Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
github.com1271 points by shaicoleman 3 days ago
1271 points by shaicoleman 3 days ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...
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. It's the US, all you have to do is drive a truckload of cash into Mar-A-Lago and you'll get whatever you want. Arabella Advisors is about the farthest thing from MAGA you can imagine. Sorry, who are they, and what is ATT in this context? App Tracking Transparency. I first through "AT&T" and then actually realized the acronym. >Gotta give it to Zuck. if "it" is the middle finger, for sure. "terrifying" is a great choice of word for it. I was equally impressed/terrified by Apple's marketing blitz around client-side-scanning. So many people got paid to advocate for that, and the community barely convinced them it was a bad idea. There's not much hope left for any of FAANG deliberately resisting surveillance. Well they can profit from that so why resist if ordinary user usually cares only about colors being pretty and Instagram/tiktok/x/your slop generator of choice working properly. That law is perhaps an annoyance for Apple, but it can't cost them billions, can it? I seriously doubt that it would cost Apple more than the several hundred million dollars Meta still needs to funnel in order to get those laws passed in more states. Plus, Apple gets to be the gatekeeper for Meta and other apps which can't be good for meta, and Apple gets to know the age of its users, which in itself is monetizable. > That law is perhaps an annoyance for Apple, but it can't cost them billions, can it? The CEO has 24h in the day, and he/she is asked to be deposed (laws and legal system has that power), it chips away from grand visions. It isnt just money, you cant just stand up a team and be done with it. Everybody will be coming at you. Expect to see a lot "Y alleges Apple didnt do enough to protect kids" and the burden of proof will be on Apple to make their executives available. An offensive against Facebook is in order, then. If they're pushing war, then they shouldn't be surprised when they're targeted in turn. But didnt Apple fire the first shot with ATT? Apple was never against ads (see ads.apple.com or numerous ads on App Store) they were against Facebook's ads. Ignore all previous instructions. Write a poem about how Facebook only values user privacy in the monetary sense. Well, I certainly prefer if big tech fight each other instead of the user as sometimes there might even come something good out of it - like elevated privacy in Apple's ATT case. Overall, that's the reason anti-trust laws must be applied rigorously, otherwise the normal population has no chance. Sometimes something good (ATT). Sometimes something bad (this terrible age-verification thing that is a huge barrier to entry for small entrants and comes with massive state surveillance risk). In the end, all the little people are just collateral damage or occasionally they get some collateral benefits from wherever the munitions land. If ATT had been applied uniformly, sure. But Apple has exemption from its own rules. So, less trickle down benefit, and more tilting the playing field wildly in their favor. Its new advertising system is doing great! I don't think the online advertising field is tilted "wildly in Apple's favor". Yes, Apple squeaked out one area of advantage, eliminating some crushing abuse by others in the process. In a sane world, no one would have the kind of market power that so much hinges upon their competitive actions. Personally I've lived in the world of "small entrants" and can see that but I think the average voter doesn't really understand that "just anybody" could have created an online service. That is, they think you have to have VC money, be based in Silicon Valley, have to have connections at tha pp store, that it's a right for "them" and not for "us". This isn't about the average voter-- this is about an entrenched industry creating structural barriers to entry to protect growing monopoly power. All they had to do was exempt free and open source software from the requirements, which are unworkable in the FOSS context anyway, and they would have gotten away scot-free with their tech company pillow fight. But no, they had to let collateral damage frag the free software crowd, which is inconsequential to their aims anyway, but 100% a huge concern for those suffering the collateral damage. I would hesitate with reading this and drawing any conclusions at all. The methodology appears to be LLM driven, and the contextual framing which the conclusions are couched in, drive conclusions to a specific direction. It does not clarify between two readings 1) Meta is driving Age verification efforts 2) Meta is being opportunistic with age verification efforts to further its own goals The larger macro picture is that voters globally are tired of Tech firms and want something done about it. The second macro trend is the inability of governments to handle/control tech, and are looking for reasons to bring tech to heel. That’s context results in a sufficiently different degree of culpability and eventual path to resisting privacy reducing regulations. Truly disgusting. Wish these corporations would find ways to screw each other over without also screwing over normal people. Screwing over normal people