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Jan. 2nd, 2026 12:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lapsaВ dreamwidth.org рванули беженцы из ЖЖ (несколько тысяч новеньких за несколько дней), местная администрация выкатила для них очень милый приветственный пост и жуткие вещи в комментариях пишет:
We have been fighting "age verification" laws for a long time! We've helped to sue multiple US states over them, tried participating in the UK "consultations" on the implementation of the Online Safety Act and why their proposals would be harmful, etc. I agree with you completely: "nefarious" is exactly the right word. I can't absolutely promise that we'll never require age or ID verification from anyone, because the US is trying to fling itself off the same cliff and we're a US company: if our own idiot politicians pass a nationwide law, instead of just individual states doing it, and if we lose in court enough times, we may eventually have to in some form. But we can promise you three things:
1. We are a US-only company, and we will only ever care about US law. Which is not much consolation, because we have our own idiot politicans, but it means people living in other authoritarian countries only have to worry about our authoritarians, not the ones who have direct control over you.
2. We will fight any US law, federal or state, that tries to force us to identify and deanonymize our users. We will fight it with everything I've got. I've helped to sue seven states over those laws so far (one of them twice!), and we mostly keep winning. Except in Mississippi, where the appellate court overruled the district court (who agreed with us that the law was unconstitutional), but even that fight isn't over yet. We specifically joined Netchoice so that we could fight these laws, and I've helped out every single lawsuit over every single law that we qualify for since. (We were even cited in the latest victory over a law that doesn't even apply to us, that's how hard we're fighting these!)
3. If another country ever does go through the trouble of trying to get a US court to issue a court order saying that we have to turn over information about one of their citizens, and the reason is anything other than "something that is also extremely illegal in the US" like distributing child sex abuse material or something on that level of severity, we will fight that just as hard as we are fighting these US state "age verification" laws. I have many, many, many lawyer friends who have done that kind of international work for years, and they are all just as eager to fight as we are. We might not be rich in money, but we are very, very rich in friends. :)
I see that you made your account seven or eight years ago, so I can give you a story from before you joined to help show that we mean what we say: when we'd been open for about a year, back in 2010, PayPal decided that we would have to remove "adult content" from the site or else they wouldn't process payments for us anymore. We told them to go fuck themselves, went without income at all for three months while we got set up with a payment processor that would allow us to keep allowing users to post what they wanted, and paid outrageous fees to take payments for a decade before we found someone else who would take us at a lower fee structure. It was terrifying! We'd only been open for a year! But we'd planned for it, and we'd made promises to our users that we weren't going to break unless we absolutely had no other choice. We really do mean it when we say we'll fight for you as hard as we possibly can. I know a lot of places say it, but the only people we have to keep happy are our users, so we can genuinely mean it.
Я регистрировалась на иностранных сайтах давно, и не знала, что там теперь требуется официальное подтверждение возраста. 😲
We have been fighting "age verification" laws for a long time! We've helped to sue multiple US states over them, tried participating in the UK "consultations" on the implementation of the Online Safety Act and why their proposals would be harmful, etc. I agree with you completely: "nefarious" is exactly the right word. I can't absolutely promise that we'll never require age or ID verification from anyone, because the US is trying to fling itself off the same cliff and we're a US company: if our own idiot politicians pass a nationwide law, instead of just individual states doing it, and if we lose in court enough times, we may eventually have to in some form. But we can promise you three things:
1. We are a US-only company, and we will only ever care about US law. Which is not much consolation, because we have our own idiot politicans, but it means people living in other authoritarian countries only have to worry about our authoritarians, not the ones who have direct control over you.
2. We will fight any US law, federal or state, that tries to force us to identify and deanonymize our users. We will fight it with everything I've got. I've helped to sue seven states over those laws so far (one of them twice!), and we mostly keep winning. Except in Mississippi, where the appellate court overruled the district court (who agreed with us that the law was unconstitutional), but even that fight isn't over yet. We specifically joined Netchoice so that we could fight these laws, and I've helped out every single lawsuit over every single law that we qualify for since. (We were even cited in the latest victory over a law that doesn't even apply to us, that's how hard we're fighting these!)
3. If another country ever does go through the trouble of trying to get a US court to issue a court order saying that we have to turn over information about one of their citizens, and the reason is anything other than "something that is also extremely illegal in the US" like distributing child sex abuse material or something on that level of severity, we will fight that just as hard as we are fighting these US state "age verification" laws. I have many, many, many lawyer friends who have done that kind of international work for years, and they are all just as eager to fight as we are. We might not be rich in money, but we are very, very rich in friends. :)
I see that you made your account seven or eight years ago, so I can give you a story from before you joined to help show that we mean what we say: when we'd been open for about a year, back in 2010, PayPal decided that we would have to remove "adult content" from the site or else they wouldn't process payments for us anymore. We told them to go fuck themselves, went without income at all for three months while we got set up with a payment processor that would allow us to keep allowing users to post what they wanted, and paid outrageous fees to take payments for a decade before we found someone else who would take us at a lower fee structure. It was terrifying! We'd only been open for a year! But we'd planned for it, and we'd made promises to our users that we weren't going to break unless we absolutely had no other choice. We really do mean it when we say we'll fight for you as hard as we possibly can. I know a lot of places say it, but the only people we have to keep happy are our users, so we can genuinely mean it.
Я регистрировалась на иностранных сайтах давно, и не знала, что там теперь требуется официальное подтверждение возраста. 😲
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Date: 2026-01-02 04:41 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2026-01-02 08:49 pm (UTC)