As many point out every time this comes up, regulating access to social media products by requiring ID checks and age gating will almost certainly not work effectively, will harm the web overall and that's if its not implemented in a half-arsed way. It's a bad idea.
You want people to stop buying cigarettes? Don't let the cigarette companies advertise. Require warning labels, plain packaging, increase tariffs, etc.
The society doesn't exist to support the businesses poisoning it.
I think if social media were required to have a subscription (even $1/month), they're usage would go down overnight.
Of course, how can anyone force them (as then they could argue that a platform is social media vs online forum or else) but that could be interesting.
Also it would prevent having to be on all the platforms, since you have to pay, one would choose the one(s) they strictly prefer/need, not literally all of them.
Sorry, I was trying to summarise there because the points get repeated a lot. I'm not saying that all ID checks are easy to bypass, but that:
- a lot of people do not want effective ID checks, for a lot of reasons
- effective ID checks are not necessarily easy or even feasible to implement (this may vary depending on your region/government)
- there's a fair chance (some would say high likelihood) that any implemented ID checks are not effective
- ineffective ID checks can fail to do what they were supposed to do (age gating) while still having negative impacts (reduced privacy, more data to the datalords, lower barriers to law enforcement access to your activity, connecting government ID with day-to-day identity, etc.)
You want people to stop buying cigarettes? Don't let the cigarette companies advertise. Require warning labels, plain packaging, increase tariffs, etc.
The society doesn't exist to support the businesses poisoning it.