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“Think of the Children”: The Big Lie Used to Justify the End of Internet Freedom

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The Epstein scandal, Gaza genocide and 50 years of neoliberalism have shown beyond doubt that our “mis-leadership” class don’t give a flying fig about “the children”.

If the past half century of unfettered neoliberalism has taught us anything, it is that the people in power couldn’t care less about the general populace — especially the children, since they are the future and neoliberals care not for the future. As Richard Murphy explains, “neoliberalism is not a mistake but a system built to shift power from people to corporations. This politics of destruction delivers an economics of failure with underfunded public services, rising inequality and shrinking democracy.”

Lambert boiled it down to two simple rules of neoliberalism: They are:

Rule #1: Because markets.

Rule #2: Go die!

The results speak for themselves. Across many of the world’s most advanced economies, younger generations are experiencing collapsing living standards, slower wealth accumulation, and higher costs of living compared to their parents and grandparents. In the US, the world’s richest country (in terms of total private wealth), life expectancy is collapsing. The children of the new generations will presumably grow up in even worse conditions than their forebears, especially if AI destroys as many white collar jobs as hoped/feared.

Again, this is not a mistake. The revelations of the recent partial release of the heavily redacted Epstein files have confirmed beyond reasonable doubt that many among the West’s “mis-leadership” class (h/t Max Blumenthal) care not a jot about child welfare or wellbeing.

Just imagine what we might learn if all six million pages of the Epstein files were released, with only the victims’ personal details redacted. Independent experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to investigate Epstein and his associates, who include some of the most prominent figures in global politics, business, science and culture, have warned that the abuses we know about may constitute “crimes against humanity.”

From Al Jazeera and Reuters (emphasis my own):

The [UNHCR experts] explained that the records tell a story of dehumanisation, racism and corruption.

“So grave is the scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach of these atrocities against women and girls, that a number of them may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity,” the experts wrote…

They added that the revelations from the files suggest a “global criminal enterprise”.

“All the allegations contained in the ‘Epstein Files’ are egregious in nature and require independent, thorough, and impartial investigation, as well as inquiries to determine how such crimes could have taken place for so long,” the experts said…

In Tuesday’s statement, the experts on the UN panel slammed the heavy redactions in the Epstein files that appear to shield the identities of powerful figures.

“The reluctance to fully disclose information or broaden investigations, has left many survivors feeling retraumatized and subjected to what they describe as ‘institutional gaslighting’,” the UN experts said.

Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and the US’ suffocating energy blockade of Cuba — both supported, tacitly or explicitly, by most of the “liberal democracies” of the collective West — are further confirmation, if needed, that the people in government do not give a flying family blog about the children, especially poor brown-skinned ones in the so-called “Global South”.

In early November 2023, the UK’s then-Labour Party leader and current prime minister, Keir Starmer, said Israel “must have the right” to cut off the water and electricity to the people (and children) of Gaza, just as the US is cutting off all energy to the people (and children) of Cuba. For Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, the collective punishment of 2 million Gazans, of whom around 50% are under 18, is a perfectly reasonable form of self-defence for Israel.

Starmer, of course, also appointed Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US despite knowing at the time that Mandelson had stayed at Epstein’s New York townhouse while Epstein was serving a prison sentence for, among other things, procuring a child for prostitution.

In short, senior Western politicians like Starmer don’t care about the welfare or wellbeing of children, apart from perhaps their own. Which is why every time they tell us that their escalating assaults on online speech, privacy and anonymity are necessary in order to “protect the children” from the dangers of the Internet, it should be treated with total disdain.

That’s not to say that the Internet, as currently constituted, doesn’t pose serious risks to children. As the German financial journalist Norbert Häring argues, something should have been done a long time ago to protect children and young people from harmful and dangerous content, online and smartphone addiction, bullying and manipulation (machine translation):

This should have been addressed at least a decade ago. Some of this also applies to adults. The only question is how to do it, and with which intentions.

