I’m asking for public policy ideas here. A lot of countries are enacting age verification now. But of course this is a privacy nightmare and is ripe for abuse. At the same time though, I also understand why people are concerned with how kids are using social media. These products are designed to be addictive and are known to cause body image issues and so forth. So what’s the middle ground? How can we protect kids from the harms of social media in a way that respects everyone’s privacy?
Do what my parents did: Only let your kids online for a limited time, while being supervised the whole time. If they could do it back before tools that helped existed, it should be super fucking easy in 2026 with all the parental controls everything offers.
But we also need to educate the parents. There seems to be a huge gap in what Xellenials (people specifically born between 1976 & 1985) were taught about the internet that not one other group/generation was, including full on mellenials, gen alpha and gen z.
What were Xellenials taught that other generations weren’t taught?