while I have a level of sympathy for the california/colorado style of age-verification law, and I think many reactions against it are overheated, at the end of the day we still have to oppose stuff like this because society's ideas of what ought to be age-gated are just wrong on the merits. the goal is to ban access to perfectly normal healthy things like queer communities and still allow kids access to fucked-up dangerous adults-only stuff like catholicism and the president of the united states
like I have a young child and nothing would please me more than to put their birthday into the OS and then let them go nuts on the internet doing whatever they want, but my values (no child should be allowed to access a chatbot under any circumstances, roblox should be a crime, but children should be allowed to read wikipedia pages about human anatomy if they want) are just not reflected in our social fabric because all age-related internet stuff is just a series of very frustrating moral panics
@glyph it's amazing to me that the discourse about age attestation assumes that nobody is going to use that information in a predatory way.
@aeva I am such a fan of tech companies getting told that socially important aspects of their platform designs are simply not their call, but I would really like the people telling them that not to be the most pitiable simpletons on earth
@glyph I mean there's only so much you can do when you're required by law to tell ad networks the user is a minor.