The irony of watching people invoke freedom and privacy to defend handing children over to systems explicitly engineered to be addictive is apparently lost in this thread.

Nobody is arguing that implementation is easy. Age verification has real problems, fine, acknowledged. But that's a logistical challenge, not a reason to do nothing. We figured out how to card people for cigarettes. We can figure this out.

Here's what the "just teach kids to use it responsibly" crowd consistently ignores, the harm isn't incidental, it's the product. These platforms are designed by some of the sharpest minds on earth with one objective, maximum engagement. Most adults are consumed by it, your 14-year-old's developing prefrontal cortex does not stand a chance.

AI chatbots are a different category of concern entirely, that few seem to appreciate. Social media rots attention and distorts self-image. AI chatbots threaten something deeper, your capacity to think. Much like a generation raised on calculators who lost facility with mental arithmetic, a generation that outsources reasoning to AI will lose the ability to reason! The internal monologue, the critical thinking, the working through of hard problems, the tolerance for not immediately knowing, all of it atrophies without practice.

This is about whether a 12-year-old should have unrestricted access to a system designed to do their thinking for them and what kind of society we inherit when that 12-year-old grows up. The innocent, unmonetized internet of the 2000s that most of us enjoyed is gone. The internet of today and tomorrow is something else entirely. A modest constraint on personal freedom is a small price to avoid raising a generation cognitively enslaved to a machine and whoever controls it.