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Suppression of the populace is the only real reason.

They want to limit, even if secretly, the ability of the people to easily disseminate information and act on it by organizing protests or unifying themselves against an (unknowing) oppressive government.

If the government can fully read along with the chat channels and easily identify who is who and where they live, it can catch 90% of public anger in chats before it spreads amongst citizens in a wildfire.

For years now governments have spied on chats and open facebook messaging where they could, to stop or redirect fights or riots from being organized.
But they had to do it by directly planting someone inside the groupchats so they could read along, still it would not catch all chats between just two people.

Now with the growth of encryption(and related protective laws) that job is getting harder, so the way to control all this is to legally break open the encryptions and have an AI import, read, decide on, and forever store them for use as evidence years later. And an AI is not one single government worker but scales to be able to intercept and process billions of messages so its far easier to catch unwanted "behavior".

So it never was/is about "the children" or terrorism, these topics are precentage wise so low its insane to force strict regulations on everyone, these new laws are for what comes next, the opening of the doors to search for everything that the government decides is unwanted.

From being angry about forced immigration that comes with negative effects for the existing population, to public anger about an executive stealing people's pensions and getting off with just a fine.
From people organizing a riot to fight the opposing sportsteam fans just to get some excitement in, to people organizing blocking a polluting company's doors because they want to make a statement against unregulated pollution.

Every form of protest can be caught before it happens and redirected into manageable situations where the government gets its way or can prepare with a positive social media brainwash campaign or just introduce new laws.

Rise of fascism

Okay, here's a wild conspiracy theory I've just made up.

Epstein's photo and video blackmail material has been lost/stolen/duplicated or otherwise out "in the wild". Before someone data dumps that on the internet they want to make sure they can quickly squash it from being accessed and put their own rules in place to be able to heavily punish and shut down those who don't quickly comply.

Have a look at the world views of tech billionaires like Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel. They've been going on about control of peoples digital life for at least a decade now, even before the popularisation of LLMs. These guys are laying the brick work for a deus ex style corpocracy.

Personally, I think it's just a result of the political machinery becoming more technology proficient. It was inevitable that governments were going to (at least try to) regulate more and more of the Internet at some point. Now the knowledge and tools are aligning themselves to make this a reality.

My conspiracy theory.

All that 'kompromat' that exists out there,

1 - They are pushing massive $$$ into AI to get it good enough that the old kompromat is meaningless, because you wouldn't be able to prove its AI or not

2 - Putting in the foundation of censorship, so when that kompromat gets released, they can have the legal framework already in place to remove it as much as possible.

After all that kompromat is rendered meaningless, who knows which way the world will go then. We basically return back to the days the world ran uninfluenced by pictures/video because either pictures/video didn't exist back then, or the means to distribute it to the general populace to make that kompromat effective didn't exist.