Comment on UK Official Calls for Age Verification on VPNs to Prevent Porn Loophole
FishFace@lemmy.world 1 week agoAll of this, by the way, is because an investment trust and thinktank (yes, a lovely little conflict of interest) called Carnegie United Kingdom Trust pretty much wrote the OSA for the government. As an investment trust, they invest money in things, but being private, they don’t need to tell Joe Public what they invest in, nor to the Investees need to tell us. So basically, they invested in YOTI or some others like it, and are making money from it because so many sites are forced to have it to work in the UK.
Can you link more information about this conflict of interest? I can’t find anything about it.
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
FishFace@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I got around to watching this video… without having seen this guy before (and therefore having no reason to take what he says at face value), and with the “source” in his description being almost unrelated to the video content, all that’s left is that “Yoti is funded by trusts, Carnegie is a trust mentioned on Yoti’s website.”
That is conspiracy-theory level. The author doesn’t even go so far as to draw actual conclusions; he’s saying “we need to follow the money” which is reasonable, but you are saying “Carnegie invested in an age verifier and that’s why they wrote the law.” That’s going well beyond the facts. You wouldn’t stand for it when some moron tries to cast doubt on climate science and you shouldn’t stand for it now just because it tickles your biases.
Some of that money probably went to companies doing ID verification
Quite possibly. But almost certainly a lot of Carnegie’s money is going to companies who provide online services who now have much higher costs from doing age verification, content blocking and users fleeing, simply because there are a lot of companies in that position.
Soup@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Just a fun fact about “think tanks”, “institutes”, “foundations” and most of those little groups is that when they appear in the news there’s a solid chance that they’re being propped up by corpo money. Every time they appear you need to go double check their bias and you’ll often find that it will be they themselves saying they’re “a conservative think tank” and, if not that, there will likely be a Wikipedia article and a bunch of other sources confirming it. I’m sure there are good ones, but it’s largely just oil companies and banks and big tech funding some corrupt as hell “academics” in order to buy some credibility.
I loved when I got into with one person over climate change and all they could do was send me articles that use oil-backed think tanks and which quoted a climate scientist who’s such a huge liar that whole webpages exist to organize and debunk all his paid-for bullshit.