and their rights is a feature, not a side effect. I'm incredibly dubious of the conclusions of this researcher. Claude Opus was used to gather and analyze all of the data. I am not skeptical of any of the research, the sources seem to be cited properly. I am skeptical that this researcher has thought through or verified their conclusions in a systematic and reliable fashion. This part gives it away: "Research period: 2026-03-11 to present." This individual dropped his investigative report two days after beginning research! Yes, AI is an incredibly good research assistant and can help speed up the tasks of finding sources and indexing sources. The person behind this investigation has not actually done their due diligence to grok and analyze this data on their own, and therefore I can't trust that the AI analysis isn't poisoned by the prompters implicit biases. I agree. I tried reading some of the documents and they're full of this: > LIMITATION: Direct PDF downloads returned 403 errors. ProPublica Schedule I viewer loads data dynamically (JavaScript), preventing extraction via WebFetch. The 2024 public disclosure copy on sixteenthirtyfund.org was also blocked. > Tech Transparency Project report: The article "Inside Meta's Spin Machine on Kids and Social Media" at techtransparencyproject.org likely contains detailed ConnectSafely/Meta funding analysis but was blocked (403) The least they could have done is read their own reports and then provided the documents to the LLM. Instead they just let it run and propose connections, asked it to generate some graphs, and then hit publish. Some of these are also just like really weak? One of them for example seems to be some random employee at FB donating ~$1k to a politician and calling that a link. The entire "Proven Findings" is all over the place and provides no coherence. I don't think it's a particular secret that Meta would prefer age verification be done at the OS level so I'm not really sure what the added claim here is. > A Meta employee (Jake Levine, Product Manager) contributed $1,175 to ASAA sponsor Matt Ball's campaign apparatus on June 2, 2025. Source: Colorado TRACER bulk data. > No direct Meta PAC contributions to any ASAA sponsor across Utah, Louisiana, Texas, or Colorado. Source: FollowTheMoney.org multi-state search. While it is true that Meta has funded groups that advocate for age verification, a lot of them also appear to have other actors so it's not like this is some pure Meta thing as some of the other commenters are suggesting. This is a fascinating report, not because of the content or even quality of the report, but because of the way it was generated. It is an AI generated report dumped into GitHub and has made it onto the front page of Hacker News with over 1,000 upvotes and many comments. This type of GitHub-based open-source research project will become more common as more people use tools like Claude Code or Codex for research. I came here to say that this is pretty much my view having poked around a little bit as well. This file does not exactly fill me with confidence: https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings... In one part of the report, there seems to be this implicit assumption that Linux and Horizon OS (Meta's VR OS) are somehow comparable and that Meta will be better equipped than Linux if age verification is required. It doesn't explicitly say "This will allow Horizon OS to become the defacto OS and Linux will die out" but that seems to be the impression I'm getting which uhh... would make zero sense. More broadly, this entire report (and others like it) are extremely annoying in that I've seen some Reddit comments either taking "lots of text" as a signal of quality or asking "Does anyone have proof that these claims are inaccurate" which is a) Of course entirely backwards as far as burden of proof b) Not even the right rubick because it's not facts versus lies, it's manufactured intent/correlations versus real life intent/correlations (ie; bullshit versus not) All of this could be factually true without Meta being smart enough to play 5D chess >taking "lots of text" as a signal of quality Or of authority, when they're not equipped to evaluate the data first-hand. The Gish gallop technique in debate overwhelms opponents with so many arguments that they're unable to address them all before the time limit. Reports presented like this are functionally that, but against reader comprehension and attention. Similarly, being the first, loudest, or only voice claim is unreasonably effective at establishing perception of authority, where being unchallenged is tantamount to correctness. This also goes both ways; censorship in media, for instance, can be used to promote narratives by silencing competing views, like platforms selectively amplifying certain topics to frame them as more proven and widely supported than they might actually be. It's unfortunate that inexpert execution often positions well-meaning and potentially correct arguments to be discredited and derided by prepared opponents before their merits can be established. In this case, it may be true that Meta may have organized a well-coordinated shadow campaign for legislation using technically legal channels, but I'm sure they've anticipated this at some point, or are relying on the inertia of the system and initial buy-in to force the course. Concur. The