[yacin]

ah yup:

> It comes on the heels of a Delaware court decision clearing Meta’s insurers of responsibility for damages incurred from “several thousand lawsuits regarding the harm its platforms allegedly cause children” — a ruling that could leave it and other tech titans on the hook for untold future millions.

[AlienRobot]

I wonder at which point do children become such a liability for platforms that it's easier to just ban all children altogether.

Children don't have disposable income to buy ads/subscriptions. They don't have experience to write about. The only thing they have that adults don't is time which translates into engagement metrics.

In an ideal world, the adults that buy/manage the computers would create age-restricted account for children, and the OS would give this information to the browser, which would just transmit it via HTTP. This is the safest method to verify ages. If an operating system doesn't want to support this, it's ultimately the adult's responsibility to install one that supports it. This would mean there would be no burden on the adults (the majority of the planet) to verify their ages, so there would be no burden on the platforms to restrict ages either.

If platforms could verify ages without inconveniencing their main user base, I wonder if platforms would just start banning all minors, or if there is some reason to allow minors in the platform that justifies all the liability surrounding them.

[WarmWash]

Children are an extremely valuable ad target.

They have their hands directly on their parents heart strings, and their parents have a credit card.

This isn't anything new, think about the toy ads we had on TV when we were young.

[AlienRobot]

I guess you are right. I assumed that something like Youtube Kids would have no ads at all given the audience, but it seems it does have ads targeted at young children. Bleak world we live in.

[germinalphrase]

Nobody takes “age-restricted account[s] for children” seriously.

Parental controls and age-restrictions are almost universally half-baked, buggy fig leafs to displace negative attention from software and content providers.

[trollbridge]

Yep. The insurance covers accidents and negligence, not deliberate decisions to impose harm to children for financial gain.

[guzfip]

Sounds too good to be true. I’ll hold my breath.