alt Hacker NewsI love how the comments miss that the problem these laws address deserve addressing, but from the producers side: making safe products for the public. This specific solution is fashioned after tobacco and alcohol regulation, which was never primarily about parental supervision, it's about what can be sold and how. And in public health we'd want everyone moving away from both not just kids. The boneheadness of age verification is that unlike tobacco and alcohol, where the best we can do is restrict access, online harm can actually be fixed at the root by regulating what these services are allowed to do to users in the first place.
The issue is, to regulate the service Meta (or whoever) provides, they have to age gate anyway. Unless the service is child friendly for all users. Which would mean; follow and friend limits, usage limits, blackout periods after 9pm, only seeing posts from friends, no algorithmic "time line". That sort of thing.
That regulation would be orders of magnitude more difficult to implement. Just look at the malicious compliance the cookie regulations created, that was a single modal.
Better to just ban it for under 16s. That might happen before my kids are old enough to be fully exploited.