I suppose it has to do with saving their asses? We probably have to thank the Government for this, too.
In any case, it is indeed crazy. If I were to live by this >10 years ago I would not know anything about Linux or BSDs. Or programming for that matter.
Meta is putting a lot of money into lobbying for these laws, presumably because it's easier to change laws than it is to fix their business model, and they're probably tired of getting sued for COPPA violations.
This may make sense from their point of view, but from a user's point of view I do not understand why I would want my own operating system to spy on me so the government can get more data, which it may then hand over to others. Now the main problem is that governments become increasingly hostile to The People, but now downstream people suddenly act as surrogate-spy helpers, such as the MidnightBSD folks do. This is a simple case where people should globally reject criminal governments from spying on people.
They're pushing because the loonies are pushing. The loonies are passing age verification laws and big businesses don't want the responsibility.
Now... it just so happens that the loonies and big business are connected another way. Despite not much liking each other, they share a political party to advance each other's goals. Only a relatively small fraction of the country really wants to eliminate porn (which is the real goal), but they have enough allies who are willing to tolerate it to make a majority (or near-majority).
Which enables big business to get everything else that they want.
They want us trapped on their platforms and absolution from obligation to police their platforms
They’re involved in indemnifying themselves legally while jacking up RAM prices to prop up their data center investments and make us use those data centers to compute
And they get the government help making us the bad guy if we lie about age verification
They are playing both sides of this argument because doing so keeps them in the conversation altogether. They sell TIE Fighters and Xwings
The entirety of American society has gone absolutely off the fucking rails kowtowing to office dweebs who need to keep us tending the server fields or their buy in data centers becomes worthless
I wasn't under 18 when I started playing with *BSD/Nix systems on my own, but how tragic that kids who would be drawn to understanding these systems are essentially 'outlawed' from learning them. As another HNer pointed out in a related post, I think this stems from not understanding the delineation between an OS/App/Platform.
In any case, it is indeed crazy. If I were to live by this >10 years ago I would not know anything about Linux or BSDs. Or programming for that matter.