Welp.
All EU will just follow in the upcoming months.
@Onscreen5341 is affected as well
December 2025 in my country, all prepaid sims are now mandated to be ties to an ID, Otherwise those that didn’t work
And now the domino effect is coming
welp I better get into some money saving plans to move to japan and get myself together as soon as possible
though of course I don’t think japan is immune but it is possible that they can find a decent compromise and stuff
At least VPNs, Tor and Signal remain, unless eu countries go full UK and plan on banning VPNs
Yeah, I’m starting to get that. I’ll probably delete my remaining social media accounts soonish cause I promised myself I would if ID was required.
Off-topic, but how do I do link previews on here like the first post?
Same mindset here, takes a bit of time. 
The forum should unwrap it automatically for you normally.
If the website you’re sharing has proper OG tags of course. 
I have similar feelings. As a parent, I understand that in the “real world”, kids are not allowed inside adult establishments (bars, strip clubs, adult video store etc). We say no way. Online should be the same, although I don’t know the perfect technical solution to that.
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For me, this is clear. We’ve already passed the point of debating whether this is a good idea or not. We are now at the stage where we must fight for the path with the least problems and friction.
We need to demand that governments guarantee our identity is protected with end-to-end encryption.
We need to demand that our navigation and usage data is erased after X amount of time.
We need to demand that any database linking our identity is properly protected.
We need to demand access to audit the implementation.
We need to demand that the system is open source.
The list goes on. Now we need to discuss what comes next. We must make sure they understand that privacy and security are not optional, they are requirements.
Restricting the access to adult content for minors online is a sensible thing to propose. However, banning all social media for under-16s is not.
Such a ban drastically restricts their access to information and their participation in the political discourse. With the majority of public discussions taking place on social media, restricting access severely hinders their freedom of expression. A good example is the FridaysForFuture movement, where young people connected and shared their thoughts about climate change on social media:
FridaysForFuture is a youth-led […] movement that began […], after 15-year-old Greta Thunberg and other young activists sat in front of the Swedish parliament every schoolday for three weeks, to protest against the lack of action on the climate crisis. She posted what she was doing on Instagram and Twitter and it soon went viral. (From the website: fridaysforfuture.org)
The current debate misses the issue at hand entirely. Most social media sites are harmful. Not just for under 16s, but for everyone. A society will always face challenges when websites generate revenue by exploiting algorithms fueling hate in order to boost engagement.
The algorithmic processes targeted different vulnerabilities of neurodiversity, loneliness, and mental health. Initial content often focused on material that recognised and sympathised with social difference, exploring themes of loneliness or self-improvement. However, as more time was spent on the app, this content increasingly focused on anger and blame (from page 17 of the article: How algorithms popularise and gamify online hate and misogyny for young people).
The situation only get worse by bots spreading like the plague and large parts of the populous seemingly not possessing the media literacy to depict true from false.
There is not one clear solution, but these laws are misguided.
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Before all that, we need to convince people around us, our peers, why. There is no movement without people.
The issue here is partly that the EU commission has let Member States write age-verification laws, despite the DSA prohibiting MS blocking big platforms, as this an EU competence. In fact, those age-verification laws will be enforced by the EU commission, just not for all EU countries.