It gives the adults the option to be apathetic. In reality, anyone who is a kid now will never know any better.
It just means we're the last generations that had the luxury of a world that remembered what privacy was.
Sounds about right.
They might still get some content downstream of other kids. However, I doubt a “look at this tiktok” here and there has any harmful effects.
What’s harmful is excessive social media use, especially unmonitored. So, either monitor your kid or do not give them access. It’s perfectly fine to have a family computer in the living room if you’re worried about little Timmy looking up “boobies”. Problem solved, and I saved you some money.
I think a lot of parents do basically nothing and then are unhappy with the results. Yes, if you don’t try, you won’t get your desired result. But you can try stuff out, and you can always pivot if you feel it becomes inconvenient. The reality is we don’t need these complex technological solutions. There are simple, brain-dead solutions like “don’t give your kid a phone for hours on end” or “give your kid a flip phone”.
I love freedom as a general principle, but internet 2026 is a undefendable cesspool of amorality, scams and worse. We are not in the 90s or early 00s anymore, and never will be again that era is gone.
Once again, the response in places like this pretends everyone is an upper middle class or above tech-savvy nerd.
I'm not a fan of these proposed solutions, which do invade privacy and remove freedom, but the problems are real. These solutions are being pushed because our industry is doing nothing to police itself or provide parents with the tools they need.
In many cases we are doing less than nothing, because the profit motive is to prevent parents from having this control. "Social" media, gambling-adjacent gaming, and other addictionware, which is a huge profit center for our industry, wants to addict kids early. Gotta get those cigarettes into their hands, which means preventing parents from stopping it.
Right now if you are not a tech-savvy parent your choices are: (1) deny children access to devices or severely limit that access, or (2) allow your kids to be raised by super-addictive infinite scroll brain rot feeds, brainwashed by propaganda and influencer bullshit, and placed on an on-ramp to future gambling addiction via mobile games with engineered "compulsion loops."
Now imagine you are a non-tech-savvy household with two parents who work. You can't really limit access since you can't supervise it enough, so your choice is now binary: no access, kids raised by brain rot and propaganda. Pick one. You have no control, no ability to whitelist, because not only do you not have time to deal with this but the tools often cost money and are imperfect and ineffective.
Then you catch your 11 year old son watching extreme fetish porn that he lacks the maturity to contextualize, or hear him spouting off Nazi ideology or talking about how he's an "alpha male" and women should be his slaves. Or your daughter becomes anorexic by following influencers. Or you have a child who is questioning their sexual orientation or identity and is targeted by an online bullying ring. These are the commonplace examples. There's a lot of much worse shit too, like sextortion of kids. Search for "764."
That's why this push exists. It's not a conspiracy. It's because we -- our industry -- is an amoral shitshow that engineers addiction and refuses to police itself or provide parents with good tools to do so.
I'd also like to note that for the non-tech-savvy privacy is dead and has been dead for over ten years at least. If you are not tech-savvy your devices are recording everything about you and transmitting it to two dozen ad networks and data brokers.
Only nerds have privacy today and only if they invest the time to police their tech environment. If you're not a nerd there's nothing to lose. You already lost it long ago. We -- our industry -- took it away.
This is a win/win for big tech. If they don’t get age verification, they can keep getting kids addicted to propaganda and consumerism. If they do get age verification, they get to see what everyone in the world thinks and is interested in, all linked to government ID.
Edit: the one outcome big tech does not want is anonymous age verification. This is technologically extremely possible, but that would be a lose/lose for big tech because they would lose kid (aka future consuming adult) addiction AND lose perfect tracking linked to government IDs.
I'm also aware of what you're talking about. That's called regulatory capture. They know this kind of regulation is coming and want to make sure they're the ones writing it so they can use it to entrench their oligopolies.
My point is that something like this will happen unless we find an alternative. The longer it goes on, the worse the backlash will be.
Rich parents can have nannies, expensive software, or a parent who stays home from work. Poorer parents do not have time or energy to police this stuff or supervise their kids. They're too busy putting food on the table and paying rent or a mortgage.
