordination in the open is normal and expected. So do you acknowledge the presence of what appears to be centralized coordination in this instance or not?

What was your purpose in responding here?

[slg]

What counter evidence is there against you, AnonymousPlanet, and gslepak being the same person? You're all seemingly acting in a highly coordinated manner. Would it be reasonable for me to assume you're all one person? Because a suspicious similarity seems to be the only reasoning any of you are providing for these laws being centrally orchestrated.

[fc417fc802]

> Would it be reasonable for me to assume you're all one person?

Depends on context. Would that be the statistically favored explanation for the behavior you're seeing here?

In the case of international politics it is indeed the highly favored explanation. Particularly when there's such a clear nefarious motive.

[intended]

When it rains, disparate actors take out umbrellas.

[AnonymousPlanet]

So if I don't answer your question, you use the fact I didn't answer against me and if I do answer, you use the fact I answered against me as well. It's hard to take your non constructive way of arguing serious. Have a nice day.

[slg]

This is a very strange response. Am I not allowed to criticize the answer you provide when it doesn't actually answer the question?

For example, if I asked you who killed JFK and you responded with "It could have been Oswald acting alone or the mafia or the KGB or the CIA or Fidel Castro or a misfire from Secret Service...", you didn't actually answer the question, you just gave a list of potential answers. One of those answers could be right, but the way you provided so many answers shows that you can't actually answer the question with any degree of certainty. You effectively answered "what's 2 + 2" with "something between 2 and 10". I'm not going to respond with it's not "2+2 is not 8 because..."

[gslepak]

They answered your question sufficiently. Have you ever done what you're asking of others here, btw?

Some questions aren't easy to just answer, even if the answer is known to the person being asked. Some topics are supressed rather well. If you're already acting like someone who is more interested in derailing conversations than having an honest discussion, it's unlikely you'll get the exact list of names of those primarily responsible for driving this push to KYC access to online services. Especially on a website that's heavily moderated and basically a battleground.

[gslepak]

And yet, it is all part of a script. The future, without naming names, without knowing names, without pointing fingers, can somehow still be known and seen. So is that a conspiracy? Even if it looks like many disparate groups, clearly there is a central script, and if there's a central script, there must be a central author of that script.

[slg]

>And yet, it is all part of a script.

You, AnonymousPlanet, and fc417fc802 are all responding to me in very similar ways and yet I'm not accusing you of reading from the same script or being puppeteered by the same person/group. This is because I can recognize that people can have the same thought process without any active collaboration. And yet I would have just as much evidence to make those accusations as the evidence that you provided here that all these laws have the same shady origin.

[fc417fc802]

> Who do you think is behind this?

I don't recall off the top of my head but in past HN threads the global lobbyists for this were named with evidence.

It's intriguing to me how there's seemingly a lot of objections in this thread to the idea that this movement was driven by lobbyists. I realize it's skirting the guidelines but the tone here comes across as some sort of astroturfing particularly when I consider the general tone of past threads on the same topic within the past few months.

[AnonymousPlanet]

> It's intriguing to me how there's seemingly a lot of objections in this thread to the idea that this movement was driven by lobbyists. I realize it's skirting the guidelines but the tone here comes across as some sort of astroturfing particularly when I consider the general tone of past threads on the same topic within the past few months.

I'm getting the same impression.

[slg]

Lobbyists don’t lobby just to lobby, they lobby on behalf of someone paying them. So this doesn’t actually answer the question, it just shifts it to “Who is behind the lobbyists?”

[fc417fc802]

No kidding. I'm saying that those parties were mentioned in past threads and that I don't recall the details.

[AnonymousPlanet]

It doesn't matter what you answer, slg will always try to use the way you answered to argue against you, not the substance. This person seems to be only interested in derailing the conversation.

[philistine]

You're decrying this supposed issue, that multiple countries are all copying one another for legislation. You've repeated this multiple times in these comments.

And yet, after all this, you're not interested enough to remember who's behind this important issue for you. If someone really cares they should get informed.

[card_zero]

So they don't really care, so what. It's Meta who are supposedly lobbying.

[fc417fc802]

> you're not interested enough to remember who's behind this important issue for you

You're demanding that others spoon feed you peer reviewed evidence that water is wet. As you say, if you really care you should expend the effort to inform yourself. I myself have no need at present for the hazily remembered details. The only thing at issue in the here and now was the absurd claim that there's no centralized lobbying effort involved.

[gslepak]

> And the car manufacturers all decided to install spyware because it made them money. That just capitalism.

Yes, you are right, it must be "capitalism" at fault. The sort of capitalism where nobody asks for the product, nobody wants the product, and yet somehow the product is the only choice you have.

[slg]

It's very noticeable that this is the part of my comment you responded to and not the question of who is behind all this. That is why people consider this stuff conspiracy theories. You aren't analyzing the various parties and what motivates them. You're just seeing a result you don't understand and jumping to the conclusion that it's only possible if there is some unknown shadowy group behind it all. If anyone here is trying to create a "shield against their own ignorance"...

[fc417fc802]

There's no requirement to name specific parties in order to make observations. Regardless of motivation it's clear from past examples that laws simply do not form across international borders in this manner. The lobbying is plain as day.

What is your motivation for denying the obvious?

[slg]

>What is your motivation for denying the obvious?

Comments like this don’t make you folks sound less like “conspiracy theorists”. It’s also a tone that tells me that you aren’t going to approach anything I say in good faith so there is no point in me trying to engage with you on the topic anymore.

[gslepak]

Written by sig a few minutes ago:

> It's very noticeable that this is the part of my comment you responded to and not the question

How funny you won't answer his question now. I'm also curious, what is your motivation for denying the obvious?

[fc417fc802]

I'm not trying to sound like anything. I've engaged with you in good faith, articulating my view and inquiring as to why you are denying what appears obvious to me. In response you've accused me of bad faith and explicitly refused to engage.

I cannot help that water seems wet to me but if it seems dry to you I am willing to hear you out.

[gslepak]

If that's the conclusion you'd like to walk away with, be my guest. ^_^