@manlycoffee @Hiltibrant I definitely do agree with their premise though. Social media is the worst kind of brain rot, and hellish for neural reward pathways especially—but not only—for still developing brains. I might feel more like there was a conversation to be had about efficacy if I thought that it was just misguided rather than entirely disingenuous policy.
[Huge tangent incoming]
Personally, I'm even more offended by legislation requiring age verification on operating systems. It does a pretty good job of illustrating just how technologically inept the people with the power to write legislation can be. It's why we were putting teenagers in jail for playing with phones in the 80s, or why people were receiving terrifying legal demands from companies that don't sell products or services but just collect patents and write threatening demand letters in the 2000s and 2010s, and why farmers can't repair their farming equipment (or why anybody can't repair most anything these days without being real ghetto about it) or (depending on the brand; purchase wisely) you can't buy a cheap ink cartridge without harvesting a chip off of the old one and manufacturers can get away with selling 3mL of ink in a big fancy shell for $55 a pop, and […] (I could do this all day, but I'll spare you lol).
I definitely lost my own point there, but basically: it makes me uncomfortable to have somebody deciding what a $1000+ box I just bought will and won't do for me, and you can be sure that as soon as they can get away with changing that age field into actual third-party verification, they will, and that is an extremely unsettling future (as if the present wasn't already unsettling enough).
