[Aurornis]

We really need to start discussing these laws by what they’re requiring. Too many people see “law bans kids from social media” and get excited because they think kids shouldn’t use social media, but they don’t read far enough into the details to see that the law actually requires sites to ID check all users to accomplish the stated goal.

Even the phrase “social media site” is a problem for these conversations because a lot of people don’t consider themselves as using social media. Yet we’re seeing laws start to cover YouTube and Reddit and companies like Discord are self-imposing age checks for features through an ID gating process. Once people start realizing that these laws are going to have broad impacts to internet sites they use, they will become much less popular.