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Age-Gating Isn’t About Kids, It’s About Control
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this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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I really liked the theory I saw few days ago in a post here.
It's the social networks lobbying for age gating, because it turns out that when internet is 90% bots, advertisers don't want to pay you as much. Why would they, if out of the 1000 reported and paid for impressions, 900 are bots?
So they started lobbying for age verification, because then you can mostly guarantee that you are advertising to real users.
I think there already was a thread with pretty in-depth investigation about who's paying for the age-verification lobby (it was Meta, trying really hard to push the responsibilty on OS instead of them having to deal with it), and it makes perfect sense.
And TBH I trust that lobby of corporations at risk of loosing profit is way more feasible reason than goverment being organized enough to realistically limit speech. It's very probably about profits first, the rest are just casualties.
We really do need some kind of government administered digital ID for certain functions in the modern age. In the US we have tried to use social security numbers in various applications but that is not what they were intended for and it causes all sorts of problems. That ID could be used for official government functions like providing public feedback on legislation (currently overrun by industry bot accounts), voting online (currently not possible), and accessing or submitting personal information (tax forms, various licensing processes, court proceedings, etc).
The biggest problem is that I don't trust our current government to implement a system like this in an effective or transparent manner. The second biggest problem is that I don't trust them to limit it's use to strictly necessary functions. This should not be required for anything outside of government administered processes. Meta and Discord don't need to verify user identities but I know they would quickly make that argument for the same reasons you outlined.
It just sucks that we have all this technological potential but we are so limited by the shittiness of the people in charge that in many cases it feels like a worse idea to use it than to not.