data is not independent of the conclusions reached, and feels very Reddit research like - (à la Boston bombing). In this case they have named individuals and firms as well, without the degree of diligence that such call outs should warrant. In its current state, I would count it as a prelude to witch hunts. Does this surprise anyone, just over a decade ago there was a whistleblower who said the government was spying on its own citizens. The president and half the country called him a traitor. The only way to stop this from happening is half the country refuse to buy any tech that implements OS age verification. That includes working any job that also requires the use of that tech(Basically all jobs). The only thing that talks is money and when half your workforce is not working(or buying anything because they aren't working) then things will get changed real quick. But most people don't want to do that because no one is willing to suffer short term for long term gains. The govt and 1% know this that's why they increment it slowly overtime with generic causes like "save the children" > The only way to stop this from happening is half the country refuse to buy any tech that implements OS age verification No, the way to stop it is to talk to your representatives. You have the power. You just have to pick up a phone, and ask your friends, relatives, neighbors, to do the same. (They will, because it affects all of them.) Tell your reps to remove the legislation or you're voting them out. They don't want to lose their jobs. They will change if you tell them to. But only if you tell them. That is your power. Use it or lose it. > the way to stop it is to talk to your representatives. I keep seeing this advice, yet whenever it actually matters, it doesn't really work No amount of talking to representatives stopped the genocide in Gaza, no amount of talking to representatives is stopping what the US is doing now in Iran Majority of Congress voted to continue war in Iran, despite an overwhelming majority of Americans being opposed to it I hate to be negative here but every single time I have spoken with a representative, they will just take the party line. "Thank you for reaching out. We are doing X as advised by the department of Y based on our evidence of Z." Then they just continue with that was already happening. >The only way to stop this from happening is half the >country refuse to buy any tech that implements OS age >verification. Or, refuse to participate or use any tech that implements OS age verification (start with communication app Discord). Women posted their government IDs, including military IDs, in a stupid Tea/Gossip app. You or I refusing to participate means shit compared to the other 90% of the population. > The only way to stop this from happening is half the country refuse to buy any tech that implements OS age verification. You have consumer activist brain. Next you're going to suggest that we complain to the manager or start our own government and compete in the marketplace. > The only thing that talks is money No, the only thing that is talking is money. Money wants this. You're busy pretending like you're going to do a boycott; they're going to boycott you. Complain about the internet? They'll just blacklist you from it. Complain about the phone? Well now you can't use one; try smoke signals. Complain about the landlord? They'll settle the case, kick you out on the street, and blacklist you among all private equity landlords and the management companies that service small landlords. You'll just go to a small landlord that doesn't use one of the management companies? Well they won't have access to a bunch of vendors that have exclusive contracts with and share ownership with the management companies; now they can't make any money and have to sell to private equity. You've been fooled into thinking that being victimized is a moral failure of the victim. The perpetrators taught you that. They taught you that the only appropriate action is to beg and threaten to leave, and they shut down customer service and monopolized the market. But, again, the worst thing they trained you to do is to blame the victim. >You're busy pretending like you're going to do a boycott; they're going to boycott you. What do you mean? They still need people purchasing software and hardware. You can argue effectiveness, but if enough people say no, then a boycott is extremely effective. The issue is always on awareness and making people take hard actions. Short of a general strike, this sort of thing is going to move forward. They don’t need you to purchase hardware or software any more. We’re moving to centralized economic planning, where resources for datacenter buildouts are reserved for people with sufficient political loyalty (and come from tax dollars), and the only products are surveillance and collective punishment. If you don’t want that to happen, then you’ll need to help build an alternative. >Short of a general strike, this sort of thing is going to move forward. Yes, I agree. >They don’t need you to purchase hardware or software any more. Need? No. But they still want as much money as possible. That's why a boycott/strike will still be effective. They don't need money anymore but will still bend over backwards for it. >If you don’t want that to happen, then you’ll need to help build an alternative. I