With all the discussion of age restrictions on social media, I wrote down a rough idea of how we could do age restrictions much more effectively than the current proposals. It’s not typical LessWrong content but I’d still love any feedback from the LW community. https://kaleb.ruscitti.ca/2026/01/18/private-age-verification.html
I think your proposal is, on the high level, relatively close to how the EU plans to implement age verification (decentralized, via one app reading the data from your id and then sharing just the old enough/too young binary variable with the platform.
As an aside, you mention that the laws in Australia favor large incumbents, but I think important nuance is that the law only applies to very large platforms in the first place. I still think your conclusion that more privacy preserving measures would be preferrable holds, for what it’s worth.
I suspect that much of the age verification stuff people have been advocating for lately is much more because people generally dislike social media and want to make it more annoying and more harmful to use for everyone, rather than just kids.
Therefore making a convenient, less harmful, and more accurate form of age verification is not something I think most advocating for this policy would like.
As I posted as a reply to OP, the EU is specifically working on measures to enable age verification in an convenient, privacy-preserving and accurate manner (open source app that checks the biometric data on your id). More generally, parents being genuinely concerned about their children’s safety seems so well established to me that it makes sense to assume they are being genuine in this discussion as well.
As another counter piece of evidence, Jonathan Haidt is probably the best known scientific advocate for social media restrictions for kids, and his work spans much other research about children’s welfare (such as “children should be allowed to play unsupervised outside”). Although to be fair, he is also critical about social media’s impact on democracy, but he proposes other measures to deal with this iirc. An interesting test of your hypothesis would be to look up which measure for age verification he supports.
I agree that people generally dislike social media, or at least that there is a decent segment of people who are vocal about disliking social media. I dislike social media and mostly don’t use it myself.
Are you guessing that people consciously want to make it more annoying for everyone, or subconsciously? I don’t have that impression (either way) and I’d be interested if you have anything you can point me to for evidence.
Instead my impression is that people are concerned about children in particular, because it is reasonable to expect that social media is especially harmful when your brain is less developed and when youre in your prime “learning to be literate” time.
With all the discussion of age restrictions on social media, I wrote down a rough idea of how we could do age restrictions much more effectively than the current proposals. It’s not typical LessWrong content but I’d still love any feedback from the LW community.
https://kaleb.ruscitti.ca/2026/01/18/private-age-verification.html
I think your proposal is, on the high level, relatively close to how the EU plans to implement age verification (decentralized, via one app reading the data from your id and then sharing just the old enough/too young binary variable with the platform.
You can read more here.
As an aside, you mention that the laws in Australia favor large incumbents, but I think important nuance is that the law only applies to very large platforms in the first place. I still think your conclusion that more privacy preserving measures would be preferrable holds, for what it’s worth.
I suspect that much of the age verification stuff people have been advocating for lately is much more because people generally dislike social media and want to make it more annoying and more harmful to use for everyone, rather than just kids.
Therefore making a convenient, less harmful, and more accurate form of age verification is not something I think most advocating for this policy would like.
As I posted as a reply to OP, the EU is specifically working on measures to enable age verification in an convenient, privacy-preserving and accurate manner (open source app that checks the biometric data on your id). More generally, parents being genuinely concerned about their children’s safety seems so well established to me that it makes sense to assume they are being genuine in this discussion as well.
As another counter piece of evidence, Jonathan Haidt is probably the best known scientific advocate for social media restrictions for kids, and his work spans much other research about children’s welfare (such as “children should be allowed to play unsupervised outside”). Although to be fair, he is also critical about social media’s impact on democracy, but he proposes other measures to deal with this iirc. An interesting test of your hypothesis would be to look up which measure for age verification he supports.
I agree that people generally dislike social media, or at least that there is a decent segment of people who are vocal about disliking social media. I dislike social media and mostly don’t use it myself.
Are you guessing that people consciously want to make it more annoying for everyone, or subconsciously? I don’t have that impression (either way) and I’d be interested if you have anything you can point me to for evidence.
Instead my impression is that people are concerned about children in particular, because it is reasonable to expect that social media is especially harmful when your brain is less developed and when youre in your prime “learning to be literate” time.