Technology

We already have that, and it has solved absolutely nothing while potentially making online surveillance and privacy issues worse.

The answer isn't age-gating or ID verification, it's changing how the sites themselves operate. Get rid of the idea of "driving engagement", no more stealth ads, and no corpo, media, political party, or lobbyist accounts. Hold influencers and podcasters to the same kind of standards we used to hold journalists to, where they're required to tell you when the're shilling for some kind of shady supplement company or political huckster.

You know, the kind of shit any sane species would do with this sort of tech, but when have we ever been sane?

Or maybe, instead of creating privacy-infringing laws or blaming parents, we actually dismantle the tech companies who created them and imprison their leaders. We all know corporate social media is cancer, that’s why we’re on Lemmy. So let’s fucking do something about the cancer instead targeting the victims or worse, exploiting the situation to expand the surveillance state.

Yeah someone has to be paying for the phones and internet access, both mobile internet and or home internet or if they don't have a phone yet, the tablet , desktop or laptop with internet access. It's usually the parents paying for this stuff.

There are parental controls built into the Android builds of all the various mainstream manufacturers. The main exception might be for example small companies selling phones with custom Android OS distributions or people who install their own where parental controls are not built in, but that isn't what the vast vast majority of people are using let alone installing on their child's phone.

There are parental control options built into IOS too. They allow parents to setup a variety of controls.

https://families.google/familylink/

https://support.apple.com/en-us/105121

The following article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation cites various research about how a majority of social media use even by people under 13 is often done with parents knowledge and even direct help.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/congress-wants-hand-your-parenting-big-tech

Most Social Media Use By Younger Kids Is Family-Mediated

If lawmakers picture under-13 social media use as a bunch of kids lying about their age and sneaking onto apps behind their parents’ backs, they’ve got it wrong. Serious studies that have looked at this all find the opposite: most under-13 use is out in the open, with parents’ knowledge, and often with their direct help.

A large national study published last year in Academic Pediatrics found that 63.8% of under-13s have a social media account, but only 5.4% of them said they were keeping one secret from their parents. That means roughly 90% of kids under 13 who are on social media aren’t hiding it at all. Their parents know. (For kids aged thirteen and over, the “secret account” number is almost as low, at 6.9%.)

Earlier research in the U.S. found the same pattern. In a well-known study of Facebook use by 10-to-14-year-olds, researchers found that about 70% of parents said they actually helped create their child’s account, and between 82% and 95% knew the account existed. Again, this wasn’t kids sneaking around. It was families making a decision together.

A 2022 study by the UK’s media regulator Ofcom points in the same direction, finding that up to two-thirds of social media users below the age of thirteen had direct help from a parent or guardian getting onto the platform.

The typical under-13 social media user is not a sneaky kid. It’s a family making a decision together.

The same parents who scream anytime a teacher grades them fairly?

You are correct, but that does not absolve the companies or the government of any responsibility. It should not be "anything goes" as far as intentionally addictive designs on anything with a screen for the same reason they can't just put cocaine in Doritos. They still engineer in what they can, but with some guardrails. And even in that case the regulations here in the US leave a lot to be desired.

The parents are also suffering from the negative medical effects of algorithms designed to manipulate and addict. You're asking why a victim of drug abuse isn't a more responsible parent.