The answer, IMO, is simply banning all algorithm-driven social media, for everyone and not just kids.

This conveniently sidesteps the identity/privacy arguments, makes it much easier to enforce, and would present an even greater net benefit. There is no benefit to algorithmic social media at all, and everyone would be better off without it.

We have parental controls on devices. The change forced by the UK government is to give control to corporations, instead of the parents.

Parents are much better at knowing their own kid's age than corporations are. Teens keep fooling the age verification (pointing the camera at a video game character, using fake ID, even drawing beards on their face with a pen). But they aren't going to fool their own mother, and they don't need to trust ID verification startup with photographs of everbody's teenage kids to do it.

This is not about protecting kids, when will you finally understand?

I'm all for protecting kids from facebook/insta/snap/etc, they have love hate relationships with all of those, but YT is a bridge too far, is's more a knowledge sharing platform than a social network.

Parents are there to protect their children. The potential harm caused by eroded privacy and reduced control over our devices is not worth the perceived benefits of this policy in ensuring children’s safety.

Some things, like invasion of privacy, are bad enough, that we should protect all citizens from it, independent of age.

So just DNS block them in the UK. They don't need YouTube

Great, you do your job as a parent and keep your children away from them while leaving the rest of us free from your envisioned surveillance state.