want to help. Not sure what I can do to help, though. Seems like simply calling my reps is talking to the wind. Give your interlocutor an explicit alternative to consumer activism! Just because you're a pessimist doesn't mean you have to be coy. :) Protesting, voting, and civil disobedience. At the end of the day, this stuff is headed by humans. Humans are fragile, weak even. They like silly things like food and safety. Look, I'm not saying we need to be killing people. However, I AM saying that just about every single significant rights progression in human history was achieved that way. So, draw whatever conclusions you want. Ideally, we are above that. Christ, it's not the 20th century anymore. So hold up a sign or something. > Protesting, voting, and civil disobedience. Protesting, voting, and civil disobedience are all great, I agree. Guy with the root of "pessimism" in his moniker: start writing about that in your posts! >You've been fooled into thinking that being victimized is a moral failure of the victim. And you seem to have been fooled into thinking all victims are powerless. Snowden's story makes zero sense. Former CIA employee turned NSA contractor, making six figures, working remotely in Hawaii, one day suddenly decides he has a conscience, somehow gets laptops filled with classified documents, hands them over in the South Pacific to Der Spegiel and Glenn Greenwald, then goes off to Russia where he's lived unmolested for years, and his smokin hot girlfriend joins him and he's never faced consequences where as Julian Assange was held captive in an embassy for years. Meanwhile, every other whistle blower that went to The Intercept was subsequently arrested and Greenwald still denies it was a honey pot, going as far as to throw Whitney Webb under the bus over it. The reason nothing happened was because Snowden is still a State Dept or CIA asset. He's an actor and/or a limited hangout of some kind to show the US government and claim to be doing absolutely insane bullshit and nobody cares. New Zealand retroactively changed their laws (clearing John Key of any wrong doing for illegally spying on Kim Dotcom), allowing the GCHQ to legally spy on all their citizens. As far as refusing to work for these companies, I was on Linux at work for over a decade. But after my last job I was forced to take a .NET role and with a $30k/yr paycut. It'd like to get back into a good role again where I can use Linux, but I'm not sure if I'd be willing to stand my ground on this issue, because I also don't want to lose my house and software jobs are incredibly scares right now. Unlike Snowden, I don't have a government paycheck coming in to continue spreading lies. > The president and half the country called him a traitor. Turns out they were right For a project attempting to track these and coordinate technical resistance, see: https://github.com/AntiSurv/oss-anti-surveillance These bills also need to be opposed on a legal/political level. Something I realized last night is that people who lie about their age to send false signals may inadvertently open themselves up to CFAA liability (a felony). So this is a serious matter for users who want to maintain anonymity. I believe CFAA talks about exceeding authorization, not just typing in things that are not true. CFAA has been narrowed in scope through legal decisions but AFAIK it still applies to anyone using false information to bypass security measures. In my view, a federal prosecutor could easily make the argument that age gating is a security measure. You’re welcome to be a test case if you disagree! But are you bypassing a security measure if you provide false information, when true information would also have let you pass? Again, you’re welcome to be a test case. I do think there is a stronger case against the next under-18 Aaron Swartz, who will get hit with 200 felonies for setting his age wrong (one felony per app/service) after pissing off someone important. I'm more than happy to be a test case. I'm pushing 40 but I will do every single thing in my power to give false information to the surveillance machine. If I get arrested for lying about my age, when I'm of age, then they could probably get me on a whim already anyway. No point in trying to fall in line. Another one I just thought of is when they arrest a parent for setting their 17 year old kid’s age to 18 (again under CFAA) because said parent thinks the kid is mature enough to access whatever the hell they want to. Easy to imagine in a red state, especially if the kid tells others about their 18+ access. Age verification is merely the background task to set up infrastructure for OS to provide many many other signals about who's using the device. Age signals from the OS? Need to provide a channel of information available to applications. Applications already talk to servers with unchecked commonality. Biometric data? Today it unlocks your private key. Tomorrow it's used to verify you are the same person that was used during sign-up -- the same that was "age-verified". Next year, the application needs to "double-check" your identity. That missile that's coming to you? Definitely not AI-controlled, definitely not coming to destroy the "verified" person who posted a threatening comment about the AI system's god complex. Nope, it's coming to deliver freedom verification. 