They are built on monetizing human attention. The attention pool is finite and non growing. Mostly kids globally who have more free time. So they have been overfishing for a long time to show everyone they can keep increasing how much Attention they can monetize every quarter. Now that entire story is breaking down. So they will fight for survival but the good times are over.

It’s the opposite. Meta, OpenAI, and others love age verification because it enables more advertising without liability and they have been silently pushing these laws. They’ve formed unauthentic “grassroots” groups that do their work of smearing the current situation.

It’s a bad thing because people will lose their privacy by having to prove their age. No guarantee of protecting our information can truly be trusted. And once you have to fear not being anonymous, you cannot speak freely online or be yourself. Minorities like LGBTQ have to fear being harassed or targeted if their identity ever gets out.

By the way, age verification is also something pushed by evangelists and project 2025. It’s seen as a backdoor way to ban porn, LGBTQ, and more.