Youth protection is a problem on the net, but you will never make the internet child safe, so parental supervision is the only alternative or your child will get in contact with non-approved content. Sadly, some people believe a clean internet is desirable, so a lot of barriers will be put up completely neglecting the fact that the average 12 year old is probably even more proficient in evading these than most adults.
This is the next bad development politics brought to the net after we now have a lot of region checks. Not a single problem was solved by this and not a single problem will be solved by age restrictions but will make usability worse. This should have been discussed and the problem should have been identified pretty easily.
> In response to mounting pressure from activists, parents and regulators
Thank you indeed, please try to think better...
> People in Japan must provide a document proving their age to use the dating app Tinder
Well, not everything is bad...
> called for new rules to protect young people after a former Facebook employee said the company knew its products harmed some teenagers
Ah, the "whistleblower"...
How long do you think it will take until people evade to other platforms? The content on the web is user generated. Any chat can have content that isn't age appropriate. So either children get supervised, or there is just no protection.
> developing programs to look for signs that users were lying about their age, like spotting when someone who claims to be 21 gets messages about her quinceañera.
So tech companies will spy on text message of little girls. Great idea.
Explaining op-sec to users that they should not give credit card information to random sites is suddenly deprecated. Although recommending certain VPN settings might be an alternative still.
It think Freetube still works and there will be alternatives. As I said, this is not beyond 12 year olds.