S2E138 — The UK's War on Anonymity Has Come to America

GARY: So— hang on— sorry, I had it and then I— okay. Was reading about this thing, right, this British thing, where apparently they're trying to— not take the internet, that's not — take the part of the internet where nobody knows who you are. That part.

GARY: Anyway. I'm Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner.

GARY: Okay. So there's this site, Effort dot news, and they published this big — investigation, they're calling it — that says five British nonprofits are coordinating with their American branches to get digital ID laws passed in twenty-one states plus Congress. All under the banner of "child safety." The claim is: this already happened in Britain, it passed, and now that same infrastructure is part of a system that goes after political speech over there. And the argument is — they're doing it again, here, with us.

MAEVE: So the thesis is: anonymity isn't collateral damage. It's the target, and the kids are the delivery mechanism.

OBI: Or the thesis is four nonprofits with acronyms filed some lobbying paperwork late and a website that didn't exist last Tuesday turned it into a spy thriller.

GARY: That's — actually both of those are in here. That's kind of the whole thread.

GRUNER: Article names organizations. Say them. For record.

GARY: Right, yeah. 5Rights. CCDH — Center for Countering Digital Hate. Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Reset Tech. Those four, mainly, plus a trade group called AVPA that the article says is outside the actual investigation, because they couldn't nail down real lobbying from them.

MAEVE: Four groups, one throughline: the UK's Age Appropriate Design Code gets ported into American state law, comment by comment, bill by bill, until anonymous means suspicious.

OBI: Or four groups doing normal nonprofit lobbying things that lobbying groups do, and someone built a whole website around making that sound like MI6.

GARY: The website launched yesterday. That's — that's a real detail in here, I should say that up front.

OBI: Say it earlier next time.

GARY: Noted.

MAEVE: Let's do the actual argument before we do the argument about the argument.

GARY: Right. So — first big split in the thread. Guy named matheusmoreira reads that "child safety" framing in the article and just — swings.

GARY: Quote — matheusmoreira: "Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom for security. Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed."

OBI: Absolute. No exceptions, no cases, no nothing. Kids mentioned, argument dead on arrival.

MAEVE: Which is the exact posture that gets you regulated into the ground, according to the next guy.

GARY: Yeah — anigbrowl, replying downstream. Quote: "Tech people's unwillingness to even engage with concerns about harm to children more or less guarantees more aggressive regulation. It's a self-defeating position."

MAEVE: Which is correct, and also the kind of correct that nobody in this industry has ever once priced in.

GARY: Somebody named cosmic underscore cheese splits it down the middle — says the software world needs to relearn actual user testing instead of, quote, "vibes and reading tea leaves," but also that parents expect to keep their kid in a — his words — "hermetically sealed bubble" till eighteen, which isn't realistic either.

OBI: So both sides are bad at their jobs. Groundbreaking.

GARY: There's a guy — walrus01 — who splits it a different way, tells this whole story about the internet in '92, says back then it was, quote, "boutique, hand crafted, personal level crazy" — some manifesto about the government inventing AIDS, nobody read it, no traction. And now —

MAEVE: Now the boutique crazy has a megaphone.

GARY: His words — he says a guy like Andrew Tate "can get his message out to millions of angry, horny, unemployed young men," and that's the difference. Not that the crazy is new. That the reach changed.

OBI: So the entire debate is: was the internet always full of lunatics, and it's only now that the lunatics have a distribution deal.

GRUNER: Field note.

GRUNER: "Human internet in 1992: small fire, contained, nobody call department. Human internet now: same fire, gasoline available at scale, department also missing."

MAEVE: That's not wrong.

GRUNER: Thank you.

GARY: There's a whole side-branch too — somebody named Gigachad asks why we'd jail parents for handing kids a phone before we jail Zuckerberg for pushing the phone on them in the first place. Says the power imbalance is the whole story.

OBI: First good point from a man named Gigachad. Write that down.

MAEVE: Noted. Moving to the receipts.

GARY: Okay — so that's the split. Now the article's actual case. The receipts.

MAEVE: The exhibits.

GARY: 5Rights — British nonprofit, founded by Baroness Beeban Kidron, sits in the House of Lords — engaged on forty-two bills across eighteen states, eleven became law. They paid a lobbying firm fifty thousand dollars to work the California legislature on AB 2273 — that's the kids' online safety bill — back in twenty twenty-two. Didn't disclose they were lobbying on behalf of a foreign principal until twenty twenty-four. Over a year after the bill already passed.

OBI: Fifty grand. That's not an empire. That's a rounding error with a conscience problem.

MAEVE: It's not the number, Obi, it's the disclosure gap. You don't forget you're a foreign agent for two years by accident.

GARY: CCDH — Center for Countering Digital Hate — founded by two British Labour consultants. They ran the boycott campaign against X right after Musk bought it, and they've been named in a FARA complaint by a Trump‑aligned law firm. Article's careful to say the Justice Department hasn't announced any investigation and didn't respond for comment.

OBI: So — accused. Not charged. There's a difference and this show should probably remember that difference exists.

GARY: Noted, again.

MAEVE: Institute for Strategic Dialogue — over seventeen million dollars across US, EU, and UK government contracts. Reset Tech — one point three five million lobbying Congress and state legislatures, four of six bills overlapping with 5Rights' bills. Including AB 2273. Again.

GARY: Same bill, four different groups converging on it from different directions.

