If the people you know are supporting and expanding mass surveillance you can bet that it's because they want control and power and not because of how much they want to protect children. Not everyone is evil. People who want to surveil and censor everyone are though. If they actually care about children they'll be trying to protect those children from such impositions on their freedom.

Maybe “simple and easily manipulated” is better. The driving force behind the UK’s “child safety” push seems to be mostly because there was “enormous potential across the Safety Tech sector … to foster the development of sustainable, high-tech companies across the country” [1].

Don’t be deceived - huge amounts of lobbying went into this, because some savvy entrepreneurs saw a market to sell age-verification services. The key driver behind the laws is more about creating that market than actual child protection - if they were actually interested in that, they wouldn’t be pushing things that are clearly so ineffective (but expensive).

1. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/safer-technology-...

I'm sure your friends want to secure a future for children, but unfortunately this motive is not mutually exclusive with being evil.