The adtech companies need human verification so they can keep selling ads. Age verification is a way to get that under the radar because normal people are pissed off about "the children" and "the social media". You've also got cultural warriors who would love to censor speech on the Internet championing it, too.

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wtallis 2 days ago | parent [-]

This kind of age signalling with no verification whatsoever does not help the adtech companies at all.

	▲	pull_my_finger 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You don't think knowing a users self disclosed age-group would be beneficial to adtech? A) they shrug any liability for showing inappropriate things to minors when all the onus is on the OS to provide accurate info, and B) they get a highly-likely to be accurate piece of profiling information to add the the already huge pile they collect from spying on people 24/7 and harvesting microdata from browser APIs and mobile apps.
	▲	hellojesus a day ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		This is step one. The next step is to say that it's not working and we need hardware attlestation or some such nonsense.
	▲	EvanAnderson a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It helps soften people up for nastier stuff later. As an example: Decades ago CPUID and a machine readable processor serial number was massively controversial. Today burned-in device IDs being sent to websites is status quo.