Part of it has got to be considered rank incompetence. I think that governments can and should take an interest in what happens on the internet, but they're going about it in what is simultaneously the most visible and least effective way possible. What they should be doing is going behind the scenes and just controlling the algorithms to suppress the things they don't like and boost the things they do - like it or not, that's what Musk did to Twitter, and we've seen how big of a cultural shift tweaking those levers can create. When I think of a future "competent fascist" administration, this is what I think about, people who understand the powers at their disposal as a result of 21st century technology and use them effectively instead of a bunch of old people bumbling around.

I agree save for your last couple sentences, which is just conservative individualist talking point silliness.

f you're concerned about kids' online engagement, then give kids reasons to exist in the real world, give them third spaces, and parks, and clubs, and places to meet up and things to do, give them education about online behaviour, encourage real socialisation, hell even build new and more attractive spaces online that are safer. There are plenty of society-level solutions to this problem which are almost certainly cheaper, more effective, and far more beneficial.

I think the past 20 years of an "anonymous" internet has been a honeypot of sorts. People have been on Discord, YouTube, Tiktok, Reddit, etc. discussing their beliefs/actions candidily. It was assumed that we were tracked largely for advertising purposes, which was fine because it was mostly anonymized data. It was always my assumption when I was younger, that I would change my behavior on the internet once we lost that anonymity. What didn't occur to me is that everything I've ever said or done on the internet would be captured and used retroactively. I don't think a lot of people realize or understand that this is possible.

Now these platforms are requiring biometric data to access those profiles (or will be within a couple of years). Suddenly all of that historical information (literal decades of reddit posts, for instance) behind your username is now associated with your personal identity. Stuff you did/said when you were 15 years old is something that you might not think about, but companies like Palantir are using it to construct a profile on you.

The best case in all of this is its just used to implement an even more invasive advertising model. The worst case (and I agree with the OP, it's where we are headed), is a full scale crackdown using historical data as a predictor of future/present behavior.

I don't think it's an accident that the same companies who helped Israel carry out a genocide are now trying to build gigantic data centers for AI domestically. I think part of the ruling class' obsession with AI is because they know were in a class war and they know this is the end game. They intend to win through whatever means possible. They even anticipate and are preparing for large-scale unrest around data center construction and AI.

Read about signature strikes if you want to be truly terrified about this shit. Here is Signal's president Meredith Whitaker talking about it. She has longer talks but I can't find them atm. Signature Strikes have already been used even as far back as the Obama administration and as recently as Israel's/USA's attack on Iran and the genocide in Gaza. They're very real, and I think it's naive to believe it would never happen here.

Have you ever once seen a statistic or government official saying a single thing about how many children have been protected or from what? For a data guzzling society with a bunch of data centers you think it would come up if they were legislating about it

Getting the kinds under control and under the approved government narratives is really a secondary or tertiary objective. The real reasons are mass surveillance with attached ID and let the social media companies really to know who is human and who is a bot so that they can get better training data for AI, that has been getting poisoned their own chatbots.

I think it largely is tbh, just that llm allow sentiment analysis on any amount of data. digital id by 2030 have been bubbling around since 2020 (even before that, but covid made them more tenable due to ease of centralizing identifying info around a phone).

control of media comes from tiktok ownership, not some ids