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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."
These options aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. You could habe age verification for everything except federated social media services
I agree that they're not mutually exclusive. I wasn't saying that they were.
I was pushing back against the idea that age verification is the best and only reasonable response to our internet problems (the "lesser of two evils" argument).
I personally exclude age verification when other, better options - like the ones mentioned above - exist and haven't even been tried.
It's like watching someone try to build a fire, fail, and then chuck a grenade in the firepit.
It's easy, but it's not going to get you the result you were hoping for and it's likely to make everything worse.
Okay, fair enough. It is interesting to hear other potential solutions to this problem. It is a tricky issue, I don't really know what the best thing to do is