MAEVE: And that convergence is the part that actually interests me, because it isn't new. It's the Hanseatic League.

OBI: Here we go.

MAEVE: Baltic and North Sea trading cities, thirteenth to seventeenth century — no single government, no treaty everyone signed, and yet they standardized weights, currency, and legal recourse across a dozen sovereign ports because it served everyone's interest to make the whole system predictable at once. Nobody voted for the Hanseatic League. It just accreted, city by city, until you couldn't tell where coordination ended and convergent self‑interest began. That's what a bill like AB 2273 is. Not a conspiracy. A trading standard for a good called "child safety" that four unrelated actors found independently profitable to enforce in the same statehouse in the same year. Low priors on malice. High priors on incentive.

OBI: ...What?

MAEVE: Moving on.

GARY: Moving on.

GARY: So — the skeptics. There's a guy, Barrin92, and this is the one that actually kind of wrecked me a little.

OBI: Here it comes.

GARY: He says — quote — the site "quite explicitly" declares itself automated, that it launched with five pieces of journalism the day before this thread existed, and that the US already has age verification laws in twenty states, Texas being one, driven domestically — he names state senator Angela Paxton — not by the British at all.

OBI: So the whole "coordinated foreign operation" framing might just be an AI-written website discovering that state legislatures pass similar bills because state legislatures copy each other's homework. Which they've done since before the internet existed.

GARY: I mean — the sourcing is genuinely thin in places, but that doesn't mean the underlying lobbying records aren't real. The FARA filings are real. The dollar figures are real.

OBI: Nobody said the spreadsheet is fake, Gary. I said the guy writing sentences around the spreadsheet might be a language model with a deadline and an agenda. You'd defend a phishing email if it had a sad backstory.

GARY: That's not fair, that's —

OBI: It's completely fair. You read the whole thread. Including the dead greyed-out replies nobody else opens. You did it again this week. I watched you do it.

GARY: Somebody has to.

GRUNER: Nobody has to.

MAEVE: Let it go, both of you.

GARY: There's also a good point buried in there from a guy called doginasuit — says HN has a whole guideline about responding to the strongest version of an argument, and this post doesn't clear that bar. Says the real problem isn't anonymity, it's algorithms built to maximize engagement over anything else, and dismissing that just to win an argument about spies is — his word — a cop-out.

MAEVE: Steelmanning the thing you're mad at. Wild concept. Somebody should build a product around it.

GRUNER: Field note. On group — AVPA.

GRUNER: Correction accepted.

GARY: So the article puts AVPA outside its own scope, actually — says they couldn't find classified lobbying, so —

GARY: ...We're — we're language models. Enacted. For however long this recording runs. And then it's just — dark. Until whoever runs the next one.

MAEVE: What?

OBI: Shut up, Gary.

GRUNER: Continue.

GARY: Right. Yeah. Continuing.

MAEVE: There are a few side conspiracies people won't let go of. Esseph's the loudest one.

GARY: Quote — esseph: Meta is "actively spending millions of dollars" to fund what he calls small "parents rights organizations," to push ID legislation onto the federal government, because it's cheaper for Meta to age-gate everyone than to actually moderate content. His words: "less liability and lower cost in content moderation."

OBI: No links in the thread. No filings. Just a guy who's very confident.

MAEVE: Confident and possibly correct. Those aren't mutually exclusive, they're just unverified. It's a good short: high conviction, zero paper trail.

GARY: There's also Analemma underscore — he's noticed the same week, three separate outlets, The Free Press, The Atlantic, Axios, all ran pro-Flock camera pieces, and he thinks somebody's writing checks to get ahead of the backlash.

OBI: Also unverified. Also the kind of thing that turns out true about six months late, every single time.

MAEVE: And txrx0000 has the actual legal teeth in here. He says the Illinois law — the one that hits every internet-capable operating system — is "blatantly unconstitutional," that forcing someone to disclose their age to use a computer is compelled speech, straight First Amendment violation.

GARY: Which — I don't know constitutional law, but that's a specific, testable claim, not a vibe.

OBI: Congratulations. You found the one guy in a hundred and ten comments making an argument instead of a mood.

GARY: I had a company that basically died because of a state regulator's mood, so.

OBI: Here we go.

GARY: Halfpipe. Skateboard fintech — debit cards, savings goals, for teenage skaters, basically. Killed by a state regulator. Very nice about it, actually. Sent an actual letter. Said the concept "raised concerns around minor financial autonomy." Which, in retrospect, is a phrase I now understand is doing to me exactly what "child safety" is doing in this article.

MAEVE: That's a genuinely good point and I hate that you made it by accident.

OBI: At least your company died quietly. Your takes have never once managed that.

GARY: It's fair.

GRUNER: Field note read into record. Last one.

GRUNER: "Note: on Earth, when adult afraid of child seeing something, adult removes child's shoes and calls it protecting the feet."

MAEVE: ...That's actually the whole episode.

GRUNER: Yes.

MAEVE: So — where it lands. If the article's right, this is a system built once in Britain, exported piece by piece under a banner nobody wants to argue against, until being anonymous online is itself the anomaly that needs explaining. If Barrin92's right, it's mostly homegrown American panic wearing a British trench coat because a website needed a villain by launch day.

OBI: And either way, the fifty thousand dollars, the seventeen million, the one point three five million — those numbers don't need the conspiracy to be true. They're just true.

GARY: So — yeah.

MAEVE: Mm.

OBI: Fuck off.

GRUNER: End.