#spotify boycott

Whether you're a musician, online artist, fanfiction writer, gamer, fandom enthusiast...whether you're on TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Bluesky, these bills will affect YOU. BUT DON'T PANIC! We can stop these bills from passing! This is a brief post to inform about the situation, and what you can do about it. (Main points in bold text) WHAT'S HAPPENING? The House Committee on Energy and Commerce had a hearing on a 19 bill package this month, these bills seek to place major restrictions on the Internet, such as enforcing age verifications. They have passed 18 of these bills, including KOSA to move on to the full committee. They are having a hearing with the HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. SECTION 230 IS ALSO AT RISK OF BEING REPEALED Update: I have shifted all my discussions of this topic to my second blog. Look at that blog for more updates on KOSA and other news.

First and foremost, contact any senators who you know opposes these laws. The more political officials oppose this, the more likely our governments will repeal it. Please do background checks on them. If people find that the leading senator(s) opposing these laws is a confirmed predator, the media will eat us alive!!!

Contact and tell everyone you know about these new laws. Not just your online friends, but your family, your local businesses, your teacher, your professor, your co-workers at work, your boss. Don't harass them, be polite and tell them exactly what these acts do and how it can affect them. And if they agree that it's bad, great! Tell them to spread the word further!

Offer different alternatives to these laws. Put a parental lock on your child's account, put a parental lock on your child's device, filter sites from your router

Print flyers opposing these laws along with summaries of what's happening, what these laws mean, and why people should oppose it (again, we are saying "no" to something called the Kids Online Safety Act. We are going to need to use every strong argument we have)

Don't have a printer? Create a public presentation!!!

If you're favorite content creator is streaming, ask them if they know about the Online Safety Act and AI age verification (remember, it's not just YouTube being regulated, but the entire internet) in their chat. Please don't harass them!!! You will be blocked. Even if they say, "Yeah, I heard about it." Someone in their audience probably didn't

[EDITED 8/30/25] On top of contacting your senators, you should also contact tech companies, large and small, to fight these new laws being introduced. Convince them to band together to protect their user's privacy and put forth better solutions to KOSA, the SCREEN act, and COPPA 2.0. Also, throw your support behind companies who are already fighting these laws. This not only negatively effects us, but them as well

spotify’s CEO personally invests profits from Spotify into AI drone tech for military use.

AKA: Israeli use.

AKA: civilian murder.

1) Youtube is owned by Google. One is a monopoly of platforms for self created, long form, video media. The other is a media and digital and tech empire. This move is considered PRESSURE according to BDS guidelines.

2) Because of this intermix, this boycott involves doing anything that can limit the amount of data Youtube, Google, and Apple can squeeze from your accounts. Just an adblocker isn't enough to stop data mining, and would therefore force you across picket lines, so you may pivot to watching your content through a zero-cookie-collection client website or parsing service instead, as one example. The less Google and Apple you access, the better, BUT

3) The SPECIFIC outlines we're working by are starving youtube and spotify of our data, at least through the holiday ad season (so, through New Years 2026). The demands we're attaching are to repeal the AI scanning and ID reading and selfie verification features. Now, specifics are good to give us a starting point, but

4) we're still up against a monopoly. Thankfully, Google and Apple are already companies not supported by the Boycott, Divest, Sanction movement, or BDS. This means we're INHERENTLY demanding two policy/legal changes. Demand 1: Ban companies from collecting IDs for online verification (and to pushback against the Online ID system some places are seeing rollout). Demand 2: Have these companies divest from funding these surveillance firms.

"Once January comes, everyone's just going to log back in" is pretty unlikely. People are having their accounts force filtered, making them move away from youtube as a product. Some people got scared by the popups and left. EVERYONE is tired of the ads. More and more people are logging out every day.

And no, Youtube has yet to back down. If anything, they've not wavered from this position- which should cause you to ask a question. "Aren't they getting less ad money?"

And yeah, they should be, right? They're deliberately shrinking their userbase, and then we have all these boycotting people, so that means less ad revenue. If Q4 2025 ends with Youtube's profit, net worth, and or revenue increasing? That will be a glaring sign that-

Trying to see something.

For those unaware, people started boycotting Youtube and Spotify earlier this year because of internet privacy and data safety concerns after they started implementing the ID age verification, as well to push back at this push towards mass surveillance poorly veiled as "we need to protect the kids!"

However, the first attempt made the mistake of announcing it last minute and giving a three day deadline - which resulted in poor turnout and high drop off.

I have a couple suggestions so that we won't make that same mistake again.

I suggest we "start" a boycott on Jan 1st. (Yes, I know some of us have been boycotting already- good job. Now lets focus on getting everyone else on board.)

No deadline. We're going to keep going until they roll the policy back, checking in at each financial quarter (every 3 months) to see how well they're listening. (Got this idea from the Kelloggs boycott)

Starting on Jan 1st should give us a couple weeks to try and get the word out- I recommend making your own posts and memes to spread the word. We need to make more noise.

Boycotts work if done effectively. This isn't just about YouTube, or Spotify. This is about precedent. If we don't push back that's seen as consent, and more sites will follow in YouTube/Spotify's footsteps.

My last suggestion for now is to remember that we're boycotting YouTube/Spotify- NOT the creators on those platforms.

Your favorite creator is bound to have another way to support them, and I suggest you find out what that is. (i.e: do they have Patreon/Kofi? Something else? A different platform perhaps?)

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8B2bcKQ/

if you answered no, basically what's happening is that youtube and spotify are trying to make people upload their IDs to be able to use the apps.

this is done under the guise of "protecting the kids" but that is bullshit and the real reason is that if this works they will be able to trace everyone's internet activity to the actual person behind it using the ID.

and if it works with youtube, pretty soon they will force everyone to do that to use any google applications. anything you do with your gmail would be tied to you, the real human person behind the screen.

this would be VERY bad for minorities and oppressed groups (lgbtq folks, activists, etc) but also for generally everyone because who wants their identity and all their data to be used against them by google and other such evils?