alt Hacker NewsWe 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.
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>We have parental controls on devices
That's irrelevant because social media regulation is a collective action problem. No individual parent can restrict their kids access to social media without ostracizing it, it only makes sense if all parents together get their kids off these platforms.
This is a tricky one, but it actually gives control to the government, not corporations. The government now has rules which let them define what social media is and how big its market can be.
The government is, frankly, just better at deciding what's good for most children than their parents when it comes to matters of health. That's a controversial statement, but truthfully most parents are just not educated enough or strict enough to decide where the boundaries should be on their children's health.