@robriley @Em0nM4stodon It’s an incredibly myopic position that entirely ignores the root cause of the problem and shifts the blame to kids (who incidentally have little to no representation in Canadian politics and therefore present an excellent vector for introduction of draconian laws).

Whereas the problem lies *entirely* with the business model of attention harvesting with surveillance-based advertising at its base. The latter is not only a dumpster fire of privacy violations but the tools to support it are also profoundly anti-democratic; the whole thing should not be regulated but destroyed outright.

So, no, we should see this drive for age verification for what it is — an attempt to tie every user on the internet to a strong identity, a base for enabling mass-surveillance and mass-censorship.