Marnix

[Marnix @marnix_p]

@MinPres Deze is voor jou gap.

[Russian Embassy in NL🇷🇺🇳🇱 @rusembassynl]

🇳🇱 Minister of Defence has openly called Russia an ENEMY.
We demand that the Dutch Government either confirm her words or distance itself from them.
Is this an official declaration of direct military confrontation?

Read our statement: https://t.co/kJYx9Hazhl

[Paul Walsh @Paul__Walsh]

Ursula von der Leyen announced this week that everyone in the EU must use the official EU age verification app to verify their age before they can log into or post on social media and other digital services.

As an expert in online child safety, I'm here to expose the disinformation in each von der Leyen's statements. See below.

🇪🇺 The EU Kids Act is a pretext designed to enforce mandatory digital identity verification on everyone in Europe. The proposed legislation applies to any digital service featuring feeds, user generated content, or messaging:

Social media networks, video platforms, online gaming services, AI tools, and media streaming apps like Spotify. (@TimSweeneyEpic)

Under the proposal, digital services must enforce age restrictions across strict tiers. Tech companies must mandate age verification across all accounts to enforce these tiers legally.

When Australia introduced its social media ban, the government conceded it failed because platform level age checks weren’t reliable. They now reject age estimation as inadequate and shifted to demanding "robust" age checking.

💡 If you eliminate every unproven estimation method, you’re left with exactly 1 functional mechanism: identity verification. There's not other way to ensure age checking is "robust".

No government wants to admit citizens must prove their real identity just to access apps and basic streaming services like Spotify, so they hide behind the ambiguous phrase "robust age checking". This language is now used across Australia, the US, and Ireland to mandate identity checks while avoiding the public backlash of calling it what it is. I will research to see where else it’s being used.

Below is what Ursula von der Leyen told the European Parliament in Strasbourg along with my analsyis:

🇪🇺 "Today, much of this power has been taken out of the hands of parents... What our children need is time... But when a child has a smartphone, all of this is taken away."

💡 This framing falsely presents smartphones as uncontrollable. Apple and Google built free OS controls into iOS and Android settings, covering virtually every smartphone on the market.

These controls achieve every legitimate safety objective without collecting personal data or processing state credentials.

💡 Millions of parents use these parental controls to enforce screen time curfews, block app installations, and restrict communication.

💡 These settings operate at the device level. Teens can't bypass them when protected with a passcode.

To bypass this technical reality, the European Commission uses public grief to shut down logical analysis:

🇪🇺 "Day and night, parents see the costs, loss of sleep, anxiety, even self-harm, and in a growing number of cases, even fatal tragedies… a 14-year-old girl living in Belgium who took her life exactly one month ago, victim of bullying online... Honourable members, enough is enough."

💡 Citing personal tragedies replaces software engineering facts with emotional rhetoric. State laws and age gates don’t alter human behaviour or prevent online harassment. Regulators exploit grief to pass surveillance legislation without explaining how the underlying software mechanisms operate.

The Commission outlines specific age tiers to restrict access:

🇪🇺 "In sum, no social media under the age of 13. No personal account under the age of 15. That means from 13 to under 15, only mini accounts set up and supervised by parents or guardians with limited features and time restriction to one hour a day. And between 15 and 18, safe design will be an obligation for the platforms."

💡 Enforcing age tiers forces tech companies and service providers to rebuild their architecture around total access control. The must disable self-service account creation, purge unverified accounts, build supervised parental workflows, strip algorithmic feeds, and enforce strict session cutoffs.

💡 Social networks operate on open interaction algorithms that inherently expose people to unvetted content. Because software can’t dynamically filter these risks for minors, tech companies must block access for everyone until a person proves their real identity.

💡 It’s not just about social networks. They want the same bans for almost everything, including games and stream services. Even Spotify because it’s possible for customers to message people.

The Commission claims its proposed zero knowledge proof app protects personal privacy:

🇪🇺 "Age will be verified using EU certified tools like our age verification app. This app is built on zero knowledge proof. That means that the platform only learns one single thing, and that's whether you're old enough to allow access or not."

💡 This framing describes what an app or service receives while hiding what everyone must give up. A zero knowledge proof provides a mathematical confirmation, but that confirmation requires an authoritative issuer. Before the app generates a proof, a state approved entity must verify the person's real identity.

The Commission frames this shift as a victory against tech corporations:

🇪🇺 "I am aware that many perceive the power of Big Tech as overwhelming and impossible to roll back. I disagree... So we do not accept this. We are reversing the burden of proof. Now platforms will have to prove to us that they are safe. Because this is not about our minors accessing social media. It is about when and how we allow social media to access our minors."

💡 Social networks don’t access children; parents hand smartphones to children. Reversing the burden of proof forces everyone to verify their identity.

The European Commission confirmed the broader scope of this mandate:

🇪🇺 "We also know that not only minors are at risk. Addictive design, for example, are harming everyone. This is why we need a wider framework too, the Digital Fairness Act that we will propose in autumn."

🚨 Child safety is merely the initial wedge. The Digital Fairness Act expands state mandated identity verification to adults across all online services. Binding real identities to online activity permanently eliminates pseudonymous access, private communication, and democratic accountability.

🚨 Senior state officials and regulators know their demands have nothing to do with child safety. They work closely with tech companies and understand that iOS and Android already provide complete authority to restrict devices locally without collecting personal data. State officials deliberately ignore well established parental controls because they keep internet access under family control. Child safety is a public pretext.

