> sharing the bare minimum of details
The reasonable approach, yes, but the approach most in the interest of the governments and corporate players driving these laws...?
I think people are overindexing on how much of this is "get more data on users".
I don't get why people believe there's a conspiracy here. There's perhaps a large tent, but "social media bad" is not a controversial opinion! "The gov't should do something about it" is more controversial, though I think the controversiality is less heavy in spaces with parents, teachers, places where people have to deal with kids.
Not that this is how things should be determined, but... I think reading this as a "get more data and track people" play feels like giving everyone involved too much credit. It really just feels like what it says on the tin here.
SEO-spam was often at least somewhat factual and not complete generated garbage. Recipe sites, for example, usually have a button that lets you skip the SEO stuff and get to the actual recipe.
Also, the AI slop is covering almost every sentence or phrase you can think of to search. Before, if I used more niche search phrases and exact searches, I was pretty much guaranteed to get specific results. Now, I have to wade through pages and pages of nonsense.