It takes little imagination to think of effective measures that could have been taken a long time ago: Enforcement of data protection law. Bans on algorithmic suggestion systems for social media to prevent tech companies from deliberately creating online addiction, opinion manipulation and artificially increased radicalisation. Only filters under the control of the users (or their parents) should have been allowed. Development of a child protection app by digital corporations or governments that allows parents to effectively protect their children from pornography and online addiction. Smartphone bans in schools.

Instead, governments like the UK’s did next to nothing for more than a decade and are now launching an unprecedented — and quite possibly, irreversible — assault on online speech, privacy and anonymity, which was the goal all along. As the UK’s Home Secretary recently admitted, “her ultimate vision” is to “achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon… that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.”

In recent days, Starmer has confirmed that his government is examining new powers to move beyond social media age limits and begin imposing ID checks for VPN use and chatbots — for the children of course.

When the UK’s Starmer government made age verification checks mandatory for accessing pornography and other supposedly adult content online in July, it sparked an explosion in the use of VPNs, which allow anonymous access to the Internet use. As we had previously warned, these online age verification checks, that are now proliferating across the collective West’s ostensibly liberal democracies, trap not just minors but everyone in their web. 

The Starmer government’s predictable response to the explosion in VPN use was to double  down by including amendments to its Orwellian-titled Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that seek to ban children from using VPNs.

“The only way such restrictions could be enforced effectively would be for VPN providers to require all users to undergo age-assurance measures,” said Maya Thomas, Big Brother Watch’s Legal and Policy Officer. “Having to provide ID or a biometric face scan to access a VPN utterly defeats the point of a technology designed to enhance privacy online.”

The Starmer government is by no means an outlier. When it comes to imposing age verification rules, including on VPNs, the collective West appears to be acting in almost perfect unison. Even the Heritage Foundation, the conservative US think tank that devised the Project 2025 blueprint for Trump 2.0, is fully on board.

In a recent speech at the World Governments Summit in Dubai, Spain’s Premier Pedro Sánchez announced that his government, like its counterparts in the UK, France, Italy, Denmark, Greece, Germany and Australia, is planning to ban access to social media for minors. Other measures aimed at increasing centralised control of digital platforms will also be adopted.

As readers may recall, Sánchez was one of the first European leaders to publicly call for an end to online anonymity on social media as well as forcing “media platforms to link every user account to a European digital identity wallet,” which he did from the most fitting of places: the World Economic Forum’s 2025 annual meeting in Davos.

Spain is also one of the first EU countries to wield a legal sledgehammer against VPN use — not to protect the children, but to protect the interests and profits of the “La Liga” football (soccer) league and affiliated broadcasters against pirate users of their services. From Computer Hoy (machine translated):

Two of the world’s top VPNs, NordVPN and ProtonVPN, are required ´by judicial order to block IP addresses requested by LaLiga. If they do not, they will face criminal proceedings. There  consequences. Crucially, there is no right of appeal against the judicial ruling.

As has already happened in Italy, the court decision may cause NordVPN and ProtonVPN to leave Spain, leaving hundreds of thousands of innocent users who have nothing to do with pirate IPTV lists unprotected.

This growing crackdown on VPNs threatens to do away with one of the most important tools that allow journalists, activists and ordinary people to use the Internet without being monitored and having their online activity tracked and stored.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, the right to online anonymity is a fundamental pillar of a free internet:

Many people rely on anonymity to speak freely. LGBTQ+ youth, survivors of abuse, political dissidents, and countless others use aliases to explore identity, find support, and build community safely. When identity checks become a condition of participation, many users will simply opt out. The chilling effect isn’t only about whether an ID is permanently linked to an account; it’s about whether users trust the system enough to participate in the first place. When you’re worried that what you say can be traced back to your government ID, you speak differently—or not at all.

No one should have to choose between accessing online communities and protecting their privacy.

In a previous post on this topic, NC reader Baron noted that VPN bans are unlikely to work anyway — at least not without breaking some very important things in the process:

VPNs are a very standard part of business IT. They are simply a means to connect remote computers together on the same virtual network. Support for them is normally inbuilt into operating systems, and hardware network companies will normally provide desktop applications to support VPN setup on their routers.

