There are many reasons why I'm against age verification and social media bans for teens.

Youth is part of society and their voices should be heard. When we take a look on how they use social media, we can see they use them for expressing themselves, mobilizing for important causes such as climate action and fair wages.

Imposing restrictions on young people is not the way to protect them. In fact, it's taking their right to freedom of expression and speech. It also harms society as young people very often have smart and accurate ideas on how to make society better.

Another reason is that to verify age, you need to collect ID. This exposes people to risks such as exploitation, identity theft, fraud, scams, etc. Breaches are happening, we saw many severe breaches in the past. Making the use of ID documents mandatory for age verification would make life easier for cybercriminals.

There are more reasons.

Yes, we need to act to protect children and fight against child abuse. There is no doubt about it. But what we need to do it in a reasonable, safe and transparent way that is not cutting young people from social media, or exposes people to risks to their privacy.

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