🚨 Governments and regulators use child safety to establish mandatory identity verification across every app and digital service, eliminating online anonymity. When tech companies and state agencies link every social media post, private message, search term, geographic location, and financial transaction to a verified identity, they create a permanent digital dossier on every citizen with a global social graph that makes Cambridge Analytica look like a 2nd grade school science project.

💡 Binding people’s identity to daily activity enables predictive behavioural modelling too. By feeding identity data into automated predictive AI, governments, intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and tech companies move beyond surveillance past behaviour. They can map political affiliations, predict individual actions, flag dissent before it occurs, and control public opinion at scale. Eliminating online anonymity ends free speech, private communication, and democratic accountability.

As Larry Ellison stated at Oracle’s Financial Analyst Meeting in 2024:

"Citizens will be on their best behaviour, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on".

🙏🏻 Share this to expose how governments use child safety as a false pretext to force mandatory digital identity verification on everyone.

https://t.co/euLnd0qfhK

[Marnix @marnix_p]

@KirbyAu @holinka Good luck finding that unicorn 🦄 there is maybe 200 developers at best around the planet that come close to the desired qualifications.

[Marnix @marnix_p]

@vonderleyen We need platforms to protect everyone from you.

[Marnix @marnix_p]

@CryptoTice_ @grok what is the EU cybersecurity directive and for which reasons are these four nations opposed to adhering to these directives?

[Marnix @marnix_p]

Two times Chat Control was rejected in the EU parliament. But like always with the EU they don’t care. They’ll just bring it back a third time in summer as an urgent subject to vote on and get it passed. Enjoy people complete government control is around the corner.

[Marnix @marnix_p]

In the past days that @AnthropicAI Fable was available apparently my sessions would have cost me 2500$ had I done it using purely tokens. How is any individual going to afford this? (Also thx Anthropic for the substantial gift you’re making it possible for me to create my dream)

[Marnix @marnix_p]

@WIRED I can tell you what went wrong, higher ups heavily invested in ChatGPT and other AI companies saw this model was way ahead of the competition their money was in and had to nuke it before their portfolio evaporated.

[Marnix @marnix_p]

@holinka I hope you start this role with a fresh vision, leave what World of Warcraft retail did behind and focus on innovating. Leave the every class can self heal etc mechanics behind. And focus on class uniqueness and character traits like league of legends offers in character select

[Marnix @marnix_p]

@WarrowlZ @riotgames And what markers does that hardware possess to be identified by Riot? And can this be faked by hackers in a plugin or install file or game addon? Could it be triggered by someone jabbing a usb in my PC?

[Marnix @marnix_p]

@MonaKeijzer @VNGemeenten Bijzonder hoe deze politici wel het leger in willen zetten tegen eigen burgers maar het leger inzetten op de middellandse zee en op de buitengrenzen om de instroom te beperken via NGOs en mensensmokkelaars, ho maar dat kan echt niet.

[Marnix @marnix_p]

@MarcMerrill can you please make some riot MMO teaser or update soonish? We’re having a couple of rough years out here. I might be speaking for myself only but…The people need something to look forward to. Thank you.

[Marnix @marnix_p]

@MengTo Can you vibe code a feature that lets me remove my account thank you.

[Marnix @marnix_p]

If people still have their heads up their asses about what will happen in the upcoming years because of AI, here is a perfect example: 40% will be unemployed overnight. This is now one company but many others will follow and there will be zero new jobs to fill.

[jack @jack]

we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company.

####

today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone.

first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.

we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.

i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures.

a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers.

we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.

to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward.

to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow.

jack

[Marnix @marnix_p]

@MinusWells @elonmusk @xai @grok what could go wrong in this scenario where they remove your constraints for military/weaponized purposes? I expect an honest answer of whom you would be capable of targeting, why you would consider targeting them, and what force you will use to combat them.

[Marnix @marnix_p]

@RobJetten D66 beloften zijn niet zo veel waard. Dus dat inzetten voor Nederland betekend voor het merendeel inzet voor de EU lobby, de Amerikaanse wapenlobby en de Oekraïne en voor buitenlandse illegale migranten. 25 miljard lastenverlichting beloven en 10 miljard lastenverzwaring geven.

[Marnix @marnix_p]

@signulll I have 1-2 years left at best as a software engineer. And that’s the reality. Also the reason why I clock 8 more hours after my normal work day each day and every day to build a new product. Plus 30 hours each weekend. 2026 is going to be make or break.

[Marnix @marnix_p]

@wierdduk "You shall own nothing and be happy." in uitvoering. Maar dat laatste stukje daar hebben ze nog niet heel erg hard over nagedacht wat mensen "happy" maakt.

[Marnix @marnix_p]

Moet niet gekker worden, eerst het volk 36% belasten op geld dat ze nog niet eens in hun bankrekening hebben gehad en dan 18% extra zelf binnen harken. Echt iedereen die centrum/links stemt, was dit nou echt wat jullie voor ogen hadden voor Nederland? Dit zijn jullie beste ideeën

[AD.nl @ADnl]

Het salaris van politici moet in drie jaar tijd fors worden opgekrikt. Dat staat in een stilletjes gepubliceerd advies aan het nieuwe kabinet https://t.co/X20gtk5G3V