(Not to be confused with: I like Age Verification.)
For a few reasons.
The government already has all of your info and is spying on you from any device with a camera or microphone and wireless connection and without a warrant or meaningful accountability. We know this objectively because the FBI, desperate to look competent, inadvertently publicized footage obtained illegally in the Guthrie case that shouldn’t have existed.
It’s not 2014. We have enough information now to know definitively that social media (and increasingly, use of LLM’s) is harmful to children’s mental health, and that its negative effects are more pronounced on developing brains. (Though they affect adults as well.) These systems harm a person’s mental health and cognitive abilities, and while this bit is anecdotal, I know several teachers who struggle to teach kids because they’re no longer able to focus on anything for more than sixty seconds. (And the question: “Why do I have to know this if an AI can do it for me?” is becoming a common refrain.)
Private entities also already have your data. Go look yourself up on spokeo.com or some other background check site if you don’t think so. (And be sure to put in a request there to have your info deleted while you’re at it.) Or sub to a deletion service that will remove it for you.
People say that to cut kids off from social media will isolate them, but I grew up in a world where we only had email, chat rooms, snail mail, and land lines, and somehow we magically made friendly connections anyway. It’s a nonsense argument, and ignores that social media itself is isolating people to a much greater extent.
Essentially, I think Age Verification is the lesser of two huge evils, and I don’t expect the government in my country to force social media companies to disclose and change their algorithms to eliminate the harm being done to kids, so Age Verification becomes a necessary evil. (Hopefully a short-term one, but we’ll see.) The social media companies have too much money for any civil suit to meaningfully impact them financially.
I’m not against age verification as a concept. But I don’t think the current solutions will actually protect children. They are simply a further attack on privacy. We will have less privacy and our kids will still be just as unsafe as before.
And I give it less than 6 months before this data is used for something other than protecting kids. It’s absolutely just going to be used to target LGBT content or something.
My problem with age verification is that what we’re being sold is not what we’re going to get.
“Choosing the lesser of two evils” implies that only two options exist. When the same companies are responsible for both evils, we should be talking alternatives, not letting them make us decide between getting punched in the face and giving up our lunch money to make it stop.
It’s not a magic bullet, but it’s better than putting the Epstein class in charge of protecting the children.
*Obviously, there are cesspools on the Fediverse, too. But we’re incentivized and empowered to curate and to moderate these spaces, in ways that we’re not on Twitter.
We is everyone that isn’t those companies and is impacted by social media.
The only power you or I have is local, and this is a national problem.
We do have little power on a national level, but that doesn’t mean the only power we have is local.
Sure, we can’t flip a switch tell the engineers to program a switch and flip it for us like Musk and Zuckerberg can, but that’s not the only power that matters.
We can build and support alternatives to addictive, enshittified centralized tech (like the Fediverse). I was offered the “choice” of accepting a degraded Twitter experience or paying for Twitter premium. I chose to check out Mastodon.
We can use the parental controls we do have, both inside the ecosystem and in the real world. No screens in the bedroom or at the dinner table. No smartphone until you’re 16. Schools that ban phones in the classroom. Venues that ban phones during shows.
Edit: Another option is educating ourselves and our children to be safe on the internet. I had to learn that the correct response to “what are you wearing” is “a robe and wizard hat” and then blocking the pedophile all on my own because my parents didn’t know those threats even existed. I do. Most parents in 2026 do.
I’m not imaginative, but we have a lot more power than just choosing between “let it suck forever” and “give up even more of your privacy and I’ll pretend to fix the problems I created/encouraged because I make more money that way.”
I support Age Verification
(Not to be confused with: I like Age Verification.)
For a few reasons.
Essentially, I think Age Verification is the lesser of two huge evils, and I don’t expect the government in my country to force social media companies to disclose and change their algorithms to eliminate the harm being done to kids, so Age Verification becomes a necessary evil. (Hopefully a short-term one, but we’ll see.) The social media companies have too much money for any civil suit to meaningfully impact them financially.
I’m not against age verification as a concept. But I don’t think the current solutions will actually protect children. They are simply a further attack on privacy. We will have less privacy and our kids will still be just as unsafe as before.
And I give it less than 6 months before this data is used for something other than protecting kids. It’s absolutely just going to be used to target LGBT content or something.
Upvoted because it is a controversial take.
My problem with age verification is that what we’re being sold is not what we’re going to get.
“Choosing the lesser of two evils” implies that only two options exist. When the same companies are responsible for both evils, we should be talking alternatives, not letting them make us decide between getting punched in the face and giving up our lunch money to make it stop.
If not one of these two evils, then what’s the third option?
My reply here.
Tl;dr:
It’s not a magic bullet, but it’s better than putting the Epstein class in charge of protecting the children.
*Obviously, there are cesspools on the Fediverse, too. But we’re incentivized and empowered to curate and to moderate these spaces, in ways that we’re not on Twitter.
There is no ‘we’ in your hypothetical, unless you’re sitting on a billionaire fortune or a member of the Epstein class.
The only power you or I have is local, and this is a national problem.
We is everyone that isn’t those companies and is impacted by social media.
We do have little power on a national level, but that doesn’t mean the only power we have is local.
Sure, we can’t
flip a switchtell the engineers to program a switch and flip it for us like Musk and Zuckerberg can, but that’s not the only power that matters.We can build and support alternatives to addictive, enshittified centralized tech (like the Fediverse). I was offered the “choice” of accepting a degraded Twitter experience or paying for Twitter premium. I chose to check out Mastodon.
We can use the parental controls we do have, both inside the ecosystem and in the real world. No screens in the bedroom or at the dinner table. No smartphone until you’re 16. Schools that ban phones in the classroom. Venues that ban phones during shows.
Edit: Another option is educating ourselves and our children to be safe on the internet. I had to learn that the correct response to “what are you wearing” is “a robe and wizard hat” and then blocking the pedophile all on my own because my parents didn’t know those threats even existed. I do. Most parents in 2026 do.
I’m not imaginative, but we have a lot more power than just choosing between “let it suck forever” and “give up even more of your privacy and I’ll pretend to fix the problems I created/encouraged because I make more money that way.”
I looked at my email and it says I’m some random lady who I’ve never met. What should I make of this?