I think you’re proving my point a little. You’re treating the costs as obvious and enormous, while treating any potential benefits as essentially zero.

The government’s job is to make sure we behave (and vote) properly.

Otherwise, as Bertolt Brecht said, the government might simply dissolve the people and elect a different one.

China and Russia did not have "freedom" prior to the internet.

>China or Russia, freedom is also lost shortly after.

This may come as a shock but neither China or Russia had their first encounter with losses of individual freedom in the 1990s. This is what the OP is talking about, this is the kind of shibboleth of online libertarianism that has little to do with real world policy outcomes. You'll find many similar laws concerning child safety in Norway that you find in China, different political systems and cultures can value the same things, even implement similar laws, without converging on the same political system.

In most countries on earth protecting children is a collective job, not a parents private business. A functioning and safe social fabric is a condition for successful families.

Just worth mentioning one data point. In the US 50% of young men (aged 18-49) now participate in online betting or gambling, likely as a consequence of the saturation of ads on social media and gaming platforms. Good luck with your parental responsibility when an entire country operates like this.

Platforms can't know what the false positive and false negative rates are simply from cases where a user is thought to be a minor and proves otherwise. Even if the law were written better, for example to say that 95% accuracy is acceptable, platforms would still have to verify id from at least a random sampling of thought-to-be-adult users, which doesn't help you if you're one of the ones randomly selected.

We need some kind of verification system that gives no extra information about users to the platforms, but I don't know if there's a true ZK way; it might require government involvement. I think that's fine. Govts could certainly run an age-verification system, give a signed yes or no token back to the user, with some permanently applied jitter per person so that platforms can't use cookies from returning users to figure out their birthday. As long as the government program has strict oversight to ensure it's not saving information about who's visiting what sites, it seems fine, or at least vastly better than entrusting photos of IDs to private 3rd parties.

WRT to how it was done in Australia.

"Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, began closing teen accounts from 4 December last year. It said anyone mistakenly kicked off could use government ID or provide a video selfie to prove their age."

So the bulk is done as you say but they still need* an age verification system for when they over-stepped.

* need here is because of the way the laws were written AFAIK.

We have a solution for that: parental controls. The new feature is that parental controls are enabled by default and cannot be disabled without the phone manufacturer's consent. The upcoming feature is that this also applies to non-adult sites like Facebook and YouTube. It's nothing less than the end of the free, open, and anonymous internet.

TL;DR don't make everyone prove they're an adult (and thus who they are). Put the kids into the daycare if that's what you want the law to be.

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Don't let the kids wander Las Vegas / the adult section of town (the Internet) unsupervised?

Or even better:

Have any website that's intended for children make a Legal Claim that they are rated Child Safe / Friendly so they fall under Advertising Law coverage and/or soliciting a minor.

Then have user agents (browsers) used by children configured to limit them to those places. Or even pay for a special VPN that limits access to those places.

It also ignores social pressure entirely. If everyone in your class is on some social network and your parents parent and you aren't then you are socially outcast from a major part of your peer socialisation.

If only 50% of parents enforce the rules suddenly half your class isn't there and it doesn't become such a big deal to be missing out and it's less appealing for the kids who are allowed still.

I'd prefer it to be voluntarily organised like https://www.waituntil8th.org/ but even a bad solution is going to have a major improvement on society even if social media is less private due to the ID issue. It's not like you don't share everything with these companies anyhow. I'm pretty confident that if you are a regular user of any large social network today they could identify you 100% of the time already even without your ID.

There are plenty of tech controls that exist for children's personal technological devices that do not require the state to intervene.

I'll take that over everyone being forced to accept the same, standardized, government-mandated "cults, wacko ideologies, and dumb fads", thanks!

Government makes everyone poorer through their terrible policies -> parents need to work more to stay above water -> nanny state must grow to take care of kids -> terrible government policies entrench. Nope, don't want it