this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2025
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Will not work. None of these kinds of bans has ever worked. Is it not a common trope that teenagers can and do drink to excess despite not being legally allowed to purchase alcohol? Are we under some misguided belief that age verification procedures in this manner can or ever have worked effectively to reduce harm on minors?
Will have large unintended consequences far beyond social media access for teenagers.
Will actually make the internet less safe for teenagers, as they will now be lying about their age and circumventing the systems in place, which renders all existing protections for them ineffective.
Is pointlessly age targeted legislation as social media is also bad for adults as well. Its bad because of business practices and lack of ethical considerations in gigantic monolithic international social media corporations. If your end goal is making the internet safer for teenagers, your end result will actually end up being making the internet safer for everyone.
I fully believe it will work. The point is not to make it impossible to visit, but very annoying to. I cannot forsee the average kid jumping through hoops to maintain access, especially when most of their and their friends accounts were deleted. Eventually, they'll realise there's nothing left to go back to. Social media lives and dies by it's number of users after all.
You could present literally the same arguments for why teenagers would never drink alcohol. Its against the law for them to purchase right, so its an inconvenience to access, so clearly they would all abandon it as all their friends become unable to access it as well. You could make the same argument for most kinds of bans. There are actually very few things for which imposing barriers to access has ever eliminated its use. Porn is an obvious example as well. Porn bans are essentially meaningless to consumers. They are so trivial to bypass as to be functionally non-existent. The only thing that imposed bans have done is make it difficult for companies to profit off of it. I am essentially ambivalent about that, but it's a literal direct parallel in this case.
What is likely is that tools for circumventing in simpler faster ways will develop. Installing a VPN is already a single click operation. You dont have to do anything else. Teenagers are not going to abandon social media. Maybe you havent encountered many in the past 2 decades, but social media use is and has been near universal among them since social media came to exist. Like you're nuts if you think they're actually going to stop using it haha I dont know what else to say. But yeah maybe youre right. Making stuff against the law totally eliminates it because everyone is so lazy and incompetent they won't expend any effort to overcome trivial barriers to access things they have built their entire lives around lol
I don't agree with porn as an example. It clearly isn't a social activity.
Alcohol on the other hand.. Haven't you heard that Gen z and younger have much lower rates of drinking? Social drinking is on the decline, and I argue it supports my theory. Their friends aren't drinking socially as much, so many don't either.
I don't think VPN are going to help much. Good VPNs are paid services, and it's kids under 18 we're talking about here. They would somehow need to maintain a recurring VPN subscription fee from their pocket money. Free VPNs aren't the same thing, they're usually exposed to steal data or other nefarious activities.
Platforms like discord and roblox aren't blocked because they're considered communication apps or games. Kids will probably just stay there.
Porn is comparable because of its implementation and circumvention strategy, not because of its substance.
Drinking rates are decreasing, yes, but i disagree that it has anything to do with carding. It has been illegal for minors to drink since... at least the 60s? Earlier? Lol
Free VPNs are abundant and teenagers using instagram are almost certainly entirely unconcerned with their data being stolen. A market gap will come to exist for better free VPNs, advertising revenue being the driving factor.
I dont think that the majority of teenagers on Instagram / Facebook / TikTok are using discord or even aware of what it is. Some of them are definitely but I dont see those platforms as being interchangeable or serving the same functions whatsoever.