People are so disingenuous about this topic for almost every game and it annoys me.
No, I’m not saying “new bad, old GOOOD”. The graphics ARE objectively better. However, a newer version of something can still fail to capture the atmosphere of the first.
Ursula von der Leyen has confirmed that everyone in the EU will need to use the EU's app for identity authentication before being able to access or post on social media websites.
🇪🇺 As an expert in online child safety, I am here to expose the misinformation and misdirection in von der Leyen's statements.
Today von der Leyen said:
"This is not about whether children can access social media, it is about whether social media can access our children".
💡The first part is true. This isn't about children. It's about surveillance and combating political dissent. A state that can't control its own citizens is more dangerous than a state rife with criminals. The second part is a PR soundbite that politicians are using like a campaign slogan straight out of 1984.
🇪🇺"The question is no longer if children face risks online, but what can we do to give children a safer start online".
💡No. You can't give children a "safer start" online any more than you can offline. In the offline world, the government doesn't enforce curfews or ban children from entering liquor stores, bars or restaurants. That's a parent's responsibility. The digital world should be no different.
🇪🇺"The age verification app is one of the tools to get it done".
💡This is a contradiction because she also said "It won't be foolproof".
🇪🇺"It's easy to use, it is privacy preserving and it is open source".
💡The app was compromised as soon as it was released. "Privacy-preserving" age verification is an oxymoron. You can't verify a person's age without verifying their identity. Where or how that age is shared afterwards is irrelevant.
🇪🇺"This is basically about putting back the power into the hands of parents".
💡More from 1984. The EU is doing the opposite. Parents are having their authority stripped by politicians who think they know better. Many parents are capable and unaffected by peer pressure, and they know how to use parental controls to block any app classified as 13+. Some teens are safe, their parents trust them, and the state has no business overruling that trust.
🇪🇺"We don't give our children keys to the car before they have their licence"
💡Comparing an app to a car is a false equivalence used to justify mass surveillance. Governments don't decide when a young person is ready for car keys, guardians do.
💡Forcing every adult and child into a biometric checkpoint just to use an app or website is not licensing drivers. It's the state seizing everyone's keys, locking the garage, and forcing every driver to ask a private company for permission to take a drive.
💡 This is a gross, unethical overreach that strips authority from parents while imposing state sanctioned identity verification on every adult who doesn't even have a child.
💡Additionally, people who pass a test, obtain a licence and drive a car aren't forced to use an app to constantly authenticate their suitability to drive.
🇪🇺"We do not let them buy alcohol until they are legally allowed"
💡False equivalence. We don't force every person to show ID at a shopping mall entrance just because a few people might buy alcohol with a meal at a restaurant. Some parents are okay with their 12 year-old going to the mall with friends while others aren't. Either way, it's their choice. Whatever irresponsible decisions some parents might make, every adult in the country shouldn't be forced to pay the price.
🇪🇺"It won't be foolproof"
💡This is all the proof we need to show that the EU and every government know that banning social media for teens won't protect them. When pressed by journalists about VPNs being used to circumvent a ban, politicians always state the ban isn't a silver bullet and will take time. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan went as far as to say "we know it's not the solution".
💡Either age verification works, or it doesn't. As a technical expert in this space, I can tell you there are no additional steps to take and no progress to be made. Either the approach does what it is supposed to do, or it's not fit for purpose. If they claim a bulletproof solution is coming, it can only mean one thing. They intend to ban or restrict VPNs to people who verify their identity.
🇪🇺"It will take time to invite the cultural change that is already taking shape in our society, just as it took time to outlaw drink driving, just as it took time to use seatbelts in the cars. Great change never happens overnight, but when it comes to our safety it is always worth it".
💡Comparing a social media ban and age verification to seatbelts is a completely broken analogy. Seatbelts are a safety feature that protects children while allowing them to travel in a car. A ban doesn't give kids a seatbelt. It kicks them out of the car entirely.
💡Instead of supporting parents who want to guide their own children through the digital world, this heavy-handed law strips away parental authority by banning the apps and websites that many parents are perfectly fine with and actively monitor.
💡Furthermore, enforcing these bans requires biometric age verification, which means forcing millions of adult citizens to scan their IDs, faces or credit cards just to browse the internet. That isn't a common-sense traffic law.
💡It's a digital checkpoint on every street. True safety means teaching kids how to navigate the digital world safely with real guardrails and parental guidance, not burning down digital spaces for everyone under the guise of protection.
🇪🇺☠️ The EU wants to ban teens from social media so every person is forced to verify their identity before they can read, share or post anything online. In their words, this is to protect children from dangerous content.
🇪🇺☠️ The EU wants to enforce "Chat Control" so every app has to monitor everything people say privately inside it, including apps with end-to-end encryption. In their words, this is to protect children from dangerous criminals.
💡Where this ends
🇪🇺 "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever".
George Orwell, 1984.
Rockstar and Sony have to have coordinated this, there’s no way they didn’t
The biggest game release of the last 15 years unprecedentedly abandoning physical right before Sony announces the end of discs on their systems, and then can use GTA’s numbers to justify it
@Carra23 Infantino: yeah this was an independent to suspend the red cards if you would please refer to fifas by laws
Trump: yeah I told that bald schmuck to rescind the red card or he’d be deported
Microsoft whistleblower on the firms deep integration into the Zionist genocide:
After nearly two years as a Critical Environment Technician at a Microsoft Italy data center, I choose to resign. This is because, right now, Microsoft is massively expanding its European data centers (aka mass surveillance centers) to use Palestine as a laboratory for its experimental digital weaponry. For the past 994 days, Microsoft has powered the genocide of our people in Palestine, and the company’s European data centers are fundamental to how Microsoft abets crimes against humanity.
On August 6, 2025, reports exposed how Microsoft hosted 11,500 terabytes of intercepted Palestinian phone call data in the Microsoft Netherlands data center, with additional data stored in the Irish data center, amounting to 200 million hours of audio. This trove of mass surveillance data has been described as “one of the world’s largest and most intrusive collections of surveillance data over a single population group.”
This data is used by the Israeli military to identify targets for airstrikes, arrests, and blackmail from the entire Palestinian population. It is also used as training data to build AI-targeting programs. These programs invent arbitrary justifications to murder non-combatants, intentionally adding civilian workers to the Israeli military’s generated “target bank“; the programs also facilitate massacres of entire families at once.
gaming isn’t dead but I can’t help but sympathize with the people who say it is. It’s a hobby that has suffered greatly from normies constantly entering, resulting in lowering standards and encouraging companies to appeal to a completely different demographic.