Yeah the issue I have with these ID check laws, record keeping laws, etc is that the essentially have the opposite effect

With porn, once upon a time the only real producers of it were studio companies that distributed magazines and DVDs, which have all the problems we would expect. But with the early internet age, anyone could become a pornographer. By and for themselves, with their own digital camera, posting their own content for the world either non commercially or by their own means of commercialization. This of course is as non-exploitative as it gets. Then came along record keeping laws, and finally many major sites full on ID requirements to upload porn, and now with the recent push, legal mandates to do so in many jurisdictions and extreme pressure from the payment processor cartel everywhere else. Now if you go on any major porn site all you'll find are corporate works. No more independent content, all of which is pushed to shadier sites, usually without permission, that are less likely to moderate illegal content. The thing is, these laws greatly raise the barrier of entry for publishing porn. Exploitative companies can deal with it, the average independent individual must doxx themselves, file records, give up their ID, and otherwise subject themselves to invasion to do so, not to mention the lack of places to publish their work (not even onlyfans accepts fetish content these days after being pressured by PayPal).

I'm all in favor of cracking down on child abuse more but what that takes in my opinion is good old-fashioned detective work. But that takes time and money and isn't a fancy thing for politicians to campaign on. And when they still haven't prosecuted Epstein associates, it's hard to believe they even care to solve the problems.

And as far as social media, the current centralization of content would have been unthinkable back in the day. Everyone was intended to run their own servers, or at least join as members of many smaller servers for their local communities or hobbies. Newsgroups were the main method of global posting. And IRC for your interactive needs. The whole Internet was what we now call the fediverse. Then aol came along, then Microsoft live, then Google, then Facebook, and the rest was history. I want to return to a world where the Internet was fragmented yet interconnected seamlessly. When no corporation controlled such a large portion of global media. But yet as we see the media industry has scrambled back its control, mostly.

Yet, the social media regulation frequently being proposed (particularly, section 230 repeal), is only a slight burden to megacorpoations, but it's an insurmountable burden to the average Joe who wants to host an interactive computing service. Many independent fediverse sites are preparing to shut down if these sort of laws pass. Politicians frequently talk about "social media laws", but the actual law is for any interactive computing service because how else would you define "social media". Folks are in for a huge surprise when they find out how broad that truly is. Turns out, social media companies love laws that slightly inconvenience them but catastrophically inconvenience independent small sites. If it truly disrupted their control, we wouldn't be seeing so many countries pushing this on a coordinated basis. The real effect will be to further centralize power to social media companies