[Scaled]

Age verification is not the will of the voters. It is the will of large political donors (specifically tech companies and religious censorship groups). It is certainly not the will of adult citizens who use adult websites, who have overwhelming shown in their usage patterns they will abandon any website that tries to do age verification.

Parental controls remains the right way to do age gating. It works today and has no privacy impacts.

[mapontosevenths]

Just for those who aren't aware, most of the recent push for these laws has been bankrolled by Meta. They wish to avoid legal responsibility for their attacks on democracy and human health by convincing governments that people don't need any right to anonymous speech, and thusly free speech, as much as Meta needs to not have to pay moderators.

[inigyou]

Nobody wants age verification (except Zuck), but most people want children kept away from social media, and nobody's suggested a better option. Why haven't we suggested a better option? Well it's because we called the whole thing authoritarianism and refused to get involved.

You know who didn't refuse to get involved? Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg. They made suggestions to governments about how to solve this problem, and the best proposed solution was adopted and made the law.

[SoftTalker]

Parental control does not work today, it's too fragmented and too difficult.

[simoncion]

> Parental control does not work today, it's too fragmented and too difficult.

Then legally require it to be effective and easy-to-use-if-you-take-a-few-minutes-to-read-the-instructions.

See also [0].

[0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48911863>

[inigyou]

This is literally what California did with the Digital Age Assurance Act, AB1043.

[simoncion]

> This is literally what California did with the Digital Age Assurance Act, AB1043.

There's apparently information that you didn't read contained in the footnote of the comment you replied to.

Based on this layman's reading of the law, [0] California did literally the opposite. They require major OS vendors to require users to enter their birthdate or indicate in some other way their current age, and then require programs and websites to act on that age information. This is entirely different from requiring major OS vendors to allow a "guardian account" to set fairly-fine-grained restrictions on one or more -er- "ward accounts", and then requiring programs and websites to refuse let the "ward account" do the things that those restrictions say that it isn't permitted to do.

"Restrict by age" neither accounts for precocious under-eighteens, nor does it account for vulnerable elderly or otherwise brain/developmentally-damaged adults who need protected. And because "restrict by age" cares very much about your age, and because it's not going to work nearly as well as promised by those pushing it, it will inevitably require scans of both a photo ID and one's face and/or other biometrics.

A "you don't need to know anything about this account other than that these are the things it's not supposed to be able to do" system gives zero shits about the identity of a person, so there's no plausible path for it to gate access behind submission of any identifying documents to any third party.

[0] <https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...>

[inigyou]

It requires you to enter a birth date which is not required to be your birth date. In case of a conflict between the age verification birth date and any other birth date, only the age verification birth date may be used for age appropriateness checks.

[simoncion]

Okay? That is not parental controls that are

  [L]egally require[d] ... to be effective and easy-to-use-if-you-take-a-few-minutes-to-read-the-instructions.

Additionally, I expect that -due to kids lying about their ages- within five or ten years, the regs will have "graduated" from self-attestation to ID and biometrics collection. It's likely that other states will require that sort of collection much sooner, causing every US-based company to do that regardless of the existence of less-invasive regs.

Like, seriously... if "the kids can lie about their age and there are no consequences for lying" is the bar you want to set, just do the 1990's thing where sites and programs have a "Warning! This might not be suitable for kids!" page/screen that has a checkbox that the kids can check or button that they can press that lets them lie that they're over-seventeen and grants them access.

[ETH_start]

So instead of instituting restrictions that will probably cost society hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars in lost economic efficiency, publicly fund development of better parental control software, and publicly fund its adoption to make it the market standard.

[toomuchtodo]

Please provide citations regarding public support for age verification. Surveys show majority support, for dating sites, social media, adult content, and sports betting.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/07/01/majority-...

https://x.com/PTBwrites/status/2031529878021923118

https://yougov.com/en-us/daily-results/20250502-1e408-1

https://yougov.com/en-us/daily-results/20250502-1e408-2

> Parental controls remains the right way to do age gating. It works today and has no privacy impacts.

This opinion is not grounded in data and facts. If this was true, we would not be here. But we’re here because parental controls are insufficient, the vast majority of parents are just hanging in there getting their kids to adulthood.

More than 3 million college students are raising kids. Most won’t graduate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48709130 - June 2026

The real single-parent capital of America - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42867716 - January 2025 ("The places with the most single parents tend to be, to put it bluntly, struggling. The strongest predictors of single parenthood are high poverty rates and high shares of the population receiving government assistance." [There are ~13.6M single parents in the U.S. raising over 21M children. This means single parents head roughly one in three households and approximately 34% of all U.S. children live in a single-parent family.])

Parents Under Pressure: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on the Mental Health & Well-Being of Parents - https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu... - 2024

> When stress is severe or prolonged, it can have a deleterious effect; 41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming compared to other adults (20% and 26%, respectively).

> Nearly 70% of parents say parenting is now more difficult than it was 20 years ago, with children’s use of technology and social media as the top two cited reasons.

> Recent data from 2021-2022 indicate that among parents, 23.9% (or 20.3 million) had any mental illness and 5.7% (or 4.8 million) of parents had a serious mental illness.

> Lastly, many other caregivers assume primary caregiving responsibility when parents cannot, thus acting as a critical safety net for children. In recent years, there has been a notable increase in such individuals taking on caregiving responsibilities for children, with approximately 2.4 million children being raised by grandparents, other relatives, or family friends, without their biological parent(s) in the household.

U.S. has world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37628812 - September 2023 (108 comments)

(fertility rates continue to collapse though, so hopefully this problem continues to decline over time, only time will tell; 40% of annual pregnancies in the US and internationally are unintended, per the Guttmacher Institute and the UN, respectively)

Charted: How American Households Have Changed Over Time (1960-2023) - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-american-households-hav... ("A record 58.4% of American households now consist of married or single adults without children. Only 25.3% of American households contain children.")