> Where are these mythical people who aren’t concerned with both?

They're called politicians.

> Monitoring children's DMs is the responsibility of the parents, not megacorps

Absolutely. But what responsibilities do megacorps have? Right now, everyone seems to avoid this question, and make do with megacorps not being responsible. This means: "we'll allow megacorps to be as they are and not take any responsibilities for the effects they cause to society". Instead of them taking responsibilities, we're collecting everyone's data and calling it a day by banning children from social networks... and this is because there are many interests involved (not related to child development and safety).

I also think children do/should have a right to privacy and their parents do not have to know everything.

Kids should be able to write a journal or talk to friends with total trust that this information will not reach their parents.

> Monitoring children's DMs is the responsibility of the parents, not megacorps.

Yup, but the tools provided make that easy or hard.

But putting that emotive bit to one side, Megacorps have a vested interest in not being responsible to children. They need children's eye balls to drive advertising revenue. If that means sending them corrosive shit, then so be it.

Its a bigger issue than encryption, its editorial choice.

The simplest way that can work is for the child account to be linked to a parent account, and the parent account can see the child account's DMs.

Mega corps should be compelled to and rewarded for allowing parents to monitor their children’s dms.

Parents shouldn't give their child access to a device that allows DMs.

That said, these platforms are making it impossible for parents to monitor anything. They're literally designed to profit off addiction in children.

> maybe an employer on a work-provided device.

The children yearn for the mines(?).

I'm all for helping parents to do this. Any site requiring age verification should indicate this as a http header or whatever, and the browser I allow my child to use should respect that and the parental controls should be easy for me to engage with

Many parental controls are massive pains to get working. Apple does fairly well (although I don't get a parental pin number to unlock the phone, which is normally fine as my child will tell me, but in some circumstances it wouldn't be), but does require the parent to be on the apple ecosystem too.

EA and Microsoft however are terrible, especially as it's likely the child will be playing fortnite/minecraft and the parent won't have ever touched it. I think with minecraft we had to make something like 5 or 6 accounts across three different sites to allow online minecraft play from a nintendo switch.

You can make it a nice round 2000 these days.

Age verification obliviates anonymity on the internet. If everything you do, _can_ be tracked by the government, it _will_ be.

Allowing for more effective propaganda, electrol control, and lights a fire on the concept of a government _representing_ anyone.

The problem with this discussion is that this is a wonk solution for wonkish times. You're trying to thread the needle between various reasonable compromises. Ironically due to social media, that is simply not how politics and lawmaking works any more. Instead it's an emotionally driven fight between various different sorts of moral panic, and the only option is to get people more mad about surveillance than "think of the children".

You might be able to get somewhere by getting a tech company on your side, but they generally also hate adult content and don't mind banning it entirely.

(people are not going to get age verification _banned_ any time soon! That's simply not going to happen!)

It's a slippery slope.

This is the next two steps into 1984.

Once you start mandating this, there's no going back.

The next generation will start associating wrongthink with government IDs. (Wait, we already do that, right?)