Comment by JumpCrisscross

> seeing many European governments tirelessly push for these new measures to protect the children, I'm pretty sure that the children are finally going to be safe online

There is strong, popular will for age gating social media. At the same time, at least in America, there is a deep streak of laziness and nihilism in the tech community that makes it civically useless. When combined, you get politicians getting calls every day to limit social media and little from experts on how.

So you get folks reaching for the first solution on the shelf, and then getting wedded to it. The correct approach is making this the social-media companies’ problem. If they wind up with users under N years old, they get fined. If you want to use social media, you put up with their BS. If not, you’re not affected. Unfortunately, I’ve worked on privacy and technical policy enough to be sceptical that anyone will actually pitch that to their elected. So we get this, instead. (And at the end of the day, I’ll take an imperfect solution over a perfect one that goes nowhere. Though the UK, as usual, seems to have found the worst of the bunch.)