VPNs are about as common as internet proxies or email. You can’t just “ban” them without breaking the backbone of modern IT systems since the late 1990s.

This warning has been echoed in recent days by many UK-based businesses that use VPNs to secure their computer systems. Some fear that they will be inadvertently caught by the Starmer government’s plans to restrict their use. From Computer Weekly:

[I]t is unclear how the [government’s] proposals will affect businesses, including small companies, that rely on VPNs to secure their computers and to communicate securely.

TechUK, which represents more than 1,000 tech companies, told Computer Weekly that the proposals didn’t appear to have been fully worked out yet and that it was hoping more details would emerge in a government consultation due to be published next month.

James Baker, a programme manager and campaigner at the Open Rights Group, said that cyber security authorities including the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, advocate the use of VPNs to enhance online safety.

“Implementing age verification for VPNs could undermine their privacy benefits and pose challenges for legitimate users, including young individuals seeking online privacy and security. We risk trading one risk posed to young people for another,” he said.

Elsewhere on the old continent, Germany’s largest political party, the CDU, is pushing for a real-name social media mandate and online ID checks. Again, the goal is to kill off what remains of online privacy and anonymity, reports Reclaim the Net:

Germany’s governing CDU is preparing to discuss a proposal that would fundamentally alter the architecture of online speech by tying it to verified real-world identities.

At the upcoming federal party congress in Stuttgart on February 20 and 21, the Schleswig-Holstein branch of the Christian Democratic Union, the party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, will push not only for a minimum age for social media (which would require users to show ID) but for a “Klarnamenpflicht” that would require users to register with their real names and confirmed identities.

This identity mandate is key to the motion. The state association led by Minister President Daniel Günther argues: “A real-name requirement creates greater accountability, facilitates legal enforcement, and strengthens trust in digital discourse.”

But it also, ironically, makes for a less trusted Internet. Take the case of Discord, an online chat service popular with gamers that recently unveiled new requirements for some users to verify their age by submitting a government ID or facial scan in order to access certain features. Discord reports over 200 million monthly active users, making it one of the largest platforms used by gamers to chat.

Following the announcement, Google searches for Discord alternatives have spiked worldwide, reports the BBC. Some social media users claim to have already cancelled their Discord subscriptions as a result:

[F]or Alastair and other streamers keen to protect themselves and their followers online, the damage is already done.

‘A dangerous precedent’

Toby, who streams as Tubbo, is a British content creator known for his Minecraft streams, with over 5.2 million followers on Twitch and 2.7 million on YouTube.

Despite Discord’s assurances, he says he would not trust his data would be kept secure if required to verify his age.

“I just think it’s kind of a dangerous precedent for social media companies to request 3D scans of your face or official documents without there being any kind of knowledge of how that information is being protected or stored,” he tells the BBC.

It hardly helps matters that Discord already suffered a data breach last October in which official ID photos of 70,000 users were “potentially” leaked. Even more worrisome: some UK-based users were recently notified that they had been selected as participants of a trial of age checking software by Persona, a US-based identity verification company financially backed by Founders Fund, Peter Thiel’s venture capital arm.

Thiel, as regular readers will already know, is the co-founder of Silicon Valley’s most controversial firm, Palantir, as well as a key mentor and financial patron to US Vice President JD Vance. Both Thiel and Palantir feature prominently in the scandals surrounding both Epstein and Peter Mandelson.

As governments rush to adopt online age verification rules, companies like Persona are increasingly being used by major online platforms to carry out biometric age checks. But how secure and trustworthy are these companies?

Given Persona’s ties to Thiel and by extension, Palantir, a company that provides data analytics tools to ICE and which has partnered with the Israeli Ministry of Defence to provide data and AI capabilities supporting Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, it’s perhaps no surprise that some Discord users are looking for alternative platforms.

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14 comments

  1. t

    Meanwhile, we’re all waiting for any social media platform to clean up bots and engagement farmers keeping the field clear for actual human people who want to talk about knitting or argue about versions of STAR Trek.

