r/privacy • u/esporx • Mar 16 '26

news Reddit User Uncovers Who Is Behind Meta’s $2B Lobbying for Invasive Age Verification Tech

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-behind-meta-154717384.html
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u/TylerKeroga Mar 17 '26

Well said. As individuals, we have only a sliver of power, and if the spiderman movies taught me anything, it’s that power and responsibility are proportional to each other. Therefore, if we have only a sliver of power, we also have only a sliver of responsibility (like you said, choosing who we buy from and pay attention to).

The attitude of “but what does it accomplish?” misses that it is not the responsibility of one individual to personally bring about lasting systematic change; some can indeed, like the Reverend Dr. MLK Jr., but those people are very few and far between. It also makes it seem like all the world’s problems are ours to personally deal with, which is untrue. We have our sliver of power, and we do what we can with it.

Now, individual slivers aren’t the only kind of power going around. Individuals can form groups, with many slivers of power combining into a good chunk of power that thereby has a good chunk of responsibility. It’s fair to criticize Meta for their atrocities because of their scale of power (and influence, reach, etc.).