Technology

For the first point, proving that you're an adult under this system requires submitting incredibly sensitive data to Discord, or rather their third party, which recent news indicates they're not capable of protecting.

It's not that people hate the idea of protecting children, it's that "protecting children" is almost always used as an excuse to errode people's right to privacy.

Just to name you one alternative for most adult content that doesn't require breaching people's privacy, DNS filtering. It's already offered as an option on many routers, and on basically all VPN services.

Why not mandate that ISPs make all routers default to Adult content filtering, and put the controls to undo that behind a protected parental control panel? All that relies on is parents doing their actual job rather than relying on the government to nanny for them.

... And sure a savy enough kid could work their way around it, but at that point they were going to work around whatever you put in their way.

For websites with mixed content like Discord, things get a little murkier, but there's always a better way. Protecting children does not, and should not, come at the cost of our collective right to privacy online.