[Nursie]

Well for a start not all of them are very tech savvy, and we've built a world in which tech is essential to their day to day lives, including for their kids.

If school demands the kids have a variety of devices to do their work, and they have no idea how to lock those down to exclude (for example) social media services that we know have been designed to be as addictive as possible, can you not see why they might want someone to intervene?

(edit: Beyond that there are also tons of bad reasons, I'm not going to try and justify them. There are a lot of bad parents and just in general people who are not firing on all cylinders out there. And many of them absolutely love a government regulation to be brought in for just about anything.

We can and should argue with these people and point out why they're wrong. But saying it's "nothing to do with actually stopping kids seeing the content" fails here too.)

[lynx97]

Right. I submit we are solving the wrong problem. Just establishing age vertification doesn't magically make these vast amounts of bad parents good parents. There is a ton of other things they can and will fail at, which their kids have to absorb. If we really cared about those kids, we'd have to reconsider a lot of things. And I know what I am talking about, had to grow up with an undiagnosed ADHS+anciety mother. It was hell. And even 30 years after i moved out, she still can't see what she failed at and continues to fail at. Age verification wouldn't have helped me. MAKING her seek treatment might have helped.

[Nursie]

No argument here, I'm not saying they're right to demand that age verification is brought in to protect kids, or that we should give up privacy etc etc.

But coming at it from the angle that "It was never about protecting kids!" is itself incorrect and unhelpful to the debate.

[pocksuppet]

It can be true that kids need to be protected, this (or some variation of it) is a good way to protect kids, therefore it's going to pass, and nefarious interests found a way to insert themselves into the process and piggyback off the efforts to increase real protection of real kids in order to also spy on the kids.

If you want to reject the nefarious actors you have to separate them from the other goals that are reasonable and sorely needed. If you treat it as a whole package, you'll fail because those other goals are too important not to try to achieve, and the package is going to get passed. If you separate them, we can advocate for the pretty sensible California-style law where it's a flag on your user account that root can change, instead of the utterly insane New-York-style law where you have to scan your face every time you open your phone.

[al_borland]

If public school is supposed to be free, the school should supply the required devices and take on the burden of securing those devices.

For private schools, the parents are more involved in the first place, but I would expect them to also have guidance for parents to help the less tech savvy among them.

[Nursie]

"should" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.