Re: Age gating legislation driven by Meta and anti-freedom right-wing aligned groups

<political opinion> it's always the Heritage Foundation isn't it
</political opinion>

On Sat, 14 Mar 2026 at 00:01, Enji Cooper (yaneurabeya)
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>         Just in case others missed it, there’s been some concerted effort by some folks in the Linux community to try and track down who is pushing for the sudden myriad of age-gating legislation from going through across the Western world (UK, USA, etc). As suspected, it leads back to companies that would profit from additional data gathering (in this case Meta), and right-wing groups—who would benefit from a way of easily surveilling and tracking a populace writ large (the Heritage Foundation, Moms for Liberty, etc [1]).
>         1. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_billion_in_nonprofit_grants_and_45/ (https://web.archive.org/web/20260313090844/https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_billion_in_nonprofit_grants_and_45/).
>         2. https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings
>         In short, like I said before in other threads, don’t waste your time/cycles on this age-gating bullshit: it’s clear that the people pushing for it (politicians and lobbyists) don’t have your best interests in mind, will only make using computing systems and software more difficult to use without being surveilled/tracked, and also forcing those who want to engage in society on the public Internet to have to waste time and effort consuming and reacting to this garbage.
>         Please support the EFF in their efforts to impede/block this kind of anti-privacy legislation from taking hold [2].
>         I’ll post a follow up reply to this later.
> Signed,
> - Enji
>
> 1. Even though a lot of right-wing groups are pushing for this, many “left leaning” politicians (aka the Democrats, Labor Party, etc) are pushing for these bills. Case in point: Gavin Newsom is a Democrat and the California legislature is majority Democrat. If stuff like the Epstein Files scandal hasn’t made it clear by now, a lot of the “economic elite” and “political elite” implementing this are all in the same club, regardless of what their voting ticket/party says they should stand for.
> 2. The EFF also supports a lot of other stuff like “Right to Repair”, etc.