"Child safety" has always been one of the four horsemen of the erosion of civil liberties, but this is getting ridiculous. We now have a government-run pedophile ring so expansive that prosecuting the people involved would potentially collapse our entire government, and at the same time, we have California passing a law requiring your operating system (Android, Linux, Windows, whatever) to verify your age and provide that information to apps installed on your own devices. The irony here is that the developer of the world's second most popular operating system (Bill Gates) is implicated in all this too as a customer of Epstein's. As are execs at other major tech companies.
Their rationale for this bill is of course "to protect children". This is absolute tyrannical bullshit that will do nothing to increase the safety of children but grinds the gears forward to the total elimination of free, private speech. If anything, laws like this will make it easier for children to be targeted for abuse. You shouldn't need to provide an ID to use your own computer or access the internet. The internet is the single greatest tool for human speech, communication, and democracy since the advent of the printing press, and we cannot let them rip it away from us or gate it behind ID checks.
Gavin Newsom, who is considered a presidential frontrunner for dems in the next presidential election, signed this into law. There is zero chance I am voting for him after passing this bill.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/year-states-chose-s…
#Newsom #politics #democrats