[ Flash ] Panoptic Delirium

Enforcing age verification on social media is a thinly veiled attempt at mass surveillance. It doesn’t just flirt with illegality; it outright violates European law, starting with the GDPR itself.

And here we go again — another full-blown fit of paranoid delusion from the French President. He proclaims to be building one more grand coalition, this time for madating age verification on the internet.

“With Greece, Spain, Cyprus, Slovenia, and Denmark, we can impose on the platforms…”. Really? Last time we checked, the European Union had 27 member states, not six.

Let’s be clear: he’s lying.
Neither the Digital Services Act (DSA) nor the Digital Markets Act (DMA) gives governments the power to force platforms to verify users’ ages using state-controlled tools. No such directive exists.

What the DSA actually requires is simple: platforms must implement “appropriate and proportionate measures” to ensure a high level of privacy and safety for minors (Article 28) — in full compliance with the GDPR.

What this band of bunglers is trying to ram through is nothing less than a universal identity check for all users, disguised as “age verification.” In plain terms, it’s illegal—a blueprint for mass surveillance by stealth.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) made this crystal clear years ago. In 2014, it annulled the Data Retention Directive (2006/24) in its entirety. Since 2020, France has been repeatedly condemned by the same court for its obsessive data-retention practices.

In its October 6, 2020 ruling, the CJEU ruled that national schemes for bulk data collection—like those in the UK, France, and Belgium—must comply with EU law, even in matters of national security. It explicitly stated that any law obliging a communications provider to process or store traffic or location data in a general and indiscriminate way is incompatible with EU law.

By that reasoning, forcing platform users to identify themselves through a state-issued credential—every single time they log in—is not only absurdly invasive, it’s flatly illegal, since such data would inevitably be retained.

No one can legally impose mandatory age verification for minors, because the GDPR states that creating and using a social media account for minors under 16 is the responsibility of parents—and parents alone.
Parental authority is never, under any legal framework, a function of the state—not even when a court transfers custody to a guardian.

Under the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the GDPR, platforms must indeed protect minors and enforce minimum “digital consent” ages (13, 15, or 16, depending on the country). They can use proportionate verification methods, such as:

• self-declaration (asking for a date of birth);

• approximate facial-age analysis without storing biometric data;

• parental confirmation without sharing additional data.

But they cannot:

• demand ID documents or digital identity credentials;

• or store this data longer than strictly necessary for verification.

That’s the law. Everything else is political delusion.

Our European “leaders” are now entangled in their own contradictory mandates, trapped in what can only be described as a form of bureaucratic psychosis. Their perception of reality is so warped that they no longer grasp the legal or technical consequences of what they’re trying to impose.

What they want to control is not child safety, but speech itself—something that can only be judged after the fact by independent courts, not preemptively by surveillance algorithms. They are terrified by the organizing power that social networks give ordinary citizens, and they loathe collective intelligence, which threatens their carefully scripted “narratives”—in other words, their lies.

We’ve already demonstrated the incompatibility of age verification with both GDPR and parental rights. Two weeks ago came another authoritarian fever dream: ChatControl, a measure so liberticidal it would scan all communications before encryption—on every phone, tablet, and computer—in the name of fighting child abuse and organized crime.

The problem? That’s nonsense.
Producers and consumers of child abuse material stopped exchanging raw files long ago; they now trade encrypted archives on the dark web, far from WhatsApp or Signal.
Likewise, major organized crime groups abandoned “off-the-shelf” encrypted services like Encrochat years ago. They run their own custom-built secure networks, because they can afford to hire IT geniuses.

ChatControl did not pass the European Parliament, despite being the top priority of Denmark’s rotating EU presidency. Why? Because it’s legally incompatible with the GDPR and digital identity, and because Europol’s bureaucratic zealots wanted every device to include backdoors—so police could decrypt data either locally or remotely.

Then come the national constitutions. In August, Germany’s Constitutional Court banned all intrusive surveillance tools except in serious criminal cases (punishable by at least three years in prison), significantly reinforcing privacy protections. That ruling makes ChatControl unconstitutional in Germany—and therefore, de facto, in Europe.

A digital identity is far easier to forge or steal than a paper one. Add to that the built-in vulnerabilities of mandatory backdoors, and you’ve created a hacker’s paradise. Once such a door exists, anyone who knows it’s there can use it.

From the moment the secrecy of correspondence—a fundamental right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—is no longer protected by strong encryption, there is no such thing as secure communication.

ChatControl would destroy Europe’s entire digital industry.
Who would buy European hardware or software once backdoors were legally required? No one. These proposals would gut privacy, kill trust, and kneecap innovation across the continent.

In short: digital identity is legally incompatible with the GDPR.
ChatControl is legally incompatible with the GDPR and technically incompatible with digital identity.

What our self-proclaimed elites are building is yet another unworkable bureaucratic monstrosity—a regulatory Frankenstein that will waste billions, crush innovation, and drag Europe further into decline.

So Thomas Fazi and the author of this article conclude their report on the Twitter Files France :

The French elite, steeped in technocratic arrogance, clings to the belief that their pronouncements alone shape reality. Estranged from the lived experience of ordinary citizens, they prioritize abstract models over tangible truths. By expanding state control to every aspect of social life — via regulation, policing, and judicial enforcement — they strive to bend society to fit their needs.

Like a spiteful prefect, the establishment seeks to dismantle countervailing powers — political opponents, impartial judiciary, independent journalism, grassroots movements — to shield itself from accountability for the disorder it has sown.

Compounding their predicament, European elites, whose position greatly stems from American acquiescence, are caught in a web of contradictions as transatlantic ties fray. They champion sovereignty while ceding it to the European Union. They decry American tech dominance while entrusting the French military to Microsoft, citizens’ health data to the same, and nuclear power plant preventive maintenance data to Amazon Web Services.

By their very nature, bureaucracies seek self-preservation and growth, and entrenched elites cling to their privileges. This portends an escalation in institutional and judicial suppression of speech in the very near future. The outlook for freedom of expression is grim. Yet, these obsolete ruling elites and the institutions they head may prove no match for the transformative force of technologies.

In the meantime, we would do well to heed Primo Levi’s warning: “Monsters exist, but they are too few to be truly dangerous; far more perilous are the ordinary men, the functionaries who believe and obey without question.” In France, functionaries abound.