I am an Australian Instagram user in my 30s. When setting up my profile a few years ago I set the birthday to some fake date near my real age. At no point, including when the ban went live, was I ever asked to prove my age through any means. Nobody I know has either (noting that everyone I've asked is an adult).
No website of any kind should require IDV unless banking. It is a tool that will be used for censorship, removal of access to information, destruction of freedom of speech, erosion of privacy, and attacks on political opponents.
We need anonymity, ephemerality, and public square free speech.
Governments should instead regulate what these companies can do. How they advertise. Engagement algorithms. Stop internal efforts to target kids. Etc.
Disallow advertising to kids. Turn off ads on children's accounts if the user is predicted or self reports as a kid. Turn off the algorithm for kids.
This is the obvious solution, but implementing it would be a herculean effort. Not because it's technically difficult, of course.
Consider the incentives of all involved powerful groups.
You have social media giants who want to addict and advertise to users. The hate your solution, obviously. With the ID checks they lose out on their younger users, but they also get cover for even more aggressive behavior as nobody can credibly yell "think of the children!" at them.
Then you have government officials who are nervous about their lack of effective control over modern media. Your solution offers them nothing and loses them points with those powerful business leaders. It opens them up to attack from the right for being "too hard on business and stifling innovation." The ID checks, on the other hand, give them a mechanism and lever to crack down on any sentiment in the public that runs counter to their or their friends' interests. It even polls pretty well with an increasingly large number of paranoid and distrusting voters.
There's no contest at all between the routes before us. Only a huge political upheaval could divert the world from this path. The indicator to look for in a representative is a willingness to champion policy that hurts entrenched political and economic power while providing straightforward utility to average citizens.
> reads "talking to bots and other low value activities"
> translates it to "stop talking online"
The mental gymnastics to arrive at 2 is insane. Either you're being disingenuous or you actually believe everyone online is a bot in which case telling people to stop talking online is good.
I expect more kids will switch to playing more games on their phones with their friends. Whoever thinks the kids will instead put down their phones and starting go out more often has lost touch with reality.
You don't understand, we're going back to the good old days.
Kids will go back to rolling hoops and playing jacks in the street, they'll write letters to each other in cursive, because print is addictive, and we can finally go back to the time where if a kid is even a little bit different from those around them, they're robbed of having any type of social support system that doesn't ostracize them.
It's not even a noble goal because it's entirely populist rather than evidence and logic based. It's giving: "Yay we solved bad parenting by pretending that bad stuff is not allowed on the internet, but only for those who are under 15". It's sad that anyone believes that this would have any real positive outcomes for our society.
Social media's entire income model is finding out who you are to advertise more accurately. Facebook knows your age down to the day, and if they ask for ID this is them taking even more data.
