United States law that would require all operating systems to implement mandatory age verification is now available to read.

Someone proposed a solution: stores sell age verification tokens for cheap to those who can present their ID to confirm their age. Each token has a one-time redeemable scratch-off code that can unlock Adult Mode on websites. This should be a win-win - minors can’t sign up willy-nilly and spend their youth on dangerous corrupting sides of the Internet, and websites don’t have our IDs.

To ask “Why don’t parents take the devices away?” is claiming there’s a dichotomy between minors who should be set loose upon the entire Internet and minors who can’t even have reliable home access to school portals and online games and hobby searches. People reflecting on Gen Z’s experience growing up with unfettered Internet access agree that we couldn’t really blame the parents for not knowing, nor could we really blame kids for being kids; the websites should’ve exercised more due diligence to keep kids away from things kids shouldn’t have been exposed to, understanding how many kids use the Internet, and even then, we can’t blame them for not knowing how.

You wonder what we’re protecting youth from?

For one, the average age of first pornography use is now 11. In the age of porno shops, nobody would’ve knowingly sold material to an 11 year old standing at the register; asking for ID was not understood to be a violation of privacy. But now kids have access to a flood of very powerful stimulating material at ages they shouldn’t be seeing it, and the “verify you are 18+ before entering” banner is a joke. What are we supposed to do about that? It’s an ongoing discussion for good reason. The sexual development of a generation is at stake. Should parents say “Sorry, you can’t use the Internet at all because we’re afraid you’ll use it to find porn,” or is there something better the sites could be doing?

Also, there’s a serious predator problem. Look up “kik” and “Omegle” on TikTok and you’ll see many young women and gay men talking about the way grown men chatted with them at shockingly young ages; these days, they find minors through Roblox and Discord communities. Omegle got shut down because as much as its creator tried and tried over the years to make it safer, he just couldn’t. The very premise was dangerous: people don’t let their kids get into rooms alone with unvetted (horny) strangers who know nobody can hear them, who can claim to be anybody, who can slip out with no trace. Adults’ access to vulnerable minors has led to dangerous situations that parents couldn’t even fathom, situations that would’ve been much less feasible through in-person interactions. It doesn’t matter how negligent their parents were (and in many cases, they weren’t even that negligent); kids of negligent parents still deserve protection from danger.

A generation of parents is realizing that it’s not actually that unsafe to let kids play in the real world and navigate their communities unsupervised…compared to the alternative in their bedrooms.

The base rate of harms from all of this stuff is like school shootings. And unlike school shootings the harms from these things are easily dodged by decent kids or parents. And like school shootings it’s already a capital crime to inflict any of the harms you’ve mentioned here. I think this is sufficient deterrence/justice, no need to “grab the guns” by destroying the internet.

The actual cause of these laws, where the base rate is non-negligible, is addictive social media. I don’t know any zoomers that were “groomed on omegle” or “ruined by pornhub”, but I know a lot who doom scroll way too much. If you listen to the intelligent discourse leaders, this is what they talk about, social media.

I think social media algorithms should be regulated directly in a non-ageist way. The ageist approach is, like always, an unjust half-measure promoted by stupids who are not equipped to rule. It is completely logically incoherent, very ineffective and always leads to waste and strife. For one this is because ageism is quite unnatural – they’re choosing 16 this time as their retarded schelling point. Guess what, that means plenty of bypass options for younger teens and social media addiction for everyone starting at the age of 16. Social media companies love the ageism because debating the age line is a distraction from regulating the real harm. It’s the same thing that happens with alcohol, tobacco, and pornography. When 16 doesn’t work they will try to raise it to 18 with more and more data mining. Both of these things are great news for social media companies.

Whereas if someone intelligent were in charge, infinite scroll would be banned, there would be a default 1 hour cap on daily usage on every platform declared Brainrot which would require some kind of annoying process to bypass, there would be a massive Influencer Tax to discourage “content creation” (if brainrotting is addiction then “influencing” is dealing and it has to go or be discouraged).

But western governments are all Stupidocracies and stupids only know how to do ham-fisted Age Restriction on everything “Le Bad.” Special interests like national intelligence agencies and data mining corporations get to shape Big Stupid into another opportunity to get what they want. So you get an age limit but everyone has to show their passport to use the platform regardless of age. Wonderful.