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Spain, Greece weigh teen social media bans, drawing fury from Elon Musk
(www.reuters.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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Elon Musk being against the social media ban on under 16-year-olds is him basically reaching a good conclusion from the wrong equation, because he's not doing it out of privacy concerns about how everyone would probably have to verify themselves to prove that they're older than 16 years old. He's doing it because it would not be good for his business.
I'm not sure how they could implement this without requiring ID verification on every single internet user. I guess I'm not familiar with the topic enough to say if there is another way that they could pursue, but even if there is, at the same time, I'm not too confident in the governments opting for the other options. I'm from neither Spain nor Greece, so I guess I can't speak on this, but I'm just referring to governments as a general group. And because a lot of different countries are trying to do this at the same time, I'm also not too confident about my own country not doing this at some point, sooner or later.
But the problem is not doing it right. If the page asks only "is this cert from a person older than 16 y.o.?" with an answer that can only be yes, no or bad cert, problem solved. The page doesn't say which user has that cert and the authority doesn't give any personal data except "older than 16".
Certificates that can’t be tied to a specific person can and will be shared, making them essentially worthless.
We‘ve had that in Germany about 20 years ago. Some websites asked you to verify your age by entering a part of the encoded data on the back of your ID card. It took maybe a few days until lists with valid IDs were all over the internet.
Sure, certificates are marginally more reliable because they can be revoked but at that point, websites need to update their revocation lists close to real time which isn’t practical and still can’t catch every shared cert.
Reliably verifying your identity without revealing too many personal details is an extremely hard problem that has troubled computer scientists for decades.