[Gigachad]

It’s not highly unpopular. When polled, the Australian public were in favour of banning kids from social media.

The harms of big tech, social media, and addiction mechanics are a lot more tangible to the average person than the anonymity aspect.

[elric]

Age Verification and "banning kids from social media" are two different things. The former being an overzealous method of achieving the latter.

Parental responsibility and better parental controls would be a MUCH better way of going about this.

Of course, the polling public is blissfully unaware of the wide ranging consequences of such an Age Verification implementation. People will continue to pave the road to fascist hell with good intentions.

[Gigachad]

What the public perceives it to be is the only thing that matters though. The OP question was asking how governments are getting this through, and the answer is the majority approve of what they see to be happening.

The average person is not thinking about the ability for journalists and whistleblowers to create anonymous Facebook accounts, they are thinking about Mark Zuckerberg trying to sell sex chatbots to their kids and discord pedo servers.

[farfatched]

> Parental responsibility and better parental controls would be a MUCH better way of going about this.

Call we do all three?

Also, what about the irresponsible parents, or parents who don't have time/opportunity to be responsible over this issue?

[seb1204]

Hold on a minute. Australians are for kids and teens social media ban. They have not been asked if their minors are all face catalogued by pop up companies that these social media companies externalise the verification process to. Insta and others simply opened the need for such 3rd party verification services, it's a way to limit their liability and risk. For Insta and co it's not their problem if these new 3rd party services become the next identity database of minors. I hate it.

[Gigachad]

I think we will eventually see age verification become more like credit card processors where some kind of industry standard for secure processing is agreed on, where most companies do not implement it themselves, and where the providers who do implement it do it securely.

There is no requirement to store ID information to verify ages and it's actively beneficial to delete everything after the verification is done.

We might also see governments implement some kind of zero knowledge APIs where companies can check with the government API if the user is over age without knowing who the user is and without the government knowing what they are signing up for.

[crest]

You have to understand children are only cute little extensions of their parents until they 18, but on that day they better be ready for the real world™. /s