alt Hacker NewsThis is Nirvana/Perfect Solution fallacy. That's like saying limiting smoking to 18 y/o was futile because teenagers could always have some other adult buy them cigs, or use fake IDs.
Ridiculous take.
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I'm saying that, in today's culture, age-gating the internet is likely to be much less effective than age-gating alcohol or tobacco. Most kids spend an appalling amount of time on social media (think, 5 hours/day*); most kids didn't spend this much time or invest this much of their lives into drugs.
* according to this survey from over 2 years ago: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2024/04/teen-social-use-mental-h...
For the smoking analogy to fit, you'd have to have parents giving their children packs of cigarettes to play with and then being mad at Marlboro they figured out how to smoke them.
Well, age verification is the "we have to do something about this nebulous problem even if the best thing we can think of actually makes everything worse for everyone but it makes us feel better" fallacy, which is equally ridiculous.