This is a global blueprint being used by governments around the world for digital surveillance and mass population control by getting people to censor themselves. This needs to be shared far and wide. Here’s the playbook: 1. Ban social media for children 2. Tech companies need to know who's over 13/16 3. To know that, they need proof of age 4. Governments say age estimation isn’t good enough 5. ID verification for everyone is therefore necessary 6. Being banned from a social network = banned for life 7. Your identity is blacklisted and can't be verified again 8. Online anonymity is outlawed 9. Some people censor themselves to avoid bans, investigations or arrests 10. Some people use VPNs to avoid surveillance 11. VPNs are restricted in the name of national security 12. The World Wide Web becomes the Dark Web 13. Regular people start using the "Dark Web" for regular communication and online activity More than 25 countries are simultaneously treating online child safety as one of the most urgent legislative priorities in the world. That's while we live in turbulent times. Given current geopolitics, it’s understandable that governments would want the ability to control and manipulate what people can read, write and share online. It makes sense that they would want greater control over how people spend money, where and when they travel, and who they communicate and organise with. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic have already built and rolled out tech updates and services that make identity verification possible before governments publicly demanded it. Between them, these companies control or influence mobile devices, operating systems, email, social media, messaging, location, AI, and most of the infrastructure people use every day. Rolling out identity verification globally only required coordination among a small number of governments and tech CEOs. G7 meetings provide an obvious forum for that coordination. Governments gain greater control and big tech gain regulatory certainty, access to government contracts and infrastructure that makes persistent identity the foundation for generating more revenue through targeted ads and seamless one-tap payment. They fight publicly about child safety, addictive design, and dangerous AI, but we see political leaders and tech executives smiling together in meetings, photographs and interviews while their representatives argue through the media. COVID showed political and tech leaders that digital identity could be deployed across entire populations quickly. It also showed how quickly people could become accustomed to proving something about themselves digitally before being permitted to work, travel, or enter particular places. Some people even fought their family and friends when they didn't agree to government mandates. Everything that enables surveillance is being politicised so citizens argue in favour of it. You’re either for masks or against them. You’re either for child safety or against it. The technical consequences disappear because the debate gets reduced to a moral binary. Governments are now adding fraud, antisemitism, democracy itself, misinformation, disinformation and other categories of speech to the reasons people can be investigated, restricted, banned online, or even arrested without committing a crime. In the UK, around 30 people a day have been arrested in connection with communications offences involving online posts and messages. Ireland’s media regulator, Coimisiún na Meán, has appointed the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland to help identify online material considered illegal antisemitic content across Ireland and the EU. Once your verified identity is tied to Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Discord or another service, a ban no longer means losing one profile. You can’t simply create another account because the next account resolves back to the same identity. If an authority flags your posts and the platform removes your account, identity verification turns a temporary platform sanction into permanent identity based exclusion. That's one of the most important consequences of outlawing online anonymity. We need to defend everyone’s right to privacy. Share my post below because it explains the blueprint that governments around the world are following and includes my simple, technical analysis showing how the Australian eSafety Commissioner is intentionally misleading the public about what these systems actually require. The same pattern is appearing across the EU, Ireland, France, UK, Canada, New Zealand, UAE and many other countries at the same time - right now. The fastest way to expose the contradiction is also the easiest. Every smartphone already contains parental controls that allow parents to block apps, block websites, restrict content, control downloads and purchases, limit communications, and impose screen time limits and curfews. I demonstrated on BBC Newsnight as I keep saying, 14 years ago to demonstrate how bad parental controls were. Today, smartphone controls are almost as good as you could technically want. They're excellent. Millions of parents and countless schools already use these controls successfully. If those controls already achieve the stated child safety objective, why are governments forcing every adult to verify their identity instead of putting the same effort into teaching parents how to use the tools already sitting in their hands? That’s the question the media should keep asking. It’s also the question smart policy makers should be asking colleagues they disagree with. Some politicians already see where this is heading and are saying publicly that their own colleagues are building surveillance systems under the language of safety. That includes policy makers inside the EU. Why is the government forcing everyone to verify their identity in the name of child safety when smartphones already have built in parental controls that work extremely well and cannot simply be bypassed by the child? If a politician responds by saying, "We don’t want to verify everyone’s identity, we only need to verify their age," the answer is the same. Why do you need to verify everyone’s age if parents can already control what their own children can access? You don’t even need to debate the technical impossibility of separating adults from children without identifying them because governments have already rejected age estimation as inadequate. Once age estimation is declared unreliable, identity verification is the only technical means to enforce any kind of digital service for a person of any age. The UK is already admitting that it's in favour a society inspired by 1984 and Animal Farm by proposing the use of passports and other official identity credentials before people are given permission to access the Internet and digital services. They're even saying it's in everyone's best interest because by collecting everyone's identity, they can protect them from identity theft. The technical chain is simple. Parental controls already solve the stated child safety problem.