> If there's no profit to be made in servicing said demographic and a law requesting at least end user 'agreement' that they are an adult, this should be sufficient.

Is it still advertising if an "influencer" takes money on the down low to sip a Pepsi not too obviously in the middle of a video?

Is it still advertising if an attractive and young person provides news that happens to be colored in a way that supports the narratives of a particular political faction?

Is it still advertising if you can't prove that a foreign power encouraged a popular yoga enthusiast or makeup artist to post some whispered ideas that weaken citizens' faith in your institutions? Does that foreign power ever care about profit?

Advertising and propaganda love to explore the grey spaces around definitions, so your bans will end up being a whack-a-mole game. Cutting off kids with an ID check is much easier. Implementing age verification the Apple way would even protect privacy by simply registering whether Apple can attest that the user is over or under the age limit, without handing the ID over to third parties.

Who decides whether an ad is targeting children or not?

I’m not playing devil’s advocate, I’m curious what the SOTA is for ad moderation. I’m sure it’s relatively easy to tell a kid’s toy ad from adult ones like alcohol, but how do you differentiate toy ads targeting parents vs toy ads targeting kids?

Instead of banning social media for teenagers, regulate it in ways that actively reduce addictive design.

For example: after 15 minutes of short-form content, show an unskippable timer every third video, displaying today’s, this week’s, and total watch time. The same principle should apply to endless scrolling, make usage visible and interruptible.

Base it on actual screen time. This would protect teenagers and benefit adults.

Any kind of zero knowledge verification should be ok.

But with minors it often goes a long way to just make the law. It’s a good instruction to parents who should be able to control this. Laws on bike helmets for minors are followed nearly 100% not because they are enforced by authorities but because the law gives parents guidance.

There is still a financial incentive to loop in teenagers that would stay on a platform and spend money there later.

Why not device-side headers? Kids' devices should always include a header saying "I'm a kid, don't show me adult content.

You can tell these proposals are made in bad faith because we can do age verification in an anonymous way using zero-knowledge proofs but regulators demand linkable IDs instead.

It's not about protecting the kids. It's about managing the public's information diet. The latter is not a legitimate function of any state.

I disagree, we should have age verification but maybe it can be done in a mostly anonymous way like a central arbiter of identity from the government or something.

Without age verification this is obviously an unenforceable ban... I think Finland already has schemes for age verification.