Smart, I am exhausted by what these algorithms do to kids' attention spans. Most importantly, their safety!
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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Don't hide behind kids' backs, call it what it is: identity tracking.
i agree kids shouldnt post on grown ups social media but if there's some kind of service protecting from grooming, bullying etc. then why not? Also how to enforce that shit? Its only a plot to make us give all our data.
Back in the day facebook tried to enforce real names.
Child safety as a pretext for mandatory digital ID and state surveillance over political speech.
I don't think you'll have to give all your data to random websites. You'll be issued a single use token with a yes/no flag saying if you're over 18.
That's it. It's so, so much less data than what people are mindlessly giving to social networksthese days. Contacts, birthdays, private conversations, credit card numbers, personal photos, minute-by-minute IP and geolocation. Those are all things that social networks take for granted and governments don't (and will not) have access to.
People are making a giant fuss about "them gov'nmint" but completely ignore all the data social networks already have. And you can simply not use them if you don't want to give "all your data to government". I know I won't.
So why are services already working with third party providers (like X or Reddit) for data collection and you have to provide your ID to those third parties that are not always the same?
Those are American solutions, they only know the old way of scanning IDs. For example, where I live websites only confirm my ID by asking through my government app. And I need to authorise which fields of my digital ID they can have acess to. The websites can't request the whole data if they only need to know if weather I'm over 18. The government just needs to create a yes/no field.
Even simpler would be to use the EUid login app to generate a single use code/token to provide the website that yes/no answer. But that's still in development I think, don't know if it's for each EU government app or an EU wide level app.
There are many modern solutions on the way, the Americans just refuse to evolve. Like USB-C ports or fixed bottle caps.
The EU solutions are worst. Having seen their solutions first hand as I work on a European big tech company... I can tell you RUN! Run as fas as you can.
In a perfect world I'm actually ok with this...the problem is this isn't a perfect world and we all know it's just a trojan horse for age verification as that's the only way to actually implement it.
I disagree. We're all accepting that the modern world exists primarily online, but instead of preparing our children for the online world, we build a walled garden with no access, until the age of 16 where they get unlimited, uninformed access.
The only solution to this problem is parents teaching and directing their children. The state cannot and should not be involved
Fair enough, I think in the real world parenting is the best solution. I just don't see an advantage to children being on social media...but I personally think social media is mostly a cesspool and barely use it myself. I just can't approve of something being used as an excuse to push age verification.
How is this going to effect the fediverse?