Is there anyone who can't do this today? Adult websites self label, and both your router and ISP offer removing adult websites as an option.
If your kid is going to get around that by clever vpn use, age gates don't help.
If your kid is going to get around that by clever vpn use, age gates don't help.
Your kid's smartphone can connect to home wifi, mobile data, public wifi, and friends' home wifi - so network filtering alone won't cut it. And 'Encrypted SNI', 'DNS over HTTPS' and Cloudflare makes network filtering much harder than it was 15 years ago.
On top of that, there's loads of porn posted on Reddit, Twitter, Twitch and suchlike. So any effective block is going to have a lot of collateral damage.
The Texas HB 1181 law only applies to websites which have content that is at least 1/3 porn. If Reddit doesn’t qualify for that requirement, then the Texas law doesn’t require ID verification.
There will always people who will arbitrage the gaps between the legal definition of something and the practical application. The blast radius of those kinds of issues always has been huge.
I think politicians and their supporters believe they do help. Of course from their perspective the only way to know for sure is to implement the restrictions (regardless of whether they succeed, at least they fulfill their campaign promises to their electors of "doing something").
Not social media sites. Sites like Reddit are everything. Some also go out of their way to hide certain information from parents.
Reddit (not to be too picky) does some weird things when a logger is in place, essentially making it impossible to know which subreddit is being accessed.
And that's really where the bad stuff lurks - it's peer to peer interactions.