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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 support it as well. In my country we already have ID verification that goes through banks. I can log into my healthcare system etc. by it.
Just branch out a service to social media sites that answers only one question: Is this person over 18? Yes/No.
They don't need anything else. By extension, this also answers the question if someone is a real person. Which is another thing I think we need on social media. Yes, maintain public anonymity but there needs to be some verification that they are a real person.
(Also, Spokeo got nothing on me, wohoo)
It certainly can work in a country where the government doesn't regularly use identification maliciously. The US for example does have a long history of spying and acting against their own citizenry and in that setting it is really hard to come up with a system where people aren't being tracked by the requesting party or the age verification party for the government to spy on everyone.
Glad it works where you live.
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.
One of the pros of age verification vs parental controls I could see is the social aspect. I could definitely block my child from accessing social media but if all of their friends are on there then I feel like I am stifling their social life. It just doesn't like there is a good solution. However with age restrictions, no kid is getting on social media, and so they will be forced to come up with alternatives for socializing together.
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 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 looked at my email and it says I'm some random lady who I've never met. What should I make of this?
Same here. Looked up an old email and it wasn't my name lol. Good news I guess?