The biggest change imo is that in the aughts, the idea that children should have unfettered access to personal computers, phones, and the internet was unthinkable. Now we have millennial parents seriously arguing their kids should have smartphones in class. But all this deanonymization garbage is downstream of that vibe shift.

I don't think it's responsible to blame any specific person or company, but I certainly can't excuse the Googles, Apples, Samsungs, Facebooks etc of the world. They manufactured a culture driven by putting as many devices in front of as many people as possible, using them as much as possible, while knowing as much about them as possible to monetize their attention. The careless disregard for how that affected the developing brains of two generations of people now is irresponsible and ugly.

It seems like no one is asking the real question here, which isn't why Roblox/Discord et al need to verify the age of their users. We should be asking how in the fuck there are so many children with unsupervised access to devices that this is a real problem.