What's horribly frustrating with the age ID stuff is that the issue at question with Meta wasn't that they didn't know what they were doing and that they were doing it to children. They did. This wasn't an issue of "If only they had the the age, then they could have done the right thing".

The laws being passed target exactly the wrong thing that wasn't a problem. They should have been passing "duty to care" laws aimed at social media companies not "give me your age" laws.

I may have missed it, but almost all these laws being passed for this issue have been pretty much solely around data collection rather than modifying the behavior of the worst businesses in the game.

It would be like seeing a car wreck kill a bunch of pedestrians and then passing a law that pedestrians need to carry IDs on them.

Yea, in the end there will basically be no consequences for Meta- Facebook is already mostly dead, and the ad revenue from that time has already been collected.

Now we're just moving on to a kind of moral panic think-of-the-kids kind of moment that is thinly-veiled state surveillance.