Pornography is often delivered by people who don't care about US legislation, and social media is carefully left undefined, intentionally confounded with algorithms used to surface content (which people actually do object to at least the opaqueness of.)
I, like most, don't think that the totalitarianism is an unfortunate side-effect of the attempt to protect children online. I think legislation, and legislation like this, will only be successful in increasing surveillance and public manipulation, and that it will have virtually no effect on childrens' consumption of pornography and social media. If you really wanted to protect children, there's better legislation to write and technical solutions to implement.
Should it be that easy or should there be some road blocks? Should I have been able to go into a store at 14 and buy a beer?
I was at the laundromat and a woman with kids was complaining across the room about how she only had $700.00 in her account. Note, she had a car, wasn't homeless, but this is actual reality for a huge number of people in the US.
I think it may be that people grew up accustomed to having everything constantly taken away from them, so they learn not to save stuff.
Seeing this as some sort of moral failing isn't the right way to look at it. It's possible that that this person could have done that, but it's also they they really may not have been able to, low wages, bad environment, health issues, all of these compound until "it's not hard to just" is a gross way to interpret their situation.
This is a claim without backing, and if there were backing to be had, it would constantly be thrown in people's faces by the various administrations that suddenly decided this was a problem that had to be stopped now by any means necessary.
They do not need any public support to implement this, they need opposition to sleep for 5 minutes. It is being advanced by the most unpopular governments in the entire histories of the countries that it is being introduced in.
Your children had access to porn 30 years ago, they will have access to porn after this. There is no actual impetus behind any legal blocking of gambling mechanics in games targeted at children, because they are unbelievably profitable (unlike children as a market for pornography.)
I'm telling you that if you fight invisible enemies, like these campaigners for online age verification (who don't exist), you are fighting a senseless battle.
I'm not dismissing the scenario and your illustration of the mindset of these fictional hoards - if I were concocting a biography and argument for age verification activists, I would come up with the same dynamics and resentments. But it's not real. There are no million-mom marches in DC for age verification on the internet, and certainly not ones so advanced that they've decided that no other method will work: that device/OS/browser level verification of identity is the only way from keeping little Kip from accessing Cambridge Analytics's Russian-Chinese hardcore trans pornography.
They don't exist. Or rather, the bulk of them are Keynesian Beauty Contest judges who have concocted a public opinion that they've followed like lemmings, and only update their vision of public opinion based on new claims from politicians and their PR departments currently pushing the legislation. They don't really believe that age verification is a good solution, but they understand why most people do. I claim that the vast majority of people don't. I'm not even sure I could find a single person to support it in real life if given a 2 minute speech about the obvious and basic privacy and civil liberties implications of such a move, and the many alternative ways to attack the same issue. And governments are prioritizing it, with no hint at all that they will see a reward at the polls. In fact, almost all of the people who are pushing it are unpopular lame ducks who have no ability or no reasonable chance to serve again. They're lining up their next jobs and securing their fortunes.
Enough with this "but they can work around it" argument, too. Kids can get adults to buy cigarettes for them, we still ban them from buying cigarettes because it's a very useful roadblock.
If there were an organic push by parents, they would be happy to buy and promote products today, without waiting for legislation to catch up. Where are these local parental control products?
Speaking of social media and Youtubes of the world, why can't I, as account owner/parent, totally blacklist some "recommendations"?
Age verification is not a fit tool for content filtering. Users want the latter, but get switcheroo'd into the former.
You know a gun or a bomb is dangerous, so you'll probably be careful with it. The gun and the bomb are not engineered on purpose to hook you by exploiting your dopamine pathways and get you to shoot yourself or blow yourself up.
EDIT: I'm being a little hyperbolic here, but I'm also talking about aggregate harm and intent to harm. I'm really being hyperbolic to bash what I consider to be the key villain in this story: addiction engineering, a.k.a. "maximizing engagement." This is the root of all evil.
