345boneshoss

Platforms (aka tech companies and the systems they build) don’t protect children. Nor do governments. Parents and their local communities do. It’s simple to discover who the real solutions come from - just ask who deals with failure and who is accountable. It’s the parents and the kids. Government mandated age verification doesn’t solve any problems for families or children - it just creates new ones. It is surveillance and censorship dressed up as security. It does solve some financial liability problems for the companies that build software that harms children - it transfers that liability to the app distributors. This is why Meta has invested so heavily in pushing these laws - supposedly over $200M - because their exposure could be over $1T if they don’t transfer it to other entities. We don’t need new laws to solve these problems - our existing justice system has recently demonstrated the capacity to bring lawsuits for those harms - all the recent settlements against the likes of Meta, Snap, TikTok and Google are solid evidence for that. Government-mandated age verification is dangerous and should be avoided. No government has a place in family decisions or parental authority. The real solutions to keeping kids safe online are as follows: 1) education 2) community 3) leverage the existing parental control tools that are provided for free on every major operating system (family link on Google products, screen time on Apple products, etc) 4) adults that lead by example and demonstrate how to have a healthy relationship with technology and the internet and its addictive algorithms