Curbing kids' social media means ID checks for every adult, the thread warns

A coordinated-looking wave of age limits

The Reuters piece is a survey, not a scoop: from Australia — whose rules it calls among the world's toughest — across Europe, governments are moving in close succession to bar or restrict under-16s from social media. One reader flagged that this exact article had run four days earlier under a different date, without even the newer developments like Canada — a tell for how fast this story is being re-packaged as the policy spreads.

The thread barely paused on the goal. Almost everyone agreed kids and social media is a real problem. The fight was entirely about the only known way to enforce an age line on the open web.

The mechanism, not the goal

The core objection, stated early:

"The most important question here is not whether social media access should be banned to children. The question is whether everyone's rights should be stripped in an effort to enforce such a ban." — a commenter who frames it as a rights tradeoff

What that looks like in practice came from a developer who'd just landed in the UK:

"I can't view half the news about Palestine on Twitter/X without handing over a government ID to prove I'm an adult. No thanks. Please let's find a way to protect children without giving up the right to anonymity on the internet." — a software developer back in the UK

"The only way to exclude children is to ID everyone"

A reader with 50k+ karma spelled out the structural trap — and the slippage already happening:

"The only way to force sites to exclude children is to have them ID everyone. This is why forcing each site to restrict access is a terrible idea. It's a backdoor to destroying everyone's privacy… we're already seeing these laws extend beyond what people thought the targets were going to be (TikTok, Facebook, Instagram) and into services most people use like YouTube, Reddit, and Discord." — a reader with 50k+ karma

His alternative, echoed by others: have sites self-declare an age rating, like TV, and let phones and browsers enforce parental controls at the device — no central ID required.

The cryptographers' version: prove a bit, reveal nothing

The most concrete counter-proposal came from an engineer in Poland, where state cryptographic IDs already back tax filing and e-prescriptions. The protocol he sketched never hands your identity to the website:

"the site requests you to sign a challenge… you sign the challenge and provide it to a third party verifier… service verifies your signature and gives you the copy of the challenge signed by itself only so your gov ID is never revealed… There is no technical reason why you should disclose your identity to prove you have one." — an engineer in Poland describing a zero-knowledge age check

A shorter version of the same idea: bind the check to the phone, so the site learns one bit — adult or not — and nothing more.

Why the privacy-preserving path probably loses

Here's the squint that closes the thread. The technology to verify age without surveillance exists and was described in three different forms in one comment section. The laws shipping across these countries reach instead for license uploads and face scans — the version that builds a sprawl of driver's-license-scan databases across vendors racing to stay compliant. The same engineer who designed the clean protocol predicted his own government would ship the bad version first. The gap between what's buildable and what's being legislated is the actual story — not whether kids should be protected, which nearly everyone in the thread concedes.