Comment by fuzzfactor

Facebook has always been there for only one reason; for people who don't value privacy.

Nothing less, nothing more.

Most things that are not suitable for children were recognized so long ago that it was decades, centuries, or millennia before anybody living was ever born.

Like porn, when it got on the web it has always been instinctively gatekept as traditionally as possible, and complaints which do arise over the decades are addressed by the websites in ways that measure up to how you expect a company to act. Consistent with the way they truly don't want underage visitors to their websites at all.

Those complaints are now dwarfed by what parents are saying about Facebook in particular.

Facebook, and now Meta, is just not something that previous generations had to deal with, so it didn't get handled in a very adult way as it should have been from the beginning. And it only got worse as it got bigger.

If it wasn't worse for their kids than porn, parents wouldn't be screaming so much louder than ever.

I guess it turns out the combination of fundamentally devaluing privacy across-the-board including minors is the main problem, and then the idea of hooking them early, like cigarette companies would do with as much habit-forming reinforcement as possible, is what leverages the lack of overall privacy through the roof.

What's really needed is bold gatekeeping on Meta's digressions alone, they should be the ones to aggressively keep everyone underage off their site. Like they really mean it, which has not existed before. That's what's been wrong the whole time, the internet was so much better before Facebook came along with their anti-privacy mission, and it got put on steroids.

Reining in Meta alone should be big enough to be noticeable, no-one else has a shred of responsibility by comparison.

Facebook has invested $billions in these underage crowds and they want to know exactly when everyone else on the internet turns a certain age even if they are not on Facebook.

Don't give it to them no matter how much they pay.

It would be the complete opposite of an advanced thinker who wants to respond by compromising more people's privacy across the regular internet, when Meta is the primary source of the problem, and they're who stand to benefit the more privacy is compromised in any way, child or adult.

Like my 19th century grandmother would say, "what's wrong with some people?"