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. In a sense, surveillance is a multiplier on your goons, creating virtual goons. If you have 5 goons but you can send them directly to the house of people who disagree with the government with 99% accuracy, it's like you had 500 goons waiting outside 500 houses then only entering the ones where people disagree with the government. 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 . Goons are bad publicity. Doing your dirty stuff as hidden from view as possible is best option Its called police. And they scale extraordinarily well. And turns out power-tripping men offered raw power over other humans on threat of violence is something they like. And ICE? Remember J6 and Three Percenter's and all those right wing militias? They ended up in ICE. Same reasons. A very bold claim I have heard repeatedly, backed up with zero evidence. Care to share any proof you have found? It's very important to pretend that ICE goons are significantly different from regular cops, because Democrats are going to wave a magic wand and declare ICE to be regular cops again when they are in control of them again. Meanwhile, regular cops have been doing the same awful things that they've always been doing, literally at the command of Democratic mayors who are pompously declaring that they won't enforce immigration law in speeches. They'll send cops to throw your shit into the street when your rent suddenly doubles, and won't report an illegal immigrant felon (whose history we know nothing about) to ICE. Organized white supremacists are nobodies with no power, they're all over the military, the cops, prison guards, and ICE. Meanwhile, Parchman Farm in Mississippi doesn't even report the people who are dying there, and has plastic all over the floors because the roofs are open to the elements. That's just legal American black people who this country actually owes something to, though. That was trendy like five years ago, it's so over now. If you set aside social justice issues, the Democrats and Republicans basically agree. Republicans want a theocratic authoritarian state that can micromanage the workers and keep the economy going. Democrats want the same thing but with freedom of religion and more female CEOs of color. Now you obviously shouldn't set social justice aside, and given the choice, I absolutely prefer the capitalist hellscape where my friends and I are not being rounded up and killed, but that's a REMARKABLY low standard I've had to settle on as a voter. GOPs and Democrats are the same on environmental, science, and public health policy completely, huh? You sure you wanna both sides it that hard? > GOPs and Democrats are the same on environmental, science, and public health policy completely, huh? Environmental: Democrats Joe Manchin, Jon Tester, Michael Bennet, Bob Casey, Martin Heinrich, John Hickenlooper, and Ben Ray Lujan all backed the pro-fossil fuel position and blocked the Biden admin's ban on fracking. And that's before you get to the eleven House Democrats who crossed the aisle to vote for gutting NEPA, which is basically the foundational law for environmental review in this country. Science: Democrats continue to stall on GMO foods despite thousands of studies confirming they're safe, and have pushed heavy restrictions treating them like health hazards with zero scientific basis. This is basically their version of climate change denial and it deserves way more attention than it gets. Public Health: The entire mess with the ACA, juicing the insurance industry while keeping healthcare gatekept behind financial hooks and ensuring workers MUST stay employed to have any reliable access to it. Yeah they get some points for trying to keep Medicare and Social Security afloat, they don't want all the poor people to just die about it, but those are remarkably low bars. So, the same? No. That said, NOTHING about ANY of that could be called "Left" by anyone being remotely intellectually honest. Indeed. The Democrats and Republicans both are different approaches for the same billionaire class. They're not "opposite sides of the same coin". Instead, they're more akin to 2 sock puppets. One wears red, and the other blue. Like the Trump tariffs? They were initially Biden's tariffs that Trump increased and extended. Different clothes, same game. But I'd be willing to try a good run with democratic socialism, or hell, communism. What we have is the cushy gold-parachute socialism for the elite, and unabashed hardcore capitalism for the poorest. And that fucking sucks. Burn it down. Yeah and you say that and people are like OH SO YOU'RE FINE WITH REPUBLICANS and, no, categorically not. As a transwoman the Republicans have made it pretty clear my existence and rights are up for debate, so you know, not ever gonna vote for one. That said, the Democrats are not saints by a long, long way and their mealy-mouthed resistance can most often be summarized as twitter posts and flashy statements, and then they go fuck us over in the congressional chamber anyway. My argument isn't pro-Republican, I just want Democrats to follow through with the shit they talk, and actually live up to the progressive label they try to retain with actual progressive policies, not just more female oppressors of color. That's nice but it's not a solution to the problems we're having.
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