I'm not comfortable with the idea that children's private messages would be exposed to thousands of social media workers and government employees.

I understand the concern but then to make this available for adults you now have to provide proof of age to companies, which opens up another can of privacy worms.

I have kids. I don't want creeps and predators spying on their conversations with friends.

In a way, this is like saying that one trusts total strangers in some random large tech company and total strangers in government agencies to read and/or manipulate conversations that kids have. This also paves the way to disallow E2EE for other classes of people based on arbitrary criteria. I don’t believe this is good for society overall.

You just need to provide the government with your name and address and the name and address of the counter party every time you send an encrypted message.

If you don't support this you're obviously a pedo nazi terrorist.

There is no reason kids should use so called smart devices, except making certain companies richer. Kids have had a healthy development without such crap for thousands of years. We don't discuss what percentage of alcohol should be allowed in beer and wine for kids.

The problem is all these ‘for the children’ arguments contain collateral damage.