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Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

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Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#301

I don't understand it . There are so many ways to child-proof a device . Google Family Link and the Apple equivalent . Use cloudflares Family dns (blocks porn websites etc ..) Instead of just creating a course that explains how to child-proof a device, we have to surveil everyone.

Do you have a child? Because I think the device makers haven't really done a good job, there are just too many workarounds.

Tell me how a whitelist isn’t going to work for you

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#302
Anyone reading this purely as a child safety or campaign finance story might miss the broader architectural war happening here. If you zoom out a little, this is the inevitable, scorched-earth retaliation for Apple's ATT rollout from a few years back.

Apple cost Meta billions by cutting off their data pipeline at the OS level, justifying it with a unilateral privacy moral high ground. Now, Meta is returning the favor. By astroturfing the App Store Accountability Act through digital childhood alliance, Meta is forcing Apple to build, maintain and also bear the legal liability for a wildly complex state-by-state identity verification API.

Gotta give it to Zuck. Standing up a fully-fledged advocacy website 24 hours after domain registration and pushing a bill from a godaddy registration to a signed Utah law in just 77 days is terrifyingly efficient lobbying.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#303
post #278

Jesus. As an American I can do my part, but it’s not much. $70 million is chump change for Meta, yet is far more money than I’ll ever have and does so much to influence state legislation.

Time and time again it amazes me how incredibly cheap lobbied politicians are. They may be earning big sums for an individual, but if you go full corruption[1] to sell out a state or a country - sell it for a fair price. I remember from peak net neutrality discussions during trump 1 maybe around 2017-2018 ant saw an article on theverge.com (that cannot find now) and biggest sum to individual politician was around $20…

Bribed are even smaller. Some councilmembers got indicted in LA some years back for pay for play development. The bribes were things like steak dinners, 5 figure sums of cash in paper bags, and hookers. Astoundingly cheap.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#304
Main takeaway:

> Meta spent a record $26.3 million on federal lobbying in 2025, deployed 86+ lobbyists across 45 states, and covertly funded a "grassroots" child safety group called the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA) to advocate for the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA). The ASAA requires app stores to verify user ages before downloads but imposes no requirements on social media platforms. If it becomes law, Apple and Google absorb the compliance cost while Meta's apps face zero new mandates.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#305
post #236

Removed! Anyone got a copy of the original text?

Also curious why it would be removed.

See https://reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_billi...

AutoModerator on /r/linux is set up to automatically remove posts after a set amount of reports.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#307
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody stops the government from sending goons to your door right now for a snarky comment. Some govts in fact do it today. It is also cheaper than ai rocket and more precise too

Goons don't scale well. Wide-scale intimidation does.

Goons work MUCH better than rockets for intimidation, and actually scale much better.

Rocket is obvious and spectacular. Those are for amateurs.

A journalist got beaten up to the brink of death and will never walk again by 'unknown perpetrators'? Well, it's a dangerous country, and he had it coming, maybe some concerned citizens went a bit too far, but our dear leader cannot watch over everybody.

Scaling: do you think other journalists will not take notice?

And he will still be alive to reminder them how they may end up.

If you want to see how far imagination can go here, look up Artyom Kamardin and think how would you behave after hearing his story .

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#309
post #9
post #2

I am now waiting for Gruber (daringfireball.net) to post another rant about how terrible EU regulation is. Zero-knowledge proofs are the way to go for this type of thing, I find it mind-boggling that the US lets itself be bamboozled into complete lack of privacy.

Though the EU is at large keeping it's composure with this. My only criticism towards the EU as an EU citizen is how slow and bureaucratic the EU is and that decisions that should be made on the fly are dragged on forever. That said, government agencies have been doing a terrible job at keeping the private information of citizens safe. But it is nowhere nearly as bad as the US. My best childhood friend died in very q…

> I was blown away by the fact that I could log into a US government website, register with a burner mail, pay 2 bucks with an anonymous gift credit/debit card and get a scanned copy of his death certificate in my email. And I didn't even have to provide his passport/id/anything. Just his name.

Death certificates become public record after a period of time, depending on the state. In some states it’s 25 years after death, some more, some less.

https://www.usa.gov/death-certificate#:~:text=Can%20anyone%2...

As far as I can tell this is the same as in the EU: Death certificates can be publicly accessed for a fee after a period of time defined by member states.

I found some comments saying death certificates in the UK could be accessed as early as 6 months in some locations.

So I don’t see this as the US being uniquely terrible on privacy. This is how most of the western world does it. You just had experience with the US and assumed EU was different.

> we never really found out what had happened(to the point where we never really got any definitive proof that he had died).

I’m sorry for your loss, but doesn’t this imply that the US did do a good job of protecting his privacy? It wasn’t until the time limit had passed that you were able to find the death certificate.

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