The statistics on people killed/injured by their kids accidentally discharging firearms in the US disagree[0]
[0] eg. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/unintentional-shootings... "At least 157 people were killed and 270 were injured last year in unintentional shootings by children" (2024)
This sounds like you have a media addiction. This is the kind of extreme hyperbole that we spent a year or two saturated with when a bunch of states and a bunch of billionaires decided that American people were saying too much on Tiktok about Israel, and something something China evil.
The main issue with this bill is that it requires a huge cost in civic freedoms, with questionable benefits to societal stability. Not only do most youth extremists first offend past the threshold this age verification would catch, this legislation lets big tech off the hook for designing addictive algorithms in the first place, since "there are no kids on the platform anymore, and if there are, they're breaking the law".
[1]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1057610X.2025.2...
It is far more common for that child to be targeted by parents, and maybe by people they know in person, especially because of the lousy social environment their parents have pushed them into, and therefore to have limited offline support systems, and you are now trying to take away all they do have.
... and information isn't really the question. Not that there's actually any good definition for "social media".
I am not disagreeing with you, but the conversation to be had is far, far wider than "think of the children!". Part of any deal would have to be: privacy of citizens is not a business model. But then you are facing the full might of Corp Inc, including their legislative powers.
The public at large have real issues with the current state of the internet and people here don't want to hear it or address it so we get this.
And, more so, that they've had a decade to reduce or mitigate the harms but have consistently (some might think deliberately) failed to do so.
So now we have the sledgehammer of legislation being wielded to do the job instead.
It's not an ideal outcome by any means, but what did people think was going to happen?
I've said it in other threads but the worst thing you can do is tell people their problems aren't real.
> Right now if you are not a tech-savvy parent your choices are: (1) deny children access to devices or severely limit that access, or (2) allow your kids to be raised by super-addictive infinite scroll brain rot feeds
> Now imagine you are a non-tech-savvy household with two parents who work. You can't really limit access since you can't supervise it enough, so your choice is now binary: no access, kids raised by brain rot and propaganda. Pick one. You have no control, no ability to whitelist, because not only do you not have time to deal with this but the tools often cost money and are imperfect and ineffective.
No access is the solution here. Tools are not expected to be perfect. The railing on a balcony is there for accidents, not to stop you from jumping off headfirst.
> Then you catch your 11 year old son watching extreme fetish porn that he lacks the maturity to contextualize, or hear him spouting off Nazi ideology or talking about how he's an "alpha male" and women should be his slaves. Or your daughter becomes anorexic by following influencers. Or you have a child who is questioning their sexual orientation or identity and is targeted by an online bullying ring. These are the commonplace examples. There's a lot of much worse shit too, like sextortion of kids. Search for "764."
Take away their internet access. If your child spends 90% of their time on phub, _take away their internet access_. If they spend 90% of their free time doomscrolling, _take away their phone_. If they need Internet access for school work, the can either do their school work at school, or you watch them do their schoolwork, or you find someone else to watch them do it. If you cannot do this, then you cannot be responsible for them and they should be removed from your care. This is basic mental health.
> That's why this push exists. It's not a conspiracy. It's because we -- our industry -- is an amoral shitshow that engineers addiction and refuses to police itself or provide parents with good tools to do so.
This isn't a third party policing the industry, this is telling the industry to police itself...by reaching inside my pockets to check my ID. Invasive security like X-ray machines at the airport aren't there for _your_ safety (regardless of what they say), they're there for _everyone else's_ safety: we're making sure you don't kill others.
> I'd also like to note that for the non-tech-savvy privacy is dead and has been dead for over ten years at least. If you are not tech-savvy your devices are recording everything about you and transmitting it to two dozen ad networks and data brokers.
> That's a different issue, and it's also being addressed by legislation in some places that actually care (not in much of the US, unfortunately).
That's a different issue, and it's also being addressed by legislation in some places that actually care (not in much of the US, unfortunately).
Privacy can be taught. We don't anymore. Nobody objected when platforms like Facebook started requiring real identities, but the simple answer to this is to not give out your information.