  2. Carolinian

    Of course the big question in all of this is whether governments who want to control the internet to cover up their incompetence are competent to control the internet. After all “think of the children” was the excuse by our Congress as far back as the nineties to gain control. And as the above says the opponents of control have themselves been economic actors taking advantage of weak government rules to build their online businesses. In the beginning Google stayed away from DC and while figures like Musk and Bezos are now heavily involved with government that carries the risk for them of another political party coming after them. In fact the Biden admin threats against Musk were his stated reason for signing on with Trump.

    Anyhow good luck to Europe. Here in America we have our own tinpot dictator to deal with.

  4. fjallstrom

    Read a age check solution recently that would demand a minimum of administration and a minimum of privacy violation.

    Just have booze vendors – who already have to check age – sell a “adult token”. Instead of enforcing identity checks, enforce “adult token” check. Include cash payment, no registry of who bought what token and the ability to buy multiple tokens, and you have an easy system to “protect the children”.

    This is useful to demonstrate that they are in fact not protecting children, they are creating even worse surveillance. Which they can’t defend, or they would.

    1. Olivier

      A bit facetious maybe but (for real) in Germany there is the PostIdent.

      It is of course no coincidence that such privacy-preserving methods are not being considered.

  6. Lefty Godot

    I support age verification limits on social media. No one under 70 should be allowed on any social media (I make an exception for blogs that have no algorithmic aspect, if anyone wants to count those as social media). And old Facebook fossils should be allowed to age out, of course, so no need to restrict them.

    If social media are harmful to children, they are harmful to everyone.

  7. Fastball

    We invaded Afghanistan because of those poor women confined to their homes and unable to get an education, doncha know? Although it seems perfectly ok in Saudi Arabia.

  8. bertl

    I think the real point is that the dream of total visibility is just one more significant indicator of Western élites highly rational fear of institutional collapse in the face of coordinated reaction by us plebs acting in concert in response to the ever more rapid vicious cycle of economic and social breakdown which the neo-libs and neo-cons have gifted us over the last half century.

  10. boots

    A tween victim of the 764 tendancy of The Com is in the custody of a hospital where I work. We get a dozen or so a year I estimate. At just one small all-ages hospital. She’s fansigned. Was manipulated into livestreaming it and other CSAM, over the last few years.

    The great majority of our under-18 behavioral health patients, and the great majority of our 5-11s, have seen Elsagate material. Maybe a third to half watch it compulsively. On a freshly installed browser, searching for italian brainrot, like Ballerina Cappucina, leads you directly to Elsagate material via persistant algorithmic suggestion.

    This is the world Epstein’s associates made, and it’s the exact same world that wants those kids’ 3D face scans, birthdates, location data, genetic sequences, deepest thoughts to AI companions, electronic medical records, undivided iris-tracked attention on school chromebooks and recreational content consumption, etc.

    May I propose, instead, a speed limit for the internet and a school typewriter revolution, or at least a return to single-tasking DOS.

    Those who urge pearl-clutching seem to think of novel ways to groom, manipulate, harm, and control “the children.” Those of us who work with what results never think of “the children,” we think of specific children, like this child right here, and what you (not you Yves; the Epstein-list “you”) did to her.

  12. Lefty Godot

    Mike Males, on his blog, regularly disputes the arguments for harmful effects of social media on teens and tweens, by referencing large statistical studies that fail to show an effect. Mostly he sees this as another moral panic to deflect attention from what’s really making these kids miserable (crappy home lives, mostly) and to point the audience at other imaginary dragons that need slaying. In this article he takes on the UK’s panic that misogynistic social media are causing an epidemic of knife-wielding teenage boys killing girls, something for which there is no evidence but that has everyone from Keir Starmer on down Very Concerned and in “we must do something!” mode. There are certainly individuals very much harmed by exposure to social media, even if those harms don’t occur often enough to make a statistically significant difference in overall numbers; but the idea that their harmfulness is okay for people above a certain age but unthinkable for those beneath that age is both illogical and, usually, dishonest, in that the argument is often made in order to foist changes on society that have an ulterior motive with no connection to children’s well-being. Algorithmic social media that require you to give up your privacy as a condition for participation is bad, whether you’re a teen or an adult. Period.

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